Finish What You Started: Paddington

This is the fourth in my 2020 bi-monthly series finishing movies I had to abandon the first time.

I almost forgot to do this series this month. Halfway through the day on Sunday, the 30th of the month, I realized that I had blithely let the entire month elapse without watching my one movie for this series. Which seems even more ridiculous when it only involves one movie every two months.

But remember in time I did, and watched it that night I did. Thank goodness, as the world would have surely exploded had I failed to watch it in time.

Paddington is a bit of a cheat in this series, as it is the first movie I've watched for Finish What You Started that is actually already on all my movie lists. That's right, I gave myself credit for a full viewing of Paul King's movie back over Christmas break in 2014, when the movie was released in Australia a couple months before it hit American theaters, and in a few moments you'll see why.

My older son -- who was only four at the time -- and I went to see it in Tasmania, where we were visiting his grandmother. But we had to leave the theater with about 15 minutes left in the movie.

Not because he had to go to the bathroom, though at least that would have been something. I mean, we are all prisoners to the tyrannical needs of our own bodies, especially when we are four.

No, we had to leave because he was too scared.

In a Paddington movie.

It seems illogical, but maybe I shouldn't tease him. I mean, the main villain, played by Nicole Kidman, does want to actually kill Paddington. She's a taxidermist, and taxidermy requires more than just stunning your target.

I wanted to explain to my son that Paddington was not in any real danger, because that's not how these movies work, but you can't explain away the fears of a four-year-old. She does actually shoot him with a tranquilizer dart, so I wouldn't be surprised if his mind translated that as a fatal shot, even with the irrepressible bear appearing again on screen almost immediately afterward.

So, with me grumbling probably more than I should have, we did leave.

Ordinarily I don't give myself credit for a viewing I don't finish, but with so little time left, and so little doubt how it would resolve, it seemed warranted in this case.

A little less than six years later, I finally did see that ending on a Sunday night during the great pandemic of 2020. It involves all the characters on a rooftop and Paddington creating a diversion by throwing his "emergency marmalade sandwich" (the one he keeps stashed in his hat) in range for a bunch of pigeons to kick up a storm in their attempt to eat it. The fluttering causes Kidman's character to lose her balance and fall of the building when Imelda Staunton unwittingly opens a trap door at her feet. Of course, in keeping with the non-fatal overriding principles of the entire movie, Kidman is left hanging on a pole, and ultimately, shoveling shit at a zoo.

The value in this second viewing, and first complete viewing, was not in finally seeing how the movie ended, which I probably could have easily predicted. (Rooftop endings are always a good fallback, don't you know.) It was in realizing that this movie is much better than I've given it credit for.

I'm not sure why I wasn't totally enjoying Paddington the first time around; I was mildly biased against it even before the premature departure. I remember not particularly liking the scene where Hugh Bonneville dresses up like a maid to infiltrate the historical society, but it's harmless enough.

This time, not only did I like it much better, but I don't even see how it is significantly less delightful than the universally beloved Paddington 2. So now I guess I like the sequel slightly less than most people, and the original slightly more.

One takeaway was how Wes Andersonian the whole thing is, which I don't remember thinking the first time I saw it. There were two main style elements I thought King had "borrowed" from Anderson, one being the quick pan and return, to action on the side of the screen before coming back to the original focus of the shot. I'm sure there would be a way to describe that more articulately, but I'm guessing you know what I'm talking about. Then perhaps even more explicitly, King twice includes scenes where we look into a miniature version of the Brown household from the perspective of a removed wall, as the camera travels around to see the different rooms and their occupants. This is direct out of the submarine in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, and Anderson has used that same trick elsewhere. Instead of accusing him of total theft, though, I was charmed by it.

Then I found myself marvelling over exactly how adorable Sally Hawkins is. She's not what you would call traditionally beautiful, but there is something so quirky and alive about her face that you can't take your eyes off her. I've certainly noticed this before, but it was like I was having a moment with it during this viewing.

Okay, I've got two more candidates to watch and two more slots to go in this series. See you in October ... if I remember..

The not-so-sudden sudden death of Chadwick Boseman

Damn.

This one hits hard.

In some kind of tragic coincidence that just screams #2020, Chadwick Boseman, the man who played Jackie Robinson in the film 42, died on the very same day that Major League Baseball was recognizing Robinson's breaking of baseball's color barrier in 1947.

That actually occurred on April 15th of 1947, not August 28th, but since there was no April 15th on the baseball calendar in 2020, August 28th was -- as far as I can tell -- randomly chosen as a substitute date.

It might have seemed logical just not to recognize the anniversary this year, except as it turned out, honoring Robinson was something that ended up feeling very important not only this year, but this week, as the country reels anew from another heinous police shooting of a Black American.

Instead, there's a kind of cruel irony in this day, as Boseman ended up passing from colon cancer on the same day. He didn't just play non-fictional heroes to the Black community -- like Robinson and Thurgood Marshall -- but he also played one of the Black community's greatest fictional heroes, T'Challa, otherwise known as Black Panther.

It didn't feel like Wakanda would last #forever on this particular day.

Boseman's death would have been painful anyway, but what made it especially painful was that I had no idea he was sick. None. And had been so for four years. I don't suppose most people knew. Last I heard, Black Panther 2 was all systems go and he would be front and center. He had been revived from Thanos' snap and could live to fight another day, many other days, on into Phases 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 of the MCU.

Now ... he's gone.

Just like that. In a snap.

I did a double take when I read the headline. I guess that's always the reaction when someone so young, so vigorous, so apparently overflowing with joie de vivre, is taken from us. I mean, he played an incomparably gifted athlete and a superhero so lithe, so quick and so agile that his character's name evoked the feline. There wasn't a thought in my head that we were about lose him.

You walk around with a number of names in your head of people whose obituary you could expect to see any old time. Like, when Olivia de Havilland finally died at 104, it was almost like a sigh of relief that someone else could finally occupy one of those spots. Someone like, say, Sean Connery, who just turned 90.

But Boseman? I didn't wake up Saturday morning (my time) thinking Chadwick Boseman could die today. And yet he did.

I was not as big a fan of Black Panther as most people were, but I was a huge fan of Boseman. Being the baseball fan that I am, I was more of a fan of 42 than most, I think. Those were some pretty big cleats to fill to play Robinson, one of the all-time baseball greats and baseball ambassadors, and yet he was the perfect choice. Quiet dignity, inner fire. That was Boseman to a T.

The Robinson biopic was where I first learned of Boseman, who got a late start on his movie career, only appearing in his first movie role after age 30. (He had been appearing on TV for five years before that, but not on shows I watched.) But he shot up quickly into other immediately interesting work. 42 was followed the next year by Draft Day and Get on Up, the latter a biopic of another hero of the Black community (though a bit more problematic than Robinson or Marshall), James Brown. I don't really remember him in Draft Day (though I liked that movie), though of course he's the central force in the highly effective Get on Up, a role that was expected to earn him awards consideration.

At this point his career became quite occupied playing T'Challa in four Marvel movies, though he did continue to make what I assume was interesting work, as I have not yet seen Marshall, Message from the King or 21 Bridges. The last movie released in his lifetime was Spike Lee's Da 5 Bloods, in which he plays a character seen only in flashback, because he died during the Vietnam War. Died young -- just like Boseman.

Because Boseman got a late start in movies, he seemed even younger than 43. And because he radiated star power, that contributed to the sense that he was just at the beginning of a long and rich career that would alternate between serious and crowd-pleasing work -- and in the best cases, work that would be both at once.

My heart aches. Rest in peace, Panther.

The right amount of Capone

Josh Trank's Capone didn't do much for me, as you know from this post, but what it did do is whet my appetite to revisit for the first time in yonks (to use the Australian phraseology) one of my favorite movies as a teenager, Brian de Palma's The Untouchables.

This is the amount of Al Capone we need.

Robert De Niro appears on screen for less than 15 minutes of a two-hour movie, but you know what? Each and every one of his scenes is memorable.

There's the opening scene, where he talks about crime in Chicago while getting a shave, and you wonder if the barber nicking his neck with his razor is going to be cause for the man to be immediately killed.

There's the famous baseball bat scene, where he murders a capo who disappointed him in front of all the other capos, to send a message to them all to stay in line, to "play for the team."

There's the scene where he talks about wanting Elliot Ness and his family dead, and keeps hitting the word "dead" so you know how serious he is.

There's the scene where both parties have to be held back on a staircase so Ness and he don't get into a fist fight with each other.

There's the scene where he's sitting at the opera and gets a big grin on his face upon learning that one of the untouchables has been taken out.

There's the scene where he starts punching his lawyer during his trial when the lawyer changes his plea from not guilty to guilty.

And there are no more scenes.

This is a stark contrast with Capone, where Tom Hardy is on screen for nearly every damn shot of the entire movie, excepting for a very few brief scenes between federal agents discussing their surveillance of him.

Now, the performances these actors are giving is one of the things that makes the contrast so stark. In The Untouchables, it's the great Robert De Niro, who can make a role iconic just by playing it. Notably, he doesn't strain for some kind of absurd accent. He just plays Robert De Niro, and if you think that's a criticism, have you ever seen a Robert De Niro movie? He's menacing without even making a specific effort to be, with just a look from those steely eyes. He leaves us wanting more.

Tom Hardy's performance in Capone is nothing but accent. Joe Morgenstern, in a review tabulated to equal a rating of 10 on Metacritic, describes him as "growling in a voice that evokes Marlon Brando, Lionel Stander and Stephen Hawking's synthesizer." (This is a hilarious description even though I don't know who Lionel Stander is.) In my previous post I suggested Hardy should win an award for most acting. He's all flinches and ticks and drools. You know the type of performance I mean, the type that makes you want way, way less. (In another review, which I can't seem to locate at the moment, the critic referred to him as showing a curious disregard for the normal binaries of good vs. bad acting.)

The real problem, though, is that by spending so much time with Capone in Capone -- and Trank's artistic choices don't help -- it's clear we are meant to sympathize with this man on some level, almost like it's a tragedy that he's lost his physical and mental faculties from neuro-syphilis. The film sets the tone by opening on a scene of Capone playing hide and seek with his grandchildren, in which he appears loveable and easygoing. I actually found this to be the film's most effective scene, as it overturns our expectations -- Capone is shown carrying a blunt instrument through his silent mansion, as though he's paranoid about an intruder trying to kill him, only for it to be revealed that he's playing the role of villain in a game with these children. However well it works on a narrative level, it lays the groundwork for us to see this monster as human.

In The Untouchables, it's clear Capone is a monster in every moment. He demonstrates nothing but malevolence, which I think is correct. Oh, I'm sure Al Capone loved his family and maybe helped an old lady across the street once or twice. But I think it's correct that our takeaway should be that this man is evil and was responsible for a great many ruined lives, while not paying nearly the price he deserved to pay for his crimes. In Capone, there's a line of dialogue where one of the feds says "What's the difference between Al Capone and Adolf Hitler? Adolf Hitler is dead." And while that line is potentially problematic in some respects, comparing ethnicity-based genocide to a much smaller scale mass murder driven purely by business interests, it does indicate the extent to which people at the time considered Capone a menace.

Capone as a movie, though, does not make us believe it.

The Untouchables as a movie was not as beloved to me in 2020 as it was in 1987, though it certainly didn't suffer the same kind of hit in my affections as another Kevin Costner movie I recently rewatched, Field of Dreams. I still like this movie quite a bit and really enjoyed watching it, but it probably doesn't quite deserve the five stars I had given it on Letterboxd as a retroactive estimation of my affections.

More Batman, eh?

I watched the new trailer for The Batman.

Yawn.

I wouldn't have normally done so, since I try not to be spoiled on too much of the imagery for big new movies. I've been generally avoiding trailers for years and have talked about it many times on this blog, so I won't bore you by going back into that now.

But this year, I'm so starved for any kind of moving cinematic images that do not seem to have been designed for, or easily optimized for, a phone, that I'm willing to go against my usual rules of thumb on this.

Yawn.

I'm sorry, but is this really the best someone has to offer on a "reinterpretation" of the character? Somehow these images look exactly halfway between the way Christopher Nolan envisioned the character and the way Zack Snyder envisioned him. Just because it's not exactly like either doesn't mean it's not so in the neighborhood as to seem entirely superfluous.

To be honest, I've already forgotten half of what we even see in this trailer -- or maybe 75%. I do remember there's a part where Batman beats an opponent so vigorously, it sounds like he's pounding his fist into the squishy remainder of a corpse's face.

Yawn.

I've seen Batman be "dark" before. Like, a hundred times.

No no -- this is darker! 

Puh-leeze.

I recognize that a fair number of people whose opinions I trust are looking forward to this quite enthusiastically, maybe because for them, it'll have been nine years since they got the kind of Batman they wanted on screen. They're probably happy to just erase Batfleck from their memories entirely.

For me, the Nolan films are still fresh enough in my memory that I wouldn't feel like I needed a new Batman reboot now, even if there hadn't been a botched reboot still leaving a bad taste in our collective mouths.

It seems clear now that they are just going to keep rebooting this character ad infinitum, every seven years or so, which will coincide with the previous version running its course. If they do, maybe at least next time they can make Batman a POC.

The only really new way to left to reboot him, it seems, is to go back to his origins -- to his silly, slap-happy, sound-effects-on-screen origins.

Make Batman a comedy -- and not just Joss Whedon trying to add funny lines to a dour story -- and maybe I'll be genuinely excited again.

Watching an iTunes movie at the touch of a button

Forgive me as I have another moment that many of you probably had months, even years, ago.

Earlier this week it was my first taste of Disney+, which you couldn't have had years ago, as it hasn't been around for a year yet. But tonight it was Apple TV, which has been around years, but in the format we know it now for only about three.

Yeah I used Apple TV earlier this week when I used Disney+, and yeah, one of its main expected values to us would be as a conduit to that streaming service. But I didn't realize the probably more useful value of it, to me and my own viewing habits, until tonight.

For any number of years now -- as few as eight or as many as a dozen -- I have been utilizing iTunes as a primary source for renting movies. Some small number of those I intended to watch on an Apple device -- an iPad, or when it worked, my old iPod. A slightly larger number were to be watched directly on my laptop, through the iTunes application itself.

But the vast majority have been intended to be watched with my computer plugged in to a proper TV by HDMI cable.

This has not always been a smooth arrangement. As I wrote about extensively most recently in this post, my HDMI setup has been plagued with difficulties over the years. If the HDMI connection itself is not acting up, then sometimes the streaming of the video is held captive by the pathetic processing speed of my computer. At the lowest level of inconvenience, there's making sure the laptop screen is pointing away from you, so you aren't seeing two screens at once -- the adjustment of which sometimes meddles with the HDMI connection. It's a tedious business.

No more.

As Apple TV connects directly to my iTunes account, anything I purchase on my computer is suddenly available on the TV itself. I know I sound like some kind of grandfather here, but the simplicity of it just blows my mind. Just press a couple buttons on the adorable little Apple remote (again with the grandfather tone) and you're watching that movie.

In fact, it was the appearance of Capone, the only movie I happen to have rented from iTunes right now, on my Apple TV menu that told me everything had worked as I'd hoped. Tom Hardy's ugly mug was beautiful to me in that moment.

Why mightn't it have worked?

Because I am still practicing a wee bit of chicanery when it comes to Apple -- chicanery they allow, but which feels like it could disappear at any moment, if any new devices becomes aware of the chicanery.

Namely, I still connect to my American version of iTunes. Have been doing so since moving here in 2013. Continue to do so with peril, with worry that it all may just go away at any moment.

The reason it's important for me to keep doing this is it allows me access to many movies way before they come to Australia. In fact, in the extreme case, I can get the movie for a 99-cent rental even before it's hit Australian cinemas. Not something I want to give up.

Yet every time I register a new device, as was the case here, I worry it'll all go belly up. I mean, I had to basically lie by saying my region was the U.S. rather than Australia. And that is the region of my iTunes account, so it's not really a lie. But by giving this device access to my wireless, I thought it might detect I was not in the U.S. and start sparking and smoking. I disallowed the activation of location services, which may have been the key to keeping my setup as it's always been.

Truth is, I'm not sure if Apple really cares if you are connecting to a different iTunes store from the country where you are currently located. Take the example of the diplomat who is sent overseas for a year. Is that person really meant to link up to iTunes in Saudi Arabia while he or she is there? Do they even have iTunes in Saudi Arabia?

So I guess setting up Apple TV confirmed what I thought I knew, though it was still an occasion for holding my breath.

Was Capone the perfect movie to test out this new functionality?

Hell no! It's really bad! Hardy's makeup is shitty and his performance is comical. He should get the award for most acting. Josh Trank, a director I do not like, who made a movie I do not like (Chronicle) and then got fired from a Star Wars movie (I haven't seen Fantastic Four), has made another turd. He's not talented.

But I don't care. I rent movies for 99 cents not because I expect them to be masterpieces, but because at worst, they fill out the bottom section of my annual rankings. Capone accomplishes that just fine.

And now, if I want to see a good or a terrible movie through iTunes, it's easy as clicking a button.

I just rented two more, and can't wait to watch the next.

Captain Marvel passes the test

Captain Marvel may not be my favorite Marvel movie -- it's somewhere around the middle, probably -- but there was a lot riding on it last night.

As you know from yesterday's post, it was my son's tenth birthday yesterday, and also our first full day of having Apple TV and Disney+. Captain Marvel had been lined up for his surprise birthday evening viewing, something my wife officially agreed to it at some point after I wrote yesterday's post.

The questions I had before watching were many:

1) Will I have miscalculated terribly? Will this be too intense for my kids, if not the ten-year-old then certainly the six-year-old?

2) Will my wife shoot daggers at me throughout the movie for twisting her arm into something she never really wanted to do?

3) Will they like it?

Since I don't love Captain Marvel, the last one of those shouldn't matter as much. But when you show someone a Marvel movie, you're not just getting them to buy in to that particular movie. You're trying to sell them on more than 20 movies, and the viability of watching the rest of those movies hangs in the balance.

For the children, I didn't think that would be a problem. I mean, superheros punching each other, flying, and shooting laser rays out of their fists? What kid wouldn't like that?

But my wife has only seen maybe five of the Marvel movies, and kind of turns her nose up at them. In fact, the only ones I can say for certain she's seen are Iron Man, Captain America: The First Avenger and Thor: Ragnarok. I'm sure she's seen one or two others, but they would have all been under my direction and without very much excitement.

I don't care if she likes these movies, really -- I've already seen them all so I don't need a viewing partner. But her liking them might also be instrumental in giving her blessing for the kids to keep watching them, which I do want them to have the chance to do. Especially now that we have D+.

Probably the more worrisome issue, though, wss whether anything in this movie would scar my kids, especially the younger one. I did a cursory check on the internet -- more than cursory, I guess, as I read the entire parental recommendation section on IMDB, as well as sought out counsel from my Flickcharters Facebook group. It didn't really seem like there would be anything too scary.

And in fact, there were only two moments when I thought the kids were actually disturbed, the first of which was previewed on IMDB.

That first was the autopsy of the dead Skrull, when you can see the flaps of his chest and abdomen held open with medical instruments. You don't see any actual alien guts, but apparently, the whole idea of looking inside the body of what had once been a living thing was a bit too much for my ten-year-old. I think he might have just thought it was gross rather than the kind of thing that chills him or makes him consider his own mortality. He looked away from the screen and asked us to tell him when it was finished.

Then the second thing was with my younger son -- who didn't care about the autopsy, it should be noted -- and was something that would never come up in a parental guidance report for Captain Marvel. When Carol Danvers is under a trance near the end and is "visiting" an incarnation of her mentor, Annette Bening's Mar-Vell, she tries to punch the vision in the face. The face, a projection as it is, subsumes the fist, so that the fist sinks into it up to the wrist, and the mouth disappears entirely. "That is the weirdest thing I have ever seen," said the six-year-old, who may have indeed dwelled on that for a few minutes after it left the screen.

Well did they like it?

"It's the best movie I've ever seen," said the birthday boy. He's prone to exaggeration -- what kid isn't? -- but I do think I've only heard him say it about five times before. So that means that Marvel beats DC, I guess, as he had previously favored Shazam.

"Yeah," said the younger one, who is not given to talking about and ranking favorites. I guess he takes after his mother in that regard.

"Oh yeah," said my wife, in a way that hits the word "yeah" and suggests "could there be any other reaction?" Captain Marvel was a strategic choice on my part, you see. First and foremost, it was something my son had mentioned. But as it's Marvel's first female-fronted movie, that had been a potential draw for my wife from back when it came out, to the extent that she may even have intended to see it in the theater. That doesn't mean she's going to automatically green light the other Marvel movies, but having sat with her kids and seen how they reacted -- both their attraction to the material, and perhaps more importantly, their lack of aversion to it -- can only help.

Me? I liked it a lot more.

I had been a bit cold on Captain Marvel from my first viewing -- not because I didn't think it was a good movie, but because, as with Black Panther, I just didn't think it was anything special. Well, I do find there to be special aspects to this movie on second viewing, and I don't just think I'm being influenced by my family's obvious affection.

Although I think the female empowerment messages are great, and I do like the performance of Brie Larson in the title role, I hate to say it, but it's the performance of the two lead men that really raises this up a notch. Samuel L. Jackon is in rare form here, even more charismatic than usual, and looking great with the aging down technology (which is more a compliment to the special effects than the performance, I realize). But I think it's Ben Mendelsohn who really clinches the tone that Jackson gets started. My wife pointed out that it's lovely that he got to keep his native Australian accent, and I think that helps sell his persona here. I'm having trouble putting it into words -- neither "flippant" nor "aloof" capture it perfectly. But his personality is key to selling the mid-movie transformation of our understanding of who this character is.

Now that I think about it, I'm wondering if this transformation played a role in why the kids like it so much. It made for a number of mid-movie questions about who was really the good guy, as they were surprised to have their expectations overturned like they may never have had them overturned before. But I think it also helped them understand a couple core lessons that we would like them to take away from any piece of art: Don't judge a book by its cover, and don't trust everything told to you by authority figures.

It reminded me a bit of my own blow-your-mind moment around this age, maybe a year or two older, when I saw the Dennis Quaid-Lou Gossett Jr. space movie Enemy Mine. If you don't recall the particulars of that one, it's the one where Quaid's human and Gossett's alien -- a Drac by species name -- get stranded together on a planet they are unable to escape. They are enemies in a raging war between their species. The film cleverly puts you in Quaid's shoes to start, so you assume he is fighting a just fight against a truly reprehensible enemy, and the fact that the Drac is "ugly" (by human standards) helps cement your core perspective. Of course, as the movie goes, you realize just how kind and worthy of our sympathy this Drac -- this enemy -- really is.

I'm not sure if the other Marvel movies have such useful messages to impart as female empowerment, racial tolerance and skepticism of authority, but hopefully, we'll get a chance to find out.

I celebrated my new D+ subscription by watching ... Cool Runnings

Today is my older son's tenth birthday.

It is, of course, also a milestone for me: ten years of parenthood. Ten years of putting someone other than myself first. (I sometimes put my wife first, but you know what I mean.) Ten years of the pitter patter of little feet. It probably warrants its own post, but I'll save that for another day.

It is also the first quarantine birthday in our household. My younger son and my wife are in January and February, and I'm in October, so even though it feels like we've spent most of this year inside our home, the reality is that it hasn't even been half a year yet.

A quarantine birthday is, of course, not very special for a kid. As we were in America this time last year and ultimately decided not to have a birthday party for him at all -- we celebrated on his birthday, but it was only with extended family -- this makes two years in a row without a real birthday party for him. We're doing a little zoom thing on Saturday so he can see his friends, but it will only compensate so much.

So we're doing a number of things to shower him with the feels today. I've already started the day with Krispy Kreme donuts, and his favorite mango juice will follow, once he can come into the kitchen to drink it. (Donuts are fine on the couch in front of the TV; mango juice, not so much.) He'll only have to do half a day of school, and then it's his Fortnite and Clash of Clans for the rest of the day after lunch. We're ordering from his favorite hamburger restaurant tonight, and will eat during a family movie. And there will, of course, be presents sprinkled along the way.

The family movie is finally what I want to talk about, along with the introduction of today's other big surprise.

We have been hemming and hawing for a while now about ordering Disney+. The debut of Hamilton almost clinched it, but we also had a debate about whether to watch it in that form or wait until our opportunity to see it on the stage first. Well, as of yesterday morning, we purchased tickets to see Hamilton in Sydney next April, so that question has been definitively answered.

The other problem was that there was no way to watch Disney+ through our TV, since our smart TV does not have it as an option, and we don't do Chromecast or anything like that. Considering how much I expect our kids to use it, it needs to be something they can control directly through a remote control, and not need one of our computers to operate.

So the arrival of my son's birthday seemed like a good time to pull two triggers: To purchase AppleTV, another thing we'd been hemming and hawing about, and then to purchase Disney+.

I set it up last night so we could watch Captain Marvel tonight for his birthday. He's never been allowed to watch a Marvel movie before, but he saw Shazam a full year ago so I'm not really sure the difference. My wife has her trepidations about exposing our six-year-old to objectionable content that may haunt him, but I told her it can't be any worse than The Goonies, which we showed them earlier in quarantine. He was afraid of Sloth (and had to leave the room, even after Sloth had been revealed as a softie) but it didn't stay with him. Anyway, hopefully the viewing will happen.

But as I basked in the glow of the unwrapping of two shiny new objects last night, I couldn't just put the whole thing away until we unveiled it to him today, even though it was 10 o'clock and I was coming off a terrible night's sleep. I had to watch something to break it in, didn't I?

Enter Cool Runnings.

Although this is, in some strange way, a classic of 1990s cinema -- if not in quality, then as a zeitgeist representative of the era, in part because it recreates such a memorable moment in Olympic history -- I had never before seen it. As soon as it popped up on the menu I knew I had to rectify that. It would be short, and no one else in the house would care one way or another about seeing it ... right?

As I was watching, my wife came in and said "Oh, I wanted to see that film! I wanted to show it to the kids." My response: "It's 27 years old!" You can't lay claim on a 27-year-old movie, or at least, you can't be surprised if someone decides to watch it in your house without checking with you first.

Well, I'd watch it again. Over time I've gone from thinking this must be really silly and not worth anyone's time to figuring it probably had a ton of heart and would be very sweet. The latter is most assuredly the reality of the situation. In fact, though the execution is surely no better than totally competent, I gave the film four stars on heart and sweetness alone. (And it's funny. And it's got John Candy.)

I still think it's a bit of a funny way to celebrate subscribing to D+. In fact, my first instinct was to watch an episode of The Simpsons -- a primary driving force behind our subscription -- but I worried my son would wander out into the living room (he stays up late sometimes) and would deduce that we'd made the purchase. At the very least I should have watched 20 minutes of a Star Wars movie.

But no, Cool Runnings was and always shall be the first movie I watched on our Disney+ subscription.

And I am more than okay with that.

Happy birthday J. Here's to many future viewings together.

MIFF: First closing night film

This has been a year of a lot of firsts at MIFF, mostly related to the online format of course. The whole thing is kind of like one giant first.

But there's a first for me that also works in context of the traditional festival and its structure.

At the end of my seventh MIFF, I finally saw the closing night film.

It's not a huge surprise, really. The tickets for the opening and closing night films are always extra, like several times as much as a normal ticket, and the only reason I even went to the opening night film last year was that my wife had a film in the festival and she got complimentary passes.

The prospect of attending the closing night film was always complicated by this extra expense, but more than anything, I think the melancholy of the end of the festival may have been a key determining factor in my not attending. It's not like I actually get depressed when MIFF ends, but it's always an exciting time of year for me -- even watching from home -- so attending the film that signifies its ending has always seemed fraught with sorrow. If I'm going to get all gussied up, it should be for a film that looks ahead to two-and-a-half great weeks of movie-watching rather than one that looks back on that period in the past.

Anyway, my complimentary tickets this year included two passes to the spotlight films, something that MIFF could afford to give me since they were priced at only $6 more than the regular films, $20 as opposed to $14. If you're not going to have a gala evening with free alcohol and passed hors d'oeuvres, I guess you don't need to charge people in excess of $100 per ticket.

Since the opening night film First Cow sold out, as you will recall from this post, I spent my complimentary spotlight tickets on Wendy, the middle weekend spotlight film, and the closing night film, Pablo Larrain's Ema.

Yes, it's a bit confusing that I will have films called both Ema and Emma on my year-end list this year. The former is certainly not a Chilean version of the latter.

In fact, it starts off as something visionary and mesmerizing. The opening shot is of a lone traffic light hanging over an empty intersection, aflame, placed in an additional context of eerie melancholy by Nicolas Jaar's immersive score. (You may recall that Larrain likes a good in-your-face score, from his work with Mica Levi on Jackie.)

We then start to meet the main character, played by Mariana Di Girolamo, via the jaw-dropping production of her modern dance troupe. The poster above gives some indication of this. The dancers are in a giant warehouse space with a huge, almost tangible hologram of the sun taking up what looks like more than half the room. Whether this would be possible in real life or not, I can't say, but it is a hypnotizing vision here, as the dancers slink and gyrate in front of this fiery orb whose heat you can almost feel.

I wish the film maintained the momentum of this opening passage, whose vibe continues strong for at least the film's first 30 minutes. It starts to lose the thread as it goes, and left us with a lot of questions by the end -- and not the good kind, due to intentional ambiguity by the filmmaker. The story revolves Ema and her husband, the choreographer of the troupe (Gael Garcia Bernal), who give back a child they adopted after his firebug tendencies cause her sister to get severe burns across the side of her face. (No big surprise, I guess, since Ema is handy with a flamethrower herself.) The film should be about the emotionally impossible decision to give up on a child, but it strays from that to its peril, and gets sidetracked on inexplicable tangents like whether reggaeton music is considered good or not.

I recommend it for the vision and for the incredible cinematography and score, but there are a lot of asterisks on this one.

And I'm not reviewing this for ReelGood as I am done with that for this year, thank goodness. (Why review a movie that people have already missed their opportunity to see, is the thinking.)

Thus ends another MIFF. It was a really good one. I saw 11 films, which is pretty typical for me, two of which are very strong contenders for my top ten for the year, which is also pretty typical.

I'll look forward to returning to the brick and mortar version of the festival next year -- we hope -- but the online one has been good to me, and I'm so glad they did it.

MIFF clean-up: Just 6.5 and La Llorona

Blame it on the Democratic National Convention, blame it on baseball, blame it on writing three actual reviews of MIFF films, but I just haven't been very motivated this week to keep you updated on all my MIFF happenings as they happened. There's also a bit of burnout when you're coming to the end of a MIFF, even if you never even had to leave your house to participate.

So I'll just jam together two mentions of my mid-week MIFF films and link you to their corresponding reviews if you want more.

On Tuesday night I kept alive a tradition of watching Iranian films at MIFF that is not actually as extensive as I had thought. In fact, I have seen exactly one previous Iranian film at MIFF, that being Asghar Farhadi's The Salesman in 2016, which I didn't even like all that much. There seemed like more. (Maybe it's because I saw Everybody Knows at MIFF 2018, which was directed by Farhadi, but set in Spain and in Spanish.)

This year's Iranian film makes it a tradition now, at least. It's called Just 6.5, and it stars Farhadi's lead actor in A Separation, Payman Maadi. I really enjoy this actor from several other exposures (he's crossed over into English language films), so adding this one to my schedule was a no-brainer.

It's a The Wire-type look into the war on drugs in Iran, Tehran specifically, and it was surprising for a number of reasons. For one, I didn't expect this type of movie from Iran, essentially a genre movie, as the movies that are allowed to be made have always been very closely monitored by censors, leaving a relative paucity of permissible subjects -- family drama, usually. All of Farhadi's movies basically qualify as that. But director Saeed Roustayi, with whom I was unfamiliar, managed to get this idea of cops and mules and drug dealers the green light from his government. I tried to find out online how he did it, but the internet was not very forthcoming on the topic.

The second thing that surprised me is that I didn't realize Iran was a country that had a big, visible drug problem. The film depicts slums and shanty towns where literally hundreds of addicts lie around smoking crack and heroin, only to scatter like ants when the police come to clear out the joint -- the punishment for some drug offenses is death, after all. 

I really enjoyed the movie. It does have the grit, determination and moral complexity of a show like The Wire, though the execution is also at sort of a TV level -- before the days of prestige TV, I should say. I gave it only 3.5 stars out of 5 on Letterboxd, but it obviously stuck with me, as I had boosted its rating up to the equivalent of four -- 8 out of 10 on my site's scale -- by the time I reviewed it. (You can read that review here.)

The second was the second movie in the themed "dark dramas" package my wife had picked up, the first being The Killing of Two Lovers, which I loved so much. Well, this package was clearly the MIFF winning move in 2020 as La Llorona immediately became my second favorite of the ten films I've seen. 

I did carry a small bias into the movie, which was that there was just a schlocky horror movie, an extension of the Conjuring universe, made on this subject last year. That was The Curse of La Llorona, or The Curse of the Weeping Woman, as it is known in Australia. Fortunately, this had only the bare minimum to do with that, as both were inspired by the same Latin American folklore. This, though, was groundbreaking new prestige horror that had me in its spell straight away.

The technique itself was groundbreaking -- I was entranced by director Jayro Bustamante pulling his camera away from the subjects in the frame one centimeter at a time -- but I'd have to say the primary new elements for me were the subject matter itself, and the country of origin. I'll take the second first. I am not sure if I've ever seen a film about Guatemala, let alone made by a Guatemalan director and technically a production of the Guatemalan film industry. As a matter of fact, I was not even sure such a thing existed. It's a French co-production almost by necessity, one would imagine, but if this is what Guatemalan film has to offer us, why have they been hiding it from us?

Then there's the subject, which is, yes, more or less a haunted house movie where the main ghoul is this physical embodiment of folklore about a weeping woman who drowned her children. But it's set in and around the trial of a Guatemalan general who has been accused of genocide for giving orders, back in the 1980s, to exterminate large swaths of the native Mayan population. That the haunted house is a palatial estate barricaded by protestors gives it a very #2020 feel, as it mixes in a social justice message that is very in keeping with the world events of our year.

Plus, it's super scary.

But I say pretty much all this stuff in my review, which can be found here.

MIFF ends this weekend, as all streams must be complete by the end of the day on Sunday. Though I'm tempted to fit a few more in, remember what I said about burnout, and you'll know why I am content to finish with 11 films when I watch the closing night film on Saturday, Pablo Larrain's Ema. 

MIFF weekend wrap-up: A prayer for two lovers named Wendy

Although a movie about religious lesbian lovers with the same first name would be great, and would be right up MIFF's alley, this is actually three movie titles combined into one, covering the MIFF movies I watched on Saturday and Sunday nights.

Saturday was supposed to be a MIFF marathon of sorts for my wife and me, as it was our fourth Anything Day during the pandemic -- Anything Day being that pandemic invention where everyone gets to do what they want all day, including the kids. Or, I should say, including the adults.

But we didn't get to our first movie until 6, rather than mid-afternoon as we might have envisioned, and then my wife ended up bailing on the second movie, with good reason. So it was more of a MIFF trickle than a stream, though it was of course all a "stream," since this year's festival is entirely online.

That movie we didn't start until 6 was by far the best of the bunch. It's called The Killing of Two Lovers, and it's set in Utah, where a husband and wife are undergoing a trial separation while trying to figure out if the only reason they're together is because they married young and had four kids before they were 30. It is deceptively part of what was billed as a "thriller package," or something along those lines, that my wife bought -- part of a concerted effort to take some of the guesswork out of picking MIFF films this year. But without giving anything away, I'll just say there's more to that title than there may seem.

Loved this. It's shot in the 4:3 aspect ratio that Kelly Reichardt favors, and I now get what she was talking about in a recent interview I heard on Filmspotting, where she said close-ups never look right in widescreen. There's one scene between the two main characters in the front of a pickup truck where it is basically trading off close-ups of both of their faces, and I really appreciated the more square close-ups that Reichardt was talking about in that interview. There are a number of other distinct but unobtrusive filmmaking choices that make Robert Machoian's film really memorable and actually quite difficult to execute, while remaining very low-key. It gets at its themes really smartly while not cluttering things up by being too on the nose.

The movie my wife bailed on, and rightly so, was the MIFF Showcase Centerpiece, Benh Zeitlin's Peter Pan movie Wendy. To be fair, she had one foot out the door before the movie even started. She had forgotten that the movie had to be watched within the hours of 7 p.m. to 11:59 p.m. on Saturday, and was no longer sure she wanted her Anything Day evening to be hijacked by this movie. And we both admitted we didn't much care for the Peter Pan story in general. I can think of two really bad adaptations right off the bat in Hook and Pan.

Wendy is better than those, but not by the margin one would hope, nor is it significantly different from the director's breakthrough feature, Beasts of the Southern Wild. It even has the same kind of driving bombastic score as that other film. I liked Beasts of the Southern Wild quite a lot, but even that film slips into self-parody pretty easily, while this one is there right from the start. And though I didn't consider this to be a problem with Beasts, or at least I didn't identify it as such as the time, Wendy indulges in a fair bit of what I would call "poverty porn." Perhaps my biggest issue with it, though, was how it renders the Peter Pan character as essentially hopeless, always making the wrong choice and barely redeeming himself, if he does so at all. Isn't Peter Pan supposed to be more of a manic pixie dream boy, whose wrong-seeming ideas all end up being the right ones?

Sunday night concluded the weekend with my only documentary of this year's MIFF, if my current schedule holds, which is the Quebecois film Prayer for a Lost Mitten. And yes, I was taken in by that title.

From the description in the MIFF catalogue, I thought the film was going to focus on the deceptively profound experience of watching a wide selection of Canadians haunt the public lost and found as they search hopefully for some insignificant lost item. Say, a mitten. In reality, that is a pretty small part of the film, and the loss discussed by the majority of the interview subjects is less material in nature -- the loss of a child's love, the loss of a romantic love, the loss of the use of part of one's body, etc. Although that seems possibly deeper subject matter for a film, and is certainly worth exploring, I was expecting something a bit more eccentric, and that just isn't what this movie is.

It is gorgeous to look at, though, as Jean-Francois Lesage's film is shot in black and white, and during a Montreal winter, with lots of scenes of swirling snow looking ever so beautiful on that particular film stock.

Only one night off from MIFF this time -- tonight, as I write this -- before I return Tuesday with this year's Iranian entry, Just 6.5.

The waters came quickly

There are a lot of takeaways a person could have from his first viewing of A.I. Artificial Intelligence in 19 years, and only second overall.

Mine was what the humans did, or did not do, as they saved themselves from the ocean levels rising.

As we know from the opening narration, the movie takes place in an unspecified future time when the polar ice caps have melted and have left Earth with a lot more water than it had before. Most if not all climate change theories, though, posit a steady increase over time, a steady loss of the shorelines and, eventually, the cities situated close to them.

Given how much water engulfs Manhattan -- like, up to maybe the 20th floor of the skyscrapers -- A.I. must take place in a very distant future indeed if we are going to go with this idea of a slow encroachment.

But even if there was a sudden increase in temperature that made the water levels rise more rapidly over a shorter period of time, they still wouldn't flood the cities in some gush of unexpected water. Humans would have time to get their affairs in order, wouldn't they?

And so it was that I became a bit fixated on why the makers of the Pinocchio-themed section of Coney Island did not have time to disassemble their creations and move them inland.

Now, if you lose your house to a fire, you take only a handful of beloved belongings with you, if that. Kind of depends how quickly it all happens. But if you lose your house to the equivalent of creeping damp -- something that will destroy it, but over a long period of time -- you take everything that isn't bolted down, and even some things that are.

I argue that those who made this wondrous Pinocchio land would have enough love for what they had made -- the same love that Geppetto has for his own creation -- that they would uproot it from its moorings in Coney Island and move it to -- I don't know -- Davenport, Iowa. Or wherever they planned to create New Manhattan -- because that's what humans do, what they have always done. Make new versions of old places they had to leave.

It's certainly nice for the story that the blue fairy is still down there, able to endure 2,000 years of the hopeful stare of our robot boy David -- which remained one of my most profound moments of melancholy during this viewing. But in reality, she'd probably be somewhere inland, enduring that version of the death of the human race.

Is it a major plot point? Worth writing a blog post about?

Nope.

But those are my thoughts on a Saturday morning in August in the great pandemic of 2020.

MIFF: Approximating the MIFF "matinee"

One of my favorite MIFF traditions is the days, usually two or three times per festival, when I go
straight from work to my first movie. No going home and having to wrangle the kids or their dinner. I only need to worry about my own dinner as I stay in the city after work and eat something yummy before the 6:40 start.

Just because I'm doing MIFF from home this year doesn't mean I couldn't do something sort of like that.

And so it was that yesterday afternoon I watched Emma Seligman's Shiva Baby in the late afternoon, even starting my stream before I had technically finished work. (As Shiva Baby has not had proper releases anywhere and does not yet have a poster that I could find, I'm including the poster for the 2018 short.)

The 71-minute film would have been easy to sneak in before dinner even without starting at 4:30 rather than 5, but starting a little early also allowed me to take an impromptu snooze in the beanbags in the garage, where I have been afternoon-napping throughout quarantine. That's where I moved my computer once I was officially clocked off for the day.

The reason I needed to see it then was that I was overdue for my next MIFF review on ReelGood, having posted my review of Marona's Fantastic Tale on Monday. I needed to get another one up by Thursday, no doubt, and watching it in the afternoon on Wednesday was my only hope of doing that. (If not for the sake of the site, then to make good on my implicit promise to cover the festival for those who have given me my free passes.)

That's because the second MIFF movie I was watching on Wednesday -- the second half of a true MIFF double feature, unlike Saturday's partial double feature that I billed as a true double feature on this blog -- would prevent me from watching Shiva Baby in the evening. Lawrence Michael Levine's Black Bear, starring Aubrey Plaza, is a so-called "spotlight film," meaning it could only be watched between the hours of 7 p.m. and 11:59 p.m. on Wednesday night, unlike most of the rest of the films, which can be streamed throughout the festival.

As that's the higher profile film, for sure, I might have reviewed that instead of Shiva Baby. However, there's limited utility to reviewing a film that my readers are not actually going to be able to see. So, Shiva it was.

I liked both films a fair bit. The first is certainly more traditional than the second, though I won't go into any detail about what makes Black Bear unusual, because it's best not to know. I will say that Black Bear reminded me a bit of the other movie that was part of my first MIFF/not-MIFF double feature on Saturday, The Rental, in terms of its core dynamics. Until it doesn't.

And Shiva Baby is just a nice little independent cringe movie, but with heart. The logline tells it all: A confused college senior is stuck at a shiva while trying to avoid both her ex-girlfriend and her sugar daddy. It's an expansion of Seligman's eight-minute short from 2018, also starring Rachel Sennott, and it's really enjoyable. You can read my full review to the right.

Okay, another two days off and then more MIFF on Saturday.

Aristocratic dickhead typecasting

My wife and I are two episodes into The Great, the TV show about Catherine the Great that seems like an attempt to give us The Favourite: The Series. Both this series and Yorgos Lanthimos' best picture nominee are about 18th century aristocracies where the aristocrats are cruel, crass and lascivious.

It also helps that they both feature Nicholas Hoult.

It almost seems like they cast him just to be sure to cement the comparison for us. But it's not like there aren't other signs that Hoult has been trending in the direction of this sort of typecasting. In fact, the guy you once knew primarily as one of the X-men is more commonly found in much different type of material nowadays.

Not only is there The Great and The Favourite, but Hoult can be seen as a dickhead of antiquity in this year's True History of the Kelly Gang as well -- though the antiquity in this case is not qute as ancient, only late 19th century Australia, and the constables of that period only act like aristocrats.

I say, let's keep it going.

I have long appreciated Hoult as an actor, dating back to the year (2013) I named him as one of my three who had a good year in my year-end wrap-up post. He was in two genre movies that I liked rather more than I probably should have, in retrospect, those being Warm Bodies and Jack the Giant Slayer (which both made my top 20 of the year). Those performances were clearly just scratching the surface of what he can do.

The reason he is so good at malicious aristocratic twits is that he has an effortless supercilious quality to him. He'd just as soon dismiss somebody, both literally and figuratively, as breathe. His characters ooze cruelty.

Although The Great, a TV show, is prompting this post -- scandalous on a movie blog -- I do think this could be his crowning achievement in that regard. Now granted, we are just two episodes in, but almost every time Hoult opens his mouth as Peter III, I laugh -- sometimes even when it is awful to do so. It's not that I always think the things he says are funny, though I frequently do. It's that it's funny that someone would say the things he says in the first place, because they're just so damn wrong.

In fact, I'm sure I would have included an image from The Great rather than this still from The Favourite, except I couldn't find an image from The Great that encapsulates what I wanted to talk about today as well as this.

Although I am specifically not going back and checking my history to find out what happens to Peter III -- though I know it can't be good -- I am kind of hoping he sticks around long enough to entertain me for a while longer.

Nicholas Hoult has been entertaining me throughout his career. As he is only 30 years old, I look forward to all the great aristocratic dickheads he will play in the future.

MIFF: More dead animals

I'm not sure I'm going to write about every MIFF movie I watch from my living room this August, but as of right now, I'm 3-for-3.

And it's a pretty #2020 year so far at MIFF, if you are keen to dwell on ideas of mortality, as I have now watched my second straight movie about dead animals, after Marona's Fantastic Tale on Saturday night.

Sunday night brought the Greek film Kala Azar, which was advertised as being in the style of Yorgos Lanthimos (they probably say that about every movie from Greece). The MIFF program also explained that it focuses on a couple who perform animal cremations and collect roadkill. So it's not like I didn't know what I was getting into.

Having seen the movie, I do get the Lanthimos comparison. I was also reminded of last year's beekeeper documentary Honeyland, though that was not as positive an association.

Overall I was pretty mixed on the movie. It's one of those semi-experimental films where there isn't a lot of dialogue, and you are supposed to glean your ideas from it only by getting a general sense of what's going on. You observe and draw some conclusions, but there isn't much of a narrative. Now that I think of it I also got a bit of a Carlos Reygadas vibe from it.

The typical scene is as follows: The two humans, usually in some state of semi-nudity, go about their their cryptic and enigmatic tasks (why are they cremating animals? why do they have to collect the roadkill?) as various dogs (there are always dogs around) pant and slobber in their vicinity. I feel like a few additional lines of dialogue here and there would have served to clarify a few things, but this movie is not interested in that. Which makes the developing fissure between this man and this woman as cryptic as anything else.

The final scene salvaged it from a mildly negative to a mildly positive review for me, and though I won't go into much detail, I will say that in this scene, I got a third fond comparision from the movie: the Swedish director Roy Andersson. There's a poignant absurdism to how the film closes, and that was enough to win me over. (Three fond comparisons and one not-so-fond comparison is a net gain of two fond comparisons, you see.)

Think I'll take a couple nights off and resume my MIFF on Wednesday.

MIFF double feature: The dog doesn't die, the dog dies

Warning: The following post contains spoilers about The Rental and Marona's Fantastic Tale.

I saw my first proper MIFF movie of 2020 on Saturday night, after watching the opening night film on iTunes as discussed here.

It was an instant reminder of the routine of being involved with a film festival. Unlike most films you stream, the movie doesn't start right away. There are nearly two minutes of short ads and thanking different sponsors, during which you cannot fast forward or even expand the player to full screen, which is all I wanted to do. And in fact, I had to start the whole thing over again when I accidentally clicked on the Chromecast button and the words "Failed to cast to Chromecast" appeared at the bottom of the screen even after the movie started. Refreshing was the only way to get rid of it, at which point the whole rigmarole started from the beginning.

With this first non-opening night film of 2020, I managed to continue two MIFF traditions in one fell swoop:

1) For the fifth year in a row, I saw an outsider animation movie at MIFF. Dating back to 2016, the first year I went from a handful of MIFF screenings to close to a dozen per year, I've seen one such movie each year. Those previous choices were Seoul Station (2016), My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea (2017), Chris the Swiss (2018) and I Lost My Body (2019).

2) The MIFF double feature. And I don't, by that, mean two MIFF movies in one evening, though I have done that plenty. I mean the double feature where I watch one MIFF movie and one non-MIFF movie, since I never want to get behind on my new theatrical releases just because there's a film festival going on. This year I continued that, even when there are no new theatrical releases.

I just never guessed that both ends of the double feature would prominently feature dogs.

The actual MIFF film, the French language Marona's Fantastic Tale, does of course center on a dog. From just reading the premise on the MIFF website I knew the movie involves this dog seeing her life flash before her eyes as she lies dying by the side of the road after a traffic accident. In fact, the poignant mortality of the dog was what drew me to the movie and let me know it was this year's outsider animation choice for me.

It was The Rental, the new thriller/horror from director Dave Franco, that I didn't expect to be about a dog, or, I should say more accurately, feature a dog prominently. Once I knew there was a dog in it, though, I knew that dog was dead meat.

Well, I like being wrong about things.

(And don't forget, I already gave you a SPOILER ALERT.)

The dog emerges unharmed at the end of The Rental. You can't say the same for his humans. He went missing earlier on, and it was presumed that the psycho killer filming and tormenting our main characters had made him into so much doggie stew.

Well, as a sign of this movie's possible misanthropy -- a misanthropy 2020 has made it easier for us to understand -- this psycho killer spares the dog but not the humans. In fact, most psycho killers probably don't want to kill a poor little doggie. But the killing of a pet is an "easy" escalation favored by screenwriters to show that things are getting more serious, without actually killing off one of your humans ... yet. In The Rental, the dog being missing accomplishes that same escalation, without having to actually show us a dog hanging from a tree or returned on the doorstep inside a bag.

And when the dog comes ambling back in at the end, it was a nice surprise -- one of many in a film I liked quite a lot.

Well, there's no surprise at the end of Marona's Fantastic Tale. The dog, who has been dying the whole movie, does die, or so you assume when the camera pulls back out to satellite view from that Parisian street.

This movie has its own delightful surprises, though, which include the imaginative use of all sorts of 2D animation to tell a subjective story from the perspective of its title character. And though I was pretty sleepy by the end of the second movie -- it's been a while since I watched two in one night, even though neither of them was longer than 90 minutes -- I did really enjoy this one too. (Review will be up on Monday morning.)

More importantly, as I was settling into MIFF proper and starting to feel that MIFF vibe -- even from my own living room -- I decided I didn't need to limit myself to the five free passes I have for this year's festival. I made a shortlist of 11 films from the festival that interest me, and Marona's Fantastic Tale is just the first.

I've got two more weeks to watch many more.

Revolori family resemblance

I had it on good authority that the 2020 remake of Valley Girl might actually be good. Two things made me suspicious of this:

1) The last time I saw it, I decided I don't actually like the original. It totally fell flat for me.

2) Although it isn't her, the girl in this poster reminds me a lot of Chloe Grace Moretz, so I had a subliminal negative reaction. (It's actually Jessica Rothe from Happy Death Day, who looks nothing like Moretz in real life.)

But when my friend who reported on the qualities of the movie reminded me, or maybe told me for the first time, that it's a jukebox musical, I became a lot more curious. The fact that it has already come to my streaming service Stan sealed the deal, and on Friday night I watched it.

He was right. It's good. It's not great, but it is light and fun and very enjoyable. I was particularly impressed by Rothe, who I had sort of written off after HDD (which I didn't like), thinking of her as merely a Blake Lively clone. She's a lot more than that.

But I'm not really here to talk about Rothe or even the movie. In fact, the thing I'm here to talk about probably doesn't even warrant its own post, but then again, it's quarantine and I can write about whatever I damn please.

As I was watching Rothe's character intermingle with the "punks," I recognized this guy:

I was doing a lot of looking up of actors during this movie, and I decided to look him up, pretty sure it was Tony Revolori of The Grand Budapest Hotel and Spider-Man: Homecoming fame.

It wasn't Tony Revolori, but it was a Revolori alright: Tony's brother Mario.

"A brother looks like his brother, Vance. What's the big deal?"

Well for one, I didn't even know Tony Revolori had a brother, and I definitely didn't know he was also an actor. It was much more likely that it was just some other actor and didn't share Tony Revolori's DNA.

I guess there's no #2.

See, I told you it wasn't worth its own post.

MIFF: Not really MIFF (really not really MIFF)

MIFF started last night. Sort of.

When I say it was "not really MIFF," that's no direspect to the Melbourne International Film Festival. MIFF itself would say that an online film festival is only a small fraction of what they usually offer, but they've chosen a reasonably large fraction, officially, labeling this MIFF 68 1/2 -- not quite the 69th annual version of the festival I have been attending religiously since moving to Melbourne seven years ago. (It's only my seventh rather than eighth MIFF, though, because I missed the 2013 festival by mere days.)

When I say it's "really not really MIFF," though, that's because we had to cheat to even watch the opening night film.

I'll explain.

Kelly Reichardt's First Cow was chosen as the opening night film of the festival, and as luck would have it, I haven't seen it yet, even though it's been available for rental from U.S. iTunes for a good three weeks now. And I was given codes to watch five free MIFF films as part of my role with ReelGood, so all good there.

What I didn't realize was that First Cow would actually sell out.

How does an online film sell out, you ask? Shouldn't the "seating capacity" be unlimited?

Well, you would think so. But my wife explained it to me this way. If they let everyone who wanted to see First Cow actually see it, it would cannibalize the film's eventual performance at the Australian box office, once it does one day open. So the "seating capacity" is a limitation placed by the distributor, not by MIFF itself. Plus, having a limited number of seats creates a sense of urgency to help sell the other seats -- which worked, apparently.

At first I thought I'd blown it, since my wife and I had talked about using one of my passes to purchase First Cow. It would be our second straight opening night MIFF film, though last year we attended in person.

But then I realized: I'll just rent it from iTunes and it'll be basically the same thing.

So yeah, on the opening night of MIFF, we watching the MIFF opening night film, just not actually through MIFF.

"Basically the same thing" is not the same as the same thing. We had multiple technical difficulties during the viewing. I will list them in order of their annoyance.

1) We noticed that the lighting was flickering during the night scenes. At first we didn't realize it was only the night scenes, and actually, it was only some of the night scenes. But my wife attributed it to a failure of the image to project the correct number of megahertz, which sounds like a real thing. Restarting iTunes and restarting my computer did not fix the issue, though it did seem to happen less as the movie went on.

2) There was something weird going on with the way my computer screen was displaying when connected through the HDMI cable. The outermost ten percent of the screen on all sides was missing, like it was blown up too close. This didn't impact our ability to perceive the content of the movie, but any time you are not seeing the exact aspect ratio intended by the director, you are not getting the full experience of the movie. We thought it was something going on with my display setting and I checked that, to no avail. Only after the movie did we discover that it was a problem with this particular HDMI cable. Never seen that before.

3) My computer crashed at one point. It does that. When it crashes, the screen freezes and you can't see the cursor anywhere, and the only choice is to restart. Unfortunately, when it crashes while hooked up to HDMI, it also makes this incredibly obnoxious buzzing sound. So another five minutes while I restarted and got us back to where we were (becaue the abrupt nature of the closure prevented iTunes from marking where we had left off in the movie).

4) Lastly, there was a little bit of drag on the streaming, even though I had no other programs open on my computer. This seems to happen with my iTunes but only for the first five or so minutes of the movie. In this case, it happened like 30 minutes in, for no apparent reason, before sorting itself out. So yes, it happened after we had already had the other three technical problems, pushing us just a little bit closer to deciding that the universe was trying to tell us something about this viewing. Were we somehow "stealing" this viewing the way the main character steals milk from the titular cow?

We never gave up on it. But you can see where the "really not really MIFF" comes in.

As for the movie itself, well, it left me a bit disappointed too. I've seen Reichardt's last two features, Certain Women and Night Moves, at MIFF, so seeing First Cow felt like a very good start to making this year feel MIFFier than it otherwise would.

But the movie?

Well ...

Look, I really loved the first half. The second just kind of ... petered out into a resolution that did not seem in keeping with the rest of the movie. My wife said it best afterward: "I don't know what she was trying to say in that movie." I'll have a review up shortly to the right, if I don't already by the time you read this.

Well, from here on out, things should get a bit more "really MIFF." I have tickets to the mid-festival centrepiece, Benh Zeitlin's Wendy, as well as the closing night film, Pablo Larrain's Ema. (Not to be confused with Emma from earlier this year.) Like First Cow, those two are available only at that one specific time. My other three passes will be used on movies that I haven't yet chosen, as those movies can be streamed at any time during the run of the festival, until August 22nd.

And considering that my wife may purchase a package as well, it'll leave us with close to my usual MIFF slate.

Onward and upward ... really.

Audient Authentic: Don't Look Back

This is the eighth in my 2020 series watching classic documentaries as yet unseen by me.

So far in this series I've covered a pretty wide range of topics, from war to politics to ethnography, with even a nature documentary thrown in for good measure. From here on out, though, my subject matter is going to become a bit more focused, as three of the last five movies I plan to watch are music documentaries.

The first is the Bob Dylan doco Don't Look Back, directed by D.A. Pennebaker, who first appeared in our year-long survey of important documentaries as a collaborator in last month's Primary. Pennebaker is fully the auteur on this one and seems to take some pleasure in reminding us of that, as his name appears rather more often and more prominently than I would have thought necessary.

Pennebaker's trademark fly-on-the-wall approach involves no talking head interviews, though that doesn't mean it doesn't involve any interviews. The setting is a 1965 trip Dylan took to London, where he performed a number of shows at the Royal Albert Hall, spent time with a number of contemporaries who would become lesser luminaries (lesser to him anyway), and was hectored by the press. That last is the interview part.

Surely, some of the press seems impressed, so to speak, with him. But others seem rather dubious in their pointed questioning, at times asking him such things as whether he thought that any of his fans had any idea what his lyrics meant. Dylan is, for the most part, gracious about such questioning, or at least, not openly rude in his responses, though he does engage in a fair bit of a bemused "turn the question back on you" approach in answering their questions. You can see his well-known personality being forged here, as he cheerfully says he doesn't believe he should be described as a folk singer and that he "doesn't believe in anything," when asked about his religious views.

I definitely appreciate the tack Pennebaker takes on Dylan, but I think I'd have been more engaged with the material if I were more of a Dylan fan. I don't dislike Dylan, certainly, but I felt my eyes rolling a bit when "Maggie's Farm" came on at one point. Not a big fan of that particular song, which I find as sort of an embodiment of the kind of bratty punkiness that I don't love about Dylan. (I'm not going to be able to describe in satisfying language what it is that bothers me about him, so I probably won't try.)

I found myself fading from time to time, but then something would happen that snapped me back to attention. Overall I am positive on the movie.

I found it interesting to note that I actually like both of the other luminaries who appear here, Joan Baez and Donovan, more than I like Dylan. Heresy, I know. But I quite enjoyed spending time with Baez, and I was surprised to discover how much Donovan actually sounded like Dylan -- something that has never occurred to me about his work. To the extent that it has any structure at all, the film is sort of set up as a collision course between himself and Donovan, who is proferred as a figure of contrast with Dylan until they finally meet near the end. When Donovan performs one of his songs, at first I wondered if it were a Dylan impersonation -- which is interesting because I have never previously gotten that impression from Donovan's work.

Another thing I was fascinated by was the extent to which Dylan's manager, Albert Grossman, reminded me of John C. Reilly. Not only could Reilly play him in a film, appearance-wise, but their voices are almost identical. I checked the internet and others have reached the same conclusions I have.

I know this is supposed to be some sort of landmark documentary, but I guess I needed to be around at that time to get a sense of how different it really was from other documentary portraits on offer. Certainly I am impressed by Pennebaker's ability to make everyone seem to "forget" that there is a camera there. This all feels very real and unvarnished, as no one appears to be playing to the camera or even really realizing it's there. Dylan comes off well despite the fact that it doesn't seem like he's trying to, though he's pretty ornery in certain moments as well.

In trying to get a sense of why the film is so respected, I went to Wikipedia, which doesn't give me very much. I mean, I myself respect it, but I don't think of it as the ninth best documentary of all time, which is how it was judged by a Sight & Sound documentary poll in 2014.

It'll be on to the 1970s in September as I watch another music documentary, the Maysles' Gimme Shelter.

Resumption of my quest for James Bond completism

About 14 years ago, I watched Dr. No, the first James Bond film I had ever seen starring Sean Connery, if you don't include Never Say Never Again. Which I don't.

About seven years ago, I watched the next two in the span of 24 hours, getting in From Russia With Love so I could go sequentially and see Goldfinger, which I was watching as part of the series I was writing at the time called Flickchart Road Trip, where I watched a movie at least partially set in each U.S. state for 50 weeks in a row. (Goldfinger goes to Kentucky.)

It's another seven years later and I've finally moved on to the next.

You may recall in yesterday's post that I vowed to watch a pre-2000 movie on streaming, and you know what? It's hard. At least 80 percent of the movies available on streaming have been released in the past two decades, and the ones that haven't are classics that I've already seen multiple times.

Except not the James Bond movies. As the timeline above will tell you, there are plenty of Bond movies -- about three starring Sean Connery, about three starring Roger Moore, and the one starring George Lazenby -- that I hadn't seen yet. (There's also the one starring Woody Allen, if we're counting movies we don't count.)

And fortunately, my Australian streaming service Stan is carrying all of them.

As you can tell from the poster, Thunderball was next up for me, and I watched all 130 minutes of it -- at least half of which were underwater -- on Saturday night.

Although Goldfinger is definitely the movie where many of the James Bond tropes we still know first appeared, Thunderball seems like the movie where they became ripe for parody. And boy is this movie jam-packed full of James Bond silliness. Just a small overview of some of the things we see in this movie:

- James Bond uses a jet pack. For reasons that seem entirely superfluous to the scenario, he escapes some kind of compound with the help of a jet pack that, I guess, he had stashed in there. If you have the access to stash the jet pack in the first place, it certainly doesn't seem essential to your escape, now does it?

- James Bond punches out a woman. During that same opening scene with the jet pack. It's not actually a woman but a man dressed as a woman, though it does function quite symbolically in terms of the mild to heavy misogyny that characterized the franchise at the time.

- James Bond gets "stretched" on a device called "the rack," that is supposed to assist with rehabilitation from injury. This seems to clearly call back to the famous scene in Goldfinger where his manhood is threatened by a table saw. I was surprised that he doesn't actually figure his way out of it, but is saved by the returning nurse, whom he quickly beds.

- Spectre makes its first appearance. I believe, though it could have appeared in Goldfinger. You get the cat being petted and the room full of Spectre agents, one of whom is accused of embezzlement and summarily executed, his chair sinking into the floor and coming back empty. Classic fodder for an Austin Powers movie.

- You get a villain with an eye patch. Largo by name. Classic.

- James Bond is the target of an assassination attempt during a big parade/festival. The gun peaking from behind the curtain also seems classic Bond. Of course, he turns the duplicitous woman he's dancing with in the path of the gun shot, and she takes the shot to the back and dies instantly. In fact, numerous people are killed instantly from back wounds in this film, including, ultimately, Largo.

- In addition to the large meeting of Spectre agents, we get a large meeting of 00 agents. Not sure if we had seen that before either.

- Desmond Llewelyn appears as Q. Not for the first time, but he appears in a way that reminds me of all his subsequent appearances, completely rolling his eyes at everything Bond does.

- Doppelgangers. A villain gets cosmetic surgery to look like the NATO pilot with security clearance, so he can board and ultimately hijack a plane carrying nuclear weapons.

- The one-liners. Ugh! A typical example: Connery shoots an approaching villain with a spear gun, and says "I think he got the point."

- The shark tank. I almost forgot! Largo has a pool full of sharks he feeds with human beings who have crossed him, or merely let him down. Classic villain behavior.

Thunderball clearly has it all. However, the most ridiculous thing it has is literally 40 minutes of underwater footage.

Many a Bond movie might have a single underwater scene, but Thunderball really goes for it. It keeps returning, and returning, and returning to the underwater milieu, and I'll be damned if I could figure out what was supposed to be going on and what was at stake in half of those scenes.

But the most hilarious moment had to be the grand finale. You know well those scenes that have become ubiquitous in epic adventure movies, where the two armies run at each other on the battlefield and ultimately meet up for a ferocious clash where heads are bashed and blood flies.

Now imagine the same thing underwater.

That's right, there are no fewer than 200 scuba divers shooting each other with spear guns and engaging in hand to hand combat underwater as one group escorts a nuclear device and the other tries to stop them from doing so. (In an interesting failure to present an immediacy to the threat, the device is not about to be detonated, but is just being escorted in the finale.)

The scene goes on for so long, and includes so many people speared (how many spears does the average scuba diver carry?), that I spent most of the time laughing. The hand to hand combat was almost as funny, with combatants slashing each others' air hoses and removing each others' face masks. (This last was considered some kind of fatal move, almost like they were removing an astronaut's helmet rather than a diver's. I suppose it's disorienting not to have your mask underwater, but does it really limit your effectiveness as a combatant? When it happens to Bond himself, he just gets a mask from a floating corpse nearby. Never mind that if you put the mask on underwater your mask would be totally filled with water and would not function as intended anyway.)

Thunderball is so silly at some points -- including the crazy speed of the background in the climactic fight scene aboard a boat -- that I almost considered giving it less than the minimum three stars for a movie you would recommend to somebody else. But after judging that I had had a really good time watching it, I did give it those three stars.

One thing I didn't mention above is that this is also the movie where the Bond franchise just unapologetically goes for the T&A. I just quipped to someone that Thunderball features "enough beautiful babes to fill a Russ Meyer movie." Indeed that is true. The babes are buxom and frequently in bikinis, or baths, or Turkish baths. Hubba hubba.

I don't think it will be another seven years before I see You Only Live Twice, the next up for me, whose beginning I may actually have seen years ago. There's a Bond scene I remember where he appears to be shot in a folded up bed at the beginning, and I think that's this movie. I definitely didn't see the whole thing though.

Especially with the availability of all the movies on Stan, I think Thunderball has inspired me to keep making my way through the now six remaining Bond movies I haven't seen. It may be a tall, and unnecessary, order to see them all before No Time to Die finally does debut later this year, but neither would I be surprised if I ended up doing so.