What to Watch: we welcome a new writer
Five top recs for your weekend including Shirkers, 303, and Loudermilk
Dear friends,
We’re premiering a new newsletter section, The Monthly Column, a space to dig deeper into one or more great films. We hope this will offer a more in-depth view of the films we love at agoodmovietowatch.
The usual picks are right after. I wish you a safe and healthy weekend.
The Monthly Column
by Taylor Leigh Harper, edited by Salwa Benaissa
Shirkers is now streaming on Netflix. 🍅 rating: 100%.
When Bilal asked me if I would be interested in writing for The Watch, I was humbled, excited, eager to contribute. I hope what I can give you in my new column a tiny offering full of feeling, enthusiasm, and care. In honor of May’s celebration of Asian American Heritage Month, I’d love to open with one of my favorite documentaries: Sandi Tan’s Shirkers.
In the summer of 1992, Sandi Tan—born in Singapore, now an author, filmmaker, and film critic—shot a road movie with her friends, Jasmine Ng and Sophie Siddique Harvey. Like the 2018 documentary in question, the never-released road movie was also called Shirkers, which Tan wrote and starred in.
The original Shirkers is everything you’d expect of young women who swore they’d become “the Coen sisters,” believing in film like a form of magic: vibrant, uncanny, experimental, bold, reckless. As Tan remembers the making of her first film, her resolve is clear—she was not only going to make a movie, she was going to make a great movie. But the documentary does not merely recount the making of the 1992 film. Rather, Tan has spent 25 years trying to forget about that long, sweaty summer, and only now is ready to confront what really unraveled after filming wrapped.
So begins the mysterious thread that pulls you through this documentary. What happened to the original Shirkers so that its footage was never released? In answering this question, Tan attempts to recover a lost time capsule of Singapore, fragmented memories, and a blooming, crushing sense of self and uncertainty.
When I first heard about this documentary, I was warned it would be frustrating, if not infuriating. And to be certain, Shirkers has no neat resolve, no simple lament for what innocence is lost. But beneath its elegy for time passed, there is also a bright love letter, dedicated to Singapore, to friendship, to adolescence, to courage, to film itself. This is not an easy watch—but Shirkers is surely worth the watch as a documentary about films, filmmaking, and the all-consuming passion that drives us to create something bigger than ourselves.
This new section of the newsletter is a monthly dive into one or more films by one of our agoodmovietowatch.com writers, Taylor, who will share words on films she is watching or thinking about every month. The next column will be in your inbox on the first e-mail of the month on Friday, June 4th.
OUR TOP MOVIE OF THE WEEK
303
New on Netflix this week. 🍅 rating: 91%. In German.
This German romance is about two young Berliners, one a hitchhiker and the other a campervan driver, who go on an impromptu road trip to the south of Europe soon after meeting.
The two characters debate human nature, politics, relationships, etc; questions that are universal to youth everywhere. And they’re played by excellent newcomers with great charisma, making the question of what will happen between them, if anything at all, a great plotline.
📰 Nikki Baughan of Screen International: “A journey of romantic discovery which, while occasionally skirting close to darker issues, plays like a charming, if meandering, meet-cute road movie.”
OUR TOP TV SHOW OF THE WEEK
Loudermilk
Season 3 is now on Amazon Prime. 🍅 rating: 92%
This comedy is about a different kind of substance abuse counselor: a cranky, sassy music-critic turned AA facilitator called Sam Loudermilk.
The show is as much a comedy as it is a heartfelt look at people trying to put their addictions behind them. A soundtrack by Canadian artist Andy Shauf sets the perfect mood for this dual purpose.
“There's a tender heart that beats beneath Loudermilk's misanthropy, especially when it delves into his work moderating group-therapy meetings and his attempts to help a young addict (Anja Savcic) get her act together.”
Top picks outside of Netflix and Amazon
A highly-acclaimed 2021 drama called Paper Spiders is now available on rental services. It’s a coming-of-age story of a high-schooler who tries to help her mom with her mental illness.
The 2020 South Korean black comedy/thriller Beasts Clawing at Straws is now on Hulu. It's about a struggling restaurant owner who stumbles upon a mysterious bag of cash.
That’s it for this week, I hope there’s something in there for you.
The next edition of this weekly letter will be in your inbox Friday, May 14th.
Until then,
Bilal