Marshall's Movie Mixtapes

And more for the holidays!

Hey friends — a little bit of Sunday housekeeping here about how to make the most of your Marshall and the Movies readership/subscription:

• Download the Substack app so you can join the chat!

Though this says “subscriber chat,” this thread is open to all readers — building off my recent Spielberg piece, I want to know what your favorite (and the best, if it’s not one and the same) film from the maestro is.

• Claim your movie mixtape if you’re a subscriber! As a reminder, I introduced these customizable ten-film recommendations to paid subscribers back in September. Just fill out a Google Form (it’s linked below and behind the paywall) and give me whatever mood, direction, or prompt you want a curated list of recommendations around. We can keep tinkering with it to make sure it’s not inclusive of things you’ve already seen and excludes things you don’t want, though I do my best to get your big no-nos at the briefing stage.

I know it seemed like a theoretical concept earlier this fall, but I want to show you what the output looks like now that I have two willing guinea pigs who gave the OK to share their lists as proof of concept.

The first mixtape comes from reader Katie Ferrigno, who gave me the idea for this feature when she asked for recommendations around a very specific mood: “futuristic or nonsense.” Here’s what I came up with.

The Daniels are the first person I thought of for this prompt — as they told me themselves, they envision themselves as “absurdist romantic humanists.” Swiss Army Man (available on Showtime Anytime) and Everything Everywhere All at Once (available on Showtime Anytime) find the sense in nonsense, locating the heartbeat of humanity even amidst the craziest of scenarios.

Quentin Dupieux is another similarly gonzo filmmaker, although he’s doing more riffs on genre like slashers in Rubber (available for free with ads on Pluto TV) and Westerns in Deerskin (available to rent). By imbuing objects like a tire and leather jacket with outsized importance, he upends typical tropes by having people respond to things as if they were people.

The offbeat Greek Weird wave has no better avatar than Yorgos Lanthimos. I think his last film in Greece, Alps (available to rent), and his first film in English, The Lobster (available for free with ads on Tubi), are perhaps his most vividly realized exercises in oddball comedy. Consider these films like an inverse of the Daniels’ optimism, a vision of a cruel and cold world where humankind’s inability to connect borders on pathological.

Stepping away from director pairings to those linked more by genre and theme — Bong Joon-ho’s Okja (available on Netflix) and Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales (available to rent) utilize bizarre humor and outsized spectacle to bring down the hammer against American capitalism and governance. These deeply idiosyncratic films draw immense power not from imagining a different country but rather from magnifying the deeply strange elements of society that already exist.

Is there anything more nonsensical than love? The free-wheeling classic screwball comedy Bringing Up Baby (available to rent) and the whimsical fantasy Mood Indigo (available on Hulu) both turn the table in their own way on traditional mores of courtship and coupling. I find them both delicious and delightful in their willingness to follow the two lovers’ romance down whatever odd path it might go. 

The second comes from subscriber and fellow critic Leila Latif, who submitted through the form. The direction: “Wild tonal changes.”

I arranged these as a set of five couplets¹:

Eastern Boys (available to rent) and Sauvage (available to rent) begin as sexually frank stories of people who view the act as something entirely transactional, only to have their understanding of what sensuality means softened by someone they encounter.

What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? (available on MUBI) and The One I Love (available on HBO Max) start with simple setups — a couple coming together, a couple falling apart — and use the imaginative capabilities of cinema and fiction to explore the forces that bind and repel in love.

The Overnighters (available for free with ads on Tubi) and The Task (available for free on filmmaker Leigh Ledare’s website) are non-fiction films that initially present as something quite conventional and simple before detonating the narrative equivalent of an atomic bomb ahead of the third act that radically transforms the way we think about the project as a whole.

Chuck & Buck (available for free with ads on Freevee via Amazon Prime Video) and The Informant! (available to rent) introduce us to two characters who seem simple yet slightly unstable — and the ground beneath our feet begins to shift alongside what the filmmakers choose to reveal about their true nature. The real genius lies in the way each film makes us think about the laughs we had at their expense earlier.

Under the Silver Lake (available on Showtime) and Synonyms (available to rent) are two of the most brilliant films about our most contemporary of problems: the radicalization of young men in need of some dominant ideology to orient their lives. The films each become increasingly conspiratorial, hostile, and unhinged as the protagonists fall deeper down a rabbit hole of misplaced masculinity.

If this seems like something you’re interested in for yourself, smash that subscribe button!