Watching Movies Until I Explode - Valentine’s Day 2025

02 Mar, 2025

On Valentine’s Day this year, I found myself looking down the barrel of a full day home alone. I live with my family, but my parents were out of town and my sibling was spending the day with their boyfriend.¹ Being single, unemployed, and having not made any sort of plans with any of my friends, I decided that I would start a new Valentine’s Day tradition for any year where I am flying solo. It is called “Watch Movies Until I Explode.” It involves me sitting down, pulling up The Criterion Channel, and watching movies until I explode.

As it turns out, the number of movies it takes before I explode is four. I don’t necessarily recommend watching four movies in one day; by the end my brain felt kind of mushy and my body felt like it was made of rocks. But the thing is, all four of the movies I watched were really good. Each one was from a different country and each one was directed by someone whose work I’d never seen before. And each one was entertaining, thought-provoking, and made me want to make better art myself. So, overall a success. Let’s just hope I’m not single by next year because if I do this again my eyes may fall out.

Here are the four movies I watched, and what I thought about them:

Mon Oncle, dir. Jacques Tati

A beautiful vision of humanity. I feel like I’m sort of used to physical comedy being a vehicle for watching people get hurt over and over again, so it’s really nice to watch a physical comedy piece be more of a way to demonstrate the indomitable human spirit and gently ridicule the silly things we do. What I love is that even though the Arpels are ostensibly the antagonists and are the clearest butt of the jokes, you still can’t really help but love them. All of us have our own failings, but they don't make any of us less endearing or worthy of love, and laughing at our own shortcomings is one of the best ways to remember our place in the beautiful mess that is humanity. I’ve seen people saying that Wes Anderson ripped a lot of his style from Tati’s movies, and I definitely think there’s a similarity in their precise attention to visual detail, but I feel like they each use that precision to very different ends. That said, while watching Mon Oncle I discovered that Wes Anderson more or less exactly copied a sight gag from this movie in The French Dispatch.

Serial Mom, dir. John Waters

A pretty huge tonal whiplash from Mon Oncle. This film is bitter, biting, trashy, and tasteless in all the right ways. It is also quite possibly the most accurate portrait I’ve ever seen of what people are like in the suburbs. Kathleen Turner as Beverly Sutfin is a pitch-perfect recreation of so many suburban mothers I have known: full of so much genuine love for her family and the little world she lives in, yet containing this really intense and frightening mania bubbling just below the surface. Her performance is what really makes this thing soar; it is absolutely magnetic and she just commands your attention whenever she’s onscreen. The whole movie (and I mean this as the highest compliment) kind of feels like what you would get if you took someone who only understands how to make a B-movie horror film and tasked them with trying to make the most serious and earnest Shirley Jackson adaptation that they can. Also, there’s some parts of it that are weirdly clairvoyant; you would think it was satirizing the OJ Simpson case and modern true crime culture except that it came out before both of those things.

Tampopo, dir. Jūzō Itami

I didn’t know you were allowed to make a movie like this! You mean you can just take little breaks from the story to further explore an overall theme and it works? Really amazing. This is probably the best work of art about food and the people who love it that I have ever experienced. The main story is also a really interesting exploration of what it means to become a professional at something, how time-consuming and agonizing it can be, but ultimately how rewarding it is when you’ve finally achieved mastery. It’s really jaw-dropping how wide the scope is on this movie while also being incredibly focused and tight. By using food and people’s relationships to it as a vehicle, you get everything from the kinkiest sex scene I have ever watched to gentle skewerings of cultural differences to a bloody, violent death. Now I need to get a really good bowl of ramen.

Chungking Express, dir. Wong Kar-wai.

I think I need to rewatch this movie sometime when it isn’t like 10:00pm and I’m not on my fourth consecutive movie of the day, but that said, I did really like it. Kind of the perfect “alone on Valentine’s Day” movie, in that it explores the process of how heartbroken people can move on to the next part of their lives. The first half is pretty good, but the second half is just jaw-droppingly amazing. There’s sort of a larger-than-life quality to the things people do in this movie: one character eats thirty straight cans of pineapple in one sitting, while another character resorts to covert home invasion to help make someone else feel better. But those kinds of extremes fit perfectly into the intense emotions that you get from a heartbreak, making them feel completely logical. Also, this film contains an absolutely gorgeous Cantonese cover of The Cranberries’ “Dreams,” which is well worth the price of admission even if you don’t care about anything else.

So all things considered, a pretty good way to spend the day. Four great movies that have me excited about the medium and itching to check out the directors’ other work. Now I just need to go on a sunbathing binge to undo the vitamin D deficiency I’ve given myself.

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