The Emerging Artist and I are drawing up our Best of 2023 lists. Spreading the lists over two or three posts seemed to work well last year, so here goes again
Movies
We saw about 60 movies, including streaming and TV. Here are the ones we both put at the top of our viewing year, excluding old movies we’ve rewatched.
The image captions are linked to either an IMDB page or a review by my favourite movie critic, Mark Kermode.
Three documentaries, all seen at the Sydney Film Festival. One had audience members variously in tears and yelling at each other, another sent us on a pilgrimage to the Bundeena art trail, and the third shed wonderful light on the workings of a rock band:
Two children’s movies, or at least movies seen in the company of small children:
Five features that we agreed on:
And then, three films that I loved that I saw by muyself:
So then fairness required that The EA got to name three more as well. She chose these:
And we didn’t even get to mention The Teacher Who Promised teh Sea or The Seed of the Sacred Fig or … we saw so many wonderful movies in 2024.
We did see a couple of stinkers, but it would serve no purpose to name the one we both chose unhesitatingly. We saw it at the Sydney Film Festival and it will never have a general release.
Coming soon, our favourite TV series of the year.
Me fail? I fly! 
We loved Lee, and I also really liked The Teacher Who Promised the Sea (which Mr Gums didn’t see). Haven’t seen most of what you’ve seen, including Conclave but plan to when it comes out. We greatly liked Touch and I loved My favourite cake (which Mr Gums didn’t see). And if Perfect Days was this year, we really liked that too.
I think we saw Anatomy of a fall last year and I loved that too. Son Gums didn’t.
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Perfect Days was in our list for last year. Touch was one of many we hated not having on the list!
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Well I’ll need to get my VPN happening!
Happy New Year to you and yours, Jonathan.
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Same to you and yours, Michelle. Happy VPNing
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Good morning Jonathan. I know this is a bit late in coming, but ever since I read that you included Lee in your best movies list, I have been going over in my mind why my partner and I walked out of the cinema last year, in furious agreement that it was one of the worst we had seen.
Apologies for the long post, but here are my takes on the movie.
Firstly, I felt that the film was structured around an exercise in sustained bad faith. The audience was led to believe in numerous ways that Miller had no children. The reason for this sleight of hand became obvious at the end, when the “big reveal” showed that the younger man in the film was actually her son. This trick worked on three women I have asked after they saw the film – it took them completely by surprise, understandably so unless they already had knowledge of Lee Miller’s life, which they didn’t.
Meanwhile, I knew that not only did she have a son, but he has been the main promulgator of her claim to fame for decades. (I saw the Lee Miller exhibition in Canberra at least 20 years ago).
To trick the audience in such a dishonest way fits my definition of bad faith.
Secondly, the role of Kate Winslett in this film is problematic. She has been trying to get this movie made since 2015, when she might have been still just young enough to play a convincing Lee Miller, who was only in her 30s at the height of her career at the end of the war. However, the passage of time has not been kind to Winslett, and she looks and acts very middle-aged in this film, which she is in real life, as demonstrated by the publicity shots for the film, where she looks much older than Miller in her mid 30s. (I have no problem with ageing beauty. But this is a biopic about a woman in her 30s noted for her beauty, and the role it played in her life).
Thirdly, this mention of Winslett being an inappropriate actor for Miller is perhaps why so little attention was paid to Miller’s earlier life, firstly as a Vogue model because of her natural youth and looks, and then as a photographer in Europe hanging around with Man Ray, Picasso, Magritte and many others in the international celebrity arts scene of the 1930s.
Fourthly, and what most got under my skin, was the peremptory way her photography of the death camps got such brief and superficial treatment. There is more of the horror of the camps in 5 minutes of The Zone of Interest than in this whole film. The lack of feeling during this part of the film shocked me.
Thanks for reading. But first a final thought. I note that the film was made by Sky UK. In my totally unscientific judgement, their typical product tends to be neither high nor low but middle brow. (Good example: Colin Firth’s Lockerbie, streaming at the moment). Suitable for a cosy night in front of the television for the relatively educated, but not trying to present itself as a cinema event. Lee in my humble opinion is such a film.
Happy New Year!
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Hi Michael
Happy New Year!
Thanks for commenting. You’ve articulated your dislike of the film very well – and I get your reasons. But none of that affected my enjoyment and appreciation of it. I know responses like this aren’t really to be argued about so I’m not trying to win you over, but for what it’s worth:
1. I didn’t take the sleight of hand about her motherhood as intellectually dishonest – we were misled, true, but not outright lied to. It was a way of adding a small, and ornamental rather than necessary, twist to the telling. It’s also a way of highlighting her son’s role in promoting her memory, as in the final credits.
2. I went into the film knowing almost nothing about Lee Miller, so the age difference didn’t faze me. I think Kate Winslett is gorgeous, and love the way she flaunted her much criticised full-bodiedness in the early scenes.
3. Again, possibly because I went in knowing so little, I’m surprised that you say so little attention was paid to her early life. I thought that was very well established – the scenes on the Mediterranean where the beautiful people sit about in the sun being all sophisticated and bohemian did a lot of work for me.
4. We responded very differently to the scenes in the death camps. I was gutted by them. (The Zone of Interest is about something different: in Lee we see the destroyed victims; in Zone of Interest we see / hear the perpetrators.)
Disagreement about movies is one of life’s great pleasures. On the weekend I saw Rashomon with my son, both of us for the first time. He hated it – despised might be a more accurate term. I could see the truth in almost everything he said, yet though for most of it I felt I was watching a museum piece (very different from hating or despising), the final telling and the coda are (in my opinion) sublime. We had a great conversation.
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