Coincidences/observations from a birthday weekend with Kristen Wiig

Kristen Wiig was in the first movie I watched for my birthday weekend away at the hotel.

She was also in the last.

Plus two in the middle.

This was, indeed, a coincidence, the first of many I will point out in a bullet point format in this post, because I don't have the energy for much more than that. I had more than 20 physical DVDs with me, as well as four movies rented on iTunes, and then, for good measure, I ended up watching two streaming as well. I watched 12 movies between Friday afternoon and Sunday morning, and because of technical difficulties that I will briefly touch on, there were maybe ten others that I tried to watch but couldn't.

I say all this to say that with an attempt to watch as many as 22 different movies, the fact that Wiig was in four of them is, indeed, a coincidence and not something premeditated. I don't think she was in any movies that I had but didn't watch, but I could be wrong about that.

Anyway, the first Wiig movie and first of the marathon was Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, in which she plays Dewey's first wife, whom he marries when she's 12. She's played by Wiig even when she's 12, which is hilarious.

Three movies later it was mother! Did you remember she's in mother!? She's a press agent turned guerrilla warrior. Her character in that film kind of typifies what I think is brilliant about it.

That took us through Friday night. My second movie Saturday morning was The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, in which she plays Ben Stiller's love interest.

Then I wrapped the weekend with The Skeleton Twins on Sunday morning, in which she plays the unstable twin sister to Bill Hader's gay would-be actor.

Wiig makes a good opportunity to segue into my first coincidence/observation:

• I watched two movies in which someone plays David Bowie's "Space Odyssey" on a guitar. The first was Wiig in Walter Mitty as seen in the poster above. The second was Seu Jorge in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, which I only watched because my first attempt to watch a Wes Anderson movie, a long overdue re-reckoning with The Royal Tenenbaums, succumbed to technical difficulties.

Maybe before I continue my bullet points I should quickly explain those difficulties.

My projector worked fine. My DVD app on my computer did not.

I feel like laptops should come with built-in ways to play DVDs, but they don't seem to anymore. When I got this laptop in 2015 I had to install an app to play DVDs, and that app was Power Media Player, which has worked fine since. Now, not so much. I think they finally want me to pay for this product, or upgrade it, which requires a login of some kind. But I didn't want to mess around with that, so instead, I suffered a severely compromised version of the app all weekend. Would upgrading it or getting a new app have been easier? Sure. But instead I did the tedious thing I'm about to describe in the next paragraph.

So the app will no longer autoplay movies from the start. It gets stuck on the status "Detecting Disk" and never gets off it, even once it has obviously detected the disk. I say "obviously" because the name of the disk came up in the folder list on the left side of the screen, and when you opened it in the folder, you could get access to the raw video files themselves -- chunks of the movie broken up in segments running anywhere from 19 to 21 minutes. I could usually get these files to play in the correct sequence, though it took me until about the third movie I'd watched this way before I realized I needed to change a setting for them to play automatically without having to manually launch each new video file. However, in some cases, I just couldn't figure out how to open the right video file for the start of the movie. Royal Tenenbaums was one such example. I had to bail. 

Oh, and then there were another couple DVDs that were just too scratched or in other ways incorrectly encoded for the computer to even properly recognize them. Anyway, a number of prospective movies were lost either through incorrect sequencing or an inability to be recognized by my geriatric laptop DVD player. 

And that completes the summary of my technical difficulties. 

Where was I?

• I saw two (consecutive) movies in which a washed up performer looks back on the mistakes he's made in his life, and also cannot smell. (Dewey Cox is stricken without the sense of smell after accidentally chopping his brother in half with a machete, and Riggan Thomson in Birdman can't smell the flowers at the end of the movie because he's blown his nose off in a botched suicide attempt.)
• I saw two consecutive movies in which a character draws an unhappy face on a mirror with lipstick. Jena Malone does that in The Neon Demon (my last movie Saturday night) and Hader does it right before his suicide attempt at the start of Skeleton Twins. 
• Speaking of which, it struck me as interesting that Hader stars in It Chapter Two -- spoilers for that about to come up, so watch out! In both Skeleton Twins and It he plays a character who's gay and who uses humor to deflect pain, and It 2 also begins with a suicide attempt in a bathtub -- though it's not successful in Skeleton Twins, and it's not Hader's character in It. 
• I saw two consecutive movies in which characters are trying to use clues to find a person who doesn't necessarily want to be found, those being Margot in Paper Towns and the Life photographer Sean O'Connell in Walter Mitty. 
• This could be the weirdest one: In both Birdman and Skeleton Twins, characters compare their own success or lack thereof to that of George Clooney. Riggan confesses his fear that Clooney would be the one on the front page of the newspaper if the plane they had both been flying in had crashed. Then there's the great exchange in Twins where Maggie says, in trying to comfort the unsuccessful Milo, "No one's a famous actor." Milo counters with the example of George Clooney, and Maggie says "Okay, I guess George Clooney is one exception."
• There was a weird prediction of the future in Paper Towns. Justice Smith appears as one of two best friends of the main character played by Nat Wolff. There's a scene in this movie where the three of them sing the Pokemon theme song before going into a scary situation, believing it will make them less scared. Four years after this movie Smith would play the lead in Pokemon: Detective Pikachu.
• It was funny to see a young John Amos and a pre-Jesus Christ Superstar Ted Neeley in Vanishing Point, Richard C. Safarian's 1971 car chase movie that supposedly inspired Quentin Tarantino in Death Proof. That they're in the movie is not funny so much as the fact that neither of them appears in the credits, which is especially strange in the case of Amos, as he appears in a half-dozen different scenes and even has a couple lines of dialogue.
• On this, my third viewing of mother!, I saw the environmental metaphor more than the biblical metaphor. I love a movie that keeps shifting in meaning every time you watch it.

This has been a bit discombobulated but here's the whole lineup, in order:

Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story

Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)

Wonder Woman

mother!

Paper Towns

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

Heartbeeps

Vanishing Point

The Breadwinner

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou

The Neon Demon

The Skeleton Twins

However, I would have watched these if I could get the DVDs to play or if they were still on the streaming services I swear I'd seen them on recently:

Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping

Monty Python's The Meaning of Life

Paris, Texas

The Royal Tenenbaums

First Reformed

The Rocky Horror Picture Show

Melancholia

The Blackcoat's Daughter

Those of you who have not stopped reading already, you can do so now. 

Slap me right in my face why don't you

It’s not every day that I am put in my place, but every once in a while it’s funny to have a thing like this happen:

In case you can't read what it says, I will retype it, to drive the stake further into my own heart:

"DEREK ARMSTRONG

Derek Armstrong's reviews do not count toward the Tomatometer. This is not a Tomatometer-approved critic, and this critic's reviews are not published on a Tomatometer-approved publication."

It was something I found when googling myself, and no, I don’t google myself very often. (When I do I get a lot of hits from a retired NHL player, and they can be annoyed to wade through.)

It relates to two reviews that got posted to Rotten Tomatoes (not by me) when I wrote for All Movie Guide between 2000 and 2011. Two random reviews, it would appear: Lymelife (2008) and The Living Wake (2010). 

The wording of it sounds almost like a warning, like “Don’t take any wooden nickels! Don’t take any opinions from a critic not recognized by the Tomatometer!”

I knew there was a reason I prefer Metacritic.

Abigail Breslin's long, slow road to Zombieland 2

It’s been a good decade for the stars of the original Zombieland, which came out ten years ago.

Jesse Eisenberg has appeared as Lex Luthor and Mark Zuckerberg, for which he received an Oscar nomination, and has starred in two film series (Rio and Now You See Me).

Emma Stone has appeared as Gwen Stacey and Billie Jean King, winning an Oscar for her role in La La Land.

Woody Harrelson has appeared in one Star Wars movie, one Planet of the Apes movie, one Venom movie, four Hunger Games movies and the acclaimed first season of True Detective, with an Oscar nomination for Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.

Abigail Breslin has …

Well, three out of four ain’t bad.

Poor Abigail Breslin, caught in the post child actor purgatory that has at least not caused her to succumb to drug addiction or public brawling. Oh she’s been working during that time, and some of the films have been pretty prominent, such as Rango, August: Osage County and Ender’s Game. But next to the outsized accomplishments of her co-stars, she’s lived the last ten years in comparative anonymity.

It’s kind of like when there are four stars of a movie announced in the trailers, and it reels them off as follows: “Oscar winner Meryl Streep, Oscar winner Daniel Day-Lewis, Oscar winner Charlize Theron, and … Keanu Reeves.” (Don’t know what movie that would be, but I’d like to see it.)

Breslin, alas, is Keanu Reeves.

Bad example as Keanu Reeves is having a terrific career. Okay … “and … Kellen Lutz.”

Breslin, alas, is Kellen Lutz.

Ages 13 to 23, which is what Breslin has been this decade, can be tricky for any performer. Some performers – I hate this example, but let’s say Miley Cyrus – can sail right through that period. They keep getting work and they keep getting bigger.

But for many if not most child actors, you have to make a bit of a rough adjustment, and see how you come out the other side when you’re finally deemed to be an adult. The things that made you so castable as a child may desert you during those intervening years. Your cute baby fat may become less cute teenage fat. Your nose might start growing crooked. That adorable baby voice may turn into an awkward squawk like the “that’s not our policy” kid on The Simpsons.

The fact that Breslin has kept working during those years is a sign that she’s doing better than most. But unfortunately, we still think of her as “the little girl from Little Miss Sunshine,” not for any new performance she’s given since Zombieland.

Zombieland: Double Tap comes out this week, and marks her most high profile appearance since Zombieland. Hopefully this will kick off a more enriching next decade for this engaging performer.

I is for Incel?

A couple years ago I wrote a post about how The Shawshank Redemption was the #1 movie on IMDB, and how that made me self-conscious about my own affection for it. I may not have used these exact words at the time I wrote the post (I could go back and read it I guess), but what I meant to say at the time was that Shawshank was the equivalent of an arthouse movie for comic book nerds. Or maybe not so much an arthouse movie, since the people I am broadly generalizing about would have no use for the arthouse in this broad generalization I’m making. But instead, maybe it was a movie they knew counted as a “good movie” that didn’t have men in capes in it. Even comic book nerds being broadly generalized about know that they can’t only like movies with men in capes.

But now I’m wondering if my preconceived notions about IMDB users has a darker edge than I originally thought.

If you haven’t heard, Joker crossed into the top ten movies of all time on IMDB over the weekend. It must have been a brief incursion only, as maybe more people saw and rated the movie to bring its average score down a bit, perhaps even as a reaction to the news that it had reached that height. But it’s still knocking on the door of that chart’s hallowed top ten at #11, with an average user rating of 8.8/10.

I’m not sure how IMDB does its calculations, but I’d guess there’s a greater likelihood of a film nudging into the top ten based on an initial burst of enthusiasm, one that is typically tempered over time by a more measured approach to ranking. Or, in other words, the movie starts getting seen by the people who are not inclined to love it, and they rank it accordingly. If Joker is anywhere near this ranking two years from now, I will be very surprised.

But for it to even make it near or close to the top ten at any point in its existence means that it has to be a pretty acclaimed movie, right?

Er, no, actually.

I learned about it reaching this peak before I saw it on Saturday afternoon, and when I didn’t like it so much (that opinion may get even more negative the more I sit with it), I figured it must be yet another “me problem.” As with films like the recent Ad Astra (don’t get me started), I felt like I must have seen a very different movie than the vast majority of people.

Actually, many people – or many critics, anyway – saw the same movie I did.

Joker has a fairly lethargic 59 on Metacritic. That breaks down to 32 positive reviews, 15 mixed reviews and 11 negative reviews. So more positive than negative – hence the 59 – but only six more positive reviews than those characterized as mixed or negative combined. And even with some perfect scores of 100 mixed in there, it looks like the Venice Film Festival was more the anomaly than what we should expect from other awards bodies as the year goes on.

IMDB is a different story. On IMDB, Joker would have an 88, using approximately the same scale as Metacritic.

So that begs the question: Why is IMDB’s user base so different from the user base of critics?

I’ve suggested what I think it might be in the provocative subject I’ve used for this post. Is this, indeed, the Incel Movie Data Base?

For you to follow me on this one, we have to make what I acknowledge are a couple stretches in our logic. First we have to say that comic book nerds are disproportionately represented among IMDB’s users, which may not be the case. There’s reason to suggest it may be, though. Even 11 years after its release, another film featuring the Joker, The Dark Knight, is still #4 on IMDB, behind only Shawshank and the first two Godfathers. Two Lord of the Rings movies appearing in the top 12 bolsters the notion that people steeped in nerd culture are heavily represented.

Then we have to make the assumption that some significant percentage of the people who like Joker, like it because they feel like it is a call to violence for incels. Incels, of course, being short for “involuntary celibates,” who are considered to be a group of people prone to shooting up a school or shopping mall because the girl they like doesn’t like them. Of course, not everyone who’s unlucky with the ladies is going to shoot up a mall, but people who characterize themselves as incels are probably a lot more likely to do so. That it incites us to violence is not the only or probably not even the primary reason a person would like Joker, but to say it is no factor at all is probably not correct either, and to say the targets of this incitement are not incels is to overlook some of the ways the film is coded.

Then you have to say that there is a meaningful crossover between people who think of themselves as comic book nerds and people who think of themselves as incels. There would be some, of course, but as with anything, it’s more of a “few bad apples” scenario.

If you do go with me on all this, though, my query about the Incel Movie Data Base makes a little more sense.

Of course, as someone who doesn’t like Joker and thinks it puts bad things into the world, I’m going to question the perspective of a person who does – or their willingness to overlook some of its more problematic elements. But it could be very rational, non-violent thinkers who find the film’s filmmaking or acting first rate (they can be), or instead see a criticism of fatcats like Donald Trump. That’s in there too, which makes the messaging of this film ambiguous to say the least. Although I like it when a film can be interpreted differently by different people, in this case it feels sort of dangerous. It feels like another way it's difficult to grasp an "absolute truth" in this day and age.

But it's not a bully like Donald Trump who gets a gun and kills a bunch of people, his comments about shooting someone on Fifth Avenue notwithstanding. It's the victim of that bully. 

As I wade further and further into this post I realize I am not going to end with a totally coherent thought that I can fully defend. I suppose it takes a piece of art with some value to spin a critical thinker in circles, so they can never fully articulate their thoughts, and have to go back to just trusting the feeling they get from the art.

So Joker is that kind of art: provocative, conversation starting. Art like that should always exist.

But if Joker is engendering passionate fans, it hardly seems likely that they are most passionate about Joaquin Phoenix’s acting, or how Todd Phillips sets up a camera. It seems likely that the passion is coming from the film’s core ideas. And I feel like the uprising of the Joker is more a glorification of the loners who always felt that they were misunderstood, who might think about going to get a gun, than a criticism intended for people who feel forgotten and left behind by the rich. That second idea is put forward on a narrative level, but I don’t think it goes any deeper than that.

Not as deep as the accumulation of hate and disgust felt by mentally ill victims who see no other solution than to rise up and kill everybody.

That's not my reductive view of people with mental illness. It's the movie's. 

Incels, your hero scares me, and your apparent quantity scares me even more.

And I really hope I’m getting all this wrong.

Schrodinger's movie projector

I’m having another one of my patented “go to a hotel and watch a marathon of movies projected on the wall” weekends this weekend, to celebrate my 46^th birthday. (If you think there's a better way for a 46-year-old man to spend his time and money, well, keep it to yourself.)

At least I think I am. See, I haven’t actually tested the projector yet.

It is, therefore, kind of like Schrodinger’s movie projector. Until I test it, I won’t have any idea whether that projector is alive or dead.

If you want a full explanation of Schrodinger’s Cat, the thought experiment devised by Austrian physicist Erwin Schrodinger, you can go here. In simple terms, though, it involves a cat in a box who may or may not have died as a result of the fact that a radioactive substance may or may not have decayed enough to poison the cat. Until you open the box, you don’t know whether the cat is alive or dead, so in theoretical terms, the cat is both alive and dead simultaneously.

My projector is like that.

But I can’t quite bring myself to look in the box. And without the projector, I might cancel the hotel stay. And if I don’t do that at least 48 hours before check-in time, I will be charged for the first night.

But I can’t quite bring myself to learn that the projector is dead. I’d rather exist in Schrodinger’s state of not knowing for as long as possible. For me, for now, the projector is both alive and dead.

If you’re wondering why I should suspect that my projector might be dead, well, I’ve been down this road before. I was going away for one of these weekends back in 2015, just one night that time, and didn’t discover until the morning I was ready to leave that the projector just wouldn’t power on. It was a cheap projector, purchased by my wife online from a Chinese company, and it did in fact work quite well for a number of months. But then it just gave up the ghost. Whether it was inferior electronics or poor storage practices that causes its untimely demise, I don’t know. As it had one of those cases that is basically impossible to open, I never made any inroads to figuring it out, nor learned whether it was within my capabilities to fix it. It just didn’t work, and since it was too late to cancel, I just went to the hotel anyway and watched movies on my laptop on the bed.

Flash forward two years, and I scheduled another one of these weekends for my birthday in 2017. And so I went about acquiring a projector, this time using Gumtree, which is the local equivalent of Craigslist. I paid a similarly cheap price for it (about $80) and met a very nice guy outside of Flinders Street train station to transact the deal. Only when I got home did I discover that it was a North American projector, meaning it was not compatible with the local power outlets. However, the guy said that if I just used an adapter, it should work fine. And it did.

But as it turns out, I don’t have very regular uses for a cheap projector that’s better suited for projecting movies on the walls of hotel rooms than for any kind of home entertainment use. It’s been two years and I have yet to use it again. If I get another use out of it, at least that’ll lower its effective cost from a one-time $80/per rental to a two-time $40/per rental.

But will I? A lot can happen to a dormant piece of electronic equipment in two years, even stored inside its original box on a dry shelf rather than in some dark and dank corner.

It would be easy enough to test it, and I will. Sometime before Wednesday afternoon, anyway.

But even if it’s a better brand than the original projector we had – and there’s no guaranteeing it is – it has that extra complicating factor of requiring the adapter to work in Australia. This may make me resemble an old person more than I’d like to admit, but I have a mild paranoia that any piece of equipment designed to work in one country might blow itself out with another country’s currents running through it. I’ve got a mild paranoia that I myself might cause the radioactive atom to decay, prompting the glass to shatter and the poison to fill the box, just by testing it to see if it works.

Which gives this something in common with another physics principle other than Schrodinger’s Cat: the Observer Effect, which states that an observer will have a measurable effect on a scientific phenomenon just through the act of observing it.

So I want to live in that dream of the projector not being broken just a little bit longer. If only because if it is broken, I will then have to admit to myself that I might cancel this weekend away, and therefore admit to my wife that I only care about going away for a weekend to myself if I have a projector that will project movies on the wall.

I don’t know which scientific principle states that if you observe your own obsessiveness too closely, it makes it real.

Joker's got a Rogue One problem

SPOILERS for Joker. 

Joker puts bad things into the world. It's one of the reasons I don't like the movie, and reason enough.

But since I haven't yet figured out why I think Joker puts bad things into the world, but why I don't think The Dark Knight does that, I'm going to save my criticisms in today's post for something more superficial and plot-focused.

When I wasn't being bothered by the gratuitous shocks and tone deafness of Joker, I was being bothered by the way it makes mincemeat of the familiar Batman mythology.

Or, at the very least, the way it recontextualizes the most notorious moment in Batman's backstory, the one that gets parodied more than any other.

And this is something it has in common with Rogue One.

Rogue One -- which I also gave a milquetoast 2.5 stars as a way of acknowledging that I appreciated certain elements of the film without actually liking it -- does things I don't like, have never liked, with what functions as the inciting incident of the whole Star Wars saga.

Instead of the transfer of the Death Star plans from Princess Leia to R2-D2 serving as this almost quiet moment in an episode of successful espionage, we now know that it was preceded by a giant battle involving AT-ATs. So much for the innocent little space caper that led to a galaxy-defining narrative. It was always operating on the largest of scales, we now know.

That didn't sit well with me at all. It was complicating a story I admired for its simplicity, and it was all in the spirit of mining our nostalgia to sell us "additional breadth and depth" on what we already knew. Or thought we knew, it turns out.

I think the agenda in Joker is a little different, but the result is the same.

I think Todd Phillips and company set out to make a movie about how the world can mold a deranged supervillain in its cruel crucible, and knowing that it was the Batman villain the Joker helped us understand exactly what type of psychopath we're talking about, because we've known that psychopath for more than 50 years. In its ideal form it would have been beholden to no other story or existing narrative timeline.

But we live in a world of cinematic universes, and the suits at DC just could not resist continuing to ram the connections to the story of Bruce Wayne down our throats.

Which I guess is why they ultimately have Thomas and a pearl-clutching Martha Wayne killed on the same night in which the Joker announces himself to the whole world by killing Gotham City's version of Johnny Carson live on air, launching a citywide riot.

Come on.

Look, this origin story for the Joker does not have to fit in perfectly with what we know about the character. Looking him up on Wikipedia just now, I found that his origin story has changed to fit the needs of whichever of the umpteen stories someone was telling about him at the time. I'd appreciate something close to the story where he falls into a vat of acid that turns his skin white and his hair green, but I'm okay if you don't want to give me that. There's only so many times you can film that scene.

I'm even okay if you give me a Joker who's "just some joker," to quote late night host Murray Franklin -- who has no "particular set of skills" that allows him to marshal an army of freaks, create all kinds of poisonous weapons, and evade capture for as long as he does and as often as he does. If you want to make Arthur Fleck just a failed clown with the remnants of childhood brain damage, I can work with that as well.

What I can't work with is the idea that the Joker would be on the scene for something like 15 year before Batman even becomes Batman. I mean, how old can Bruce Wayne be in that scene in the alley where his parents are killed? Eleven? Twelve? And what's the youngest Batman can be when he first emerges? Thirty?

So in Todd Phillips' and Joaquin Phoneix's Gotham City, Bruce Wayne grows up with a hatred for the Joker his whole life, with a single focus for all his efforts toward shaping himself into a tech-savvy vigilante. No, this Joker does not pull the trigger that killed his parents, but he might as well have. He incited those copycats to violence, and besides, he came to my damn house and talked to me through the gate. He's the face on my voodoo doll and my punching bag. He's the last face I look at when I go to bed and the first I see each morning before I wake up.

It's a problem because I can't abide by a world where the Joker is on the loose for 15 years, menacing Gotham City, begging for someone to rise up and do something about him, until someone finally does. If he's on the loose for that long, it speaks incredibly poorly of the Gotham police -- though it speaks even worse of the prisons and the justice system if he keeps getting caught and keeps escaping.

I had always thought that the killing of the Waynes was a random crime, a robbery, not some vendetta on the rich launched by the villain who would become the future Batman's greatest nemesis. I had always thought their alley demise was the narrative equivalent of Leia Organa hunching over and surreptitiously sliding a disk into a slot on an R2 unit.

Rogue One tried to tell me something quite different about that scene, and now Joker is trying to do the same, and I don't like it.

I agree with a friend of mine who stated that the movie would have been better off leaning away from, rather than leaning into, the Bruce Wayne stuff. Like if they had to get Bruce in there for a cameo to make the audience chuckle, make it like Wolverine's five-second cameo in X-Men: First Class. Not everything has to be related to everything else. If Joker were more of a standalone, I might have liked it better.

Or, I might have just written this post about why I think it puts bad things into the world instead.

Like Psycho

It took until October was in double digits, but I've finally started watching horror movies, having now ticked off two in two days. (I watched The Dead Don't Die on October 1st, but that wasn't to feed the Halloween horror beast, rather just to review it, on the first day after its September 26th release I was able to see it. If it had been to feed that beast, it would have left it seriously hungry.)

Today I want to discuss the first, though I could easily see a second post forthcoming to vent the vitriol I feel toward the Pet Sematary remake.

That first movie on Thursday night was Dementia 13, and it's the film that finally made me understand what Roger Corman was all about.

It wasn't Corman's name that attracted me to this 1963 film, though it would have; when I came across it among the horror selections on Kanopy, a cursory review of its details told me that it was among the first films ever made by Francis Ford Coppola, and that got me in the door.

But I noticed Corman's name as producer in the credits, and it whetted my appetite. I familiarized myself with the Corman schlock aesthetic during my 2011 month series Getting Acquainted, in which I singled out a cinematic talent I was unfamiliar with and watched three of his or her works during the month. (You can read my Corman piece here.) And schlock horror is particularly appetizing to me in the month of October, as last year I used Kanopy to watch both The Driller Killer and Death Bed: The Bed That Eats. Corman was not associated with either of those movies, though he should have been.

I knew Corman was all about producing popular genre movies at the lowest possible cost and the highest possible volume. What I didn't realize until Dementia 13 was how much he was trying to capitalize on the specific popularity of an existing property, an understandable third leg in the tripod of his approach that I hadn't considered before now. You know, kind of like The Asylum does today.

Specifically, Dementia 13 is his Psycho, and as nakedly as one could imagine.

Okay, about to go into SPOILERS for this movie. (And for Psycho, though I can't imagine you haven't seen that.)

Both movies start with a female protagonist who is effectively on the run (or who becomes so pretty early on). In Dementia 13 it's in the first scene, as gold digger Louise Haloran (Luana Anders) and her husband, an heir to his family's fortune, are rowing out to the Irish island on which his family lives. Like Janet Leigh's Marion Crane, she's blonde, though that may not be a hugely compelling similarity. More compelling is that she's neck deep in a scheme that endangers her life, here trying to convince the family that her husband, who has died of a heart attack on the boat ride, is not actually dead. (She dumped him and let him sink to the bottom of the bay.) This wasn't just a random occurrence that she reacted to poorly; in his dying breath he tells her that she won't get her share of the fortune if he's dead, indicating that he knows her affections for him are not on the level. She similarly responds to his death throes with a "You're not dying on me you bastard" bedside manner, but it's too little too late.

Where she really shares something in common with Marion is that she'll be dead before the movie is even halfway over. In a way that is a mirror image of the Psycho shower scene except by the banks of the water rather than in a shower stall, Louise is hacked to death by a man (we assume it's a man, though we can't really see the person's face) wielding an axe. And as in Psycho, we see only flashes of the crime, letting the audience imagination do the rest. (Which, of course, was also a convenience for someone with Corman's low budget.) The most recurring image is her bloody hands vainly clutching at the grass on the banks as she slips into her watery tomb.

Unlike in Psycho, we don't actually know who the killer is for the lion's share of the movie. Coppola and Corman retain that as a mystery. I can't remember if there was ever a time when I didn't know Norman Bates was the killer, though maybe that's just because I knew so much about the movie before I saw it. Anyway, there are about five candidates who it could be. When the killer is ultimately revealed, he has Norman's same type of overt placidity, which masks his darker urges.

Finally there is the dead female character who functions as supernatural red herring. In Psycho it's obviously Mrs. Bates, but here it's Louise's husband's sister, Kathleen, who drowned when she was a child. That's the reason Louise and John were headed out to the island, to participate in a bizarre annual ritual marking the girl's death. Although she has been dead for decades, we see her body on a couple occasions, almost as if it were freshly deceased, or in some state of suspended animation. The reveal at the end that it was a wax recreation of the girl is similar to the reveal of the skeletal remains of Mrs. Bates in her rocking chair.

Perhaps if I had known that Dementia 13 was conceived as a ripoff of Psycho -- Wikipedia says flatly "The producer wanted a cheap Psycho copy, complete with gothic atmosphere and brutal killings" -- I might have judged Dementia 13 more harshly as I was watching it. Perhaps also if it had been some anonymous hack who directed it, rather than the eventual director of The Godfather and Apocalypse Now, I would have seen it more clearly as a hack job and not the creative seeds of a future master of the form. But the truth is that those creative seeds are there, and I do think you can appreciate a movie more as emblematic of the style -- either the early style (Coppola) or the trademark style (Corman) -- of a particular cinematic voice. Dementia 13 looks a bit different as the product of auteurs other than Coppola and Corman, but it isn't the product of those hypothetical other auteurs.

Besides, the general contours of Psycho are effective in Psycho, and they are effective in a "cheap copy" as well.

Un-lee-shed: Miracle at St. Anna

This is the fifth in my 2019 bi-monthly series Un-lee-shed, where I catch up with (most of) the Spike Lee movies I haven’t seen.

Spike Lee has made a bunch of duds in his career. Given what I’d heard about it at the time it was released in 2008, I was pretty sure Miracle at St. Anna would be one of them.

It’s really not. Although it veers toward that territory during its low moments, Lee does mostly right the ship. He doesn’t right it enough for me to actually recommend Miracle at St. Anna, which is too long and has too many “goofy moments,” for want of a better word. But really, it’s not that bad of a movie.

What’s more, it feels like a Spike Lee movie. It’s loaded with his familiar concerns and some trademark touches.

When I first heard about Miracle at St. Anna, I thought it was a strange milieu for Lee – you know, a war movie. Many directors seem to eventually want to try one, so it isn’t surprising that Lee also wanted to take his turn. I mean, he’s never a director who has limited himself to just a few genres. But I guess I just didn’t expect it, maybe either in terms of the scope or in terms of the subject matter.

But Lee is no stranger to historical epics, which is kind of what I consider Malcolm X to be. Ambition can take on multiple forms, and with Lee, it has. He has ambitions toward tackling thorny racial issues, but he’s also got ambitions about the canvas on which he paints. So really, Miracle at St. Anna is not such a strange choice.

And it’s fairly credibly mounted. The war scenes, which are actually relatively few, have the basic details right. Bodies fall in the direction they should. Explosions seem like explosions. Music plays forlornly, perhaps too forlornly. If I have technical concerns with the movie, they relate mostly to the editing choices, and some of the shots by Matthew Libatique, who has actually since become one of the most sought-after DPs (Black Swan, mother!, A Star is Born).

I guess what doesn’t really work about the movie is that it feels like a mish-mash. Oh, plus those moments that feel like they come out of left field, tonally, many of which involve actor Omar Benson Miller.

Lee bites off a little more than he can chew here, but that’s not unusual territory for Lee. He was accused of doing that in BlacKkKlansman, which was my second favorite movie of last year. Maybe it’s the way he chews it.

The story follows the four surviving soldiers of a misbegotten mission in which a cowardly white captain (Walton Goggins) sends in a black company basically as sitting ducks for a German ambush. Oh, this is World War II, in case you didn’t know, and the setting is rural Italy. These four make their way to an Italian village, picking up an injured and delusional young boy along the way. Those villagers also have a back story, as do some Germans we meet, as do a group of Italian “Partisans” who were anti-Mussolini.

The story has the strange effect of introducing some of these characters too late for them to seem like such an integral part of the story, and abandoning others too early. I forgot to mention there is also a present-day (early 1980s) frame story involving one of the surviving soldiers shooting a man point blank when he recognizes him as his one time enemy, during a random interaction at a window at the post office. This portion of the story features John Turturro, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Kerry Washington … who, combined, receive about four minutes of screen time. The story doesn’t miss them per se, since the flashback that takes up 93% of the running time is actually more interesting, but it just calls into question why Lee bothered to show us this frame story and cast it with actors we would have expected to see more of. Perhaps most problematically, there's an especially strange and pointless cameo by John Leguizamo that doesn't even have any corollary when the frame story wraps back around at the end. 

And then there are the weird episodes. Almost without explanation, Omar Benson Miller, playing the character Sam Train, breaks out into uncomfortable moments in which it almost seems like he is doing a parody of the type of minstrel show African American that was the subject of Lee’s film Bamboozled. At best it’s a distraction and a tough tonal shift to swallow; at worst it feels like it sets back the racial understanding the film is grappling with. The fact that these moments of outrageous behavior are few and far between kind of helps, but also kind of begs the question about why Lee let those scenes get away from him in the first place.

In all, though, this is a mostly credible war movie that has some affecting moments. There’s too much of it, for sure, but that’s not a problem that’s unique to Lee. And it’s not totally satisfying, but it’s not unsatisfying, either. I’m not sure if I’m being biased by the negative reviews of it to give it a mild thumbs down rather than a mild thumbs up, but my concerns with it are significant enough that I’m comfortable with that. Especially since I’ve decided I need to toughen up and not just give every mediocre movie a pass.

One complaint I definitely had about it is that I went through the whole movie and could not definitively determine what the miracle of the title was supposed to be. There are a couple things that might have qualified, but none of them seemed really miraculous, or if so, the miracle was not presented in enough of an “a-ha!” moment for it to really sink in. There’s some magical realism here, but it’s begging for more explication.

To end on a more positive note, I did enjoy seeing some elements that I considered to be trademark Lee. Two in particular, in fact, were later echoed in BlacKkKlansman. The first is a scene where the soldiers stop and look at some war propaganda posters pasted to a stone wall in one of these villages they pass through. We see them looking at the posters in disgust – head on, as if the posters occupied the space where we the audience are sitting – for quite some time before we see what they’re actually looking at. It turns out this propaganda features some racist caricatures of black people in the type of hurtful style that was, again, the focus of Bamboozled. But the technique itself reminded me of the moment in BKKK where John David Washington slowly approaches the vile caricatures that the klansmen had been using as target practice. It’s not until he reaches the targets that we see how awful they truly are.

Lee’s fondness for cross-cutting is also on display here. There’s a scene where we see soldiers from three different countries – America, Germany and Italy – all praying to the same God, despite the fact that all three are in opposition to each other in meaningful ways. It may be a rather obvious message that we as human beings are more the same than we are different, but I’m a sucker for the kind of technique he uses to dramatize that. I suppose it’s used differently here than the “White power! Black power!” moment in BKKK, but no less effectively.

I’ve ended up writing more about Miracle at St. Anna than I expected I’d have any reason to, which most certainly speaks well of it, whether I think it’s ultimately a success or not.

Okay! This series concludes in December with Chi-Raq.

A most unexpected disappearance

I've gotten way behind on my Excel spreadsheet of all the films I've ever seen. It's not worth getting into. I've got a Word document with the exact same information, but I also have a spreadsheet. It doesn't have about the last 500 movies I've seen. So I've been catching up.

In the course of going backward through my Letterboxd diary so as to be sure to add everything, I came across Kingsman: The Golden Circle, which I watched in January of 2018, to give you some idea of my progress. (I still have about 300 to go.) In conjunction with adding the movie, I read a review of it on the site I used to write for ten years ago, All Movie Guide.

That review mentioned Channing Tatum, which made me realize something surprising:

That was the last time I had seen Channing Tatum in a movie.

You know, Channing Tatum, one of the world's biggest and brightest young stars. I couldn't remember the last time I'd seen his face grace a poster or his biceps burst through a trailer.

As it turns out, Tatum has been in only two movies since I saw Kingsman. Actually, he's not "in" either of them; only his voice is. He voices the main character in Smallfoot, presumably alongside Zendaya, who is Meechee. But I didn't see that. I did see this year's Lego Movie 2, but he's only the voice of Superman in that one, a tiny role, if I remember correctly.

In other words, a role he could have done over breakfast one day while feeding his child.

Tatum's absence is, indeed, due to fatherhood, or so he claimed when Variety caught up with him last September. "I've got a kid, man," he told Variety, when Variety noticed he'd had a scant year and asked him about it. "That's the biggest job I have."

But also in that article came the revelation that he was about to end his informal hiatus, to get back to work. He didn't do that. Lego 2 couldn't have been what he was talking about, and besides, by September he'd probably already recorded that part. There's something called America: The Motion Picture that is listed in pre-production on IMDB, but there also he provides only a voice, and you'd think, wouldn't have done so yet. His next live action movie appears to be Free Guy, a comedy starring Ryan Reynolds, next July. He's listed fourth in the cast ... so maybe that's what he was talking about?

Still and all, it's a bit of a strange thing for a guy in his Hollywood prime -- his absolute prime -- to take what amounts to two years off, and sort of going on three. He's only 39. Some actors don't even hit their prime until their 40s.

But I wonder if I'd be saying the same thing if he were a woman.

Earlier this year I wrote about Rachel McAdams, who is only 18 months older than Tatum and similarly in her prime, and how she was probably about to take a couple years off because she was having a baby. That was just a deduction from the timing of her child's birth and the lack of upcoming projects on her IMDB page. But I didn't note my surprise that she'd be taking time off to be a parent. With Tatum, I did.

Well, good on Channing Tatum then. Be a dad. Let your accountant continue to invest your millions. Now's the time your child will remember that you were around. And he or she won't have to grow up on a damn movie set.

Because when you are really ready to return, you'll have no shortage of offers.

Layer upon layer of really real-ness

I haven't seen Joker yet -- today, probably -- but I have a theory why we continue to hunger for this material even though DC seems intent on forever screwing it up.

It's because each new incarnation of the DC comic book characters purports to be the "really real" version.

While some comic book movies have been made with an eye for approximating an actual comic book, DC has taken the opposite approach, and it seems like we are at least in theory open to it.

Since Batman is the throughline here, let's look at it from his vantage point.

The first Batman movie was in 1966, and it was total camp, even for the time. I haven't actually seen it, but I feel like I can say this without second-guessing myself. The way you approximated a comic book at that time was to have words like POW! and BANG! on the screen in big letters. That was about all you could do because there was no way to really approximate the look of comic book panels, or anything but the most basic special effects.

When Tim Burton's 1989 Batman came out, it promised to be dark and brooding, which moved it a step away from the original comics, giving it the feel that the comics had taken on since then (or so I assume -- again, I was not a reader). "Dark and brooding" was, of course, more "realistic," as a real person forever avenging his parents' death in a spandex outfit would probably not have the groovy vibe of Adam West's version.

By the time Batman and Robin, the fourth film in that series, came out, the series had descended back into a cartoonish type of camp that almost resembled the 1966 film (if only it could have been more like it, we might have actually liked it). That meant the world was ready for Christopher Nolan's take on the character in 2005, which matched an increasingly sophisticated filmmaking with an even darker take on the character set in consummately realistic settings. This was what Batman would really look like in the real world.

Then Batman got caught up in the attempt to make Superman more realistic. You could argue Bryan Singer tried to do that with Superman Returns, but Zack Snyder again pitched that as our reason to get interested in Superman again with Man of Steel, in which we see a lengthy back story of Clark Kent working on a deep sea trawler and the like. How can you get more realistic than Superman working on a deep sea trawler? But by the time Batman got involved in this with Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice, Snyder's "even darker" (is it possible?) take on the characters backfired and became kind of ridiculous, again creating the conditions for another reset, another stab toward greater realism in the conception of this character.

I have to assume that reset will be what we get with 2021's The Batman, but for now, we're seeing it in the form of Joker, which will surely be simpatico with the vision of the DC anti-hero that Matt Reeves has planned for his film. (Will Joaquin Phoenix's Joker even be in that film? Not sure.)

What I believe we will be seeing in Joker is the most "realistic" version of this character yet, though you'd have to think Nolan did a pretty good job back in 2008 with The Dark Knight. And by that it seems to mean an independent film-style psychological profile of a character who will later be fighting characters in spandex, though I don't expect to be seeing them in this movie. In fact, I kind of wonder if the intended audience for a DC film will even like it -- a supposition supported by the fact that the movie won the top prize at Venice.

Given that many of DC's movies have been very poorly received -- Batman v. Superman, Justice League, Suicide Squad -- I have many times wondered why they haven't just sent these characters into hibernation for ten years. The most obvious answer, the one we don't even need to go beyond, is that these movies will make money no matter how terrible they are. The second most obvious answer is that they've made movies that have been received extremely well (Wonder Woman) and "better than their worst" (Aquaman). But if you are being less cynical, each time out there seems to be a genuine aesthetic argument to reenvision these characters. And most of the time, that aesthetic is based on the idea of further imagining "what this would really be like in real life."

Joker seems to be a hit, so maybe that means the next wave of DC movies -- which I feel like we are hearing about constantly -- will be tolerable. Because lord knows reviews from critics haven't slowed them down. Birds of Prey, an attempt to reclaim Harley Quinn even though she was portrayed by this same actress in one of DC's biggest turds, hits theaters next year, followed by The Batman and at some point James Gunn's reimagining of that aforementioned turd, Suicide Squad.

Then again, Gunn didn't succeed with Guardians of the Galaxy because it was "realistic." So maybe instead of going forward with a consistent artistic vision, they'll just give each film to the filmmaker they think is best suited to tell the story, and hope for the best. Perhaps that straddling the worlds approach starts with Todd Phillips, who is not the type of "visionary" I would have expected to be given a movie that does a deep dive into the Joker's psychology, with the help of one of the best actors working today. If this works, which it appears to have, maybe anything they try will.

Occasionally unearthing something "old" on Netflix

I went cruising last night for something old on my streaming services. I don’t mean something from five years ago; I mean something from 50 or 60 years ago. Before I was born. Before blockbusters. Before every film was made in color by default. I’d been watching entirely too many 2019 films and I needed a little palette cleanser.

You won’t be surprised to learn that I struck out.

You can’t find anything truly old on streaming services. If they're there at all, they're buried so deep that using the site’s ordinary search mechanisms won’t uncover them, unless you were to know exactly the title you were looking for. I know Kanopy would have obliged me, but I have to hook up my computer to the TV to watch it on a decent screen, and I just wasn’t up for it last night. I just wanted to point and click and watch something from Hollywood’s golden age. I miss Filmstruck and I never even had it.

So 1991 – the year I graduated high school – would have to do.

In truth, the bias toward newer releases is so pronounced on Netflix and my Australian streaming service, Stan, that even finding something as old as 1991 leaves you kind of taken aback. You have a hard time imagining which suits would demand these titles among the buyers, or offer them among the sellers. It seems like someone made a mistake and this is the result. That said, I jumped at my opportunity to recently re-watch Ulee’s Gold (1997) on Stan, as I had not seen it anywhere else in ages. (Too bad it wasn’t as great as I remembered it being.)

Fortunately, the new-to-me movie from 1991 I found on Netflix, Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust, was really great.

This is a film that came on my radar five or so years ago when there was a list going around of the best films by African-American filmmakers. This, in fact, was one of the first, or, to be more precise, the first feature film by an African-American woman to receive a general release. Yes, that ceiling was shattered only 28 years ago. Hard to believe. (Side note: I had to keep reminding myself that the director was Julie Dash, not Stacey Dash, who plays one of Cher’s friends in Clueless. And wow, I just googled Stacey Dash to make sure I was spelling her first name right, and she's in the news, having just been arrested for domestic battery.)

It's a non-linear story about the descendants of freed slaves who lived on an island off the coast of Georgia with their own Creole-English hybrid language, and it takes place in 1902, when a number of the residents were making the tough decision to sail to the mainland and begin living a more modern existence. At first I thought I was failing to comprehend the story, in part because of the difficulty of understanding all the dialogue, but I eventually came to recognize that it’s being told in an episodic fashion during several time periods, where currently living people interact with ghosts, or maybe with people who haven’t been born yet. This is not a movie about story, but about theme, and about capturing a specific place and time and the feel of that place and time.

I usually prefer movies that have a more straightforward narrative, which is one of the reasons Terrence Malick’s insistence on making movies the way he does has steadily worn me out. A couple movies that way, sure – they’re beautiful and poetic. But every movie that way? I get cranky about your artistic limitations.

Dash here is a bit like Malick before Malick, or at least, before all but two of Malick’s movies. And because it’s not the same filmmaker doing the same thing over and over again, it felt fresh and exciting. There’s voiceover and the imagery is poetic, with lots of shots of characters in flowing turn-of-the-century lace and other garments, against water and jungle and watercolor sunsets. It has a distinct feeling of emotional weight, even if some of its story elements are confusing or not easily discernible. (The Wikipedia plot synopsis helped me realize it wasn’t just me, and helped me make a few narrative connections that deepened my appreciation of it.) Ultimately I found it beautiful and really rich.

And it did really scratch my itch for something “old,” both because it depicted a time 120 years in the past, and because the actual filmmaking was clearly of a different era. There’s some traditional score in here, but the rest of the score is kind of a fusion of traditional music and late 1980s synthesizer, which dated the film, but not in a bad way. I also noted that the use of slow motion was clearly of another era; at first glance you might call it “cheesy,” as nowadays slow motion is only really used in the context of big action sequences and bullet time, and this is certainly not that. But I also found it kind of hypnotic, which I think would have been the experience of audiences at the time as well.

Now, if only Netflix could have a category, or even a secret category I could unlock, of films from before 1960, I’d be really happy.

Losing control of my kids' Future

So earlier this year I made a bad call and showed my kids The Princess Bride when my wife was out of town. In fact, she might have even just been out for the evening. Either way, it was clear from her reaction that I should have waited until she was around so we could jointly show them a movie we both love. She wasn’t mad; she was sad, which you will agree is probably worse.

She seemed to get over that pretty quickly, but on Sunday, she got her revenge.

My sons were having twins over for a playdate, an impromptu outgrowth of a morning playing laser tag together at the local shopping center. They’d played outdoors and indoors and video games, and the afternoon was supposed to wind down with a movie, to be accompanied by chocolate chip cookies my wife made freshly.

They wanted to watch Shazam!, but we still think that a number of scenes in that movie (and one in particular) are just far too intense for the younger one, who is not yet six. His eight-year-old brother had to cover his eyes in that scene, even when he saw it for a second time recently on the plane, after turning nine. It became clear that their guests weren’t interested in anything animated. They grow up so fast.

So my wife suggested “How about something old school, like Back to the Future?”

That seemed a great idea to me – until I learned I wasn’t going to be able to watch it with them.

The Princess Bride may be in my top 20 films of all time (#11 currently), but Back to the Future is a whole different story. It’s my #2 movie on Flickchart, bested only by Raising Arizona. Although I hadn’t specifically mapped out a plan to show it to them, it’s probably among the next five “classics” I had imagined I'd expose them to.

Quickly realizing the stakes, I said, “Yeah, maybe I’ll watch it with you.”

The look on one twin’s face was priceless. His eyes went wide, and almost in spite of himself, a single word in a small voice escaped him: “No.”

I wasn’t going to inflict my will on a guest. So I rescinded the idea and promptly occupied myself in other rooms, listening to the movie’s familiar score and dialogue through the imperfect buffer of several walls.

So I was joking a bit when I said my wife got her revenge on me. Certainly she hadn’t envisioned that I’d be prohibited from watching the movie, but neither did she probably guess I’d suggest watching it with them either. My kids like to watch movies with me on movie nights, and in fact, sometimes they get upset if they want to watch something that I don’t want to watch and I slip away or never start watching in the first place. But when they have friends over, my kids don’t need or want me there, particularly the older one. He confirmed this later on, that he wouldn’t have wanted me to sit with them. I get it. (For the record, the younger one cried when I un-invited myself to watch, which was sweet, except that him crying in itself became a problem.)

It was really weird having one of my favorite movies of all time so close yet so far. I was supposed to be the one showing them this movie, but instead, no one was showing it to them. They were discovering it on their own, with no one there to subtly direct their eyes back toward the screen if they got distracted, no one there to imperceptibly indicate just how great a certain scene was.

And without a guide, they predictably got distracted. The younger one actually spend a decent amount of the second and third acts playing in his room, which I also get, because Back to the Future has “a lot of talking.” The older ones mostly paid attention, but one of them was whacking our bean bag chair with a large plastic orange bat, and there was a point near the end when all three of them were in the kitchen, playing a game where they tried to stretch each others’ clothes to the breaking point. In fact, both my wife and I had to threaten to turn the movie off, though it really wasn’t much of a threat, since maybe that would have been fine with them. So it was more of a sad “Why don’t we just turn the movie off if nobody’s watching.”

What did I expect, I guess. I was 11 when Back to the Future came out and I saw it in the theater (something like three times), but the difference between 9 and 11 is maybe the difference between liking Back to the Future and really loving it. Then you've got to factor in the way their relationship to screens is so much different than ours was then, plus the changes in what they find entertaining. They did like it, but the fact that there was a lot of talking was definitely mentioned. I heard some laughs, though, which was good.

The atmosphere of general chaos that eventually took over did have a benefit: It at least allow me to insinuate myself into the living room for the ending. We all kind of ended up in there for that, even my wife. And as I sometimes do with movies that I love dearly, I surprised myself by tearing up at the scene where Doc Brown lets out the triumphant howl after Marty successfully warps back to 1985, dancing in the flame tracks of the Delorean, a look of glee on his face, as a forlorn strain of Alan Silvestri’s main theme graces the soundtrack.

I guess maybe they really were too young, as my older son asked me “Why was there so much swearing in old movies?” and “Why did that woman take Marty’s pants off?” Maybe some of it was a bit advanced. Then again, I kind of appreciate a time when you could say “son of a bitch” in a movie watched by children and no one batted an eyelash. And none of the mother-son incest is really consummated anyway.

Raising Arizona will probably be a bridge too far for at least a couple more years, but you better bet I won’t let anyone show them this without me present. As for my #3 film on Flickchart, well … I think it will be a lot more time before either of them is allowed to watch Pulp Fiction.