Welcome to BriZigs LLC, the new name of That’s Weird. This post could be considered a “soft opening” of the BriZigs LLC acquisition of That’s Weird, with the merger still set to be completed in 2023. All our executives are still engaged in the grueling process of hand-shaking.
Brianna in Review
2022 was an annoying year for me for a few reasons. For one, after seamlessly evading them for 27 years, I got my first UTI (then two more before the year ended). And it was horrible—not that it was particularly painful or anything, but it took three rounds of antibiotics to clear and stayed with me for about a month and a half in total. And even after it cleared up, and I had scientific proof that it had cleared up, it still seemed to be causing me grief. I’m a very hypochondriac, neurotic person, and the pandemic amplified these quirks in my personality tenfold. Because the other annoying things about this year were my various trips to specialists over imagined medical fears. I went to a cardiologist for newfound heart palpitations (my heart was fine, the palpitations eventually went away), a dermatologist when I became fixated on my moles (all fine), and an ophthalmologist when an optometrist told me my eye pressure was high and that I was at risk of going blind (ok, that one was on the optometrist; the ophthalmologist told me that guy was just totally wrong about my eye pressure). I’m not trying to be a Jewish stereotype, I guess some things are just inherited.
Once I received a negative test back in August, it seemed as if the UTI was still bothering me like a phantom limb post-amputation. I was experiencing anxiety when I went to bed over whether or not I’d be able to fall asleep, and still found myself waking up multiple times in the middle of the night out of the pure habit that had been formed. I’ve never had sleep problems in my entire life until now (I have always thought that I sleep for too long, even), and it felt as if the UTI had broken something critical in me that was requiring far too much effort to mend, something psychosomatic that my increasingly anxious and worried mind did not have the fortitude to fight back. The seemingly undaunted and self-inflicted mental torment that this little UTI has caused me has kind of defined where I found myself, emotionally, in 2022.
Ultimately, this year was about trying to expand my cinematic horizons. I think I wrote something early 2022 when I first tried and failed to bring this Substack back; something about how, despite how far I’ve come in my exploration of film, my tastes have been very insular and I want to do more to step out of my comfort zone. I had compiled a list of directors that I was going to try prioritizing, but I abandoned it. It was a bad idea. I will only grow to hate movies if I turn them into homework.
Still, my teenage and college years as a “cinephile” were defined by anti-intellectualism, older films and foreign films were “pretentious,” and Tarantino was the only director that mattered. I know that this isn’t a novel POV—many film lovers of that age narrowly worship directors like Tarantino, Fincher, and Wes Anderson in the same way that I did. But there is a great sense of shame that I still carry for being so closed-off for so long, when I know that many of my peers who I respect were already far more curious than I was at that age. Admittedly, I get very nervous and insecure, instead of excited, when I think about all the films that I still haven’t seen, and all the things that I still don’t understand, even though I put more of a concerted effort now into seeking this knowledge out. It’s the best I can do, be curious, but I am consistently beset by the perception that it will never be enough. It’s too easy to trick myself into feeling like I’m behind other people, when “watching movies” isn’t a race. I’m only 28. It’s a bad habit—one of many— that I’m trying to break in the new year.
The year was, however, good for a few reasons as well. I got into a healthy romantic relationship, I moved to Brooklyn, I visited California for the first time, I saw Tim Heidecker and Nick Cave perform live (not together, sadly), I saw Martin Scorsese in the flesh, I got my first pair of Crocs, I watched Elvis, and I did an introduction for a sold-out screening of one of my favorite films, Under the Silver Lake, at Syndicated in Brooklyn. A note for any programmers or NYC cinema people out there who might be subscribed to this newsletter or simply taking a cheeky little peek at this post: I would love to do more screening intros in the new year. I think I did a good job.
Also, if you didn’t read my last post, I’ve scrapped the old name and theme of this newsletter: “That’s Weird,” where the original mission was to regularly write about/champion “weird,” “odd,” “underseen/appreciated” things in pop culture. But after a fairly short amount of time, I became vehemently averse to writing things on here if I had to adhere to a structure. So, I’ve just done away with that structure. I’ll write about a lot of the same stuff that I would’ve written with that old theme, but it will won’t be only that kind of writing. BriZigs LLC is all about expansion and progress. Getting those numbers up up up!
Because, ultimately, I want to get this blog to a point where I have enough subscribers that turning on paid options makes sense (I feel like I’ve been saying this over and over for a long time), and I am slowly but surely getting to that point. It would just be nice to not have to rely solely on what precarious freelancing I can scrape up per month in order to supplement my income.
Favorite First Watches
This year introduced me to more wonderful cinema than I have room to write about in this Substack, but my favorite introduction of 2022 has been to Bollywood cinema. After expressing my thorough enjoyment of S.S. Rajamouli’s RRR (though, not a Bollywood film, but a Tollywood film of Telugu cinema), my boyfriend—who had himself become a big fan of Bollywood in recent years—encouraged me to watch more Indian cinema. I first watched an earlier Bollywood film, Disco Dancer, from 1982, and then my boyfriend and I watched one of his favorites together, the Shah Rukh Khan-led Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi. In addition to this, on my Bollywood journey so far I have seen: Om Shanti Om, Kal Ho Naa Ho, Happy New Year, Main Hoon Na, Dil se…, and Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, and I watched a second Tollywood film, Eega, also from Rajamouli. I also firmly believe that Shah Rukh Khan has more juice than any actor who has ever existed and been capable of having “the juice.”
It was my recent affection for Bollywood films that finally got me to take a chance on James Cameron’s Titanic, a movie that I’d put off for years in part due to its omnipresence in pop culture. The fact that I’d seen so much of it in clips and parodies it felt like I’d already seen it, so why bother; and because I had always viewed it as schmaltzy garbage and I have historically been an unromantic person. Researching Titanic for an article a few months ago, I learned that the film did well at the Indian box office because of the similarities it shares to Bollywood films. This piqued my interest and I finally took a chance on it. And since I now love love and also Bollywood films, I found myself totally swept away in its spectacle, eventually reaching a point in my watch where I was weeping so hard it was physically painful for me to do so.
My second favorite discovery of 2022 has been the independent work of Matt Farley and Charles Roxburgh (also introduced to me by my wonderful boyfriend), under the banner of Motern Media. The nature of their odd, low-budget, self-funded films made up entirely of actors from their neighborhood creates an uncanny almost-reality that only exists in their worlds. I wrote extensively about the unique joy and ingenuity of their films, and their newest film, Magic Spot (which is my favorite film of 2022), for Paste Magazine earlier this year. I encourage everyone to seek out their work. My favorite Motern titles are Local Legends and Don’t Let the Riverbeast Get You!, but there is so much to be gained from any and all of their films. Farley, Roxburgh, and frequent actor Kevin McGee came to screen their 2007 film Freaky Farley in New York back in October, which was awesome. I’m in this selfie somewhere if you look hard enough.
I tried to fill in a lot of former-half 20th century blind spots this year as well. I finally got around to films by Ford, Ophüls, Fassbinder, Rohmer, Pasolini, Sirk, Godard, Truffaut, Wilder. Some big titles I finally filled in were: City Lights, All About Eve, Sunset Boulevard, The 400 Blows, Double Indemnity, Seconds, Touch of Evil, Persona, Adam’s Rib, Come and See, The Parallax View, Female Trouble, The Mother and the Whore, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Close-Up, Rebel Without a Cause, North by Northwest, Rio Bravo, Freaks, and F for Fake. I have also nearly completed David Cronenberg’s filmography though I’m a little annoyed I didn’t just finish it off this year. I didn’t get to quite as many older and foreign films as I initially would have liked, but I definitely watched more of both this year than previous years which is something to be proud of I think!
I loved lots of movies this year, but here were my favoritest favorite first watches. I’m probably forgetting some (here’s a link to the list on Letterboxd as well since some titles are a little compressed in this format):
Favorite 2022 Watches
I did not like many new releases this year, and my list of 2022 watches is comprised mostly of films that I either thought were ok, mediocre, or bad. I still have a lot of catching up to do, but I probably won’t actually finish my catch-up list anytime soon. Again, I’m doing my best to get to the movies I’m most interested in that I missed during the year, but I will gently notion what I mentioned earlier in this piece about turning movie-watching into homework.
I do genuinely believe that after a certain point, I have seen all the new releases of the year that I am going to love. Maybe that sounds narrow-minded of me in the same post where I profess to want to “expand my cinematic horizons.” But it takes a lot for me to love a film and I’m very familiar with my taste and what I like, and also what I am less likely to like. And while I’m sure there are plenty of films on my catch-up list that I am prone to highly enjoy, I think I have already sought out the films that I will love let alone find a place for on my already-formed Top 10. But whatever. Who knows! Even people like me are known to be wrong. As of now, these are my Top 20 films of 2022:
Magic Spot (Charles Roxburgh)
Elvis (Baz Luhrmann)
Jackass Forever (Jeff Tremaine)
Funny Pages (Owen Kline)
Tár (Todd Field)
RRR (S.S. Rajamouli)
Armageddon Time (James Gray)
The Eternal Daughter (Joanna Hogg)
The Munsters (Rob Zombie)
The Fabelmans (Steven Spielberg)
Babylon (Damien Chazelle)
All That Breathes (Shaunak Sen)
Avatar: The Way of Water (James Cameron)
The Banshees of Inisherin (Martin McDonagh)
The Northman (Robert Eggers)
Fall (Scott Mann)
Hustle (Jeremiah Zagar)
Jackass 4.5 (Jeff Tremaine)
EO (Jerzy Skolimowski)
Ambulance (Michael Bay)
But my actual favorite new release of the year isn’t technically a 2022 release, since it’s distribution is set for next year. It’s Kelly Reichardt’s new film Showing Up, which I had the pleasure of catching at the 2022 New York Film Festival this past fall. The film centers on a ceramics artist (played by Michelle Williams) struggling with creative competition and insecurity—in addition to a series of near-comical setbacks—in the lead-up to her gallery opening. I’ve been thinking a lot about this movie. I like Kelly Reichardt’s films and the way that her minimalist style breeds a deeply felt naturalism in her worlds. There are universes of emotion nurtured in the smallest of otherwise negligible human interactions: from brief glances and pauses in between sentences, from the bend of a wrist or the slump of shoulders. From listening to other people talk.
Lizzie (Williams) carries her wavering confidence in her physicality, in the way she reacts to other artists who she feels overshadow her own work. Her smile will falter and she’ll turn body inwards when she no longer feels happy with what she’s created. She is in a constant pissing contest with her more successful landlord and fellow artist Jo (Hong Chau), who is able to use the extra money she makes off of Lizzie and the extra time this passive income allows to afford a better studio space and, thus, a nicer gallery to show off her work. Even Marlene (Heather Lawless), a fellow teacher at the art school Lizzie teaches at who expresses interest in Lizzie’s work, makes Lizzie recoil. Marlene is confident and forthcoming, qualities that Lizzie does not have, and her kind words and curiosity in Lizzie’s art only serve to highlight Lizzie’s own meager self-confidence and dissatisfaction in what little she feels she herself has accomplished. In between work at the school, we see Lizzie wander the halls, observing other people crafting their art. One might suspect she is quietly comparing their work to her own.
I felt a deep kinship with Lizzie watching this film, thinking about my relationship to my own creative work, and I cried during the opening of her art gallery. It’s not an outwardly emotional scene, but I understood the anxiety Lizzie clearly felt seeing her tiny ceramic figurines lined up in one tiny row on a single tiny platform in the middle of the tiny gallery, not long after a scene in which she walks through the vast expanse of Jo’s own in-progress gallery. In her mind, it’s like, “This is all my work is, and this is all I have to show for it.” Working in a creative field, it is hard to not compare your career and abilities with those of your peers, and to feel like you aren’t good enough or doing enough, especially if you struggle more acutely with feelings of insecurity and self-doubt. But all you can do is keep creating, which is something I often have to tell myself. I’m on my own path and other people are on theirs, and it’s not productive to compare the two even if I have difficulty adhering to that advice.
A very reassuring line of dialogue comes from Marlene while perusing Lizzie’s gallery, at just about the end of the film. Marlene observes a figurine that had been badly burnt while in the kiln. Lizzie had reluctantly put the figurine on display nonetheless as if a monument to her own perceived incompetence; as if to show that no matter how proud she often feels of her work, she still isn’t good enough, and here’s the proof. “At this stage, you just gotta own it,” Marlene warmly tells Lizzie. Yes, I suppose I should, shouldn’t I?
2022 Juice Awards
The first annual recipient of the Juice Award is Hong Chau, who killed it in three movies this year (I’m going to count Showing Up for this). In her triptych of fantastic performances — The Whale, Showing Up, and The Menu — Hong Chau has more than proven than she has “the juice,” though she’s always had the juice. Chau has become a familiar and reliable character actor since her debut not even a decade ago as Jade “pussy-eater’s special” in Inherent Vice. She’s gone on to give memorable performances in films like Driveways, Downsizing, and American Woman, and her upcoming films are even more exciting: roles in both Wes Anderson and Yorgos Lanthimos’s next films.
Chau has an incredibly lived-in quality to her acting; she’s chameleonic but completely natural, able to not only believably embody each character she takes on (be it an aggrieved nurse, a flaky landlord slash artist, or the sadistic Maître d'hôtel of an exclusive restaurant) but in a way where it feels, every time, that this is the only character she has ever been, or ever will be. And she does it again and again. Does that make sense? I’m not great at talking about acting.
But I’m frequently reminded of what Brendan Fraser said of Chau, who was absent from the New York press screening of The Whale that I attended back in November. He said that she “speaks volumes in the pauses.” I thought that was an incredibly eloquent way of articulating what makes her performances so lifelike and so powerful, and also what I believe made her such a perfect fit for a Kelly Reichardt film. It’s not just about the dialogue she’s reciting, but everything that she’s doing with her face and her body in the spaces in between her words that really breathes life to her characters. You really believe that she’s these people, and has always been.
Congratulations to Hong Chau for being the first recipient of this prestigious accolade!
Conclusion
Check out this close-up of my parrot.
Also, feel free to leave a comment below and ask me questions. Things you’d like my opinion on, any advice you’d like from me, topics you’d like to see me write on, my thoughts on a particular movie, or whether I think a celebrity has the juice—you know, whatever. I’ll continue doing larger AMA’s from time to time, but I’ll also incorporate more subscriber-driven ideas into my posts going forward.
Loved this, especially the Juice awards! Excited to read more of your words in 2023.
the way I relate to so much of this...