Hello and happy SUNDAY, everyone! *air horn noise* If you’ve read my Friday post, you know it was about movies, and because I had movies on the brain, and was on my Letterboxd account a lot while writing, I decided to make this Sunday’s listicle about movies as well. I don’t want to do a “My Top 5 Movies” because that would be a little overdone, so I scoured my Letterboxd and decided I’d do a “Top 5 Movies That Maybe You Haven’t Seen.” Maybe you have seen these movies, maybe you haven’t, I don’t keep track of you like that. I tried to pick some relatively underrated/“obscure” movies that I don’t think that many people have seen so let’s get into it!
Climax (2018) dir. Gaspar Noé
I was first turned on to this movie when someone I followed on Twitter said that they watched it and felt like they had just “watched someone commit a crime.” I did some cursory googling and found out that this movie apparently gets pretty crazy and fucked up, so I knew I had to watch it. Climax is a movie about a French dance troupe (played mostly by actual dancers with no prior acting experience) who throw a party in an abandoned school after a rehearsal for their upcoming US tour. Unbeknownst to them, someone spikes the sangria with a hallucinogen and the night dissolves into chaos. While I didn’t walk away from this movie feeling scarred, on a scale of one to The Human Centipede, I would give it like a 7.5 on the Craziness Scale. Just how crazy it is aside, I love this movie a lot (pretty sure I showed this to my boyfriend on like our third date), and can only describe it as a “slice of life” film, if that slice of life was just the worst night ever. I will say that this movie isn’t for the faint of heart or the pearl-clutching, so I’m sorry to anyone who saw my Instagram Story from a year ago where I said it was “just like OHS theatre after parties to a TEEE.” All in all, this is a fantastic exploration of sanity and madness that showcases man in a very primal form with some great dancing thrown in! Here is the opening scene:
Coherence (2013) dir. James Ward Byrkit
Coherence is a movie that is very very very very very hard to describe. It’s… a sci-fi movie… about people at a dinner party… and things go wrong… It’s a movie that you really have to see to understand. A movie about reality and who you are and who you could be if circumstances were different. It’s very intimate and was made on a shoestring budget, and the best part is that it’s only 89 minutes long. It’s a film filled with big ideas, but the characters are the most important part. Byrkit cast actors who didn’t know each other, invited them all to film at his home, and gave them each just a paper with notes and motivations for them to let their dialogue evolve naturally, and the end product is a tense, thrilling and cerebral look at several people’s psyches. I wouldn’t recommend you put this on in the background as it is a little confusing at times, but I 100% recommend you watch it if you’re in the mood for a surreal character study.
Black Bear (2020) dir. Lawrence Michael Levine
Coherence and Black Bear share two things in common, they are both very intimate, character-driven movies, and also that they are both quite confusing at times. Black Bear is a movie starring Aubrey Plaza as a screenwriter and actress who stays at a lakehouse with a married couple and attempts to write a new script… or so it seems. I won’t give anything away other than the movie is split into two-ish distinct parts, both with different plots that bear striking similarities to one another. It’s a film about what it means to be an artist, or, as one Letterboxd user eloquently puts it, “at its core, the film probes artists' relentless quest for authenticity[...]” While it’s not a sci-fi thriller like Coherence, Black Bear still leaves you with a lot to think about and is equally as trippy. Aubrey Plaza is amazing as the lead and delivers a performance that more people need to be talking about goddammit! Again, like Coherence, I don’t recommend you watch this film on in the background, but I do recommend you watch this film, be you a screenwriter, actress, artist, or just plain normal.
Bachelorette (2012) dir. Leslye Headland
I love movies about women (my favorite movie is Gone Girl), especially movies where women get to behave badly (again, my favorite movie is Gone Girl) and this movie is just that. To say Bachelorette is my guilty pleasure movie would be wrong because I do not feel guilty about liking this movie, it’s hilarious. Sadly, I rarely hear this movie talked about, and when I do it’s usually not the most positive. Bachelorette is a movie about a gaggle of friends from high school, Isla Fisher, Lizzy Caplan, and Kirsten Dunst (I love Kirsten Dunst) who get together for the wedding of their other friend from high school, played by Rebel Wilson before she started acting in shitty Netflix comedies. They go to the bachelorette party, some coke is done, a stripper arrives, someone is called “pig face,” the bride gets angry, the dress gets ruined and it’s up to our group of friends to come together to make the wedding all good again. This movie features women who still seem stuck in high school, being nasty and mean to other women, being selfish and careless, doing coke, and ruining a wedding. It’s amazing. Sadly, this movie was released in 2012, right around the time fourth-wave feminism, “women empowering women” was everyone’s priority and Hillary was still the Secretary of State. This movie was deemed “anti-feminist” and a “bad look” for women, but frankly fuck that. To paraphrase this Letterboxd review, I think it’s great to see women behaving badly, and I think there should be more movies where women are allowed the space to be debaucherous, because some women do behave badly and some women do get coked up before their friend’s weddings, and I think that’s something that should be celebrated.
The Scary of Sixty-First (2021) dir. Dasha Nekrasova
Alright, so I’m really asking for it by putting this on my list, but I don’t care, I think this movie is good! If you’ve spent some time on Twitter you may or may not know of the podcast Red Scare, you may love it, you may hate it, or maybe you’ve never heard about it and I envy you a little bit for that. Well, as it turns out, Red Scare podcast host Dasha Nekrasova made a movie! Yipee! I saw The Scary of Sixty-First at a 24-hour movie marathon with one of my best friends from home and she absolutely hated it, but I just don’t think she got it (sorry Allison :/). The Scary of Sixty-First is a movie about two girls, played by relatively unknown actresses Betsey Brown and Madeline Quinn, who move into an apartment that, as it turns out, was owned by Jeffrey Epstein. A girl, played by screenwriter and director Dasha Nekrasova, comes to investigate and draws them both into a deranged and delusional world of conspiracy and madness. It’s not intense like Climax, nor is it confusing like Coherence or Black Bear, and it definitely isn’t a movie for everybody at all, but if you’re a fan of conspiracies (or even my newsletter on conspiracies) and dark, “edgy” humor, then I highly recommend you watch.
Well, folks, that’s my list and I’m sticking to it! I would list off some honorable mentions here, but instead, I’ll link this Letterboxd list I made, so you can check out some other movies that you may or may not have seen that I thoroughly enjoy. Thanks for tuning in on this beautiful Sunday, this has been Trauma Response, good morrow.