Holiday Viewing
Nov. 26th, 2022 12:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
phantomtomatoTwo movies for me this holiday week, one new and one old:
Blood Relatives (2022), currently on AMC+. A Jewish holocaust survivor and vampire has been living nomadically for decades, until his half-vampire daughter tracks him down and makes him re-evaluate. My partner and I watched this because a Jewish vampire narrative felt… needed. Noah Segan (director, writer, lead) plays his character with a lot of campy, winking awareness—there’s gratuitous Yiddish, he calls The Fonz a nice Jewish boy—and the daughter (Victoria Moroles) has a sort of goofy intensity that works opposite. I thought the back half of the movie was a little weaker than the front half, which had great road-trip qualities with lots of bonding moments, but overall I enjoyed it, appreciated its tidy runtime (1hr 30 in 2022!), and thought it was a nice answer to some of this year’s conversation about reconciling Jewish identity and vampire media. Plus, I am always here for gentle movies.
Another Country (1984), this one I had to buy. Roughly based on the school years of one of the Cambridge Five spies, I mostly wanted to know what this was even… about, seeing as I’d osmosed the idea of there being a gay public school boy and a variety of other boys around him (maybe a communist? maybe he was the communist?). It was lovely! And then I googled Rupert Everett and wished I hadn’t. Anyway…
As much as I did enjoy the movie, my main takeaway at the moment is how glad I am to actually see a 1930s-ish public school, from the camp beds with their folding mattresses to the laundry room with spare sheets to the clothes (fuck I wish it were still possible to buy shirts like that, with cotton that thick!). I’m not a re-watcher, but I would probably benefit from seeing this one again to internalize more about the supporting characters. Guy Bennett sort of monopolized my attention; I see why Bennett’s Law works.
(Oh, and all this movie-watching has put me within a few hours of finishing a pair of mittens, hurrah.)
Blood Relatives (2022), currently on AMC+. A Jewish holocaust survivor and vampire has been living nomadically for decades, until his half-vampire daughter tracks him down and makes him re-evaluate. My partner and I watched this because a Jewish vampire narrative felt… needed. Noah Segan (director, writer, lead) plays his character with a lot of campy, winking awareness—there’s gratuitous Yiddish, he calls The Fonz a nice Jewish boy—and the daughter (Victoria Moroles) has a sort of goofy intensity that works opposite. I thought the back half of the movie was a little weaker than the front half, which had great road-trip qualities with lots of bonding moments, but overall I enjoyed it, appreciated its tidy runtime (1hr 30 in 2022!), and thought it was a nice answer to some of this year’s conversation about reconciling Jewish identity and vampire media. Plus, I am always here for gentle movies.
Another Country (1984), this one I had to buy. Roughly based on the school years of one of the Cambridge Five spies, I mostly wanted to know what this was even… about, seeing as I’d osmosed the idea of there being a gay public school boy and a variety of other boys around him (maybe a communist? maybe he was the communist?). It was lovely! And then I googled Rupert Everett and wished I hadn’t. Anyway…
As much as I did enjoy the movie, my main takeaway at the moment is how glad I am to actually see a 1930s-ish public school, from the camp beds with their folding mattresses to the laundry room with spare sheets to the clothes (fuck I wish it were still possible to buy shirts like that, with cotton that thick!). I’m not a re-watcher, but I would probably benefit from seeing this one again to internalize more about the supporting characters. Guy Bennett sort of monopolized my attention; I see why Bennett’s Law works.
(Oh, and all this movie-watching has put me within a few hours of finishing a pair of mittens, hurrah.)
