Finish What You Started: Sanctum and Withnail & I

Today I am not only finishing a movie I started -- two movies, actually -- but also a series I started.

As you are surely aware, it is the end of the year, which means it is also the end of Finish What You Started, my 2020 bi-monthly series that involved completing movies that I once had to abandon unfinished.

I ended up with two movies in the final month. I'll tell you how that happened in just a minute. But at one point, I wasn't sure if I'd have any.

When I first forecast what I expected to watch in this series, I could think of only five titles. I needed six. 

October saved me from that predicament, as I remembered that I'd once started Akira Kurosawa's Dreams, a film I happened to have assigned to me in October for a different viewing project altogether. That meant I didn't have to find any more movies for Finish What You Started, and that the final film in the series, Bruce Robinson's Withnail & I (1987), could be my December movie.

Only I combed the various streaming services and iTunes, and I could not find this film. I had never thought of it as particularly hard to come by -- we came by it eight years ago, which is approximately when I started watching it with my wife the first time. But it was nowhere to be found this time.

So then I remembered one more movie I'd started but not finished. (There are certainly others, but the trick is remembering them.) That was Alister Grierson's Sanctum (2011), which I immediately rented from iTunes. 

Done and dusted, right?

Not so fast.

Within hours of renting Sanctum I realized there was one more source for Withnail & I that I had not yet consulted. The public libraries have been closed for the majority of the year, it probably goes without saying, but they were even significantly slower to get back up to regular functioning than other local entities, probably because they are not designed to turn a profit or support people's livelihoods. In fact even now, when we are going on two months without a single new case of COVID in the state of Victoria, you are still given the third degree when you enter the library, and the librarians help you with tasks you previously were free to do yourself.

So I hadn't reserved anything from the library all year, but yes, reserving movies is now a thing again. And of course, Withnail & I was available for reserve. Even though I'd already sorted things out with Sanctum, Withnail had been on my original list and I decided just to watch it also. The librarian had to go to the reserve shelf to get it for me rather than letting me walk the ten feet into the library to do it myself, but indeed, I had now sourced Withnail as well.

So you get a bonus movie for this series. Or, I should say, I get a bonus movie, because if I'm being perfectly honest, this series probably has pretty much zero value for you to begin with.

I watched Sanctum first, on the night of December 20th. 

It was the completion of a viewing that began almost six years ago, when we were away for the weekend renting a house for my wife's birthday. It was a surprise gathering involving three other families, which wasn't revealed to her until they started showing up. (My wife wondered why we had such a big place just for the four of us.) As we were the first to arrive on Friday night, I started watching Sanctum from the house's DVD collection on its exceptionally large TV. There was a chance the first other family would not arrive until the next day, but when they showed up about 20 minutes into the movie, I had to abandon the viewing. There wasn't a reasonable chance to pick it up again for the rest of the weekend, and I've never gotten back to it.

Although I'd heard not great things about this James Cameron-produced disaster movie, I ended up quite enjoying it. I'm a pretty big fan of disaster movies to begin with, and this was a setting I hadn't really seen before. The characters are spelunking and mapping out a tremendous underground cave with its multiplicity of previously unexplored passageways, most of which require diving gear to properly explore. So as the characters start dying as the result of a surface-level monsoon, the deaths took on a variety of forms related to climbing mishaps and diving mishaps, with headwounds and drownings aplenty. I think the idea behind a disaster movie is to put you in the shoes of the characters and what they're dealing with, and this one does that quite well. I'd heard the acting derided, but I found that for the most part, the actors portrayed their fear and (occasionally) their courage with total credibility.

Probably neither of these viewings -- the one that started in 2015, or the complete viewing now -- were under the ideal conditions to watch Sanctum. Those conditions would have been on an IMAX screen in 3D back in 2011, as Cameron's involvement meant all sorts of technological spectacle that's invariably diminished when you watch it on the small screen. Given that I found it effective even in that forum, I suspect I would have really enjoyed it in a format that accentuates the film's visual strengths.

Unfortunately, Withnail & I -- which I watched last night on Boxing Day -- was a different story.

And this I might have expected given the circumstances of my original failure to finish the movie. That's right, this is the only movie in this series I stopped watching simply because I didn't want to watch it anymore. Saving the worst for last, I guess. 

It was sometime late in 2012 or early in 2013, as the second half of that first year and the first half of the second were the only times we lived in the house we bought in Los Angeles just before moving to Australia. (And still own, but have been renting out.) My wife was either the driving force behind the viewing or she co-signed it once she saw I'd acquired it from Netflix, discs through the mail back then. In any case, it had been a favorite of hers that she wanted to show me.

But I just didn't like it. 

Considering only the two movies discussed in this post, there could not be a bigger contrast between the visuals of Sanctum and the visuals of Withnail & I. This is a scuzzy looking movie -- by design, I'm sure -- full of scuzzy characters, both scuzzy looking and scuzzy acting. It is no doubt an outgrowth of the kitchen sink movement in British filmmaking of the 1960s, populated by angry young men, albeit in a would-be comedy. And yes, Richard E. Grant and Paul McGann have anger to spare in the title roles.

If I can be really reductive, here is a quick and easy way to describe the two halves of Withnail & I:

The first half is a portrait of Withnail trying to drink himself to death, a peak he reaches very early on in the narrative when he drinks paint thinner and then asks for his compatriot's toolbox to see if there's an additional supply he's holding back. I suppose the people at the time thought this was funny, but my face did not even crack a smile.

The second half is an extended episode of gay panic. That's right, "I" spends literally the entire second half of this film trying to escape the pursuits of Withnail's randy uncle, who is almost rapey in his enthusiasm. Except instead of being played as comedy -- even this film's dark version of comedy -- the idea of possibly being buggered is treated as a source of serious drama for "I," one the film feels it can keep hitting over and over again without seeming exceedingly homophobic. Of course, 1987 was a different time, and you could get plenty of comedic mileage out of gay panic. If this film were just doing that, it would be okay, but the look on McGann's face is not one of comedic worry -- it's like deep existential dread. 

As I said, 1987 was a different time, and it's possible -- though quite unlikely -- that I would have been more favorably disposed toward the movie if I'd seen it then. It has things in common with movies I like, most notably something like Mike Leigh's Naked, which I only just saw for the first time a few years ago. But in 2020, this movie was as much a slog for me as it was in 2012 or 2013. Only this time I could not turn it off.

I did take breaks every half-hour on the half-hour, a task made easier by the fact that I could easily see the readout on our DVD player. And to be fair, it did pick up for me a little in the middle before spiralling downward again. But it's good to know that I wasn't just too tired, or not in the mood, or whatever temporary affliction I thought I might have felt the first time I tried to watch Withnail & I. It's quite clear now that I will never be in the mood for it.

One final note on this film. I have chosen to write the title as Withnail & I rather than Withnail and I, even though it is far more often represented in print with the "and" than the ampersand. I usually go with how the title is actually presented on screen in the movie, but I don't remember that in this case, and I'm not going to put the damn thing back in my DVD player to find out. I do remember, however, that in the credits, Grant is listed as "Withnail" and McGann is listed as "& I," so that's what I'm going with. In fact, that may be the funniest joke in the whole movie. 

That's it! That's the series. 

I'd offer some kind of recap, but really, these were just six (actually seven) movies that I started once and didn't finish: Sisters, That Sugar Film, The Man Who Fell to Earth, Paddington, Dreams, Sanctum and Withnail & I. They didn't have anything else in common with each other, except that they shared a wrong I have now righted.

In 2021, it appears I'm going to be doing something I haven't done before: I'm going to do two bi-monthly series, intertwined with each other. That's in addition to the regular monthly series I will also do. Whereas I usually had January, March, May, July, September and November off from my bi-monthly series, now I'll be watching the second (or is it first?) of the two bi-monthly series those months.

What will they be? You'll have to stay tuned to see.

Finish What You Started: Dreams

This is the fifth in my 2020 bi-monthly series finishing films I once started.

When I first envisioned devoting a bi-monthly series to movies whose viewings were interrupted, never to be resumed, I imagined I'd be watching only movies where I'd gotten a good chunk of the way in -- say, at least a third. After all, there are any number of movies over the years I started watching and said, before the ten-minute mark, "No, not right now" or "No, not ever," most of which have now been forgotten by me. 

As luck would have it, I also did not have a sixth movie in this series. My fifth, Withnail and I, is one I've been putting off but will finally get to in December. Until I came across the movie I watched on Thursday night, I thought I might watch Withnail in October simply to delay the decision on the sixth. I had reluctantly selected a placeholder, but was not really happy with it. That would be Blood Diamond, which technically obeyed the guidelines of this series because I had to turn it off on a plane that was landing with anywhere from five to 15 minutes remaining. But I didn't really want to watch that for this series, because I got what Blood Diamond was all about after watching more than two hours of it, and really didn't need to see whatever small amount I missed.

Sometimes, though, these things just work out felicitously. 

I am also involved in a monthly series that I don't write about on this blog. I'm part of a Facebook group where we get paired up with another member of the group, and watch the highest ranked movie on their Flickchart that we haven't yet seen. For October I got assigned Akira Kurosawa's Dreams (1990), which I always thought was called Akira Kurosawa's Dreams, but now notice that most places only use the single-world title.

It wasn't until I sat down to watch it on Thursday night, for that series, that I realized it would also work for this one.

Sometime in the past 15 years -- whether it was near the beginning of that time, or as recently as five years ago, I cannot say -- I started watching Dreams. Given the methodical pacing of many of Kurosawa's films, this one in particular, I realized about ten minutes in that the "No, not right now" reasoning applied. I either started it too late, or was lying too comfortably, or any one of the other things that can kill a prospective viewing. But I watched so little of it that I didn't even really think of it for this series. 

As I started watching, though, I realized I had gotten through more of it than I thought. 

The third-to-last film for the great Japanese master, a personal favorite director, is constructed as a series of vignettes based on dreams that the director actually had. Given that the film is two hours long, the average length for each would be 15 minutes. It appears I watched closer to 30 minutes of the film, because it was the end of the second vignette that I remembered, as it features an orchard of blossoming peach trees. (I had remembered them as cherry trees.) I might have slept through the first one, actually, because I did not remember it at all.

Each dream features a male character of varying ages who operates as sort of a Kurosawa surrogate. There sort of seems to be an attempt to proceed chronologically, as the first two feature a young boy, who never returns as the surrogate in the later stories. Though the third vignette features the oldest surrogate, so this is less of a firm guiding principle and more of a general trajectory. The more obvious trajectory is a metaphysical one toward the concept of death, which I will try to construct for you as I describe each short. For brevity's sake I will only describe the segments, not name them, though they do have titles. I suppose I should say my ensuing description constitutes kind of a SPOILER about the film's content, if you believe it's possible to spoil a series of short films.

The first two, as discussed, feature the younger Kurosawa. In the first, he spies a wedding ritual by foxes in the forest, the foxes of course being Japanese kabuki-style performers in costumes that suggest foxes, more than trying to look like actual foxes. In the second he visits the aforementioned cherry orchard, which has been chopped down, leaving only stumps. Wood spirits -- again, these kabuki-style performers -- try to dance it into existence again as a gift for him.

Just when you think all the pieces are going to have what appears to be a feudal Japan setting -- a metaphor for the early stages of Kurosawa's career, perhaps? -- the third segment offers us a quartet of mountain climbers threatening to be lost in a blizzard. This one proceeds in a hypnotic slow motion for five minutes before introducing a similar element of the magic seen in the first two films.

The fourth may have had the most impact on me. It features a soldier, a World War II survivor, visited by ghosts of his regiment, who were all lost in battle. The ghosts have faces that are painted blue, though they don't know they have died. They emerge from a tunnel in haunting fashion. A feral dog is also present. It's an astonishing reflection on survivor's guilt and the guilt of a country over its ambitions toward world domination.

The fifth contains a surprising shift in tone as a kind of mid-movie respite. It features a man at a museum viewing the paintings of Vincent Van Gogh, and then losing himself in them. He travels through Van Gogh's watercolor landscapes until he happens upon the painter himself, played by none other than Martin Scorsese. I saw his name in the opening credits, but as he was the only actor listed in those credits, I wondered for a moment if it was actually a producer credit. This short cleared that up.

From here the movie makes a definitive turn toward the end stages of life. The sixth segment features a series of nuclear power plant explosions that light up Mount Fuji and turn it red. A number of fleeing future victims of the radiation see it coming for them in smoke of different colors as they contemplate jumping into the sea.

If that's the moment of death, the seventh vignette starts to contemplate the afterlife. This involves a man's encounter on a barren, rocky terrain with a number of weeping horned demons. It's a vision of hell if Kurosawa ever presented one.

Fortunately, Kurosawa ends on a more positive note with a vision of heaven. His middle-aged surrogate comes upon a village of unsurpassed natural beauty that also features a variety of watermills churning the water. There's a joyous funeral parade celebrating the life of a village elder. Of course, in a sense, it's a celebration of the protagonist's life, as we are meant to understand him as passing into a new realm. He underscores this by crossing a bridge over a stream and out of sight as the film's final image.

Wow.

I had thought at first that this was Kurosawa's final film, which would have made the subjects he's examining even more profound. As it turns out, he made two more, with his last film arriving in 1993, five years before his death at age 88. (I could have sworn he was over 90 when he died, but obviously I was wrong about that.)

But my how profound this is. It's not always that directors get to make films that feel like a true summation of their careers and a reckoning with their mortality, often because they don't want to think of any particular film as possibly their last. Speaking of Scorsese, at age 77 (but 75 when he made it), he's already started making films (The Irishman) that could function that way if he doesn't get to make another. Then there are those like Clint Eastwood, who doesn't seem to be interested in reflecting on his impending death even though he is now 90.

Dreams feels like it could be a greatest hits reel for Kurosawa, as it samples from a number of cinematic modes he has explored over his career, as well as types of subject matter. There are no samurai in this film -- he probably figured he'd done that enough -- but the everpresence of the kabuki-style performers feels like a shout to them. The colors and images in this film are breathtaking, though to be certain, not all of the segments are "beautiful" in the traditional sense. Kurosawa is just as interested in gray here as he is in bright reds and greens. 

I wondered if I would be as engrossed in the film without a single narrative running through it. I don't dislike omnibus films, but they tend to be of varying quality, especially when multiple directors are involved. That each of these films contained something thematically potent and enriching, and that I would have a really hard time choosing a least favorite, just reminds me what a master Kurosawa was. Although I gave the film "only" 4.5 stars on Letterboxd, already two days later I'm wondering if it should have been five. It may already be among my top three favorite Kurosawa films.

Although I could go on, this is already the longest I've written about any film in this series, and I need to get on with my Saturday.

This series will conclude in December with Withnail and I. 

Finish What You Started: Paddington

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In a Paddington movie.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Finish What You Started: The Man Who Fell to Earth

This is the third in my bi-monthly 2020 series in which I finish movies that I had to leave unfinished at some point in the past.

It looks like I'm going to have to try a third time at some point with The Man Who Fell to Earth.

Oh, I watched the whole thing this time. I just didn't follow it very well. Or, like, at all.

When I read the plot synopsis on Wikipedia afterward, I determined I had not absorbed a significant number of plot points. Now, I was very tired. I did a five-mile run on Sunday afternoon before dinner. And I did have to nap in it because I foolishly waited until almost ten to start this two hour and twenty minute movie. But I paused during those naps and resumed only when I was sure I was awake.

This was actually the first Finish What You Started movie I've already written a post about failing to finish, that post coming back in 2012 and being called "Finishing what I started." Ha, that was probably in my subconscious when I selected the name for this series. A later choice in the series is also mentioned in that post. I probably wouldn't have remembered I'd written this post previously, except that when I was typing The Man Who Fell to Earth into the labels section of this post, it auto-completed, meaning I'd already used the label at least once before.

I see that similar circumstances thwarted my first attempt to watch it some ten years ago. Again it was a Sunday night, and again my window of opportunity was closing. In that case, the movie was due back at the library the next day, and I just started it too damn late. This time, I still had five days left on the iTunes rental before it expired, but I calculated my nights this week and determined that Sunday night would be my best chance to watch it.

But it's quite possible I just will never "get" this movie under any circumstances.

I was hoping that would not be the case. The director, Nicolas Roeg, made a film I really love, one of my formative movies in film class back in college. That is Don't Look Now, a film I've seen about four times, most recently about two years ago. One of the most famous scenes in that movie involves images of Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie having sex, intercut with images of them getting dressed afterward. It's quite memorable, especially since there's a lot of frank 70s nudity from both genders.

Well, you can definitely tell this is the same director, three years later, as there are any number of scenes of David Bowie or Rip Torn rolling around in bed with various naked young women, shot very similarly to that scene in Don't Look Now, and also intercut or cross cut with other material. It's almost a Rip Off rather than a Rip Torn, if you will. (Sorry, that was bad.) It being the same director probably relieves it of those accusations.

It's the non-sexual material, though, that left me cold in this one, where it engaged me so much in Don't Look Now.

The story that I couldn't follow involves Bowie's alien coming to earth to help relieve a drought on his home planet. We see his family in their alien space suits on this drought-stricken planet a couple times during the movie -- not enough for my liking, I'll say. Every time the action shifted to this setting in flashback, even for a moment, I really sat up and took notice.

But there's way too much in this film that isn't that, and worse, is stuff that I would lump into the category of material you'd find in one of John Cassavetes' more self-indulgent films. Not that I don't like Cassavetes, but when I don't like him, I really don't like him. His movie Faces is in that last category, and it involves entirely too much sex, drinking, and conversations that seem like they don't go anywhere. In other words, self-indulgence.

The Man Who Fell to Earth is, of course, far more abstract, but I still felt it had far too much pedestrian, behind-closed-doors wrangling between people. I suppose Roeg's purpose here is to explore how a pure alien life form can come to Earth and be corrupted by its influences, like alcohol and sex. I value that agenda. In fact, one of my favorite movies of last decade -- Under the Skin -- is sort of exploring the same thing.

Under the Skin accomplishes what it does better and with enviable economy. Its 108-minute running time prevents it from getting sidetracked in the way Roeg does over the course of 138 minutes. Now, having been in a pretty loose state of consciousness for a while there, I'd be hard pressed to tell you exactly what those tangents were. But I can tell you that if this movie had done more work to get me on board at the start, I think it could have kept my attention better. In recent years I've found that when you fall asleep during a movie, it's usually because the director is not doing the work to keep you. I don't fall asleep during movies in which I'm fully engaged, a prime example of that being that I don't fall asleep in movies I know I love, even though falling asleep would not be fatal to the viewing since I've already seen them. If I like the movie, and it holds my attention, it doesn't matter how tired I am.

Even if I couldn't tell you exactly what happened in The Man Who Fell to Earth -- the blame for which I share with Roeg -- I now know it is not, in fact, worth it to me to give it that third viewing, and second complete viewing, sometime in the future. This just isn't my movie, and it never will be.

I did want to mention, before leaving, that there is a funny coincidence between this movie and another I saw this weekend, whose coincidences with yet a third movie I saw this weekend were written about yesterday. Dorian Gray, which I saw on Friday night, has some similar themes to The Man Who Fell From Earth, which, in its final stages, presents us aged versions of the main characters, while Bowie's alien remains forever young -- and paralyzed in a purgatory of addiction and human excess, not unlike Dorian.

See, there are some good themes in here -- it's just Roeg couldn't focus on them enough to make a movie that spoke to me.

In August I will likely watch either Paddington or Withnail & I.

Finish What You Started: That Sugar Film

This is my second in a 2020 bi-monthly series of finishing movies I had to abort watching on my first attempt. (I still like the original usage of the word "abort," but this particular instance is, er, not ideal.)

There are discontinued viewings that you stop by choice, and then there are those that are just out of your hands.

My attempt to watch That Sugar Film in December of 2015, as discussed here, was the latter.

By waiting all the way until the end of my 30-day rental period on iTunes before starting to watch it, I had no time to recover when the viewing started glitching and buffering, and then just wouldn't play at all. It was a prelude to the end of my previous laptop -- actually, two laptops ago now -- which succumbed to a faulty hard drive (and was too old to be worth replacing), but I didn't know it at the time I wrote the post linked above.

The circumstances were rather unusual. I was watching the movie in a Starbucks prior to my midnight screening of The Force Awakens. That doesn't happen to be all that relevant to the story, I just thought it was worth sharing.

When my laptop did ultimately die, I was still able to get back the other rentals I had downloaded but not yet watched by just setting up iTunes on my new computer and downloading them again. Obviously there was no such option with That Sugar Film, as I had already kicked off my (then 24-hour) viewing window. It's not Apple's fault my laptop gave up the ghost.

I had only been liking the movie at a mid-range level before then, so I have not prioritized getting back to it before now. I should probably explain a little bit what this is, if you don't know. It's basically Australia's answer to Supersize Me, with director-star Damon Gameau in the Morgan Spurlock role. Instead of 30 days of only McDonald's, though, the experiment is 60 days on a high sugar diet, the kind Gameau had previously forsaken. That "high sugar" diet being, of course, a fairly average diet for most people in the world. Gameau made the experiment one step more difficult -- he would only eat foods that are considered to be "healthy," like non-sugar cereals, yogurt, fruit and smoothies. He quickly discovered he would have no difficulty getting to 40 teaspoons of sugar a day -- the average intake for an adult in the western (?) world -- even without a single bit of what's considered "junk food," and in fact might even have to "diet" for a part of each day not to exceed those 40 teaspoons. It's all in the interest of preparing for the arrival of his new daughter, who is in the belly of his pregnant girlfriend for the entirety of the narrative. (That last detail feels very Spurlock-ian.)

Interesting experiment. At the time I thought "The world already has one Morgan Spurlock -- does it need another?" Since then, though, I've softened on Gameau, who also released a documentary last year called 2040, which looks at where the environment will be 20 years from now if we do nothing about it, and what we can do. Again, not all that original, but it gives him a little more credibility than if he were trying to be "just another Morgan Spurlock."

The good news is, Gameau comes across positively, as Spurlock did in is early efforts, and not kind of self-indulgently, like later career Spurlock. I was fully with That Sugar Film this time around. It has a really lively presentation. There's a lot of use of fun and reasonably sophisticated graphics, like Gameau riding around on a fat cell travelling through the body. My favorite recurring technique that felt distinct was the way Gameau handles normal talking head interviews. Instead of just appearing in whatever environment in which they were interviewed, they appear on the side of a cereal box or in the ingredients section of a bag of candy, with their faces often color-adjusted to match the packaging. It's a small detail, but small details in a form as frequently tired as the documentary can make a big difference.

There is, of course, quite a lot of eye-opening information here, if it is all to be taken at face value. We know that there is some disagreement among experts whether sugar or fat is more harmful to humans, though maybe less so than there once was. But Gameau is quite clearly on the side of sugar = bad, and a lot of the information he provides compellingly makes that case. (Among them -- the one expert he talks to who seems to disagree with these findings is someone who openly admits receiving funding from Coca Cola.)

The one hesitation I had with the film, because I just did not believe it, despite the physical evidence presented, was the transformation to Gameau's body over the course of the 60 days. He gained something like 20 pounds, his bloodwork was terrible and the doctors were telling him he was on the way to getting a fatty liver. As this is a healthy early 30s guy, it just didn't really ring true, even with before and after video/pictures of how he looked. There just seemed something too far-fetched about the radical changes given only a change to drinking more juices, while maintaining the same level of exercise.

Then the fact that there's a lot that just seems like a self-fulfilling prophecy. He'd say he felt a lot less energy and had wild mood swings, then there's footage of him just being sacked out on the couch in a half-coma of exhaustion. I'm not saying Gameau would fake this to sell his case more convincingly, I'm just saying he could.

Overall, though, it's a really compelling and alarming documentary, while remaining very fun. Probably the best of all worlds when it comes to the aims of the types of documentary I tend to enjoy the most.

Full disclosure: I ate the remnants of a bag of chocolate chips while watching. Ha.

Okay, I'm whittling down my choices. I'll probably watch the original Paddington in June -- or finish watching it, I should say.

Finish What You Started: Sisters

This is the first in my 2020 bi-monthly series, in which I finish watching movies I had to stop watching for whatever reason.

When I told my wife I was finally finishing Sisters, the Tina Fey-Amy Poehler vehicle we had started some three years earlier, she said “Didn’t we stop watching that because it was so terrible?”

I said, “No, I think it was just late on a Saturday night and we were tired. I don’t think it was terrible.”

As it turns out, she was right.

“Terrible” may be a strong word, but the movie does not showcase Fey and Poehler at their best, though it may showcase Fey at her sexiest, if you consider cleavage, acting wild and bits of bra poking into view to be “sexy.” I did, because I have always been attracted to Fey, but my fondness for her goes way beyond the mere physical. She is kind of the poster child for brainy women in comedy, so a role like this, in such inferior material, is unbecoming for her. But hey, even with her feminist bonafides, Fey is probably like any other human being in that she wants to remind people of her physical desirability as she hits her mid-40s. (Late 40s now, but this was five years ago.)

The bigger problem with the movie – well, there are many, but I’ll start with one. Fey and Poehler may be great friends in real life, but sisters, they do not seem to be. It’s not that they are so physically dissimilar, but just that they don’t seem like they had the same parents (James Brolin and Dianne Wiest, in this case). Fey plays a wild party girl and Poehler plays her goodie goodie sister. Obviously you can have “the good sibling” and “the bad sibling,” but a shrewd script and/or casting director would find things that the two had in common that made them read as siblings, even if their looks or behaviors are different. This reads as two real-life friends trying to have fun together. But not succeeding.

The premise is that the two grown daughters are facing the fact that their parents want to sell their childhood home. Both are stunted in their own way – Fey has a resentful teenage daughter and can’t hold a job, Poehler is successful but unlucky in love – so they see the selling of their home as a symbol of the ways they’ve failed. That sounds deeper than it really is, as the movie bumbles around in the doldrums of physical comedy and dirty language. What the two really want to do, apparently, is throw a final party in their old home, inviting all the other 40-somethings they went to school with, even though the new house has already been sold and the new owners are already hovering around, being obnoxiously wealthy (they paid in cash).

Can the two women throw a giant rager without destroying the home? Well, what do you think?

I have nothing but love for Fey and Poehler separately, or even together in the right context. Movies, though, are not the right context for them. I never much liked their first cinematic collaboration, Baby Mama, which again casts them against type in ways that don’t work (with Poehler the raunchy one in that context, and Fey the good one). I won’t even get into the icky ways that movie is insensitive, especially racially. Then their most recent collaboration, in which Fey plays more of a supporting role, was last year’s Wine Country, which Poehler also directed. That movie is more flat and disjointed than wrong-headed. It’s quite lethargic. (I remember from IMDB that they were both also in Mean Girls, but I don’t think their characters had any interaction.)

Sisters was written by actress/but-mostly-writer Paula Pell, who appeared in the Wine Country cast and has a small role here. (These women do like doing favors for each other, and you can throw Rachel Dratch and Maya Rudolph into this troupe of performers who appear together, as they also both appear in Wine Country and Sisters.) I kind of feel like Pell is someone with good comedic instincts. She wrote for SNL for ages and has punched up the Oscars a couple of times. But you really wouldn’t know it from here. Even a huge cast of likeable performers – including Ike Berenholtz, Bobby Moynihan, Chris Parnell, Greta Lee, John Cena and Samantha Bee – cannot scrounge up laughs from Pell’s material.

It’s not that there are zero laughs, though. I did chuckle in spite of myself on a couple occasions. Movies where parties spin out of control usually have at least a couple moments that work, that are sold simply by the talents of the performers in question. Sisters is no exception.

And so it was that I reported back to my wife that the film was “not irredeemable.” That’s not high praise though. The 1.5 stars on Letterboxd more concisely summarize this film’s value.

Okay, I’ll be back in April with another movie I started but didn’t finish.

Unpausing the world's longest pause

For four of the past five years (I skipped 2016), my bi-monthly viewing series – not to be confused with my monthly viewing series – have been part of the lifeblood of this blog.

In 2015, I watched one of the six existing Star Wars movies every two months in anticipation of The Force Awakens. In 2017, it was anime films. In 2018, I revisited films by Joel & Ethan Coen that I hadn’t loved when I first saw them. In 2019, I filled in (most of) my blind spots in Spike Lee’s filmography.

In 2020, I am going to take a little pause from something quite that useful.

Starting in February and every two months thereafter, I will be finishing movies that I started, but was not able to finish at the time I started them for whatever reason. Think of it as kind of branching off of last year’s monthly series, Audient Audit. (In fact, I considered doing them both in the same year, but I decided I wanted to watch Lee’s films more.) Appropriately enough, the series will be entitled Finish What You Started.

So while this series has no grand thematic ambitions and it’s unlikely to be something you are going to “follow along with” – to the extent that you do that anyway – it’s a useful personal goal that helps tidy up my lists and scratch itches that were never fully scratched.

As I am working from a very specific list, I can already tell you the titles I plan to watch, assuming I can source them. Since I don’t know what order I’ll watch them, I’ll just list them alphabetically. They are:

The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976, Nicolas Roeg)

Paddington (2014, Paul King)

Sisters (2015, Jason Moore)

That Sugar Film (2014, Damon Gameau)

Withnail & I (1987, Bruce Robinson)

Coincidentally enough, the reason I could not finish That Sugar Film relates to The Force Awakens, indirectly, but I’ll wait until we get to that film to expand on that further.

You’ll notice that’s only five films. That’s because when I first started gathering titles for this series, I had not finished Sophie’s Choice. As I watched the entirety of that film in 2019, it now quite obviously cannot be watched for this series. I already finished what I started. So that means that sometime before December, I will have to remember one other film I prematurely aborted, or else prematurely abort this series.

Just so it’s not a completely dry series, I will try to add some humorous comments about why I did not watch the entire movie at the time I started watching it.

In any case, this series may not be supremely interesting to you, but what can I say, it’s my blog and I decide how to use it.

Hopefully you will derive some enjoyment from it from time to time.