Twisted Double Features 👯‍♀️

Five perfect, and perhaps puzzling, movie pairings.

One of my favorite parts of attending film festivals is the strange collision of ideas that results from watching disparate films in close proximity. Only when one movie is still rattling inside my head would I dare to find parallels between, say, a German workplace comedy and a French cannibal horror film. (If that sounds absurdly specific, it’s because I am still proud of the bizarre and unforeseen connections I found between Toni Erdmann and Raw in this piece.)

“It has been said that every film critic is a closet programmer,” wrote J. Hoberman in an informative 2016 New York Times piece about the history and endurance of the so-called “double bill.” Guilty as charged. (And if you want to learn even more about the double bill and how it birthed the term “B-movie,” Boston’s Brattle Theater put together an excellent explainer I’d highly recommend taking the time to read.)

I love that this newsletter allows me to be as random as the availability dictated by streaming platforms’ licensing deals, resulting in the odd highbrow-lowbrow confluence of Mike Leigh and the Olsen Twins appearing in the same list. But I also relish the chance to “program” thematic series on a larger scale, digging into related works for people who really want to do their homework.

This piece attempts to find a happy medium. If other posts are meant to be a grocery list to stock your pantry, this is a delicately planned tasting menu with an intentional order and logic. Consider it the cinematic equivalent of a sweet-and-savory combo, something that seems like it won’t work because the flavors are just too far apart … only to leave you with a pleasant lingering taste you didn’t see coming.

Everyone will get a taste of what I’m talking about in a freebie pairing suggested to me by the great comedian John Early, and paid subscribers will get an additional four. Enjoy!

ENTER THE VOID

What could a droll ‘90s workplace comedy and a trippy sci-fi thriller have in common? I’ll leave that explanation to John Early in an extended quote from the Decider piece I wrote about how he helped rescue Clockwatchers from perishing forever:

“My dream, recently, has been to do a Clockwatchers screening series where I screen it with Annihilation […] because I feel like these are movies where you have a group of women going into a strange new territory where the environment eats away at you and causes this paranoia and releases these repressed Freudian urges and threatens the bonds between its characters. It's fun to think about Clockwatchers in a little bit more of a sci-fi, Technicolor way.”

At their core, both Clockwatchers and Annihilation are tales of female colleagues who begin a journey as a cohesive unit only to have that workplace tear those bonds apart. The jobs may be worlds apart, but the forces they must contend with share some remarkable similarities.

Clockwatchers is available to stream for free with ads on Tubi TV. Annihilation is available to stream on Paramount+. Both are also available through standard digital rental services.