tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-78773713470864474902024-03-19T09:18:14.593+11:00The AudientDerek Armstronghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13750747272647975591noreply@blogger.comBlogger3183125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7877371347086447490.post-56687691848797025942024-03-19T08:32:00.000+11:002024-03-19T08:32:54.540+11:00Who or what the hell?<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCgMJr6lqgljojFddnj8Ne3HSWNB4rk2vPx7EGZehZgdD5630gjQcYTqzY6P4cH6kzUcLCSDreM8GKq7aQMdzG-jQFIQlaqW6Cfcdsl9svN271D-M5jEpYHdyb1zoAtn0kPh8mXlI9tts_AT6eQq0sX09gI1S6n4PnL4RrKAoLtgkJQgGnHP-8hVRlGuXy/s3168/the%20marvels%20facebook.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3168" data-original-width="1440" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCgMJr6lqgljojFddnj8Ne3HSWNB4rk2vPx7EGZehZgdD5630gjQcYTqzY6P4cH6kzUcLCSDreM8GKq7aQMdzG-jQFIQlaqW6Cfcdsl9svN271D-M5jEpYHdyb1zoAtn0kPh8mXlI9tts_AT6eQq0sX09gI1S6n4PnL4RrKAoLtgkJQgGnHP-8hVRlGuXy/w181-h400/the%20marvels%20facebook.jpg" width="181" /></a></div>I've written posts before about how when they're advertising a movie and they need to choose a still from the trailer for social media, they'll choose the most salacious image possible in order to get the extra clicks. <a href="https://theaudient.blogspot.com/2023/10/surely-most-representative-image-from.html">This</a> was one example of such a post.<p></p><p>However, when a freeze frame is chosen and you don't even know what the hell you're looking at, I just don't know what to make of it.</p><p>That was my experience when coming across this Facebook ad for <i>The Marvels</i>. I spent about two minutes trying to orient myself within the image and figure out what anything was, before giving up.</p><p>Okay, so only one thing do I know I'm looking at for sure: hair. The thing above the play symbol looks like it could be a shoulder, so maybe the person is wearing a sheer black sleeve, and there's some kind of cleavage visible to the right side of the play button. This, then, would be a traditional clickbait and switch.</p><p>But the more I look at the photo, the less I'm willing to commit on anything but the hair.</p><p>And the other thing is, whose hair is that? That's not the way Brie Larson wears her hair in the movie, and sure as hell not the way Iman Vellani, Teyonah Paris nor Zawe Ashton wears her hair. </p><p>Okay, looking at some of the other pictures of the movie, I guess it would have to be Larson's hair. But then anything nearby her in the picture that might be clothes couldn't be clothes, because Larson no more wears a sheer sleeve outfit in this movie than she wears a tuxedo. She's either in uniform or wearing sort of dressed-down casual clothing.</p><p>And what's going on in the upper half of the photo? It looks like some sort of control room, maybe. And there are control rooms in <i>The Marvels</i>.</p><p>But then in the upper left hand corner it looks sort of like a woman in a black cocktail dress with her right arm stretch out in a come hither pose, but that is totally not something that happens in this movie either.</p><p>The only other things I can possibly identify are in the lower right-hand corner. That might be a little slice of the earth seen from space. And that might be some kind of handheld computerized device with a green display. But they could also be literally anything else. </p><p>I guess we are just looking at the rare occasion when someone completely botches their assignment to raise awareness of a product on social media, and perhaps I captured it in the few moments between when it was first published and when someone shared with them a variation on the thoughts I've just written, causing it to be taken down and fixed. </p>Derek Armstronghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13750747272647975591noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7877371347086447490.post-5644067130416895972024-03-18T08:03:00.000+11:002024-03-18T08:03:02.156+11:00Yes, I'm the guy who watched Irish Wish on St. Patrick's Day<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglGgxTdLIMEEzaiObYMg3ha6IP7saq26CdrD3JQi3QF6FqKCZ4z3pXjFEfLBxr9QPst8wTgpJKrnRcahOWE-F8H4RJFs360hi0cRYmg2b8Q9Sopp_7C3LbuzqpqfGQfmxcunoZBXJ8vw1JD20C1nchv4WTPIIRhCfk0_o4Pv4b32pmpvbwivk3s7bZKANQ/s1350/irish%20wish.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1350" data-original-width="1080" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglGgxTdLIMEEzaiObYMg3ha6IP7saq26CdrD3JQi3QF6FqKCZ4z3pXjFEfLBxr9QPst8wTgpJKrnRcahOWE-F8H4RJFs360hi0cRYmg2b8Q9Sopp_7C3LbuzqpqfGQfmxcunoZBXJ8vw1JD20C1nchv4WTPIIRhCfk0_o4Pv4b32pmpvbwivk3s7bZKANQ/s320/irish%20wish.jpg" width="256" /></a></div>When Netflix dreamed up their algorithm, they had saps like me in mind.<p></p><p>Yes, there are certain people who are so accustomed to choosing thematically appropriate viewing material at certain times of the year that they will watch a bad Lindsay Lohan movie on St. Patrick's Day just because someone decided to take a standard romantic comedy plot and set it in Ireland.</p><p>And just so there was no confusion about whether you were supposed to watch it on St. Patrick's Day, Netflix released it just two days beforehand and called it <i>Irish Wish</i>.</p><p>To be fair, I didn't actually know it starred Lindsay Lohan just from the promotional materials, those being one of the screen-saver stills Netflix offers you when you've paused too long, showing each for ten to 15 seconds. It's actually one of my most common ways to learn about new viewing options on Netflix.</p><p>I saw the red-haired woman and just assumed she was some Irish lass I didn't know, since red hair seems to be a common thing in Ireland. I mean, she<i> looks </i>like Lindsay Lohan, but it never even occurred to me that it might be Lindsay Lohan because I thought they drummed Lindsay Lohan out of the industry years ago. So gone was Lindsay Lohan from my mind, I didn't even think "That woman looks like Lindsay Lohan."</p><p>So I first got <i>Irish Wish</i> on my radar as a bad romantic comedy <i>not</i> starring Lindsay Lohan, and it was not my first consideration of what to watch on Sunday night either. At first I considered a personal favorite like John Carney's <i>Once</i>, but I did already watch <i>Once</i> on St. Patrick's Day six years ago. That's a recent enough viewing for that film, much as I love it, plus, the people who like their thematic viewings also like finding new ways to interpret the themes. Plus, I had already rewatched something on Saturday night -- Andy Muschietti's <i>It </i>-- and I felt like alternating new and prior viewings on this particular weekend.</p><p>Without another obvious candidate for an Irish film I needed to see sitting in the informal watchlist in my brain, I decided to just go with <i>Irish Wish</i> and continue to build my 2024 list. If I'm not going to watch this movie now, I'm certainly not going to seek it out in August, when there will be a dozen more bad romantic comedies on streaming services to choose from that will benefit from being more recent.</p><p>It was only then that I finally figured out it was Lindsay Lohan.</p><p>And at the point that I had already committed to it, I used this this new information to support my choice rather than detract from it, albeit for reasons of morbid curiosity.</p><p>Those reasons being: What does a Lindsay Lohan who has been seven times through the ringer still have left in the tank at this stage of a career that I did not know was still going on?</p><p>Actually Lohan has been working more than you might think she'd been. If I'd already seen the <i>Mean Girls</i> remake, I'd be able to tell you she had what sounds like a cameo in that (her character is listed as Mathletes Moderator). She's had work sprinkled throughout the rest of the previous decade, with no credits in some years but multiple credits in others. And yes, some of these are just cameos, and in one of them she plays herself, but now that she's got her second movie of 2024, it's reasonable to wonder if it would be possible for her to make a comeback -- even at age 37, when most actresses are starting to see their roles dry up rather than take off.</p><p>Well, from <i>Irish Wish</i>, I'd say not really.</p><p>Lohan is not <i>un</i>appealing. But the teenage spunk that gave her her initial breakout in a movie like <i>Mean Girls</i> or <i>The Parent Trap</i> or <i>Freaky Friday</i> -- I think the reason I confuse the plots of those last two was because Lohan was in both -- just isn't there anymore. Naturally gifted performers would retain that even through all sorts of personal and legal troubles. For example, years of drug-related disasters did not take any of the shine off recent Oscar winner Robert Downey Jr.'s craft. With Lohan, though, the years have taken a toll on what she brings to the screen. </p><p>And this is not because she's looking old, which would be a standard sexist gripe to make about a woman nearing 40. She's pretty well preserved, though she's probably had a little of that proactive plastic surgery women get so that when they really <i>need</i> plastic surgery -- according to them, anyway -- it isn't such a shock to us. Still, to even discuss any meaningful way Lohan looks different from how she looked in <i>Mean Girls</i>, beyond being 20 years older, has no value, because she looks pretty much exactly like a 37-year-old Lindsay Lohan should look. I only didn't recognize her in that first still from<i> Irish Wish</i> because for a minute there, I sort of forgot she existed.</p><p>But she doesn't really have the dexterity or the fitness for light physical comedy or the easy charm of a goofy facial expression that she once had. It's like she's performing self-consciously, aware that we are all looking at her and wondering if she's still got it. It's like she knows that she needs to -- or feels like she needs to -- apologize for her past transgressions, and hope we're still willing to accept her into our hearts. </p><p>Which doesn't make her <i>un</i>appealing, as I said, but it does put a likely cap on her opportunities going forward.</p><p>As for the movie itself, well, it's just standard romantic comedy pablum, given a superficial sense of Irish charm by being mostly set there, by having a few characters with exaggerated Irish characteristics and by setting a romantic scene at the Cliffs of Moher. Movies that really have Irish bonafides would be about an Irish protagonist rather than an American book editor (is book editor the most common job for a romantic comedy heroine?) who is only in the country for an Irish wedding. </p><p>I guess asking Lohan to do an Irish accent, when she's just trying to get a steady paycheck, would be a bridge too far.</p>Derek Armstronghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13750747272647975591noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7877371347086447490.post-31484879388761045472024-03-17T07:53:00.001+11:002024-03-17T13:31:13.853+11:00I need to cool my jets on Millie Bobby Brown<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJ_CIN1RoZG0w2XJ42FFjvvBPSHQXWX1F0t1E7tOdjdEfeAQpL8Wpeu8Ibm3xWxUXyttXnBKms89j04iebiVfv4iPl8zM93EE8mPhnhCmgMbUYJm2CdCMqWQlt3lYVygX_fiFA3D77ZtWD-1aR13NStnucGq6U3ieKA20pukzh3GCwU8nPoXcCVGrEbD15/s2222/damse;.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2222" data-original-width="1500" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJ_CIN1RoZG0w2XJ42FFjvvBPSHQXWX1F0t1E7tOdjdEfeAQpL8Wpeu8Ibm3xWxUXyttXnBKms89j04iebiVfv4iPl8zM93EE8mPhnhCmgMbUYJm2CdCMqWQlt3lYVygX_fiFA3D77ZtWD-1aR13NStnucGq6U3ieKA20pukzh3GCwU8nPoXcCVGrEbD15/s320/damse;.jpg" width="216" /></a></div>The time I became obsessed with Millie Bobby Brown must have coincided just about exactly with her 18th birthday, which does make me feel a lot better about it.<p></p><p>To be clear, this infatuation is not of a sexual nature, but more a matter of becoming so overwhelmed by the strength of someone's charisma that you almost have to look away in embarrassment. </p><p>And because I've never actually tagged Brown on my blog before (perhaps motivated by shame in that regard) and because Brown has a new movie out, I thought it was time to delve into this crush that would make me stammer like a fool if I ever met her in person.</p><p>I can remember the exact moment when I realized the power of Millie Bobby Brown. </p><p>For the first few seasons of <i>Strangers Things</i> I had been sort of poo-pooing other people's declarations of her greatness. To me, she was just a kid with a shaved head who scowled a lot. And if this marks me as a person who isn't naturally struck by the good looks of a woman with a shaved head, so be it. What I loved about Sinead O'Connor back in the day wasn't her appearance either, though I have no doubt it would have been if she had played the conventional music industry game and tried to make herself as pretty as possible. (But then, you will agree, she wouldn't have been Sinead.)</p><p>But then during season 3 of <i>Stranger Things</i>, Eleven finally grows her hair out and blossoms into something she was not before. I remember very specifically this conversation she has with Finn Wolfhard's Mike when they are both sitting in a mall. For the first time she struck me as traditionally vulnerable rather than just a simmering powder keg about to explode, and for the first time she <i>smiled</i>. (Look, I didn't say these series of confessions were going to make me look very good.)</p><p>(Oops, and another thing that isn't so great: Brown was<i> not</i> 18 in <i>Stranger Things</i> season 3. She was more like 15. I thought she was 22 right now, but it turns out she's only 20. What are you going to do. I'm not trying to find her to ask her out on a date or anything.)</p><p>Anyway, I remember melting when she brandished that smile at Mike. I was going to say literally, but that's not the case. And I have been a puddle in Brown's presence ever since.</p><p>Here, just let me show you how I've written about her in her four films I've reviewed since then.</p><p>From my <i><a href="https://reelgood.com.au/reviews/review-enola-holmes-2020/">Enola Holmes</a></i> review. Careful with this one, I do go on and on:</p><p><a href="https://www.imdb.com/name/nm5611121/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0" style="background-color: #fff4eb; box-sizing: inherit; color: #1a1a1a; font-family: "Roboto Slab", Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 16px; font-weight: 700; letter-spacing: -0.16px; text-decoration-line: none; touch-action: manipulation;">Millie Bobby Brown</a><span style="background-color: #fff4eb; color: #1a1a1a; font-family: "Roboto Slab", Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: -0.16px;"> has been earning raves since the earliest days of </span><em style="background-color: #fff4eb; box-sizing: inherit; color: #1a1a1a; font-family: "Roboto Slab", Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: -0.16px;">Stranger Things</em><span style="background-color: #fff4eb; color: #1a1a1a; font-family: "Roboto Slab", Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: -0.16px;">, where she plays the telekinetic teenager known as Eleven. If there was anyone who didn’t immediately recognise her star power, that could be because she spent those early days looking at the world with timid doe eyes, broken up by occasional eruptions of rage. By the third season she really started smiling, at which point, her charisma manifested as a physical force that radiated off her for all to see, and few to resist.</span></p><p>And a bit later in the same review:</p><p><span style="background-color: #fff4eb; color: #1a1a1a; font-family: "Roboto Slab", Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: -0.16px;">By giving us a light diversion that is purposeful about its sense of fun, Netflix has now weaponised Brown’s charisma. When she turns to the audience to break the fourth wall with a conspiratorial glance, you are practically inclined to blush.</span></p><p>And:</p><p><span style="background-color: #fff4eb; color: #1a1a1a; font-family: "Roboto Slab", Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: -0.16px;">The movie around Brown is quite enjoyable, but could probably never equal the special talents she brings to the table.</span></p><p>And as if that weren't enough:</p><p><span style="background-color: #fff4eb; color: #1a1a1a; font-family: "Roboto Slab", Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: -0.16px;">She provides something for everyone in this role, dressing as boys on several occasions to more closely approximate the head-shaven, asexual mode in which we first met her in </span><em style="background-color: #fff4eb; box-sizing: inherit; color: #1a1a1a; font-family: "Roboto Slab", Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: -0.16px;">Stranger Things</em><span style="background-color: #fff4eb; color: #1a1a1a; font-family: "Roboto Slab", Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: -0.16px;">, but she also spends time in corsets and other Victorian garb, with the flowing locks to match. In all modes she has spunk and </span><em style="background-color: #fff4eb; box-sizing: inherit; color: #1a1a1a; font-family: "Roboto Slab", Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: -0.16px;">joie de vivre</em><span style="background-color: #fff4eb; color: #1a1a1a; font-family: "Roboto Slab", Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: -0.16px;"> to spare.</span></p><p>Okay finally moving to <i><a href="https://reelgood.com.au/reviews/review-enola-holmes-2-2022/">Enola Holmes 2</a></i>, where I do rein myself in a bit, but only a bit. And sorry for the some of the out-of-context excerpts:</p><p><span style="background-color: #fff4eb; color: #1a1a1a; font-family: "Roboto Slab", Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: -0.16px;">Surely that’s enough time for us to appreciate all the different charming facial expressions </span><a href="https://www.imdb.com/name/nm5611121/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0" style="background-color: #fff4eb; box-sizing: inherit; color: #1a1a1a; font-family: "Roboto Slab", Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 16px; font-weight: 700; letter-spacing: -0.16px; text-decoration-line: none; touch-action: manipulation;">Millie Bobby Brown</a><span style="background-color: #fff4eb; color: #1a1a1a; font-family: "Roboto Slab", Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: -0.16px;"> is increasingly capable of making.</span></p><p>And:</p><p><span style="background-color: #fff4eb; color: #1a1a1a; font-family: "Roboto Slab", Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: -0.16px;">The Netflix-style excessive length (this being a product of Netflix after all) draws attention to how much narrative filler there is when we’re not watching Brown’s face. She’s on screen for most of the movie, so there’s a lot of face watching, but this film’s writer (</span><a href="https://www.imdb.com/name/nm2113666/?ref_=tt_ov_wr" style="background-color: #fff4eb; box-sizing: inherit; color: #1a1a1a; font-family: "Roboto Slab", Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 16px; font-weight: 700; letter-spacing: -0.16px; text-decoration-line: none; touch-action: manipulation;">Jack Thorne</a><span style="background-color: #fff4eb; color: #1a1a1a; font-family: "Roboto Slab", Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: -0.16px;">) and director </span><a href="https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0102873/?ref_=tt_ov_dr" style="background-color: #fff4eb; box-sizing: inherit; color: #1a1a1a; font-family: "Roboto Slab", Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 16px; font-weight: 700; letter-spacing: -0.16px; text-decoration-line: none; touch-action: manipulation;">(Harry Bradbeer</a><span style="background-color: #fff4eb; color: #1a1a1a; font-family: "Roboto Slab", Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: -0.16px;">), both reprising from the original, confuse our interest in their charismatic star with a genuine interest in unravelling the mystery. </span></p><p>And look how self-conscious I was that you were onto me, even though I was relatively restrained in my praise of Brown in this one:</p><p><span style="background-color: #fff4eb; color: #1a1a1a; font-family: "Roboto Slab", Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: -0.16px;">A lot of the credit for that energy goes to Brown, who has already received her share of praise in this review.</span></p><p>I even doffed my cap to her charisma in <i><a href="https://reelgood.com.au/reviews/review-godzilla-vs-kong-2021/">Godzilla vs. Kong</a></i>, a film I otherwise disliked, though fortunately, this was her only mention in the review outside of a first reference to her playing her character:</p><p><span style="background-color: #fff4eb; color: #1a1a1a; font-family: "Roboto Slab", Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: -0.16px;">And while there’s a lot </span><a href="https://www.imdb.com/name/nm5611121/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0" style="background-color: #fff4eb; box-sizing: inherit; color: #1a1a1a; font-family: "Roboto Slab", Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 16px; font-weight: 700; letter-spacing: -0.16px; text-decoration-line: none; touch-action: manipulation;">Millie Bobby Brown</a><span style="background-color: #fff4eb; color: #1a1a1a; font-family: "Roboto Slab", Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: -0.16px;"> can do (and to a lesser extent, an under-utilised </span><a href="https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0151419/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0" style="background-color: #fff4eb; box-sizing: inherit; color: #1a1a1a; font-family: "Roboto Slab", Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 16px; font-weight: 700; letter-spacing: -0.16px; text-decoration-line: none; touch-action: manipulation;">Kyle Chandler</a><span style="background-color: #fff4eb; color: #1a1a1a; font-family: "Roboto Slab", Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: -0.16px;">), she can’t through sheer force of charisma turn this into something more than a smash-em-up with bad dialogue.</span></p><p>Then this week I was back in raving form with my review of <i><a href="https://reelgood.com.au/reviews/review-damsel-2024/">Damsel</a></i>:</p><p><span style="background-color: #fff4eb; color: #1a1a1a; font-family: "Roboto Slab", Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: -0.16px;">But Brown is such a good actress and compelling presence that she doesn’t need to make this character an ass-kicking badass. In fact, from the number of times Brown cries out in real agony from a gory injury, we are reminded that women can be strong and still be real(ish) people.</span></p><p>And:</p><p><span style="background-color: #fff4eb; color: #1a1a1a; font-family: "Roboto Slab", Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: -0.16px;">There are plenty of standard components in </span><em style="background-color: #fff4eb; box-sizing: inherit; color: #1a1a1a; font-family: "Roboto Slab", Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: -0.16px;">Damsel</em><span style="background-color: #fff4eb; color: #1a1a1a; font-family: "Roboto Slab", Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: -0.16px;">, but the production has found an actress who can make these components feel somewhat fresh. The impossibly charismatic star of </span><em style="background-color: #fff4eb; box-sizing: inherit; color: #1a1a1a; font-family: "Roboto Slab", Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: -0.16px;">Stranger Things</em><span style="background-color: #fff4eb; color: #1a1a1a; font-family: "Roboto Slab", Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: -0.16px;"> continues her relationship with Netflix in a manner that requires different things from her than the plucky heroine of the </span><em style="background-color: #fff4eb; box-sizing: inherit; color: #1a1a1a; font-family: "Roboto Slab", Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: -0.16px;">Enola Holmes</em><span style="background-color: #fff4eb; color: #1a1a1a; font-family: "Roboto Slab", Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: -0.16px;"> series. This material is darker and more in sync with </span><em style="background-color: #fff4eb; box-sizing: inherit; color: #1a1a1a; font-family: "Roboto Slab", Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: -0.16px;">Stranger Things</em><span style="background-color: #fff4eb; color: #1a1a1a; font-family: "Roboto Slab", Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: -0.16px;">, and Brown is equal to it. The fall into this pit, slowed only by the gnarled branches that allow her to reach the ground in one piece, has left her with suppurating wounds and a stew of rage and fear. Brown has all the gifts in her repertoire to give her character a sense of real struggle and probable defeat.</span></p><p>And finally:</p><p><span style="background-color: #fff4eb; color: #1a1a1a; font-family: "Roboto Slab", Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: -0.16px;">If </span><em style="background-color: #fff4eb; box-sizing: inherit; color: #1a1a1a; font-family: "Roboto Slab", Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: -0.16px;">Damsel</em><span style="background-color: #fff4eb; color: #1a1a1a; font-family: "Roboto Slab", Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: -0.16px;"> is getting a slightly higher rating from me than it possibly deserves, that’s probably due to Brown, who is on screen almost throughout this film. Great movie stars have the power to take middling material and thrust it upward through sheer force of will, and Millie Bobby Brown is a great movie star.</span></p><p>At least this time I am more praising her acting skills and less obviously infatuated with her? Maybe?</p><p>The thing is, I don't <i>love</i> love her like I sit there day-dreaming about what it would be like if I were 30 years younger and happened to work in the movie business, meaning I might actually rub elbows with her. I do find her attractive, obviously (she's 20 so it's okay if I say it), but there are a million attractive people in Hollywood of both genders and I don't fixate on most of them the way it feels like I've fixated on Brown. (And thank goodness most people wouldn't have been reading the above reviews in conjunction with one another -- that is, before I conveniently cobbled them together in the same post as I have done here.)</p><p>No, there are two things about Brown that really get me:</p><p>1) Her eyes. They penetrate right through you.</p><p>2) Her charisma, you won't be surprised to learn as that word has already appeared in this post about 17 times. Especially in <i>Enola Holmes</i>, it became clear just what a variety of charming facial expressions she was capable of making, all of which speak to the inner fire of her personality.</p><p>There I go again.</p><p>I do think it's time for me to pump the brakes a bit on all this, though, and let's call my blog a bit of my own personal confessional, where I tell you things in order for them to stop having such a hold over me and to make them less shameful.</p><p>I think here about how a critic, probably especially a male critic, has to be careful how they write about an actress, which I think is something I've discussed before (though I don't remember when so I can't search for it among my more than 3,000 posts). I think about how the New Yorker's Anthony Lane got in trouble for sexualizing Elastagirl in his review of <i>The Incredibles 2</i>, which I always have in the back of my mind any time I'm trying to convey that an actress or a female movie character has that certain something. Words like "beguiling" and "incandescent" and "effervescent" might make their way into such a review, though it appears I have not used any of these three words in connection with Millie Bobby Brown.</p><p>So what <i>am</i> I trying to do in this post?</p><p>I don't know, just maybe it's my way of trying to tell myself not to be so head over heels for this woman (yes, she's a woman not a girl) the next time I review a movie of hers, which seems likely not to be until 2025 as her four future credits on IMDB include only one film that is in post-production, while the others are all in earlier stages. </p><p>I've told the world I find her darling enough times, and even once is probably superfluous when it's something they can so plainly see with their own eyes.</p><p><i>*Note after publishing: I think it's funny that I devote as much mental energy to this person as I do and yet I can never remember if it is Milly Bobbie Brown or Millie Bobby Brown. I've fixed it so it is both consistent and correct now, I believe. </i></p>Derek Armstronghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13750747272647975591noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7877371347086447490.post-87022206561367091972024-03-16T07:53:00.000+11:002024-03-16T07:53:48.187+11:00The sadistic delay<p><i></i></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNjWkT2502NS2zEwWVT50Gh_GCY6UOk1egsc433uHEIy4YY9T9xoZREBBlgcfa04P26Oe2Y270WXIWOaVmQb5nSlOv2xYpCFVA12kNVmQMetxDSr-EOdkA1SVssHI6nWP55ajnyI6W8fIfYCgJdVTJ6pFNZafuk88PUu1mAin22ZG4FI-Z59Kqa1wfkvbG/s1000/feyd%20rautha.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="667" data-original-width="1000" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNjWkT2502NS2zEwWVT50Gh_GCY6UOk1egsc433uHEIy4YY9T9xoZREBBlgcfa04P26Oe2Y270WXIWOaVmQb5nSlOv2xYpCFVA12kNVmQMetxDSr-EOdkA1SVssHI6nWP55ajnyI6W8fIfYCgJdVTJ6pFNZafuk88PUu1mAin22ZG4FI-Z59Kqa1wfkvbG/s320/feyd%20rautha.jpg" width="320" /></a></i></div><i>Note: In this post I am using the term "he" instead of "he or she," because it's quicker and because the post more generally involves the actions of male characters than female characters. I am not trying to sideline women. Thank you for your understanding.</i><p></p><p>I was watching a movie last week -- I don't remember which and it doesn't matter, as you will discover in a moment -- in which a good character survived as a result of a delay in killing him by a bad character. </p><p>I am going to call that moment "the sadistic delay," and I'm going to explain what I mean by that.</p><p>(But first: The movie in question wasn't <i>Dune Part Two</i>, but I thought an image of Feyd-Rautha would at least give the post a sense of immediacy. Plus he looks really badass, and whether he's actually guilty of this behavior or not, he's just the sort of villain who would be.)</p><p>A "sadistic delay" occurs when a bad character has the opportunity to kill a good character, but does not because he's got to savor the moment before applying the kill. He may only savor the moment for a few seconds, but in doing so, he botches his advantage and allows a third party to save the day, or even the prospective victim to save himself.</p><p>This is because bad people like killing too much to do it quickly.</p><p>And this has led to the survival of numerous heroes throughout the history of cinema.</p><p>Now, when a good character kills, he kills with a grim determination and plenty of regret. He capitalizes on his advantages and kills quickly. And afterwards, it is clear he is disturbed by having had to do this. But the previous transgressions of the the person he killed, in probably a kill-or-be-killed situation, meant there was no other choice.</p><p>A bad character?</p><p>He gets a sadistic grin on his face. He raises his weapon higher than it needs to be raised. He might throw a bit of triumphant shade at his prospective victim. He might even laugh.</p><p>And in that delay, which can last anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes if he wants to deliver a pre-kill victory speech, he usually lets his entire motivation in the movie go unrealized. (Though really, villain speeches are a different category of screenwriting transgression that numerous others have already written about.)</p><p>And yet this villain will do the exact same thing next time, if he survives this interaction. </p><p>It's funny how hacky screenwriters can be when they want to be. They're so worried about making <i>sure</i> we <i>know</i> this is a bad character, that they will not resist any opportunity to remind us of this. The other 32 terrible things this person did in the movie? Maybe they don't mean anything if he doesn't preemptively gloat at the key moment of the narrative.</p><p>And this can pop up in the most ridiculous of scenarios. A villain can be getting beaten terribly in a battle, having lost most of his army or other support structures, and to any impartial observer would appear to be on the verge of utter defeat.</p><p>But if he thinks he has a moment where he is absolutely sure to finally kill this hero who has been getting the better of him?</p><p>Cue that sadistic grin and that sudden unwarranted confidence that totally misunderstands the dynamics of the current situation.</p><p>Because this person has a taste for killing, and perhaps this will be the most satisfying kill he has ever performed.</p><p>I say, savor it after the fact when you have already nuked the city or gotten the magic amulet. There will be plenty of time to gloat later on.</p><p>And they tell us villains are supposed to be smart. </p>Derek Armstronghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13750747272647975591noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7877371347086447490.post-13070301272644371142024-03-15T07:30:00.006+11:002024-03-15T07:30:34.065+11:00I am not an auteurist<p><i></i></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgecfy6DC3TFDHHJx5dvVGIbykkDsnE_3TbFEI8lLgcR7iEKtUis1DAhE7yla3OWvMS1E40ZZw7XN3GbYQsDUSRXQmkWncxm3yiNJ8eXs3CT16mBNikNnXolC7TW_7z5c3_infNWgQ1V8dAFTFXKC2GOU8S9dTxEMRvmzlYdXxDTVUq97I5-yHJ01FOIhq0/s1500/priscilla-final-2-jpeg.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1500" data-original-width="1000" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgecfy6DC3TFDHHJx5dvVGIbykkDsnE_3TbFEI8lLgcR7iEKtUis1DAhE7yla3OWvMS1E40ZZw7XN3GbYQsDUSRXQmkWncxm3yiNJ8eXs3CT16mBNikNnXolC7TW_7z5c3_infNWgQ1V8dAFTFXKC2GOU8S9dTxEMRvmzlYdXxDTVUq97I5-yHJ01FOIhq0/s320/priscilla-final-2-jpeg.jpg" width="213" /></a></i></div><i>Clarification of the subject: I am a big fan of the auteur theory. That is not what this post is about.</i><p></p><div>Yesterday morning I was very belatedly listening to an episode of <i>The Next Picture Show</i>, the podcast hosted by staff of the former website <i>The Dissolve</i>, in which they were discussing a pair of Sofia Coppola films: <i>Marie Antoinette</i> and <i>Priscilla</i>. The structure of the show is to compare a new release to a classic that it echoes, one each week in a two-week pairing, and choosing two films from the same director's career is not uncommon. (A recent show I listened to was their 400th, so they've had to stray from the purity of the conceit on plenty of occasions, plus are rapidly using up their available pool of "classic" films. Though I do love<i> Marie Antoinette</i> so in this case I think it qualifies.)</div><div><p></p><p>As the discussion progressed to <i>Priscilla</i>, I found two things very unsurprising:</p><p>Hosts Scott Tobias and Keith Phipps basically loved the movie.</p><p>Host Tasha Robinson, long branded the show's contrarian, did not love it, though she respected it. </p><p>(Fourth host Genevieve Koski, who produces the show and sometimes doesn't appear in the main episodes, was somewhere in between.)</p><p>I described the above reactions as unsurprising, but that is only a criticism in the case of Scott and Keith, because I agree with Tasha and have the same basic reservations about <i>Priscilla</i> that she does.</p><p>It can be hard to defend Tasha Robinson. Although she is undoubtedly a critic with immaculate film coverage and is easily the most well spoken of the four, in terms of having a voice and a delivery made for podcasts, she can sometimes dominate the discussion and occasionally comes off as a blowhard. Plus there are all those contrarian opinions, some of which are more defensible than others.</p><p>But you know what?</p><p>Give me a contrarian any day over a person who blindly rubber stamps the latest film from an acclaimed auteur.</p><p>Sofia Coppola certainly fits that description, perhaps more so than any other female working director. You know when you are watching a Sofia Coppola film. (Except, maybe, <i>On the Rocks</i>.) And I love Sofia Coppola, having named <i>Lost in Translation</i> my #1 film of 2003 and having felt very strongly about <i>The Bling Ring</i>, <i>The Beguiled</i> and the aforementioned <i>Marie Antoinette</i>.</p><p>But you know what? Coppola does not make a great film every time out, as evidenced by previous misfires <i>Somewhere</i> and the similarly aforementioned <i>On the Rocks</i>. <i>Priscilla</i> is better than those two, but it now joins that group, to some extent. (If you want my thoughts on the one feature film of hers I haven't mentioned, I want to like <i>The Virgin Suicides</i> more than I do, but I still respect it quite a lot.)</p><p>Scott and Keith appear to find Coppola incapable of misstepping. One of them also talked about how <i>Somewhere</i>, which had a decidedly middling reception at the time of its release, has lately been embraced as the classic that it is. Maybe I have to watch <i>Somewhere</i> again, but I doubt I would reach that conclusion.</p><p>Even <i>On the Rocks </i>was thrown some love. "It's her least essential film, but it's still pretty good." Um, no it isn't. </p><p>Today I am interested in examining this compulsion.</p><p>If I were being truly cynical, I would say it stems from fear. If you think someone is going to call your critical bonafides into question if you don't like the latest movie from a respected auteur, you will find yourself emphasizing all the things you like about it, and dismissing anything that doesn't work for you.</p><p>But even in that case, you should be able to acknowledge the things that didn't work for you in a free-ranging, 30-minute discussion of the type they have on <i>The Next Picture Show</i>. Tasha was very reasonable in stating her concerns with the movie, which I won't rehash here (you can read <a href="https://reelgood.com.au/reviews/review-priscilla-2023/">my review</a> if you want). It was like she was begging Scott and Keith to meet her halfway. Instead, they just kept doubling down, gainsaying anything that she said and coming across more like the contrarians themselves. Not in a disrespectful way, but more as a sign of their own recognition of the absurdity of their contrasting opinions, the other two were laughing in spite of themselves -- almost as though this were a snapshot of the podcast's core personality dynamic writ large. (I find it an interesting side note that the two men were the ones in favor of the movie directed by a woman, while the two women were critical of it.)</p><p>Or it could come from insecurity. If some people think a master made a masterpiece, and you did not see it that way, maybe the problem was with you and you didn't get something essential about it. I feel this sometimes especially about older classics that I am just seeing for the first time. But you have to have the confidence to state that something about a film doesn't work the way it should or as advertised, because I guarantee you there is someone else out there that feels the exact same way. </p><p>Then it could just be a case of giving deference to a great artist. Even if they made a movie that was less than their best work, you don't want to denigrate their overall output in the way a mixed or negative review would do. It's almost like this awesome creative force doesn't have the power to withstand your pan. If anything, that person has a lot more power to withstand it than the fledgling newcomer would. </p><p>I feel like none of these things are stumbling blocks for Tash. And this is why I will always defend Tasha. She may reach some conclusions I don't agree with, which is the nature of differing subjective viewpoints on films among the critical community. Worse, she may reach some conclusions where I can attack the logic of her reaching that conclusion, beyond the conclusion itself. But never do I think she has decided she likes a movie even before she has started watching it. I have exactly zero doubt that Tasha Robinson considers every movie on its own terms, and this is the sort of critic I fancy myself being, as well.</p><p>I'm sure Scott and Keith fancy themselves that sort of critic. What critic wouldn't. And in truth, I often admire them considerably more than I admire Tasha. They may not sound as professional in the podcast medium as she does, but their thoughts are always well researched and soundly argued.</p><p>The thing is, I can't get over the idea that on some level, they aren't being as critical as they should be about the work of a favorite director. They are not going to surprise us. They are going to provide us reactions that fall well within the critical mainstream.</p><p>Take their favorite films of 2023, for example. Scott went for <i>The Zone of Interest</i>. I believe Keith went for <i>Killers of the Flower Moon</i>. (Genevieve, who is being neglected in this post, was not on that show. Part of her problem is that she is a TV editor and has to watch a lot more TV than movies, so she might be selecting from 20 movies for her best of the year, and 15 of them would be films discussed on the podcast.)</p><p>Tasha? She anointed <i>Saltburn</i> as her #1.</p><p>Now, <i>Saltburn</i> is my least favorite of those three films, but it was still barely in my top 30 for 2023. (Oops, no, it was my #33.) And I find it to be a much more interesting choice, one that does not just elevate the most recent offering from one of the industry's undisputed greats. </p></div>Derek Armstronghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13750747272647975591noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7877371347086447490.post-73839031867236577932024-03-14T08:33:00.000+11:002024-03-14T08:33:02.640+11:00Bill Skarsgard seems like a good Crow<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEistdgcNbdscgzwsmdIig9m5Ld8Rfv-8C1j3Op2Lfj9kcMod3F_aQaJMQn6Odc8ItPhX6nYKGslqO0Xq-Iq0uRZ4iEPSHi2vTA-1Xrwmjy_t7ordLm5eRXaubKIUm9SyAgZTzS8p_a7bQ3Xd5_5It5xlxYwoyECnRL5z6QIGkhmlr45jqiZG_qie7uT_-KM/s750/the%20crow%20skarsgard.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="750" data-original-width="500" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEistdgcNbdscgzwsmdIig9m5Ld8Rfv-8C1j3Op2Lfj9kcMod3F_aQaJMQn6Odc8ItPhX6nYKGslqO0Xq-Iq0uRZ4iEPSHi2vTA-1Xrwmjy_t7ordLm5eRXaubKIUm9SyAgZTzS8p_a7bQ3Xd5_5It5xlxYwoyECnRL5z6QIGkhmlr45jqiZG_qie7uT_-KM/s320/the%20crow%20skarsgard.jpg" width="213" /></a></div>I go through long periods of neglect of my ReelGood email account, such that I sometimes come back after a month and discover I've missed invites to ten screenings I might have otherwise liked to attend. These are inexcusable lapses in doing my due diligence as the editor of the site, but I have an excuse that's even less excusable: I just don't remember to check. <p></p><p>Yesterday I checked, though, and one of the emails hyping an upcoming movie was about the remake of Alex Proyas' <i>The Crow</i>, which I vaguely remembered was a thing but had not thought about in ages. As it is releasing in a couple months, it happens to be timed -- or maybe was intentionally timed -- to the 30-year anniversary of the original, which was of course overshadowed by the on-set death of Brandon Lee.</p><p>The original film had huge significance for me in 1994, when I was 20 turning 21, and when I was transported by its triumvirate of primary strengths: the soundtrack, the action sequences and the overriding sense of melancholy, which exudes from the themes of the movie itself, and then is expanded exponentially by Lee's death of a gunshot wound from a prop gun.</p><p>I'd ordinarily bristle at the idea of remaking it, or maybe more accurately, of re-adapting the comic on which it was based. I <i>know</i> Alex Proyas bristles at that idea. And I think this was one of the reasons, other than its incredibly poor quality, that I disliked <i>The Crow: City of Angels</i> as much as I did.</p><p>But the casting of Bill Skarsgard gives me hope.</p><p>The trick Lee pulled off in the original film was to be both sympathetic and a little -- or maybe a lot -- insane. That describes Skarsgard's cinematic attributes to a T.</p><p>In fact, I would go so far as to describe Skarsgard as one of the top two creepy weirdos introduced to us in the last five to ten years, alongside Barry Keoghan. </p><p>Surely this impression was cemented by his role as Pennywise the Clown in <i>It</i> and its sequel. Whatever you ultimately thought about those films, it is inconceivable to me that you weren't scared as fuck by Skarsgard. He is so demented, so sinister, and so giving his all that, if I remember correctly, you see involuntary ropes of spittle emanating from him on multiple occasions. Many actors play evil. In these movies, Skarsgard <i>was</i> evil.</p><p>The thing is, this is not Skarsgard's only mode. Not by a longshot.</p><p>One of the great fakeouts (SPOILER ALERT) about 2022's <i>Barbarian</i> was the fact that Skarsgard is <i>not</i> the creep. Oh, he seems like he would be/will be, and they are milking our preconceived notions of the actor for everything they're worth. But as we are watching this charming man be charming and kind, and just waiting for the other shoe to drop, and then realizing it <i>isn't</i> going to drop and we are just watching a charming man be charming and kind, it serves as a revelation about this actor and the things of which he is capable.</p><p>Well, I think he will get to use both modes in <i>The Crow</i>. At some point in this movie, Skarsgard will make you feel the pain of what has been taken from him, and then in the next moment do something with his eyes that will make you want to go run and hide in the corner. </p><p>Another bit of hopefulness: Danny Huston is also in the cast, presumably as a villain. There's something alien in his aloofness, too, and I think the movie could use this to good effect.</p><p>Then again, <i>The Crow</i> is also directed by Rupert Sanders of <i>Ghost in the Shell</i> remake fame, which takes away a little of my hope.</p><p>Please drag Sanders, and this movie, to the finish line, won't you Bill?</p>Derek Armstronghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13750747272647975591noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7877371347086447490.post-48953596365237264962024-03-13T07:03:00.002+11:002024-03-13T07:03:09.784+11:00Blaxploitaudient: Petey Wheatstraw<p><i></i></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9bp0R_Cn2eMKWaCa-Z-57T4ZRcO3bmSR7ESqUXZ23uVjU_XHiLwVEcHoOh7SLoYB_yeNqPjlTdfE8B95XCsP8xP7M1xKEY91o1OYkhXMuuh7-zYhPPyhGtPKzEQZQBgKXVl4DnoTi9tgXfQ0uaZVzCVORWUNeagxXocTln_N0zQle5zf8FLAh5p6Dyt9n/s2953/petey%20wheatstraw.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2953" data-original-width="1949" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9bp0R_Cn2eMKWaCa-Z-57T4ZRcO3bmSR7ESqUXZ23uVjU_XHiLwVEcHoOh7SLoYB_yeNqPjlTdfE8B95XCsP8xP7M1xKEY91o1OYkhXMuuh7-zYhPPyhGtPKzEQZQBgKXVl4DnoTi9tgXfQ0uaZVzCVORWUNeagxXocTln_N0zQle5zf8FLAh5p6Dyt9n/s320/petey%20wheatstraw.jpg" width="211" /></a></i></div><i>This is the third in my 2024 monthly series watching blaxploitation movies.</i><p></p><p><i>Petey Wheatstraw</i> was, in some ways, the first movie on my list for this series.</p><p>I'm being a bit cheeky when I say this. Of course, as soon as Elvis Mitchell's documentary <i>Is That Black Enough for You??</i> gave me the idea to do this series, I realized that <i>Shaft</i> was my biggest blind spot and the movie I would watch first.</p><p>But <i>Petey Wheatstraw</i> was on my Kanopy watchlist even before I saw Mitchell's movie, just waiting for its perfect occasion to rise to the top of that list. That didn't happen until this series, unfortunately -- but then again, previous neglect of blaxploitation is why I'm doing this series.</p><p>Of course, part of the reason it came up for viewing as early as March was that a bird in the hand beats two in the bush. When something is already available to you on streaming, it tends to jump ahead of things where you have to shell out some money to see it (as I did with the first two movies, each chosen specially for their months for different reasons).</p><p>Another good reason to watch it: It stars Rudy Ray Moore, the character played by Eddie Murphy in <i>Dolemite Is My Name</i>, which was my #14 movie of 2019. Perhaps <i>Dolemite</i> would have been a better Moore movie to watch, but <i>Dolemite</i> isn't on Kanopy -- though the movie he made the year before <i>Petey Wheatstraw</i>, <i>The Human Tornado</i>, is. By getting to it early, it left me with a chance to watch one of these films later in the series, if I really dug Moore.</p><p>So, did I really dig Moore?</p><p>In parts I did. There is definitely a goofy charisma there that explains why he was popular within this milieu in the late 1970s. (Made in 1977, <i>Petey Wheatstraw</i> is now the newest movie I've seen in this series by more than five years.)</p><p>I think I thought he would be more consistently entertaining, which is a funny comment to make about a performer who has stylized himself on the principle of being loud and outrageous and chaotic -- in short, inconsistent by his very nature. But, I can't deny that I hoped <i>Petey Wheatstraw</i> would see its ideas through just a bit more coherently.</p><p>Of course, other times I just reveled in the joyous nonsense of it all.</p><p>There is not a lot of plot in <i>Petey Wheatstraw</i>, but the chaos is baked into the movie from the very beginning. In a device I recalled from Michael Winterbottom's <i>Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story </i>-- because I haven't actually read the novel on which it was based -- the title character, after some opening introductions to the audience, says he recalls his own birth. So of course we go straight to a scene of this birth, and it's immediately hilarious. Petey emerges from between his mother's legs as a boy of about eight or nine years old, and the first thing he does is start wailing on the doctor, who runs screaming from the shabby house where he's been born. This leads to an immediate scolding by his mother, which adds further hilarity to the affair. No one seems surprised by the fact that a newborn should be as large as he is, should be able to talk or hit people, and should be in a position to even understand what it means to be scolded.</p><p>It might have been something to sort of follow Petey through this picaresque childhood, but pretty soon we get to the main plot. Petey is a standup comedian about to open a new club, but that means he's drawn the ire of competing comedians Leroy and Skillet, played by Leroy Daniels and Ernest Mayhand. Apparently, they are so eager for their act to retain the spotlight over Petey's that they are willing to kill for it, and so it is that Petey and a bunch of his cohorts are assassinated -- at a funeral for a boy killed in the previous scene, no less.</p><p>Sound grim? Well don't you worry. The corpses littered on the church steps are soon revived, as showing up on the scene is none other than the devil. (He's played by G. Tito Shaw.) Oh, I think I forgot to tell you -- the movie sort of has a subtitle that I don't find used as part of its official title anywhere, so I'm not using it here. But the full title, if you chose to use it, would be <i>Petey Wheatstraw: The Devil's Son-in-Law</i>. (I always like a title that rhymes.)</p><p>So Lucifer is happy to reverse what has just happened over the last five minutes if Petey will agree to sell his soul and marry the devil's daughter. We don't see her face right away, but Petey gets a look at it, and he assures us that she is ugly. But, it's better than him and all his friends being dead. So the scene rewinds and Petey has saved everyone, plus been given a special walking stick belonging to the devil that has magic powers. </p><p>After this promising setup, there's a fair bit of meandering in the middle of the movie -- things happening that don't make much sense, and are more enjoyable to appreciate on the level of sheer spectacle. For example, at one point Petey turns an abusive man into a poodle, but I don't think this man or the woman Petey's saving from him have anything else to do with the rest of the movie.</p><p>By the end, when Petey tries to fool the devil into getting out of his commitment to marry the girl, the movie has found some of its purpose again, as well as a wild spirit that it never lost in the first place.</p><p>I won't say I loved <i>Petey Wheatstraw</i>. It's the first movie in this series to get a technically thumbs down star rating, as it ended up at 2.5 stars on Letterboxd. But the more curious thing was that the things I did like about it were not tied to Moore himself, or not as tied to him as I expected they would be. That speaks well both of the supporting cast and of the wild imagination of writer-director Roquemore, who I would not be surprised to learn was also a character in <i>Dolemite Is My Name</i>. (Does not appear to be the case, though Mike Epps does play Jimmy Lynch, who is Petey's closest friend and second billed in the <i>Petey Wheatstraw</i> cast.)</p><p>When I do give the movie only 2.5 stars, it's certainly not because I wanted it to be made any better than it was. The low-tech special effects and makeup are of course a huge part of the fun, and I suspect they wouldn't have wanted to make this movie any better even with five times the budget. This is a movie that is what it wants to be.</p><p>I'll see another such movie in April, title undetermined as of now. </p>Derek Armstronghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13750747272647975591noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7877371347086447490.post-69216026902897254732024-03-12T09:35:00.000+11:002024-03-12T09:35:12.920+11:00Ed Harris in the control room double feature<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEji0JIWRtgFQpDR13QpuaNbqdU3qkRSQCR96xRaipdZRQgbxugT-3pHDiEZSWrjimbsjUERrdq43CYkIVD5fmCTmDLrLau3T7FPI2Og0Qh20Zc0kAzlkEAXQYVelxz9zgpQmiYSnFAJCVY1WAHW0qifAs5huHebm9XbDLq151R4vzi9ZXCO_Q7Ml5x28RxO/s815/truman%2013.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="815" data-original-width="273" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEji0JIWRtgFQpDR13QpuaNbqdU3qkRSQCR96xRaipdZRQgbxugT-3pHDiEZSWrjimbsjUERrdq43CYkIVD5fmCTmDLrLau3T7FPI2Og0Qh20Zc0kAzlkEAXQYVelxz9zgpQmiYSnFAJCVY1WAHW0qifAs5huHebm9XbDLq151R4vzi9ZXCO_Q7Ml5x28RxO/w214-h640/truman%2013.JPG" width="214" /></a></div>With the projector still set up in the garage for the Oscars yesterday morning on Labour Day, I decided to make use of it with two more movies. Which is actually a lot less than I would usually watch, but this is one three-day weekend where we didn't get the projector set up until the final of the three days, in part due to my wife's preference for watching <i>Spaceman</i> together on Saturday night in the living room rather than on the projector. (It's been the hottest three days of the summer, even though it is now autumn. And even though the garage is the coolest place in our house if all else is equal, it doesn't stand a chance against an air conditioned living room.)<p></p><p>One of the movies was one that my son and I started the day before, watching only half of it. The other was a classic from the 1990s that I've seen only once.</p><p>Both had Ed Harris occupying a position of dominance in the command center for a project involving the coordinated efforts of thousands of people. </p><p>If I had been looking for a true thematic double feature for <i>Apollo 13</i>, I might have gone with <i>Space Cowboys</i>, which I have never seen and which was one of the "if you liked this, you'll like this" offerings from Stan after Ron Howard's film had finished. But in the time we paused to have dinner and usual nightly chores, I decided I wanted to fish for a previously seen film that I hadn't seen recently -- and <i>The Truman Show</i>, which I only saw that one time in the theater, was a good match.</p><p>First how we got on to <i>Apollo 13</i>, which is my #57 film on Flickchart but which my records tell me I haven't watched since before 2006. </p><p>A few weeks ago, my ten-year-old started telling me what he had learned about the doomed Apollo 13 mission, possibly collected from YouTube. (Hey, maybe if YouTube is educating our children on NASA, it isn't all bad.) Of course my mind immediately went to one of the five 1995 best picture nominees, which had such an impact on me the last time I saw it -- which was probably the second time overall -- that it rocketed up (no pun intended) into the stratosphere (pun intended this time) of my Flickchart, where it regularly beats films you'd think I might like more. Probably a good time to test my loyalty to it.</p><p>I did wonder if it would be over the head of my son, but he was the one who was telling me about little things they had to do aboard the ship in order to save it (and themselves) from becoming space junk. Plus, he's pretty advanced for his age, and an interest in space exploration seems like the sort of old-school ambition I'd like to nourish in my children.</p><p>I then wondered briefly, given that it is obviously a film intended for adult viewers, whether there would be any language that I wouldn't want him to hear, understanding that he has heard it all before -- just maybe not in films sanctioned by me. I didn't think so, and true enough, there was only the "mild coarse language" promised in the trigger warnings at the beginning. (He asked me why it didn't say "mild curse language," allowing me to define "coarse" for him and explain that "curse" is a noun rather than an adjective.)</p><p>What I didn't properly calculate, in a movie all about calculations, is that this is still a ten-year-old and many of the concepts being discussed would be way over his head. Many of the concepts are way over the head of even a 50-year-old.</p><p>I'm sure this contributed to the fact that we watched only 55 minutes of a 2 hour and 20 minute movie on Sunday afternoon, when finishing it off would have taken until about 8:20. Even in the air conditioned living room for this portion of the film, I was still secretly grateful that I properly interpreted his squirming and asked him if he wanted to continue the next day. With the heat and with us having gone to the beach earlier, I was all too eager to curl up with one of my late afternoon cat naps.</p><p>My son is at an age where he never wants to disappoint his daddy, so he elected to continue on Monday, even though I'm sure his various soccer games on his Nintendo switch and YouTube soccer videos on his tablet held more sway over him than the near-fatal misadventures of Jim Lovell, Fred Haise and Jack Swigert. (The first two of whom are still alive, I was pleased to see on Wikipedia after the film ended.) So we continued watching on Monday, this time in the garage on the projector, and this time with about the same amount of squirming, but only slightly more than half the movie to go.</p><p>In the end he said he liked it, and he did make a couple spontaneous comments along the way that proved his investment. However, he admitted that he didn't understand most of what was happening. I suppose the question is with a film like <i>Apollo 13</i>, is it important to understand exactly why their current crisis endangers their lives, or do you just need to know that they need to think quickly in order to save themselves? For me, I benefit from a pretty good understanding of the former, which makes the latter all the more tense. For my son, maybe it didn't quite reach that level.</p><p>I also think it is probably interesting for a child to watch a movie whose outcome they already know. He knew right from reporting to me the basic details of the Apollo 13 mission that they survived, otherwise he'd be talking about a morbid space tragedy and that's not the sort of thing that tickles the intellect of this particular kid. I tried to address the issue by saying that I thought the movie was incredibly successful and that the <i>proof</i> of this is that you feel tense and excited even though you know the astronauts made it back safely. Again possibly in an attempt to say what I wanted to hear, he co-signed this, albeit somewhat unenthusiastically. </p><p>As for me, I think the #57 ranking on Flickchart was basically supported. Maybe it'll fall down into the 60s or 70s, but not much more than that. I had to fight back the tears when they finally splash down in the South Pacific. </p><p>As an interesting side note: <i>Apollo 13</i> is the fourth movie I have tagged on this blog that starts with the word <i>Apollo</i>, the others being the documentary about the first moon landing (<i>Apollo 11</i>), Richard Linklater's rotoscoped coming-of-age story centered around that moon landing (<i>Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood</i>) and a found footage horror about a hypothetical moon mission that never happened (<i>Apollo 18</i>). That <i>Apollo 13</i> should be the best of those films -- though in a smaller margin over the first two than the third -- and only just now be getting its first tag on my 15-year-old blog is interesting indeed, and maybe a little sad. </p><p>Landing (again, no pun intended) on <i>The Truman Show</i> was something I did after about five minutes of further scrolling on Stan. I wanted something short enough (since I do have to return to work today) yet also something with a bit of a grander scale to match the scale I'd just been watching. As an only one-time viewing, with that first viewing coming more than a quarter century ago, <i>The Truman Show</i> fit the bill perfectly. (And I noted that if <i>The Truman Show</i> were made today, it would have failed my first test for length, as it certainly would have been <i>Apollo 13</i>'s 140 minutes rather than the 102 minutes it actually is.)</p><p>I was not necessarily the biggest fan of <i>The Truman Show</i> in 1998, in that there were people who embraced it more wholeheartedly than I did. Even as I say that, though, I'm checking my rankings for that year and find it at #10 overall -- which is more an indication of the number of films I ranked that year (58) than a true affection for the movie. I did always like it, but something had left me a little hesitant on it -- a feeling that has resulted in never watching it a second time.</p><p>Well, I'd say I probably liked it just a touch more than I remembered. I didn't have some big revelation about it, or a reading on it that seemed new to me. It's about what it's about tightly and efficiently, and I think it interestingly anticipates our fascination with reality TV, and sometimes our inability to separate a real person from a character we want to be subjected to dramatic things. </p><p>Something I hadn't maybe considered about<i> The Truman Show</i> was its relationship to another Jim Carrey movie from that era that I adore, which is my #16 on Flickchart, <i>The Cable Guy</i>. Until this viewing I wouldn't have made the connection that both movies are about our desire to watch, and both movies feature a moment at or near the climax where a rapt audience effectively opts to change the channel and ask what else is on. As the more praised of the two movies, <i>The Truman Sho</i>w surely gets the credit for these thoughts that <i>The Cable Guy</i> does not -- but let's be real here, people. <i>The Cable Guy</i> predates <i>The Truman Show</i> by two years.</p><p>Two more quick thoughts:</p><p>1) I liked that before we have really been introduced to this world, we already see it falling apart -- literally as a way to preview its metaphorical collapse. One of the first things that happens to Truman is that he is almost hit by a light falling from the top of the dome, which might have not happened for ten minutes in a less efficient film. This also sets up how they explain away the weird phenomena Truman witnesses in the form of news broadcasts.</p><p>2) The efficiency of the script does, though, have a few narrative disadvantages. For one, I was sort of surprised that Truman never has it out with his "best friend" -- or so he thinks -- since he was seven, Marlon, played by Noah Emmerich. (Incidentally, Emmerich's entrance where he leads with a six-pack of beer has always been one of my enduring memories of this film.) Albeit only reading the dialogue that Harris' Christof is feeding into his ear, Marlon tells Truman that if everyone was in on a conspiracy against him, he'd have to be in on it too, and the last thing he'd ever do is lie to Truman. Clearly the actor playing Marlon does not like to read these lines, but he reads them, and he's never held accountable, which would certainly happen in today's longer version of this film. Then again, I like the fact that it is implied, through what happens in the story, that the betrayal of Truman by Marlon is so total, so callous, that he isn't even worthy of a big scene where Truman tears him a new one. Instead, Truman will just leave this world and never look back. </p><p>And what about Ed Harris in all this?</p><p>Harris has a similar function but a very dissimilar status as a hero in the two films. In <i>Apollo 13</i>, he personifies the tireless, sleepless, unwilling-to-accept failure dedication of the many NASA employees not to lose these three men in space. Whether it's a particular sense of humanism or just his somewhat jingoist determination not to lose the first American in space on his watch, Harris' Gene Kranz does what needs to be done and does not rest until it's done -- and because he's such a cool customer, nary a hair on his head seems to be out of place.</p><p>In a film containing a lot more shades of gray than <i>Apollo 13</i>, <i>The Truman Show</i>'s Christof is a lot more of a monster -- but he's not an uncomplicated monster. Yes, he is mostly driven by the vainglorious trappings of having created the most popular and longest running television show of all time. But it's also clear that on some level, he views Truman as a son, closer to him than any real person in his real life. When he therefore risks killing this surrogate son upon Truman threatening to leave him, it reveals significant complexities in the dynamics of this relationship. </p><p>It is clear, though, that Harris was born to preside over a control room, because there is a third movie -- at least a third, possibly more -- I could have added to make this double feature a triple feature. It occurred to me that although his identity is not revealed until late in the movie, Harris plays the same role once again in <i>Snowpiercer</i>. Whether this was a conscious quotation of either of these two previous performances, or just something in Harris that suggests a man in (and possibly losing) control, only Bong Joon-ho may know. </p>Derek Armstronghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13750747272647975591noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7877371347086447490.post-17274617720337169432024-03-11T13:48:00.005+11:002024-03-12T10:19:02.361+11:00Oppenheimer wins, after all<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPoV8OvZCJLqmeZRpidMbS6etGoAbPYBJa5XtPxsd2GPxHEIi85TJBDUIKDmXsS8_bKbKYTeLAeg7WRebPW0ztGYEKZCyawiAwHZDp1RPOkyoZ5tffA2GnqQA8bouXLanm8Pvn-9szeVLJqNta3SzbwUB6Ff6biYNULQaGD2aHqrsxz9m5agL2MDeF2DtU/s3840/oppenheimer.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2720" data-original-width="3840" height="227" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPoV8OvZCJLqmeZRpidMbS6etGoAbPYBJa5XtPxsd2GPxHEIi85TJBDUIKDmXsS8_bKbKYTeLAeg7WRebPW0ztGYEKZCyawiAwHZDp1RPOkyoZ5tffA2GnqQA8bouXLanm8Pvn-9szeVLJqNta3SzbwUB6Ff6biYNULQaGD2aHqrsxz9m5agL2MDeF2DtU/s320/oppenheimer.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>Back in July, when I had no idea how this whole Barbenheimer phenomenon would play out, I went to see <i>Oppenheimer</i> on opening night for both films. <p></p><p>The Sun in Yarraville was decked out in pink, as were the eager beavers coursing through its lobby, many of them carrying drinks or posing for photos in the life-sized Barbie packaging. </p><p>Meanwhile, my screening of <i>Oppenheimer</i> in one of the Sun's smallest screening rooms was attended by three other men, all older than me.</p><p>There were a couple obvious explanations for this last. One was that it was far more popular to attend a 70 mm screening of <i>Oppenheimer</i> at the Sun on one of its largest screenings, though that showing was halfway through its running time, so I wouldn't have seen any of those excited attendees in the lobby or anywhere else.</p><p>But I thought I'd collected enough evidence about the relative merits of these two movies to write a post entitled "<i>Barbie</i> wins," which you can find <a href="https://theaudient.blogspot.com/2023/07/barbie-wins.html">here</a> if you are so inclined. </p><p>Nearly seven months later, in the competition that confers on a film its immortality, <i>Oppenheimer</i> has emerged as the ultimate winner, taking home the statue for best picture at the 96th Academy Awards.</p><p>It was only my seventh favorite of the best picture nominees at my ranking deadline, and would now fall to eighth behind <i>The Zone of Interest</i>. But it was still my 26th ranked film overall in 2023, so I'm happier about this win than I have been about many of the best picture wins in the past decade. </p><p>And as I told you I would yesterday, I watched the ceremony live for the second year in a row -- an hour earlier, as you know, so the 10 a.m. start time basically meant it did not impede on the trajectory of our Labour Day one iota. </p><p>Here is what would have been my "live tweets" if I were on Twitter and if it were still called Twitter.</p><p>- The Australian television network 7+ is really making me kiss the ring in order to stream the Oscars for free. They've required me to sit through seven ads, in increasing agitation, in order to start watching. Fortunately, the telecast did then play from the start.</p><p>- Back to extensively praising the acting nominees. It's going to be a long night.</p><p>- How did I never hear Da'Vine Joy Randolph's name pronounced correctly before now?</p><p>- Rita Moreno must be the most still-coherent person over 90 in Hollywood.</p><p>- Love that Paul Giamatti was seated next to Randolph and had a tear in his eye during her acceptance speech, which was very nice, even if she did not thank him (or anyone else in the film, for that matter).</p><p>- I got the animated short winner correct so my first miss of the night comes when <i>The Boy and the Heron</i> wins best animated feature. It was dumb to go against Hayao Miyazaki's last film, even if I didn't like it very much. (Then again my guess, <i>Across the Spider-Verse</i>, was not a personal favorite either. But I knew <i>Elemental</i> had no shot.)</p><p>- Okay I liked that adapted screenplay joke by Jimmy Kimmel, who is off to a fairly disappointing start otherwise.</p><p>- What are Melissa McCarthy and Octavia Spencer talking about?</p><p>- I'm surprised that I correctly picked <i>Anatomy of a Fall</i> to win best original screenplay. I'm also surprised, though maybe I shouldn't be, that they played "P.I.M.P." as accompaniment to Justine Triet walking on stage. (Great, now it will be in my head again for the next three weeks.)</p><p>- The <i>Oppenheimer</i> sweep is officially off as it loses best adapted screenplay to <i>American Fiction</i>. (It didn't win for best supporting actress either but that was never going to happen.)</p><p>- Cord Jefferson is really likable. </p><p>- Billie Eilish comes on stage and I continue to amuse myself by calling her "Billie Eyelash." But I don't know why we need 50 different shots of people reacting to her <i>Barbie</i> song. </p><p>- Speaking of possible sweeps, <i>Poor Things</i> is going after all the art and design awards. (And I actually wrote this before it won for its costumes. Unfortunately, best costume was the only one of those things I picked correctly.)</p><p>- The John Cena bit was funny. "Costumes ..." (pause for laughter). Good stuff. </p><p>- Okay, the reactions to the <i>Killers of the Flower Moon</i> song were many, so I guess this is a thing this year.</p><p>- Will Jonathan Glazer winning an Oscar cause him to want to make more movies? I hope so.</p><p>- The Gosling-Blunt <i>Barbie-Oppenheimer</i> rivalry bit was funny. When they introduced the montage on stunts, though, I wondered if they were finally giving out an Oscar for stunts and I just missed it on my ballot this year.</p><p>- That is one hirsute Sam Rockwell.</p><p>- It's taken a long time but <i>Oppenheimer</i> finally has its first win of the night. Robert Downey Jr. seems like he should have won an Oscar before, but it's only his third nomination. Unsurprisingly snarky acceptance speech, but with enough heart.</p><p>- The <i>Oppenheimer </i>editor is adorable.</p><p>- Okay, as <i>Oppenheimer</i> has now appeared in each of my last three comments, the momentum for it is building as it wins for Hoyte van Hoytema's cinematography.</p><p>- Of course Wes Anderson did not show up, even though it was expected he would win. </p><p>- Wait, what is the movie <i>Flamin' Hot</i> again? (Checks IMDB.) Holy shit it's about Cheetos and Eva Longoria directed it! </p><p>- John Mulaney made me laugh out loud with the second rip of <i>Madame Web</i> of the evening, but then I missed most of his bit about <i>Field of Dreams </i>because my wife and son came into the garage needing to get the beach tent. Okay, so much for having the day not impacted by the Oscars and vice versa.</p><p>- Picking <i>Oppenheimer</i> to win all the technical awards lets me down again. I should have figured that the sound in <i>Zone of Interest</i> was one of its best bets at an Oscar.</p><p>- I think it's funny that England has Mother's Day in March. The English-speaking countries need to get together and figure this stuff out. Australia and the U.S. both have it on the same Sunday in May, but they do deviate on Father's Day (which is in September here). I have no idea when British Father's Day is.</p><p>- Okay, Ryan Gosling is reminding me again of how awesome he was in <i>Barbie</i>. Remember when he went away for a few years? So glad he's back, and it looks like <i>Fall Guy</i> will be super fun. </p><p>- Wait, Slash?</p><p>- Every Oscars needs a bring-the-house-down number. That was it. But thank you for playing, Cheetos movie song.</p><p>- When Kimmel continues to make references to his crush on Gosling, he's just saying what we're all thinking.</p><p>- Jeez Cynthia Erivo, take it down a notch with the facial jewelry.</p><p>- I just realized Mica Levi didn't get a nomination for her<i> Zone of Interest</i> score. And Robbie Robertson didn't get his posthumous Oscar, which seemed like an easy call. </p><p>- Really, the <u>other</u> <i>Barbie</i> song wins? Come on Billie Eyelash. It feels like we have a future EGOT here.</p><p>- Tina Turner gets the last spot in the In Memoriam section. Not a fan that they never went full screen with it. Didn't learn of any deaths I didn't already know about except one: Lee Sun-kyun, who played the rich father/husband in <i>Parasite</i>. And now via Wikipedia I've just learned a lot of unsavory details about accusations and investigations of drug use that may have led to his suicide. I might have preferred not to know.</p><p>- I finally learned how Paul Giamatti did the eye thing in <i>The Holdovers</i>.</p><p>- Matthew McConaughey looks a bit like Spock looked after he fixed the radiation leak on the Enterprise in <i>Star Trek II</i>.</p><p>- Cillian Murphy wins in his first attempt. This should have been Giamatti's third if they didn't insanely forget to nominate him for <i>Sideways</i>.</p><p>- Nolan has eight nominations? That's crazy, considering that many of his films weren't really going for Oscars.</p><p>- Sally Field is <i>still</i> adorable.</p><p>- Emma Stone wins and <i>Killers of the Flower Moon</i> gets shut out. Seems like the biggest surprise of the night. She gives one of my favorite speeches of the night but I'm maybe a little surprised she's quite so emotional on her second win. </p><p>- "Isn't it past your jail time?" NICE.</p><p>- For a second I thought they were introducing Robert De Niro to give out best picture, which would be a conflict of interest, but no, it's Al Pacino, looking his age. And acting his age, as he forgets to read the nominees again and gives a completely botched and confusing delivery of the winner's name. But yes indeed, it is <i>Oppenheimer </i>as we all thought it would be.</p><p><i>Past Lives</i> and <i>Flower Moon</i> got shut out, which may be a tad disappointing, but so did <i>Maestro</i>, which was richly deserved. </p><p>Just another quick thing I noticed ... the only non-best-picture-nominated features to win Oscars won them in categories where no best picture nominee was nominated. So <i>Godzilla Minus One</i> won for its visual effects, <i>The Boy and the Heron</i> for best animated feature, the documentary whose name I already don't remember for best documentary ... but in none of those categories was there a best picture nominee. Even the best international feature winner was, of course, a best picture nominee.</p><p>And so that puts an official final wrap on my Oscars coverage and on 2023 in general. Catch me again this time next year when <i>Madame Web</i> takes home its statue for best picture.</p>Derek Armstronghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13750747272647975591noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7877371347086447490.post-7158196535512994302024-03-10T09:09:00.000+11:002024-03-10T09:09:04.411+11:00Labour Day Oscars, second year running<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYXFr-EHqHkLdV2nnWpHk2PmwI9UHM0pd9XO0kPdIvOqSki8IZY_EAiPyXh3wQsIJjFsCZRmSqXID7lhVmig-1T2AMxa8X_IibCfcq02tVgTIG6V7-Wot80WMLXx5F9GkznxnnnkSp6FQ0gAoM1cfJf7RX7nFgKoml_Vz1w2H6vXnTxOo2LWfUzrMtlJ2W/s1600/america%20fiction.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1080" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYXFr-EHqHkLdV2nnWpHk2PmwI9UHM0pd9XO0kPdIvOqSki8IZY_EAiPyXh3wQsIJjFsCZRmSqXID7lhVmig-1T2AMxa8X_IibCfcq02tVgTIG6V7-Wot80WMLXx5F9GkznxnnnkSp6FQ0gAoM1cfJf7RX7nFgKoml_Vz1w2H6vXnTxOo2LWfUzrMtlJ2W/s320/america%20fiction.jpg" width="216" /></a></div>Last year in <a href="https://theaudient.blogspot.com/2023/03/the-novelty-of-watching-oscars-live.html">this post</a>, I discussed the fact that it took ten years of my family being in Australia for the Oscars telecast to line up with Labour Day, a day off from work that I believe always falls on the second Monday of March.<p></p><p>Well, it took only one year for it to happen again.</p><p>I doubt the Academy is specifically consulting the Australian bank holidays, but by landing on some sense of consistency with its telecast date, it has allowed the two to align for the second year in a row -- which means only my second chance to watch the Oscars live since I've lived in this country.</p><p>And this year, I don't even have to take my kids out for breakfast as a trade with my wife, to buy myself the good will to take three hours off in the middle of the day to watch TV.</p><p>I hadn't remembered that that was the case last year, but reading the previously linked post reminded me of it.</p><p>Another improvement from last year: I'm writing the post you are currently reading on Sunday, rather than Monday, meaning that I can write my Oscars recap post as the ceremony is occurring, and post it straight afterward. (Some necessary background information: I never post more than one post in the same day. If it looks like I have ever done this in the past, it's only because changing time zones to Australia may have retroactively placed two posts in the same day that were once in two different days.)</p><p>I did my final bit of Oscars homework this past week, watching <i>American Fiction</i> on Tuesday night. It's the only best picture nominee I hadn't seen and really the only film of note that received any nominations that I hadn't seen. The only other film I haven't seen with a nomination in any of the major categories -- excluding categories like documentaries or international features, where there is not an expectation that I would have seen them -- is <i>The Color Purple</i> with its best supporting actress nomination for Danielle Brooks. (I don't know why they even bothered to name any other nominees in that category as Da'Vine Joy Randolph is going to win, and rightly so.)</p><p>My initial reaction to <i>American Fiction</i> was a bit more tepid than I wanted it to be. You can read my review <a href="https://reelgood.com.au/reviews/oscars-prep-american-fiction-2023/">here</a>. Then yesterday I was listening to a podcast in which the three hosts discussed the movie, and though they had some of the same reservations I had, they pointed out that the bait-and-switch Cord Jefferson is doing here is similar to the sort of stunt Monk Ellison is trying to pull off in the story. And that gives some of my concerns with the film a sort of intentionality that makes me value those choices more. It still likely comes in ninth out of the ten nominees for me, miles ahead of <i>Maestro</i>, but at least trailing the others by less than I would have originally thought.</p><p>As proof that it is almost Oscars time, I am also early this year in printing my ballot -- or would have been, if I'd actually clicked print on <i>Vanity Fair</i>'s printable Oscar ballot just now. But the printer is in close enough proximity to where my wife is currently sleeping that I held off. </p><p>Don't want to give her an excuse to make me take my kids out to breakfast again. </p>Derek Armstronghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13750747272647975591noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7877371347086447490.post-10428280618105213812024-03-09T09:00:00.000+11:002024-03-09T09:00:15.810+11:00International Women's Day: The Marvels<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8CbZiTtzKDbPG4WBth9Z__9hON3QiEuDDwNIdvvQ1d6ln_bv71bIzgAMkjP_FE961CbJbld6LZQ3SJPa1a_gr-kunxsPkaDDNfqtddGwZ-Ewz2cp5HnshmwgqjY4XO9orgcZfHwFL_50ir8aLF1AUltkhHAYKyMbB7gIEFZ_kIRcibWlblnRliM48SRhK/s1000/the%20marvels.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="670" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8CbZiTtzKDbPG4WBth9Z__9hON3QiEuDDwNIdvvQ1d6ln_bv71bIzgAMkjP_FE961CbJbld6LZQ3SJPa1a_gr-kunxsPkaDDNfqtddGwZ-Ewz2cp5HnshmwgqjY4XO9orgcZfHwFL_50ir8aLF1AUltkhHAYKyMbB7gIEFZ_kIRcibWlblnRliM48SRhK/s320/the%20marvels.jpg" width="214" /></a></div>To recap, my position on <i>The Marvels</i> at the end of 2023:<br /><p></p><p>1) I'm definitely not seeing it in the theater, but</p><p>2) I'll definitely see it if it streams on Disney+ before my ranking deadline, which it did not, which is okay because</p><p>3) I'm feeling kind of backlashy toward Brie Larson, for reasons that may be valid but might align me with people I don't want to be aligned with, and besides</p><p>4) Not seeing it would allow me to finish watching <i>Ms. Marvel</i> on Disney+ before I see it.</p><p>But really, what I worried people thought when I didn't rank it was "He just doesn't want to see it cuz there's girls in it."</p><p>People who know me know that's not the case, but I'm thinking about all those people who don't know me.</p><p>So to atone, I watched it last night on International Women's Day. </p><p>It's only been a tradition for me to watch a movie to celebrate International Women's Day for one year. Last year I finished off my best picture nominees by watching <i>Women Talking</i>, which hadn't yet been accessible to me on my ranking deadline, and that experience had a good ending. I say "ending" because I thought the start of that movie was stilted, but I came around on it pretty strongly by the time it reached the finish line.</p><p>No such finish for <i>The Marvels</i>, but I will say that it also went up for me a half-star by the end. Unfortunately, instead of that getting it up to the four stars <i>Women Talking</i> received, it got it up to only 2.5.</p><p><i>The Marvels</i> has been streaming on Disney+ for about a month now, and considering that I've watched two 2023 best picture nominees as well as one other 2023 film that wasn't nominated for anything, the lid was officially off the prohibition against watching movies from the previous year in the wake of closing my list. In fact, I'd already been eyeing it for a viewing for several weeks now. Once a Marvel die-hard, always a Marvel die-hard, I guess -- even after consciously acknowledging that Marvel movies don't carry the likelihood of success with me that they once did.</p><p>The thing is, there was one thing holding me back: Finishing <i>Ms. Marvel</i>, as I said n point 4 above that I intended to do.</p><p>To recap <i>that</i> one, we started watching it as a family not long after it debuted in the middle of 2022. But after about two episodes, the kids admitted they weren't drawn in by it. My wife and I were disappointed, but not enough to continue watching it on our own after they went to sleep for the night. </p><p>I did try to pick it up again last month, to prepare for the <i>Marvels</i> viewing that I didn't care enough about to prioritize a viewing in the theater. I guess that was too much preparation for too many things I didn't care enough about. A pause of 18 months fatally sapped my interest in finishing <i>Ms. Marvel</i>. I'd watch halves of episodes before either falling asleep or moving on to something else, and in the halves I did watch, even though I watched them consecutively in terms of the narrative, I felt myself confused about what was happening.</p><p>And then I realized a simple thing: I'm not in a place right now to be a Marvel completist both in terms of Marvel television and Marvel movies. It's enough to be a Marvel movie completist, which I am again now. Stuff may have happened in <i>Hawkeye</i> and <i>Secret Invasion</i> and <i>She-Hulk</i> that has some bearing on these movies, but I've gotten by without watching those shows. <i>Ms. Marvel </i>would just be the same.</p><p>And in truth, the only thing I probably needed to know that I didn't get from three-and-a-half episodes of the show was that Kamala Khan did indeed come into her powers and that the members of her family survived the experience. Which is what I would have guessed before I watched one minute of the first episode.</p><p>Okay let's get back to this movie.</p><p>It's fine. I have no interest in getting all hatery and saying how it's a disaster. It's competently made and I didn't find the characters grating in any way. I have actively positive thoughts toward Teyonah Parris as Monica Rambeau and especially the delightful Iman Kellani as Ms. Marvel, essentially our viewer surrogate in this film. They did their level best to try to make both the actress and the character a bit more accessible in terms of Larson as Carol Danvers, surely absorbing some of the backlash that involved Larson being difficult to work with and feeling too arrogant about her character's powers. But I still caught her posing with a superior look on her face one too many times for my liking.</p><p>There's a problem that remains with Captain Marvel, which is that she is, by some descriptions, the most powerful character in the entire MCU, and yet you can't have a protagonist who doesn't have vulnerability. I must admit that I didn't work very hard to piece together the plot of this movie and whether it made sense or was satisfying, but I had a hard time feeling like Carol was in danger at any given moment. At the same time, they have to specifically <i>not</i> have her use some percentage of her powers to solve problems so she doesn't just fly into everything and zap a supernova at it, which it seems she is capable of doing. By being too strong, the character has possibly unsolvable problems in terms of building stakes and creating tension in the narrative.</p><p>I did like the bit about how the three main women switch places, though again, I didn't really understand how or why it was happening and what the rules were. Therefore, I couldn't tell if the gimmick was being used cleverly or fairly. The enjoyment I got there was purely surface level.</p><p>Then I will also admit liking the scene with all the newborn cats, which I won't spoil if you haven't seen it, even if that whole joke is the sort of thing we've already seen in four <i>Men in Black</i> movies.</p><p>So let's drop the qualitative analysis of the movie for a moment and see how it does as a viewing on International Women's Day.</p><p>I feel like there is something smart in the construction of this movie as being divided between three main female characters. Even though more women may be more triggering for the wrong segment of the public, Marvel has not been catering to that segment of the public for years, if ever. What it does for people who are less extreme in their anathema to heroines is it divides it equally between three characters, rather than providing a monolithic single character against whom to expend your negative thoughts. To some this is just woker and woker, but again I say, those people can go suck an egg.</p><p>I also do think there is something useful about the movie in terms of being post the most obvious subtext of any movie involving female superheroes: namely, the chip on its shoulder about being able to do anything a man can do. We've had enough female superhero movies now that those original gestures are now too simplistic of a goal in this type of movie. As with any representation hurdle we must overcome, the first step is to overcome it, and to tell your audience that you are doing so in no uncertain terms, so they're not too thick to get it. Then, you get to a point where the representation alone is enough and you don't have to draw extra attention to why you were fighting for that representation in the first place.</p><p>I think <i>The Marvels</i> is in that spot, which is good. The fact that it doesn't totally succeed -- in fact, that it doesn't even succeed enough to earn the minimum three stars for a recommendation -- isn't on the women, or on director Nia DaCosta, who does a good job with the material in terms of her specific responsibilities. (Though she does share the writing credit with two other women, and that particular trio may not do their job as well as the trio they are writing about.)</p><p>No, <i>The Marvels</i> is a disappointment because 33 MCU movies have raised the bar to impossible heights in terms of what qualifies as something new or interesting. Even the trio of female superheroes is not particularly new, in the wake of that famous scene in <i>Avengers: Endgame</i> where all the female Avengers assembled on the battlefield to walk together in slow motion. And space? I feel like fully half of the ongoing MCU properties are now set in space, even if it is outer space-resembling inner space, like in the last <i>Ant-Man</i> movie.</p><p>I'm glad I watched it on International Women's Day, though, if only for the benefit of that hypothetical bean counter I often reference, who may be taking note of spikes in streams and may correlate that to a day dedicated to women. I still want to appreciate women, even if I didn't appreciate this movie as much as I'd hoped.</p>Derek Armstronghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13750747272647975591noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7877371347086447490.post-65097507881122183952024-03-08T08:19:00.003+11:002024-03-08T11:07:58.381+11:00A public service announcement from the audience<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2_9w7KCD_4E8EWP7HdZdLx_aN0IWua3xLKTC9WyOQwINnZ1RChAUw0nIlBrMXqfxfoBFwVX-ISFqUP9CPrlNW-g3Vv8KpKrW-9M9D3EaXNKOEkKDWzahLV86py_bXLj65J8_zo78FEvv-KyTVzQrMc7X0d0pPqtVp-_9-q0ePyZbooaCXdjCNiW6Mzl83/s1482/how%20to%20have%20sex.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1482" data-original-width="1000" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2_9w7KCD_4E8EWP7HdZdLx_aN0IWua3xLKTC9WyOQwINnZ1RChAUw0nIlBrMXqfxfoBFwVX-ISFqUP9CPrlNW-g3Vv8KpKrW-9M9D3EaXNKOEkKDWzahLV86py_bXLj65J8_zo78FEvv-KyTVzQrMc7X0d0pPqtVp-_9-q0ePyZbooaCXdjCNiW6Mzl83/s320/how%20to%20have%20sex.jpg" width="216" /></a></div>Yesterday after work I went to see Molly Manning Walker's <i>How to Have Sex</i> on its opening day, and felt myself compelled to make a joke to the (female) clerk about whether people are supposed to be embarrassed about buying this ticket. I think I even said something like "I promise I've done it before." Before things started to get awkward I took my ticket and went in.<p></p><p>(As a side note, I wonder if this title will overall do well for the movie's box office or hurt it. On the one hand, it seems to promise to titillate. On the other, you do have to face the person selling you the ticket and actually speak that title out loud, in which moment you can't help but be self-conscious.)</p><p>Greeting me inside the small (about 20 seats) screening room was a set of increasingly interesting sights. </p><p>Of the about seven people scattered throughout the theater, only one struck me as in any way the target audience for this film (and that includes myself, I suppose). She was what appeared to be a mid-20s Black woman with very hip stylings. She might have had a friend with her, she might not. I didn't get a second good look at her later because she was sitting in a row behind me and she left pretty much as soon as the credits started. </p><p>The rest were a truly eclectic bunch:</p><p>A woman who appeared to be in her 60s.</p><p>A man about my age, maybe a little younger, who spent the entire trailers talking on his phone to someone in the area just outside the entrance, where we could easily hear him and were becoming steadily annoyed by his violation of social etiquette, even before the movie had started.</p><p>An older man, though it was hard to tell how old because of his COVID mask, in a fully mechanized wheelchair that was pushed to the right side of the area just in front of the front row, for obvious reasons of accessibility.</p><p>And a much older man in the seat closest to the exit on the left side of the front row, who was at least 75.</p><p>I thought the guy on the phone was going to be our biggest problem, but then this happened:</p><p>At the start of the trailer for the Luca Guadagnino tennis movie <i>Challengers</i> -- whose trailer I have seen about six times now -- the 75-year-old man stood up, faced us, and said something along the lines of this, in a loud and perturbed voice:</p><p>"This movie features a lot of tennis players who smoke. This is a product placement by the tobacco industry. No real tennis players would ever smoke. This is a crappy American movie."</p><p>And then he sat down.</p><p>I considered piping up that Guadagnino was Italian, but thought better of it.</p><p>I'd never seen this sort of thing before. And frankly, it annoyed me. Not because of the message -- sure, it is for the betterment of society if you try to prevent people from smoking -- but because he thought it was his responsibility to send it to us, when at least half of us were over 50 and none of us were likely tennis players. (Actually, I am a tennis player, but he probably wouldn't have known that by looking at me.) Given our collective age, we decided whether we intended to smoke or not a long time ago. </p><p>The funny thing was, this was actually an alternate version of the <i>Challengers</i> trailer than the one I'd seen the other five times, which does indeed feature a lot of casual smoking among these world-class athletes. There isn't all the casual smoking here, but there is a very pointed moment where the tennis player played by Josh O'Connor asks the tennis player played by Zendaya to come outside and have a smoke with him, holding out a dark blue pack of cigarettes.</p><p>As if to purposefully tweak this guy, or perhaps reinforce what he was saying, Zendaya shuts him down and tells him she doesn't smoke. And then there's a long beat and she closes her laptop, I guess indicating that she succumbed to the request. (And because I've seen the other trailer, which reveals the whole story, I know that things don't go particularly well for her, so maybe they were trying to hint at that with this bit in the trailer.)</p><p>When the actual movie started -- and, thank God, the man on the phone finally ended his conversation -- the first thing that happened was that the characters lit up a cigarette every one minute on screen. I thought this was hilarious. The old man may be boycotting <i>Challengers</i>, but the actual movie he came to see featured what I would assume is far more smoking than that film. In the first few minutes alone, the girls humorously commiserate a pack of cigarettes lost to the ocean water when they go for a spontaneous swim, and then when they arrive at their hotel, one of them dumps about half a pack of cigarettes into a frying pan, though I did not entirely understand what she was trying to accomplish there. The rest of the movie features a regular succession of more traditional smoking moments in the midst of drunken hedonism.</p><p>I regularly checked in on the guy for signs of visible annoyance, but I saw none. I did wonder what had brought this cantankerous old coot out to<i> How to Have Sex</i> in the first place. Maybe the aforementioned titillation promised by the title. Dirty old buzzard. </p><p>He did inexplicably leave with about ten minutes remaining in the movie, though he did not appear to be annoyed when he did so, and there was nothing particularly confronting that had just happened on screen to prompt it. Maybe his bladder finally caught up to him.</p><p>Some of the explanation for this motley bunch lies in the fact that the screening was at 4:20, which is before most employed adults get out of work. But most of these people seeing this movie at all was somewhat unusual. </p>Derek Armstronghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13750747272647975591noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7877371347086447490.post-85534692612233013742024-03-05T09:42:00.001+11:002024-03-05T09:42:41.533+11:00Gummy worms and sand worms<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnChFRnyqIUpwOL40LcxsjrIuHzWQQ02xRDC8DL3I4rQIaw0I0dO0v99hPbZsB2BunpvMCDYS007-Dnwl8fPwrUf3zVhLq7EtwKMsNYiySkjjsnqzsJ85b-SmgEgGHH3W-hjmj5m0g2hxVWrdCAtvtS4We1z4uB_kCPNQ40P6LJvhyphenhyphen7eJ0a8oAada4qAH_/s4096/dune%20two.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4096" data-original-width="2764" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnChFRnyqIUpwOL40LcxsjrIuHzWQQ02xRDC8DL3I4rQIaw0I0dO0v99hPbZsB2BunpvMCDYS007-Dnwl8fPwrUf3zVhLq7EtwKMsNYiySkjjsnqzsJ85b-SmgEgGHH3W-hjmj5m0g2hxVWrdCAtvtS4We1z4uB_kCPNQ40P6LJvhyphenhyphen7eJ0a8oAada4qAH_/s320/dune%20two.jpg" width="216" /></a></div>The long-awaited day finally arrived on Sunday.<p></p><p><i>Dune: Part Two</i>.</p><p>It was long-awaited in a couple respects. In one sense, I was waiting for it since the end of the first <i>Dune</i> in late 2021, not because I had to find out how it all turned out -- I had read the book, and these aren't the sorts of movies that leave you on the edge of your seat in terms of the drama. (And having seen the second movie, it's clear that "how it all turned out" is just another stop in the road in what seems to be envisioned as a long <i>Dune</i> franchise.) No, I was waiting for it because being transported to that world was such a surrounding, fulfilling, tactile experience that I wanted more of it. You could say, we go to any movie because we want more of that sort of immersive experience. The movie finished in my #9 spot for the year. </p><p>The other reason the day was long-awaited was that this movie was supposed to come out either three or five months ago, I can't remember which. If memory serves, the delay was due to the writer's strike, though in the end, not many titles actually moved their release date for this reason. Remember the writer's strike?</p><p>And then it sort of felt like a long wait between Thursday, when I would have liked to have seen it, and Sunday, when I actually did get to see it.</p><p>Fortunately, I was able to carve out an ideal 4:15 viewing slot on Sunday, on a suitably large screen at the Sun with a suitably soul-rattling sound system. (That's a phrase I used in my review, which you can find <a href="https://reelgood.com.au/reviews/review-dune-part-two-2024/">here</a>.) </p><p>I don't normally get to go to the movies in the late afternoon, usually requiring a 9 p.m. time slot, which can be a bit of a challenge for a movie that lasts two hours and 45 minutes -- even one as engrossing as this one. But I've started to become conscious of possible times on the weekend when I can sneak in such a viewing, which also includes the first pre-11 a.m. viewing of the day (it was in this time slot that I recently saw <i>The Zone of Interest</i>) and the so-called "quiet time" time slot, since my kids are allowed to have "quiet time," i.e. get back on their screens, around 4:30 on weekend days, but sometimes as early as 4. </p><p>Anyway, I don't have a lot to say about the viewing except for the series of logistics I've already rattled off. I'll let my review speak for itself. </p><p>If you don't want to read the review, well, in short:</p><p>Is this a perfect movie? No.</p><p>Does it still deserve 4.5 stars because of the staggering scope of its achievement? Yes, yes it does.</p><p>Oh! One final thing.</p><p>The subject is a reference to the fact that I had a bag of gummy worms in the movie with me when I watched this movie about giant sand worms. Technically they were gummy snakes, but if you are splitting hairs on the difference between a snake and a worm, you're doing it wrong.</p><p>One survived the entire movie, and at the end, I saw it sitting there, looking up at me from the seat next to me. </p><p>That one went down the hatch too. </p>Derek Armstronghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13750747272647975591noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7877371347086447490.post-51031846079430237512024-03-02T09:10:00.001+11:002024-03-02T09:10:06.688+11:00We're all talking in complete sentences<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjm7wdAzAAwH7pD7YR197KkBGXe9rAfU-tKwuK9rDoe5B0o-C8ygw5fE42fd36Na5srvEuIwaYVh4AEm9-Jy6SGrieu75y23W22DnqSnCJfcNu0spLZKDMchtBIB9547kS11xImWP1dpCUTX69MIMmFhC7YqUGvEWrB3dYuMxQWofOQWBdDyIiT4bYLh0Xm/s512/i%20saw%20the%20tv%20glow.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="512" data-original-width="346" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjm7wdAzAAwH7pD7YR197KkBGXe9rAfU-tKwuK9rDoe5B0o-C8ygw5fE42fd36Na5srvEuIwaYVh4AEm9-Jy6SGrieu75y23W22DnqSnCJfcNu0spLZKDMchtBIB9547kS11xImWP1dpCUTX69MIMmFhC7YqUGvEWrB3dYuMxQWofOQWBdDyIiT4bYLh0Xm/s320/i%20saw%20the%20tv%20glow.jpg" width="216" /></a></div>Horror director Jane Schoenbrun is well acquainted with subjects, predicates and objects.<p></p><p>Two years after her squirmy little horror movie <i>We're All Going to the World's Fair</i>, Schoenbrun has been given some name actors to work with, including star of Jurassic World and Pokemon movies Justice Smith, in <i>I Saw the TV Glow</i>.</p><p>Realizing I had heard her name before and seeing that this also involved looking at screens, I didn't take long after hearing about <i>I Saw the TV Glow</i> to conclude it was from the same person who made <i>We're All Going to the World's Fair</i>. </p><p>But really, it was the similar structures of the titles that clinched it.</p><p>No real comment here, except that we do tend to notice when movie titles are a grammatically complete thought. It's a somewhat irregular occurrence. I don't have a way to test this against the titles I've seen that wouldn't take forever, and if I look only at movies starting with "I," I'll get a sort of reverse confirmation bias because most of those will in fact probably be sentences. (Quick glance: The only ones that aren't are those that start with I and a comma -- such as <i>I, Tonya</i> -- and one other that just doesn't really mean anything: <i>I Origins</i>.)</p><p>This is a pretty flimsy premise for a post because Schoenbrun has one other feature as a director, when she was Dan instead of Jane: 2018's <i>A Self-Induced Hallucination</i>. So that breaks that particular titling convention.</p><p>But this is Jane Schoenbrun, and Jane, in two features, has been consistent in her approach.</p><p>The movie doesn't open until a couple months from now, but the advanced buzz seems to be good. And consider me unusually primed both after <i>World's Fair</i> (which was quite chilling until it petered out into a limp ending) and <i>Skinamarink</i> (which, as I have discussed <i>ad nauseum</i>, was the first horror movie to top my chart last year).</p>Derek Armstronghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13750747272647975591noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7877371347086447490.post-11354971745334428352024-03-01T10:12:00.005+11:002024-03-01T12:46:00.475+11:00February 29th redeemed<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhd3sSq5XxHjl_HKOdaFLPH6j1LinEpe0A_zS4LhfJcb3WU7RAg6RiabMrvfSGwUCtAGuXFO2JAcBrmPBhkV97FSB_agl-PKK7SdI3Pxf2JwGM9hGh7vb9Sda7U5Ltf-FRD6yCuR9ybReGqCKpHG-bBdEUoTQDLPoYvadbJnpMRdXojSn5johMuGw3HCNEe/s1475/from%20justin%20to%20kelly.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1475" data-original-width="1000" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhd3sSq5XxHjl_HKOdaFLPH6j1LinEpe0A_zS4LhfJcb3WU7RAg6RiabMrvfSGwUCtAGuXFO2JAcBrmPBhkV97FSB_agl-PKK7SdI3Pxf2JwGM9hGh7vb9Sda7U5Ltf-FRD6yCuR9ybReGqCKpHG-bBdEUoTQDLPoYvadbJnpMRdXojSn5johMuGw3HCNEe/s320/from%20justin%20to%20kelly.jpg" width="217" /></a></div>Four years ago, I put up a poll in the Flickcharters group on Facebook, asking people which of a dozen terrible movies I should choose as my viewing for February 29th of 2020. It's a tradition that started in 2008 when I happened to watch the Nicolas Cage remake of <i>The Wicker Man</i> on that day, and it birthed the idea that I should be watching something howlingly awful every February 29th. <p></p><p>The Flickcharters made their choice rather definitively, but in the comments section a write-in candidate started gaining traction. It was seconded and thirded and before long, the evidence was overwhelming that the best candidate wasn't in the poll offerings, but was, rather, <i>Christian Mingle</i>, a Christian-themed dating movie starring Lacey Chabert.</p><p>So I watched <i>Christian Mingle</i>. And I sort of liked it.</p><p>I wasn't going to let that happen again.</p><p>So the winner of the 2020 poll, the 2003 film <i>From Justin to Kelly</i>, was my choice for 2024 ... and I couldn't have been happier with that decision.</p><p>I'm not even sure where to start on how bad this movie is, but maybe I should start on how much different a movie like this would be if it had been made today.</p><p>A 2024 movie featuring two <i>American Idol</i> stars would be a cross-promotional dream with all the various social media platforms, and it would get high-profile talent behind the camera -- an up-and-comer with possible music video experience, but either way, someone fresh and full of ideas. The resulting movie, even if ultimately unsuccessful, would have been bouncy and buoyant and probably have the look and feel of something like this year's <i>Mean Girls</i> remake. (Which I haven't seen, but I can make assumptions based on the trailers.)</p><p>The person they did get to direct the movie, Robert Iscove, is not a name I know off the top of my head, but neither is he some hack who stumbled into the job through nepotism. In fact, Iscove had more than 50 of his 65 directing credits (mostly in TV) prior to <i>From Justin to Kelly</i>, and was already 56 years old at the time of its release. Perhaps the clearest example of why he was chosen was that he had directed <i>She's All That</i>, which was a pretty big hit in 1997, even if it does have the dubious legacy of popularizing the instantly dated notion that a woman would turn from ugly to pretty if only she removed her glasses. </p><p>Given the sheer volume of professional experience Iscove brought with him, it's hard to overstate how shabby this movie looks, how inert are its performances, and how flat the whole experience feels.</p><p>Surely, the fact that neither Kelly Clarkson nor Justin Guarini were trained actors had something to do with their lack of charisma (independently) or lack of chemistry (jointly). (During the movie I found my mind wandering and thinking how "chemistry" can be defined as "charisma between two people.") But they are not as bad as they could have been, and might have been propped up a bit by any sort of passable filmmaking technique, or decent choreography or song choices. </p><p>Nope.</p><p>One of the first things you notice about <i>From Justin to Kelly</i> is just how bad the lighting is. That's not something you see anymore on any movie with any modicum of a budget. These actors are not lit to bring out their physical attractiveness -- not just these two, but the physical attractiveness of any of the cast, who are all attractive as this movie takes place in a Hollywood version of spring break. Even the daytime scenes are full of shadow and glare.</p><p>To delve fully into all the things that don't work, I need to set up the plot.</p><p>So Kelly plays Kelly, a waitress in a country (Texas, is it?) bar who also sings to a nightly crowd of two to three drunks sleeping it off. Her two friends, backstabber Alexa (Katherine Bailess) and the sweet Kaya (Anika Noni Rose), convince her to come to Florida for spring break. That's also where Justin (as Justin) has come with his two friends, horndog stud Brandon (Greg Siff) and nerdy Eddie (Brian Dietzen), who is trying to meet up with a girl he met on the internet. Their paths are going to cross way more times than should be possible in an area suffused with probably 15 to 20,000 college-aged kids.</p><p>So here we get into one narrative problem with <i>From Justin to Kelly</i>. The two leads are supposed to be separated after their initial meeting by bad luck (she writes her phone number in lipstick on a paper towel, but it lands in a puddle and becomes unreadable) and the conniving of the bitchy Alexa (who gives Justin her own phone number, pretending it is Kelly's phone number, so she can send him misleading texts and send him on wild goose chases that will allow her to swoop in on Justin instead of her friend). </p><p>When characters are kept apart in a movie for these reasons, it's supposed to increase our investment in their eventual pairing and make us yearn for that to happen. However, after every latest roadblock is introduced, it takes less than two minutes of screen time for them to randomly cross paths again, meaning that whatever narrative value is gained from these roadblocks is immediately frittered away. They don't seem to discuss the reasons they didn't call or arrive at the designated meeting spot the previous time, so it's like they are reset to their default interaction standards without any of what happened before meaning anything. Also, they never manage to learn -- until the very end, of course -- that Alexa has been manipulating and misdirecting them. (A simple reference to any one of several dozen texts would have done the trick.)</p><p>You'd think the relationship would be off to a less-than-magical start given this film's version of a meet cute. Although they have rubbed elbows in big dance numbers before now, Justin and Kelly first speak after meeting in a women's bathroom. He's been chased there because women want the tickets he's handing out to some party, and she's already in there. Under some staging this might have worked, but this is the most drab and boring bathroom the location scouts could have possibly found, and nothing of the short exchange that occurs between them seems like it lays the foundation for an infatuation that will occupy both of them for the rest of the movie. The actors can't sell it, but it's not there in the script, and it lets us know that this sort of lack of a pulse is going to inform the entire film.</p><p>And boy does it ever.</p><p>My wife walked in on what was probably the funniest scene in terms of the cluelessness of the staging.</p><p>In one of their many attempts to overcome the obstacles that have been thrown their way, Justin and Kelly go out on a boat ride. I can't remember how or why he has access to this boat or how he knows how to pilot it, but you need to understand how this is staged in order to understand why it's so funny. So here is a picture:</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8LNyqRKvLOlHqvsvNwDTSR4NpdTfqs_PCXHpV68F9IS3CFJYgXnly-8Oxz3VILI729znZeiinabW6zvg7FpD6aZdi7WVwmC7z99Sim-jEsxVIMoGVZPgT4dS4Og_oPHQsA-9HXvE61kAuk3Q8KXOj21TuxUOXszZ6XKQAUngzkvnNehvoIRClfG705M64/s584/justin%20kelly%20boat.webp" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="316" data-original-width="584" height="173" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8LNyqRKvLOlHqvsvNwDTSR4NpdTfqs_PCXHpV68F9IS3CFJYgXnly-8Oxz3VILI729znZeiinabW6zvg7FpD6aZdi7WVwmC7z99Sim-jEsxVIMoGVZPgT4dS4Og_oPHQsA-9HXvE61kAuk3Q8KXOj21TuxUOXszZ6XKQAUngzkvnNehvoIRClfG705M64/s320/justin%20kelly%20boat.webp" width="320" /></a></div><p>They sing a duet on this boat, but they never leave the configuration you see above, and in fact, she never even turns around to look at him. It's supposed to be a point of optimism in their relationship but the song feels dour, which is exacerbated by the fact that they are not looking at each other and in fact are both as stiff as a board. Making matters worse is that Iscove shoots it from about ten different angles, but because they never move it just draws further attention to their twin senses of rigidity and lifelessness.</p><p>Given the sort of career Clarkson has gone on to have, you might think that the songs she and Justin sing are some real bangers, maybe not "Since You've Been Gone," but at least something befitting a recently anointed diva. Nope. I wouldn't say the songs are horrible in that they violate basic principles of song structure or anything like that, but they are just so mediocre and forgettable, which is also the best description for the scenes that do have some sort of choreography that does not involve two people sitting on a boat staring straight ahead. A final fart in the wind is the closing number, which is quite involved in its choreography, but is a curiously chosen staging of KC and the Sunshine Band's "That's the Way (I Like It)." A good song, to be sure, but not really the vibe you are going for in a big happy ending number where everyone has been paired off successfully and everything's going to turn out alright. (Oops, spoiler alert.) Plus it seems to last for about two full play-throughs of the song, an interminable ending to a movie that is only 81 minutes long.</p><p>Is there anything good in <i>From Justin to Kelly</i>? Maybe "good" is too strong of a word, but I can tell you about something I found in the neighborhood of charming. The only real actor in the cast -- there isn't even some guest star from the older set, a Danny DeVito or someone like that -- is Anika Noni Rose, though she would not become described as such until later on. It's kind of hard to believe Rose went on to appear in films like <i>Dreamgirls</i>, considering that this was her first feature and it might have ended the acting careers of anyone involved (and did for most of the others). But Rose does indeed have ability, and she shows it in a romantic sub plot with a young man named Carlos she meets who works in one of the spring break resorts. (He's played by Jason Yribar, who is also pretty good.) The things that happen in their sub plot are mostly sweet and are the sorts of things you would hope would happen in the A plot, if the script knew what to do with either Justin or Kelly.</p><p>Take away points, though, in another romantic sub plot involving Brandon and a female police officer who keeps issuing him tickets for holding events without permits and gambling on things like a grudge being settled in the form of a duel between two hovercrafts. (Don't get me started on that one.) Since we're naming names, the officer is played by Theresa San-Nicholas. Brandon is a real douchebag, and Siff's performance is probably the third most professional in the movie after the two mentioned in the previous paragraph. You'd expect he'd be a douchebag with a heart of gold but he's just sort of a regular douchebag, always boasting about his female conquests and trying to see a little more female flesh (they hold a whipped cream bikini contest). He tries to seduce the female police officer as well every time they meet -- which is about five times -- so it's no surprise at all that when she finally shows up in the final scene, and he's <i>not</i> doing anything illegal, it's in a bikini and she's finally succumbed to his "charms," such as they are. Yes, retrograde morality on the powers of seduction of a creep were still alive and well in 2003.</p><p>It's hard to understand how Clarkson and Guarini would allow this sort of travesty to be made, except that they weren't famous at all a year before this, and of course she couldn't yet know she was really going places. (Guarini, not so much.) Today's recently minted <i>American Idol</i> winner and <i>American Idol</i> finalist would be much more conscious of burnishing their brand, as they would already have millions of followers on Instagram and would expect the world to be at their feet. Here, Justin and Kelly look like novices pushed into a disaster on terrible advice, powerless to do anything about it.</p><p>One final note on the universally agreed-upon awfulness that is this movie. <i>From Justin to Kelly</i> has a user rating of 1.9 out of 10 on IMDB. Usually when you see that sort of rating, it's because a bunch of trolls have gotten on IMDB to give 0/10 on a movie whose subject matter they find politically objectionable or that challenges their sense of the primacy of the patriarchy. That could not possibly be the case with this movie, so it just means that everyone thinks it's bad. </p><p>I could go on, but February 29th is over, and now it's time to get back to our regularly scheduled viewing.</p><p>But I'd be lying if I didn't admit I'm already thinking about potential candidates for 2028, now that I've gotten this tradition back on track. </p>Derek Armstronghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13750747272647975591noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7877371347086447490.post-13063852221874073072024-02-29T09:36:00.004+11:002024-02-29T16:21:59.116+11:00Driven away<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikSmgeQrIbY1SKyUGXzEgKVsR3FrZoifiFc7N-VF0PbzY2hskiqsrFn6FWZgdcuEoysRwJ_4ZjHVgkLfeevn634lUJ44OKvdGQqubwrDPJ2HRjdHWe4pPX4eijoYrMdRNUYCjcKyRRDFDhYCqMksj7thHhSjckmKxM1-VSbIjyvswmGxVJRp78GMzuRaWh/s1200/drive%20away%20dolls.webp" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="810" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikSmgeQrIbY1SKyUGXzEgKVsR3FrZoifiFc7N-VF0PbzY2hskiqsrFn6FWZgdcuEoysRwJ_4ZjHVgkLfeevn634lUJ44OKvdGQqubwrDPJ2HRjdHWe4pPX4eijoYrMdRNUYCjcKyRRDFDhYCqMksj7thHhSjckmKxM1-VSbIjyvswmGxVJRp78GMzuRaWh/s320/drive%20away%20dolls.webp" width="216" /></a></div>Australia is, or at least once was, known for letting movies hang around in the cinema for ages. I frequently marveled at how a movie released in March was still available in August, and sometimes commented on it here. (That might be a slight exaggeration, but only slight.)<p></p><p>You know <i>Drive-Away Dolls</i> isn't great when it is already retreating to the smallest screening rooms and way fewer showtimes after only a week in theaters. </p><p><i>I</i> know <i>Drive-Away Dolls</i> isn't great because I saw it yesterday.</p><p>I know <i>Drive-Away Dolls</i> <u>really</u> isn't great because a beguiling performance by Geraldine Viswanathan was only enough to bring it <i>up</i> to two stars. (You can read my full review <a href="https://reelgood.com.au/reviews/review-drive-away-dolls-2024/">here</a>.)</p><p>There were some lesbians in my audience who seemed to be enjoying it, so I know there is at least a possibility I would have liked it more if I had been giving it the pass you give movies that speak very specifically to something about you. Like as soon as they make the world's first movie about fantasy baseball, I'm sure I will give it five stars on Letterboxd, no matter how shit it might be.</p><p>But I'm not going to sit here and berate myself for not being queer enough to like <i>Drive-Away Dolls</i>. I think it's just a bad movie. </p><p>And I guess most audiences do too, considering that my Wednesday showing (after last Thursday's debut) was in the smallest screening room at Cinema Kino, and when I checked the Sun in Yarraville to see if there was a more optimal showtime to catch on my way home from work, I noticed that the day's latest showing had been at 1:45.</p><p>It's now another Thursday release day -- <i>Dune 2</i> comes out today, very exciting -- and <i>Drive-Away Dolls</i> has survived at both of these theaters. It's even got a nighttime screening at the Sun, though only the 6:50 slot, not the primetme slot. </p><p>At Kino, it is playing only once, at 1:20.</p><p>So what drove me -- and presumably others -- away from <i>Drive-Away Dolls</i>?</p><p>If you followed the link to my review, you already know, but it's two words:</p><p>Margaret Qualley.</p><p>Like mother, like daughter I suppose -- or maybe, dislike mother, dislike daughter.</p><p>I'm not going to make a whole post out of this because I already regret the traction that my post "Anybody but Andie MacDowell" gets. I guess any traffic to your site is good traffic, but the internet seems to have glommed on to my posts that allow them to indulge in some sort of negative take on an actress. My post about Gaby Hoffman gets a lot of engagement, and the one about Andie MacDowell I wrote in 2010 has had 7,835 views and 21 comments. </p><p>The premise of that post was that if anyone other than Andie MacDowell had appeared in two personal favorites -- <i>Four Weddings and a Funeral </i>and <i>Groundhog Day</i> -- then I might like those movies even better. (Though I also ended up saying that if changing a single thing about them made me like them any bit less, I wouldn't risk it.) I got into a few specific things I don't like about her as a performer. I won't rehash them here.</p><p>The same things I don't like about Andie MacDowell, I don't like about Margaret Qualley. But Qualley doesn't have a great movie propping her up a bit -- or not one where she plays a central role, anyway.</p><p>I saw Qualley in several movies (<i>Palo Alto</i>, <i>The Nice Guys</i>, <i>Death Note</i>) before I really made note of her or her connection to MacDowell. I really like <i>The Nice Guys</i> but I don't even remember what her role was in it. I don't think I had made the MacDowell connection yet either with <i>Once Upon a Time in Hollywood</i>, but I do remember Qualley being one of Manson's crazies, which seemed appropriate since there is something in her eyes I don't like. Interestingly, Sydney Sweeney was also a Manson crazy and I have gone on to love her. Not so much Qualley.</p><p>By the time of Claire Denis' <i>Stars at Noon</i>, I knew she was MacDowell's daughter and I really, really didn't like this movie. As one of the two main characters (along with Taylor Swift's ex-boyfriend Joe Alwyn), Qualley bore the brunt of my dislike. A similar two-hander -- a lot more of a two-hander than <i>Stars at Noon</i> -- was last year's <i>Sanctuary</i>, parts of which I liked. Overall, it was too much time with Margaret Qualley. She was in a top 12 movie for me last year, <i>Poor Things</i>, but see my previous comments about the amount of screen time she gets. Not much in <i>Poor Things</i>.</p><p>And now <i>Drive-Away Dolls</i>, where she's turned up to Nigel Tufnel's 11 with her exaggerated southern mannerisms and cartoonish love of pussy.</p><p>I already found a couple creative ways to rip her in that review so I will stop talking about Margaret Qualley now.</p><p>Because Ethan Coen also deserves a significant helping of my scorn.</p><p>Another observation I made in that review was that if we were to take the Coen brothers' two solo efforts as indications of the sorts of tone each brother prefers, we'd conclude that Joel was more responsible for the direction of a film like <i>No Country for Old Men</i> (which is not one of my Coen favorites) while Ethan would be more responsible for something like <i>Raising Arizona</i> (which is not only my favorite Coen movie of all time, it's my favorite <i>movie </i>of all time). </p><p>The trouble is, there is a far greater range of outcomes for a movie in the <i>Raising Arizona</i> mold. There is worshipping it as I do, and there is hating it, which is how I feel about something like <i>Burn After Reading</i>. Zaniness is great unless it's terrible. </p><p>The zaniness in <i>Drive-Away Dolls</i> is terrible, and Qualley has been asked to personify it from start to finish. (Sorry, I said I would stop banging on about her.)</p><p>The final reference I will make to my review is that I said that apparently Joel does not need Ethan but Ethan needs Joel. (I can't be accused of stealing good lines if I am stealing them from myself.) I may not prefer that the output of the Coens is all in the mold of <i>The Tragedy of Macbeth</i>, but that film did make my top ten in 2021. And if <i>DAD</i> is any indication, Ethan may no longer be able to hit the high end of the range of outcomes for this sort of movie.</p><p>I'm regretting, now, the decision to stack my chips on a viewing of <i>Drive-Away Dolls</i> yesterday when I might have been better served to use my wife's good graces to get to an opening night viewing of <i>Dune 2 </i>tonight.</p><p>Then again, lo and behold, it's February 29th again -- meaning the revival of my tradition, which dates back to 2008, to watch the worst movie I can find.</p><p>Tune in tomorrow to see what that ended up being. </p><p>And I hope it's worse than <i>Drive-Away Dolls</i>. I really do. </p>Derek Armstronghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13750747272647975591noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7877371347086447490.post-82980440777902370582024-02-27T07:37:00.001+11:002024-02-27T07:37:07.705+11:00Jonathan Glazer's film-per-decade approach<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMgTaXcCTnQXLXd0oLRy-RxsKhxNsRGl4xWLox82d3-rqdtEqpcpuG0srFtQfAauuT_tzRHqDexMF6Gtff5vRdTvNXuopMjmrnIRIekb2NAqCd5IwTCQfFMkrdQHCQq5a3M8K5n02tpBg6_IKab922CCzg0bK1QRGZ6a3H_6lUh0gG2n7Tkdx6GhYVXZXB/s2000/zone%20of%20interest.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2000" data-original-width="1250" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMgTaXcCTnQXLXd0oLRy-RxsKhxNsRGl4xWLox82d3-rqdtEqpcpuG0srFtQfAauuT_tzRHqDexMF6Gtff5vRdTvNXuopMjmrnIRIekb2NAqCd5IwTCQfFMkrdQHCQq5a3M8K5n02tpBg6_IKab922CCzg0bK1QRGZ6a3H_6lUh0gG2n7Tkdx6GhYVXZXB/s320/zone%20of%20interest.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>I doubt it could be intentional or likely something he's ever considered -- he doesn't seem like the sort of person to dwell on superficial patterns -- but Jonathan Glazer appears determined to grace us with his talents only once per decade.<p></p><p>"But Vance," you say. "Glazer put out two films in the 2000s, <i>Sexy Beast</i> (2000) and<i> Birth </i>(2004)." (Yes, you include years in parentheses when you speak.)</p><p>Ah but did he?</p><p>If you believe all those smartypants who wanted to be pedantic when the year changed from 1999 to 2000, the 21st century didn't start until 2001 -- meaning that the year 2000 is technically the final year of the 1990s. No one actually really thinks of it that way, but if you are being as accurate as possible, it's true. (I didn't see and rank <i>Sexy Beast</i> until 2001, but it played festivals in 2000.)</p><p>In any case, the point is, Glazer does not make very many movies. And if he were to reveal after making his final film in 2042 that he had purposefully made only one film per decade, I wouldn't be surprised. If Quentin Tarantino can decide he's going to make exactly ten features, Glazer's hypothetical mission statement might not be much different in concept.</p><p>Which is why the fact that I didn't love <i>The Zone of Interest</i> is particularly disappointing.</p><p>Oh, I started out loving it. For about the first 30 minutes, I imagined the post I'm currently writing would be entitled "The movie that would have been my #1 of 2023." But Glazer made a couple choices in the direction the narrative went that just didn't really work for me. I don't oppose them on moral grounds -- I understand there is some outrage out there about how this subject matter is handled, but I haven't delved into it. I oppose them on storytelling grounds only.</p><p>If you want to read my full review now that the film has finally released in Australia, it's <a href="https://reelgood.com.au/reviews/review-the-zone-of-interest-2023/">here</a>.</p><p>Will I now have to wait until 2031 -- or, if we are considering the ten-year gap between <i>Under the Skin</i> and <i>The Zone of Interest</i> to be the new standard, as late as 2033 -- to get another of Glazer's incomparable conceptions of the world we live in?</p><p>It's hard to say. I'd hoped to be surprised and go to IMDB and see another project in pre-production. I mean, even Terrence Malick eventually started becoming more prolific, and then he became so with a vengeance. (On the music side, this can also be said for my favorite band, Nine Inch Nails.)</p><p>Alas, no. And if we are to take his previous patterns as a prediction of future patterns, we'll have to satisfy ourselves with shorts and music videos and other bits of ephemera that occupy a creative person between major symphonies. </p><p>Before I go, I should circle back on two bits of business:</p><p>1) You may recall that earlier in the month, I watched the aforementioned <i>Sexy Beast</i> as the inaugural film for my bi-monthly <i>Audient Outliers</i> series. At the time, I stated that I chose to watch that before <i>Zone of Interest</i>, even though I could have worked it out in the reverse order, because if I didn't like <i>Zone of Interest</i>, not liking<i> Sexy Beast</i> wouldn't be such an outlier. If you didn't follow the link to my review previously, you won't know that I ended up giving <i>Zone of Interest</i> an 8/10, only dropping from a 9/10 in the last 20 minutes of the film. (I actually may have dropped all the way from a 10/10, or five stars, in those last 20 minutes.) So at least you know <i>Sexy Beast</i> remains a valid first choice for that series. </p><p>2) This is a potential future entry in another series, <i>Audient Bridesmaids</i>, but as discussed a few days ago in the post about <i>The Prince of Tides</i>, we don't actually know for sure that <i>The Zone of Interest</i> will <i>not</i> win best picture this year. So to save myself the hassle, I'll limit the reference to that series to the two sentences you are currently reading. </p>Derek Armstronghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13750747272647975591noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7877371347086447490.post-22360269946630674072024-02-26T07:01:00.001+11:002024-02-26T07:01:48.031+11:00The end of a different Affair<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiznNQkzj5B7S_oYii4rXexW3tI6xM4olC8IJHPLFdn_O1QpKKUnZOjEbeBFFg0biN1c0Y2X0-9_vu90njQfv4e_t4GpIm59hz4XOZMrSrU3jaGA1ki8GquHMN_jhzDGtq5GG6WRVvmttfwTwnSLdlVTEbNe4HHw_pQovCmCSlNfzs4c-hej6VueNx_hTRn/s654/the%20end%20of%20the%20affair.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="654" data-original-width="424" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiznNQkzj5B7S_oYii4rXexW3tI6xM4olC8IJHPLFdn_O1QpKKUnZOjEbeBFFg0biN1c0Y2X0-9_vu90njQfv4e_t4GpIm59hz4XOZMrSrU3jaGA1ki8GquHMN_jhzDGtq5GG6WRVvmttfwTwnSLdlVTEbNe4HHw_pQovCmCSlNfzs4c-hej6VueNx_hTRn/s320/the%20end%20of%20the%20affair.jpg" width="207" /></a></div>With all my talk of <i>Love Affair</i> and <i>An Affair to Remember</i> two weeks ago on this blog, you'd think Sunday night's viewing of <i>The End of the Affair</i> might have something to do with that.<p></p><p>You'd be wrong, and it would be a different <i>End of the Affair</i> than you might think.</p><p>In December I read Graham Greene's celebrated 1951 novel <i>The End of the Affair</i>, which was recommended to me by a friend who called it his favorite book. Since I'd actually borrowed his copy, I moved it straight to the top of my reading list in order to avoid one of those "perpetual loan" situations we all dread. </p><p>I really liked the book. Not a personal favorite maybe, but quite a quick read and quite an anguished look inside the head of a narrator full of jealousy and loathing, which I hadn't remembered being the default condition of Ralph Fiennes' character in the 1999 Neil Jordan film, where he was opposite Julianne Moore. Nor had I remembered the story was so much about spiritual yearning, involving a promise to God and then a desperate urge not to believe in that God in order to break that promise.</p><p>Usually when I finish reading a book that has a well-known film version, I watch the film version pretty soon afterward, whether I'd already seen it or not. Therefore, I expected to queue up the Jordan film, which I'd also quite liked, pretty soon after the start of January.</p><p>That being my busy time of year in terms of viewings, though, I hadn't gotten to it until Sunday night.</p><p>But when I couldn't find it on any of my streaming services, including the streaming service everyone has (Internet Archive), I turned to iTunes, where I noticed not one, but two filmed versions of Greene's novel to choose from. </p><p>Instead of choosing the one I'd seen, I spontaneously decided to choose the one I hadn't seen.</p><p>That's the 1955 version directed by Edward Dmytryk whose poster you see above. It stars the always fascinating Deborah Kerr, Van Johnson (whom I've seen plenty of times, but whose films I could not identify without the assistance of IMDB) and perhaps most importantly in terms of clinching the decision for me, Peter Cushing, who played Grand Moff Tarkin in <i>Star Wars</i>. </p><p>And I think I liked it even more than Jordan's version.</p><p>I wasn't sure that would be the case at the start. Dmytryk's film, from a screenplay by Lenore Coffee, tells the story of Henry and Sarah Miles and Maurice Bendrix chronologically, which is a departure from a book published only four years earlier. In the book, we meet narrator Bendrix, appropriately, after his affair with Sarah has already ended. From my limited memory of Jordan's film, that's where that film starts as well -- and perhaps one of the reasons Jordan wanted to adapt the material was to correct the "mistake" made by Dmytryk and Coffee. It definitely seemed like it would be the less courageous choice, to feed this classic novel, which at the time was really only a contemporary novel, to audiences in the most common chronology available that they would be able to understand most easily.</p><p>By the end of the film, though, I was so wrapped up in the characters, in the performances, and in the choices made to adapt the book that I found myself giving the film 4.5 stars on Letterboxd, half a star higher than the admittedly flawed 4-star rating for Jordan's film -- flawed because I gave it out retroactively, some dozen years after I'd seen it.</p><p>Is this one of those recency bias things, or a case of me already trying to stack the deck for next year's "ten best movies I saw in 2024 that weren't from 2024?" Or another sort of bias, the "I just read this book and therefore would be more favorably inclined than average toward an adaptation of it" sort of bias?</p><p>Possibly. But Coffee and her director made all the right moves here, which I won't discuss in detail because it's likely you haven't recently read this book or seen either version of the movie, so it would fall on deaf ears.</p><p>One thing I am wondering, though, is whether this means there will be one more <i>Affair</i> in my near future. Now it feels like I must rewatch Jordan's version. If comparing a recently read book and its film adaptation is a good exercise on a blog -- or really, just a good cinephile exercise that helps expand your appreciation of the screenwriting process -- then comparing that book with two <i>different</i> adaptations, separated in time by 44 years, is even better. </p>Derek Armstronghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13750747272647975591noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7877371347086447490.post-19737433550515939032024-02-25T08:12:00.006+11:002024-02-25T08:20:25.537+11:00Vivarium is so getting that exemption<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFFa6z0XGmxrlkjdXVs0yQnYQjabO3wuiiRc4Ax2VsLVCU9w15ItFRlrJKRnAd6ts3UO93cht488xG0cULcHe7nfuKNmaupXAuvJbYlcndgieyMpMhq7H1MwQi_HwhQ55xvSE4czRR2GxddIX9GLMJ3P8MlQyVwMqwb2aCXHe7W6GDqhAXNh9y9r4I9wEx/s1200/vivarium.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="840" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFFa6z0XGmxrlkjdXVs0yQnYQjabO3wuiiRc4Ax2VsLVCU9w15ItFRlrJKRnAd6ts3UO93cht488xG0cULcHe7nfuKNmaupXAuvJbYlcndgieyMpMhq7H1MwQi_HwhQ55xvSE4czRR2GxddIX9GLMJ3P8MlQyVwMqwb2aCXHe7W6GDqhAXNh9y9r4I9wEx/s320/vivarium.jpg" width="224" /></a></div>It's still early in the decade, but increasingly less so with every passing moment.<p></p><p>We've all just started watching movies from the fifth release year of the 2020s, which means there are only five more to go. The fact that most of us have seen only a handful of 2024 movies is what allows us to still think of this as the early part of the decade. A year from now, we will be officially midway. If the 20s were our age rather than an agreed upon convention for denoting the passage of time, first established more than 2,000 years ago based on the birth year of a person who claimed to be the son of God, we'd be calling ourselves in our mid-20s already.</p><p>And for an obsessive list maker like me, it causes me to ponder the paucity of serious contenders for my #1 movie of the 2020s. </p><p>It makes for a very interesting contrast with the 2010s. At this same juncture last decade, four of my eventual top five movies of the decade had already been released, and all four of my top four. Only my #5, <i>Tanna</i>, still had its release on the horizon, in the year ending in 6 (2016). Three of the top four were all from the very first year of the decade (2010). </p><p>I can't see the movies of the early 2020s dominating in this same fashion, unless it is going to be a really weak rest of the decade. I've named a #1 film in each of the first four years and I've loved those films, but each time I've anointed one of them, I've recognized that it was not a serious candidate to finish the decade at #1 -- and my secret hope was that none of these four titles would actually penetrate my top ten. They were the best of their year but of course that's all relative.</p><p>This is where <i>Vivarium </i>comes in.</p><p>I rewatched <i>Vivarium</i> on Friday night for the first time since 2020, having set myself the goal of scrolling until I found a heretofore undetermined title for my Friday night viewing. It didn't take long on Amazon Prime to see Lorcan Finnegan's film pop up and decide it was time for my third viewing. </p><p><i>Vivarium</i> was, technically speaking, my #3 movie of 2019. This was because I saw it at MIFF in 2019, well in advance of the rest of the viewing public, who saw it on its wide release in 2020 or sometime after that on video. But I gave it five stars without hesitation, and if I had just seen it in 2020 like everyone else, there would have been no doubt of its appropriateness to be ranked alongside all my other 2020 films. In fact, I feel pretty confident that it would have been my #1 movie of 2020, ahead of <i>I'm Thinking of Ending Things</i>. (Though how interesting would <i>that</i> have been as a 1-2 punch of noodle fryers.)</p><p>And as I thought about it, I thought <i>Vivarium</i> might actually have taken each of the next three #1s as well, if it had been released in those years. As I write this, I don't actually know whether <i>Vivarium</i> is ranked above or below those movies on my Flickchart, so let's find out right now in real time. I'll list each as a hypothetical duel based on the rankings they already have, rather than making this decision as though it were a live Flickchart duel, and you'll see which one is higher when I present the result: </p><p><i>Vivarium</i> vs. <i>I'm Thinking of Ending Things</i> - <i>Ending Things</i> wins, 182 to 355<br /><i>Vivarium</i> vs. <i>Our Friend</i> - <i>Our Friend</i> wins, 209 to 355<br /><i>Vivarium </i>vs. <i>The Whale</i> - <i>The Whale</i> wins, 227 to 355<br /><i>Vivarium</i> vs. <i>Skinamarink</i> - <i>Vivarium</i> wins, 355 to 408</p><p>Not a very conclusive result in what I was hoping to prove, since <i>Vivarium</i> is only fourth ranked out of these five films. </p><p>But I think this does indicate an interesting subconscious bias on my part. I believe the first three #1s of the decade were added to my Flickchart <i>after</i> I had already crowned them the best of their year, meaning I was inclined toward a confirmation bias and to elevate these films into comparatively august positions on my chart. <i>Skinamarink</i> was, if memory serves, the only of these movies to be ranked before it was officially named the best of its year.</p><p>In any case, if these movies came up against each other organically, I could see myself picking <i>Vivarium</i> in any of the four duels -- especially now that my third viewing reminded me how great it is. The film may have suffered a mild setback in my personal feelings during that second viewing, in which I think I forced my wife to watch it with me, as that was something I did in 2020 a lot more than I do now. When she inevitably didn't like it as much as I did, I think it made me a little more critical of it.</p><p>No such problem on this viewing. I was audibly laughing at twisted absurdities and saying things like "Oh my God," especially anything and everything related to that bizarre little kid. Not really a kid, as Jesse Eisenberg points out at one point, with a resigned sense of loathing: "That's not a boy." In fact, one of my big takeaways about <i>Vivarium</i> on this viewing -- and we might go into mild <b>spoiler territory</b> here -- is that the things that are observing our two protagonists may not be aliens, but rather, AI. That likely wouldn't have been what Finnegan was thinking in 2019, but today, it seems like an obvious conclusion to reach. The ways they get this "boy" wrong are very similar to the way an AI creates humans with extra fingers. This gives the film a whole creepy new interpretation that the director mightn't have even considered, which is one of the things good art is capable of doing. </p><p>I won't go into too many more details about the movie itself because the purpose of this post is not to synopsize <i>Vivarium</i> or specifically to try to get you to see it, if you have not already.</p><p>What <i>is</i> the purpose of this post, if I can finally get to it?</p><p>It's to remind myself that I did not initially consider <i>Vivarium </i>eligible for the best of the 2020s. Like <i>Agora </i>the decade before it -- a film with a 2009 release year in its native country, but that I didn't see and rank until 2010 -- <i>Vivarium</i> had slipped into that crack between decades, not quite a 2019 movie but not quite a 2020 movie, and because I compiled my best of the 2010s list <i>after</i> I saw it, I felt like it had missed out on its one and only shot.</p><p>Now, I think there's a plausible reason to reconsider it -- to call it a 2020 movie even though it is listed on my 2019 lists, and is definitively associated with that release year by my own rules for determining such things. </p><p>You may recall, though it's more likely that you do not, that I considered the <i>Vivarium</i> question in my post for the best of the 2010s. Unlike the other three movies that narrowly missed consideration due to similar release year ambiguities -- <i>Agora, Mother</i> and <i>Mr. Nobody -- Vivarium </i>was the only film that missed because of a future release ambiguity (post 2019), not a past release ambiguity (pre 2010). Here is what I wrote about it:</p><p>"<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-size: 14.85px;">The last is a film that had only festival premieres in 2019, including MIFF where I saw it, but for most of the world will be a 2020 film, meaning I have decided to consider it for the next decade even though I have already ranked it in my 2019 year-end list. We'll see how I handle the release year in parenthesis dilemma ten years from now."</span> </p><p>Well there you go. Just as I didn't check my Flickchart rankings before starting this post, I obviously didn't read this previous post, or remember what I had concluded from it, before I started writing either. </p><p>So I had already made the decision that <i>Vivarium</i> could <i>not</i> slip through the cracks between decades, that it would be considered as part of the 2020s, despite the aforementioned disconnect between putting a 2019 release year in parentheses whenever I mention the film, and then including it for a consideration in a decade whose other movies start with a 2 rather than a 1.</p><p>Well, maybe not <i>whenever</i> I mention it. As you will see if you are reading this post relatively soon after I've written it, I have decide to challenge my own sense of the rules by listing the release year of <i>Vivarium</i> as 2020 in my "most recently revisited" section in the right margin. It is an ephemeral choice, as it will be gone as soon as I rewatch three more films, but I do it symbolically, out of recognition that, indeed, I am making the decision -- or rather, reinforcing a previously made decision -- to grant an exemption to <i>Vivarium</i> for consideration as part of the best of the 2020s.</p><p>Because who wants to get to decade's end and have a top ten bereft of the sorts of movies that decorated that most elite tier last decade? Here is a reminder of those titles:</p><p>10. <i>Under the Skin</i><br />9. <i>First Reformed</i><br />8. <i>The Blackcoat's Daughter</i><br />7. <i>Inside Out</i><br />6. <i>Like Father, Like Son</i><br />5. <i>Tanna</i><br />4. <i>The Social Network</i><br />3. <i>Rabbit Hole</i><br />2. <i>Spring Breakers</i><br />1. <i>Tangled</i><br /><br />As of right now, all of those movies are better than any of my 2020 contenders, <i>Vivarium</i> included. (And if <i>Vivarium</i> <u>does</u> make my top ten of the 2020s, that'll mean two straight top tens for Eisenberg, star of <i>The Social Network</i>.)</p><p>Here's hoping the 2020s will be a backloaded decade. </p>Derek Armstronghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13750747272647975591noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7877371347086447490.post-55112551504399795172024-02-24T07:35:00.003+11:002024-02-24T07:35:39.834+11:00A steady progression toward my demise<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQxlCIXzY-0VeFcOq9gVYSBBm08GT2L58H__OhUvPGMVEs4s2RnGXE12rCeDBW49AH6Sub31B0UXnap0TcHs_FsX-qniMRMvtvij8eGqB1ZTmaVhde4V7xrsj4LrXiD-qJrxoHEd9sau1Hn5-Yv3c0Uav5wvBoP7ekAQCXIWvVaAwR-ZEPHnFtrtnofmtn/s387/sean%20penn%20carlitos%20way.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="374" data-original-width="387" height="193" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQxlCIXzY-0VeFcOq9gVYSBBm08GT2L58H__OhUvPGMVEs4s2RnGXE12rCeDBW49AH6Sub31B0UXnap0TcHs_FsX-qniMRMvtvij8eGqB1ZTmaVhde4V7xrsj4LrXiD-qJrxoHEd9sau1Hn5-Yv3c0Uav5wvBoP7ekAQCXIWvVaAwR-ZEPHnFtrtnofmtn/w200-h193/sean%20penn%20carlitos%20way.JPG" width="200" /></a></div>You know those movie characters who get injured a number of times during the course of the movie, so when they do finally get killed once and for all, you don't feel as great a sense of loss because they were already 85% of the way there anyway?<p></p><p>I kind of feel like this is me since I turned 50. </p><p>First there was the loss of my big toenail on my left foot last November, followed five days later by the breaking of that same toe, which I discussed in <a href="https://theaudient.blogspot.com/2023/11/toe-trauma-follows-me.html">this post</a>. This was about three weeks after my birthday, mind you.</p><p>Then a few weeks ago, I fell while climbing up a ladder from the water at a pier near my house. I won't get into all the details, but let's just say that a kid behind me literally nipping at my toes caused me to hurry and lose my grip. Fortunately, he was alright. I was not. Even though I thought it was a clean fall, broken nicely by the water, the next day I noticed pains in my left hip, thigh and knee. Yes, that's the same leg as the repeatedly abused toe, whose nail is now a hideous sight that I cover with a bandaid anytime I'm at the beach or in mixed company who are going to have to stare at this monstrosity. Anyway, it took nearly three weeks to feel like I'm close to 100%, although I still have some numbness in my heel and some pain in my ankle that I think were side effects of the original injuries.</p><p>What prompted me to write this post, though, was that yesterday, I hurt my back just walking across the room in my house. </p><p>I have no idea what caused this injury. I didn't step wrong. I didn't run into anything. All the sudden it just screamed out at me, and I ended up rubbing some Deep Heat on it.</p><p>Just put me out of my misery, already.</p>Derek Armstronghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13750747272647975591noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7877371347086447490.post-76441909410924297582024-02-23T08:35:00.000+11:002024-02-23T08:35:28.685+11:00The amount of time it takes to fold laundry<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPSH_6fu4dcMHKUHoQvhV0LL4FxvvjzyEIKnHZC8HTEHGz4PfgjB6UmFq9UGxgLKimyU9xIkBBnbjmS9DB0eLYb5ayqvt36o8EmXEsqDxBNNrHCG5pmong5QI9dR2vhi1MB2ekftASwqX6-Cc4QZqpyrDrjZRPoulGMuusViYWLfYgshshiPmOcZIux91G/s1481/rustin.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1481" data-original-width="1000" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPSH_6fu4dcMHKUHoQvhV0LL4FxvvjzyEIKnHZC8HTEHGz4PfgjB6UmFq9UGxgLKimyU9xIkBBnbjmS9DB0eLYb5ayqvt36o8EmXEsqDxBNNrHCG5pmong5QI9dR2vhi1MB2ekftASwqX6-Cc4QZqpyrDrjZRPoulGMuusViYWLfYgshshiPmOcZIux91G/s320/rustin.jpg" width="216" /></a></div>In listening to a recent episode of <i>Filmspottin</i>g, I became acquainted again with a type of movie co-host Adam Kempenaar has put forth into our taxonomy of movie types: the type of movie he likes to watch while folding laundry.<p></p><p>I totally get the concept, and the movie they were discussing, <i>Rustin</i>, totally fits that description. It's kind of like filler between movies you watch more intentionally. Pleasant, but not a needle mover in terms of movies you will one day consider personal favorites. (Unless, of course, the movie really surprises you, in which case you regret the way you underestimated it.)</p><p>I did wonder, though: Exactly how much laundry does Adam Kempenaar's family have?</p><p>More than most, to be sure. From having listened to Adam for more than a dozen years now, I've come to learn a fair amount about his family, including the fact that they have (I believe this is correct) four biological children and one adopted child. It could be five biological children. Anyway, it's a lot.</p><p>Still, is it enough to spend a whole movie folding laundry?</p><p>Even if every piece of clothing every family member had worn during a week's time were washed within a few days of each other and placed in a large pile for folding -- this large pile sits on one of the chairs in our living room in our house -- I still can't envision more than about 25 minutes of laundry folding. Meaning that even in the shortest of movies, you still have to find another mindless activity for the remaining hour.</p><p>Plus it's likely less than that, as I am pretty sure his oldest is off at college now. </p><p>I've actually watched a movie while folding laundry before, but in my house, 15 minutes is the most amount of the movie this activity could occupy. Granted, I do have either three or four fewer children than he does.</p><p>If I'm really trying to pull off this sort of multi-tasking, the better activity for me is ironing. In my closet at any given time, I have at least ten and probably closer to 15 shirts I never wear because the fabrics that comprise them require ironing for them to be worn for anything more than the most informal occasions. Instead of doing that ironing, I usually just don't wear them.</p><p>However, maybe it's time for another good ironing session, which really could take that whole movie, and probably I'd still only have half of those shirts looking good by the end.</p><p>Thank goodness for polyester blends, I say. </p>Derek Armstronghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13750747272647975591noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7877371347086447490.post-58677955092575402582024-02-22T09:42:00.001+11:002024-02-22T10:22:14.009+11:00Audient Bridesmaids: The Prince of Tides<p><i></i></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzl_7qjb2KPYwbVbpH4yXS9mF6yHEQ2I0kivKGRRBGBNlukmfzCEoEy2CSIZ01h5JssdVax-Vg_LsZbJiFaLjANX6RHmRTggLZf-_9w_IaAAx4f2QbmMXsq_UaYUUPUYqG3gsD4nutKk0lVcQSE3rbIM6cTv1YZ3LnNetVt5M4KJQzI2gKviy59GnXVCxM/s1280/prince-of-tides-poster.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="960" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzl_7qjb2KPYwbVbpH4yXS9mF6yHEQ2I0kivKGRRBGBNlukmfzCEoEy2CSIZ01h5JssdVax-Vg_LsZbJiFaLjANX6RHmRTggLZf-_9w_IaAAx4f2QbmMXsq_UaYUUPUYqG3gsD4nutKk0lVcQSE3rbIM6cTv1YZ3LnNetVt5M4KJQzI2gKviy59GnXVCxM/s320/prince-of-tides-poster.jpg" width="240" /></a></i></div><i>This is the latest in a periodic series in which I watch best picture nominees I haven't seen, in reverse chronological order.</i><p></p><p>What does a cinephile do when he's finished all his February viewing commitments by the 20th of the month?</p><p>Why, continue a recurring series that hasn't had its latest entry in nearly 14 months, of course.</p><p>I haven't progressed very far, in total, in <i>Audient Bridesmaids</i>, since announcing it at the end of March 2022 and watching the first entry (<i>Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close</i>) a week later. I did get in my second viewing (<i>Ray</i>) that December, but it's been a quiet spell since -- which is an appropriate measure of the distance in time between the 2004 release of <i>Ray</i> and the 1991 release of Barbra Streisand's<i> The Prince of Tides</i>.</p><p>(Quick interjection: My viewing of <i>Women Talking</i> last March technically qualified, since the recent Oscar nominations had added a new title to the list -- and in theory, I should watch both of this year's best picture nominees I haven't seen, <i>American Fiction</i> and <i>The Zone of Interest</i>, before I continue in my reverse chronological order. <i>Zone</i> finally releases today so I will get my chance soon. However, we don't actually <i>know</i> that these movies will not win best picture, so they are not technically bridesmaids just yet.)</p><p>Why such a long interval? Well of course it was because the 1990s were when I became a cinephile, and particularly obsessed with the Oscars. I might not have seen all the nominees in the year they came out, but you better bet I have gone through and cleaned up the ones I didn't see in the time since, with the two previously mentioned titles being the lone exceptions I had not yet gotten to by the time I started this series.</p><p><i>The Prince of Tides</i> never felt like it required my attention so urgently. It seemed like the classic case of the melodrama that warranted Academy consideration only because of its "important" subject matter, and not because it excelled in any of the areas that a budding cinephile would respect.</p><p>What I found when actually watching the movie was that it really made me miss the sturdy, family-oriented drama that contained a blend of trauma, romance and humor -- so much so that I toyed with giving it 4.5 stars on Letterboxd.</p><p>Cooler heads prevailed and I ended up with four stars, which doesn't do much to distinguish <i>The Prince of Tides</i> from many of the better-than-average films I watch on a weekly basis. But I know in my head that when the year finishes and I'm posting next year's wrap-up post, this has a good chance to be one of my ten best I saw in 2024 that weren't released in 2024.</p><p>Nick Nolte at the very top of his game gives this film a good head start. Known for being irascible, Nolte is often also unlikable. Here, though, he shows us a softer side that's still capable of occasional apoplexy (it wouldn't be Nolte without that), that overall keeps us interested in his every moment on screen.</p><p>The same can be said of Streisand herself, not in terms of the irascibility or apoplexy, but in terms of always being extremely watchable. Streisand has always had an uncomfortable relationship with her own beauty or lack thereof; I think of that line of dialogue in <i>The Mirror Has Two Faces</i> (where Nick Nolte is played by Jeff Bridges) where she says "Why put on makeup? It's still me, only in color." Streisand is certainly not a traditional beauty, but maybe a little bit like Lady Gaga, she is just so interesting to watch. Her elegance in this movie approaches beauty, if we are continuing in this superficial realm that doesn't have anything to do with her performance or her direction.</p><p>I remember one of the discussion points around <i>The Prince of Tides</i> was Streisand's failure to get a nomination for best director, just the latest indication that the Academy, especially in 1991, was unwilling to recognize the contributions of women behind the camera. This failure could have been one of the key factors in Jane Campion getting nominated for <i>The Piano</i> two years later. The direction here is not exceptional in terms of camera tricks or outside-the-box choices, but the movie is a good reminder that a director also, perhaps primarily, is tasked with getting good performances from her cast. And the performances here are <i>quite</i> good. </p><p>The story is about Nolte's character, Tom Wingo, who is a South Carolina teacher and football coach who is having a bit of a midlife crisis that probably has its origins in the trauma of an unhappy childhood, whose details we will learn as the narrative plays out. Due to his inattentiveness, his wife (Blythe Danner) is having questions about their future together despite having three girls under the age of 13. The timing of her doubts is inconvenient, though, as he's called to New York after his sister Savannah (Melinda Dillon), a poet, makes her most recent suicide attempt. She's suffering under much the same childhood trauma as he is.</p><p>In New York he meets her psychiatrist, Susan Lowenstein (Streisand), who is trying to learn more about this childhood trauma in order to prevent her patient from trying to take her own life again. They originally butt heads, as is the case in most love stories, and only very slowly does their relationship take on the components of a romance -- a detail the film makes plenty easy to stomach considering that both of their spouses are cheating on them. Because he is not technically her patient, there's nothing gross about this -- though he does benefit from the traditional services of a shrink in getting at his own issues that he shares with his sister. He also helps train her son, an accomplished violinist who wants to be a football player.</p><p>I guess movies like <i>The Prince of Tides</i> do still exist, though if you are looking for prominent examples that take the culture by storm, you are going to have a lot tougher time providing them. I wouldn't necessarily say<i> The Prince of Tides</i> was a cultural phenomenon in 1991 either, but being one of only five best picture nominees (at that time), it certainly was a bigger part of the monoculture than it would be today. Today's version of this movie does not get the accolades and does not get generally seen because indeed, we are looking for slightly different things in our movies today. We're looking for movies that are more obviously cinematic and perhaps don't lean quite so much on their score, though I will say that none of these defining elements felt like a limitation to me, and if it's dated, it's only in a good way that reminds me of more idealistic times for cinema.</p><p>In a way I myself have been gravitating toward movies like <i>The Prince of Tides</i> recently, finding my own versions, whether they generally receive praise or generally do not. Two of my last three #1 movies, <i>Our Friend</i> and <i>The Whale</i>, are sort of today's version of <i>The Prince of Tides</i>. In keeping with my theory about how times have changed, one of those movies was praised, but primarily for the performance of its lead actor rather than the movie itself, while the other was almost totally unseen, even with three known actors in the three central roles, one of them an Oscar winner.</p><p>I wasn't moved to tears in <i>The Prince of Tides</i> as I was in those movies, but the distance of 33 years could have something to do with that. I was, however, aware in every moment that I was watching a really good film that deserved one of those five best picture slots in 1991, and never deserved to be looked down on by me.</p><p>Excluding the two 2023 movies I mentioned earlier, my next movie in this series will be 1989's <i>My Left Foot</i>, probably something I should have seen before now just because it was one of Daniel Day-Lewis' three Oscars for best actor. </p>Derek Armstronghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13750747272647975591noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7877371347086447490.post-71891563764384407012024-02-20T08:50:00.001+11:002024-02-20T08:50:58.898+11:00Concert movie weekend concluded on Monday<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9eSW1vrNnErA2vL8T-6MkXhWeh9sEAw4oDWoAs8wnp0pWBPKW7gb6wAKpeRRRTQJ8e7hjKgHK4ih5aVMgyjZmVLeV7p-lgWe2KZR7FdjMooPjQWBBhEJJJ1x2L_xHabAFwbBHy4YEt5npKef6YaTr1Y_Z9uJJT4MFY8h_IAIC1SENYaZgXFq71T3PpNG7/s1500/american%20utopia.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1500" data-original-width="1013" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9eSW1vrNnErA2vL8T-6MkXhWeh9sEAw4oDWoAs8wnp0pWBPKW7gb6wAKpeRRRTQJ8e7hjKgHK4ih5aVMgyjZmVLeV7p-lgWe2KZR7FdjMooPjQWBBhEJJJ1x2L_xHabAFwbBHy4YEt5npKef6YaTr1Y_Z9uJJT4MFY8h_IAIC1SENYaZgXFq71T3PpNG7/s320/american%20utopia.jpg" width="216" /></a></div>I was ticking off all my remaining February viewing commitments this past weekend, perhaps overreacting to the short month, which is not quite as short this year as it usually is.<p></p><p>Having watched my <i>Blaxploitaudient</i> movie on Friday (and written about it yesterday), yesterday I finished watching <i>David Byrne's American Utopia</i>, which was my monthly assignment for Flickchart Friends Favorites Fiesta. I started it Sunday night, expecting to watch it by myself as a thematic rejoinder to having watched the Taylor Swift concert movie on Saturday night.</p><p>But then my wife walked into the room near the beginning, and my <i>ideal</i> condition for watching it -- with her -- suddenly came to fruition. She is more of a Talking Heads fan than I am (I really like them but never bought their albums), but usually when I approach my wife with an idea to watch a movie, she suddenly feels the pressure of needing to adhere to my schedule. She knows I don't usually ask her until I have a need to watch the movie in question one of the next few nights -- either to review it, or because I have to watch it during this particular month for commitments on my blog or in the aforementioned series whose acronym I will use on second reference (FFFF). Lately, I've just been avoiding the discussion altogether.</p><p>Now, Sunday night might not have been her ideal night to watch it. But since I'd already pressed play, the 48-hour rental clock had already started ticking. As a compromise for what worked best for both of us, we agreed to watch half of it on Sunday night and the other half on Monday -- which was her birthday. (We ended up watching slightly less than half on the first night, since Byrne and company's performance of "Once in a Lifetime," which concluded at the 45-minute mark, seemed about the perfect place to close the curtain after Act 1, if you will.)</p><p>I might have been slightly less engaged on Monday night than I was on Sunday night, and that was just enough to knock the whole experience down from a possible 4.5 stars on Letterboxd to 4 stars. I don't want to just hand out 4.5 stars like candy, something I've been guilty of in the past. This at least gave it an additional half-star over Taylor Swift, which felt important to me. I definitely feel like I liked <i>American Utopia</i> at least a star more than <i>The Eras Tour</i>, whose 3.5 rating was probably generous since I was already conscious of coming off as a Swift hater. What can I say, star ratings are fickle creatures.</p><p>(And I think the main reason I felt slightly less engaged was the two drinks we had at Mexican dinner, as well as a number of blunders committed by me at dinner, including ordering her the wrong item through the app, and miscalculating the dessert options that would work as a birthday cake. These left me feeling like I'd fumbled her birthday. I don't think she felt this but I can be hard on myself.)</p><p>Having emerged from an actual three days of celebrating her birthday in small ways, I'm a bit too burnt out this morning to go into the detail <i>American Utopia</i> deserves. I'll say generally that it was very cleverly conceived and executed and stood out in stark contrast to the performance histrionics of a typical rock concert like the one I'd seen the night before. Byrne always has been a lot more of a dada performance artist type, and both his sense of humor and social compassion came shining through in the Spike Lee-directed film. I did think it would have a slightly more definitive conceptual shape than it did, but I greatly appreciated all the little thematic tangents, which were either delightful or thought-provoking in isolation. </p><p>Plus, it was clear the additional thought that went into staging this with someone like Lee at the helm. I've never been entirely clear the role a director plays in a concert movie, but it's a "final product" sort of thing. I know Jonathan Demme directed Byrne the first time, in <i>Stop Making Sense</i>, in a way that wouldn't have been what it was if more of a hack had been making the decisions. Again, I'm not sure how much of this is Lee's doing, but I was particularly impressed by the number of cameras and camera angles, and how I could never seen any of the cameras in any of the shots.</p><p>And now that I haven't watched a movie with a narrative since Friday night, I think I'll take a break from concert movies for a little bit. </p>Derek Armstronghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13750747272647975591noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7877371347086447490.post-65266103084064394942024-02-19T07:52:00.005+11:002024-02-19T07:52:48.874+11:00Blaxploitaudient: They Call Me Mister Tibbs!<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQaAJ47fonYB7fGqcvgdl08IMnYuiYFiZNJ51S0efPE0-dPkGjfIynyQZCAmZLEQDOYShp-6PhQTramtaJoTVs9MXJYdqgRnBruB0XCS2HIJUPg-BNCtzwYS1_GNjBg70XAfbPOFeHeetx5GGTonTUUaF4q-XLKMQug0hT30iqqkLDewpu43HNfFpQw-Rw/s1023/they%20call%20me%20mister%20tibbs.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1023" data-original-width="666" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQaAJ47fonYB7fGqcvgdl08IMnYuiYFiZNJ51S0efPE0-dPkGjfIynyQZCAmZLEQDOYShp-6PhQTramtaJoTVs9MXJYdqgRnBruB0XCS2HIJUPg-BNCtzwYS1_GNjBg70XAfbPOFeHeetx5GGTonTUUaF4q-XLKMQug0hT30iqqkLDewpu43HNfFpQw-Rw/s320/they%20call%20me%20mister%20tibbs.jpg" width="208" /></a></div><i>This is the second in my 2024 monthly series watching blaxploitation movies I haven't seen.<br /></i><p></p><p>It being Black History Month in February, I tasked myself with finding just the right title to watch for this series, but it's possible that effort may have backfired.</p><p>It was a bit doomed from the start. Although I reckon there is something empowering about any blaxploitation film, when considered through the right lens, any blaxploitation film is also necessarily going to include disempowering elements that lean into hurtful stereotypes, even if the ultimate goal is to undermine those stereotypes.</p><p>My first port of call, among the movies I've already identified in a <i>Blaxploitaudient</i> Letterboxd list, was those that at least also empowered women. But the two different movies I will watch this year starring Pam Grier, <i>Coffy</i> and <i>Foxy Brown</i>, both mentioned drug dealers or pimps or some other unsavory element of society in their brief plot descriptions, so I steered clear of them -- at least for this month. March and beyond, these will be fair game again.</p><p>Then I saw there was an obvious option staring me in the face: <i>They Call Me Mister Tibbs!</i></p><p>(Incidentally, in the movie itself, the title is listed as <i>They Call Me MISTER Tibbs!</i> But it goes against my sense of correctness to capitalize only a single word in the title, even to provide the correct emphasis when spoken out loud. At least I include the exclamation point, which my iTunes rental did not.)</p><p>This being a sequel to <i>In the Heat of the Night</i>, I never would have thought it could qualify as a blaxploitation movie. But in my research leading up to this series, I saw the 1970 film listed as a "pre-<i>Shaft</i> blaxploitation movie," which implies that <i>Shaft</i> is considered the inception point of the genre. Clearly that assignation would have been given in hindsight, if people were not even talking about blaxploitation at the time it came out. In fact, given that the term was coined in 1972, that's obviously the case. </p><p>Given Sidney Poitier's proximity to the civil rights movement and prominent role in the emergence of Black leading men in Hollywood, I could think of no better choice for Black History Month.</p><p>Here's why it may have backfired: </p><p>Most of this cast is white. As is the director, Gordon Douglas.</p><p>It's true, Virgil Tibbs and his family are all Black, and there's a lot more time spent with his family, particularly his son, than you would expect in a movie that is largely the case of a murdered prostitute. (Even though I used this unsavory subject matter as a reason to exclude the Grier movies, you can't fully escape it, I suppose, because that's one of the things that makes it blaxploitation. At least Poitier's dignified presence takes the edge off it.)</p><p>And there are one or two more other Black characters, one another prostitute and one a mentally slow handyman who discovers the first prostitute after she's been killed. (An opening scene that actually has a bit of a giallo flavor to it.)</p><p>In general, though, you've got a bunch of white guys filling out the rest of the cast, including three very familiar faces: Martin Landau, Ed Asner, and Anthony Zerbe, whom I know from a lot of things but who I initially mistook for Tom Skerritt. (Which allowed me to look up Skerritt and remember that he is still alive and kicking at age 90.)</p><p>Given that this movie comes only three years after Poitier's watershed twin appearances in <i>In the Heat of the Night</i> and <i>Guess Who's Coming to Dinner</i>, it's not surprising that this would still be the sort of template in which he'd be fed to mainstream audiences. This is distinguished from other films considered blaxploitation by the fact that indeed, it would have been clear that the studio wanted the same audience from <i>In the Heat of the Night</i> to watch this. As it would develop, the blaxploitation movement would be a lot more clearly aimed at Black audiences than this movie is.</p><p>I said the choice of <i>They Call Me Mister Tibbs!</i> was sort of a backfire, but I don't have any objection to it being included in a blaxploitation series, and am very glad I've seen it. Let's talk about the parts that do resemble a blaxploitation movie.</p><p>One is clearly the groovy score by Quincy Jones. It's very seventies, even in only the first year of the seventies. I'm not musically literate enough to talk about the instruments that give away the score's placing within this landscape, but let's just say the score did definitely put me in mind of other blaxploitation movies I've seen, especially the way it gets ramped up and almost over-emphasized in action moments.</p><p>And those action moments are also noteworthy in terms of our genre expectations. There are only a few moments where Tibbs has to become a man of action and take out a potential assailant, but given that this was never Poitier's primary mode on screen, they are striking for using karate chops and other moves with heavy genre associations. So while I think the movie on the whole is not so different, tonally, from <i>In the Heat of the Night</i>, these individual moments do set it apart. </p><p>Because I have, up to this point, failed to bring you up to speed about what this movie is about, I thought I should include a few thoughts on that quickly here. Virgil Tibbs and his family have relocated to San Francisco -- reason unknown -- and Tibbs is a lieutenant in the San Francisco Police Department. He's called in to investigate the death by strangulation and bludgeoning of a prostitute being protected by her pimp (that's Zerbe), and the prime suspect is a minister involved in the passage of a local proposition for an upcoming vote (that's Landau). In fact, given that the project relates to urban renewal, and the precariousness of the vote is one of the factors why they are being delicate with the investigation, it does make this probably a good choice for Black History Month, at least in that respect.</p><p>As alluded to earlier, it's interesting how much of this story is related to Tibbs' family dynamics, specifically the way his son (played by George Spell, whose real-life sister plays his sister in the film) is reaching an age where he's talking back to his parents and even experimenting with smoking. There's a memorable scene where Tibbs makes the boy (Andy by name) smoke a cigar and drink what appears to be some whiskey, which he predictably reacts to by vomiting in short order (since he seems to be about 11). Today, that kid would be taught a lesson in a different way, just because the idea of showing children smoking is so taboo. (Also taboo: hitting children. Tibbs hits a defiant Andy a couple times in this movie, though each time it is a slap on the face that is a very small percentage of his capabilities, which we saw on full display in <i>In the Heat of the Night</i>.)</p><p>Overall I was quite impressed with the film. There are some subtle bits of technique on display, and Poitier is brilliant as always. If it does ultimately feel fair to include <i>They Call Me Mister Tibbs!</i> in the blaxploitation genre, only just barely, it is likely one of the finest example of the form in terms of the overall quality of its craftmanship, to say nothing of the caliber of its performances.</p><p>Unlike In the Heat of the Night, in which the topic of race is quite foregrounded, <i>They Call Me Mister Tibbs!</i> basically includes no discussion of race whatsoever. It isn't even really an elephant in the room, since Tibbs is generally treated with respect. And perhaps that explains the existence of this and one other Virgil Tibbs film, 1971's <i>The Organization</i>, which I may or may not watch in this series depending on how much it is viewed as blaxploitation: They want to show this character become post-racial, at least for a little while. Mission accomplished. </p><p>Before I leave you, I did want to mention a funny random pickup I made during the film. There's a scene outside a church where you see a lot of extras, and in probably no more than three seconds of screen time, I picked up actor Al White in his first (uncredited) screen appearance.</p><p>Don't know the name Al White? Allow me to refresh your memory:</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKV6IU5raYvlP3v2dresFYGXEVA_bESi9X0KOm64R9KQMKd1SZDDa5gQOugZW-5QGsHT-1wONKe2bBNk8cV4YzoNLN1Z0hmAGNlO2WWezbCRMjsleh-lVthr5VU8BINs3Hd0xJcYH4Nw5vvcdforneWvzTgv2nDoAJXsN5udRLDBBiaI0bCoGEYGy9_hy8/s1920/al%20white.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1080" data-original-width="1920" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKV6IU5raYvlP3v2dresFYGXEVA_bESi9X0KOm64R9KQMKd1SZDDa5gQOugZW-5QGsHT-1wONKe2bBNk8cV4YzoNLN1Z0hmAGNlO2WWezbCRMjsleh-lVthr5VU8BINs3Hd0xJcYH4Nw5vvcdforneWvzTgv2nDoAJXsN5udRLDBBiaI0bCoGEYGy9_hy8/s320/al%20white.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><p>He's the one on the left.</p><p>Yep, with just a few seconds' exposure, I picked out "Second Jive Dude" from another movie with an exclamation point in its title, <i>Airplane!</i></p><p>Come to think of it, there may be more blaxploitation in that one scene of <i>Airplane!</i> than there is in the entirety of <i>They Call Me Mister Tibbs!</i></p>Derek Armstronghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13750747272647975591noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7877371347086447490.post-56598032707205369432024-02-18T09:09:00.011+11:002024-02-18T09:30:46.670+11:00Supporting Taylor Swift<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUlpvbhhFuDmjLiuWrOXbmcHOjXil_OjGIQ-MKCN__BmRU9bGT7xq0f1zXnXZaaUTEcXimf0MrvRA-FRePMYFCJTKE4CZFrTNXVa_WLX92F43e75goKaoEjdUOQiHVAfI5f-DEeKdhinqsqXl2AJT_L7Ol2ms2UMyezIoRlLJn4LyxektXfJQFqQVTMpoR/s861/taylor%20swift%20the%20eras%20tour.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="861" data-original-width="735" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUlpvbhhFuDmjLiuWrOXbmcHOjXil_OjGIQ-MKCN__BmRU9bGT7xq0f1zXnXZaaUTEcXimf0MrvRA-FRePMYFCJTKE4CZFrTNXVa_WLX92F43e75goKaoEjdUOQiHVAfI5f-DEeKdhinqsqXl2AJT_L7Ol2ms2UMyezIoRlLJn4LyxektXfJQFqQVTMpoR/s320/taylor%20swift%20the%20eras%20tour.jpg" width="273" /></a></div>So what, exactly, does one of the most popular musical artists who has ever lived need with <i>my</i> support?<p></p><p>It's not that kind of support, exactly. I'll explain.</p><p>I must have been feeling a little annoyed by all the hype surrounding Taylor Swift's arrival in Australia, which occurred a few days ago, because on Thursday I made my third post on Facebook about it in the space of a couple weeks. Two were about advertised impacts on train travel within the city due to the concert, and one wondered whether she timed the trip to avoid the Super Bowl on the off chance she'd be dating someone who'd be playing in it. (Little did I know that the trip was <i>not</i> timed so fortuitously, as she had already been in Japan and had to fly back to be at the game.)</p><p>Here's the one I posted on Thursday, just to get a sense of the tone that was neither nasty toward Swift nor, you will agree, supportive:</p><p><span face=""Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">"So today riding home there were actual announcements on the train about the big concerts (Taylor Swift) this weekend and about the resulting effects on train service. However, the Melbourne Cricket Grounds, where she is playing, are frequently at capacity for sporting events and other concerts, without such announcements. Just because she's TAYLOR SWIFT, does that mean that the logistics of getting to and from the venue are any different than for other capacity events at the </span><span face=""Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><a style="color: #385898; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit;" tabindex="-1"></a></span><span face=""Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">MCG? Does it being TAYLOR SWIFT cause a single person to become more than one person? In actual fact, many of these people will be smaller than your average cricket fan."</span></p><p>First of all, the premise of the post was actually wrong. I later learned that in addition to all the ticket-holding fans -- a record 96,000 and change -- there was expected to be crowds congregating outside who didn't hold tickets but who just wanted to bask in the proximal glow. Hey, you never know when you might catch a glimpse of her. </p><p>But the thing that gave me pause was a long response from one of my female Facebook friends, which I will not include in total but rather excerpts. It didn't call me out per se, like I was the root of the problem, but it wouldn't have run on for several hundred words if I were not meant to take something away from it. Which I did.</p><p>Anyway, here are some choice parts of the response:</p><p>"<span face=""Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: #f0f2f5; color: #050505; font-size: 15px;">I feel like there’s this negativity towards how much girls and women are excited about and enjoying going to see her in concert and my take is that it comes from how - under patriarchy - we are told to not take up space or require men to make accommodations for us the way we accommodate and give space to men."</span></p><p><span face=""Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: #f0f2f5; color: #050505; font-size: 15px;">"To me, if a man really wants equality and for women to be able to take up space and express who they are then they should be flexible and not complain because it not so subtly sends a message to the women in their lives to be less and be smaller."</span></p><p><span face=""Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: #f0f2f5; color: #050505; font-size: 15px;">"</span><span face=""Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: #f0f2f5; color: #050505; font-size: 15px;">How many women in the world don’t care at all about sports but every weekend get their homes ready, plan, shop, buy, cook food for “the game,” don the jersey, etc. all in service of their husband and his friends and their sons interest in a sports team?"</span></p><p>Amen to all that.</p><p>I immediately credited her with the excellence of her points and tried to explain that the post was intended as humor about infrastructure more than any judgment against Taylor Swift, which I do think is true, though I understand how it may have come off differently.</p><p>I proceeded to tell this woman that I regularly try to convince my wife that Swift has good songs and her music is valuable. I know, I know, it's like being called a racist and then naming all the Black friends you have. But it is true that in our house, it's the man who feels a bit sheepish about this inclination to give Taylor Swift space and the woman who dislikes her and other "divas" who came before her (such as Madonna) on principle. (Hey, she was raised on punk rock, what do you want from her.)</p><p>I also told this respondent that I had considered watching <i>Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour</i> this weekend but was worried my wife would frown on it.</p><p>Well, Saturday night I made good on my word, so that any little bean counter who happened to see my $19.89 rental fee would know that I, too, want to give Taylor and her fans space.</p><p>In truth, I had considered watching this in time for my 2023 rankings, but I couldn't quite stomach the premium rental fee, adjusted cleverly to mirror the year of Swift's birth as well as the name of one of her albums. As you can see from the previous paragraph, that price has not yet come down. However, I also thought, "If not now, when Taylor Swift is actually in Melbourne, and actually physically in the process of giving this performance within 15 kilometers of my house, then when?" </p><p>And, as I said, it's a mea culpa for contributing some small amount to marginalizing this nearly unprecedented worldwide phenomenon. (The precedents my friend listed were Elvis and the Beatles. That tells you something. But in those cases, heterosexual hormones were a big factor as well. Here, not so much, making this display of undying affection potentially unprecedented, full stop.)</p><p>I'll tell you something, though: It's sort of hard to watch a concert when you are only familiar with about a third of the songs, and two-thirds of those don't come until hour three of the movie. (I think it was about 2:40 when released to theaters, but there were four extra song performances added here at the end, kicking it up to an even three hours in total.)</p><p>While finding myself extremely impressed with the feats of staging and costume changing that <i>The Eras Tour</i> required, I think you need the ability to sing along with and love the songs to really be transported by a concert experience -- and perhaps that is even more true on film. In the arena, the absolute intensity of the vibe can take you places you won't go at home, but on your couch, you are inevitably distracted by your phone and by the fact that there isn't a plot to sink you teeth into. </p><p>On this particular Saturday night, when I'd been out for most of the day on a day trip, I viewed the lack of a plot to be a bonus, especially with the three-hour running time. But I also wasn't in a position to fully disengage, because then I'd fall asleep and miss five songs and not really know if there was something in one of those songs that would unlock the experience for me on the whole.</p><p>It's kind of hard to rate this sort of experience. I ended up going with 3.5 stars on Letterboxd, a recognition mostly of the difficulty of the feat they were trying to pull off, Swift's inexhaustible energy and devotion to her fans, and the fact that I do, indeed, quite like about eight songs I ended up hearing. Incidentally, this usually prominent rating for any movie represents a comically small percentage of the star ratings on Letterboxd for <i>The Eras Tour</i>. Just four percent of us (5,621) gave it 3.5 stars. You might not be surprised to learn that 68% (108,018) gave it five stars, with the next two healthiest percentages being 4.5 and 4 stars. I guess Swifties use Letterboxd too. </p><p>As a movie itself, of course there isn't usually anything all that special to an experience structured as just filming songs that occurred consecutively on one night (or a small number of nights). I'd say something like <i>Stop Making Sense</i> is the exception to this rule, but most concert movies exist in service of just giving the songs their best showcase. (I remember people also had good things to say about that other Jonathan Demme concert movie involving Justin Timberlake, so maybe I should watch that at some point.)</p><p>The movie was filmed over a number of nights on the final stop of the tour, at LA's Sofi Stadium, and it does have a bit more structure than some concert movies might, as the songs she performed were grouped according to albums. Those album titles would flash up on the screen, so fans got a sense of the era of Swift music they were about to hear before they began hearing it. At first I thought these were actual song names, because both of the first two albums also feature a song by the same name as the album -- or at least a song that says the album name among the lyrics. As it went I got what they were doing, though.</p><p>Look, I've always found Swift's songs catchy, but few of the ones I'd never heard did anything for me. This is not something unique to Taylor Swift, of course. For one, big radio hits are big radio hits precisely because they have something propulsive and toe-tapping about them that distinguishes them from the album's filler tracks. But big radio hits have also been played to us so many times that we know them back to front, and that is one of the things you are looking for in a concert. Do I enjoy tapping my toe to "Shake It Off" because it is an inherently good song or because I've probably heard it a hundred times? I reckon a little of both.</p><p>I couldn't help, though, thinking that there isn't anything so uniquely charismatic about Swift as a personality or exceptional about her as a songwriter that would elevate her above others in her position who have topped out at a half or less of the fan support that Swift enjoys. It seems to me that reaching her height in a period of maximum social media saturation has something to do with it, as does the fact that she seems more accessible to your average fan than forbears who have been more intentionally confrontational with their choices, such as Madonna and Lady Gaga. I'm not sure there is ever a perfect formula for determining why two artists who offer about the same thing can have wildly different career trajectories.</p><p>Oh, and as for my wife's feelings on all this? She just teased me a bit. My younger son brought his device back into the room to put it on charge while I was watching, and my wife joked to him "Don't worry, he's still Daddy, even if he <i>is</i> watching Taylor Swift."</p><p>I wouldn't have given <i>Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour</i> 3.5 stars if I weren't glad I watched it. And a lot of the songs were in my head last night as I slept, as the concert definitely infiltrated my dreams in a way that feels scrambled and difficult to remember in the morning.</p><p>More than my experience of the film itself, though, I'm glad I contributed some small amount to proving I'm not an obstacle to the amount of space women and girls deserve to take up in the world. </p>Derek Armstronghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13750747272647975591noreply@blogger.com0