Monica Barbaro’s four favourite movies
The ever-present Letterboxd mic is fast becoming a staple of film festivals and red carpet premieres. Actors either fear it or run towards it, wary of reducing their love of cinema to four singular movies, or relishing the opportunity to reveal their most-loved features.
When actor Monica Barbaro was cornered at this year’s Bafta Awards by the Letterboxd mic, it seemed she had come prepared. Barbaro stormed onto our screens in January this year, playing the strong-willed legendary folk singer Joan Baez in James Mangold’s Bob Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown. The film, starring Timothée Chalamet as the young and brooding Dylan, charts the singer’s rise to fame and his controversial shift from folk to rock and roll.
Barbaro’s four favourites were less musically inclined, however, with the actor instead opting for films that revolve around “turning on something you’ll enjoy”.
“It’s not about film school,” she told Letterboxd, adding, “These are all films that you can watch and not feel bad about for the next, like, week.”
With that in mind, the actor chose David Mirkin’s 1997 screwball comedy, Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion, as her first. The classic chick flick stars Lisa Kudrow and Mira Sorvino as carefree party girls Michele and Romy, who choose to reinvent themselves for their ten-year high school reunion. There are surprises along the way, iconic 1990s fashion, and a hilarious on-screen friendship between Kudrow and Sorvino.
Taking a different angle with her second favourite, Barbaro chose Wolfgang Becker’s 2003, Goodbye Lenin, a charming tragicomedy melding the personal with the sociopolitical. When Christine’s son Alex is arrested in East Germany, she falls into a coma, but when she wakes up, the Berlin Wall has fallen and the German Democratic Republic has been dissolved. However, Alex must fake the GDR regime to help his mother recover.
Speaking about the film, Barbaro said, “You learn a lot historically, and also it’s romantic and fun and heart-wrenching and beautiful”.
Her third choice, Shaun of the Dead, is full of gut-wrenching laughs and slapstick comedy. Made by the British actors and directors Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright, the iconic duo’s first film in the ‘Cornetto trilogy’, released in 2004, follows salesman Shaun, whose uneventful life has no direction. That is, until a zombie apocalypse, when Shaun gets to finally prove his worth against an entire community of the undead brain brigade. In Barbaro’s words, it’s “heartfelt but fun”, with a heavy dose of gore, blood and violence.
She ended her four favourites with the 1999 sci-fi comedy Galaxy Quest, whose stellar cast boasts the likes of Alan Rickman, Sigourney Weaver, Sam Rockwell and Tony Shalhoub. The cult classic sees actor Jason Nesmith’s character, the star of a television series, receive a call for help from a group of aliens to defend them against an alien warlord. Interestingly, Barbaro highlighted the film’s accuracy regarding the goings-on in the film industry, telling Letterboxd, “The more I work in this industry, the more true it becomes. It’s very accurate”.
Barbaro’s choices span the genres of romance, sci-fi, horror, and, as she eloquently put, “good, clean girl, fun”, but with one central trope in common: a heavy dose of comedy. It will be interesting to see if the actor welcomes this into her own filmography.
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