Before The White Lotus, Glass Onion and The Menu eviscerated the ultra-wealthy, there was Greed. Released right around the start of the pandemic, Greed is the story of a billionaire’s 60th birthday party-gone-awry directed by Michael Winterbottom and starring Steve Coogan as the toothy asshole behind a high street empire. It’s tagged as a satire and, in some ways, it is, but the movie is so grounded in the realities of the 21st century global economy that I don’t think that’s quite the right classification. It’s a little too prescient to be a satire and perhaps that, plus its unfortunate early 2020 release date, is why its Rotten Tomatoes score belie how good this movie is.
Seeing Der Fan in a theater beats watching it at home.
There’s a moment in Der Fan, when it’s obvious that something is extremely not right about Simone. A cute, teenage boy who clearly has a thing for the protagonist of this 1982 German film hands her a cassette tape. She rejects the tape so casually that I practically gasped while sitting in the front row of a screening at Alamo Drafthouse.
William Finley as Winslow Leach and T.O.N.T.O. in Phantom of the Paradise
On its surface, Phantom of the Paradise, the 1974 sold-my-soul-for-rock-n-roll musical, may not seem like it’s a Brian De Palma film. It’s, essentially, a retelling of The Phantom of the Opera with a meta-dose of Faustian legend, along with touches of The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Count of Monte Cristo. It’s campy, drawing plenty of comparisons to Rocky Horror, the film adaptation of which came out the following year. But, if you stick around to the movie’s final concert scene— and you should— you might have the same reaction that I did, which is, “OMG, Carrie!”
Falco: Verdammt, wir leben noch! is a 2008 Austrian biopic of the late pop singer Falco, released in the U.S. under the title, Falco: The Rise and Fall of an ‘80s Pop Icon. Now, you might be scratching your head and thinking, “There’s a Falco biopic? Why?” In fact, that’s exactly what went through my dumb American brain when I recently learned of the existence of this film.
