Movie industry executives are sanguine that this weekend’s releases of Wicked and Gladiator II can provide a repeat of last summer’s “Barbenheimer” box office miracle. Some have even, optimistically, nicknamed the future phenomenon “Glicked.”
It seems Hollywood’s plan for the future is the juxtaposition of films that are monumentally different in tone. It’s a return to the “double features” that were once regularly booked in America’s theaters. If you’re looking for similarly incongruous double bills, look no further.
‘Melancholia and Coronets’: Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) and Melancholia (2011)
Could anybody possibly watch Lars von Trier’s magisterially downbeat disaster film, Melancholia, without the addition of the lightest possibly palate cleanser? My advice – start with Robert Hamer’s delightful Ealing Studios comedy from 1949, Kind Hearts and Coronets. It’s about a low-born cad (Dennis Price) who discovers he’s the heir to a dukedom and murders all of those above him in the family tree (eight of them, to be exact, all played by a pre-Obi-Wan Alec Guinness in the role[s] of a lifetime).
Then, primed with enough impish joy to last you a week, you can tackle von Trier’s story of a depressed runaway bride (a dead-eyed Kirsten Dunst) who fully welcomes the destruction of the world as it prepares to collide with a rogue planet. These are two sharply distinct perspectives on death, to say the least.
Kind Hearts and Coronets is available for rent on Amazon Prime Video, while Melancholia is streaming on Max.
‘Between the Silence’: Between the Temples (2024) and Silence (2016)
Here we have a sort of a communion wafer-and-matzah religious pairing: director Martin Scorsese’s deeply serious story of Portuguese missionaries in 17th-century Japan and Nathan Silver’s exquisitely Jewish semi-rom-com. The question is which to watch first – one could go chronologically or by “Old Testament first, New Testament second” rules.
On instinct, I’d say start with Silence, which operates, as its title would suggest, in the realm of concealed secrets. Between the Temples completes the circle by concluding with a Shabbat dinner scene at which secrets are revealed at such a breakneck pace as to give a 1600s Jesuit whiplash.
Between the Temples is available for rent on YouTube, while Silence is streaming on Pluto TV.
“Decembertown’: May December (2023) and Elizabethtown (2005)
The A.V. Club critic Nathan Rabin coined the term “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” in his review of Cameron Crowe’s Elizabethtown, and while Crowe’s paradigmatic 2000s romantic comedy is as wholesome and soul-filling as good chicken soup, it’s hard to fault Rabin for his characterization of Kirsten Dunst’s female lead as existing solely “to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life.”
Could there be a more wrenching departure from the Elizabethtown/(500) Days of Summer-era depiction of women than Todd Haynes’ masterful May December? Julianne Moore plays Gracie, a former tabloid target who, when she was 36, sexually groomed a 13-year-old to whom she’s now married 24 years later. Natalie Portman plays a Hollywood actress and Machiavellian manipulator who upends Gracie’s family while she prepares to play Gracie in a movie.
No Dream Girls here, however Manic. Elizabethtown might be better to watch second, though, to safely reinforce sex and love as positives instead of recipes for twisted melodrama.
May December is streaming on Netflix, while Elizabethtown is streaming on Paramount+.