Thursday, December 30, 2021

The year overstuffed with last year's leftovers

I had envisioned an entirely different approach to my traditional year-end post -- not to be confused with the several posts related to my best and worst of 2021, which will come along in a few weeks.

Titles under consideration were "The year movies felt perfunctory" and "The year I stopped updating." The first is self-explanatory, indicating a going-through-the-motions quality to my watching of movies in 2021, and the second refers to a habit I have previously had of updating my records as soon as I'd finished a viewing. My wife used to make fun of me because the credits wouldn't even have stopped rolling, and I'd already be at my computer adding the movie to my various lists. She even came up with a little sing-songy joke at my expense, with the lyrics "Update, update" and an exaggerated pantomime of me typing. Unlike some jokes that hit too close to home, I thought this one was sweet and hilarious.

She couldn't make the "Update, update" joke in 2021 because I would go three or four days, sometimes even a week, between updating my records, at which point I had to add like five movies. That certainly seemed indicative of a decrease in my normal enthusiasm.

But as the date to write this post grew closer, I realized that any end-of-year ruminations focusing on a decrease in my movie appetite would directly contradict the facts in front of me. I'll outline those here.

For starters there is the number of new-to-me movies I've watched this year. My total of 275, with two days left to watch, is trailing last year's total of 276 by the smallest of margins. That was my highest total since 2016 -- and my highest total ever if you remove the years 2015 and 2016, when I blew past 300 while vetting films for that human rights film festival. Depending on how I structure my time between now and New Year's Eve, I could surpass the non-festival record. 

Then there's the number of 2021 movies I will be ranking when my list closes in a couple weeks. That's definitely going to be a record, no two ways about it.

I don't know how this happened because I didn't specifically set out to consume as much new content as possible. There were a couple periods -- such as the month of October, when I watched a lot of 70s horror, and my DVD film festival back in June -- when I neglected new releases for a couple weeks at a time. Plus I had no international flights, which is where I usually collect four or five new movies at once -- on both legs of the trip.

The reality remains, though, that my personal high of 151 movies in 2016 is going to get left in the dust by my 2021 total. I'm at 147 movies as of this writing, and I'm not even closing off the list until January 17th.

I do know how it happened, actually: All the 2020 movies that couldn't come out in 2020 finally came out in 2021.

It explains not only why I'll shatter my previous record, but why I still feel like I'm scrambling to see several dozen significant films before my list closes.

It's one of the reasons this holiday season in particular feels so overstuffed. When can you remember at Christmastime getting the latest movie in three major franchises, those being The Matrix, Spider-Man and Ghostbusters? Only the third of those was supposed to come out in 2020, but earlier delayed releases -- from Fast 9 to Black Widow to Dune to No Time to Die -- have cumulatively placed strain on the release schedule and created a logjam at the end of the year. 

Perhaps the reason this has felt so perfunctory to me, though, is that I've found the overall quality of these films to be down significantly, an idea I will probably dig into further in a couple weeks. 

I'm wondering if there is an ineffable holistic quality to a particular movie release year that gets thrown out of whack when the biggest movies of one year can't get released until the next. The four Marvel movies we got in 2021 are a good example of that, and may have had something to do with the exhaustion I experienced when Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings came out. And also why I might not even see The Eternals before my list closes. (Though you can count on a Spider-Man viewing as soon as I watch the first two Holland movies with my kids, the viewings of which will keep my record number of 2021 movies slightly more modest.)

It's not just me setting personal records. My oldest friend, who does these lists along with me, is expecting to see a staggering 275 films released in 2021, with 300 being an outside possibility. In 2012, I had him write a guest post on my blog when he saw a then-record 212 films, because we considered it worth exploring how he was able to see such an unfathomably large total. He's basically guaranteed of seeing 60 more movies than that in 2021.

On the one hand, this is an encouraging sign for the health of the film industry. Even though methods of distribution are changing, the total number of movies available has not gone down, and may have even gone up. The sun is not about to set on film as an art form, as the most fatalistic among us have worried.

On the other hand ... viewing more movies than I have ever seen is feeling more perfunctory than it has ever felt. 

Maybe a decrease in the total number of films would be a good thing, as it will spread the talent less thinly and make better movies. Maybe. Or maybe the overall contraction of the industry would have deleterious cascading effects we cannot anticipate.

Or maybe all we really need to get things back on track, both in terms of quality and quantity, is to have a "normal" 2022. The thrice-or-more-delayed Top Gun reboot is the only pandemic casualty I can think of that has yet to premiere, so maybe that will finally ride us out of this danger zone.

Wednesday, December 29, 2021

A new route to an old theatre

And I'm talking really old. The original Sun Theatre in Yarraville was built in 1938.

There are certain regular movie-going routines I have to give up, or at least adjust, by moving from North Melbourne to Altona. Thankfully, being a regular patron of The Sun is not one of them.

I just need to come from a different direction.

I tried this new route for the first time on Monday night with my 9:20 viewing of The Matrix Resurrections.

Now, I can still drive to the theatre, which is the way I have visited it most of the time. It'll just take probably five minutes longer to get there.

Or I can take my bike to the Altona train station, then take the train four stops on our new Werribee line, which disgorges me basically directly behind the building seen above.

I almost pushed it a little too much. Instead of allowing myself plenty of time by catching the 8:42 train, I caught the 9:02, which was scheduled to leave me off at 9:17. One of the Sun's other pleasures, beyond its large old-school auditoriums and art deco decor, is that it doesn't show many ads. But three minutes still should have been long enough to negotiate everything I needed to negotiate.

I didn't anticipate, of course, the train being two minutes late, then the platform being on the opposite side, meaning I had to run down and cross the tracks to get to the Sun. (I also entered the train carriage that was the furthest from this crossing point in Yarraville, realizing only belatedly that I could have done that part of the journey on the Altona platform.)

Once I actually got to the theater, there was of course a holiday week queue, a ticket clerk who had never seen my critics card before and didn't know how to enter it, and a guy in front of me who changed his seats right before paying, and then couldn't get his credit card to be recognized by the reader.

Just when I was starting to get totally exasperated, an usher called in everyone who had been waiting patiently in the lobby to be seated for The Matrix. Which now included me as well.

I'll save my first examination of the new car route for another day.

The bike-train combo, though more expensive than driving, is a lot of fun especially in the summertime. On my return home after midnight, I never even had to slow down as I whipped through the empty Altona streets.

If only the movie had been good meat in my commute sandwich, but I'll leave that discussion for another day as well.

Tuesday, December 28, 2021

Dismissing Bradley Cooper

It's been a couple years since I've seen Bradley Cooper in anything. In fact, if I had thought of him at all in the past few years, which I haven't, I might have said "Hey, what happened to that guy?" His last movie prior to the last few weeks was in 2019, but he wasn't on screen, as that was just voice work in Avengers: Endgame. Before that it was A Star is Born in 2018, which feels like ages ago. 

It turns out it was just one of those weird issues of COVID timing, as it's now been a Bradley Cooper December. He's in both Licorice Pizza and Nightmare Alley, neither of which I've seen yet. 

So why am I writing about Bradley Cooper today, you ask?

While scrolling through Facebook on my phone the other day, I came across an article that asked if it was finally time for an "overdue Oscar" for Cooper. 

Overdue? What are they talking about? This is a guy I only first became aware of 16 years ago in Wedding Crashers, and he's only 46. He might score an Oscar nomination every now and again, but that's usually because of the strength of the films he's been in, nothing front runner-y about the performances he's given.

Well, I got some clarification on that "every now and again" frequency of Cooper's Oscar nominations: He's been nominated EIGHT times.

What the hell?

I thought it was a misprint. But I have gone back and confirmed. And surely, any person who has been nominated eight times for his industry's most prestigious award could reasonably be described as overdue to receive it.

He doesn't feel overdue, though, and when going back and considering the roles that have earned these nominations, I think you'll agree with my assessment.

The first thing I discovered, though, was that they were not all roles. Three of the nominations were not acting nominations. That's cheating a bit, don't you think? Cooper was a producer on American Sniper, A Star is Born and Joker -- the latter of which being the only one that was not accompanied by a best actor nomination for the actor, who does not appear in it. As all three of these movies felt like underdogs to get a best picture nod, they were easy for me to forget -- had I even been considering producer credits when my eyes first jumped out of my head at the eight nominations.

Five acting nominations is still pretty impressive, so I had to dig further into that.

His first acting nomination came in 2012 for Silver Linings Playbook, a film I had as my #3 of the year, but which I have not since rewatched. A friend had it has his #1 of the year. But he didn't include it in his best of the decade and I've never felt inclined to go back to it, so I suspect this one has not aged well. Cooper does give a pretty nuanced performance if I remember correctly, with a good mixture of comedy and the anger that highlights the character's mental health issues.

Next up was American Hustle the following year, where Cooper received his first and so-far only supporting actor nomination. It was a second straight nomination in a film directed by David O. Russell. This one didn't work for me nearly as much as Playbook, as I gave it only a marginal thumbs up. I don't remember Cooper either hurting or helping this film. All four of the leads got nominations so he may have just been swept up in the general furor of interest in the film (which, deservedly, did not win any of its ten nominations). 

It was three years in a row for Cooper with American Sniper in 2014. I didn't see the film at the time, but I always remembered that one of the hosts of the Slate Culture Gabfest went nuts for it, so I knew I should get to it at some point, and finally did in 2019. Clint Eastwood has made some good films in his dotage, but this is not one of them. I gave it 2.5 stars on Letterboxd.

Ha, I needed to read Wikipedia more closely before starting this. There were actually three separate nominations for Cooper in A Star is Born, one of which was an adapted screenplay nomination. So he actually only has four acting nominations, which is finally starting to sound more correct. This might be his most deserved acting nomination, though I find this film falls apart pretty significantly down the stretch after a powerhouse first hour, of which Cooper is a crucial part. Actually he's a crucial part in both the movie's initial ascent and eventual downfall.

Whether Cooper has eight nominations, or only half that number in terms of the nominations that really "count" (I've always found producer nominations a little suss, even though films obviously need a producer), is besides the point. The article was clearly misleading when it mentioned Cooper's eight nominations very prominently in the text. (And if I needed to read Wikipedia more closely, I probably needed to read the original article more closely as it likely would have saved me some trouble writing this whole post.) I think you can be "overdue" to win an acting award, but you can't be "overdue" as a producer, as your role there is less quantifiable and it's hard to know to what extent your fingerprints are on the final film. For example, do we consider Brad Pitt an essential voice on 12 Years a Slave? I don't think we do.

The point is that I have always dismissed Bradley Cooper a bit, and may continue to do so until he gives me a real reason not to.

I don't have anything against the man. I like him as a screen presence. 

But I think the smarmy asshole we first met in Wedding Crashers has never really gone away in my mind. There's always going to be a bit of the aggro, entitled frat boy in him. There's malice in that smile. There's a part of me that always wants to smack that malicious smile off his face.

Maybe that's key to his work though. Maybe it gives him something either to dive into more deeply, or to play off of. 

Well, I'll have the opportunity to reconsider Cooper as I see Licorice Pizza (probably within the next week or so) and Nightmare Alley (maybe not until later, as it doesn't open here until later in January). Given the different setting of the two films, which seem to ask very different things of him, maybe I'll finally appreciate the range that has gotten Cooper a still impressive four acting nominations.

He won't really seem "overdue," though, until those acting nominations reach eight. 

Saturday, December 25, 2021

For unto you this day, a lamb is born

As I continue to cram movies before my 2021 list closes in a couple weeks, there's only one reason I take a night off: total cumulative exhaustion. That means there's a movie all other nights, even Christmas Eve -- or Christmas itself, when you start watching the movie at 11:15 and don't finish until nearly 3 a.m. (I think Santa tiptoed through the living room while I was sleeping on a bean bag on the floor, my movie paused with about 20 minutes remaining.)

Christmas Eve was actually a two-movie night, considering that we did watch Elf -- again a big hit as it always is. That properly put us in the Christmas spirit that loaned an additional frisson of excitement to our remaining annual Christmas Eve traditions before the kids went to bed.

The goal for the second movie, on this holiest of nights (note my playful sarcasm), is to watch something that's compatible with Christmas -- or at least, not incompatible with it.

I took a gamble on Vladimar Johannsson's Lamb, knowing it had been chattered about joyously by cinephiles, knowing it might be batshit crazy, knowing it would push the limits of "not incompatible."

As it turns out, this is a lot more of a Christmas movie than you would ever guess.

LAMB SPOILERS TO FOLLOW

For starters, the very first image you see is wild horses trotting through a snow-swept Icelandic landscape. Snow is something I desperately need to be reminded of here in Australia, where it was hot enough yesterday for the kids to go swimming in our pool -- the fifth consecutive day of doing so since we arrived on Monday. And the horses? They easily reminded me of reindeer.

Then we go to sheep in a barn, surrounded by straw. It was very manger-like.

The icicles hanging from the barn continued that necessary dose of winter chill. 

Then we go to the house, to a man and a woman. She's wearing a festive red outfit and carrying a roast. There are candles lit and hymns playing. The movie doesn't specifically say so, but this could actually be Christmas night itself. The woman looks sad, though, so it's a melancholy Christmas, for reasons we will soon discover, related to the loss of a child.

Fast forward to what appears to be that spring. The man and the woman are delivering baby lambs. One particular baby is "special," possibly due to some sort of "immaculate conception," though we don't immediately learn what her special attributes are. We just know the man and the woman look at each other with a certain gravity leavened by hope, and begin taking care of the lamb in their own home, swaddling her, sleeping her in a cradle, feeding her bottles of milk.

It may be another ten or 15 minutes before we finally see that while this creature has the head of a lamb, it has the body of a human girl. 

"Immaculate conception" indeed. I mean, neither of them had sex with a sheep, did they? I suppose it would have to have been him. It wasn't an immaculate conception, but we go through much of the movie thinking it might have been before another batshit crazy reveal.

It wasn't boredom with Lamb that caused me to take naps during its second half, and, as I learned from reading the plot synopsis afterward, to sleep through about ten minutes of the action. No, the movie just succumbed to the same fate as every other movie I've watched during this epic week of moving into our new house and preparing for Christmas. I pressed on despite massive evidence of the "cumulative physical exhaustion" I mentioned earlier as a reason not to watch a movie, only yielding to that sensible advice on December 23rd, when I just couldn't fool myself into the attempt. 

But after today, after we host local relatives for a big Christmas lunch, and show them our new house for the first time, I can finally relax -- and maybe get through a movie without a half-dozen naps and finally retreating to my bed closer to breakfast than dinner. 

Merry Christmas all, and a lamby new year. 

Friday, December 24, 2021

No-bit Christmas

With my life in total chaos -- living in a new house, half the things I need in boxes I can't find, and preparing for hosting Christmas -- at least my Letterboxd watchlist is in order. 

I've been regularly consulting the 72 films still sitting in that list, far less than a third of which I will watch prior to finalizing my 2021 rankings next month. I suppose it's been a small symbol of stability in a storm of a week where the emotion and stress levels have run high.

The one thing I do not have much of on that list, though, is Christmas movies. In fact I have only one, and I can't even watch it.

I've been angling for some Christmas-themed viewings this week with the family, whether that's actual holiday movies or movies that have a "Christmas feel," which sometimes just means family friendly blockbusters. There are plenty of those playing in the theater right now, but because we've been focused on moving and preparing to host Christmas, they have been out of my grasp. I imagine we as a family will get to a number of them from December 26th onward.

I've suggested viewings of the first two Tom Holland Spider-Man movies in preparation for the third, which is playing theaters and getting rave reviews. Sticking with the Marvel theme, I've also suggested starting to watch Hawkeye, knowing it's set during the holidays. 

Both of these were shot down and I know both of them are not quite right. For one, I don't know that anyone wants to fill up a busy Christmas week with obligatory Spider-Man viewings. Neither would they do much to advance my personal goal of watching 72 movies from 2021 before the second week of January. Plus I didn't even particularly enjoy the second one. Then with Hawkeye, I imagine you have to devote several episodes before you get to the most solid Christmas material. We should have been watching it from the start, not cramming it in now. 

Plan B -- or maybe Plan C -- was to watch 8-Bit Christmas, an apparently nostalgia-filled new Christmas movie starring Neil Patrick Harris. As the week ground on and my viewings didn't feel the least bit Christmassy -- I tried with Being the Ricardos but it wasn't quite right -- I knew that 8-Bit Christmas would save us. (I say "us" even though I didn't, of course, subject anyone else in my family to Being the Ricardos.)

I had thought it was playing on Netflix. Actually, it's playing on HBOMax. Which, after I recently signed up for Paramount Plus, is about the only streaming service we don't yet have.

There's probably more than one reason we don't have HBOMax -- I don't want to be the guy who subscribes to every streaming service -- but the one that nullifies the others is that it's not available in Australia. So I can't even sign up for it as a desperation move for 8-Bit Christmas.

Now it's Christmas Eve and we have to watch something tonight ... don't we?

Even though I knew this would not be a "typical Christmas" -- we moved less than a week ago -- now that it's actually arriving and not being typical, I'm struggling with it. I'm accustomed to the week leading up to Christmas being paved with holiday-appropriate family viewings, not just whatever episode of Futurama happens to be next in the list as part of our family watch of the series. We still have the week after Christmas of full-on holiday mode, but it's not the same feeling, you know?

Besides, one of the reasons we pushed for a 45-day closing on this house was to spend Christmas in our new house. The inspiration behind that wasn't just to physically occupy this house on Christmas. It was to have some version of a classic Christmas. And while the house looks pretty Christmassy, and the "classic" part is covered by the house dating back to 1970, for me, it's not a full classic Christmas without some Christmas viewing.

The poster above points us to a possible solution, though it would not be a new one. 8-Bit Christmas is advertised as from the studio that brought us Elf, and in truth, Elf may be the thing that saves us. It'll be the third time the kids have seen it, but the first since 2018, which was the first since 2015. Maybe we're building a family tradition of watching Elf every three years. I'd be fine with that.

And when Buddy's father, Walter, finally finds it in his heart to start singing, and provides the necessary final boost to lift Santa's sleigh into the sky, maybe that's when my classic Christmas will finally kick in.

I'm getting goosebumps just thinking about it. 

Wednesday, December 22, 2021

Summer of Soul on the winter solstice

The second movie I watched in my new house was much more the speed my taxed mind could handle. The first was Tick, Tick ... Boom! on Monday night, and though I can say I "watched" (and liked) it, the events of the last half hour of the movie did not ring a bell when I consulted the plot synopsis on Wikipedia. That's what happens when you are trying to cram in movies while also cramming in a move.

Tuesday should not have been any better of a day to conclude with a movie. I followed up moving day with a day in the office, meaning a five-minute bike ride to the train station, a 25-minute train ride into the city and then a 15-minute walk to my office. I'll fine-tune as I go, as there are multiple options for how to do this. But with the uncertainty, and sleeping in a new bedroom for the first time, I was waking up every 15 minutes to see what time it was. I ended up finally getting out of bed around 6, a full 90 minutes before I needed to leave the house.

At least there was no plot synopsis to check for my second movie, Summer of Soul (... or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised). Maybe my third won't contain an ellipses. 

It was time for the latest documentary alternate Tuesday, and I'm proud to say I haven't missed one yet since I kicked off this initiative back in August.

My first choice was The Rescue, the latest film from Jimmy Chin and his wife Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, who made Free Solo. I swear I searched this up on Disney+ a few days ago and saw it there. I know it is there. But I could not find it last night. At this point, with my cumulative physical and mental exhaustion, I may never know whether thinking I saw it originally or being unable to find it last night was the error.

But my first choice was only my first choice because I didn't know my second choice was available. When Summer of Soul came out earlier this year, I knew at the time -- or at least thought at the time -- that it was not available on any service I had. But this may be a good reminder that the streaming service where something is available in the U.S. does not necessarily match up to where it is available in Australia. Or maybe it's just change hands since then.

Anyway, it was the fruitless search for The Rescue that showed me that indeed, Summer of Soul was playing on Disney+. Having been reminded of my need to see this due to its mention on year-end movie podcasts, I leaped to press the play button.

What a lovely, celebratory movie to usher in my new living arrangement. And to usher in the actual summer, or what should be the start of the summer.

I mentioned the winter solstice in my title for this post, but that's because I imagine I'm writing primarily to an audience in the northern hemisphere. And because even in the southern hemisphere, December 21st is not actually the start of summer.

I won't get into it at length. But Australians, and I imagine many others in this hemisphere, don't like to split months between seasons. Therefore, summer "officially" begins on December 1st, even though the longest day of the year doesn't arrive until yesterday. (And ends on February 28th, in case you were wondering, or February 29th every fourth.) 

In a way I get that. Shouldn't the longest day of the year arrive part way through the summer, not on its first day? It's a symbolic landmark that indicates peak summerness. In terms of symbolic value, it would be like the 4th of July kicking off summer in the U.S.

But I'm really digressing, and even though you may not be as busy as I am this holiday season, it's the holiday season and you are definitely busy.

So my new home and my American's interpretation of the start of an Australian summer were both kicked off with this glorious found footage of the Harlem Cultural Festival from the summer of 1969.

I have to say, I wasn't sure that critics were all praising Summer of Soul for the right reasons. It's just the type of film a woke white critic would embrace as an attempt to prove how enlightened he or she is. I personally wasn't exposed to a lot of soul, gospel and blues growing up, but I cynically suspected that a lot of white critics would gush about how they had "always" known and loved this type of music -- and, while they're at it, would slip in that they have "tons of Black friends."

No cynicism required. Actually, I was familiar with many of the songs shown here, likely because Questlove selected the songs the most people would know from all the available footage. And what versions of these songs they were.

I also noticed something that I was noticing in the week leading up to Christmas last year. About exactly a year ago I watched The Young Girls of Rochefort, which reminded me of the popping colors of Technicolor and how they have disappeared from the landscape, as discussed in this post. Summer of Soul was shot two years after Young Girls, and it's full of the same impossible neon pinks, oranges and especially greens. Even if the passion and musical genius of the performers were not enough to carry me through, the neon greens would have been. 

There's also something weird, and wonderful, about seeing old footage for the first time. There's so much rich material in this film that you feel like you should have already seen most of it reused a hundred other places in the last half century. Nope. This stuff is just seeing the light of day now. Twenty years from now, it'll feel very familiar as I suspect it will be reused in the future. For now, it's sparkling and new, even 50 years old.

I've gone on long enough today. Just know that I found this movie a joy ... and even if I dozed off once or twice, I didn't miss any of the plot.

Now, for a day of work at home, where I pay 25 percent attention to actual work, and 75 percent to preparing the house for our first visitors tonight.

Sunday, December 19, 2021

Pom Poko-inspired hate speech

My December movie for the Facebook group Flickchart Friends Favorites Fiesta, which randomly assigns me the highest ranked film I haven't seen on another member's Flickchart each month, was Isao Takahata's Pom Poko, a 1994 effort that I suppose falls into the middle tier of Studio Ghibli's films. It did for me, anyway.

It was also the occasion for Facebook to flag me for a comment that violates community standards on hate speech, for my first time since they began cracking down on this the past two years.

Before you gird yourself for my revealing an anti-Asian bias you never knew I had, that wasn't it at all. I'll reproduce the comment and see if you can figure out what it was.

First, though, some context. In my post about the movie I had talked about how the movie's shape-shifting raccoons were more properly identified as tanuki, or Japanese raccoon dogs, only the English translation of the subtitles simplified it by calling them raccoons. I put "Japanese raccoon dogs" in quotation marks as though tanuki were an invention of the movie, not a real thing. Another commenter assured me they were real and sent me to the Wikipedia page. Here was my response:

"Oh yeah I knew they were, I guess putting it in quotation marks made it look like I thought they weren't. These movies are so full of fantastical terminology that I wonder why they couldn't have just referred to them as tanuki rather than raccoons. Even dumb Americans would have figured it out!"

Did I offend quotation marks? Was fantastical terminology the source of my hate speech?

No, of course it was the term "dumb Americans."

It's all about the context, Facebook. Of course, Facebook has so many billions of comments to monitor that context is not possible. But I'm not using the phrase "dumb Americans" the way it might legitimately be used as some sort of epithet. I'm using it as a member of the very group I'm teasing, part of the unofficial license any group has to make fun of itself. And I'm not accusing "dumb Americans" of being racist or otherwise ignorant, I'm only accusing them of exposing themselves to foreign culture only tepidly, suggesting they don't want to do the work involved in such things as reading subtitles or adjusting their view to incorporate cultural concepts with which they may not already be familiar.

Facebook advised me that the comment violates community standards on hate speech and that only I and the author of the post can see the comment. At least I believe that's what it said. I clicked through a flurry of screens this morning on my phone before I even had my coffee, and now I can no longer get back to their original message. I only have a message that tells me I can appeal the decision to take down my comment.

Which I think I will. I need to clear my good name. Plus, I don't know how many warnings about stuff like this I get before they limit my account access on a short-term basis. Who knows the next time I will carelessly drop hate speech into a neutral exchange about raccoon-like creatures who are depicted as having very large testicles. 

Okay, so I just clicked on the link for the appeals process, and there was a huge section with specific ways speech can violate the community standards. This includes all sorts of racial groups and the words or images designed to proliferate the existing stereotypes about them. Plus dozens of other things.

The one that seemed most relevant to my situation was this:

Intellectual capacity, including, but not limited to: dumb, stupid, idiots.

This made me pause in the process. Strictly speaking, I am in fact insulting the intellectual capacity of Americans. Just because I am one, it doesn't change the intention behind my comment. (And besides, I'm located in Australia, so they would have know way of knowing I am one.)

I tend to think of Americans as being the geopolitical equivalent of white people in terms of their historical lack of a protected status. It's fair game to tease white people, especially if you are one, because we have all informally agreed that the astronomical level of privilege involved with being white vastly outweighs any negative effects of the teasing. You can't say the same for other ethnic groups. To me, the same logic should apply to being American.

But Facebook doesn't want to get into the business of deciding which groups are fit to survive such an "attack" and which ones aren't. Which you can totally understand.

Then later I came across this passage:

In certain cases, we will allow content that may otherwise violate the Community Standards when it is determined that the content is satirical. Content will only be allowed if the violating elements of the content are being satirised or attributed to something or someone else in order to mock or criticise them.

This seemed to support my case. I'd get a chance to plead my perspective and I could argue that it was satirical. Maybe a human being reading what I had written, in the context I had written it, would get that no harm was intended by the comment and would side with me.

Ultimately, though, I abandoned my appeal. Facebook is trying to be a responsible corporate megagiant, and the result is inevitably going to be some false positives as part of an overall beneficial mission to curb hate speech.

But now that I've got a strike against me, I guess I do have to be more careful about what I say and who I say it about. Of course, I don't usually make broad generalizations about anybody on Facebook, but I didn't consciously think I was doing so here, either. Or if I was, that the group in question could take it.

I guess in the future, if I want to suggest that Americans are intellectually lazy and slightly xenophobic, I'll have to restrict that particular hate speech to this here blog.

Saturday, December 18, 2021

A theme of finality

I didn't plan for the viewings in my final week at my house to take on any particular theme, but once I noticed one forming on its own, you better bet I'm leaning into it.

Namely, the movies I've watched in the past week are organized around a theme of things ending. At first it was accidental, but for the next two nights it will be intentional.

You can go back as far as last Sunday night if you really want to stretch things. That's when I watched the terrible Dear Evan Hansen, which basically starts with a suicide. (Not Evan's, though I could have done with a lot less of him in the movie.) 

The theme strengthens a little with Tuesday night's viewing of Passing -- if not in the subject matter, then at least in the title. While this very good movie is about Black people attempting to "pass" for white in Harlem of the 1920s, "passing" is of course also a euphemism for dying.

Then on Wednesday night I watched my final film in my Orson Welles series, as you would know from my previous post. The Other Side of the Wind was not only the final film in that series, it was the final film in Welles' career, and it had to be finished by other people after he died.

Finally we get to Thursday, when I watched Ridley Scott's The Last Duel, which I thought was outstanding. I'd like to properly gush about this movie at some other time, but I probably won't considering that it's Christmas and I'm moving. But not only does the movie deal with a duel to the death, it also has the word "last" in its very title.

It was at this point that I noticed the theme, and decided to pre-select my last two viewings in this house tonight and tomorrow night, which are both called, fittingly, Swan Song.

You might remember these films from another previous post about these identically named movies becoming available to me around the same time. The one starring Mahershala Ali has just yesterday become available on AppleTV+, and the one starring Udo Kier is something I rented from iTunes shortly after writing that post. 

Then Monday, we'll be gone.

A lot of films have themes of death and endings, of course, and if I want to go back earlier in the month, I also note that I watched the final films of Humphrey Bogart (The Harder They Fall) and David Gulpilil (My Name is Gulpilil), the indigenous Australian actor who died of lung cancer just last month. So what I'm saying is, you can squint and fit the theme to any week-long viewing period.

But I write this today more as a recognition of the mental state I'm in as I prepare to leave the house where I've watched more movies than any other place in my life.

Sure, I lived a lot longer in my childhood home, but back then, I probably watched two movies a month. I've never lived anywhere else even close to the eight years and four months that I've called this old terrace house in North Melbourne my home.

There are a ton of ways I'm feeling sentimental, but since this is a movie blog, that's where I'm focusing today. 

The first new-to-me movie I watched in this house was State Fair on September 2, 2013. According to my records, I have watched 2,251 movies since then, probably 75% of which were in this house, not to mention hundreds of repeat viewings. That includes my 4000th movie of all time, my 5000th movie of all time and my 6000th movie of all time.

It's probably true that when watching something at home, you remove the memorable environmental factors that color a theatrical screen at a particularly cool cinema, and all that really matters is your TV (or laptop screen, or projector) and your eyeballs. But I definitely remember the room where I saw certain first-time home viewing favorites, and that specific environment definitely contributed in some small way to my overall experience and memory of the film.

We have an outstanding living room in our new house, one that gets tons of natural light, and I'm sure this will be a very memorable location for most of my new viewings. I also expect there to be a TV set up permanently in our garage, which is attached to our house in the new house and doesn't have a leaky roof where it could get rained on.

But 23 Curran Street will remain, at least for most of the next decade, the place where I saw the most movies I've ever seen -- the most good movies, the most bad movies, and everything in between. 

Tonight and tomorrow night I will see it out with my twin swan songs, and then this sentimental old fool can look ahead to the next thing. 

Thursday, December 16, 2021

All's Well That Ends Welles: The Other Side of the Wind

This is the final installment of a 2021 bi-monthly series watching my remaining unseen films directed by Orson Welles. 

Well here we finally are, at the "end" of Orson Welles.

I might logically have watched The Other Side of the Wind back when it was released in 2018 -- shot decades earlier, of course, and only assembled into a modicum of a coherent narrative by dutiful Welles acolytes a couple years back. But the film presented me with a bit of a conundrum about whether to count it as a 2018 new release and rank it with the other movies I saw that year, given its composition of old materials, not to mention its status as a curiosity more than a real film. So I just decided not to see it at all.

The chance to finally catch up with it was one of the reasons I decided to do this series. If so, it's a bit of an anticlimax in that respect.

However, I did find stuff, or at least a vibe, to like in this movie, in spite of the fact that I almost never knew what was going on.

An aesthetic sensibility that definitely overtook Welles as he aged was this jittery, rapidly edited montage approach to storytelling, one in which the shots are noticeably shorter than the comfortable length viewers are accustomed to, and the logic of any particular sequence of shots is jumbled. Not only did the images have this feel, but so did the dialogue, leaving a person out to sea if he or she failed to keep up with its frenetic pacing.

I despised this approach in Mr. Arkadin, the worst film I saw for this series, but I thought it worked much better in F for Fake. It still had the same disorienting effect, but there I thought it was to a purpose, since the movie itself is a bit of a puzzle box. 

The Other Side of the Wind is this sensibility to the extreme, and it's somewhere in between the two films listed above in terms of its effectiveness. Here, though, the editing in particular is not of Welles' choosing, but rather, an interpretation of what he would have done with the hundred hours of footage he shot -- and a damn fine interpretation, enough that it becomes an impersonation, which is really what you're going for in this situation. The assemblers of The Other Side of the Wind were certainly familiar with Welles' body of work, that's for sure. 

Semantically, though, the approach left me with the least amount of bearings on the material. I don't know whether to blame the increasingly eccentric footage Welles' shot, or the incredibly faithful attempt to reproduce Welles' peculiar editing rhythms, but I couldn't really follow any of the conversations in this movie and what they all added up to. I was left appreciating it, to the extent that I did appreciate it, in individual moments, not as an overarching narrative.

And you know what? That was fine.

The effect created by The Other Side of the Wind is kind of like being a fly on the wall at a party where you don't know any of the people. The majority of this movie takes place at a party, so that makes a certain sense. The party is for the character played by John Huston, Jake Hannaford, a brilliant director who is as polarizing as he is brilliant. (It's fitting, I suppose, that Welles' final film was the closest the man ever came to a literal self-portrait -- and equally fitting that he could not finish it before he died.) The occasion for the party is Hannaford's birthday, and also the screening of his latest and most inscrutable film. It's also the last day of his life, as the film tells us early on (but never shows us, likely because they never filmed it).

Truly, given what we see of this movie, which is called The Other Side of the Wind, it's appropriate that the people talking about it seem like they're speaking a foreign language. They talk in rapid-fire shorthand that makes sense to each other but doesn't function very well as exposition. However, that approximates experiences people have in the real world, where they're in a situation that's over their head, and they have to glean from it what they can through a sort of flooding of words they can't completely make sense of. I'm sure this is what people feel like all the time when they are immersed in a culture where they don't speak the language. 

The film within the film is this weird arty mess that has tons of nudity and sexual content, and plenty of brooding from a James Dean-like star, John Dale, played by Bob Random. It also features plenty of skin from Welles' current partner and muse, Oja Kodar, who was used similarly in F for Fake. Here, though, her exposure is much more graphic than it was there, as we see her fully nude, and also in sex scenes with Random that are far hotter than I expected they'd be. I'm not sure if Beyond the Valley of the Dolls was on Welles' mind when he was making this, but there's something campy about it that recalls that. 

I didn't get this film within the film -- I don't think you're meant to -- and I didn't get most of the conversation surrounding it, which kept coming back to the star Dale's inability to finish the film. He's the mystery who fuels the whole film -- will he show up at Hannaford's party? what's he all about? -- and assumes a sort of mythic quality, as he is for the most part only seen in the footage of the incomplete film. There are a number of other familiar actors here, the most prominent in terms of screen time being the director Peter Bogdanovich. Most of the other characters are enablers and functionaries in the employ of Hannaford, and I had trouble distinguishing them from each other.

I didn't really care. There was something sort of intriguing about the experience of watching this that made me like it more than I probably had any reason to. There was also a comfort in realizing it was basically hopeless to glean anything definitive from it, so eventually I judged it merely in terms of its moment-to-moment sensory impact. 

Interestingly, though -- for all its meanderings and incomplete thoughts -- the final product is something that has a clear sense of a beginning, a middle and an end. I don't know if Welles shot enough material for all parts of the narrative, or whether existing material was reimagined for the role it could play in a plausible denouement for the film, but the last ten minutes or so were actually sort of the most profound for me. I guess that's the definition of ultimate success -- however marginal. 

Overall, though, I'm not sure if I would consider Welles' career a success. Watching his movies in 2021 has clearly demonstrated for me that I had already seen the best of Welles before this year. Really, though, he never did anything else that was even in the ballpark of Citizen Kane.

It was a very compelling sort of career, though, full of interesting failures. Welles was not the type of artist to just keep remaking the same movie, and though it was possible to isolate themes and recurring artistic choices, he had a sort of restlessness that was probably to the positive overall. It seems like a full half of the films he made had major financial difficulties, and they certainly forced a sort of innovation to his approach, an adjustment that probably made his films more memorable than if they had just been well-funded studio movies that felt prestigious. I can't say I went with him on all the thematic journeys and all the wild techniques he selected, but I'm glad he did those things. It was never boring, and that's not something that every filmmaker with a four-decade career could say.

Although I didn't love any of the Welles films I saw this year -- which included The Lady from Shanghai, Macbeth, The Trial, Chimes at Midnight and The Immortal Story, in addition to those I've already mentioned -- the ultimate success of this series is that I'm primed to follow a similar format again next year. I've got another director picked out whose career I can finish in six films, as well as a cheeky name for the series, and it may be that this will be a recurring project for me. I'll fill you in on all the details in a few weeks.

Whether anyone can surprise and confound and prod and tickle me as much as Orson Welles, though, remains to be seen. 

Sunday, December 12, 2021

Knowing Noir: Bogart Reckoning

This is the final installment of my 2021 series watching film noir.

I finally found the right Humphrey Bogart movies.

That's right, I said "movies." If you thought this was only a 12-movie series, you've got some bonus material coming your way.

If you recall, my guiding principle in launching this series a year ago was to struggle with a chicken-or-the-egg scenario: Was I cool on noir because I don't like Humphrey Bogart, or do I not like Humphrey Bogart because I'm cool no noir?

I started with a Bogart movie (In a Lonely Place) and I always knew I would finish with a Bogart movie. I ended up finishing with three, giving Knowing Noir 14 movies rather than just 12.

If you want to know how I decided to add complication to my schedule in the month of December, a month in which I am also moving to a new house while planning to have no noticeable dropoff in the Christmas I provide my family, well I'll tell you.

I had pretty much decided on one particular Bogart title to finish my noir series, but just to be sure, I decided to go through the other titles that were still sitting in the Letterboxd list I had been adding to all year, just to see what other classic noir I'd be neglecting by not selecting them. I noticed two other titles that also featured Bogart still appearing unwatched in that list. (At least two, but I stopped after two.)

I figured, if I'm trying to decide whether I like Humphrey Bogart or not, let's not let it come down to just one more movie. Let's let it come down to three, and be certain about it one way or the other.

And just so I didn't let the extra ambition swallow me as my month got busier, making me regret I'd decided to add two titles, I front-loaded my three viewings and got them all in the books by December 9th.

Dead Reckoning (1947, John Cromwell)

I finally found the right Bogart movies, but this was not one of them. My first movie of December, on the first of the month, just left me deeper in doubt of its star.

I could tell how little Dead Reckoning was stimulating my engagement with noir by how few notes I took while watching it. Taking notes during a film is tedious and it's something I don't usually do, even though some critics think that helps when you are reviewing a movie. But in this series I've been doing it, since I was specifically trying to notice noir characteristics that I wanted to write about here.

Here is the sum total of what I wrote for this movie:

Bogie's face completely in shadow talking to police
Sexist
Bad singing scene
"The problem with women is that they ask too many questions. They should just spend all their time being beautiful."
She's bad

The "she" there was Lizabeth Scott, Bogart's co-star, who seems intended as a stand-in for Lauren Bacall. I just didn't think her performance was good at all, though it does certainly qualify as a femme fatale. There was something weird about her voice -- was it too deep? not sultry enough? Anyway, ten days later I don't remember. But I just found her off the whole time and I never recovered from it.

The bigger problem, though, was Bogart. I figured out something about Bogart that I guess should not come as a surprise, though it took one of the later films I watched this month for me to reach this conclusion retroactively: If he's not working with a skilled director, he's just not that good. In Dead Reckoning I really noticed how his acting style could best be described as "waiting to say his lines." They say that acting is reacting, but in most of his scenes here, I felt like he was just waiting for the other person to finish speaking so he could spurt out the next bit of his rapid-fire dialogue. (I don't actually know if John Cromwell is considered a good director or not, since I haven't seen any of his other films, but this movie does not provide strong evidence in his favor.) 

One convention that has thankfully fallen by the wayside underscored this. It was common in films from that era to see only one half of a phone conversation, and in order not to deaden the pace of the film, the speaker barely pauses for the other person to say anything. The other person is speaking so quickly, and both parties are assimilating what the other person says so instantaneously, that we can hear the whole conversation in about the time it would take just to hear Bogart's half. And that's including him repeating things the other person said so we can understand them. This may not be Bogart's fault, and it may not even be the director's fault, since as I said, it was a convention of films from that era. But taken in combination with the fact that I was already judging Bogart's acting style pretty harshly, it didn't paint a flattering portrait of his skill with the craft.

As you can also see from one of my notes, I really don't like it when Bogart plays a sexist character. Obviously that would be/could be true to life for whatever character he's playing, and I certainly don't hold it against other performers when they play characters who don't respect women. But with Bogart, he's praised for this cool demeanor, dismissive attitudes and quick hard-boiled dialogue, which are part of what made him an icon. I don't dig the role of sexism in completing that picture of the man as a myth and legend.

It occurs to me I haven't told you anything about the plot of Dead Reckoning, and given that I have to write about two other films today, I'm not inclined to start now. Let's just say it involves all the typical double-crosses, paths crossed with unsavory characters, several instances of the protagonist being knocked out and awakening later next to dead bodies. Maybe after 12 months of this I'm just bored of these tropes.

Let's move on.

Key Largo (1948, John Huston)

What a difference a week makes.

On December 8th I had this month's second Wednesday date with Humphrey Bogart, and finally, I became smitten.

I took a comparative ream of notes on Key Largo, and as soon as I started watching it, I was sorry it would have to share real estate with two other films in my final Knowing Noir post, because I could talk about this movie all day.

I won't. I'll try to be economic. We'll see how I do.

It was immediately clear what a difference it made for Bogart to be in the hands of a good -- nay, great -- director. John Huston did wonders for Bogart in 1948, and I suppose vice versa, as this was also the year they collaborated on what has always been my favorite Bogart film, Treasure of the Sierra Madre. I think I like Key Largo even better.

The first difference I noticed was technical, as it was immediately clear the thought Huston was putting into camera placements and movements. Huston will zoom in or pan to capture a particularly useful piece of visual information, and one camera setup that seemed simple had a profound effect in terms of just using the available resources to create visual dynamism. There's a moment near the beginning when Bogart's character is pulling in a boat that's moored in a Key Largo harbor, and the camera sits on the boat, getting closer to Bogart and Lauren Bacall with every tug he gives it. As I write this out it does not seem as interesting as it felt in the moment, but it acted as a symbol of how I was in the hands of a man with clear storytelling notions that he knew how to convert into reality.

The other thing I knew I loved about Key Largo, once it became pretty clear what its parameters were, was its choice to take place all in a single location, giving it the contours of a proper frame story. I will tell you about the plot of this particular film, because it's elegantly simple -- and that's something I've determined, over the course of this series, is a boon to any film noir. Bogart plays Frank McCloud, a World War II veteran who travels to the titular locale to visit the widow (Bacall) and father (Lionel Barrymore) of his fellow soldier and friend who died in the war. He's arrived at the Largo Hotel, which they run, at the wrong time for potentially three reasons: 1) It's the offseason, meaning it's incredibly hot and the hotel is not actually open to guests; 2) A hurricane is expected to bear down at any moment; 3) The hotel actually does have a group of ominous looking "guests," who have rented it out for a "fishing trip" -- but really to receive a package delivered from Cuba that will make them a lot of money. In fact, this gang of sketchy guys turns out to be run by the infamous mobster Johnny Rocco (Edward G. Robinson). I suppose there's a fourth reason, which is that police are in the area looking for a couple young Native American men who escaped from prison, who are friends with the widow and her father.

I don't really know the order in which to talk about the things I loved about Key Largo so I will just have at it and see how I go.

I suppose it's best to start with Bogart. It was immediately clear to me how much a director like Huston gets out of this actor. He's specifically not just waiting to say his next line, as you can really see the impact on his face of whatever new piece of information has just crept into his awareness, whether that's a line of dialogue or a shift in the dynamics of a scene (usually inspired by a line of dialogue, I suppose). Key Largo is no less talky than any other noir -- I suppose since it's contained to one location, it might even be more so -- but all the dialogue is to a purpose, clearly advancing the stakes or deepening the portrayals of the characters. I noted that even Rocco's flunkies all had distinct personalities, something the film needn't have done but carries off with a minimum of effort and a maximum of impact. But as you can see I am already getting sidetracked. I started off talking about Bogart.

The full breadth of his charisma is apparent in a role like that of Frank McCloud, where he isn't just lighting up cigarettes and dismissing dames. This is clearly not a sexist character, which is certainly a benefit, but neither is he a purely righteous character either. There's a moment where he reacts to a situation with what appears to be cowardice, and which he writes off as a result of his own self-interest. Later events will prove that this is a bit of bluster and a tendency to be hard on himself, but Key Largo has room for McCloud to be complicated, a man motivated by fear and calculation rather than just the sort of imperviousness to harm that characterizes some of Bogart's shallower performances. You can see Huston taking Bogart and turning him into a human being rather than just a collection of tics and tropes.

Sadly for Bogart, he doesn't get to be the most interesting performer here. That's Edward G. Robinson as Johnny Rocco. What a portrayal. Robinson and screenwriter Richard Brooks (who co-wrote with Huston) depict a gangster whom we can dislike on a human scale, without having to go over the top. In lesser films and probably in newer films, Robinson would have been required to be cruel at every turn, and build up a body count so we can hiss him with more relish. Instead, we get a powerful but extremely intelligent man, one whose ego does motivate him to take certain small reprisals against the people who have insulted him, but who acts out of pragmatism at every turn. Yes he's cruel, and sometimes it's for sport, but what we get here is a man who understands the lay of the land, the advantages and disadvantages he has in any moment, and to what extent a personal insult directed at him should actually impede the larger scheme he has in mind. That doesn't mean there's no room for his character to have linguistic flourishes and moments where he laughs at or withers another character with his comments. It all makes for a dynamic and life-sized portrayal of maliciousness. 

It was also really wonderful to see Bacall here, especially so soon after Lizabeth Scott in Dead Reckoning. It's clear what the real deal can do in such direct contrast to a fake. She's comparatively passive as a character, but just her acting -- her reacting, really -- makes it clear how much of a pro she is. There's always something interesting going on on her face, and her sheer charisma is disarming.

Basically I just loved this simple setup that takes place over the course of one afternoon and one evening at this shuttered hotel, with a dozen characters factoring in, also including the gangster's moll, played memorably by Claire Trevor. You'd think there would be a sort of inertness to the film because it doesn't leave the hotel, but nothing could be further from the truth. The narrative just propels things forward and changes the dynamics in forever appealing ways. I think of my favorite film that could be characterized as noir, the Wachowskis' Bound, and how that really all takes place in one apartment. This is just the right setup for me I think.

Three final notes before I will force myself to move on:

1) I love the choice to have this set during the offseason in Key Largo. I expected a film like this to showcase the area at its peak, which probably would have made it feel more ordinary, and also involved multiple locations. It's much better as it is, taking what could have been a travelogue of sorts and turning it into a location that's out of place and time.

2) Some dialogue exchanges that I have to include, just because I loved the writing. I will present them with minimal context in the interest of space and time:

A character's description of a hurricane: "The ocean gets up on its hind legs and walks right across the land."

When a police officer talks about getting hit over the head: "I made a break for the door and the lights went out again."
The mobster who hit him: "I'm the electrician."

"Everybody has their first drink, don't they? But everybody ain't a lush."

"You don't like the storm, do you Rocco? Show it your gun why don't you. If it doesn't stop, shoot it."

"Your head says one thing and your whole life says another. Your head always loses."

3) Although this is clearly film noir, it deviates from it in several important ways. For one, neither Bacall nor Trevor, the only two women in the story, is a femme fatale. It occurs to me that maybe the mere idea of a femme fatale is a problem for me, as it feeds the protagonist's latent sexism, which I've already acknowledged is a problem I have with Bogart. Maybe a solid, not overly complicated story that has a sprinkling of noir elements, but doesn't need to tick all the boxes, is just the type of noir for me.

The Harder They Fall (1956, Mark Robson)

It seems fitting to end with what was also Humphrey Bogart's last movie. He died the following year, when all the drinking and smoking led to fatal esophageal cancer.

In truth, you can sort of see that the end was near for him in this film -- not because his performance is limited, but because his skin looks a bit sallow, the wrinkles and bags around his eyes becoming more pronounced. It's hard to know if that's just because he had crossed over into his late fifties, or because the makeup design intended to draw out the way the character has been worn down by life. But I have to think Bogart's cancer would have had something to do with it. 

The interesting thing about finishing with this film is that I'm not sure it's actually noir. The Wikipedia entry leads by describing it as a "boxing film noir," which is how I was able to shortlist it for this series, and also a point in favor of its inclusion, as I knew I'd be getting a sort of hybrid film that would provide a nice variation on what I'd been watching. As it turns out, it was so much of a variation that I'm not even sure if noir is a useful label for this movie. Maybe by this point in his career -- its end -- any movie featuring Bogart would get the noir label as long as it was set primarily in cities and there was some sort of criminal element to it.

The Harder They Fall is more of a sports corruption movie, and it's a dandy. The story involves Bogart's Eddie Willis, a character who prompted me to wonder how many times Bogart played a character named Eddie. He's a former journalist who is looking for his nest egg, so he takes a job writing publicity for an up-and-coming boxer from Argentina named Toro Moreno (Mike Lane), the property of corrupt promoter Nick Benko (Rod Steiger). The only thing is, although Toro looks the part, he can neither land nor take a punch. This is no obstacle in the corrupt world of boxing, though -- not when every fighter Moreno fights can be paid to take a dive.

As I was watching this movie a very flattering point of comparison came up in my head. It made me think of my favorite Billy Wilder film, Ace in the Hole, which is also about a journalist who exploits innocents to advance his career. Eddie has a conscience but he's also in it for the wrong reasons, and over the course of the movie, a man who comes on the scene as a joke -- the hulking boxer who is hopelessly untrainable -- really wins our sympathies as a tragic figure, exploited by the machinery of corruption. The great face of this villainy in this film is Steiger, with his absolute disdain for morality, for the hapless boxers who are reluctant necessities for his money-making schemes. 

It's a bracingly critical portrait of American sports and American capitalism, though I don't think it's actual noir. There are criminal elements, sure, and there are times when men in fedoras run around in menacing fashion, especially near the end -- almost as though there were an 11th hour attempt to associate The Harder They Fall with noir. Really, though, this is just an exceptional story of greed and the losing battle against it, which takes aim not only at sports but also at journalism. It's also really funny in spots as the satire is on point throughout. Then it can turn on a dime and spend significant energy on brain-damaged boxers who are chewed up and spat out at the other end, left penniless by the huge cuts of their pay taken by the various managers and other skimmers who helped give them a "career."

And I'm glad to report that Bogart is again really good in this film. I don't know Mark Robson's work either, but the performance he gets out of Bogart speaks well of his abilities. This is a sort of perfect swan song for the actor, as he's fighting his own personal battle with selling out and exploitation -- and coming out victorious, I'm glad to say. Not that this was not a typical journey for a Bogart character, but I suppose he could have just as easily ended on a role where he thought "you dames are all alike," and lost that battle. 

In the end, the version of Bogart I wanted to like won out in a similar way. Now that I've ended with two films that showed me what I must have always wanted from the actor, I feel a lot better about him on the whole. I just need to find the right movies, and I'm hoping there are some more out there that will give me the feeling that Key Largo and The Harder They Fall have given me. 

As an additional note: If I had watched only one movie in December, it would have been Key Largo, so I still would have ended on in this happy place (rather than the Lonely Place where I started off) with Bogart. But I'm glad I fit in the other two, for different reasons -- one I loved, and the other helped me put my finger on the versions of Bogart's screen persona that I don't like. 

Because this may be the only good place to squeeze it in, I wanted to tell you that my viewing of The Harder They Fall was part of a Harder They Fall double feature. Knowing that the 2021 Netflix all-Black western directed by Jeymes Samuel was also on my upcoming viewing schedule, I decided to watch both movies called The Harder They Fall in the same evening, which was last Thursday, December 9th. That was about four hours of movie, but I managed to finish it up in the wee hours of the morning. And I really liked the Samuel movie as well, though not as much as Bogart's farewell.

Ordinarily at the conclusion of a series like this, I like to look back and added another couple hundred words recapping the movies I saw and what I ultimately took away from the experience. I kind of still want to do that, but I think I've written enough for today -- and since, as I said before, I still have Christmas shopping and house moving to do, I don't think it's worth it to test your reading stamina any further for now. 

But I do hope to officially recap the series in the next couple weeks. Tune back in to see if I manage to fit it in.

Wednesday, December 8, 2021

Two swans a-singing

This holiday season, would you rather see Swan Song or Swan Song?

Yes.

When I saw a poster for a movie starring Udo Kier called Swan Song at the cinema the other night, I thought to myself "Didn't I see a trailer for that, and didn't Mahershala Ali star in it? And didn't it look totally different?"

Yes.

As happens sometimes -- as with the two versions of Lamb that came out in 2015 (never mind the one that came out this year) -- there are two identically named movies called Swan Song opening within the next few weeks in Australia. Having them come out in the same year is weird enough; having them come out in the same week is far weirder.

Benjamin Cleary's Swan Song is the one with Ali, which is a science fiction film about human cloning. It debuts on AppleTV+ on December 17th.

Todd Stephens' Swan Song is the one with Kier, which is about a hairdresser styling his client's hair for a funeral. It opens at Melbourne's Cinema Nova on Christmas Day.

Although I do love me some Udo Kier, the one with Ali has more of a natural appeal to me in terms of subject matter. It's also more readily available without a specific excursion to the cinema, which is tricky at this time of year, especially with the theaters about to burst forth with juicy films (a subject for another post). 

But lo and behold! Kier's Swan Song is already available for rental from U.S. iTunes, meaning the coincidence of their release dates is only an Australian thing.

I feel a Swan Song double feature coming on.

Except it's comical to imagine getting through even one movie in a night these days, let alone two. Last night I ended up finishing the movie I was watching between 2:15 and 2:45 after sleeping on the couch for a good three hours. And it was only one hour and forty minutes. And I only had one egg nog spiked with brandy. 

This time of year -- especially when you factor in moving houses -- is exhausting.

Friday, December 3, 2021

Preserving my body's water, and other Dune thoughts

I wrote to you six weeks ago about my personal countdown to the opening of Dune in Australia and the fact that I was trying to read the book before that happened.

But lately it's been clear that my whole cinematic life has been focused around the approach of December 2nd.

Not only was there the reading of the novel, which I knew I didn't have to complete in order to cover the events of this movie, which is technically Dune - Part One (though for now I don't think I'm going to write it that way in my lists). I got to page 350 (of 577) prior to the film opening, well past the point I knew would function as the climax of the movie, given what little birdies told me.

But then I had also paused in the chronology of about three different podcasts that were set to discuss Dune in their next episode. In recent days that has left me with a dearth of podcast material if I wanted to stay in chronological order, which I like to do if at all possible. 

It struck me as funny that I was both trying to avoid Dune spoilers and actively courting them. I mean, the very reading of the novel meant that I wasn't trying to keep the plot a mystery in my mind, never mind the fact that I'd already seen David Lynch's adaptation, though I don't remember much of it. There was always the possibility that I'd hear a bit of the plot ruined that I had not yet reached in my reading, but that wasn't really the motivation behind avoiding the podcasts.

No, it was that I wanted the style of this film to remain a mystery -- the look of it, to the extent I could (I was also avoiding trailers). I considered people's opinions on the film to be spoilers themselves, and if someone described some particular great shot or profound artistic choice, I didn't want that to be ruined.

Well opening night finally arrived last night, and because I was seeking an immediate end to all the various Dune-related states of suspended animation in my life, I made sure I was available to go.

I arrived at the theater sweaty from my ride along the bike path into the city to attend a 9:20 showing at Crown Casino's Village Cinema, a favorite spot for big blockbusters due to its massive VMax screens and the fact that they don't blink at taking my critics card. Some other places aren't taking them right now as they assess their own financial bottom lines in pandemic times, and though I understand that, I also like getting movies for free, my right as a member of the Australian Film Critics Association and my only compensation for being a working film critic in 2021.

I also really like this ride. The bike path snakes along a river from my house down to the Docklands, and I hug the Docklands and into the city proper, only having to cross traffic about three times total. It's a lovely little ride of about 20 minutes, and when I move from North Melbourne to Altona in a few weeks, I'll probably never do it again. 

But the sweaty arrival, coupled with my COVID mask, made me think of one of the characters from Dune in his or her stillsuit, the highly refined desert wear that recycles sweat and saliva to result in a loss of less than a thimble of water per day. I'm not sure if my rain jacket itself (it was also lightly sprinkling) was the primary reminder of this, since it's orange rather than the dark gray of the movie, but the mask definitely pushed the whole getup in that direction. 

And then, finally, it was time for Dune.

WARNING, THAR BE SPOILERS AHEAD. 

A massive, impressive sci-fi vision

I'm not going to give a true review of my feelings on Dune here, nor do I expect to do so on ReelGood, as another writer claimed the movie like six months ago. (Given the percentage of reviews I currently write for ReellGood, I was happy to oblige.) But I did think I should give you some sense of my thoughts on the movie itself before I get into the extra-textuals that typically comprise a post like this.

Simply put, Denis Villeneuve is a master of size and scale.

What a large vision. Everything that felt small about Lynch's Dune was trebled and quadrupled here, except the acting styles, which were not laughable as they were in that movie. The sweeping desert vistas, the ships of all shapes and sizes that disgorge other ships, the ornithopters beating their wings like dragonflies, the covered cityscapes to shut out the heat, and finally, the massive worms, whose Sarlaac Pit-style openings for mouths are usually all you see of them -- and all you need to see. It's all there in Villeneuve's vision and it's all absolutely breathtaking. Even though there's comparatively little time spend on the Atreides home world of Caladan, even that is built out into a true physical space with its own distinct ecologies and architecture.

It's just all there.

I'm not really sure what more you could want from a Dune movie than this. I still haven't sampled the critical consensus on the film, and I'm sure there are people out there nitpicking about certain decisions, but before I do go wading into those reviews, I don't know what those nitpicks might be. (And I'll probably wait a few more days before I do, just to be sure my colleague does actually write the review and I don't have to pinch hit for him.)

It strikes me as more successful by a fair bit than Villeneuve's previous venture into prestige sci-fi, that being Blade Runner 2049, which was also quite a complete and distinct vision. There the story felt like it really dragged, and that the choices made within that story were sometimes questionable. No such problem for Dune, though being in the process of reading the book certainly could help in that regard. In fact, I felt that this movie streamlines and even improves the book in necessary ways, even while covering only half of its content in this first movie. As just one example, what happens with Dr. Kines in this movie -- who was also re-envisioned as a woman -- is more satisfying and less of a cosmic joke.

All in on Chalamet

There have been times during Timothee Chalamet's rise to fame when I have been unsure if he were the real deal or if we were being sold a bill of goods. To be clear, I have never doubted his ability as an actor, which was present from the moment we were all first exposed to him in Call Me By Your Name. But maybe because I reacted to that movie a little less positively than some people, some of that skepticism rubbed off on Chalamet, and I've since been wondering if he's more hype than hope.

No more.

I could not imagine a more perfect casting choice for Paul Atreides, and maybe I never had to imagine one because I knew before even reading the book that Chalamet had been cast for this. But I don't think that prevents me from recognizing the brilliance of getting Chalmaet for this role. There's something in those eyes that creates a presence, a tone, the sort of thing you could easily imagine religious people latching on to as they seek their messiah. In this case that's a good thing, but it's also a complicated thing, and I think Chalamet's performance perfectly embodies that.

But there's a particular moment I wanted to call attention to, which is Chalamet's variety of expressions as he has his hand inserted in that box with the gom jabbar at his neck. Maybe that's the moment everyone is talking about, I don't know -- remember, I've been avoiding reviews and other thoughts on the movie. But he runs the gamut from pain to righteousness to calm as he endures the Bene Gesserit test, and the range of his emotions is not as simple as those three words I've used to describe them. In each shot that returns to his face, he's in a different part of that journey, something subtly more or less intense, something frightening in its very determination, its superiority, its disgust. There's possibly something even psychotic in there. Remember, with Paul Atreides, it's complicated.

Duncan Idaho doing Duncan Idaho things

One of the things I found strange about the novel is that we lose characters from the narrative before it feels like we've even really met them. One of these is Duncan Idaho, who I knew from near the start of reading was being played by Jason Momoa. 

When Idaho dies in the book with little fanfare, I wondered why they had even bothered to get someone with Momoa's star wattage to play the character. I think this points to something a bit unusual about Frank Herbert's writing. While he goes into great detail about some things, he gives relatively little "screen time," as it were, to others. Idaho is a prime example of this. We hear his name a couple times and there are vague mentions of his role in House Atreides and warrior feats he may have accomplished, but he's gone before he gets a real "scene."

This movie corrects for that. The script by Villeneuve, Eric Roth and Jon Spaihts gets him on screen about every 15 minutes for one reason or another, so by the time we do lose him, he's done the things we'd expect of a character with his importance to the narrative. We see him fighting not once but twice, whereas in the book, those fight scenes are vaguely alluded to but not detailed. 

It's another way the film takes what seem like small oversights in the book and gets the most out of them. Or maybe, more charitably, capitalizes on the advantage films can sometimes have over books, which is to depict things that might seem laborious to depict in a novel. While Herbert's writing would probably have been weakened by a blow-by-blow description of Idaho fighting Sardukar warriors, we can see that in the movie and we can appreciate what it means to lose a warrior of his abilities.

Words I was pronouncing wrong

It was disappointing to learn what the "official" pronunciation of Harkonnen is. 

I put "official" in quotation marks because you can never be sure what the "real" pronunciation is of a made up word that appears in print. Presumably, Herbert gave interviews at the time, during which he spoke the word out loud and confirmed what he envisioned as its pronunciation. But if not, then I disagree with the pronunciation they've chosen here.

When I say this word in my head, I say "Har-COE-nin." When they say this word in the movie, they say "HARK-uh-nin."

I don't suppose I can really argue why my pronunciation is better than theirs, but I do think my pronunciation is easier to say. I also think it sounds more threatening, though I can justify that impression even less. 

The other phrase I wasn't saying quite right was "Bene Gesserit," mostly because I used the hard G sound at the start of the second word rather than the J sound they use. I actually think theirs is better in this case.

Actors who weren't playing the characters I thought they were

One of the cast members I knew before seeing the movie was Dave Bautista playing Baron Harkonnen, which I discovered through an ill-fated google image search. In fact, I mentioned this accidental discovery in the post I wrote six weeks ago.

Of course, Bautista does not actually play this role.

I'm not sure what happened with that google search, and I can't recreate it now as the search produces the correct results this time. Baron Harkonnen is actually played -- quite chillingly, I might add -- by Stellan Skarsgaard. Bautista's role is Rabban, actually not a character who really factors in to the first part of the book if memory serves. 

Now that I've seen the movie, of course my own images of the characters is going to suffer for the 200+ pages of the book I have remaining. For example I know now that Gurney Hallack is Josh Brolin, and Thufir Hawat is Stephen McKinley Henderson. However, I don't think this is going to change my view of the Lady Jessica, who I have envisioned as Jessica Chastain (probably because she shares the character's name). Even though I learned early on that Rebecca Ferguson was playing this role, it wasn't enough to supplant my image of Chastain for the character.

What other sci-fi franchises can Villeneuve salvage/revive?

Now that he's made the consecutive grand sci-fi visions of Arrival, Blade Runner 2049 and Dune, Villleneuve has clearly established himself as one of the preeminent makers of prestige sci-fi, right up there with guys like Christopher Nolan, James Cameron and Ridley Scott. In fact, his track record probably contains fewer blemishes than any of those guys.

It's probably also pigeonholed him a bit. Oh well. It's not a bad way to be pigeonholed.

Villeneuve has got a full slate with the second Dune on the way, an announced role as director of the new Cleopatra movie and even an announced directing credit for a Dune TV series. But it did occur to me to think about what other sci-fi brands could get boosted by a little of the Denis Villeneuve touch. 

Here are the top five, in no particular order:

1) Denis Villeneuve could probably make a really great Terminator movie.

2) Denis Villeneuve could probably make a really great Alien movie.

3) Denis Villeneuve could probably make a really great remake of Strange Days.

4) Denis Villeneuve could probably make a really great Matrix movie.

5) Denis Villeneuve could probably make a really great Star Wars movie.

Some of those may be obvious, and they do involve the work of the aforementioned Scott and Cameron. And I've only listed them without elaborating because you can probably imagine what movies like this would look like under the creative supervision of this man. 

But I guess what I'm saying is that whatever this guy makes in the future of his career, even if he can't get to any of these ideas until 2025 or later, I'm there. This is a man who knows how to make movies.

                                                          ***********

The night almost ended on a sour note. As I was riding my bike back home well after midnight, in fact probably closer to 1, I was listening to The Next Picture Show podcast, in which they compare a new release to a classic film that may have helped inspire it. I wasn't ready to fully listen to a Dune podcast yet -- if I have to review the movie, I don't want my perspective to be biased -- but in this particular pairing, the first episode was about Lawrence of Arabia. They'll get to Dune on the next episode.

When I was about eight minutes from home, one of my ear buds popped out, and I couldn't find it.

It was something I should have expected. As I took my helmet on and off, I risked dislodging my right ear bud on multiple occasions, and had to push it back in place. I should have known that it was not fully in there and was susceptible to falling out. In fact, kind of like Paul Atreides with his visions, I predicted it would happen even before it did. 

The spot where it fell was on the bike path, so I didn't have to worry about a car driving over it or anything. And I noticed the loss of sound from the right ear almost immediately. But because I couldn't find it straight away, I worried that it might in fact have fallen in the busy road I'd just recently crossed, or worse, fallen down the grate I had just ridden over, lost for good. I had even removed the bike light from the front of my bike and was using it as a flashlight over a stretch over a decent stretch of path.

After more than five minutes of looking, and just when I was about to give up, there it was, glistening a little in the dirty by the side of the path, not too much before the spot I'd originally stopped.

Better yet, it was still in perfect wording order.

Good ear buds. They're comparable to a good stillsuit in terms of bang for your buck. 

And thus ends a Dune odyssey whose post rivals the girth of the movie.