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Better Late than Never: Movies of 2024: Catching Up with Shunji Iwai, Part 2: A Chair Shattered Across the Clobbered Back of Your Mom's Cinematic Ignorance

Afterword

2024/12/30

As the old proverb asserts, "So swings the wooden chair upon the back of knowledge, to which splinters of wisdom therefrom may find purchase." Maybe I can smash some wisdom into your knowledge's mom's back by reporting what I've learned from this year's movies and reviews thereof:

  1. Never mind that Kyrie's Song wasn't among his best; Shunji Iwai is still among the most creative and engaging intermedial artists alive. I'd hug this guy if I could (and someday may).
  2. Never again will I view and subsequently review so many heretofore unseen movies, ever! In addition to reviews that I composed for Cinematic Feature Survey this year, I was crazy enough to appraise another 115 flicks, but not enough to imagine that most people would read most of these reviews. My record high for new movies was set at 254 in 2020; I'd be content to watch 50-60 in the coming year. Ugh! Seriously, I have books to read.
  3. In the past 30 years, Japanese and Koreans have produced the vast majority of worthwhile motion pictures. Lynch, the Coens, a smattering of very talented independents, and little else can fill the qualitative gap between the trendily brain-dead black hole of Hollywood and Tokyo or Seoul. I gravitate to excellence, so most of the best American movies that I watch were, as ever, made by Silents. I didn't learn this (I've known it for twenty years), but it bears ingemination this year, and maybe every year.
  4. Most cinema from emerging markets and developing countries are a waste of time. Don't get me wrong: there's great Mexican, Vietnamese, Georgian, etc. stuff to be found if you're willing to dig, but don't bother with most of the southern hemisphere. Indians make movies the way Korean women drive: with great persistence, zero aptitude, and dangerous stupidity.
  5. Like British literature, British cinema was great before they fried their brains with drugs and embraced American trash culture.
  6. That enduring globalist notion that the best cinema transcends culture to universal appeal is dead wrong. You can cite rare exceptions like 2001, but in actuality, the vast majority of great movies are steeped in and wholly expressive of their ethnocultural provenances.
  7. All Francophone nations produce but one good thriller or horror every decade. Once you've seen it, don't bother seeking others.

In closing, I'll leave you with a tart little quote from one of the Lumière brothers (I think it was Auguste or Groucho): "The cinema is an invention without any future, so tell those whores to get their god damn clothes off, because we gotta strike while the iron's hot." Never heard the rest of that one, did you? Until next year, happy eating, happy reading, happy viewing.

Part VI: The Best <

© 2024 Robert Buchanan

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