Fave Firsts #1

Cover collage by Isaac Lewsey. Images sourced from IMDB.

For the last three years I have posted a monthly Instagram story featuring the posters for four first watches which I either enjoyed or found interesting enough to recommend. This year, I wanted to try and take this a step further and start writing about them… ideally on a monthly basis…

It is now almost April and, so far, I’ll be honest, I have not had a month yet this year where I have had four films to earnestly and wholeheartedly recommend. I started a new job and I am just not watching the same volume of new stuff that I once was. I have, however, watched an interesting selection of things over the last three months and I still wanted to write about them. So, I present to you, the first of my Fave Firsts: a column which I hope to pen semi-regularly here on Archives Abound!

Look Back (Dir. Kiyotaka Oshiyama, 2024)

Kiyotaka Oshiyama’s Look Back is an exquisitely animated adaptation of Tatsuki Fujimoto’s manga of the same name — a semi-autobiographical reflection on art and connection that follows two aspiring manga artists whose lives intertwine when they discover a shared passion for their craft. It is a heart-wrenchingly brilliant piece of work that resoundingly reaffirms the need to keep on keeping on in the face of trauma and adversity (and it’s less than an hour long so you have no excuse not to watch it!)

A Real Pain (Dir. Jesse Eisenberg, 2024)

I was pleasantly surprised by A Real Pain. Great central performances are grounded by an incredibly affecting script from Jesse Eisenberg which, while tight — vive la 90-minute movie! — allows itself to meander and linger on moments that just feel incredibly genuine and well-observed. It is a shame (though perhaps somewhat in keeping with the film) that Kieran Culkin has overshadowed Eisenberg so much on the awards circuit, but I’m glad that Eisenberg’s film has gained as much traction as it has — it is very much worth the watch. 

A Complete Unknown (Dir. James Mangold, 2024)

In a similar vein, I was not sure what to expect from a Timothée Chalamet-led Bob Dylan biopic (especially as a Dylan fan and someone who often struggles with these big A-lister driven music biopics), but I again found myself pleasantly surprised. I liked that Chalamet’s Dylan was, as Monica Barbaro’s Joan Baez puts it, “a real asshole” and that, despite the film’s reverence for Dylan as innovator and poet, it was unflinching in its portrayal of him as a kind of destructive force who tore apart those around him in both his personal and professional lives.

It thrives on the fact that it naturalises you to folk — from the moment it opens on the soft strumming of Pete Seeger’s Banjo, moving through Dylan and Baez’s early work and collaboration to The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan — and yet it lets the noise of the city and the prospect of a new sound simmer just under the surface. The prospect of Dylan ‘going electric’ haunts the narrative like the rock n roll spectre of Boyd Holbrook’s Johnny Cash and when he finally does, you are so completely immersed in what came before that it truly feels like a brilliant and terrible revelation.

Watch it, then go and listen to Diamonds and Rust, think about Edward Norton’s Pete Seeger’s sad, tired, best-supporting-actor-deprived eyes, realise that that was the cost of Highway 61: Revisited and then go and have a little cry.

The Producers (Dir. Mel Brooks, 1967)

The Producers is a delight. An ever-so-slightly (probably incredibly) dated delight, but a delight nonetheless. A failing producer and his anxious wreck of an accountant (played by the ever-excellent Gene Wilder) realise they can make more money with a flop than a hit and so aim to stage a musical almost certainly destined to crash and burn on its first night: “Springtime for Hitler, a Gay Romp with Adolf and Eva at Berchtesgaden” (and all that that entails…)

While, I will admit, some of the gags did not land for me at all — and that, in all honesty, Brooks’ comedic sensibilities are not always entirely aligned with my own — that moment, when the curtain goes up, and an audience of well-to-do theatregoers realise just what it is exactly they’re strapped in for, is just priceless. 

When Brooks discussed the thought-process behind The Producers in a 1978 Interview for Macleans Magazine, he remarked that “you can bring down totalitarian governments faster by using ridicule than you can with invective” and, watching The Producers on the eve of the inauguration of a certain orange Führer in an incredibly disunited States, I, strangely, felt a profound sense of hope — despite the horrors abroad — knowing that our political satirists are more active than ever, and that Brooks’ musical is having a successful West End revival.

Blade of the Immortal (Dir. Takashi Miike, 2017)

To say Takashi Miike is prolific is an understatement. Blade of the Immortal was marketed as the man’s 100th film (of 134 according to Letterboxd…) and just one of many live-action anime adaptations he has churned out over the years. Although I have had a couple of his films on my watchlist for a while, I was a Miike virgin until this just so happened to be soon-to-expire on Film4 on a Friday night.

It's great. It is a movie where the fights are tiring, where the combatants keep stumbling on because they simply cannot die — until they eventually take so many swords to the chest that they do. It masters a kind of choreography of attrition where the camerawork starts out incredibly frenetic and intense but then seems to lag and lengthen as if the cameramen cannot keep up with the people they are meant to be filming.

I went in hoping for a fun 90-minute turn-your-brain-off action movie until I realised that that would actually do the premise a disservice, but I still got to watch the guy who voiced Howl in Howl’s Moving Castle hack his way dynasty-warriors style through thousands of dudes in feudal Japan — which brought me an immense and slightly troubling amount of joy.

Grand Theft Hamlet (Dir. Sam Crane and Pinny Grylls, 2024)

Grand Theft Hamlet is a documentary about two out-of-work actors attempting to stage Hamlet in Grand Theft Auto Online during the pandemic and on that premise alone I was sold.

Watching it, however, I did not feel like I was really the intended audience.

I think I struggled with it — as someone who grew up watching weird and wonderful spontaneous community projects on YouTube at its peak — because it simply did not feel quite as novel to me as it might to a slightly older demographic.

To someone who has never really realised the sense of community that online games can foster, let alone considered that that could then be mobilised to do something as ambitious as staging a production of Hamlet, I can imagine this being incredibly fascinating and actually kind of moving.

I do think it captures something of the desperate ingenuity that came with trying to perform and keep performance alive during the pandemic but it was at its best, to me, when they were just out in the world interacting with random strangers, getting griefed in the rehearsal process and just trying to navigate the insanities of a virtual world of modern ultraviolence while staging a historically ultraviolent play.

Highlander II: The Quickening (Dir. Russell Mulcahy, 1991)

The Wikipedia page for Highlander II: The Quickening reads:

“Highlander II was panned by critics and fans, and is considered to be one of the worst films ever made.”

I however simply do not believe that anyone who considers this “one of the worst films ever made” has watched enough films, let alone enough terrible 90s sequels to know what the worst film ever made might possibly look like (Robocop 2 exists and it is soul-crushingly dire…)

If you cannot enjoy this movie (and Michael Ironside and Sean Connery chewing so much scenery that they bankrupted Argentina) then I fear you are beyond help. This is a true gem that, along with John Carpenter’s Escape from LA — and, tentatively, Battle Royale II: Requiem (yes, I said it! I enjoyed the visually indecipherable post-9/11 Battle Royale!) — enters the club of panned sequels that might actually veer on brilliance.

(And yes, before you all write in, I did watch the version where the immortals are Aliens from the planet Zeist and no, I don’t want to watch the Renegade cut, unless it gives Michael Ironside or Sean Connery (or both!) more screen time!)