FERAL ROYAL : blog

2024 movie roundup: honorable mentions

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I watched a lot of movies in 2024. It was honestly a nightmare to try and cut down 200+ into 20 (10 releases of the year + 10 releases from previous years), made worse because I caught up on so many GOOD fucking films from the last few decades. As such, there was some overflow. What you’re now reading is the honorary mentions list, with my actual nominated top watches of 2024 to come later whenever I finish picking away at it. (I consider it a personal victory to be getting any writing done presently, let alone in a timely way.)

It does bear mentioning, I think, that even if they didn't make the finalists I consider all these a certified great time at the cinema.

Aside from all the movies I’m yapping about at length, there’s several more that I simply did not have much to say beyond ‘damn this really rocked.’ Like, look, The Zone of Interest knocked me on my ass, but I have no thoughts on it you haven’t heard. In the interest of not making this post any longer than it already is, here is the Just Go See It shortlist.

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)

I don’t have much pithy or thoughtful to say on The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari in its own context — the environment in which it was produced is one where a lot is lost on me! I’m not familiar enough (yet) with the postwar German political atmosphere to speak confidently on the movie’s text, but I can appreciate what it did for the world of movies to come. It also encouraged me to explore more movies from the 20s and 30s, which in turn made a serious impact on how I approached toning/greyscale for the graphic novel I was working on at the time. Those sharp, beautiful brutalist shapes cut into shadow left their mark.

This era in film feels like looking at something through its eggshell. A veined little limb moves over a peachy illuminated yolk. Light catches on the bossed brow of Boris Karloff. Bela Lugosi moves his cape over his face. These cut through time and space, fixing an image in history. How rare it is, to watch a thing you can point to and say, ‘This is where film changed forever.’ Conrad Veidt’s eyes snap open and horror movies begin.

Paths of Glory (1957)

It legitimately pained me to have to leave this and 2001 to honorable mentions, but as much as I can withstand the slings and arrows of this world I cannot shoulder the burden of making a movies of the year list that is three-tenths Kubrick pictures. One of Kubrick’s quieter strengths lies in how dark his humor runs, but though Paths of Glory is maybe his least ‘funny’ film I’ve seen so far — excepting Clockwork Orange, which I am very chilly on — it may actually be my favorite?

It is a bleak and sickening anger, sharpened to a point, and driven slowly through the gut for an hour and a half. Paths’ viewpoint on combat caused such controversy it was not screened in France until 1975 and Spain until 1986. Describing Paths of Glory as having an ‘antiwar theme’ feels a bit like saying Luigi Mangione had an ‘anticapitalist message.’ The contours, drudgery, and most of all the ugly pointlessness of WWI are rendered here as few others have ever managed to sketch them. Tight, furious filmmaking all the way to the finish line.

Black Lizard (1968)

A sublime work of queer pulp, featuring the astounding drag queen and singer Akihiro Miwa (you may know him as the voice of Moro in Princess Mononoke) in the role of a villainous jewel thief. He is so beautiful in this it’s stressful. The cat-and-mouse romance happening in Black Lizard is divine, adapting Mishima into a form akin to a Japanese giallo. It’s like a warm, lovely dream.

Fyi if you need a place to watch this, I uploaded the mkv and subtitle files to archive.org out of sheer desperation to make sure this movie is preserved. The only other streams of it I could find were seriously degraded VHS rips and Black Lizard deserves better than being lost to time like that!

The Stepford Wives (1975)

God, this one really caught me by surprise. I was ungracious in my expectations of this movie, being real with you. I expected something schlocky, or at least less trusting of the viewer. It brims with understated touches — the shifting of the soundtrack from cozy chill vibes 70s music to a world intermittently breaking apart at the seams perhaps the most unexpected of these. Having read the story does nothing to blunt the creeping dread The Stepford Wives builds up within you. It’s one thing to know that these women are going to lose their agency. It’s another thing entirely to watch them be taken apart piece by piece, smiling all the while.

Scanners (1981)

Trying and failing to keep this bit short, but it bears saying that I’m happiest talking Cronenberg when I get to tackle it in tandem with the larger body of work -- David really loves to revisit his preferred topics, and not just the body horror (and tang of Gender) that has come to define public perception of his art. The bureaucrat’s repression of nature, the focus on An Office Building as one of the most evil possible locations, all these thorny sticky delightful jawbreakers of body and agency and connection.

These are tools in his oeuvre that you can trace like smoke signals in time, running a finger through the dust from ConSec’s tracking and management of scanners to the National Organ Registry’s restriction of where human evolution will progress. The red thread of fate connects Darryl Revok purring ‘brothers should be close, don’t you think?’ to Beverly Mantle mewling ‘Elly… Elly…’

Catching up on Cronenberg’s catalog has been in some ways an exercise in watching him think out loud. It’s fucking thrilling to see someone at work who can so beautifully drill down on his own fascinations.

A few particulars of Scanners I wanted to touch on: the soundtrack for this movie absolutely slaps. The mixture of bells and synths and orchestra with bordering-on-flatulent brass flourishes is so distinctively juicy. Catchy doesn’t quite describe the way the score gets into the brain and stays there. Howard Shore maniac genius at it again.

Also, Scanners has some of the most shocking/upsetting deployment of VFX work I’ve yet seen, and I don’t mean the head explosion! (Louis Del Grande’s physical acting immediately prior to The Famous Scanners Head Explosion is magnitudes more distressing than the actual money shot. You can earnestly believe you’re seeing a human brain so pushed beyond its limits it regresses to a base animal, scrabbling to escape. Awesome shit.)

The use of prosthetics took me aback completely — there is something so profoundly visceral and ugly to the wounds in Scanners’ final act. Cronenberg movies possess a uniquely intense, pervasive sense that the earthly human body could, at any time, have some profoundly terrible thing occur to it. The feeling continues that, no matter how often I rewatch, something new might happen or reveal itself. There could be something else under the skin this time.

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986)

This also hurt to cut. Voyage Home is #11 on the Top 10 in my heart, not least because it’s some of the most fun I’ve had watching a movie with friends this year. Part of my 2024 involved finally undergoing the Trekkie metamorphosis and it’s been a needed source of joy and human connection this year. The long and short of it: friends sat me down for the first two Trek movies, and after Wrath of Khan I became so uncontrollably Spirkpilled I watched the entirety of TOS. Of course, Spock and Kirk’s relationship being what sucked me into the series means that I fucking love this movie.

It is Peak Trek spirit to me — the sincerity, the silliness, these things entwining and amplifying each other in a way that makes the whole film feel both like a really good Trek episode and a really good Trek fanfic. The chemistry between the boys is so excellent here, man. I have very little to say about this in terms of ‘movie analysis’ relative to the others here but sometimes you just gotta give props to the power of comfort food.

Jacob’s Ladder (1990)

Fucking hell, man, this movie. It’s very, very good, but I wanted to give a little additional shout out to it largely because I was pretty unprepared for how much Silent Hill as a game franchise was lifting directly from it. (This isn’t a slight against either of the works. We don’t pit bad bitches against each other.) Something that’s really fascinating to me here is how much Team Silent clearly drew from Jacob’s Ladder for a series that quite markedly is not about Vietnam in any fashion. I have no larger thesis here, it’s just fascinating to finally sit down for something so influential and find that one of its greatest drivers is entirely absent from the text of the iconic horror franchise it inspired. Food for thought.

Revue Starlight: The Movie (2021)

The first thing you must know is that, in order to enjoy this movie, you need to watch the Revue Starlight anime. All of it. It's twelve episodes and it goes down smooth. The Movie will make little to no sense on its own, but as the capstone on a full season of buildup this stuff pops like fucking crazy. The show on its own is solid fun, but The Movie is functionally a finishing move whose flourishes elevate the entire thing well above and beyond what would have been possible within a 22-minute episodic format. More even than Madoka Rebellion, Revue Starlight: The Movie is the banger ending anime movie you simply did not expect to see coming (or maybe even think was necessary, until it stole your heart.)

A friend fell so in love with Revue Starlight that, when the opportunity arose to book a private screening when a lot of people would be in town, they took the time to sit our friend group through the anime via Discord, just so that we all would be ready to walk into the theater together. I’m incredibly grateful they did, because Revue Starlight isn’t something I would have picked up on my own time. Not to dig at it — I simply generally do not go in for transmedia franchises about high school girls unless there is an outside force guiding me very intently toward them. In Revue’s case, our friend being that force meant that I had one of the happiest theatergoing experiences of my life.

I haven’t been to the theater in a group very often, even before the pandemic altered the trajectory for how I had to assess prospects of ‘going out’ for the rest of my life. Hearing so many people I love gasp and yell in delight — and doing the same along with them — was a treasure. The fucking spectacle of it all, man. The Mad Max scene. I wanted to stand up in my seat. What a love letter to melodrama and big messy feelings and screaming and finding yourself. And of course, above all else, the stage.

We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2021)

It’s difficult to convey how it feels to watch this without revealing too much about myself, or at least without saying more about personal traumas than I care to in a public movie review. Director Jane Schoenbrun is slightly older than me, but their primary attentions here drill down into something deeply felt and shared: growing up with The Computer.

I wish I could exchange World’s Fair with I Saw The TV Glow for my final rankings of 2024, ultimately because, well, I’m more Casey than Owen. It’s selfish, but they’re personal movies about personal feelings. World’s Fair feels like what happened to me, plain and simple. It’s not an experience I ever expected to have reflected back at me with such ferocity — staying up late, the isolation, the movies on the laptop, the unsavory websites, the isolation… but here, it unfolds with a delicate precision that continues to impress me. Schoenbrun’s flair in regards to the Youtube and Youtube-alike videos deployed is also a masterstroke — there’s such a savvy bitchiness to the editorial choices made in this department. Excellent stuff.

Tuesday (2023)

I’m learning more and more that at the end of the day I’m an easy mark for a movie whose plot largely exists to contain a single painful event — here, a teenager is dying of cancer and her mother struggles against it. That’s all there is to it. Get ready to sit with the sadness, turn it over in your hands for a while. I’m writing this at a time where death is pretty present in my mind, and what Tuesday feels most dialed into is that the long curve of loss is pitted with all these small mundane, absurd things that throw a wrench into what might otherwise be simple interminable sadness. There’s comedy in it, even. How else could we survive grief without going insane? Maybe I’m kinder to it looking back because of how life has changed between then and now, or because I tend to give bonus points to movies that are willing to take ambitious weird as hell swings even if they don’t stick every landing. (Death is portrayed as a talking parrot. It’s magical realism, man, don’t worry about it.) In the end, Tuesday is a lightly acquired taste, but it’s worth trying.

It’s neither a movie from this year nor a movie I watched for the first time this year but I’m giving an additional honorable mention spot to Phantom of the Paradise (1974), on account of it’s my sleepover so I make the rules. Showing this to a big group of friends and hearing in realtime the way the movie caught and held them is going to be a Movie Memory I treasure for a long time to come. I could — and at some point, may — write a full length post just yapping about Phantom, the way it makes me feel, the complete maniac shit de Palma does in this movie, but for now I’ll settle for giving it a participation badge on account of having watched it four more times this year. Phantom is also available to watch for free on archive.org, if you haven't seen it yet.