Ciara Moloney Film

Double Features #8: The Whole of the Moon

This article is part of the Double Features series, which pairs great films that go great together. Check out previous installments here.

One of my pet peeves is complaints that a film isn’t basically a totally different film. Why doesn’t The Deer Hunter deal with American war crimes instead of being an extremely beautiful, sad film about three working-class Russian-Americans’ experience of Vietnam? Why doesn’t Michael Moore make documentaries that drily recite the facts instead of comedic leftist polemics? Why won’t Aaron Sorkin stop writing in the style of Aaron Sorkin?

Films don’t need to be about all things to all people, and probably shouldn’t be. I like when films are about something specific and small, and I love a lot of my favourite films because of their attention to granular detail, not for speed-running through everything they can fit in.

But there is something nice about feeling like you’re getting a panoramic view. Like you’re seeing a bunch of sides to something all at once. These double features are each made up of two opposite halves that make up something approximating a whole. Whether that’s taking on similar material from opposite directions or using the same approach to deal with apparent opposites, you won’t come out of any of these pairings asking why they didn’t address blah blah blah.

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Dean Buckley Film

Double Features #7: Genre Buddies

This article is part of the Double Features series, which pairs great films that go great together. Check out previous installments here.

The worst thing a cover of a song can be is faithful. The point of a cover should be to shift a song in a different direction, whether it’s Jimi Hendrix transforming “All Along the Watchtower” from a cryptic folk song to an apocalyptic howl of electric madness or Take That turning Barry Manilow’s dark, dramatic piano ballad “Could It Be Magic” into a synth-driven dance track. It’s fascinating how a change in genre – something so often treated as cosmetic, even superficial – can make the same song sound completely different.

I wouldn’t describe any of these films as covers of each other exactly, but I feel a similar thrill watching them together and thinking about them, the thrill of common elements changed utterly by their context, style and genre. Like they’re singing from the same hymn sheet, but with wildly different approaches to the material. Some of the shifts are smaller than others, but all of them reflect on each other in really interesting ways, and most importantly, all of them rule.

Here’s five more double features.

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Ciara Moloney Film

Double Features #6: The Same, But More

This article is part of the Double Features series, which pairs great films that go great together. Check out previous installments here, here, here, here and here. 

Films are great, so why not watch two in a row? And if you’re going to watch two films, why not watch two that complement each other well?

Here are four more double feature recommendations.

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Dean Buckley Film

Double Features #5: Here We Go Again

This article is part of the Double Features series, which pairs great films that go great together. Check out previous installments here, here, here and here.

Double features are great. You watch one film, and then you watch another? Sign me up! Every time I’ve seen two movies right after another in a cinema, it’s been great. (Except when I had to sprint from The Handmaiden to Raw. I am not a man made for sprinting.) But I find they’re even better when there’s a throughline connecting the two films, so, y’know, here we are.

Check these double features out if you like movies. If not, suggest them to your friends who do like movies as a power move. Either way, read on.

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Ciara Moloney Film

Double Features #3: Partners in Theme

This article is part of the Double Features series, which pairs great films that go great together. Check out previous installments here and here.

The best way to learn about films, in my experience, is to watch a lot of films. Duh, I know. But every film you watch teaches you how to watch the next. One of the good things about double features is that watching films together can illuminate both, each teaching you how to watch its partner. Here are five pairings that clarify genre focus, help to situate each other in history and otherwise enrich each other, both as films and as guides to future films.

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Dean Buckley Film

Double Features #2: Sweet Dreams and Bitter Pills

This article is part of the Double Features series, which pairs great films that taste great together. Check out part one here.

One of the things that make double features such a source of fascination, for me, at least, is how two films can bring certain aspects of each other to the fore. Most great films are multifaceted and rich in theme, you can and should look at them from any number of different angles. But it can be hard to do in isolation, when all of a movie’s themes and ideas are inextricably bound up in each other. But place two films side-by-side, or, in this case, one after another, and it’s like the similarities reach out to each other, making both their common ground and their differences more apparent and easier to appreciate.

All ten of these films deal in some way with the rupture between expectation and reality, between how we dreamed our lives would be and how they turned out, between what our society claims to aspire to and what the world is actually like. They all do a great job of navigating these themes alone, but, together, they’re even better.

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Dean Buckley Film

Double Features #1: See Them and Weep

The double feature dominated popular cinema for thirty-odd years, back when a night out at the cinema was actually a whole night out. After sitting through a mix of newsreels, shorts, serials, cartoons and advertisements, the audience would watch two films. First, the B-movie, shorter, cheaper and uglier, with nobody actors and hacky writing, and then the main feature, with its big stars and exquisite Hollywood production values.

Nowadays, unless you’re a professional journalist, seeing multiple films in one day is, unfortunately, an extravagance. Apart from just wishing people could just see more films more often if they want, my own experience of irresponsibly blowing all my money on going to the cinema, especially around awards season, has often resulted in me discovering movies that pair wonderfully as double features, because of similar subject matter expressed in different aesthetics, opposing or at least disparate takes on the same themes, or a combination of both.

It’s not the same kind of magic as those you stumble across on your own, but I have suggestions of double features that would make a great night in. Two of them were spontaneous discoveries (the ones where both films came out the same year, obviously) while I developed the others from the highly scientific method of watching a film and thinking “huh, that would pair well with this other film I like”.

Fair warning: these are all pretty heart-wrenching movies.

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