Major League bookends

My fantasy baseball draft was this past Sunday morning, back to its usual late March date after being diverted to July for hopefully the only time ever. It's always my favorite day of the year, even if the 90 minutes it currently takes to do it online pales in comparison to the ten-hour in-person auction I used to enjoy in the late 1990s/early 2000s.

I wasn't going to watch my first baseball movie in 2021 until the night before the start of the season, as is my custom. But I wanted to do a last night of cramming on Saturday night, so I decided to throw on some background in the form of a baseball movie I know so well, I wouldn't have to pay particularly close attention to it. (I did anyway. It's what happens with movies we love.)

It wouldn't have otherwise been time for another Major League viewing so soon after my last one in 2018, which was very soon after my previous one just a year before that. But as background noise for fantasy baseball prep, it was perfect. 

As with any favorite movie, you usually discover something new each time you see it, or an angle you hadn't previously considered. Yes, even with a comparatively shallow movie like Major League. It doesn't have to be Bergman for you to find those deeper layers. 

The thing I harped on this time, though, was actually something that had always bothered me. So not quite as good a takeaway as I had last time, when I discovered for the first time that Rick Vaughn may have had an unspoken backstory of being a recovering alcoholic. (Check here if you really want to read about that.)

I was again struck by a simple question:

Why didn't Rachel Phelps just give up?

If you aren't familiar with the plot of Major League, Phelps (Margaret Whitton), the widow of the owner of the Cleveland Indians, decides she's going to run the team into the ground so she can move them to Florida. See, only if the attendance dips below a certain level can the team break the lease with the city, and she aims to do that. (What quaint times those were, when Florida was baseball-starved -- today, the state has two baseball teams, or actually three this year, as the Toronto Blue Jays will have to start in Florida for COVID reasons.)

It looks like a smart plan when she brings in a bunch of "has beens and never-will-be's," who are fit to lose most of their games and start off on that pace. Of course, our plucky band of misfits will pull together to prove her wrong, something that starts happening well before midseason. Never count out the human spirit.

The interesting thing about Phelps' plan is that it is a failure as soon as the team is not awful. Even very bad major league baseball teams have decent attendance most years; only when it's clear the owner is spitting in the eye of the players and the fans themselves do the fans stop coming. But even after 120 games -- in other words, three quarters of the season -- the team is 60-61, which is not a playoff contender but would be a better record than at least ten other teams at that point in the season. Making them more mediocre than awful, and definitely not a threat to attract a lease-breaking paucity of fans.

So why doesn't she just read the tea leaves and change course when she realizes her plan has no chance?

Well, she's a movie villain, that's why. Movie villains are more motivated by the opportunity for maniacal laughter than the successful outcome of a well-considered plan. 

Still, once the Indians are loveable losers at worst and playoff contenders at best, wouldn't she realize that a better strategy is hope that her team wins, and therefore inflate the price to the point where she can sell to a new owner? Then it doesn't matter how much or how little she likes Cleveland, as she can take her money and lie on the beach in Boca Raton.

Then it occurred to me: I don't actually know what Rachel Phelps does after the team wins the division, much to her chagrin during her thousand-yard stare after the final out. Because there's a whole Major League movie -- two, actually -- that I've never even seen.

As I was pondering writing this post about Rachel Phelps on Sunday night, I also pondered how odd it was that I had not seen even the first sequel to one of my favorite sports movies of all time. I mean, bad word of mouth is something to consider, but when you really love a movie and its characters, don't you owe it a sampling of the sequel?

So I decided to rent it from iTunes and throw it on that very night, providing the second half of a Major League bookend to my fantasy baseball draft.

And I ultimately concluded: Yeah, there's a reason I didn't watch this before now.

I knew Major League II wasn't well-liked, but I couldn't have guessed that it would be quite this bad -- especially with most of the cast returning. The only one notably absent was Wesley Snipes, who was replaced by Omar Epps in the same role.

But boy is this movie not good. It's guilty of many common sequels sins, the kind you would guess without me enumerating them here. There's not one but two characters -- the aforementioned Vaughn and Pedro Cerrano (Dennis Haysbert) -- who have to get back their previous mojo to pull the Indians out of another predictable slump. Unfortunately, the movie never gets back its mojo, probably because it never had any to begin with.

I could go into depth about why Major League II fails, but I'll include only one minor thing that bothered me, rather than the many major things. The movie was made in 1994, five years after the original came out, but it's supposed to take place the very next season. Not only were Charlie Sheen and Haysbert already way too old for their roles -- and Tom Berenger looks more ancient than his 44 years -- but their character changes are too extreme for only a single offseason to have passed between this and the events of the first film. Then you've got the weird detail that while everyone else is significantly older, Willie "Mays" Hayes is significantly younger. When they replaced Snipes with Epps, they were selecting an actor 11 years younger, who was only 21 at the time he made the movie. Next to Berenger he looks like even more of a baby. 

I guess I might have preferred not to know about the dispiriting adventures of next year's Cleveland Indians, but I don't regret watching the movie. I generally don't believe in keeping movies pure by avoiding their lesser sequels and remakes. I can just pretend the next season was Cerrano's prolonged hallucination after some spiritual journey involving ayahuasca.

The real question is: So what did Rachel Phelps do?

Well she sold the team to Roger Dorn (Corbin Bernsen), of all people, who isn't supposed to have been right on the verge of retirement the previous year. Which gives both he and Berenger the retirement subplot that only one of them should have had. Of course, Dorn has overextended himself and can't make payroll 40 games into the season. 

Re-enter Rachel Phelps. She wants to buy back the team at a profit, because she realizes she shouldn't have walked away from a winner? No? Not quite. Because she wants to devise more ways to humiliate them and take her revenge on them.

Maybe I'm crazy, but a sports franchise is worth a lot more money the better it is. 

As is a sports movie franchise. And there is one more I can watch, if I want to, which is Major League: Back to the Minors, which still utilizes some of the same cast four years later in 1998. Alas, it doesn't sound any more promising.

Not this year. Hopefully I'll get myself back on track with the traditional Opening Day Eve movie later this week, which will be finally removing one the most celebrated baseball movies of all time from my list of shame. Want to know which one? Tune in later this week. 

It strikes me that this is a particularly good year to watch Major League again, after all, as this is a momentous season for the real Cleveland Indians. After 120 seasons in existence, the Cleveland Indians will no longer be known as the Cleveland Indians after 2021.

It's been a long time coming. Baseball has two teams whose names are insensitive to Native Americans -- the Atlanta Braves being the other -- and in the wake of social justice protests last year, the real team owner (Paul Dolan) announced that the team would not only drop its mascot, Chief Wahoo, but the actual team name itself. It's something Washington's football team, formerly known as the Redskins, has already done, going (only temporarily I think) by the name The Washington Football Team. 

We'll see if the soon-to-be-former Indians come up with something better than that. It's not moving the team to another city, but I'm sure many of its fans are crying in their overpriced beers nonetheless. 

To usher out Chief Wahoo et al, maybe this year's team needs to do what Berenger's Jake Taylor urges his team to do. When they collectively learn that they'll all be out on their ass after the season, Taylor stands up before the locker room and says there's only one thing they can do: 

"Win the whole fuckin' thing." 

Judas legacy

For me, Judas was always Black.

That's a pretty inflammatory way to start a post if you don't know what I'm going to say next. It suggests that Black people are uniquely suited to play a trusted insider who betrays the person he loves the most. 

That's not it at all. It's just that Carl Anderson etched an image of this character in my head that has never gone away.

Anderson, the man to your left in this photo, played Judas in Norman Jewison's 1973 film of the Andrew Lloyd Webber-Tim Rice rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar. Although I'm not religious -- or maybe because I'm not religious -- the film has become one of my most cherished over the years, such that it is now in my top 20 of all time on Flickchart. 

Because of that lofty position, it has also come up quite a lot in a monthly movie challenge I participate in on Facebook with other Flickcharters. Each month you are randomly assigned the highest ranked film you haven't seen on another participant's chart, and because Jesus Christ Superstar currently sits at #16 for me, it seems to get drawn pretty much every other month. Most people, you won't be surprised to learn, don't get it. So while it's in the top 1% of my own chart, it might be closer to the bottom 1% of theirs. 

I've been wanting to catch back up with this beloved favorite, for the first time since 2015, for some time now, as each new failure of another Flickcharter to get this movie spurs an interest in reminding me why I love it so much. In fact, I was going to watch it at the beginning of 2020, only I had no way to play it on our DVD player -- long story short, you couldn't press play from the buttons on the front of the DVD player and our remote control app no longer worked on our phones. It was shortly after that we discovered that the device's actual remote control was working, even though we'd long since given up on it as broken. Anyway.

But the actual excuse for watching Jesus Christ Superstar on Thursday night ended up being that I saw Judas and the Black Messiah on Wednesday night. (For some reason I want to call this movie Judas and the Black Iscariot.) Which gives us another prominent Black Judas, played by recently Oscar-nominated Lakeith Stanfield, though in this case the Christ figure (also Oscar-nominated Daniel Kaluuya) is also Black.

Stanfield's strong, conflicted performance reminded me of the strong, conflicted performance of Anderson in that movie from 48 years ago ... not to mention a stage version in which he appeared in the late 1990s or early 2000s, also alongside the actor who plays Christ in the film, Ted Neeley. I got tickets as a Christmas present for my mother, who always loved this show and was integral in getting me interested in it, whether she knew it or not. (I could also tell you about how I waited afterward to meet Neeley, and how he was hugging everyone, and how I hugged my own most dominant mental image of the personification of Jesus Christ, but that would be getting sidetracked.) 

In that film version of JCS, Anderson uses his whole body to express the inner torment of a man who thought he was doing the right thing by kneecapping a beautiful soul whose thirst for power and glory had perverted his message. Anderson's wiry frame makes it all that much easier. As he makes impassioned pleas that fall on deaf ears for Christ to right his ship, his body twists and turns and undulates. When he runs, his body flails, powerless against the rushing waters of fate. 

This is not just a performance of great physicality and exquisite singing, though. It's a big performance, but it contains small moments of brilliance. One of my favorites is the exact moment of Judas' betrayal. As the pharisees have dangled his bag of 30 silver pieces and dropped it in the dust for Judas to retrieve, he actually parts with the information they need, about where to find Jesus to capture him on Thursday night. The last words in the sentence yield the location: "In the garden of ... Gesthemane." And on that last word, the camera does one of many wonderful zooms employed by Jewison in the film, so only the very agent of Judas' betrayal -- his lips -- appear in the shot.

Stanfield's performance in Judas and the Black Messiah is not all that similar. How could it be? This is not a musical. He wears mostly dark black outfits, as opposed to the red technicolor getup that is Anderson's most regular garb. No dancing is required, and very little running.

But there's something at the core of Stanfield's performance that he shares with Anderson, that any good portrayal of Judas should share: the sense of how the conflict is tearing him apart. Bill O'Neal's scenes with the FBI agent played by Jesse Plemons have that same uncomfortable dynamic of Judas with the pharisees, a clear sense of the power and the ability to manipulate one has over the other. There's an ideological difference here, to be sure, and some of the parallels are imperfect. While Judas betrayed Jesus of his own free will, an attempt to rein him in, O'Neal is planted with Fred Hampton's Black Panthers as an attempt by O'Neal to avoid prosecution, only becoming more ideologically aligned with Hampton as he goes along. Judas, on the other hand, is falling out of that alignment with Jesus. 

The moment of O'Neal's final, ultimate betrayal -- drugging Hampton in order to allow him to be assassinated -- takes very literally something Judas may have only done metaphorically. And how Stanfield plays that moment, trying to smile and speak clearly through tears that he knows could give him away, reminded me of the masterwork of Anderson.

Now, back to that opening comment, the one that seemed so controversial at the time.

I'm glad Jesus Christ Superstar was made in an era when, for better or worse, we had a simpler perspective on matters of racial representation. Obviously much of the time it was for worse, and I don't even need to get into all that here because you know I understand the horrible racism of the films of decades past. But there were times when it was for the better, such as allowing Anderson to be cast in this role.

Today, we would never see a Black Judas next to a white Jesus. It would just be way too fraught. Even if there are ways to argue that Judas is the hero of the piece, there are many more ways to argue the opposite, and no modern production would want to court that kind of controversy. Of course, the image of Judas hanged near the end of the film -- lynched, even if by himself -- would be highly triggering to today's audience, and avoided at all costs. 

But without a more naive view of what constituted a good look or a bad look at the time, we would never have gotten the great performance of Carl Anderson as Judas. The interesting thing was that it seems Judas was specifically conceived as Black. Anderson was an understudy for Judas on Broadway. Who initiated the role? Why none other than film and stage legend Ben Vereen, also a Black man.

It doesn't appear to have been written that way by Rice and Webber. After all, as I learned from a little poking around on Wikipedia this week, Ted Neeley originally auditioned to play Judas, as he found that the more interesting role. I doubt they ever seriously considered him -- I mean, he just looks like Jesus Christ -- but that it was a possibility means that Judas had not yet been fixed as Black.

With the work of first Vereen and then Anderson, though, his racial identity seemed to solidify. To the point where, when I saw a little bit of a filmed version of the stage revival from around 20 years ago, I saw the actor cast as Judas and immediately dismissed him because he was white.

This seems like a strange perspective to have, though it's consistent with my theory that the first version of something you experience is usually your favorite, and subsequent versions can't measure up. But I also think there is an inclination toward "othering" Judas in other works in which the Judas-Jesus relationship is depicted. With just one example off the top of my head, Garth Davis' 2018 film Mary Magdalene features Tahar Rahim, an actor of Algerian descent, playing Judas to the white Jesus of Joaquin Phoenix. Interestingly, Peter -- who also betrays Jesus by denying him -- is played by the Black actor here, Chiwetel Ejiofor.

It's a different story with Judas and the Black Messiah, as both characters are Black, and the true personification of evil is Plemons as the FBI agent. He is this film's pharisees. So I'm not sure if it makes a useful comparison in this case except to say that the comparison did occur to me, and I think that's because this is another Black Judas, one who harnesses the spirit of Carl Anderson whether he was trying to or not. 

As I've said, I'm not religious, and I am far more interested in both Jesus and Judas as literary figures than as religious ones. They are great characters loaded with human frailties, but particularly Judas, a man beset by conflict about the right thing to do. Judas' reputation as a character has been burnished by one of our finest Black actors today, continuing the legacy started by a Black actor who was underappreciated at the time. Who left us in 2004 ... a fact I was reminded of while watching a little bit of the DVD commentary by Jewison and Neeley, which they happened to record only a month after his passing. 

I hope neither actor regretted his casting in the role. I assume Anderson didn't, as he continued to play it on stage in the ensuing decades. And hopefully Stanfield won't either, something that seems unlikely considering that he's been nominated for an Oscar. True progress is not casting Black actors only as morally upright characters. True progress is reaching the point where it's okay for them to play seriously flawed ones. 

R.I.P. to the comedy MVP of 1996

I've missed memorializing some great film stars recently -- not a word on here about either Christopher Plummer or Yaphet Kotto, unfortunately -- but I've awakened from my slumber to honor a man most would only consider a minor film star.

George Segal had a special place in my heart, though, as a result of his two great supporting roles in comedies I cherish from exactly 25 years ago.

Segal was better known for other things, to be sure. He was nominated for an Oscar in Who's Afraid of Virigina Woolf? He was a regular in the sitcom Just Shoot Me. A show called The Goldbergs, which I am somehow not familiar with, was name-checked in the headline of the story that alerted me to his passing in Variety.

For me, though, George Segal was never better than in Flirting With Disaster and The Cable Guy, my #2 and #4 movies of 1996, the very first year I kept a ranked list of my favorite films of the year. 

His was a significant supporting role in the David O. Russell film, as he played Ed Coplin, the neurotic adopted father of Ben Stiller's Mel, who spent the entire movie searching for his birth parents. His comic rapport with his wife, played by Mary Tyler Moore, is one of Flirting With Disaster's true highlights.

His character didn't actually get a name in The Cable Guy. On IMDB he is credited only as "Steven's father." But indeed, his appearance midway through as the father of that film's main character, played by Matthew Broderick, kicks the comedy memorably if briefly into a new gear.

Both films showcased what Segal did best, which was to play an affable but flustered everyman. And both films have a line or dialogue sequence that I love quoting, even to this day, which perfectly illustrates his ability to play clueless and confused with an abundance of charm.

There are actually two lines in The Cable Guy, which is impressive considering that he has maybe seven minutes of screen time in the movie. The first is when Steven gets arrested, and his father comes to bail him out. Concerned over an arrest he can't comprehend, his father asks Steven "Are you taking the pot?" It's an adorable moment, as it demonstrates both that he's too square to understand how to talk about drugs using the correct terminology, and also that he believes marijuana makes people do things that lead directly to their arrest.

Later, in a game of Porno Password instigated by the thorn in Steven's side (Jim Carrey's Chip Douglas), this uptight man and the rest of his family get unexpectedly caught up in the ribald moment, contrary to their apparent squareness. When Steven, seemingly playing the game at gunpoint, gives a winning clue that makes the whole room (except Steven) crack up in hysterics, his dad shouts out "I would have said schlong!" 

Maybe you had to be there. Fortunately, I was.

He's got much more to do in Flirting With Disaster, where he appears in about three different parts of the movie and is knee deep in guilt-tripping his son over Mel's quest for his birth parents. These lead to a lot of little funny moments by Segal, but none funnier than this. 

When he hears Mel is going to San Diego to find his parents, he tries to instill fear in Mel about the "dangers" of that comically sunny and safe city. His story concludes with "They have a big car-jacking problem in San Diego. They bump you, and when you pull over, they mutilate you and take your car. It's how they got Art Sackheim."

Patricia Arquette rejoins "Art Sackheim is dead?"

Segal: "Who said anything about dead? They stole his car."

Arquette: "You said 'mutilate.'"

Segal: "Please."

There's something great about that "please," in part as it is almost lost when his wife immediately tramples over it with another flow of insecure objections. I just love how well he sells this moment, as if he's already forgotten what word he just used 30 seconds earlier, and his daughter-in-law is absurd for suggesting such a thing.

These moments probably don't seem like an excuse to elevate Segal over other recent luminaries we have lost, at least in terms of this blog's "in memoriam" priorities. But the thing is, they were my moments. They are some of my favorite moments from two seminal comedies, each of which I have watched more than a half-dozen times. And these are the types of moments I will still remember when I'm an old man on my own death bed, lucky if I get as many as the 87 years Segal got.

Rest in peace, you loveable neurotic. 

The moment when Bud and Ed team up

I watched L.A. Confidential for the first time in about nine years last night. It's a great film whose greatness I came to fully appreciate on my last viewing in 2012. Last night's viewing was just on a whim, just as a treat. 

Back in those days when I considered L.A. Confidential to function primarily as a rival for my favorite film of 1997, Titanic, whose attention from the critics made me vicariously jealous, I kind of didn't think it was all that. Oh, I clearly liked it -- you don't rank a film #12 for the year if you don't really like it -- but I resented its acclaim, because I felt that many of those same critics really didn't see the value in Titanic, and I imagined they were attacking my intellect and my tastes by bashing the James Cameron movie.

Titanic is still ranked higher on my Flickchart, but L.A. Confidential regularly gains ground in my estimation.

The thing I always forget about L.A. Confidential is how much of an entertainment it is, first and foremost. Since it was such a critical darling, I tend to think that it must be deep, or artsy, or Important. L.A. Confidential is not really any of those things. It doesn't need to be. It's just a crackerjack Hollywood crime story full of charismatic performers and great twists. Okay, not twists by the standards M. Night Shyamalan would establish a couple years later, but good narrative twists and turns that made you feel like you were on a amusement park ride, having the time of your life.

One of the simple, gut-level pleasures of L.A. Confidential is the moment our two heroes, who approach police work in polar opposite ways and are at each others' throats for much of the story, finally team up to get The Bad Guys. "Bad guys" is certainly a term of great relativity in L.A. Confidential, as many of the "good guys" are venal and compromised, and even the morally upright one has a pole up his ass and seems to go too far in the other direction, making him vaguely disagreeable as well.

But after a good hour and 45 minutes of gray areas, the movie does reduce things to good guys and bad guys, and it's that moment when Bud White (Russell Crowe) and Ed Exley (Guy Pearce) finally realize they are working toward the same goals. Which is to take down the REAL bad guys.

The ensuing scenes between Ed and Bud are filled with such hopeful testosterone that you can't help but be swept up in them. You might almost call their new bond homoerotic, if you didn't see how drawn they both were to Kim Basinger.

As these guys enter rooms with guns drawn, almost engaging in that back-to-back dance of gunmen fighting off a circle of foes, throwing bullet clips and car keys to each other, it's like a well-oiled machine driven by a righteous purpose. The throwing of objects to one another especially captures their unified energy. You can't play catch with someone unless you like them, and you can't perfectly aim a projectile toward the other's hand, barely having even to announce your intention first, unless your minds are perfectly in sync.

And when they're holed up in the Victory Hotel, throwing mattresses and bureaus in front of the windows to block incoming gunfire, picking off corrupt cops with shotguns and pistols, it's invigorating as hell.

Another day I can tell you all the other great things about L.A. Confidential -- and how I watched the movie without gagging over Kevin Spacey's involvement -- but today I just want to talk about Bud and Ed.

The forgotten Oscars

I didn't actually forget the Oscars this year, even if it's taken my nearly three days after the nominations were unveiled to finally write about them. 

In fact, I so didn't forget them that I watched the nominations live, just like I always do, even coming in the middle of March instead of the middle of January. That's only supposed to be for die-hards -- if you live in Los Angeles, as I used to, it means getting up at 5 in the morning, which I also used to do. I guess that makes me a die-hard, given the time is also inconvenient on the east coast of Australia. At least this year I benefitted from U.S. daylight savings having already passed, meaning I got to watch them at 11:15 p.m. rather than 12:15 a.m.

These Oscars do feel sort of forgotten, though, and not only because most of us have already tried to move on from 2020. Joe Biden has ushered out Trump and ushered in all sorts of hope across the board, including the recent COVID aid package. Who wants to dwell on last year?

The Academy, that's who, as they forced an Oscar qualifying deadline that was perversely late. I was under the misapprehension that the nominations were supposed to come out on March 8th -- that was the deadline for this year's Flickchart Awards nominations, which are usually in sync with the Oscars on their timing -- but they didn't arrive until wee in the early hours of the Ides of March Los Angeles time.

Even with the extra time allotted me, I had only seen five of the eight best picture nominees. I'll remind you of how I ranked them back in January on my year-end list:

1. Sound of Metal (7)
2. Mank (39)
3. Promising Young Woman (40)
4. Nomadland (82)
5. The Trial of the Chicago 7 (99)

Wow, looking at that, I guess that makes me more out of sync with the Academy this year than I thought. I was going to say "The Academy managed a good slate of nominees despite the pandemic," but who am I kidding? Only one of them cracked my top 35 for the year. (I have complicated thoughts on Promising Young Woman, as do most of us I imagine.)

I did catch up on Minari this week, Tuesday night, sort of in celebration of the nominations. That was the first night after they were released when I could have seen a movie, and I opted for this over one of the two other best picture nominees I haven't yet seen, Judas and the Black Messiah, mostly because a different critic owes me a review for that and I thought I could get a Minari review out of the experience. Only then did I realize Minari has been out for a month here now, so that kind of goes against my usual review-posting timeframe.

Minari would slot in at #2 behind Sound of Metal. I liked it a lot but do not think of it as a "special favorite." The Father, the third I haven't seen, comes out here two weeks from today.

I'm also still having trouble shaking the notion that Judas and the Black Messiah is "really" a 2021 film. Because I was hearing awards buzz a lot earlier for The Father and Minari, I don't see them that way, even though they are more or less in the same boat as Judas. But I didn't even hear about Judas until 2021 and felt for sure that it was "always intended" as a 2021 release, rather than a 2020 release delayed for awards consideration, though really, I have no idea.

The nominees threw some other titles from 2021 into confusion. I thought for sure Ramin Bahrani's Netflix film The White Tiger, which I currently have ranked among my 2021 films, was a "pure" 2021 film, but there it was, getting nominated for a screenplay Oscar. I guess it's time for me to just throw out all my worries and count all these films, including probably also One Night in Miami, toward 2021.

There were a few unusual nominees that might not had made the cut in a normal year. For example, although I think Maria Bakalova's performance in Borat was great, it's not the type of performance, nor is that the type of film, that would get Oscar nominations in a full slate of releases. (That's right, plural -- it also got a screenplay nomination, strangely enough, and good on Priyanka Chopra Jonas for spitting out the whole 53-word title flawlessly, not once but twice, as she read the nominees.) Overall though, aside from the lack of big tentpoles dominating the technical categories, it probably looked pretty similar to most other years. 

I'm sure I'll be there on April 25th -- or April 26th my time -- to watch the show, like I always do. But these Oscars still feel forgotten to me, and I kind of want to forget them and move on. I suppose I should get used to this, though, as the ten-month 2021 Oscar season might leave me in a similar place of melancholy consternation next year. 

I'm Thinking of Kaufman Things: Human Nature

This is the second in my bi-monthly series revisiting the films of Charlie Kaufman.

I remembered so little of what happens in Human Nature (2001) that it was like discovering the existence of a Charlie Kaufman film I had never seen before. It all came back to me as I was watching -- or at least it felt familiar -- but if asked to tell you any of what happened going in, I would have been unable. And now that I've seen all the Kaufman films that followed, I can recognize that it's a film overflowing with his traditional concerns and themes.

But I should start by talking about another collaborator in the film, the director, Michel Gondry. 

I admit I forgot he was the director here, which challenges the notion that Spike Jonze was Kaufman's primary translator of his distinct vision of the world, at least before he started directing his scripts himself. Actually Gondry directed as many Kaufman films as Jonze did, two apiece. George Clooney is the only other person who has directed even one of Kaufman's scripts, and we'll get to that one in May.

I'm trying to think of the primary way Gondry's approach differs from Jonze's, and I can't, at least not in terms of Human Nature. The DIY aesthetic that would be introduced to some parts of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind would bear fruit in later Gondry works, like The Science of Sleep and Be Kind Rewind, but he had not yet discovered his construction paper-inspired filmmaking style at this point.

But we're here to talk about Kaufman, not Gondry.

And Human Nature is a Kaufman movie through and through. It contains a line of dialogue, spoken by Tim Robbins, that may serve as a thesis statement for Kaufman's entire body of work: "I know how miserable it is to be alive."

Since this is undoubtedly Kaufman's least-seen work, I suppose a little plot synopsis would be helpful. The story revolves around not one but two Kaufmanian outsiders, or maybe even three depending on how you look at it. One is a child raised in the wild, thinking of himself as an ape, who is called Puff by the scientists who discover him. Another is a woman named Lila (Patricia Arquette) who is afflicted with hirsutism, meaning she has hair growing all over her body, which would (and does) make her a rather obvious companion for Puff. However, before she meets Puff she is matched up with Dr. Nathan Bronfman (Tim Robbins), a behavioral scientist who is trying to teach mice the correct dinner fork to use when eating their salad. Lila's friend and the woman administering her electrolysis (Rosie Perez) thinks he might not be particular about her condition (which she still keeps hidden from him) because of his small penis and because he's still a virgin at 35.

Upon discovering Puff in the wild, Bronfman takes it upon himself to reform the bestial creature into a gentleman of great refinement. In fact, the results are so successful that Puff litters his speech with 50 cent words and foreign phrases. Of course, remnants of the beast persist, like the fact that he still wants to hump any female that moves. A shock collar administered by Bronfman helps with that.

This has got Kaufman written all over it. In fact, it feels more similar to later Kaufman works even than the movie that kind of set our expectations for a Charlie Kaufman film, Being John Malkovich. It's got existentialism. It's got absurd comedy. (The shots of Puff being zapped across the room by the shock collar are acrobatic delights.) It's got love triangles. It's got eccentric science, which we first saw in Being John Malkovich and will continue to see in Eternal Sunshine. It's got awkwardness and neuroses and animal urges and the shame we feel over them.

One Kaufman trademark that I think really ties this film to I'm Thinking of Ending Things is what I referred to in my notes as "warped domesticity." Those scenes in Kaufman's latest where Jesse Plemons' character gets so triggered and agitated by his mother are presaged here. It's Bronfman here who has the twisted relationship with his mother (Mary Kay Place), who insisted he be punished if he used the wrong fork for his salad -- and led directly to his later work with mice. (A fact he denies in a handful of humorous exchanges with his therapist, played by Miguel Sandoval.) As far as I can tell, Place is the sole casting link between this and Malkovich, as she played the secretary who can't hear properly.

Kaufman's clear affinity for freaks is in ample quantity here, but the question really is, which character is the stand-in for the author? Bronfman seems like the obvious pick, as Kaufman has never been shy about self-deprecation -- I don't know if he was a virgin at 35 or has a small penis, but if he were he'd be unafraid of making that fact known to us. But his character is only the third most important in the narrative and the last of the main three introduced, and the character playing the Kaufman role is usually one of the two main leads. Certainly he would see himself in Lila and Puff also, Lila specifically, as her excess body hair is an outward manifestation of inward shame, the kind with which Kaufman is quite familiar.

In terms of the narrative itself, the film has a complicated structure that I also think of as a telltale sign of Kaufman's work. The story jumps around a bit, traveling into characters' pasts, without every being confusing, and shifts perspectives between the characters in a way that is also easy to follow. A shifting of perspective is often a narrative sin, a sign of bad writing rather than good writing, but Kaufman uses the tool as though the three main characters are all telling one chronicler -- maybe a documentarian -- the same story from their own viewpoints. It works exceedingly well.

I can't leave off discussing the film without noting that it had some interesting noir elements, or one in particular. (In addition to thinking of Kaufman things, I'm also thinking of noir things for my monthly series this year.) Miranda Otto is highly entertaining as Bronfman's assistant, a con artist who is pretending she's French (we don't realize until relatively late that she isn't) and is shamelessly throwing herself at Bronfman, despite the fact (or maybe specifically because of the fact) that he's already with Lila. She's a femme fatale, dressing the part in skimpy outfits and leading him down a path that leads to his own destruction. 

I can see I was not really ready for Human Nature when I first saw it, as the rating I gave it on Letterboxd (or at least, the rating I gave it retroactively when I started using Letterboxd ten years ago) was only three stars. My experience with it this time around would have been a full higher star than that. It gets at all the core Kaufman issues while also being a jolly good time.

Confessions of a Dangerous Mind will be on the docket in May. 

A fine line between best and worst

As the interminable wait continues for the Oscar nominations to finally be revealed -- just two more days now -- the penultimate 2020 movie "awards" announcement has gotten the internet's attention the past few days.

The Golden Raspberries delayed their own announcement of 2020 dishonors to coincide with that of the Oscars, as they always do, and one of the nominees has reminded me of my own problematic position on a 2020 movie. 

It's actually a 2021 movie for all intents and purposes, but those are the times we live in.

And it's actually a movie that has already gotten a different kind of "golden" nomination -- a Golden Globe.

When I went to see Sia's feature directorial debut, Music, back at the end of January, the ticket seller did something I thought was sort of unusual for someone in her position: she badmouthed the movie. She hadn't actually seen it, but thought it was possible to badmouth it on reputation alone. "Good luck with that," she told me. "I understand it's pretty rough."

In Australia, this use of the word "rough" -- assuming my memory is correct and this is actually what she said -- would colloquially be understood as "bad," not "emotionally challenging" as an American might interpret it. You know, like "rough sledding."

When I came out of the movie, though, I thought she'd misheard. I understand why she gave me the warning, but I thought Sia largely pulled it off. I was conscious that I might be going against the grain of the popular perspective on the movie, but I gave it a 7/10 on ReelGood when I reviewed it. I don't let ticket sellers who haven't actually seen the movie bias my reviews, whenever possible.

My limited affection for Music seemed to be justified when, lo and behold, Sia's film turned up among the Golden Globe nominations just a week later. Not just one nomination, for the film itself as best musical or comedy, but a nomination for Kate Hudson as best actress in a musical or comedy. At the time, its inclusion surprised me more on the basis of its release year, as I thought this was a genuine 2021 release (and in most years would be), than on the basis of its quality. Though I was also surprised to see this apparently shit movie, according to the hearsay propagated by theater ticket sellers, embraced as decidedly not shit.

Music didn't win any globes, which I think would have been the biggest surprise of all. And probably would have started to fade into our collective memories if not for the Razzie announcement.

Music didn't just slide in there with one nomination, but it was almost leading the pack. It was nominated for worst picture, worst actress (also Hudson), worst supporting actress and worst director. In fact, if not for Dolittle and the Netflix movie 365 (gotta watch that now), which led with six, Music probably would have gotten a lot more headlines than it did.

Perhaps that ticket seller had her finger on something after all.

The Big Problem with Music, of course, is that it does that thing that is an absolute cinematic no-no: It casts a normally abled actress as a person with intellectual disabilities. It "goes full retard," to use the intentionally offensive parlance of Tropic Thunder.

This actress, Maddie Ziegler, is a veteran of a number of Sia videos. She was cast for her abilities in the dance numbers that populate this film and dramatize the title character's inner life. Turns out, she's also an actress of some ability. I don't suppose I found her portrayal 100% free of the reasons we are legitimately worried about normally abled actors essaying these roles, but it could have been a lot worse. And I thought the character was ultimately sweet. If you decide you are forced to do this for logistical reasons, like the actress needing to perform complicated dance choreography for the role, Ziegler walks that tightrope about as well as you might hope. (That's not to say a person with autism couldn't also be an amazing dancer, but I suspect it's considerably less likely.)

Of course, as it turns out, most critics stopped at "normally abled actress as a person with intellectual disabilities."

When I saw how the Razzies had rained scorn on Music, I had to do something I hadn't yet done for this film: check out its Metacritic score. With this new information that contradicted the praise of the Golden Globes, I guessed it was worse than I thought it might be. I guessed 37. It was worse than that: 23.

Ouch.

Of course, at that moment I started to panic about my own review. Had I gotten this really, really wrong?

The 18 Metacritic reviews are divided between mixed (six) and negative (12), without a single positive review in there. The highest individual score listed was 60, which I suppose is only ten points lower than my own converted score of 70 would have been. But still, giving the movie a better review than the 18 other critics on Metacritic gave me a wave of nausea that reminded me of other extreme outlier positions I've held in the past, like my affection for the universally loathed The Emoji Movie. (Fortunately, I had the good sense not to review that one, a consequence of seeing it a good two months after it actually came out.)

But then I noticed something interesting: the user score. That score exactly equalled my own 7.0 rating of the film (Metacritic includes the decimal point in this calculation), based on a lot more than 18 opinions. 

That's right, among users of Metacritic, Music has a staggering 113 positive reviews, 48 negative reviews, and somehow only four mixed reviews. I guess you either love it or you hate it. 

With these new data points, I started to feel a bit better about my own positive review. I mean, if you're a critic, you're likely to turn your nose up at what the rabble thinks of any movie. But if you go back to the guiding principles of why you started reviewing movies, one of those was to make useful recommendations to average moviegoers. My review of Music would have steered at least 113 people in the right direction. 

This is the latest strong bit of evidence about a disconnect between critics and the people they write for. There may be a lot more film snobs going into film criticism than ever before, as the cheery working professionals who championed popular entertainments are steadily retiring. I don't know why that would be -- the industry should have been peopled with snobs from the start -- but the obvious gulf between critics and audiences on Music has to mean something, and this may be it.

It seems to be an example of the way our core assumptions fail us sometimes. A core assumption is that a movie where an actress goes "full retard" is going to be patently offensive no matter what. It isn't going to matter if there are subtleties in her performance, moments where she held back and opted for a less showy way of demonstrating the traits of the character's affliction. But a movie about a person with autism can't be all moments like that; she has fits and moments of extreme agitation, and for those critics who judged Maddie Ziegler harshly, the moment the script called for one of those moments, they started writing the review in their head.

Let's be honest, they started writing the review even before they watched the movie. It helps that Sia is an easy target. She's got a unique combination of traits that make her easy to pick on. For one, she offends critics by suggesting that anyone can direct a feature film, even a musician who theoretically excels in a different type of artistic expression altogether. (Though Sia has been directing her own videos for some time.) Then she's got that eccentric public personality that includes airy fairy statements and wigs that cover her eyes entirely. This is a person they can pile on without getting a guilty conscience. 

The critics are right that Music should not have worked. But the truth is, it does. And you have to review the movie you're seeing, not the movie you assume it will be.

Of course, the community of critics is no monolithic entity who do any one thing for the same set of reasons. I have to assume there are plenty of critics who did give Music a chance, but it still didn't work for them, possibly as much for their antipathy to Sia's colorful dance numbers featuring silly outfits (I said she had a "Teletubby aesthetic" in my review) as for Ziegler's casting or performance. And in fact, I noticed the critic who has the highest listed review of Music on Metacritic -- Tara Brady of The Irish Times -- states in the part of her review they excerpted, "Ziegler's performance is the best thing about Music." I'm not sure I agree, as I did sort of go for the dance numbers and for Hudson's performance, but I'm glad she had the courage to say what she did.

But back to the Golden Globes and the Golden Raspberries. One thing that's for sure is that the Globes' endorsement of Music, even if having some validity according to me, is a bad look for them in a year in which the Hollywood Foreign Press has gotten some of its worse PR ever. That body has come under fire this year, quite rightfully, for having almost no racial diversity, and I'm sure its decision to honor Music only contributes to that sense of its fatal tone deafness. 

In truth, even though I like it, Music would never have made my own nominee shortlist. It's one thing to say a movie succeeds on its own terms; it's quite another to say it is among the best of the year. And at least I can provide some separation between myself and the Hollywood Foreign Press on that one. 

In determining who votes on the Golden Raspberries, I noted Wikipedia describes the voting body as being comprised of "filmmakers and very opinionated film buffs from around the world," and that members hail from "all 50 states and every continent except Antarctica." (That's good; I'm glad that neither climate scientists nor penguins are taking time from their busy schedules to trash the worst movies of the year.)

I wonder if the Razzie voting for Music was a direct sign of outrage at the Golden Globes, and that maybe if the movie hadn't already been singled out by that body, it would have just slipped under everyone's radar as a problematic movie that wasn't as problematic as it seemed like it should have been. Instead, now it will live in infamy as a movie straddling the line between a dubious best and a dubious worst of 2020. 

And all this for a movie that didn't even come out that year. 

Knowing Noir: Gaslight

This is the third in my 2021 monthly series seeing classic noir films I have not yet seen.

Watching my March movie for Knowing Noir was a bit of a rollercoaster. My first instinct was that I had made a grave mistake, and the movie wasn't a noir at all. My second was a growing understanding of just how slippery a term "film noir" actually is, and that it can apply to movies that, on their surface, don't seem to qualify as noir. 

Fortunately, every point of this rollercoaster was a moment where I smiled with glee in terms of the film's quality.

George Cukor's 1944 film Gaslight was a film I have wanted to see for some time, and was glad this series was finally giving me the opportunity. It's the rare film that has provided us a household word, one that has become well-known to anyone who follows politics, especially recently. Numerous articles critical of Donald Trump have described what he does to followers and opponents alike as "gaslighting," as denying the reality of clearly observable truths merely through his power of suggestion. Of course, like most political terminology, both sides use it to describe the tactics of the other, so Trump's own base would be quite familiar with it as well.

The term comes from this film, and it has to do with one small detail of a much larger scheme to convince a young married woman, Paula (Ingrid Bergman), that she's going crazy. Her new husband, Gregory (Charles Boyer), has tricked her into moving back into the house where her aunt, a famous opera singer, was murdered when Paula was just 14 -- and was present in the house at the time. Paula is resistant to the idea, but he uses smooth reasoning and other tricks to reduce her objection to it. His purpose is to search for the opera singer's valuable jewels, a search that was interrupted when Paula's arrival on the scene forced the murderer to flee. Gregory was that man, though of course Paula doesn't know that.

In order to search for the jewels among the singer's belongings, which have been moved to the attic to placate Paula, Gregory has to create an atmosphere of self-doubt around Paula, by suggesting she's hearing and seeing things, losing some objects and stealing others. The servants in the house unwittingly help his cause, as one loathes Paula and the other is hard of hearing. Paula steadily falls apart in the wake of this apparent evidence of things she doesn't remember doing, and is considerably more susceptible to his suggestions given the revelation -- possibly false -- that her own mother was crazy.

The title comes in in terms of the lights in their home, which brighten and dim when Gregory is in the attic searching for the jewels. When he turns on the lights in one part of the house, they necessarily dim elsewhere as gas must rush into the pipes to accommodate the new request for an additional light source. However, no one in the house, including the servants, takes note of these changes in the level of the lights, proving that Gregory's subterfuge has been successful. Once no one else can confirm any of Paula's observations, she's less likely to believe his footsteps in the attic are anything more than a figment of her active imagination. 

I couldn't really tell the extent to which the servants may be in on the scheme, though we never explicitly see Gregory enlisting them. Without their explicit involvement, though, Gregory could not be sure the others would support his attempt to gaslight his wife, to use the title as we would use it in a modern sense. That may be a bit of a loose thread in the plot, though it's supported by the servants' respective deficits (one's loathing, the other's poor hearing ... and eyesight?).

Okay, back to why I almost gave up on this movie as my March noir.

As you might guess from the prevalence of gaslights, this movie is not set in the 1930s or 1940s, the more typical time period for a film noir. No, it's in London of 1875, a time of carriages and lamplighters and all sorts of other Dickensian details one does not usually associated with hard-boiled detectives and femme fatales. When I checked Wikipedia, I saw that the film is described in its opening paragraph as a "psychological thriller," not a film noir.

I had wanted to see the movie anyway, and it was early enough in the month for me to just shift gears and watch something else for this series for March. But then, while still watching, I started poking around on the internet using "gaslight" and "film noir" as my search terms. And there were a lot of hits.

As it turns out, and this could just have to do with the period in which it was made, Gaslight was thought of by many as a film noir for things like its lighting scheme and its character dynamics, even if its subject matter does not traditionally suggest that assignation. (I knew I wasn't crazy for selecting it for this series. Don't gaslight me, world.) And this is where I started to learn a bit more about the debate about film noir.

There's a lot of argument about what film noir actually is. While some cineastes consider it a genre, others will go no further than to call it a "style." I learned something that might have been obvious if I'd thought about it, but is still pretty illuminating. The term "film noir" is used retrospectively to refer to the films from that period, and only came into being in the 1970s. At the time, most of those movies were referred to as "melodramas."

There is also considerable debate about particular films and whether we should consider them noir or not. The impression I got from a quick scan of the Wikipedia page is that there are a number of noir elements, only some of which may be present in any noir film we see. Whether enough are present or not for a person to call it "noir" is kind of something that person has to decide on an individual basis. It's a kind of "you know it when you see it" thing.

When I started watching Gaslight, I thought I knew I was not seeing it. The setting and time period initially ruled it out for me. But after reading that article, I know that a narrow viewpoint of what constitutes noir is not consistent with how the term has been used over the years. I feel like there are certain settings that simply could not be noir -- like, say, a movie about King Arthur and the knights of the round table -- but 19th century England is close enough in noir spirit not to be one of those dealbreakers. I suppose you could make a noir about King Arthur, too, if you got your design details right.

Lighting is a big element of noir, and this movie has the word "light" in its actual title. The idea of light works metaphorically in this film as well, as Paula is being "kept in the dark" by her husband. The actual amount of light that falls on her face, given the vicissitudes of the gaslights, is a noir detail if ever there was one. 

I'm still finding my way around all the design details of a film noir, but one thing the Wikipedia article referenced was the likelihood of "unbalanced compositions." I don't specifically recall that from Gaslight, but it's something to keep my eye on going forward, and reminds me that this aspect of the mis en scene might exist in productions from a range of subject matters. 

If you're going for noir's more obvious tropes, you've got a femme fatale here too. In her terrific screen debut, which actually earned her an Oscar nomination, Angela Lansbury plays the servant that loathes Paula, if not an actual co-conspirator for Gregory than certainly someone with no moral compunction about deception. Although we never see anything romantic between her and Gregory, she flirts with him recklessly and he is receptive to it. Her eyes just suggest mischief. 

Overall I was just really caught up in this film, a great example of suspense and clever screenwriting. I particularly enjoyed the performance of Charles Boyer, watching him adapt on the fly to changes in his circumstances like a first-rate con man. In a moment where Paula insists on going out for the evening, and will do so even without him, Gregory's initial response is to remind her how her recent behavior makes her unfit to appear in proper society. When she won't be dissuaded, instead of doubling down and giving her additional backbone in her rebellion, he changes his tone and cheerfully accompanies her on the outing. In that moment he's developed a plan to strengthen his own position, to force Paula to make a public scene when he pretends to find his pocket watch hidden in her purse in the middle of a high society music performance. Her resulting breakdown will provide further proof, both to others and to Paula herself, that he should keep her home under lock and key, making his own job that much easier.

If I have one quibble about the plot, it's that it takes Gregory entirely too long to find the jewels, especially when they are ultimately revealed to be hiding in plain sight. However, this is necessary to get a Scotland Yard detective played by Joseph Cotten (a personal favorite) involved in the plot, so I will allow it.

This series has taken a notable turn toward the positive in the past couple months. After two sort of atypical examples of film noir, I think I'll opt for something featuring a hard-boiled detective in April, though what that will be remains to be seen. 

Limping my way to a Coming 2 America post

I saw Coming 2 America on Sunday night. It's now Friday and I am finally forcing myself to write something about it.

This is not because it's hard to write the word "meh," but because I felt like I wanted some more insightful thoughts on why I thought the film was "meh."

Plus I have struggled with why I thought it was "meh," which gets into the everpresent self-scruitnization of a modern critic into why he may not like a film that strays from his own perspective. (I say "he" because it's the male critics who have to do this the most -- female critics are well practiced in considering films that stray from their perspective.)

In my review for Coming 2 America, I likened it to another long-delayed sequel from last year -- actually two long-delayed sequels, but I only went into detail about the one I felt more strongly about. Those were Bill & Ted Face the Music and Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, both of which I gave four stars out of five.

Coming 2 America? I gave it 2.5 stars.

I can go into why if you like, but the review already does that. You can find it here.

The comparison to those movies is germane, especially Bill & Ted. The last movie in the Bill & Ted series came in 1991, while Coming 2 America's predecessor was in 1988, so they are both more similar to each other than they are to Borat. So we can leave off talking about Borat. 

Now, the difference in my feelings towards the two films may have to do with a difference in my expectations. I was expecting not to like Bill & Ted Face the Music, so when I liked it, it was a pleasant surprise. I was expecting to like Coming 2 America, so not liking it all that much was a steady downhill slope to disappointment.

And sure, I think I can reasonably argue that Bill & Ted has a better script, a better resuscitation of the characters' core traits by the actors, and an overall more imaginative way to explore the logic of the world it has provided us. It may not even require arguing; it may just be self-evident.

But I started to doubt myself after the movie ended, following a speech from my wife that was close to a harangue.

She liked Coming 2 America a little better than I did, I think, though not considerably. However, she was definitely attuned to the possible complications of a negative review from a racial standpoint -- a negative review she knew I was about to write. (Or mixed, at the very least.)

Her points were well-considered. No matter how successful it may ultimately have been, Coming 2 America was a triumph in a similar way to the original was a triumph, which I discussed in my piece about the original a week ago. Namely, it gathered together a cast of almost exclusively Black actors, who gave us an entertainment that crossed over in a way that was no small feat in 1988. Even 33 years later, you could argue this is still no small feat -- and that a movie that does so with the celebratory atmosphere of a number of songs and dances, and successful shout-outs to its predecessor, is worth cutting a little slack, maybe even worth celebrating.

"And think about that before you write your review," she seemed to say with her eyes, or sort of actually said with her words. "Think about the power you wield from your soap box."

I did think about it. I thought a lot about it.

In fact, one night I lost sleep over it. It was Tuesday night, I think. I had a stress dream that combined worries I have about my job, where I deal with financial issues and where senior members of my team are leaving at the end of the month, with worries I obviously had about this review. I dreamed I was trying to handle Prince Akeem's finances and was in woefully over my head.

I did ultimately write the review, which I've linked to you above, and it does not call this movie a turd. In fact, I don't think it's a turd, so it's appropriate that my review doesn't convey that.

I do think it's worth only 2.5 stars out of 5, which translates to a 5 in my site's rating scale. But I gave it a 6.

If you're trying to be woke in 2021, you have to consider how much of your own baggage you are bringing to the perspective you publish to the world. And I couldn't help ask myself:

"Do I like Bill & Ted Face the Music better than Coming 2 America because the characters are white and I can relate to them better?"

Even if you don't believe something like this is true -- and I don't -- I do think it's worth asking yourself the question. Or, asking yourself if other people will ask that question, which is the big Worry with a capital W.

You can think yourself in circles on this topic if you're not careful. On the one hand, you know you should not engage in the criticism version of affirmative action, boosting the rating of a film because you are concerned about how a negative appraisal of that film makes you look, or because you think it needs "help." On the other, you need to consider the way the differences in your perspective and the perspective of the film may play themselves out in your perception of it.

Is that worth a single point on a ten-point rating scale?

It may be. 

On the other hand again, Coming 2 America is not exactly outsider art. Its director and two of its three writers are white, and it comes from a corporate place. Also, Eddie Murphy himself is one of cinema history's most white-tested Black stars. 

I'm not sure if I would have thought about this issue so much if not for my wife's impromptu post-movie speech. But I think speeches like that are worth listening to, their wisdom worth heeding. And if it means saying I like a movie that is genuinely funny in some parts, and enjoyably fan servicey in most parts, a little more than I actually do, I suppose that's a small sacrifice to make.

I posted the review on Wednesday, and have slept well enough since then. 

Damning with faint praise

I know that Wikipedia is written by countless dedicated volunteers who may not all have the same editorial sense, but the content is remarkably consistent overall, isn't it?

Occasionally, though, you get sentences like this one:

"Opening the Virginia Film Festival, Big Stone Gap (film) was ranked among the top 250 grossing women-directed films of 2014."

I messaged this to a friend of mine telling him he didn't need to know the context of the sentence to find it funny, but that's because I didn't want to bother to write it all out at the time. But I'm happy to tell you.

I was researching the director Adriana Trigiani, who directed the film I just reviewed, Then Came You, which opened here in Australia today but which opened in the U.S. last October. Turns out she's primarily a novelist, though she did direct one feature and one documentary before now. 

The documentary was Queens of the Big Time from 1996, which Wikipedia tells me was quite good. It's Big Stone Gap, though, that concerns us today.

I'm not going to ding it for opening the Virginia Film Festival. I'm sure that's a fine festival.

No, it was the attempt to big-up the movie by talking about its box office performance that made me laugh.

In 2014, we'd be lucky if there were even 50 films released that were directed by women, let alone the 250 implied by that comment. That this film, or any film, should be lauded for finding itself among the most profitable 250 movies directed by women in a single release year is just absurd. 

It makes me wonder if the person who wrote Trigiani's Wikipedia page was intentionally having a laugh at her. I had to, of course, check Wikipedia to see what that box office take was, and it was barely over a million dollars -- worldwide.

Taken out of context, that may not seem too shabby, but the context here is important. The film also stars Ashley Judd, Patrick Wilson and Whoopi Goldberg. Seems like getting the fans of each of those people, who are not an inconsiderable number, to contribute only about $333,000 apiece is not a particularly tall order.

Trigiani is a novelist, and Then Came You suggests she should probably stick to that. And without stars Kathie Lee Gifford (!) and Craig Ferguson, I probably wouldn't have praised it at all, faint though my praise may have been. 

48 Hrs., give or take

If you want to know why I was tired on Monday, and maybe a bit grouchy, it was because I stayed up until 1:45 Sunday night trying to finish 48 Hrs., which I'd never seen.

For a guy who was a big Eddie Murphy fan in the 1980s, it's crazy that I've never seen this movie. I know I saw part of it on cable once, but its gritty style that was a holdover from the 1970s turned me off. I think I was expecting something more like Beverly Hills Cop, which probably also had a sort of gritty style in parts, but at least also had palm trees.

I decided to finally rectify that on Sunday night after my wife and I finished Coming 2 America, when it came up after the movie as part of a list of movies other Amazon viewers had also watched. I know I owe you a post on Coming 2 America, but I don't know how to start that post, and hopefully writing the review will get me going.

It was already 10:30, which was my first problem. But this was no usual Sunday night. We had Monday off for Labour Day, so it seemed as good a time as any to push my bedtime. Not as much as I ended up pushing it, but at 96 minutes long, 48 Hrs. should have only taken me until just after midnight.

What actually happened was that I got really sleepy at about the 30-minute mark. I intended to just take a short nap -- I can usually get away with this type of thing -- but I slept for nearly an hour. In the past I might have given up and gone to bed at this point, but I've stopped splitting movies over two days if I can help it. It's something I used to do regularly and barely ever do anymore.

But buoyed by additional courage from not having to get up on Monday morning -- though who am I kidding, I'm awake by 7:30 no matter what day it is, or how late I stay up the night before -- I dug back into the movie, moving back the goal posts to an expected 1 a.m. completion.

The problem was, in that hour of time I was asleep, our AppleTV obviously timed out and turned itself off. The only real problem with that was it gave me a chance to get really disoriented.

Of course, at the time I thought there was a second problem. Even though Amazon Prime does what all the other streaming apps do, which is remember where you paused your movie, 48 Hrs. started playing from the beginning again when I got back into the app. That struck me as unusual but I obviously didn't ponder it any further.

Instead, I forwarded to about the 30-minute mark, remembering that that was about as much of the movie as I had watched. The content on screen was not familiar, though. So I thought maybe I was misremembering where I paused it.

I went back to earlier in the movie and started watching about the 10-minute mark, just to refresh myself. I had to have gotten this far. Didn't I? It still didn't look very familiar. Nick Nolte and Eddie Murphy were there, but they were doing things I hadn't remembered them doing.

Remember, I was very sleepy. 

After watching two or three chunks of this movie and continuing to scratch my head about what was happening, I finally figured it out. And pressing the back button to the menu confirmed the title of the film I was watching:

Another 48 Hrs.

Told you I was sleepy.

I might have gotten it sooner except that Murphy is wearing the exact same suit, and they repeat the bit where someone comes to get him out of a jail cell and he's listening to "Roxanne" by The Police on his walkman, singing along in that falsetto voice familiar to anyone who gobbled up Murphy's standup comedy like I did. 

But this whole disorienting experience took another 35 minutes or so in total. 

So now I was staring down 12:45 with another hour to go in the movie. I should have called it and just made this the rare example of the movie I finished off the next morning. But I wasn't really liking it and really wanted not to sit with it again.

Which brings us to my eventual aforementioned 1:45 bedtime.

Yeah, the instinct I had about 48 Hrs. way back in the 1980s was correct. It didn't do it for me. I don't think I laughed once, which is an impossible thing to imagine for Eddie Murphy in his prime. It was Murphy's first film -- the guy was barely 20 years old when they filmed it -- but that prime started early and lasted for a good decade, followed by 30 years of mediocrity after that, occasionally broken up by special performances.

But no, I didn't laugh, and in fact I cringed plenty. This movie really didn't age well. All sorts of people -- prostitutes, lesbians, Black people, Native Americans -- are referred to using casually despicable terminology, another holdover from the 1970s. This came with the territory, but when even Nolte busts out the n-word in referring to Murphy at one point -- to his face -- it was a bit too much for me if the movie also still wanted me to like his character. 

Another 48 Hrs. didn't come out until 1990, at which point I assume we were collectively a bit more politically correct. And I've already seen chunks of its first 30 minutes, so if I decide to watch it I guess I'll have a head start. 

But I'm not really eager to get back to the adventures of Reggie Freeman and Jack Cates, even if Cates does later apologize for his use of the n-word. The movie made me long for Prince Akeem, even if his own new set of adventures left something to be desired.

More on that tomorrow, I assume, if I ever figure out what I want to say.

A drive-in I hadn't been to -- just eight miles from my house

How does a cinephile -- particularly a cinephile who likes drive-ins -- neglect a nearby drive-in that's only eight miles from his house, for nearly eight years?

I'm not really sure, but that's what happened with Village Cinema's drive-in in Coburg. Google Maps shows that it's only 12.7 kilometers from my house, and in a separate transaction, Google shows me that 12.7 kilometers is 7.89 miles. 

To put that in perspective, my most recent run on Friday afternoon was 7.57 miles. A little extra push and I could run to this drive-in from my house, though somebody would have to pick me up to take me home.

I suspect having kids at the wrong age has something to do with it. As my kids are now 10 and 7, they have really only been a patient drive-in audience for a couple years now. In a bit of a funny twist, they went to this drive-in even before their old man did, with their aunt, who lives just a stone's throw from it. (And in fact, there's a run along a stream that I do when I've dropped them off at her house, and you can see the backs of the drive-in screens from the running path.) But my wife and I had never been, as apparently we have never prioritized this for a date night on the occasions her sister was watching the kids. It's taken nearly eight years for all the variables to finally align. 

The Coburg Drive-In has certainly been operating a lot longer than those eight years, or 7.54 years, if we're already talking about things that are seven and a fraction. Google again tells me that it opened in November of 1965, though it closed from 1984 to 1987 before being acquired by its current corporate parent, Village Cinemas. I'm kind of surprised it didn't spend more time closed given how drive-ins fell off the cultural landscape for a while there. (The year 1984 is an interesting benchmark in my personal drive-in history, as that was the year I attended my first drive-in on a visit to Colombia, South America -- and didn't go again until 2002 in Los Angeles.)

I almost missed my chance. There was word that they were planning to close it, a probably not unexpected development after the rise of streaming started to reduce the hunger for the theatrical experience in general. Then again, drive-ins are an entirely different type of experience, as COVID-19 has taught us, and now the place seems to be thriving. 

How thriving? When we were driving in, we were told we had to park two cars between each white metal pole with the concrete bases that littered the parking lot, which once held the speakers out of which the sound played. (Nowadays you tune your car to a certain FM frequency to get the sound.) This maximizing of available space was necessary to accommodate all the tickets they'd sold. We twice tried to park our car in such a way that two cars could squeeze in, but we never could manage it. What can you say, Fords are not known for their sleek design.

You can tell from the menus at the on-site diner that it's meant to evoke 50s nostalgia, though this little number at the entrance is your first indication of that endeavor:

The Dromana Drive-In, which we attended on New Year's Eve a couple years ago (as discussed in this post), has an X-Wing fighter above its entrance rather than this beauty. I guess vehicles perched atop the ticket booth -- be they real or fictional -- are a thing at Australian drive-ins. 

The actual experience was not really noteworthy in any way. Unlike most of the other drive-ins I've visited, this one is set up for only one movie rather than a double feature, which is just as well. My kids didn't get to bed until nearly 11 as it was, even with an 8:20 start to the movie, and I had no need to tack an extra couple hours on to that. 

I guess I should tell you, though the poster art has stolen my thunder, that we saw Raya and the Last Dragon, Disney's latest. It was enjoyable to watch without feeling particularly distinctive. I'm supposed to be reviewing it but haven't written anything yet. 

I did have some of the normal "why are people the way they are" annoyance about this drive-in experience. For example, there were still cars arriving and jockeying for viewing spots 20 minutes into the movie. Come on, at that point you've just missed the experience. Cut your losses and do something else with your evening. 

Of course, this probably wouldn't have annoyed me as much if I'd been inside the car. I chose to sit outside in a camping chair, at least for the first 45 minutes, at which point it was getting a bit nippy and my wife asked if she could close the car windows. This would cut off my access to the sound, so I moved inside the car with the rest of the family. Which turned out to be both a warmer and more sonically optimized way to view the movie. 

The diner burger I bought repeated on me a bit -- we actually had to crank down the windows on the way home to escape the toxicity of my burps -- but overall it was a really good experience that we expect to do again a lot sooner than 7.54 years from now. If 2021 has a fairly normal slate of high-end children's movies released, we could be back in just a couple months. 

In fact, Raya gave a slightly skewed indication of the current popularity of the drive-in experience. It seems clear it's a thing being embraced by families, not the groups of young people who may have once been the venue's bread and butter. There were far fewer cars for Chaos Walking, which started on the neighboring screen about 45 minutes after Raya, and fewer still for The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers on the third screen, though I watched that screen fondly as we drove out, The Two Towers being my favorite of those movies. Of course, one of those is a new release that's been poorly reviewed by critics (including me) and one of those is 20 years old, so they may not provide the perfect barometer of the health of the drive-in as an institution. 

Even the Raya ticket sales may be an example of artificially inflated enthusiasm, though, as this was a Disney film, in its opening weekend, on a three-day weekend, at the tail end of summer. You can't duplicate those specific conditions every weekend. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if this was the theater's biggest single night since the pandemic began.  

The internet tells me the drive-in is still for sale, but I guess that's not necessarily a bad thing. Being for sale is different than deciding to tear the screens down. It's a pretty big commitment to prevent a vacant lot from being able to function as a drive-in, as there would have to be a pretty compelling competing usage in order for a prospective buyer to remove the screens entirely. Hopefully even if it does close for a period, as it did in the mid-1980s, they'd keep the screens up and leave it just a buyer away from rejuvenating. 

So let's keep pumping out those Raya and the Last Dragons, which can carry Coburg through and allow the rest of us to see our occasional Lords of the Ringses. 

And if other families have kids like mine -- who declared the movie one of the best they'd ever seen, and also the night one of the best nights they'd ever had -- then the Coburg Drive-In should be with us for the foreseeable future. 

Tons of heart and the right kind of tokenism

Getting a bit of deja vu from last September, when my wife and I rewatched the first two Bill & Ted movies on a Friday and Saturday night in preparation for watching the long-delayed sequel on Sunday night. There's only one previous Coming to America movie, but this is sort of our similar Coming to America weekend, as we watched the original Friday night and are planning to watch the long-delayed sequel tonight.

I hadn't seen John Landis' 1988 movie since the 1990s, when I watched it two or three more times after I originally saw it in the theater. I started keeping track of rewatches in 2005, so it's possible I watched it in the first half of that decade, but unlikely. It had been awhile. 

I always felt my affection for this movie was something of a surprise, like the movie should have been bad but somehow ended up being good. I guess Eddie Murphy was already making misfires by the late 1980s, though Harlem Nights (which I still haven't seen) was not until the following year, so it wouldn't have been biasing me if I'd come into America with low expectations. Maybe the chronology of events was that I didn't think Coming to America was anything special on my first viewing, but subsequently came to really embrace it. I can't remember at this point and it really doesn't matter.

What does matter was how right I was in my eventual assessment of the film.

Coming to America holds up like a lot of movies from 1988 surely don't. On a purely technical level, there may still be no finer example of makeup work in the history of cinema than the one by Rick Baker here, to allow Eddie Murphy and Arsenio Hall to disappear into the roles of secondary characters in a way that completes what they started with their accent work. There may be equally fine examples, but none finer.

But I'm not referring to the look of Coming to America when I say that it holds up. (Because, let's face it, there's no way for 1980s fashion to really hold up.) It's the feel. And that feel is sooo gooood.

When the credits rolled, I shouted out "So much heart!" My wife agreed, but not as enthusiastically as I'd hoped. Which is okay, because not everyone can be enthusiastic enough to shout out their compliments at the end of a movie.

The balance this movie gets so right is between the delightful naivete of Prince Akeem (Murphy) and the rough edges of the world around him. There are plenty of venal characters in this movie and people who are just plain jerks, but the nifty trick of David Sheffield and Barry W. Blaustein's script is that the characters dropping f-bombs and acting in their own self interest do not diminish the film's core heart in the slightest. In fact, they serve as reminders of the essential purity of Akeem and the way you have to use optimism and a good nature to overcome the ways the world tries to swallow you. It's an essential proving ground for Akeem as he tries to convince himself he would make a good king.

We had for a time considered showing our kids Coming to America, maybe thinking they could watching Coming 2 America with us, but I told my wife (who suggested the idea) that there was some content in this movie that was not appropriate for them. The thing I remembered most was the scene of the bare-breasted members of Akeem's court washing him in his royal bath and telling him "The royal penis is clean." But for a moment I convinced myself that this mention of his royal penis was about as bad as it gets in terms of language.

Uh uh. There are characters dropping profanities left and right in this film, consistent with a pre-Giuliani and pre-Disney version of New York whose subways were still overrun with graffiti and whose streets still had a variety of tough characters walking them. Akeem may be naive but the film isn't, and I love that about it. I seriously doubt Coming 2 America has been made with the same liberal use of language -- today, unfortunately, we're a lot more likely to put a family friendly character like Akeem in a family friendly movie. But I hope the sequel holds on to some of the laugh-out-loud gruffness of the original. I did laugh out loud plenty of times, and pretty much any time Akeem's landlord, played by Frankie Faison, opens his mouth. "Yeah, you'll love my apartment," he says upon preparing to trade with Akeem and Semmi. "It's a real shithole."

My wife thought that John Amos' character, Cleo McDowell, was portrayed as too interested in enriching himself at the expense of his daughter's happiness. But I feel like this is another area where the film is honest while still retaining its heart. He's involved in a shady business practice to essentially steal every one of the ideas and working practices of McDonald's, to confuse people into thinking he's running an actual McDonald's, so you know he's got a bottom line profit mentality. The thing is, this is an actual thing in New York, where I saw businesses in the Bronx called Kennedy Fried Chicken and Kansas Fried Chicken, both of which were designed to trick customers into thinking they were eating at a national restaurant chain. 

Besides, McDowell gives up his chance at a million dollars -- then at two million -- when the Zamunda king (James Earl Jones) offers to buy his daughter out of Prince Akeem's life. That may be a bit of an exaggeration in the opposite direction, but it firmly convinces us that this is a good man at heart. Maybe my wife is right that they'd hedge their bets on McDowell more from the start in a movie made today, but if true that may be something to mourn rather than celebrate. I think the portrayal of his character in Coming to America is just right.

What may be even better about the movie than its heart is in the way it breaks ground as a trailblazer for representation. This is another thing I wouldn't have thought to credit Coming to America with until I saw it again. 

Simply put, this is a movie starring almost exclusively Black people. Without Eddie Murphy as the star, it surely would never have crossed over to a mainstream audience, but it mightn't have crossed over even with him as the star, so it represented a real risk for Paramount at the time. (And in a side note, I noticed that the camera travels three-dimensionally through the Paramount logo at the start of the film and into the rolling terrain of Zamunda -- I didn't think they'd started doing that trick until more recently.)

The risk may not have been making the movie at all, since it's a winning idea, but making it the way they made it. A skittish studio worried about its bottom line would have, in most scenarios, found a way to include more white characters. I'm not sure how you do that while keeping the same general contours of this story -- interracial romance would have been a far greater risk at the time -- but they would have tried.

Instead, the white characters here are total tokens. The largest white role is played by comedian Louie Anderson as a clerk at McDowell's, and he has no more than seven or eight lines in total. Then there are some really funny cameos by white performers -- like the woman at the Western Union who reads Semmi's telegram to King Jaffe Joffer with that priceless New York accent dripping with sarcasm -- but really, not much else in terms of white skin on screen at all. My wife read that Paramount had actually forced them to add Anderson into the cast, so there could be at least one white character who appears in the whole movie, but that's hardly something to get up in arms about considering how little he actually does. 

This is basically a straightforward fish-out-of-water romantic comedy with just the races reversed. Instead of a token Black best friend, there's a token white cash register operator at a McDowell's restaurant. In fact, the token white character has considerably less to do than a token Black character would have, maybe even back then, though Black tokenism was pretty awful and paltry right at the start. 

In fact, I'm thinking of another favorite romantic comedy I've recently revisited from the 1980s with a very similar plot, which is Splash. In both films a fish-out-of-water (literal in that case) character comes to New York in search of a romantic partner, though Madison has already identified hers in Splash. Both main characters are inordinately trusting, good-natured and innocent, and threaten to have those traits squashed by what New York does to them. (Though the New York in Splash is a considerably more optimistic place; it's the scientific community that is the villain there.) Both characters also have to initially deceive their love interests. 

The big difference between the two? Splash is a slam dunk from a studio's perspective, filled with character types who historically reward financial investment. Coming to America had to make Paramount at least a little bit squeamish -- what if white audiences just don't want to see it? -- but they went ahead anyway with very little in the way of support from white characters. Even with Murphy as a proven box office draw, this was the first time he was appearing in a film with almost exclusively Black characters. In fact, he'd been pretty much the only Black character in films like Beverly Hills Cop and The Golden Child.

Somehow, Landis et al had their finger on the pulse of a world 33 years in the future when they made Coming to America. That's not to say everything reads perfectly, but even the moments I thought might reveal their era-appropriate ignorance did not. In playing devil's advocate and mentioning some scenes that she thought did not work so well, my wife mentioned the "bad dating candidate" montage when Akeem and Semmi are at a bar, hoping to find Akeem's future queen. I was waiting for the moment when Hall appeared in drag, thinking that it would be a blatantly transphobic moment in a way that was extremely common back then. I was glad to see that the character is not definitively coded as trans, or as being a man in drag. Hall plays the character, but the character could just as easily be a very large woman who threatens to be too much for Akeem as she says she'd "tear him apart."

I could probably go on, but I'll save some of my thoughts as a point of contrast for when I watch and inevitably write about Coming 2 America.