Richard Jenkins double feature

We made it an evening of favorite comedies on Saturday night. We'd already queued up Step Brothers, noting it had been a while since we'd last seen it (2015), and then had time for another short one afterwards. Turns out, it had been a lot longer since we'd last seen Flirting With Disaster: 2009.

The choice of the second movie was certainly influenced by the first. As I was going through the folder of DVDs I brought with me from America, I landed on Flirting because a) we wanted to keep the comedy vibe going, and b) it would allow for a double feature of movies featuring the great comedic actor Richard Jenkins. Or, Richard E. Jenkins, as he was once credited.

Not only did this make a great 1-2 punch of exasperation and perfect line deliveries, it also made an unexpected two-movie exploration of families constructed, reconstructed and deconstructed in unusual ways.

In Step Brothers, of course, you've got a new family unit that is composed of two sixtysomething adults (Jenkins and Mary Steenburgen) and their two adult children who still live with them (Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly). The parents are both successes in their respective fields and the kids have no fields at all, yet we are invited to try to see the similarities between them that would make them legitimately related. Ferrell's gentler nature mirrors that of his mother, whom he describes as a saint, though not his asshole brother (Adam Scott), who must have taken more after their dad. Meanwhile, we finally see the relationship between Reilly and Jenkins bear fruit at the end, when Jenkins explains that he always wanted to be a dinosaur, even in his late teenage years. It explains some of the fantasy focus of the adult Reilly.

In Flirting With Disaster, we've got Ben Stiller's character desperately seeking to belong to biological parents, to see in them traits that he has. With each misstep they make on their journey, it takes usually less than an hour to determine the person he's meeting is not actually related to him, but by that point he has already identified apparent physical and behavioral similarities to the people he's meeting -- kind of like how you can read yourself into any horoscope if you squint hard enough. His potentially rivalrous relationship with his own previously unknown brother (Glenn Fitzgerald) is explored, and we see Stiller in all manner of possible family dynamics. Then of course there is also the unconventional family of Jenkins' character with his husband, played by Josh Brolin.

The common factor is Jenkins, but I'm not going to posit any kind of match between actor and subject matter. It's surely just a coincidence.

What isn't a coincidence is how great Jenkins is in both films. Neither part is a lead role, though he does have plenty of screen time. But he's got the presence and the comic instincts to steal scenes from those he does appear alongside. His apoplectic rage at the step brothers is comic gold, and his reaction to getting dosed with acid after eating the wrong quail in Flirting With Disaster is legendary. "Is this a musical table?" "Good night Tina!"

His delivery is, of course, first rate, as he can put a cynical spin on a line of dialogue with the best of them. But this time around I took particular note of the work he does with his face. His look of absolute adoration as he takes in the bullshit slung by his new stepson, the asshole brother Derek, is just hilarious. He's a sixtysomething man glowing with a school girl crush. It's a variation on that same look that is so great when he wishes Tina good night in the middle of his acid trip. This is a first-time experience as well, and for this moment at least, it's a good one.

As Jenkins is now 73 and hasn't appeared in a film since The Shape of Water, I worry that there will be a paucity of future Jenkins roles for me to appreciate the way I appreciate these two. Then again, he's in two 2020 movies that have yet to release. Miranda July's Kajillionaire, at least, seems like it has the potential for Jenkins to again wrestle with the absurdities of life the way only he can.

Sleepy Bruce Willis

I swear I'm not on some Bruce Willis kick, all evidence to the contrary. Yesterday I wrote about how I watched my second quarantine-themed Bruce Willis movie of quarantine, and one day later, I've already watched a third Willis flick. This one isn't quarantine-themed, unless you count one scene where a couple guys rob a store wearing half-masks that are basically surgical masks. That was the only possible connection to COVID-19 I could make.

In fact, I certainly wouldn't have watched Cop Out on Friday night if it weren't for a discovery I made the night before, shortly after finishing Surrogates. I can't remember what bit of internet research it was that led me to it, but I stumbled across the information that Willis acted in a stage version of Stephen King's Misery, which ran from late 2015 to early 2016. He played Paul Sheldon, of course. (What, did you think he played Annie Wilkes? That was Laurie Metcalf. Would have really liked to see this.)

I messaged the surprising information to a friend, another big Stephen King fan, and he responded that he didn't think Willis would have the chops for that. I countered that Willis does have the chops, he just doesn't usually use them. In this case he might, since he would obviously not have taken that role for a paycheck. In all other cases, at least lately, he tends to phone it in.

So Friday night, as proof of my theory, I decided to watch him phone it in.

I had heard awful things about Kevin Smith's movie -- both that it was bad, and why it was bad. The latter, at least, was according to Smith himself, who hasn't been shy about talking about how difficult Willis was to work with. I'm not googling his exact quotes now, but I think it was both an attitude issue and a preparedness issue. Like maybe Willis didn't want to be there, hadn't learned any of his lines, and was an asshole to everyone on set.

I was inclined to believe it, even as I also subtracted points from Smith for blaming the failure of a movie on one of the actors. For directors, in most cases, the buck should stop there. Or at the very least, accept the blame publicly even if you don't privately.

But in the ten years since Cop Out was released, I hadn't had occasion to see for myself how terrible Willis was in the movie, which would likely either confirm Smith's comments or render them as overblown blame-shifting.

The thing I remembered before watching was that I thought Willis looked "sleepy" on the poster. That was what I wrote in this post, a decade ago. It was a slightly different version of the poster than the one here, a version where he looks sleepier. I can't use the same one due to my long-standing rule of not using the same poster art twice for two posts on my blog -- even when they are separated by ten years. Anyway, that's why I'm invoking the adjective "sleepy" in the subject of this post, even if it comes a little closer than I'd like to Trump's lame characterization of Joe Biden as "Sleepy Joe."

Well, Willis may be sleepy in this movie, but I'd argue it's a lesser sin than other elements of Cop Out that are way too awake.

The worst scene in a very bad movie is not a Willis scene at all. He's in it, but he's on the other side of the glass of the interrogation room where Tracy Morgan is busy hamming his fool head off. Screenwriters Mark and Rob Cullen -- Smith can't take the blame for the script, at least -- apparently thought it was a good idea for a five-minute scene in which Morgan's character plays bad cop to a perp, roughing him up with lines he's gotten from movies. The joke is supposed to be that the lines start out as from cop-related movies, but devolve into famous quotes from any movie. It's actually a funny idea, but it goes on at least four times as long as it should, and Morgan doesn't sell it well. That could be because he's also wildly putting the perp in headlocks and pushing his head into the interrogation table while trying to deliver his lines.

Willis' responses, on the other side of the glass, are pretty sleepy, but they aren't what makes the scene so painful to watch.

This is just one example of the typical mode of Cop Out, an early tone setter. Willis is not good in it, and maybe he isn't as engaged as he should be, but his disinterest wouldn't have stood out to me if Smith hadn't called attention to it. There's no doubt the movie is quite bad. It's reasonable, I suppose, to conclude that Smith was so worn down having to cater to Willis' diva mentality that he had nothing left for the rest of the movie.

It occurs to me that Cop Out represented an interesting turning point for both men, in different directions. It's only a year after Surrogates, in which I thought Willis was quite good, and definitely engaged enough. After this, though, he started steadily sliding into where we find him now, selling his phoned-in performances for increasingly smaller paychecks on increasingly smaller movies. (The theory works better if you disregard Looper in 2012, in which he is again quite good.)

On the other hand, it's only a year before Red State, which is still the best directing Smith has ever done if you are considering both the performances of the actors and the overall craft of the film. I know most people don't like that film as much as I do -- it made my top 25 of last decade -- but I hope most people at least acknowledge that it is good by Smith's standards. You can see him having used the experience of Cop Out as motivation to be better. The win streak continued with Tusk before he came back down to earth again.

Well, one thing I can tell you for sure -- tonight will not be my third straight Willis movie.

What we all need right now are some surrogates

My self-proclaimed outside-the-box quarantine-themed viewings continued last night, as I saw my second Bruce Willis quarantine movie. And by that I mean not only was it my second Bruce Willis movie during quarantine, but it was my second Bruce Willis quarantine-themed movie during quarantine.

The first, Twelve Monkeys, dealt with an actual virus. The second, Surrogates, deals with how we cope with threats from the outside world, a virus being only one possible example.

So all you peons out there, watching your "obvious" quarantine movies, need to check out the movie where people put artificial simulacra of themselves into the world to avoid getting killed. It's got loads of current relevance.

I was actually a fan of this comparatively under-the-radar 2009 sci fi flick back from the start, but given how far under the radar it flew, I hadn't really considered watching it again in the intervening 11 years. Then the other night it jumped into my mind for reasons I can't remember, and then stuck there to the point that I paid good money to rent it after not finding it on any of my streaming services. (It's just the kind of movie that should have been hiding away somewhere among Netflix's offerings, much as its characters are hiding away, but no.)

If you aren't familiar with the basic premise, it looks at a world in the not-too-distant future where people (known pejoratively as "meat bags") stay at home all the time, and instead of going out themselves, they pilot around androids that do all their real-world interfacing for them. Some look like their hosts, some look 100% different -- which makes sense, as they are, in a way, walking and talking chat room avatars. That 47-year-old man pretending he's a 22-year-old coed is entirely possible, maybe even encouraged, in this world.

The technology allows the actual humans, the people susceptible to violence and accident and disease, to stay at home in the protection of their apartments, where they sit in comfortable dentist chairs and connect up to a rig that allows them to see the world through the eyes of their robot surrogates. They can get into fist fights or jump off buildings or have sex with whoever they want, all while their increasingly fragile bodies stay at home, safe against everything except the ruination caused by lack of exposure to fresh air and lack of the use of one's muscles.

As I watched these "meat bags" walking around their apartments, unshaven, in bathrobes and slippers, squinting painfully against the stray beams of sunlight that reach them, I saw ourselves in the time of quarantine.

For the more enterprising of us, it's not that bad. We venture out for exercise and grocery shopping, using masks as the technologically viable alternative to having our own personal robots. We do get out and we do move around.

But some of us have probably gained an additional ten percent of our previous body weight, have lost any real inclination toward personal hygiene, and are the willing prisoners of devices and other virtual experiences that help us escape from the drudgery our lives have become.

And how good would it be, right now, to actually have a surrogate? The surrogate can go to the store, go to the movies, ride in a packed subway, even do your job -- and if your job is a dangerous one, your surrogate can do it without even wearing a helmet. In short, surrogates can keep the economy going in times of pandemic.

Alas, no one thought it fit to invent surrogates, even though Jonathan Mostow's film came out 11 years ago, even though the film series that helped inspire it -- The Terminator and The Matrix -- predated Surrogates by even longer than that. Why did they spend so much time on other things, like Tik Tok and chicken sandwiches with Krispy Kreme buns?

Of course, having your surrogate live your life for you is no way to live life, the movie is sure to let us know. Nor would we want to, I hope, in the long run, though this movie has interesting ideas to explore about how virtual reality could increasingly be a replacement for real life experience. During a pandemic, though -- when a vaccine is still probably more than a year away -- it could be handy.

Until then, we'll probably all be slightly hairier and more bathrobed versions of ourselves, squinting at the sunlight.

A pandemic is a pandemic is a pandemic

This past weekend I watched only my second proper virus movie of the pandemic, but it was not one I was expecting. Or, I should say, I was expecting it, but I couldn't have guessed how closely it would resemble our current situation.

The movie in question was Jezebel, the 1938 Bette Davis-Henry Fonda vehicle from director William Wyler. I knew from its recent discussion on Filmspotting that the movie dealt with yellow fever, though that was just a coincidence for them when they chose to watch it as part of a Bette Davis marathon during quarantine. For me it was less of a coincidence, as I chose to watch it because I heard them talking about it, particularly because they gave it the highest marks of any of the four films they watched during the marathon.

The first half of the film deals very little with this sort of thing, as it establishes the characters and gives us a chance to understand why Davis' character would receive the titular assignation. She's a bit of a troublemaker -- a protofeminist, I guess you'd say, even in 1852 New Orleans. She's the type of rebel who refuses to wear a white dress to a ball just because she's an unmarried woman, preferring a more scandalous red that will get the gums flapping. Oh the horror! (They get the gums flapping alright, but they also drive away Fonda. Guess that was a bit too much protofeminism.)

The second half of the film, though, is in the midst of the southern U.S. outbreaks of 1853 and 1854, which appear to have been historically accurate. Was it also historically accurate that they dumped fever victims on a nearby leper island to live out their days or, less likely, to get better? Not going to look that one up.

What interested me was how much the reactions of others to possible infection were similar to ours today. This is in a movie made more than 80 years ago about a period of time more than 80 years before that.

First there's the scene where Fonda's character starts to show symptoms of the sickness, fainting in the middle of a crowded hotel bar. (Oops, spoiler alert.) The crowd backs away from him instantly, avoiding him like the ... well, you know. More tellingly, they all raise kerchiefs to their mouths to protect themselves from transmission. Oh how much better we'd get along these days if we all carried kerchiefs.

A bit later on, Fonda has gotten worse and some medical types/hired goons come with a stretcher to take him away to Leper Island. These guys are fitted with actual, proper surgical masks, something I might not have been sure even existed in the pre-Civil War era. Watching them ascend the stairs to fetch Fonda gave me a chill of recognition.

I don't suppose there was anything earth-shattering about this realization, but it reminded me that pandemics have always been and will always continue to be, and that there is still something elementally similar about how humans respond in the face of potentially contracting such a virus.

Damn good movie, too -- it's a bit like Gone With the Wind before Gone With the Wind, and about half the length.

I'd love this virus to be gone with the wind, but we're still wearing our masks -- metaphorically or otherwise.

Better as a jumping off point

I'm not going to say that Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters is a better movie than Gretel & Hansel, but I'm disturbed that I'm even considering saying it.

The former is a violent and silly action horror with one foot firmly planted in the realm of camp, while the latter is a serious and stylish vision from the man who directed one of my top ten films of last decade, The Blackcoat's Daughter.

The difference that benefits the former?

The former uses the classic Grimm fairy tale as a jumping off point. In the latter, well, the fairy tale is the point itself.

Say what you will about fairy tales, but they rarely would be confused for traditional narratives with a beginning, middle and end. Or at least with satisfying versions of those components. I can't tell you how many fairy tales I've read -- and we were doing that regularly a couple years ago, reading from this beautiful old book with illustrations that we acquired at some point -- where I thought the ending was abrupt and nonsensical.

As a matter of fact, Hansel & Gretel itself is an example of this, at least in version that appears in the book we have. After the children resolve the core conflict by defeating the witch, they still have to cross this lake on their way back to their house. There are a number of paragraphs devoted to this "set piece" and yet it ultimately is totally superfluous, as they successfully cross the lake and make it home.

Fortunately, Gretel & Hansel does not have the bit about the lake. But most of the rest of its action is restricted to the children being cast out from their home, wandering the woods, and coming to live with the witch, whose sinister plans become revealed to them gradually over the course of their stay.

It's all done with an incredible amount of style, and a few moments that might activate your sense of revulsion, but not very much forward momentum. Osgood Perkins, Anthony's son and the guy who directed Blackcoat, favors slow burns, so not having a huge amount of story is suited to his style. It's just that in a story you already know, it feels like a lot of time spent getting to its various points. The striking visuals sustain you, but only so much.

He seems to have not been following his own advice from Blackcoat, as well as the approach taken by Robert Eggers in a similar film, The Witch. The less you see of your primary antagonist, the better, and the fleeting images of that character are one of the best aspects of his previous work, and of Eggers' work. Make no mistake, Alice Krige is great in the role of this witch, and in fact, her gaunt face made her a good choice for the role. Krige's face has always made her suited for such parts, back from when she was in the little-seen movie Ghost Story to her casting as part of the Borg in one of the Next Generation Star Trek movies. But this film spends so much time with her on screen that anything ominous about her dissipates pretty quickly through sheer familiarity.

I'm not sure if the best way to translate Hansel and Gretel on screen is to having them dropping f-bombs and shooting witches with crossbows, as happens in Tommy Wirkola's goofy 2013 film. But it does seem like a good idea to do something with the characters other than just put them through the familiar arc of the fairy tale. As it turns out, it's not enough, even for a movie that's only 87 minutes long.

Would you Uber Eats a movie popcorn?

Oh Hoyts, bless their little hearts.

That sounds incredibly condescending, but I swear I don't mean it that way.

What I mean is, it's sweet and quaint and so doggedly optimistic that they are trying to make up some of their massive financial losses during the pandemic by getting us to order movie theater popcorn to our houses.

I really hope some people are doing it.

Now, I'm not saying there's no market at all for this sort of thing. There could be. We all know that there is some kind of magic crack they sprinkle on popcorn made at the movies that makes it taste better than anything you can make at your house. In fact, when some company tries to convince us that they've cracked the code and brought the best-tasting popcorn possible to the supermarket shelves, they advertise it as popcorn that tastes like movie theater popcorn.

But we shouldn't forget that one of the key charms of movie theater popcorn is its warmth. While Uber Eats may be able to keep your pizza or your Chinese food or your Big Mac warm on the trip from the place of its origin to your house, I don't know that the same is really possible with popcorn. By starting at a lower temperature to begin with, you're inevitably going to lose almost all of its warmth, if not all of it, by the time you deliver it to the person who ordered it.

Maybe warmth is not even the goal. While this whole enterprise is designed not only for Hoyts to turn a buck while it can't make money on movies, but also to give some of their employees a paying job, I can't imagine that they have somebody sitting there making popcorn all the time on the off chance somebody orders it. Even in times of desperation, and maybe especially then, businesses have to be run with a common sense approach.

What touches me about this email is that I know how much Hoyts is struggling, behind its desperate effort to insert a breezy attitude. Here's a sample:

"Has this cold weather got you craving your candy bar favorites from Hoyts? We got you!"

There's enthusiasm in that text, but I know there's also pain behind it.

I've been too worried to even check in on any of the theater chains around here, to see the signs plastered to their windows about their temporary closure. I've been too scared to google any news about them to see if any have already said they're going under. Even as things start to open up around here a bit -- my younger son goes back to school on Tuesday -- I understand theaters will be one of the last things to follow suit, probably not until July. And even then, who knows how they will do until they can get a steady diet of new releases coming from the U.S.

And even then, who knows if this virus will be the final nail in the coffin for an industry that was already losing viewers to streaming and the many platforms that provide it.

Hoyts is not even a chain I frequent anymore, this email notwithstanding. A couple years ago they stopped accepting our critics cards, which is something they'd clearly been wanting to do long before then, as they had only accepted the card on weekday afternoons and Monday and Wednesday nights even before dropping their participation altogether.

But I do have this rewards membership from a time I had to buy tickets for my kids to see a movie there, combining it with a day at the shopping center that also included a trip to Pancake Parlour. And I do wish them well, as a purveyor of the thing I love most.

We all know AMC is in trouble in the U.S., as rumors of a bankruptcy filing float around. I have to imagine it could only be worse with smaller chains, though I suppose the economies of scale may favor them instead. Probably a lot has to do with how effectively they were running their business before all this.

Alas, I don't think I could save Hoyts even if I did Uber Eats a movie popcorn from them.

Let's just hope the return of movies, and the return of audiences, can do it instead.

The overdue curdling of a problematic affection

Sometime between when I started writing reviews for AllMovieGuide in late 2000 and when I started keeping track of the order of my viewings in March of 2002, I watched and reviewed King Vidor's The Fountainhead -- or, more to the point, Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead. It looks like it must have been July of 2001, as it sits next to the movie High Heels and Low Lifes on my running list of all the movies I reviewed for AllMovie, and I watched and reviewed the latter film not long after its theatrical release that month.

The date I saw The Fountainhead doesn't matter, except in the following way: I didn't really understand who Ayn Rand was when I saw it. Hers was a name I had heard, but I had no idea that she was a hero to the modern conservative movement, with her endless pontificating about the exceptionalism of the individual and her scornful disdain for any virtues that resembled socialism.

As the political contentiousness between the right and the left has come into sharper focus in the nearly 20 years since then, and as I have become more aware of it personally, I of course do know who Ayn Rand is now.

Which has made it really uncomfortable for me to reconcile how much I liked The Fountainhead.

I have occasion to think about the movie periodically, as I do about any movie in the upper echelons of my Flickchart rankings. Because of the way I rank movies on Flickchart -- I won't get into that now -- the movies that are higher up tend to come up for duels more often. The Fountainhead is currently my #338, so it comes up with some regularity.

Every time I duel it -- usually victoriously -- I have occasion to wonder why it was that I felt myself so taken in by philosophies that I fundamentally abhor.

So the good news is, I'm still a free thinker. I have not, to this point, even subconsciously penalized The Fountainhead because I know Rand wrote it. She didn't only write the book, she wrote its adaptation for the big screen. Its spot at #338 still puts it in the 93rd percentile of all 5150 movies I have ranked on Flickchart. (Which is about 400 fewer than I've seen -- I'm still catching up following a long period of inactivity.)

The bad news is, I liked -- nay, loved -- this movie, and I don't know why.

Tuesday night, it was time to find out.

If you aren't familiar with The Fountainhead -- and for your sake, unless you've seen the movie, I hope you aren't -- it concerns Howard Roark (Gary Cooper), an iconoclastic architect trying to make his name in the architectural world. His designs are sleek and modern, which means they butt up against the more classical tastes of the masses. In fact, so eager to please the masses are those who commission new buildings, no one wants to hire Roark for fear of his unwillingness to conform to the public preferences. Ever a man of principle, Roark will only accept an assignment if he can do it his way -- even taking on work as a day laborer when he becomes financially destitute, if the alternative is to design a building where his vision is compromised.

At the time I saw The Fountainhead, I probably thought "Good on him." I didn't recognize these themes as an encoded -- or not even very encoded -- celebration of the superior individual whose judgements are unassailable, especially in contrast to the plebeian mediocrity of the masses. I just thought "Yeah, an artist shouldn't compromise himself!"

Maybe that's true of an artist, but it's not true of a person, particularly a person in the political arena. Compromise is the foundation for sane politics. When you have no compromise, you get Donald Trump.

On this viewing, what Rand was telling the world was simply inescapable to me.

It feels like nearly every line of dialogue is some flat-footed statement of political philosophy, of downright dogma. (The political philosophy Rand founded, Objectivism, is based on a rejection of collectivism in any form, which is why libertarians like her so much.) The villains in this piece are members of the media, either a newspaper owner (Raymond Massey) or his primary architectural columnist (Robert Douglas), who believes in a brand of conformity that is almost fascistic. Here are some choice lines I scribbled down. On the side of Rand's objectivist view of the world:

"I want nothing, I expect nothing, I depend on nothing."

"I'm pleading for man's achievement. I'm pleading for greatness."

"They hate you for the greatness of your achievement."

"The man who works for others without payment is a slave."

"I don't give or ask for help."

That last I find particularly stunning, and indeed, Rand's philosophy rejected the value of charity and philanthropy. It's every capitalist asshole for himself.

Or herself. Next to Roark there is his love interest, Dominique Francon (Patricia Neal), who spouts about half the above lines. She's his equal in exceptional individualism. You'd say Rand earns points for at least not being sexist, but, nah.

Oh, and here are some choice nuggets from her socialist villains:

"Why take chances when you can stay in the middle?"

"You will take your spectacular talent and make it subservient to the tastes of the masses."

It's an old trick to put lines of dialogue in your enemy's mouths that are patently ridiculous, and have them speak them as though they are not.

But as you will see, even Roark's enemies admit his "spectacular talent." In the purest sign of the type of self-regard that we now think of as Trumpian, every character in this movie falls all over themselves telling Roark how brilliant he is -- it's either the reason they love him or the reason they hate him. But no one will disagree that he is an "exceptional person."

In fact, Roark never makes a single misstep in the movie, according to his own political philosophies anyway. He never compromises and therefore he never does something for which he can later feel sorry. On a basic narrative level, it's extremely dull when your protagonist has nothing to learn and does nothing wrong.

The film also continues to beat us over the head with the respect it has for people who brought themselves up from nothing. All the characters in this film who we're supposed to like are self-made men (or women); all the sniveling, milquetoast weaklings never had to earn anything.

Well, I guess there is one way this philosophy differs from that of Donald Trump.

I squinted really hard here to find what must have drawn me to the movie at the time. I had to go back to my original review to see what it was. Here are some lines from that review:

"Rand's talky philosophies, which dominate the film for better or worse, invite endless contemplation about what it means to be a trendsetter and to protect the purity of one's artistic endeavors, especially in a world eager to quash those who challenge the status quo."

"Everything in The Fountainhead is meaty with thematic import, solidified by the acting and King Vidor's directing, which earns kudos for keeping the audience glued to a nearly two-hour movie that's mostly dialogue."

If I remember correctly, at the time I think I was unduly influenced by the fact that the film is about architecture. I'm not sure I've seen a movie, before or since, that is so centrally focused on architecture, excepting maybe Columbus from a couple years ago. What I should have realized, and what I realize now with ultimate clarity, is that it didn't matter what the subject of the movie was. It's just the armature on which to drape Rand's beliefs, and it's not done nearly so deftly as I once thought.

It's temping to think of King Vidor as an innocent bystander in all this. As far as I can ascertain, he was just a regular working director in Hollywood who had no political bent to his choices. He did have staggering longevity to his career, making nearly 100 films of varying length from 1913 to 1980, though that last might be something different, as it was the first film listed in his filmography since 1964 and only two years before he died at age 88.

But Vidor does play his role in how he directs and shoots Cooper. I don't consider Cooper to have much range and this is a pretty similar performance to others I've seen him give, but there's a certain unapologetic quality to him that continues to enforce his superiority as a specimen of the human race. That he's permitted to address the court himself, without legal representation, in a climactic courtroom scene -- one where he absolutely should be found guilty, but isn't -- may be straight out of Rand's book and script. But I suspect Vidor had something to do with the choice to shoot him standing triumphantly atop the skyscraper he's making, which is the film's final shot, his shirt flapping in the breeze like some kind of conservative victory flag.

Speaking of directors and their relationship to the material, in researching this piece I just noticed that there has been announced a second adaptation of The Fountainhead, this time helmed by Zack Snyder. Given the current climate and how Rand's work is viewed now, there could be none of the kind of accidental association with the material that may have described Vidor's involvement. I wonder if this means that Snyder is a strong believer in this stuff. You could argue that how he portrays Superman would get Rand's approval.

I'm not sure if I will push The Fountainhead downward in my Flickchart rankings through a forcible re-ranking, or just allow it to steadily sink over time as it loses more duels.

But I can definitely say it is not my 338th favorite movie of all time.

Phew.

My first properly sequenced Godfather II viewing

If I had had a blog at the time, I would raked myself over the coals for what I'm about to tell you.

But my first viewing of The Godfather Part II came about six months before I started documenting my movie thoughts on The Audient. That was June of 2008. I was 34 at the time, so that was already pretty late in the viewing career of a cinephile like me to be seeing this movie for the first time.

To correct the long-time oversight, and to watch the infamous third movie in the series for the first time as well, my wife and I planned a themed viewing weekend. We watched The Godfather (which we'd both already seen) on Friday night with a pasta dish one of us made. We watched its sequel (which she hadn't seen either) on Saturday night with a pasta dish made by the other. And we watched The Godfather Part III on Sunday night with delivery pizza. I hope it was bad delivery pizza, so that the quality of the dinners mirrored the quality of the movies.

Except we screwed up watching the second movie. And we screwed it up in a way that, it appears, I've never revealed on this blog in 11 and a half years of its existence, despite it being a great story and despite my confessional nature.

We watched the second disc first.

How is this possible, you ask? How can you start a movie two hours into its running time and not realize that this is what had happened?

It still seems incredible today, but I'll try to set the scene.

I can't blame having too much wine, I guess, since I think we ate while watching the movie. Unless I dipped into it before we started, but that wouldn't have been like me. If I knew I had three hours and 20 minutes of movie ahead of me, I would have known I couldn't stack the deck against myself with too much alcohol -- even at the comparatively vigorous age of 34.

So I guess, when disc 2 went into the DVD player rather than disc 1, we must have both thought the apparent abruptness to the start of the movie was just a strange, minimalist intro into the action. The Lake Tahoe setting was not a carryover from the first movie, so starting in winter, rather than at the outdoor festival where the movie actually starts, was only a little stranger than what I would have otherwise experienced.

The weird part is that we did not, after about 20 minutes, decide that something was wrong. We watched all the way until the closing credits, which came at about an hour and ten minutes of disc 2. Again, some of this material might have struck us as more befitting of the second half of a movie than its first. But we also knew this was a beloved film, and beloved films are often rule-breakers. Maybe the apparent disorientation of it was part of its greatness.

Once we realized what had happened, we shook our heads, smacked our foreheads, and started over at the beginning.

It was possible to recognize The Godfather Part II as quite an achievement even when viewing it out of sequence. In fact, given that it takes place in two different time periods, you could say it's out of sequence to begin with, in a manner of speaking.

However, the fact that I didn't love it -- just as I still don't love The Godfather after two viewings -- would probably continue to nag at me. It meant I could never be sure whether the strange circumstances of my first viewing played a significant role in my feelings about the movie, or whether the Godfather movies were just never going to be special favorites of mine.

Never, that is, until I budgeted that three hours and 20 minutes again, to give it another shot.

It took a dozen years, but it finally happened on Sunday.

The occasion was that they have started to ease some pandemic restrictions here in the great state of Victoria. The national COVID death toll is still under 100 -- sitting at 99 today, out of a 25.5 million population -- so we are cautiously putting our toes back in the water of social interaction. My sister-in-law was excited to take the kids for the day. It would have been an overnight, but that is not yet part of the permitted activities. (I don't understand what coronavirus you can get from an overnight visit that you couldn't get from a five-minute interaction, but I'm also not a scientist.)

It was a beautiful day, but I had already expended my outdoor activity on a 45-minute run. Which left me without the energy or the desire to bask in the increasingly less regular sunshine as we head into winter.

Couch? Yes.

In fact, I had specifically decided that I intended to watch something long, something I couldn't take down on an ordinary weeknight, but didn't initially have a candidate in mind. Then I remembered The Godfather II, still sitting in a flip folder among all the other discs I brought with me from America back in 2013. Only the next day I would discover it was available for streaming on Stan, but there seemed something correct about watching the same two DVDs that had flummoxed me 12 years ago.

Thoughts? I thought you'd never ask.

I get why everyone loves this movie without still fully loving it myself. I'll try to articulate my complaints, even if some are minor.

1) I'm not sure how well the two narratives speak to each other, nor how well they are interspersed with one another. Although I am not privy to the thinking of Francis Ford Coppola and Mario Puzo at the time -- though I could probably get so on the internet if I wanted -- it strikes me that the decision to tell a prequel story about the deceased Vito Corleone grew out of the belief that he was the most interesting character in these movies, and a sequel could not survive without his presence. It seems like the better reason to include such a story is to show how he bequeathed his own traits as a mob boss to his son, Michael, and his story does sort of accomplish that. But maybe I needed the comparison to be more on the nose, as I don't really see that much in Michael that reminds me of Vito, and vice versa. I also felt that Vito's story was abandoned for really long stretches of time, sometimes as long as 45 minutes. So while I like and am engaged by both stories, they feel more like two movies smashed together than stories that demanded to be told in the same 200-minute package.

A funny thing did occur to me, though, and it gets at something universal about the impulse to tell a prequel story about a beloved character. Vito Corleone gets his surname because an Ellis Island immigration officer misreads his documents, believing Corleone to be his name rather than his region of origin in Italy. I couldn't help but think of a similar scene in a movie that came nearly 45 years later, as the young Han Solo gets his own surname as a result of an imperial officer assigning it to him. Fan service was a thing even back in 1974, though I'm sure none of the people involved would characterize it that way.

2) If the movie was really 200 minutes long, why is there so little room for Diane Keaton's Kay? If memory serves, she's a far more significant character in the original Godfather, but she's really sidelined here. I may be using Martin Scorsese's gangster movies as a bit of an unfair gauge, but I don't see Goodfellas or Casino as the same movies if Karen (Lorraine Bracco) and Ginger (Sharon Stone) don't have plenty of screen time to impact the character arcs of the movies' male protagonists. Here, Kay gets an early scene to complain about not being able to leave the Lake Tahoe compound after the assassination attempt, and a later scene in which she gets to explain why she's leaving Michael. Although I remember from the original that the relationship started deteriorating from the end of that movie, I felt like it would have behoved Coppola to check in with her more regularly here, so her decision to leave would not feel so abrupt.

3) There's something about the movie's core conflicts that I still don't quite grok. Why did Hyman Roth want Michael out of the way? That is not clear to me. In fact, maybe I missed a bit of dialogue somewhere, but when he goes to visit Roth, it seems to me that he believes Frank Pentangeli was responsible for the assassination attempt. In fact, either he knows Roth's involvement and is playing Roth in that scene, or he learns it later, but then if it's the latter, the moment he learns it does not come as the kind of revelation I was expecting. I was also unclear about why he flies Fredo to Cuba with a briefcase containing $2 million, only to not give it to Roth -- even though, if my memory of a movie I saw two days ago serves, he does not discover Fredo's involvement until after he decides not to give the briefcase to Roth. What changed his mind?

Some of these questions might be able to be answered within the text, but even when paying full attention in the middle of a Sunday afternoon -- pausing to nap at one point, but not missing any of the action -- I couldn't get what I thought were solid answers. I can't fully give myself over to a movie if I've still got nagging complaints like these ones.

I guess there's also something about this movie that does not make it "seem like a Godfather movie." I know that's a weird thing to suggest when there had only been one other. But I felt like the New York settings of the original seem more true to what I think of as "a Godfather movie" than the Lake Tahoe and Cuba settings.

So yeah, I think I do like the original better, but since I have similar reservations about the original, this may just not be my series. It's not heresy to like the original better than the sequel, but having the reservations I have about both of them probably is.

I will say that the end of the second movie left my longing to again watch the third, even knowing how bad it is, since the end of Godfather II so clearly feels like a pause rather than an ending. It also made me wonder why there was such a long delay between the second and the third.

Well, it too is streaming on Stan, so I might have my chance -- if I really want it.

R.I.P. to the king of mockumentary

For the past couple months I have been sprinting through the seasons of Schitt's Creek in order to catch up with my wife, who has only not seen the most recent sixth season, just released to Netflix. I like it so much that I almost devoted a post to it on this blog, even though it is not a movie.

What's so great about it? Well, in addition to reviving Chris Elliott and introducing me to two dynamite young comic actors in Daniel Levy and Annie Murphy, it has given me another healthy dose of beloved comedy veterans and regular collaborators Eugene Levy and Catherine O'Hara in peak form.

This past weekend they lost one of their other long-time collaborators.

When I heard Fred Willard had died -- not long after I heard that Lynn Shelton had died (see yesterday's remembrance) -- my first reaction ... well, my first reaction was a pang of sorrow. But my second reaction, the one I want to talk about right now, was that I could not believe he was 86 years old. I always thought of him as a contemporary of Levy and O'Hara, who are 73 and 66, respectively. Since they are so young and virile in Schitt's Creek -- though I should say, I'm still in season 3 -- it felt strange to me that Willard was closer to 90 than 80.

The mockumentaries they made together, under the variable stewardship of Christopher Guest, are now mostly 15 to 25 years old. I guess it isn't particularly strange that Willard was in his late 60s or early 70s then, now that I think about it. But he obviously hadn't lost a step then, and I'd guess he still hadn't lost those steps now. He hadn't appeared in a film in two years -- that was 2018's The Bobby Roberts Project, which I haven't even heard of -- but he has a recurring role in the upcoming Netflix TV series Space Force, which comes out late next week.

The reason I'm so fixated on Willard's age is that there was a timeless quality to him, something that belies the aging process. His core comic personality, at least when I was introduced to him, was a relic from another age. With a dopey but sweet grin constantly affixed to his face, he excelled in roles of the clueless announcer on some kind of low-level and square competitive TV show, like the dog shows in Best in Show. He was clueless not because he lacked intelligence or because he spun these folksy aphorisms, but because he would go on lengthy tangents about things that the viewer could not possibly care about, and frequently, that ended up being not quite appropriate for television.

The weird thing about Fred Willard being actually old was that he was always old, in a way. He was the consummate sweet wool-gatherer, a guy telling you a story that went nowhere, allowed to continue doing what he was doing because he lives in a forgiving society that sometimes respects its elders rather than putting them out to pasture. There was something optimistic about his distinct brand of comedy, then.

Willard's comedy grew out of a gentler time, and gradually came to lampoon that time. But Willard himself had the kind of love and respect for that gentler mode that kept him from ever really playing against type. He was never the type of comic performer who was interested in testing his range, and for us, that was a good thing. I didn't need to see a Willard performance where he dropped f-bombs and hurt people. In every Fred Willard performance, I wanted Fred Willard to be Fred Willard.

And that's what I got, for a long and generous amount of time, dating as far back as This Is Spinal Tap -- a top ten film for me -- in my personal awareness of his work. At some point it had to stop, and that moment came this past weekend.

Rest in peace.

R.I.P. to the queen of mumblecore

It kills me to start out a remembrance of Lynn Shelton with a term like "queen of mumblecore." Rightly or wrongly, the progenitors of this distinct subgenre or style of filmmaking had all long ago rejected the term, possibly as long ago as not long after it was introduced.

But really, Shelton was one of the two people I first identified with this style after I first learned about it. The other, or pair of others, were Mark and Jay Duplass. Their film The Puffy Chair was the first mumblecore film I ever saw, back in March of 2007.

Lynn Shelton's Humpday was probably not the second such film I saw, since it took me nearly three more years to see it. But it was the next that made such an impression on me, and is still, ten years later, among my very favorites that I would tag with that term they were so eager to avoid.

If this were a competition between the Duplass brothers and her, she may have taken the lead with 2012's Your Sister's Sister, which was my #2 of that year. Though, since that movie also featured Mark Duplass, there likely was no competition at all. The people associated with the term "mumblecore" were like a collective of collaborators, all seeking to communicate their new vision to a waiting independent film audience.

And what was that vision?

You might call it "radical truth."

Mumblecore stripped away all the layers of artifice that tend to make a typical narrative film not feel truthful. By leaving the actors to mostly improvise their lines, and always come from an emotional place based entirely in reality, directors like Shelton explored deeper themes with a minimum of other noise to distract from them. Greta Gerwig also got her start here, and it seems one of the reasons she's been able to convey her own directorial efforts with a similar form of radical truth.

How radical? How about two heterosexual men and intimate friends who explore the idea of filming themselves having sex with each other for the purpose of political art?

That is the premise of Humpday, which also stars the younger Duplass brother as well as Joshua Leonard of Blair Witch Project fame. Just because a film was told with a handheld camera and the actors producing lines based only on an understanding of their characters' motivations in a particular scene, doesn't mean it couldn't be high concept. Mumblecore did not mean watching people eat cereal and do their laundry. It meant watching real people discuss dangerous things that could tear them apart.

Shelton hit the only bad patch of her career with her next two features, Touchy Feely and Laggies, both of which were short of the mark. They are not terrible films, but they do not accomplish what Shelton set out to accomplish.

Just when I was wondering if the earlier films might have been the exception rather than the norm, Shelton bounced back with a pair of movies that returned her game to its previous level. Outside In was in my top 20 two years ago (this time starring the older Duplass, Jay, and a superlative Edie Falco), and last year's Sword of Trust, starring her beau at the time of her death (Marc Maron), was more than a pleasant little diversion, though it was also that.

My wife commented today that she had a lot of good work still ahead of her. There's zero doubt about that. She'd been showing us by directing episodes of some of our favorite TV shows, like Master of None, Love, Glow, and The Good Place.

I didn't know Shelton well as a personality; she did act, and certainly had the looks for that, but it was not her forte. I did hear her interviewed a couple times, though, and I was struck by how down-to-earth she seemed, capable of charming self-deprecation and also terrific insight. She had a ready laugh too.

If I'm looking at Shelton's career in pairs of movies, I am fortunate that I still have one pair to look forward to. Her first two features, We Go Way Back and My Effortless Brilliance, are still unseen by me. I have not tried to track them down particularly, but they may be hard to find. Which could allow me to stretch out indefinitely this state of not yet being done with Lynn Shelton.

Shelton died this weekend of a rare blood disorder that had only recently been discovered. She was 54.

Marc Marcon is heartbroken. So am I.

Rest in peace.

Audient Authentic: The Living Desert

This is the fifth installment in my 2020 monthly series watching "classic" (pre-1990) documentaries, in chronological order.

In May, I watched a movie that was on my radar for reasons I didn't even remember.

As I moved into the 1950s, I was all set for On the Bowery, Lionel Rogosin's 1956 look at down-and-out (i.e. homeless) people in New York's skid row. But because I'm going in chronological order, I thought I should first look to make sure there was nothing to watch before that in the 1950s.

So I consulted the list I've been keeping on Letterboxd every time I find a new candidate for this series, and saw the 1953 movie The Living Desert on there. I didn't remember putting it on there, and in fact, I went to the location where I'd culled a number of choices back in January, the Wikipedia page on the history of documentary filmmaking, to see if I could find it mentioned, since I didn't imagine it rose to a level of prominence to be featured in such an article. It doesn't appear there, so the mystery remains.

But I'm glad I decided to push On the Bowery to June and rent this from iTunes, because it made quite a nice way to wile away my last hour of work on Friday afternoon. If you can't occasionally keep one eye on a movie for the last hour-plus of your work week, when everyone has mentally packed it away for the weekend, what's the point of working from home at all? I expected to be able to keep only one eye on it, but pretty quickly, it had my full attention.

The Living Desert is Disney's first feature-length nature documentary, in what would ultimately come to be known as its True-Life Adventure series. I suppose it might have been on my radar since it won the best documentary feature Oscar in 1953, but I did not scour that list of winners for this series, and if I had, it would have produced a lot more candidates than I have now.

I should also say there is a very good chance I have already seen this movie. This is just the kind of thing they would have shown us in school -- in science class, I suppose, though who knows how careful they were about making sure the material they showed us fit the subject matter of the class in question. Then as now, teachers were undoubtedly looking for some way to wile away the end of their own work weeks, without having to plan a whole lecture.

Anyway, The Living Desert gave me a real sense of nostalgia for watching this and films like it back in elementary school and middle school, though I suspect by the time I got to high school they would have moved past this kind of thing. The basic setup of a narrator visiting multiple animals in the desert and whimsically dictating their thoughts and the little dramas of their lives, accompanied by a lively orchestral score, felt like something I got a lot of back then, but haven't seen in more than 30 years now.

I guess that's kind of a backward way in to talking about what this film is actually about. Indeed it is shot in the desert outside Tucson, Arizona, as the camera captures not only panoramic vistas and impressive rock formations, but intimate cracks between rocks and scrub brush. The subject is of course the animals of this "living desert," from arachnids and insects to mice and bobcats and birds.

I was frankly amazed at how sophisticated this is for a first foray into this type of filmmaking. N. Paul Kenworthy, a doctoral student at UCLA, had shot ten minutes of footage of a wasp battling a tarantula, which is this film's central action set piece. That's what got Walt Disney's attention and prompted him to commission the entire film, which Kenworthy also worked on, sharing DP responsibilities with Robert H. Crandall.

I'm not sure how they got their cameras in so close to these battles, but the battle between the wasp and the tarantula seems totally unaffected by the presence of onlooking eyes. And in case you thought they just set down the camera and hoped the creatures would walk into range, the camera actually moves to keep the action centered as it spills out of the frame. I'd like to watch a making of feature sometime.

Anyway, watching a wasp repeatedly sting a tarantula until it kills it -- the proof of the victory being that the wasp then drags off the tarantuala's body, with no small amount of effort -- has a sort of elemental fascination for me. I suppose this is not uncommon now as all manner of nature documentary would contain similar material; maybe I just don't watch enough of them. But they may have all been chasing The Living Desert in terms of sheer profundity of the footage captured.

And there are other great battles, like a bobcat being chased by warthogs, as seen in the poster above (finding its respite at the top of a cactus), and a small rodent trying to ward off the attack of a snake by continually flicking sand into its eyes. See, snakes have no eyelids, so getting sand in the eyes is a pretty good deterrent to prevent an ambush.

What I love also about The Living Desert is its era-appropriate wholesomeness and its also era-appropriate willingness to be corny. A lizard eating ants with little whips of his tongue is accompanied by quick trills on a piccolo, and two scorpions having a mating ritual which is scored to hoedown music. It's a very trademark approach to music for Disney from this period, which would have also been present in films like Bambi and Fantasia. (Those films are a decade earlier, of course.)

The narrator is probably the corniest of all, but I had to say I really appreciated the writing. Both can be attributed to a man named Winston Hibler, who both narrates and serves as co-writer with director James Algar. I laughed out loud a couple times as a particular turn of phrase perfectly captured the look on the face of a gila monster or roadrunner. Even though there are human traits, so to speak, being ascribed to the insect and animals in these scenarios, they are universal enough to seem as though they are probably accurately describing the drama at hand. The whimsy of the orchestral score is an indispensable element in conjuring the necessary mood.

As you can see my instinct is to keep going on and on about this 70-minute film -- I didn't even talk about the male turtles battling for a mate, and the drama of whether the overturned loser will get back on his feet before dying of sun exposure. So obviously I really liked this. In fact, as my 48-hour rental window still has a good 30+ hours remaining in it, I'm inclined to show this to my kids. My only concern is that since they didn't have that same experience I had of watching it in science class in the mid-1980s, the corniness will outweigh the nostalgia. Of which there will be none, I suppose. But hopefully the basic interest of watching small animals fight each other will win out.

Okay, it's on to On the Bowery in June if you want to watch along with me ... or even if you don't.

Only avoiding Sandler's Netflix deal for so long

I didn't see The Ridiculous Six.

I didn't see The Do Over.

I didn't see Sandy Wexler.

I didn't see The Week Of.

I didn't see Father of the Year.

I did see Murder Mystery, but since Jennifer Aniston was there classing up the joint, I didn't think of it as finally seeing my first movie produced by Adam Sandler's Happy Madison Productions under its many-film deal with Netflix.

That finally happened, undoubtedly and indubitably, when I pulled up on Wednesday night -- on "opening night," at that -- for The Wrong Missy.

Sandler's face does not appear in this movie, though the faces of all his cronies, as I wrote in my review, do. You've got your David Spade, you've got your Rob Schneider, you've got your Jonathan Loughran. (Look him up. You'll recognize him.) And of course then you've got Sandler's wife, Jackie, who has appeared in just about every single Happy Madison production ... and nothing else.

I could have kept the streak going, and in fact would have under normal times. But these are not normal times. I'm reviewing two out of every three new movies released to Netflix while there are no alternatives being released to movie theaters. In fact, the only reason I'm not reviewing all of them is if they get bunched up in a particular week and I just don't have time. I mean, I have to watch things other than just new Netflix movies, you know.

In a way, it has represented a kind of oversight, that I've been avoiding these Sandler movies. I make it sort of a mission as a film critic to sample and review a little bit of everything from every possible genre, subgenre, studio, budget level, or pocket of cinema, however you want to define that. Sandler's Happy Madison movies have certainly become a pocket of cinema unto themselves -- a largely disappointing pocket, but not exclusively disappointing, even recently. (In fact, I had a limited fondness for Murder Mystery.)

But I'll exchange my usual completist tendencies for having missed some of the most godawful filmmaking of the last five years. I assume, anyway.

The Wrong Missy reminded me what I've been, er, missying. I tried to give it the same benefit of the doubt any critic should, I really did. I thought, "I've enjoyed David Spade in things before" and I thought, "Lauren Lapkus can be a funny performer."

But no, this movie is just bad. It is kind of a poster child for what Happy Madison is: lazy, easy comedy meant to be filmed quickly in order to pocket the profits quickly. And since Sandler had already pocketed the profits, the quicker it could be filmed, the better. (I invite you to follow the above link to my review if you want a more detailed takedown.)

There are actually some films Sandler has made over the years that I've really liked, and not just the ones everybody else likes (Punch-Drunk Love and Uncut Gems). I have a fondness for Click, for example. I'll also go to bat for the Hotel Transylvania movies.

But it seems like Sandler has been content for a long time to do the least possible, at the expense of his good name, or a name that used to be at least somewhat closer to good. He may be having a laugh at Netflix's expense, taking the money and running as an attempt to play the corporate giant for a fool. But he can't do so without it tarnishing whatever reputation he once had.

Well, there's always Hubie Halloween this autumn.

I probably won't see it.

But then again, if the theaters aren't open yet, maybe I'll be there on opening night.

Life is Beautiful in a post-Jojo world

I've finally finished the movies I had borrowed from the library, which at one point were due back next Monday, the 18th. When I looked yesterday, they are now due ... June 27th. I sincerely hope the libraries will be open again before that, but who knows.

I learned the new due date before I watched Life is Beautiful, so I certainly could have put off the viewing. But it was already what I had planned for the evening last night, so I just went ahead with it.

The title of this post makes it sound like I am going to explore something profound today. Really, I just mean that having seen (and loved) Jojo Rabbit last year made me interested in revisiting the thing I saw it most regularly compared to. I had not seen Life is Beautiful since the autumn of 1998, when I was in graduate school in New York.

I quite liked Life is Beautiful at the time, ranking it my #16 out of the 58 movies I ranked in 1998. But the movie has suffered in our collective estimation over the years. Suffice it to say, when people compared Jojo Rabbit to Life is Beautiful, they did not mean it as a compliment.

Having randomly borrowed Life is Beautiful from the library, back when I had no idea I wouldn't be borrowing another movie for more than two months, gave me the opportunity to see if they're right.

Now, I should start by saying that the two movies don't actually have that much in common in terms of their plots. For starters, Jojo Rabbit never actually sets foot inside a concentration camp. But both movies do fall under the general umbrella of "movies that are trying to be funny despite featuring Nazis." When The Next Picture Show podcast chose an older movie to compare and contrast with Jojo, they selected The Producers. There's something valid about both choices, though both are also a stretch in certain ways.

One interesting difference is that while Jojo spends all its time in Nazi Germany, Life is Beautiful is not actually a holocaust movie for much of its running time. Although there are ominous little nuggets of what's to come, Beautiful spends its entire first hour in an idyllic Italian village, functioning mostly as a series of meet cutes between Roberto Benigni's Guido and Nicoletta Braschi's Dora, or "Principessa." How many meet cutes does one movie need, you might ask? Life is Beautiful has never met a meet cute it didn't like, so it puts in 17 of them. In fact, my primary memory of the first half of this movie is Guido running around a restaurant and repeatedly calling her Principessa. Even then it straddled the line between sweet and unctuous.

The issue, of course, was that Benigni had made primarily madcap farces in which his own talent for physical comedy took center stage. He was a bit of a Charlie Chaplin in that sense -- still is, I suppose, as he is still alive. Life is Beautiful was a change to something more serious, but even then, it required a lot of the silly to get there. Good silly, but still silly. The movie people should have compared it to, if they didn't -- though they probably did -- was Chaplin's The Great Dictator.

The approach mostly works, but I couldn't help feel now, as I did then, that there's a lot of filler in that first hour. While the set pieces are, without exception, sort of delightful, many of them don't provide the film with much momentum toward where it's going. A scene that does, but still kind of falls short of the mark, is one where Guido poses as a fascist official in order to get closer to Principessa, not realizing that he is visiting her school for the purposes of talking about the racial superiority of white people. He takes the piss out of that argument, of course, before the real official shows up and prompts him to flee through the nearest window. But the movie doesn't really do anything to ponder the significance of that scene at that moment, meaning it's not really building toward something.

While the first hour does allow us to get to know Guido and Dora, and to like them (unless we're already rolling our eyes at them), it ends up feeling like a lot of build-up before they are shipped off to the camps. That said, I don't think we could have handled a lot more of the film's second half. Not that it's bleak, but that it kind of continues hitting the same marks as Guido tries desperately to prove to his son that they are involved in a game, and they have to do all the right things to score 1,000 points and win a tank.

This is a good idea too, and effectively carried off, for the most part. But the way it's executed, it tends to diminish the presence of the others around them who are there and suffering through the experience. Guido has long and loud talks with his son while everyone else in the room is exhausted or trying to sleep, where he's going on and on about the rules of the game. Wouldn't any of the others yell at him for kind of commandeering the scenario and putting a happy face on it just for the benefit of one child, when none of the other children got a similar amount of energy invested toward blinding them to the horrors in front of them? Even if it's the most parental instinct in the world, would all the others be so eager to "play along," as it were?

Then there's the part of it where Guido somehow seems to have free rein of the camp, without consequences. There's the part that's reminiscent of The Shawshank Redemption, where Guido gets control of a loudspeaker and a record player -- or are those even two separate scenes? -- and gets to send an extended message/music to Principessa before he is stopped. In Shawshank, Andy gets a month in the hole for that transgression. But in a concentration camp, where they could just kill the offender without any repercussions, Guido seems to get away with it for a very long time, and is either never discovered, or not punished if he is.

Complaints aside, I ultimately do still feel fondly toward Life is Beautiful. I guess the biggest comparison to Jojo is that both movies involves a director known for comedy making a successful transition into something more serious. I think Taika Waititi's venture is ultimately more successful, but I think he also had less far to go than Benigni.

Quarantine Battles: Sherlock Holmes puzzle vs. Sherlock Holmes movie

This may be my final Quarantine Battle. The premier of Victoria has announced that small groups of people can start getting together, and I got my first email yesterday about laying the groundwork for returning to work.

Which is leaving me feeling kind of odd. I should be jumping for joy, but I kind of feel like I should have "done a lot more" during quarantine. You know all those people who learned to bake? Yeah, my one attempt to make a pavlova was a colossal failure. You know all those people who read all the great works of literature? I read Watchmen and about 75% of a Philip Roth novel. You know all those people who can now play piano and juggle at the same time? I can't. I can only do the juggling part.

But while I try to come to grips with my strange indifference to returning to reality, albeit on a gradual basis, I do have one last funny thing I can shoehorn in under the banner "Quarantine Battles."

One thing we did do during quarantine was slightly increase our pace of doing puzzles. About 18 months ago, my wife and I found that a dormant love of puzzling lived within us. Before about September of 2018, I couldn't have told you the last time I'd done a puzzle of any variety, let alone a 1000-piece one -- possibly never.

Well, what I refer to as "the Harry Potter Paraphernalia" puzzle changed it all. See below to understand what I mean by that name:

We just finished our sixth since then, which is not a huge number in the grand scheme of things, and involves a couple four-month layoffs. We just don't have an ideal puzzling table and we hate working around the puzzle when we're trying to sit four of us at the dinner table. But given that the previous nearly 45 years of my life had zero such puzzles, it's a lot.

And we've now finished two during quarantine, which has been a good distraction.

Here's the one we just finished:

Parts of it were very easy, as there's a lot of text, and you can tell pretty easily if a piece is a good candidate or not -- does it finish the sentence or doesn't it? And the puzzle designer had the courtesy to include about 12 distinct typefaces, making the task easier.

But the word "Sherlock Holmes" itself? That was my burden, and it certainly was one. Every bit of that lettering looked like every other bit, all green and ornate and flowery. That last is not metaphorical; there are actually flowers (and vines, and leaves) embedded within the two words. I fought that part of the puzzle long and hard, and ultimately won.

When we finished on Saturday afternoon, I decided there was no better time than Saturday night to watch Guy Ritchie's eponymous 2009 film, which I'd never seen. (And what kind of Guy Ritchie kick do I think I'm on, anyway? I've seen this and RockNRolla both since quarantine began.)

I thought it had the chance to be a very delightful sort of escapism, which would pick up where the puzzle left off. And in truth, there were some things about Holmes that I wouldn't have known if not for reading them on that puzzle, which did appear in the movie, such as the motto "Facts to suit theories instead of theories to suit facts." Though to be honest, I can sound that out either way, semantically, to make one sound like the superior approach over the other.

But I found the beginning of Sherlock Holmes to be very rushed in its setup, what I like to refer to as "feeling like it's starting in the middle of a sentence." I think part of the problem, which is consistent with Ritchie's obvious mandate in making this movie, is that we are introduced to Holmes in a "man of action" context rather than a sleuth context. First and foremost, Sherlock Holmes should be a detective. In fact, even though I know the character boxed and fenced, I tend to think of him as a bit stiff. Here, in the opening scene, he's taking out adversaries with dual batons that he uses kind of like nunchucks -- there may have even been some parkour in there. That's not the type of Holmes I imagine.

I guess I prefer Robert Downey Jr. when he's playing Robert Downey Jr. (i.e. Tony Stark, as that is essentially a variation on Downey's real personality) than playing a Character with a capital C. Exhibit A might be the movie I saw earlier this year, Dolittle, where he's really Trying Something, though I still don't know what. Sherlock Holmes is not as much of a caricature as Dr. Dolittle, but I do feel like he labors a bit when he's trying to interpret somebody rather than just being the character. Jude Law seems more natural, and I don't suspect Watson is actually too far off his real personality.

There's some nice filmmaking here, though also some empty style, and I enjoyed the choice to set the climax on the under-construction Tower Bridge. In a rare bit of fidelity to actual history, the Tower Bridge was indeed being built during the time that Sherlock Holmes was first active, according to the books. In all, though, I found this film lacking in substance, and indeed quite forgettable. Its attempts to make Holmes a bit of a slapstick figure seem as ill-considered as its attempts to turn him into an action hero. I usually don't believe it when a character is totally above the fray, but I feel like the character of Sherlock Holmes might and possibly should be the exception to that.

Compared to the glorious literary density of this puzzle, with its bits on all the key characters, its psychological analysis of Holmes by Watson, its rich illustrations and its other tidbits of information on the man, his times, and the crimes he solved, Sherlock Holmes is empty indeed.

Victor: The puzzle.

Okay, this is has been fun, even if it's only been going on for the last week.

Our first Trump-era Idiocracy viewing

On the one hand, Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho (Terry Crews) seems like quite the exaggeration in terms of a person you would want to be in charge of anything, particularly a country. He's a professional wrestler prone to shooting a machine gun into the air to get the attention of the house of representatives.

On the other hand, wouldn't you kind of rather he was president than Donald Trump?

It kind of amazes me that we hadn't watched Idiocracy, a favorite comedy in our household, since Trump's election. Maybe for a while it would have been too painful, and we weren't ready to laugh at the decline of western civilization we thought his election represented.

But we finally corrected that last night, on Mother's Day, as it was my wife's viewing choice to accompany the taco and margarita kit we'd purchased from a local Mexican restaurant for Mother's Day. I've got a good one, don't I?

There does seem to be something about election years, however, that brings out our desire to watch this movie. Going back and looking at my viewing history of Idiocracy, I discovered the following two things:

1) Somehow this was only my fourth viewing of the movie. Even though I've been keeping a comprehensive history of my rewatches for the entire time Idiocracy has existed as a movie, I have to believe there was a fifth in there somewhere that I failed to record, given how both my wife and I can quote from the movie extensively.

2) My previous two viewings were in 2016 and 2012. In 2008, it might have been too soon because I'd only just seen it for the first time the January before, and I didn't rewatch films as regularly back then as I do now.

The 2016 viewing was in February. So it might have been a watch timed to the increasingly likely notion of Candidate Trump, though we surely would have watched it with the certainty that the eventuality of President Trump would never arrive.

Well, it arrived nine months later.

Four years and three months later, there's a good chance Trump's reign will end this November, or really, next January. But if the predictions of Idiocracy hold any weight at all, he could not only get reelected, but also amend the constitution to allow him to keep getting reelected until he dies, and maybe even after that. At which point the presidency gets handed down to whichever one of his children can chug the most beers in five minutes.

"Short and sweet," I said as the credits started to roll at the 79-minute mark, 80 if you round up. Indeed, one of the reasons the movie is so great is that it packs so much in to such a short running time. There isn't a wasted moment, though there could have been -- for the first time I watched the DVD extras, which offered up some truly deadly deleted scenes. Included among those are two scenes with Joe's girlfriend being hit on by her boss. Those characters were left on the cutting room floor entirely, thank goodness.

Other things I noticed this time:

1) Terry Crews used to be credited as Terry Alan Crews. Was that a remnant from his football days? No idea.

2) I love Andrew Wilson as Beef Supreme -- both the performance and the name. Only afterwards looking it up did I realize that he's Luke and Owen's older brother. (And not all that talented, I suppose, which is why he only gets a fraction of the work they do.)

3) Speaking of Luke Wilson, he may be one of my favorite actors who I don't actively consider to be a favorite. He's in a number of movies that I like more than most people do, such as Henry Poole is Here, Middle Men, The Family Stone and The Skeleton Twins. Add that to generally recognized classics like Bottle Rocket, The Royal Tenenbaums, Old School and Anchorman, and you've got a really nice career there. I guess Idiocracy falls somewhere in between a "me movie" and a "generally recognized classic."

4) But as for Dax Shepard, well, this is as good as it ever got for him.

5) People ask why I have a crush on Maya Rudolph -- some of my friends do, anyway. This is Exhibit A.

I wish there were some solid details actually related to the movie that I'd never noticed before, but what can I say -- it's short and I know it well.

And I'll make it a point to watch it again before another four years go by, so I can be sure of those five viewings.

I just hope the next one will come during a Biden presidency.

Quarantine Battles: Frankenstein vs. Bride of Frankenstein

I probably didn't need to sew -- pun intended -- two pictures together for my second quarantine battle, because there are perfectly good pictures of the monster and his intended bride in the same shot from Bride of Frankenstein. But my edited picture gives them a more oppositional quality, so I'm going with it.

So I'd never seen Bride of Frankenstein before, but then neither had I seen Frankenstein. I know, I know. I only just saw Tod Browning's Dracula within the last decade or so and still have not seen the original King Kong. I'm behind. I had nearly 5,600 other films I needed to watch first.

The reason for me finally watching it is that I drew Bride of Frankenstein as my monthly pick in Flickchart Friends Favorites Fiesta, which is a Facebook group in which people randomly draw the highest ranked film they haven't seen from each others' charts, and watch it that month. I've mentioned it before.

You're allowed to reject sequels where you haven't seen the original, but instead of doing that for my May viewing, I decided just to use it as an excuse to finally watch James Whale's Frankenstein. I've seen so many iconic images from it that I feel like I've seen it, not to mention having also watched Gods and Monsters, which is about Whale. But actually sitting down to watch the movie hadn't happened yet.

I changed that on Tuesday night, and then followed it on Wednesday with Bride -- a double feature with the Michelle Obama documentary Becoming. (And partial apologies to Netflix for the previous post -- the movie became available for viewing by primetime, so I got to watch it that night after all.) The short running time of both movies allowed me to fit them both in easily, as neither surpasses the 75-minute mark. That was even with having to prepare a beef bourguignon on Tuesday night to cook in the slow cooker all day Wednesday.

Now, you might not automatically consider these two movies to be in battle with each other, since they are sequels and even made by the same man. And in most instances, the second movie after a successful first would be at a big disadvantage in any such duel. Not here, though. I've read that many people consider Bride of Frankenstein the superior work, and indeed, Whale's masterpiece. So, I thought it made a good opportunity to find out.

First I'll say that while most of the iconic scenes I was already aware of are in the first movie, the one that I was waiting for most didn't come until the second. That's the "She's alive! Alive!" quote from Colin Clive as Henry Frankenstein (why Henry and not Victor??), which was familiar to me from a childhood favorite, Weird Science, and namely its titular theme song by Oingo Boingo. If I had remembered the gender pronoun there, I wouldn't have been looking for it in the first film, which does have a very similar quote, but one that I could tell was not exactly the same.

Frankenstein the original clearly tells a much more straightforward story, one whose details were familiar to me: The birth of the monster, the monster's fateful interaction with the young girl, etc. I did wonder how, when they found their daughter drowned, her parents somehow knew it was the monster to blame. No one witnessed their interaction; couldn't she have just fallen in? They were the ones who left her unattended. Oh well, not important.

I realized also that a lot of what I "know" about Frankenstein is from Young Frankenstein, which borrows liberally, of course, being a parody of it and all. When the henchman -- he's only called Igor in the Mel Brooks movie, I guess -- has to take the second brain after dropping the first one on the ground, I thought "That's Abby Normal's brain!" Yes, I'm due for another viewing of that movie too.

The 1931 movie I found very satisfying, and quite atmospheric at times -- the opening scene when they rob the grave was almost haunting. Colin Clive is quite the charismatic presence, and I was sorry to hear he died only two years after the sequel, drowning himself in booze I guess.

At the start of Bride of Frankenstein, I was tickled to learn that this was going to be a movie I did not know so much about -- from the opening cast listing, I could see that the movie was going to break the fourth wall in a way by having Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley and Lord Byron appearing as characters. I'm not sure if I understand the function of that opening scene other than establishing a tone of humor, a tone that is continued as the story unfolds with Una O'Connor giving a pretty hilarious performance. But I liked that it was unexpected.

Another unexpected element is the appearance of a second mad scientist in the second movie, Doctor Pretorius, as Henry Frankenstein (WHY HENRY AND NOT VICTOR???) gets to play a more traditionally heroic role this time. I thought the movie was going full comedy when it reveals that Doctor Pretorius has created miniature people -- a king, a queen, an archbishop, a mermaid. Other than showcasing some quite good special effects, I'm not sure if I understood the value of this -- not if it's supposed to be a horror movie, anyway. Though I'm starting to think that one of its pioneering elements was as horror comedy.

But what ultimately disappointed me about the movie is that when Elsa Lanchester -- playing a double role with that of Mary Shelley -- finally shows up in the end, with those great jerky head movements and streaks of white in her hair, it's only for ten minutes or so. She shrieks a couple times, the monster (who now can talk) considers her to have rejected him, and he decides to destroy the laboratory and everyone in it, except for Henry and his wife, whom he tells to "Go live!"

I think it may be worth a second watch of Bride of Frankenstein sometime soon when I have a better idea what to have been expecting from it, because for me, for right now, Whale's masterpiece is the original. Though I enjoyed watching them both very much.

Will there be more quarantine battles? I don't know -- could quarantine be ending here in Australia? The prime minister announced that restaurants would be opening soon. Could movie theaters be long after them? (They're saying July, actually. Boo.)

But maybe soon, at least, it won't be possible to call this a "quarantine" anymore. Stay tuned.