Movies I watched in June 2025 -- and a rant on expressiveness in film
Felt like shit a lot of the month; a bunch of things all combined to make sure I barely slept through the whole month (this is ongoing), and so I watched a lot of youtube videos on the couch instead of movies -- or even reading books much, though that's also a casualty of being in the middle of too many books at once, again.
So, here are the two movies I watched this month.
Clue
1985, Jonathan Lynn, dir.
This is one of my favorite movies. Shout! Factory did a 4k rerelease so I grabbed it, and then we watched it with some friends who'd never seen it.
As Pontifus said afterwards, "That movie didn't have to go that hard." It's, to me, the quintessential adaptation of something stupid. Who would want to make a movie out of a board game? Of course, given the past few years, who could ever confidently say that again, right? But in 1985 it must have seemed insane. But it's a board game about a murder mystery, so, just make a murder mystery!
If you don't know anything about this movie, there are some things you should go in not knowing, but I'll spoiler them below. The general idea is that the six playable characters are all invited to a mansion in the middle of nowhere (called Hill House, as a little nod to the Price film) to meet their blackmailer, Mr. Boddy. He gives them all the classic weapons from the board game, in an bid to get someone to kill Wadsworth (Tim Curry) in the dark so they can all go back to their lives, no one the wiser, but of course still being blackmailed.
In the dark, of course, someone actually kills Mr. Boddy. The police are coming, as the person who planned this whole event wants to accuse Boddy of the blackmail with all the victims gathered together, so of course it becomes a kind of goof on the locked room murder. The house is locked up, so they know it had to be one of them. But no one knows who.
It is intensely funny. Just go check out the cast. Madeleine Khan is in this, as a serial husband-killing widow (Mrs. White).
I just read some of the wikipedia entry after getting that link and apparently people don't like this movie? That seems like news from another dimension to me.
Anyway. So,
Finally, and this is probably the most famous thing about the film now, it has three endings. Originally, theaters got one of the three endings, and when it was released on home video they were all put on there with some cards saying "this is how it could have happened."
Night Moves
1975, Arthur Penn dir.
I'd never seen this before, but I've seen plenty of people talk about how good it is, and it was on Criterion's streaming service. And then, as they do, they announced halfway through June that they would remove it at the end of the month. I barely squeaked it in, on the final day of the month, having watched a third of it the week before.
It's really good. It is so fucked up.
Gene Hackman plays Harry, a former football player turned private eye who is hired to track down a 16 year old runaway whose mother is a bitter, aging b list starlet who slept her way to her best roles and who is living off the money endowed to her daughter, Delly, by her first husband, who's died.
Harry goes through some pretty typical detective stuff, just wandering around asking questions, and figures out Delly went to Florida to see her stepfather -- who, we learn, she has slept with, because, as some kind of teenage rebellion, she's sleeping with all the men her mother slept with.
Meanwhile, Harry's wife is cheating on him because he's gone all the time and miserable when he's not. Leaving for Florida does not help this situation.
Harry meets Paula, the stepfather's assistant, and hits it off with her. They will eventually have sex in a very awkward and strange way, the scene featuring her encouraging Harry to touch her breasts while she talks about her childhood. Delly refuses to go back until, diving one night, she stumbles across a dead body in a crashed plane and Harry helps her with her nightmares. She goes home, only for a huge family argument to break out. Harry fucks off and decides to quit this business.
Now, the rest of this movie I can't summarize for you because it goes off the fucking rails at this point. It was extremely good before, as a thoughtful "neonoir" take on the shambling corpse of old Hollywood (Delly's boyfriends include a mechanic who works on cars and planes for films, the stuntman who pilots and drives those vehicles, and possibly but maybe not the director of those films who's friends with Harry) as well as the United States' upcoming fascination with Florida (which would arguably peak in the following decade).
The way people deliver their lines is amazing, the, not method acting the way people mean, but actual "Method Acting" the way it was taught, filtering through everyone's performances. There's stuff everywhere, people own things. Paul's car burns oil and Harry has to follow her to the dock where Delly is hanging out, and we see her car burning oil the whole way. This does not become a thrilling plot point; Harry does not figure out she was secretly somewhere because of the smell of burned oil. It's just a fact, because she's poor and kind of roughing it and can't afford a new car, or to get this one fixed.
I happened to watch this movie in juxtaposition with seeing a comment on bluesky. Maybe the person who said it will read this, so know that I'm not trying to roast you -- I think a lot of people feel this way. But the person said they tried to watch a lot of "good" movies lately and they found they just prefer animation because everything is expressive, not just the actor's faces.
And, I get that. I think at some points in my life I have felt that way without being able to put it into words. But it's not actually true. You can prefer whatever you like, but live action films are as expressive as animation.
I think we all have a tendency to think live action film, for movies or tv, somehow "really happened," that the sets and clothing and settings just happened to be there, because that's just where the characters happened to live, what they happened to own. But every single little detail in a film is there on purpose, unless someone is doing guerilla filmmaking. They're often on sound stages, so the walls and floors themselves are fake. Night Moves really spoke to me about this. Everyone's drinking, and everyone's drinking different things, out of different glasses. Harry interrupts his wife having sex with her lover once by cranking up the guy's sound system, and when they storm out of the bedroom, he's got his feet up, eating their leftovers, drinking their wine, and he asks if that's the new such-and-such hifi, "it really fills the room."
There's quite a bit of food in the film, actually. Harry is often eating a sandwich, stuff he can fit in between driving all around town. Paula and Tom (the stepfather, and note, it's mostly Paula) cook while Harry's in town, spreading things out on a picnic table. Paula slaps Harry's hand when he filches a cucumber off the family style spread.
Everyone's car is weird and of the time and some of them are nice but they're just the cars these people are using, even though, as I said, they aren't. They're carefully chosen to tell you something about this character. Harry is expressive when you can't see his face, because his car is the ugliest weird brown beige you've ever seen, but it's a kind of nice car, with these tiny little backseat windows that demonstrate he's never considered anyone ever sitting back there.
I had to practice this. I still do have to practice it. I'm not naturally a film person. I notice stuff in books without meaning to, especially after all the years of training I got. But I had to sidle into movies, as I never got to take a film class. Look at the frame, where the director and the cinematographer have decided the image you see terminates. There's more stuff on the edges. Maybe they'll pan and you'll see more of it, before you get to the focus point.
Look at the editing -- is it jarring, or smooth? Do they mirror things, so a character in one scene is in the same position as the next character shown? Or are they opposed, on separate sides of the frame?
And obviously there's music and sound as well.
Most of this will of course apply to animation, but I think we all instinctively think about this a little more in animation because we think of it as a drawing, and we know that's purely artificial. But a film is like a photograph -- while it's just as artificial, in this context, we think it's "real."