my 3 favorite + most hated movies of 2024 so far
Beefy lesbians, a chivalrous zombie, and MySpace songs are in movies worth your time this year.
August has been the month of the movie for me. For now, the days of little faith in my attention span are over, and my first month as an AMC A-Lister has paid off about five times over.
I’m not going to a whole lot of parties or events in-person right now as COVID ravages LA County once again. If you and I were to run into each other at a party these days, though, I would want to tell you about some of the movies I’ve seen this year. Four new movies in particular have left a lasting impact on me—three in a good way, and one that has joined a rare club of movies I despise with my whole heart.
First, the good:
Love Lies Bleeding
The first 2024 movie I saw this year has remained my favorite so far. Love Lies Bleeding is a gritty, stylish thriller following gym employee Kristen Stewart and the female body builder who strolls into town played by Katy O’Brien. It’s a movie not for the prudish or faint of heart—nearly every bodily fluid imaginable makes a cameo. Grotesque and erotic are near indistinguishable here. Love Lies Bleeding also features one of the most impressive and exciting lesbian sex scenes I’ve ever seen.
Watching this movie, I thought a lot about RS Benedict’s essay Everyone is Beautiful and No One is Horny. I highly suggest reading it yourself, but essentially it draws a contrast between movies up until the early 90s and movies today, which have removed the visible flaws in bodies and the spaces they inhabit while adopting a shame-ridden aversion to using those bodies for sex or pleasure. Love Lies Bleeding never once suggests shame or embarassment for its filth and sexuality. It embraces the viscera produced as a byproduct of indulgence—the pile of yolks leftover from making a lover’s egg white omelet mix with the ash and cigarette butts from a nasty, hedonistic habit. I left the theater after this movie feeling inspired and alive, and returned to my ultra-tame-by-comparison life with something exciting to chew on for weeks after.
If you are someone averse to the Marvel-industrial complex and the “no kink at Pride” crew, you should watch Love Lies Bleeding.
Lisa Frankenstein
Continuing the trend of blending hot and gross, Lisa Frankenstein is a stylish and insane movie following a girl who’s an outsider in her new family and new school. She hangs out in the abandoned cemetery for unmarried men until a lightning storm brings the inhabitant of her favorite grave back from the dead.
Lisa Frankenstein has the punchy dialogue of Jennifer’s Body, the style and dark teen debauchery of Heathers, and—best of all, IMO—the zany comedic beats of a movie like UHF. There are bugs and grubs, covetable gothy fashion, a character who grunts for dialogue but is completely understood by their co-star, and a bitchy villainous step-mom for the ages.
Lisa Frankenstein is not a perfect movie—it could commit harder to its style and further eschew conventional cinematography and plot progression. As a directorial debut, though, this movie is a very good omen for stylish stupid future romps.
This movie deserves a spot in the modern camp canon, and I would be delighted but completely unsurprised if Lisa Frankenstein attains cult classic status in a few years as more people uncover this underrated gem.
Didi
As one of the oldest zoomers, who was in middle school at the end of the 2000s, every young millenial coming-of-age movie has always been a few years shy of correctly capturing the artifacts of my adolescense. Didi broke that streak, following a 13 year old Taiwanese-American boy in the summer of 2008 between ending middle school and starting high school. He messages his friends on AIM, uploads homemade videos to YouTube, keeps track of the MySpace Top 8 slots of his friends, and makes the ringtone on his flipphone the MySpace song of his crush (if I recall correctly, it’s a Hellogoodbye song). As an avid follower of the Indie Sleaze instagram, and someone just the right age to develop nostalgia for that time, the late aughts do feel like a defined period with recognizable, isolatable culture artifacts. When my mom saw Didi, she said this movie was the first time she saw that time as a defined period (“All of my female students in 2008 had the older sister’s haircut!”)
Even though I’m particularly tickled by those nostalgic details, Didi is so much more than a time capsule. This movie captures the conflicts of young teenhood painfully well, never shying away from how offputting kids (especially boys) this age can be, all while never sacrificing heart. I remember thirteen being universally traumatic, because I was an asshole and did asshole things to people, and everyone else was also an asshole who did asshole things to me and my friends, perpetuating a cycle of thoughtless shittiness that slowly died down through high school. Didi depicts this shittiness cycle empathetically and in context. The main character Chris—nicknamed “Wang Wang” and “Asian Chris” by his friends and “Didi” (meaning little brother) by his family—responds to the pressure to seem cool and mature by suppressing parts of himself, carries anguish from his constant efforts to be cool and liked, and lashes out against his mom and sister who, to him, just don’t understand what he’s going through.
This conflict isn’t uncommon in coming-of-age stories, but the tenderness in which Didi does it is unique. It hardly ventures into hard-to-watch territory like Mid 90s and Pen15 because Chris’s cringey behavior is well-contextualized and well-contrasted by the childlike sweetness he tries to conceal. It also doesn’t try to conceal or euphamize Chris and his friends’ gross behavior. I’d wager Didi is the most heartfelt movie where characters chat about getting their dicks wet.
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This next movie might not be the worst movie of 2024 so far. I haven’t seen Borderlands, and almost certainly won’t see it (to know which movies I am seeing, you can follow me on Letterboxd). I don’t actively seek out bad movies to watch, but watching a larger number of movies has exposed me to a few stinkers, the stinkiest of which is…
Strange Darling
I can probably count on one hand the amount of movies I have hated with every fiber of my being. Strange Darling is a pretentious horror-thriller exploiting the true crime serial killer fanaticism of this cultural moment to deliver something that seems generated by ChatGPT by prompts that all start with “In the style of Quentin Tarantino, write a…”
I had a bad feeling about this movie from the moment our main character is shown in a fully red car in a head-to-toe red outfit. An eighth-grader’s understanding of color theory holds steady throughout this movie, which features a lot of RED and therefore violence, blood, and lust. It’s contrasted by a few moments of BLUE, which are by comparison calm and collected.
Strange Darling proudly announces at the start that it was filmed on 35mm, the first of many title cards used as a crutch to prop up this mess to resemble art. Title cards also number and name chapters, which the film progresses through non-chronologically. At one point, instead of showing an act of violence going on for a while through, I don’t know, directing actors and camerapeople to convey the passing of time, title cards spell out “1 min…2 min…3 min…” and so on, to far lesser effect than Spongebob’s famous “TWO HOURS LATER” segues.
At the heart of Strange Darling is a one-night stand gone wrong, with a twist that will shock you until you consider how movie studios and some filmmakers must still resent the Me Too movement for prioritizing mostly female survivors of violence and abuse over men misusing power. When this realization kicks in, the rest of the movie plays out like OpenAI didn’t try programming ChatGPT to not regurgitate the misogyny easily found across the internet.
Women in this movie are either evil and two-faced, exploiting a non-existent “female privilege” to victimize themselves, or they are fatally naïve, earning their demises through the simple error of believing another woman. All but one man in this movie are the true victims: cops, who let their guards down and take their temporary upperhand over a woman for granted. Can you imagine any cop giving their gun over to a bloody woman in the backseat of the cop car instead of shooting her the moment she breathed a single malicious breath? If you live in reality, probably not, but reality doesn’t matter to this “based on a true story” movie.
Strange Darling is a misogynistic pile of garbage, with a pitiful film school attempt to cover said misogyny with pretentious art film tropes. I checked my watch countless times and even pulled my phone out in the third act to check the runtime, which made me realize just how long 30 minutes can feel. If you want to watch a good movie where the woman sucks, stick with Gone Girl. This is worth nobody’s time.
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very cool recommendations!! I want moree