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.
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