All's Well That Ends Welles: Chimes at Midnight and The Immortal Story

This is my fourth bi-monthly installment of a series watching the films of Orson Welles that I haven't yet seen.

August represented my second twofer in this series, as I needed to watch slightly more than one film per month to get through the remaining Welles films I hadn't seen. However, it also forced me to stretch my definition of "feature film," which gets at a larger issue with the remaining "filmed art," for want of a better phrase, that I had to parse through when I first laid the groundwork for this series.

The "Orson Welles filmography" Wikipedia page contains a number of items that I do not, strictly speaking, consider to be films, for length or other reasons. Some I excluded, but some, just as randomly, I included. My second film in August, The Immortal Story, fits into the latter category. 

The Immortal Story is a 58-minute "movie." Is that a feature? By some definitions, yes. By my own personal definitions of silent films made a hundred years ago, yes. By the standards of a film released in 1968, when standard feature length was much more firmly established? Eh.

Part of the problem with me watching The Immortal Story was that I decided not to watch Journey Into Fear, a 68-minute film released in 1943. However, putting myself back into the mindset of myself nine months ago, I believe I decided to exclude this not based on length, but based on the fact that Welles is only an uncredited director on this film. The credited director is a man named Norman Foster, who I have not otherwise heard of.

In any case, I have now watched The Immortal Story so I guess I've ruled on its worthiness to be considered a feature film, and since we've started out talking about its classification, let's get into it first, even though it was the film I watched second. (Although I actually watched both of my Welles features on Sunday as a kind of day-night doubleheader, to use the baseball terminology.)

Before we get to it, though, I'll mention one annoyance related to it that caused me to consider excluding it from this series on that basis alone. The film is available for free on YouTube, but the version that's up there is compromised. You start watching it, and after about a minute, the screen freezes. The clock is still running, but the image doesn't move. When it does resume about two minutes later, two minutes of the story has been missed. If this were the only time it happened, I probably would have just pressed onward, but it happens again periodically throughout the running time, making the viewing impossible. 

Instead of walking away from it entirely, I decided to check on iTunes to see if it was rentable. It was. So I went ahead and rented a 58-minute "movie" for $3.99. With no small amount of grumbling.

The Immortal Story is most certainly not something that could be stretched out to feature length. It's basically sort of a parable, and if there's any stretching, it's to get it to nearly an hour at all.

It concerns a rich old man living in China (Welles, naturally) whose dying wish is to stage a story that has been told by sailors for generations. The story is about a penniless sailor being selected from the streets and brought back to a mansion where he is fed and led into the bedroom where a beautiful woman sits ready for him -- the mansion owner's wife, who is set to be impregnated by the sailor. The rich man (Mr. Clay) becomes obsessed with the idea that although the story is likely apocryphal, he wants it to become some sailor's reality, so when he tells the story, it will be true.

The film has some interesting thoughts about the storytelling tradition and about the willingness of various participants to fulfill the roles that are proscribed for them. Both the sailor Mr. Clay's bookkeeper conscripts (played by Norman Eshley) and the woman Clay hires (played by French treasure Jeanne Moreau) are able to intuit what Clay is doing -- it's a very well-known story I guess -- and balk at the requirements of them in intriguing ways. The film is a bit of a trifle I suppose, but it does take itself quite seriously, especially in comparison to Welles' most recent previous film, which I'm about to discuss in a moment. 

Technically, I noticed a few Welles touches. For example, when we are first introduced to Clay sitting in a restaurant, he is reflected multiples times through the mirror that's next to his face, like the climactic shot of Kane in Citizen Kane. And of course the character Welles plays is a variation on the others he had played, which were somewhat dictated by his increasing girth -- though whether that is a technical detail or not is hard to say.

Let's move on to Chimes at Midnight.

This was my first cinematic introduction to Falstaff, played by Welles (naturally), who is a literary figure much discussed and referenced, but who has generally evaded me to this point in my life. As you would probably know (because I am very late in coming to this information myself), Falstaff was a character who appeared in a number of Shakespeare's histories -- a big, larger than life figure who enjoyed his alcohol (referred to in the text continually as "sack") and his skirt chasing, and was a close confidant of Prince Hal, a.k.a. Henry V in his younger years. He has the naughtiness and the verbal dexterity of characters in Shakespeare's comedies, and indeed, the plays he appeared in resembled his comedies at least for the parts involving Falstaff.

Welles has said it was his life's ambition to play Falstaff, to the point that one almost wonders if his excessive indulgences in food and drink were designed to prepare his own body for the role. The interesting trick he pulls off here is to combine the appearances of Falstaff in five Shakespeare plays and give them a single narrative cohesion within one story. It's something Welles first did on stage before making this filmed version of it, and even though I'm a bit of a rusty Shakespeare scholar, it seems to be a phenomenally successful experiment. Welles himself said this was his greatest cinematic accomplishment, which is pretty crazy coming from the guy who directed Citizen Kane.

I certainly wouldn't go that far, but this did immediately become my second favorite film I've watched in this series. That's not quite the compliment that it seems, given that many of the Welles films I had not yet seen had remained unseen by me for a reason. But there have only been one or two that didn't work for me on some level, so that does strengthen Chimes' accomplishment.

I'm not going to delve too much into the story, but I can give you a general overview. It involves the period of time when the young Henry V had to fight off a claim to the throne by a man his own age, also named Henry, who represented what many believed to be the rightful king of England, who was instead languishing away in prison. Henry IV, Prince Hal's father, was considered to be a usurper -- in part because of the small detail that he had the previous king killed (not checking my facts on this but I believe that's accurate) -- and in order to defend his father's right to the throne, Hal had to set aside his carousing ways and take up arms, as did his drinking buddy John Falstaff. As Hal grows into a more serious person, set to eventually become king himself, he outgrows Falstaff, to the latter's great disappointment.

I'm a big fan of Shakespeare, but I have actually never read any of the histories. I stuck to the comedies and tragedies that were assigned to me in two different college courses. I've seen a couple filmed versions of Henry V and Richard III, but never actually read the texts myself. My point in telling you this is that I could discern nothing about Chimes at Midnight that did not seem to read as one continuous narrative from one text, and I consider that to be incredibly impressive. If I'd been more familiar with these five texts, I might have easier seen the seams, and they might have distracted me. But Welles loved his Shakespeare and was certainly equal to the tasking of assembling this coherent homage to the Bard's work. 

Technically, this is one of Welles' better realized efforts. The black and white cinematography (by Edmond Richard) is really great, and I was particularly impressed by the editing. The big battle scene at the film's center has a really impressive montage quality, with quick snippets of swords clashing and bodies in distress creating quite the portrait of the chaos of battle. It may have been the highlight of the film for me, even with Welles' delicious performance of Falstaff, and the typically high-level contributions from the likes of Sir John Gielgud as Henry IV. 

I've had a vast preference for Shakespeare's tragedies over his comedies, meaning I was really surprised to enjoy the scenes of the carousing of Falstaff and Hal as much as I did. I think one of the things that enhanced my enjoyment was my decision to turn on the subtitles, which I now think I'm going to make a regular habit when I watch Shakespeare. It's not that I couldn't have followed what was going on, but having the text on screen allowed me to catch the great plays on words that were Shakespeare's (and Falstaff's) bread and butter. Given how important word choices are for Shakespeare, and how the cleverness of any particular unfamiliar turn of phrase might get lost if you are not laying eyes on it, I don't think it's any sign of failure that I benefitted from the subtitles. Rather I view it as an enhancement of something I suspect I should have enjoyed quite a bit anyway.

Okay, just two more movies in this series, F for Fake in October and The Other Side of the Wind in December. 

Favorite words, favorite actresses

When you can't watch the third episode of The Stand because your AppleTV remote is broken, and when you can't watch An American Pickle because your wife walks into the room two minutes in and requests to save it for a time you can both watch it together, why not watch a film whose title is one of your favorite words, especially if it stars one of your favorite actresses?

If this poster were what I'd seen when scrolling through the Netflix options, it might have been clearer sooner that Florence Pugh was the star of Malevolent. It had already passed the test of having a short running time of only 88 minutes, but I clicked into the details to differentiate it from other contenders that were about the same length. Seeing that Pugh was the star did that plenty well.

(Despite the short running time and despite the presence of Pugh, I still fell asleep early on after my third white russian of the evening, a Tuesday night lockdown treat because I was taking Wednesday off for my son's 11th birthday. I didn't wake up from that "nap" until after 12:30, but still doggedly finished it up, afforded the luxury by not having to work the next day.)

You may recall that Pugh was one of my breakout discoveries of 2019, when I named her among "three who had a good year" in my year-end wrap-up post for her performances in Fighting With My Family, Midsommar and Little Women. After that diverse trio of roles, I knew there was nothing she couldn't do.

But then I had to wait for my next dose, as the delay of the release of Black Widow meant that Pugh followed up her dynamite 2019 with zero new releases in 2020. Black Widow took another half-year into 2021 to finally come out, and when it did, it was a disappointment -- both the movie in general and its use of Pugh.

So when I saw Pugh's name on Malevolent, there was a funny surge of urgency as I clicked on the play button. I want as much Pugh as I can get.

She did not disappoint here. I would not say this is a superior film -- I gave it a 3 out of 5 stars on Letterboxd -- but as you might expect, Pugh is a pro. She doesn't exceed the requirements of a film like this, but as was the case in her three films of 2019, she has a keen idea of the emotions each scene dictates. If you've got the kind of craft Pugh has, you elevate everything you are in. (To be fair, the film gave me chills a number of times, and I really liked its score. It also has a few creepy gestures toward the malevolence of its title. The idea of charlatan ghost hunters finding themselves involved in a real haunting has been done before, lots of times, but Malevolent managed to distinguish itself enough to warrant a recommendation.)

And regarding that malevolence, that brings me to the other "favorite" in the title of this post. I love the word "malevolent," and I use it in a fair amount of my reviews of films involving evil in some way, shape or form. Doing a search of that word in my reviews stored on my computer, I found it appearing in ten different reviews -- including, quite interestingly, Lady Macbeth, which is the first place I ever saw Pugh. (And in my review for the Macbeth proper starring Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard, so I guess the word describes the Macbeths pretty well.) I suspect the word actually appears in more reviews than that, but some of them are stored on my work computer.

If we were going for least favorites, I don't know, maybe a movie called Plethora, starring Vicky Krieps? (I won't go into why I don't like either of these at the moment ... sometimes I like to leave you wondering. Though this post would give you a clue on the latter.)

Knowing Noir: Out of the Past

This is the eighth in my 2021 series watching classic film noirs, one per month.

I don't know if I've stopped paying attention at the crucial moment of every film noir I've ever seen, or if the films really are plotted too complexly for my little brain to follow, but I've finally seen a prototypical film noir where I actually knew what was going on. 

Now, I've seen a number of noirs for this series that I don't consider prototypical noirs, where the story was no problem. But as soon as one person starts double-crossing another person who's already double-crossing another person, my brain sort of shuts off.

That's how Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past was structured, but you know what? I could follow it. I could figure it out. I could stay oriented within the story. 

Maybe there's hope for me after all.

Or maybe there's hope for film noir.

If I had to surmise why this is, I'd suggest it might have something to do with the presence of familiar faces. Sure, Humphrey Bogart is a familiar face, and there have been similarly familiar faces in other films I've seen. But the two male co-stars of this 1947 film, Robert Mitchum and Kirk Douglas, were both still working well into my career as a cinephile. Heck, Douglas only just died last year. So in some real ways they feel like my stars, not hand-me-downs from a previous generation, and I guess that makes them somehow more relatable. 

So with a little bit of investment in the stars, and a little bit of kindness from screenwriter Daniel Mainwaring (adapting his own novel Build My Gallows High), I finally got everything I want from noir in one tidy, 97-minute package: star wattage, clear and present noir tropes, and a story that didn't make my head ache.

There's definitely some narrative finesse going on here, but I do think this story is also less complicated than my shining example of noir narrative confusion, that being The Big Sleep. Because I'm accustomed to giving you a little plot synopsis here, let's get on with that.

Mitchum's character (Jeff Bailey, later Jeff Markam) is living an idyllic life in small-town California outside of Lake Tahoe when his old life catches up with him. (In fact, I think David Cronenberg's A History of Violence must have drawn some inspiration from this.) He's involved in a chaste romance with a local woman (Virginia Huston) and runs a local service station. But what he used to do was work as a private investigator, and he took a job tracking the girlfriend of a crime boss (Douglas) from New York to Mexico. She fled after shooting him and taking off with $40,000 of his money (or so he tells Jeff), and Jeff has accepted the contract to bring her back. Only, when he finds the woman, Kathie Moffat (Jane Greer), he falls for her, and they devise plans for a new life together.

That of course goes awry, which we know for several reasons, one of which is that Jeff is telling this story to his current girlfriend (Ann by name) in flashback as he goes to meet Whit Sterling (Douglas) a second time, years after the original story. This can't end well for Jeff.

The other reason we know it went awry is that Kathie Moffat is pretty much the femme fatale to end all femme fatales. Her powers of seduction over Jeff and over the audience are clear. During the section of the film set in Acapulco, I conveniently forgot that she was wanted for two serious crimes (attempted murder and theft) and wondered if Out of the Past was not going to turn out more like a sweeping romance than a film noir. See, that's the thing about a good femme fatale -- you are powerless to resist her suggestions because she's just so enchanting. And so was I enchanted by Greer's Kathie, I suppose.

I didn't take a lot of notes on Out of the Past but I did take down one choice bit of dialogue that Jeff uses to describe Ann, during one of the moments when her spell on him is broken. He says to her "You're like a leaf floating from one gutter to another," which is kind of a perfect description -- it not only encapsulates her beauty (I think we think of a leaf as something beautiful) but also her changeability, her willingness to sell out one side to the other depending on what is in her best interests. But wherever she lands, it's a gutter. 

The film has a number of twists and turns from there that I don't need to get into here. But, as I said previously, I was able to follow them, and that was just a dynamite feeling. 

I liked the cast quite a bit beyond Mitchum, Douglas and Greer, but since I've already spent a few words on her, I owe them the same. There's an interesting switcheroo here between those two, in my experience of them as performers. Douglas is usually the dashing hero -- think Spartacus -- while Mitchum is the creepy figure of menace -- think Night of the Hunter. Here they're reversed, and they both do the thing the other one is known for quite well. Of course, both of those films were still distant on the horizon at this point. It's kind of hard to believe that Douglas wouldn't make Spartacus for another 13 years, as I think of him as being fully in his prime on that film, while he's already supposed to be a person of power and influence here. It's kind of hard to believe he's only 31 here and would be 44 in Spartacus.

The thing I liked about Mitchum is that, although you can rely on him for some quippy retorts, he's not the type of remote, inaccessible figure that I find most noir heroes to be. He shows some soul here, some moments of world weary frailty, not just sneer and snark. 

Technically speaking, Out of the Past makes for an interesting noir entry because while it does hew closely to noir tropes, it doesn't spend much time at all in urban environments. There are scenes in both New York and San Francisco, but rural Mexican and Lake Tahoe adjacent locations are more the norm. However, Tourneur cleverly uses the noir trope of shadows on characters' faces quite effectively, only he uses more rustic shadow-throwing shapes when the nearest venetian blinds are hundreds of miles away. One memorable scene between Jeff and Ann occurs in the woods, with the moon throwing the shadows of tree branches on their faces.

In fact, the use of lighting is extremely compelling overall in this film. I can think of a number of shots where the light falls on a character's face in just such a way, illuminating one of the two speakers while throwing the other in the dark. Nicholas Musuraca's cinematography is just one of this film's exceptional technical elements.

I think I could go on with Out of the Past, but I also think this is a good place to stop.

However, I will say that noir never fails to be consummately noir. Even though I mostly followed it, I did read the plot synopsis on Wikipedia afterward, just in case. 

Four more installments of this series, and still plenty of choices left, so we'll see where I go from here in September.

MIFF Closing Night: Duplass double

There weren't actually two films at this year's Melbourne International Film Festival featuring a Duplass brother, Jay or Mark, in front of or behind the camera. If a film festival always benefits from one Duplass movie, two can only be better, right?

But I did follow up the MIFF Closing Night film, Language Lessons, which featured a Duplass in front of the camera, with a Duplass favorite I'd seen only once, Cyrus, which has both of them behind the camera.

There's something a little special about a Closing Night film -- that phrase doesn't look right either lower or upper case -- that distinguishes it from the others. My 12th and final film of this year's MIFF only became available at 7 p.m. on Saturday night, and only for something like an eight-hour period, differentiating it from the other streaming films, which were available for the duration. (With the exception of the Opening Night film, CODA, which I did not see, which was only available for an eight-hour window that night.)

So in order to make it a little more special, my wife and I ordered Mexican from our favorite local Mexican restaurant, margaritas included. 

When we planned that food option we didn't realize how appropriate it would be. Language Lessons, a two-hander starring Mark Duplass and Natalie Morales (who is also director), has to do with an American living in Oakland trying to brush up on his Spanish via video chat Spanish lessons with a woman living in Costa Rica. I suppose if she had been in Mexico that would have been a better match, but the language is shared between the two locations and that's good enough for me. 

Two other reasons the film was an appropriate way to finish this year's MIFF:

1. It was yet another film where the language of the film proved to be a surprise. Since I knew it was starring Mark Duplass, I could only assume that the film would be in English. As it turns out, at least half of the dialogue is in Spanish, as the two characters try to speak Spanish as much as possible in keeping with Duplass' character's intended immersion in the language. So you could say it was yet another film that I thought would be in English that ended up being primarily in another language. At least in this case I mostly understood the language due to my own immersion in the culture of a city where it is widely spoken (Los Angeles), and half of it was being spoken by a guy where it was not his first language, as I myself would speak it if I tried. (But much better than I could speak it, as I can understand Spanish better than I can produce the words spontaneously in conversation.)

2. It was a film made during the pandemic, about two people talking to each other over screens. Duplass himself gave us that history with a little video intro, in which he bemoaned that he couldn't be there in person (that would have been fun) but that it was thematically appropriate that his greeting to us would have to be in this format. Indeed, seeing this movie in a cinema would probably be the weirder thing, given how it was created and what we've been through the past 18 months, as exemplified by this very festival, which had to scuttle its theatrical screenings in favor of online only. 

Really liked the film. When I realized it was another film that was going to unfurl over Zoom, I got a little wary, as I'd already seen plenty of those in recent years as a kind of narrative stunt, even before the pandemic made it a somewhat necessary fallback option. But it's an extremely effective use of the format, not for reasons of "cleverness," but to show the sort of intimacy that can develop between two people through a computer screen.

And it's not that sort of "intimacy" either. Duplass' character is gay, which ruled out that sort of shipping from the start. In fact, we are just shipping for the friendship, which initially thrives on its obvious compatibility, and the fact that they both can be there for the other in difficult times. Of course there are threats to that -- the income inequality between the two being one -- otherwise there would be no conflict. But it ends up being one of those films with real heart and a real perceptiveness about human beings. Kind of like every other film Mark Duplass has ever been involved in.

I considered another Duplass two-hander that I haven't seen, Blue Jay, as the second half of my double feature when I couldn't scare up Cyrus in any of the obvious locations. But then I looked in a non-obvious location, and you know what? Cyrus is streaming on Disney+. That service just keeps on surprising me with its catalogue.

Cyrus was a favorite of mine in 2010 when it finished in my top ten of the year at #9. For reasons I can't really fathom, I've never gotten back to it for a second viewing. So when I decided a Duplass movie would be a good way to keep the evening's vibe going, this one immediately jumped to mind.

Still love it. The cast is great of course -- John C. Reilly, Marisa Tomei, Jonah Hill, Catherine Keener -- but I had worried that Hill's role in the movie might seem too over-the-top to me today. Hardly. There's a touch of post-Step Brothers in the relationship between Reilly and Hill, but it's like the Duplass version of Step Brothers, where everything is life-sized and the ways the characters sabotage each other are subtle. Plus, like all Duplass movies, tons of heart in the end.

Okay, that's a wrap on MIFF 69. Maybe things will be back to "normal" with MIFF 70 a year from now.  

MIFF: Doubling down on Iran

If the theme of this year's MIFF has been lining up movies that I thought were in English but actually were not -- and I just realized that makes me sound like a bit of a philistine -- then what about a movie I thought was foreign but actually wasn't, just to mix things up?

My second-to-last film of this year's festival, and the second film chosen by my wife, was The Night, also the second Iranian film of this year's festival for me. Which, incidentally, makes it possibly the first time at MIFF I have ever seen two films from the same country that wasn't either the U.S. or Australia. 

But exactly how Iranian is this movie, actually?

To be sure, the principal cast is primarily Iranian, Farsi is the language most commonly spoken, and the director (Kourosh Ahari) is also from Iran. 

But in the first scene of the movie, at a dinner party featuring three Iranian couples, I commented to my wife that exactly one of the characters was speaking primarily in English, and how weird that was, since the rest of the conversation was conducted in Farsi. As the scene went on, the other characters sprinkled in some English, until I realized the movie was actually set in the U.S. Although it's mostly a two-hander between actors Shahab Hosseini (the star of Asghar Farhadi's The Salesman, which I saw at MIFF in 2016) and Niousha Noor, the story introduces a hotel concierge and a police officer who are both American, and have probably the third and fourth largest speaking roles in the film.

This may be the first film I've seen with a primarily Iranian creative team that was filmed in the United States. IMDB lists Los Angeles as the shooting location. While on the one hand I find it kind of dispiriting that these people have all had to leave their home country, I guess if it allows them to make movies they might not otherwise be able to make, hopefully they consider it a change for the better.

On second thought, this description also fits Ana Lily Amirpour's A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night. And like that really exceptional film, this is a horror, about a husband and wife hiding secrets from each other who are tortured by apparitions and inexplicable occurrences during an endless night at a hotel. It's a lot more distinctive than that basic description makes it sound.

The Night was really great for its first 40 minutes or so, at which point it starts to lose a little focus, and at which point it starts to be clear that there are going to be number of red herrings in terms of the film's themes, talismans and imagery. "Red herrings" is the kind way to put it; "loose ends" is the more critical appraisal, from a screenwriting perspective. Simply put, some of this stuff just goes nowhere.

But the mood it creates is creepy throughout, and the number of discrete instances of getting chills was off the charts for me. I wish it had come together a bit better, which would have led me to rate it higher, but as it is, it's still well worth watching.

Can you tell I'm running out of a bit of steam here?

Well never fear, it's MIFF closing night tomorrow night. Or really, in about an hour's time, given the lateness of the hour at which I'm writing this. Tune in tomorrow for my final MIFF post of 2021. 

MIFF: Two more foreign films, neither starring Jason Bateman

I can't overstate the number of films I've watched at MIFF this year that I assumed were American/English language films that totally were not.

Okay, I guess it's only three. Still, that's a lot.

The latest came Thursday night, and it's the poster you're seeing here.

I had every reason to assume Riders of Justice was in English. Mads Mikkelsen probably does more English language roles than Danish roles these days, and besides, Jason Bateman can't speak Danish, can he?

Jason Bateman? Where did I get that?

Well, look at this poster and judge for yourself:

If that's not Jason Bateman riding shotgun, I don't know who it is. 

Okay, I do know who because I have IMDB. It's Nikolaj Lie Kaas, and he's really good in the movie. But he's Jason Bateman if I've ever seen Jason Bateman.

Of course, if this poster were what I'd seen, I would have known this were not the kooky ensemble revenge comedy I thought it was. (It's sort of that, but it's a kooky Danish ensemble revenge comedy.) That title -- Retfargegheandends (pause for breath) Rytereareyrre -- kind of gives it away. But it was seeing Kaas' picture in the MIFF materials that led me to my incorrect assumption.

Bateman or no, the movie was good. I don't think it totally sticks the landing, but before that, it's another masterful mixture of tones from a Danish director. That's something director Thomas Vinterberg already does well, and as it turns out, so can Anders Thomas Jensen. I could give you some further information about the film here, or I could point you to my review. The latter's easier so I'll just do that.

I had intended to review the movie I watched Wednesday night, Night of the Kings from the Ivory Coast, to lend more diversity to the slate of international films I watched at MIFF this year. In fact, I'm not sure if I've ever watched a film shot on the African continent at MIFF, and Night of the Kings gave me a good opportunity to rectify that. (I mean, I still watched it, even though I didn't review it. That begs the age-old question: "If you watch a movie but don't review it, does it make a sound?")

Alas, I had a rarity for me when it came to writing that review: writer's block. If I'd really sat down and set my mind to it, I'm sure I would have come up with something -- I always do. But I got caught up in the workday on Thursday (despite having technical problems that were making productivity almost impossible), and the two sentences I'd written never turned into anything more. By the time I missed posting it on Thursday, I allowed Riders of Justice to become a candidate for my last MIFF review of 2021, and as it turns out, I found it easier to churn out something passable about that film last night before I went to bed.

Part of the issue was that I resisted Night of the Kings a bit. It had a pretty intriguing setup, as the film is set in a notorious Ivory Coast prison where the inmates run the place. A new inmate arrives and per tradition, he is named storyteller, meaning he has to tell the inmates a story. The quiet part that doesn't get said out loud is that after he finishes this story, he's to be executed. Another prisoner (played by Denis Levant!) lets the cat out of the bag, so our storyteller keeps talking all night -- I guess if he survives the night, like Scheherazade before him, he will escape his fate.

There's some good gritty realism here, but also some parts that I just didn't really believe, like the fact that 60 prisoners would hang on this man's every word for a whole night. The story he's telling is in way too broad strokes to go on for 12 hours, or however long -- in order to tell a story like that, he'd need to recite the characters' most mundane dialogue, which would test everyone's patience long before then. We also don't learn much about any of the characters, and I didn't find the story he was telling very compelling either.

Just as well I didn't review it. To not love my first MIFF film set in Africa kind of undid the benefit of watching it in the first place. It's probably a good thing that my attempt at virtue signalling backfired, because that shouldn't be something we critics have to do ... though to suggest we might be exempt from it is pretty naive as well.

Okay, just two more MIFF movies for 2021. I'll either single them each out in their own post or combine them into one. I'm sure the suspense is killing you.

MIFF: Behind on my writing, not my viewing

The reason most people write a blog, I imagine, is that they have thoughts about a certain topic or life in general that simply must flow out through their fingers and spill out onto their keyboard. To put it another way: the reason to write a blog is because you want to write it.

But sometimes you set expectations for your readers, like you are going to regularly update them on your viewings from a film festival, and when it comes time to produce those missives, you just aren't feeling it.

Which is why I've now watched four more MIFF movies that I haven't told you about yet, including a double feature last night.

It's really okay, I know this. You'll read what I choose to write here, or not, depending on how busy you are that day, and whether it seems to be about something you're interested in. Most likely you won't have heard of any of these four movies, so your interest will be academic anyway, or just because you like me.

Still, I think it's worth catching you up on what I've been watching, even if it comes with no cute stories or overarching themes. (There would have been an overarching theme to the post I was going to write on Sunday, but now it's Wednesday.)

Saturday night brought the Chilean film associated with the poster you see above, La Veronica, which was my wife's choice, not mine. So I have her to thank for my favorite of the eight movies I've seen at this year's MIFF so far, if you count Zola on Friday night as a "MIFF movie," which it technically isn't. (The theatrical screening got cancelled so I rented it from U.S. iTunes on the same night we were scheduled to see it.)

It's a movie about a social media influencer and wife of a soccer star who is trying to get enough Instagram followers to become the face of a cosmetics company. She's also being investigated for the death of her infant daughter some ten years earlier. The nifty trick about this one is actress Mariana Di Girolamo is in the center of the frame for every single shot of the entire film, which run back to back with her in different settings, with different people, under different emotional circumstances. It's an incredibly engrossing look at the solipsism of social media but also how a person can be cracking up under that glossy surface, and the central performance is simply astonishing -- especially as it relies on unbroken takes that sometimes run for three or four minutes at a time. You can read my full review here. 

Sunday night was The Nowhere Inn, a film that was on my radar due to my love for Portlandia alum Carrie Brownstein. (She's also in Sleater-Kinney but I have no relationship with that band.) In this film, Brownstein, playing a fictionalised version of herself, is trying to make a rock documentary about a fictionalised version of St. Vincent, nee Annie Clark, whose music was also unfamiliar to me. (But I am more likely to check out St. Vincent's music than Sleater-Kinney's.) In this movie as probably also in real life, Brownstein and Clark are best friends -- which is clearly a relationship that's going to be tested when Brownstein finds the footage of the off-stage St. Vincent too boring for a rock documentary. She suggests "enhancements" to Clark's real-world persona to more closely approximate her savage stage persona, and well, things predictably devolve from there.

In fact, the form itself devolves as this goes from a rock mockumentary to something far more existential and experimental. But I'm repeating my review now, so I should probably just point you to that to read for yourself. Anyway, this was another big win for me.

The most recent two are films I have not reviewed yet, and may not, considering that I only plan to write two more reviews at most, and have films to watch tonight, tomorrow night, Friday night and Saturday night. (Though only the next two will be contenders to be reviewed, since I don't post reviews on the weekend.)

Since I am off work today (hence a chance to catch up on my writing), I scheduled two movies for last night. I don't usually watch two movies in a single night anymore -- especially when I'm drinking beers -- but the first being only 80 minutes made it a bit easier. Making it a bit harder, especially with the beers, was that both films were in another language. Before starting to watch, I didn't consciously realize either was. 

The first was We are the Thousand, an Italian documentary featuring the Foo Fighters. You may already be familiar with this story from its viral video six years ago, but I was not. An organizer in Cesena, Italy decided to get one thousand musicians together -- singers, drummers, guitarists and bass guitarists -- to orchestrate a simultaneous playing of the Foo Fighter song "Learn to Fly," in order to record a video and use it as a plea to get the band to play in Cesena. The outcome of the seemingly impossible task -- requiring untold amounts of perfect timing and other coordination -- was a thrilling viral video, one that obviously came to Dave Grohl's attention. And because Dave Grohl is a good guy (and savvy enough to avoid negative publicity), he and his fellow Foos did indeed come to play a local concert.

The documentary was pretty enthralling, but what kept me from embracing it quite as much as I possibly could have was the structure. The logical way to divide up this film is the preparations for the big song recording and the Foo Fighters playing, but the film ends with another 20 minutes of what the musicians did a year later that feels like a bit of an anticlimax. Of course, the film redeemed itself in the very end as we get to see one thousand musicians begin to play The Verve's "Bittersweet Symphony," which gets me every time.

The second half of the double feature was the Norwegian comedy? I guess? Ninjababy. It features a promiscuous but otherwise nice young Norwegian woman who doesn't realize she's pregnant until long past the point where abortion is still an option, because she ignores certain warning signs and doesn't get the distended belly that most pregnant women get. She's an aspiring comic book artist who draws an imaginary version of her fetus that looks like a masked ninja, and speaks to her while hopping around between the various flat surfaces of her environment. She really doesn't want to be a mother, and she really doesn't want to have a child with the father (nicknamed "Dick Jesus"), in part because he's a dickhead and in part because she's falling for her aikido instructor ... who was also considered a possible biological father of the baby.

Enjoyed this one a lot as well, though maybe just a touch less than the others. One thing that I appreciated about it was that it allowed me to continue my streak of what I can loosely consider outsider animation films at MIFF. I've been seeing animated films at MIFF for something like five straight years now, but this year's candidates (the top one was called Cryptozoo) all failed to migrate to streaming when the theatrical screenings had to be cancelled. Ninjababy is 90% live action but I'll take the 10% of it that's animated as my last port in the storm for animation in 2021.

As another indication of how behind I am on my writing, I started writing this 11 hours ago now. It's almost time for my Wednesday night movie. 

MIFF from A to Zed

This was what I planned out as the subject for my first MIFF post of 2021, expecting that it would recap for you an epic double feature at the Coburg Drive-in: Leos Carax' gonzo Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard-starring musical Annette (that would be the A) and the much buzzed about Twitter stripper saga Zola (that would be the Zed).

The first sign that this probably would not happen was when my wife told me she wasn't sure she could handle a more than two-hour musical from a director she didn't like. (I didn't like Carax' Holy Motors either, but was willing to look past that). I then considered going by myself for the first feature and having her join me by Uber for the second, but then I discovered they were charging $40 per carful per movie, and it didn't seem worth it just for myself. So Annette was out. (Thinking about it now, I wonder how they would have handled the separate admissions. I probably would have had to drive out and drive back in, which just seems like a hassle and a headache.)

Zola was still on, and we purchased our $40 carful. But it started to possibly slip through our fingers when they pushed back all theatrical screenings by a week's time in order to avoid possible lockdown cancellation, meaning our drive-in trip was shifted from August 6th to August 13th.

Friday the 13th probably should have been an omen of some sort, as soon after that, all theatrical screenings were cancelled for 2021. 

But Zola itself was not lost.

I had noticed earlier in the week that it was available for premium $19.99 rental through U.S. iTunes, though it took me a few days to put two and two together: I could rent Zola and we could have the drive-in in our own living room.

I set it as a surprise for my wife, and she loved the surprise. I think she loved the surprise to a greater extent than it was actually a good surprise. Suffice it to say that in lockdown, we all need a surprise. 

If I'd been really clever, I would have assembled additional props or special foods to kind of simulate the drive-in experience, but let's just say my sense of cleverness is a bit dulled right now. Besides, #lockdown. 

I only wish the movie had delivered more on our hopes and expectations.

I probably had it too hyped coming in, as I've been hearing about this for what feels like a year now, and it was easy to imagine it being really off the hook. I'd heard it likened to Spring Breakers, which makes sense given the Florida setting and certain stylistic choices. But that probably also set the bar way too high for me, since as you know, Spring Breakers was my #2 movie of the entire last decade.

I could tell right away that it wouldn't pop like Spring Breakers, which could be the difference between cinematographer Benoit Debie and cinematographer Ari Wegner. When I looked up Wegner's credits, I expected to find a neophyte working on one of his first films, given the sort scuzzy look of Zola. (Intentionally scuzzy, but scuzzy is scuzzy.) However, that's not the case at all -- Wegner has worked with both Justin Kurzel (True History of the Kelly Gang) and Peter Strickland (In Fabric). I thought Kelly Gang looked terrific, and that In Fabric looked ... scuzzy. I have no doubt the aesthetic was intentional in both places, but I wanted something crisper here.

There are far bigger problems than the film's look, though. There are two main ones as I see it:

1) The story is not as over-the-top absurd as I expected it would be. Given the Florida setting, I expected a truly bizarre odyssey of strange characters, hilarious circumstances and unexpected twists and turns. The actual story is a very banal and sad weekend escapade involving strippers turning tricks under the iron grip of a despicable pimp. The details of what happened do not seem particularly extraordinary. Check that -- they are extraordinary for your average, everyday citizen, but they are not extraordinary by the standards of movies made about lowlifes and people at the margins of society. The way Zola was sold to me was that I would not be able to believe what happened next, and that's a comparison to other similar movies, not to my own life as a dad in Australia. It just didn't live up to that. Nor was it funny, as I thought it was supposed to be. I mean, darkly funny, but still funny. I did laugh sometimes, but my overall takeaway was that this was all just sad, and not kind of delightfully preposterous as I thought it was supposed to be.

2) We don't learn enough about the characters. This is particularly problematic for Zola herself (Taylour Paige), the one whose tweet storm became the raw materials for this movie. She is supposed to be our surrogate -- Stefani (Riley Keough) does get to tell the story at one point, but only for five minutes of obvious exaggeration we can't trust -- so the fact that we don't get to know her at all is a real issue. A movie does not have to prioritize character development -- Spring Breakers does not -- but when the story is told from one particular person's perspective (and the movie is named after that person), not having much of a sense of that character is indeed a shortcoming. If one of the characters had been the narrator of Spring Breakers as Zola is here, it would have been a problem that we didn't know more about her at the end, but that is an ensemble piece being viewed by a disinterested, omniscient eye. Zola's eye is the eye here, but it's empty.

You should still see the movie, but just temper your expectations. Like, a lot.

Oh, and it occurs to me that the subject "MIFF from A to Zed" still sort of works, if you incorporate my Thursday night viewing. All Light, Everywhere can just take the place of Annette as the A. 

Should have waited and discussed them both in the same post. Curses! 

Our living room drive-in kicks off a weekend of MIFF-related activity, and I'll probably be back tomorrow to tell you about more of it. 

The MIFF shift we all knew was coming

That is, a shift to completely online.

As soon as the extension of our current lockdown by seven days was announced, it became inevitable: MIFF would have to cancel all its in-person screenings.

Yes, even the ones scheduled for the drive-in.

Weirdly, this has actually served to focus me. 

See, before then I had been caught in a kind of no man's land with regard to what movies I was going see this MIFF -- unsure if there were actually going to be cinema screenings, and if so, whether I would actually be able to attend them. (I don't think I told you that I was particularly trying to stay out of crowded areas in an attempt not to get COVID before my mother-in-law's 80th birthday visit -- which has now also been cancelled.) As I fiddled and diddled, most of the theatrical screenings ended up selling out anyway, though I had selected a handful of titles that I thought would work for me -- if we decided it was safe for me to go.

Now that I know definitively no one is going to any cinemas, I can just line up my streaming schedule.

Invigorating me on this subject is the fact that three of the films I had planned to see in cinemas are among the 30 that are now available to stream after their in-person screenings were cancelled, not to mention a couple others I wouldn't have been able to see because they were sold out.

Score -- I guess.

I should probably catch you up on what I've seen since I last updated you.

Tuesday night it was what feels like a personal MIFF tradition, but in reality, it's only the third of its kind overall: the latest and greatest from Iranian cinema. Asghar Farhadi's A Hero was sold out (and didn't come online), but that still left me able to catch Ballad of a White Cow, which joins previous MIFF Iranian films The Salesman and Just 6.5.

This one is about the mother of a deaf daughter, who falls on hard times as society shuts her out after her husband was executed for a crime he didn't commit. A laugh a minute, right? It has the rhythms and concerns of the films of Farhadi's filmography, if not quite the quality. Though I did give it a very solid 8 out of 10 on ReelGood, convincing myself it was worthy of higher than the 7 I was originally thinking of giving it. 

I guess it also continues a tradition of movies with "cow" in the title after First Cow last year.

Then on Thursday night it was All Light, Everywhere, the latest from Rat Film director Theo Anthony. This documentary confounds in a similar way to Rat Film did, as it's more like an essay of interconnected ideas then a straight narrative -- but this one was also far more rewarding and profound. Vision is the theme underpinning it, including the inner biology of the eye, persistence of vision concepts related to the invention of the moving image, surveillance, and body cameras worn by police. Trust me, it works.

Okay, it's a Friday night at 8 o'clock -- hopefully my next MIFF post will go into a bit more depth on the movies.

And now that I know exactly what shape my 2021 MIFF will take, I'm hoping there will be seven or eight more of them.

MIFF, sort of

It may seem a little late in the year for my first MIFF post. In reality, you probably have only a vague idea when the Melbourne International Film Festival starts each year, but trust me, it's late. The festival is already starting later than it used to, as the days when it caught the tail end of July appear to be gone. But there was still a three-day delay between the August 5th opening night and last night, August 8th, when I finally got around to watching my first MIFF movie of 2021. 

That's probably because this year's festival feels well and truly compromised, even more so than it did last year.

COVID is the compromiser, of course, and logically, COVID should be less of a problem this year than it was last. Well, yes and no on that.

It's less of a problem because we are not, in 2021, locked down with a nightly curfew like we were last year. August of 2020 was a month of particular seclusion, if I remember correctly.

But it's more of a problem because we thought we were going to have something approaching a normal festival this year ... and this latest lockdown, which began last Thursday and does not figure to end this week, has proven to us the naivete of our assumptions.

It was always the idea to have MIFF 69 ("Huh huh, huh huh." - Butthead) exist partially online and partially in cinemas. They had even expanded the number of venues showing MIFF movies so they could sell the same number of tickets while still having the venues less densely packed. Then there were some movies that were always only going to be available through MIFFPlay, the streaming wing of MIFF, or in some cases, available in both places.

To accommodate the last lockdown -- which only just ended a week before this one started -- MIFF had already moved the theatrical screenings back a week, starting this coming Friday rather than last Friday, to give us additional clearance from the appearance of threat. The MIFFPlay movies were also expanded to be available for the entire duration of the festival, from the 5th to the 22nd, as a sort of compensation. 

The problem is, the current lockdown -- which features an alarming number of new daily cases by Victorian lockdown standards -- is not likely to end this week. And it needs to end if anyone is going to get to their first theatrical screenings, scheduled (quite ominously) for Friday the 13th.

Me, I'm hoping that at least the venue my wife and I are supposed to attend on Friday -- the Coburg drive-in -- might be allowed to go forward with its screenings, since social distancing is built into the drive-in experience. But I know that is not the reality of a lockdown, so our Zola viewing probably will not go forward, considering the way things are looking now.

So they should just push everything that was going to screen at a theater into MIFFPlay, as they did last year, right?

Not so fast. Last year was different. Last year they knew the score coming in.

When a festival gets the rights to show a particular film, there are very strict guidelines on when it can be shown and to whom. This is why some of the online screenings sell out. It's not that there is a finite number of digital streams of a movie -- the very concept of that is ludicrous -- but that the distributor does not want so many people to see the films that it destroys the potential for profit of an eventual theatrical run in the local market. It's possible that some of these terms could be renegotiated, but it's not entirely clear that this is what will happen. As far as I'm aware, MIFF hasn't even issued a statement about what is likely to happen in the event that people cannot go to theaters this weekend, and understandably, does not want to speculate, thereby potentially propagating misinformation and further customer frustration. 

At least I've finally gotten started on 2021 with my first MIFFPlay screening on Sunday night, Cooper Raiff's Freshman Year.

Don't recognize the title, but recognize the name Cooper Raiff? That's because this film was released in the U.S. last year as Shithouse, which is kind of a funny reversal, because "freshman year" is more of an American term and "shithouse" is more of an Australian term. Here, I'll use it in a sentence: "Sure, I'll hit a ball around with you, but I'm really shithouse at tennis." Yes, it's an adjective. 

I wish I could say it had gotten my MIFF off to a better start. I expected this to be an easy win for me, as it had been likened to Before Sunrise, which I really liked, and had been praised by the hosts of the first podcast I ever listened to (and obviously still do), Filmspotting.

Turns out, no. Raiff's character is no Ethan Hawke. He's a college freshman who is weirdly always on the verge of tears because he misses his mommy. That's an over-simplification, and there's a dead father in there potentially contributing to some of these emotions, but I was kind of taken aback by how weirdly babyish this character is. 

I think it has something to do with my expectations. Most movies about characters adjusting to college life have an aspirational quality, like you want to be the main character, either because he's cool or because he's a screw-up in relatable ways. The character who talks to a stuffed animal from home, when he's not crying on his phone to his mother because he misses her, does not meet those preconceived notions.

Too bad because I really like the actress Dylan Gelula, who is Raiff's co-star.

Also, I know it would have still been the same movie, but I think I would have liked it better if they'd just stuck with this:

Well, maybe I'll get a better result on my second MIFF film, which I plan to watch tonight.

And I also hope this will get me into as much of a "MIFF groove" as is possible in a year when so much is up in the air, when it feels so little like the time to make annual rites approximate what they've been in the past.

To put it another way: Here's hoping this year's MIFF won't be shithouse. 

Promising young man

Bo Burnham doesn't think he's young anymore.

In his phenomenally well-regarded comedy special/movie (more on this in a minute) Inside, which he conceived and executed in a year's time during the pandemic while locked inside his house (and his guest house), Burnham sets aside a moment to acknowledge the end of his 20s. Whether it was real or staged is uncertain, but he turns on a light to reveal himself sitting next to a digital lock that reads 11:58. He gives about 90 seconds of explanation that these are his last two minutes of being 29, and he really, really hoped he would not still be cooped up indoors on his 30th birthday (which was last August). 

No such luck. He stares at the clock for about the last 15 seconds -- which feel like twice that, almost to the point where you think he's doing a bit, and has manipulated the clock so the red numbers would never flip over to 12:00. But they finally do, and now Bo Burnham is officially old.

This of course makes a 47-year-old laugh -- laugh heartily until he starts coughing, because that's what we 47-year-olds do.

Whether or not Burnham thinks he can be classified as young, there's no debating that he can be classified as promising.

The title of my post is of course a reference to Promising Young Woman, the 2020 best picture nominee in which Burnham plays the love interest for Carey Mulligan's Cassie. 

But did you remember that in addition to being a capable actor and concocting genius performance art comedy specials/movies (more on that in a minute), he's also a really good writer and director? And I'm not talking about a comedy writer/director, of material starring himself. Burnham was also the main creative force behind Eighth Grade, which made my top ten of 2018. 

Promising indeed.

As hyphenates go, Burnham's list is daunting. Wikipedia describes him as "an American comedian, musician, writer, actor, film director and poet." But that's even selling him short a bit. The term "musician" seems to be encompassing both his instruments (he can play both piano and guitar, in addition to all the "virtual instruments" on your typical music software) and his voice. So they really could have added "singer" to that list. (And by the way, if he's bad at guitar -- as he says in Inside at one point -- then I guess I don't have a very good ear for guitar playing.)

It would probably be useful to go into depth about Burnham's whole career, but today I just want to talk about Inside. (The proper title, I believe, is Bo Burnham: Inside.)

You've probably heard that it is a creative tour de force. You've probably heard that it is the ultimate piece of pandemic art. Both of these statements are true. I cannot stress enough how quickly you should put down what you're doing and watch it. It's on Netflix, if you didn't notice the logo in the poster above. (Wait, there is no logo. Netflix promotional art without a logo? What is the world coming to?)

The first thing I want to talk about, though, is the thing I had not heard about it: That it is actually, probably, a movie.

I never dreamed I'd have the chance to rank this among my 2021 films, and now that I believe I can, it could be very near the top.

You know that the topic of what constitutes a movie and what constitutes, uh, "something else" has interested me a lot lately. There are plenty of attributes you can consider about a film when deciding how to categorize it, such as running time, venue of its first availability, and whether it exists as part of a larger collection of content, possibly making it resemble episodic television more than movies.

But we don't, in making these considerations, want to significantly reduce the content -- a term Burnham uses a number of times in Inside -- that can reasonably fall under the umbrella of the term "movie."

Now, one term Burnham also uses in Inside is "comedy special," which is certainly a valid way to describe what you're watching. It's especially valid for Burnham as this is the type of thing he is more accustomed to making, and a thing that dozens if not hundreds of comedians have made for Netflix during their time as a streaming giant.

With your typical comedy special, though, I am not for a minute considering it a movie. For one, these things usually clock in at about an hour, which brings them in well under feature length. Then they tend not to have an aesthetic agenda of any kind, being content to use about four cameras to capture three different angles on the comedian on stage, and one to capture audience reaction, which is interspersed throughout the comedy. This is not a movie -- it is a filmed version of a live event. (Or in some cases, several live events.) It's the same reason I don't consider the Hamilton on Disney+ to be a "movie."

(But what about concert movies, Vance? What about them?)

(Shut up.)

Bo Burnham: Inside does not have an audience -- not one that we can see, anyway. It has an audience only in the same way that a film has an audience, in that the filmmakers made it for people to watch in a darkened theater. Now of course, Burnham made Inside for Netflix, and I don't think there is a better place to watch it than from your own couch -- preferably if you are also locked down while watching it. (It occurred to me that when we watched it on Friday night, it was a viewing experience most other people wouldn't have had, since Americans haven't really been locked down since it was released. We, on the other hand, just began our sixth lockdown in the state of Victoria on Thursday night). However, I'm reading now that it was also shown in select cinemas in the U.S. from July 22nd to 25th, further cementing it as a film, as something that seemed appropriate for and would benefit from a theatrical setting. (It got nominated for six Emmys, the awards designed to celebrate television, but let's just set that side for a moment.)

Then there's the fact that it's feature length. While most comedy specials run an hour -- he says without really knowing, because he doesn't watch that many comedy specials -- this one runs a full 87 minutes. That means that if you did go to a theater to see it, you would consider your $14 to $18 legitimately spent on content that met your preconceived notions of length.

But here's the coup de grace if you are on the categorization fence. The final words on screen in Inside before it goes dark for the last time are:

"This motion picture is protected under the laws of the United States and other countries. Unauthorized duplication, distribution or exhibition may result in civil liability and criminal prosecution."

Mic drop.

Unable to help myself, I looked at the end of another Netflix comedy special, a Dave Chappelle 63-minute special, and it also refers to it as a motion picture. I just need to leave well enough alone.

Whatever, I'm counting it.

I actually have a number of other comedy specials on my list of all the movies I've ever seen, because there used to be comparatively fewer of them, and when they released them, you went to the theater to see them. From the old days, I have two Eddie Murphy comedy movies listed among my movies, those being Delirious and Raw, as well as Bill Cosby Himself (don't judge, we didn't know back then). More recently after the turn of the century, The Original Kings of Comedy (which was directed by Spike Lee) was also presented to us as a film, as was Martin Lawrence's Runteldat.

Although there is almost no chance I would still consider a comedy special consisting almost entirely of a comic's act on one night, with an audience lapping it up, as a film, Inside is clearly not that. I hardly think I need to spend any more time defending my choice.

In fact I'll spend what time I have left -- before you "TL; DR" me -- on trying to describe the indescribable virtues of Inside.

It's hard to express to you how unlikely it seems that Burnham would have put this whole thing together in a year. Not because it's impossible to write more than a dozen funny and thought-provoking songs that speak perfectly to our moment in time in just a year, but because during that year, he also had to conceive comedy bits that use technology in fascinating ways, figure out a dozen different ways to dress and light the single-room space in which he films, do all sorts of clever things with projection, and even gather all the necessary props during a pandemic. 

He had to do all this while still making the movie mostly funny, and laugh out loud funny on multiple occasions, but also acknowledging the extreme darkness of a time of unprecedented loss of life, racial and political disharmony, and the personal intense depression of not being able to see your friends and loved ones and doubting whether it's worth even going on at all.

I wish I were writing a proper review of Inside -- I won't because it's already been out for more than two months, and that goes against my rules on ReelGood -- because that would force me to engage with it more properly, while also condensing my thoughts into about a thousand words. But it's late on a Saturday afternoon and I want a nap before dinner, so I can't hope to do that in the time I've allotted here.

But let's just say that Inside is profoundly funny, profoundly moving, profoundly creative, and the most valuable artistic usage of a lockdown I can imagine anyone someone having. It'll make you cry with laughter (and possibly with sadness), and its songs are also good enough to exist as a distinct album (which, if I bought, I might listen to constantly -- maybe I will buy it. I'll certainly watch it again anyway). It skewers internet culture and white privilege better than anything I may have ever seen, while also acknowledging that Burnham himself is a product of both of those things. It's got tricky balances left and right, and a casual moment-to-moment cleverness that is almost mind-boggling.

Just see it.

And to return to where I started ... I can't wait to see what this promising young man is going to do next.

Documentary alternate Tuesdays - I'm Gunda do it

Since the end of my year watching classic documentaries last year for my monthly Audient Authentic series, I've dropped watching them like a bad habit.

I watched a couple in the waning days of finalizing my 2020 year-end rankings, but since I closed off that list and returning to "normal" viewing? Only three, and one of them (Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets) is not really a documentary as such. (For the record, the other two were They Shall Not Grow Old and Free Solo.)

Narrative films have always been my preference. See past discussions on my concepts like "the documentary ceiling," though that is not nearly the only post I've written where I've struggled with a waning desire to watch non-fiction films. In fact, looking over the "documentaries" tag on my blog, I seem to write a post bemoaning my on-again off-again relationship with documentaries at least once every two years. 

But as you know, a great documentary can still transport you like a great narrative film does, and just because I got burned out on documentaries while vetting films for a film festival a few years back, it doesn't mean I can/should just forsake them. 

So just as I launched Audient Authentic to goose my doco viewing at the start of 2020, now I'm determined to watch two documentaries a month on alternate Tuesdays, starting with the first Tuesday in August.

It's not a series -- I don't plan to write about them here, or only if something else about watching one of these movies inspires me to write. Rather, it's just a personal mandate that I hope to continue following in perpetuity.

I considered Monday night originally as an ideal night for this, but during the baseball season, Monday is problematic. I sometimes wake up early (like 3 a.m.) on Monday morning to watch the end of the baseball week as my weekly fantasy baseball matchup is being decided, so Monday nights often find me very sleepy. Tuesday it is.

Being comparatively less sleepy -- though I did also wake up around 5:30 on Tuesday morning -- was no help with Gunda, the first film in this mandate/non-series. This is one of the more visually beautiful films I've seen in a while, with its glorious black-and-white and its perfect lighting, the farm animals (mostly pigs) silhouetted by a fuzzy glow of sunlight. 

But it is, literally, 90 minutes of watching pigs walk around. That's it. 

Sorry. At about the ten-minute mark, there are some chickens introduced. Then it's back to the pigs. At about the 45-minute mark, some cows are introduced. Then it's back to the pigs.

And while everything on the screen is amazing to look at -- those piglets are cute AF -- a total absence of any human voice or real narrative is the kind of thing that puts you in a trance. I definitely paused at least twice, maybe it was three times, for a short nap, and in looking back on my viewing, it feels like I was in a kind of fugue state. Only this time I was not inspired to distract myself with other diversions, as I was when I watched Sweetgrass and wrote this post. I did, in the end, find it profound, and certainly not like what one thinks of as a "documentary" in most cases. (Sidebar: If it was filmed at farms in three different countries, as the end credits state, and yet the suggestion is that it is following the same pig as she and her piglets age, is it really a documentary? Are these not multiple pigs playing the role of one pig?)

Three other things I should tell you:

1) I may still watch documentaries on other days of the week. But most likely I will watch them on Tuesday.

2) If I miss an alternate Tuesday, which could happen for any number of reasons (like being on vacation), I will not watch my documentary on Wednesday. I will just skip ahead to the next available Tuesday, even if it resets the bi-weekly schedule to the second and fourth Tuesdays of the month rather than the first and third. (And this will get off schedule anyway as some months have five Tuesdays.)

3) I did already try this once before, as you can see in this post. It was ten years ago, and it was Mondays then, not Tuesdays. I don't remember how long we did it, but since it was a joint project with my wife, she might have pulled the plug on it if I didn't. Also I characterized it as a "summer series" in that blog, so maybe it just ran its course naturally.

I say I'll continue this one in perpetuity, but we probably know I won't still be watching a documentary every second Tuesday when I'm 70. But I'm gonna -- I mean, I'm Gunda -- do it in the short run, and let's just see how long it lasts.

Amusements

On Sunday we went on rides, and then we watched a ride.

Only the second was anticipated when the day began.

As gratitude for allowing me to be out all day playing baseball on Saturday, I took the kids out to do something on Sunday, to give my wife time to herself. I never think of what we're actually going to do until about five minutes before we leave, though. 

About five minutes before we left on Sunday, I decided to go down to St. Kilda, where we could frolic on the boardwalk and beach for a couple hours, even though it's winter. Any time there is the promise of treats, most outings are at least reluctantly accepted by the kids.

Of course, when we actually got there, the place I chose to park -- because I always park there -- was directly adjacent to Luna Park, the amusement park that my older son told me he doesn't like the last time I proposed we go there. I get why he was underwhelmed by it. It's a pretty puny amusement park by American standards, but then again, most Australian things are puny by American standards. 

Of course this time, my ten-year-old told me he wanted to go, and got to whining so much that I thought he was doing a bit. The seven-year-old agreed.

At first I stubbornly decided to stick to my original plan. Luna Park is a huge ripoff unless you do an all-day pass, but killing two hours is not worth the money it would cost for the freedom to go on any ride.

So instead I spent a combined $77 for entry into the park and two rides for each of us. You read that right. It's better than $150 I guess.

I was glad to see that both the kids really enjoyed it as I do want to come back when it makes sense to do the all-day pass. I was even gladder to see that the younger one is screwing up his courage to go on more challenging rides. In fact, I was nearly floored that he wanted to do that ride where everyone is sitting around in outward-facing seats, and the block of seats rises up a central track and drops again at regular intervals. Not only did it not scare the shit out of him, but he said it wasn't scary at all. 

I've got an amusement park future with this kid.

The other ride was a smallish roller coaster whose cars spin around in circles, and despite its compact track, it actually produced quite a thrill in all of us.

Sandwiched in between were the aforementioned treats. The younger one had an ice cream (and a Sprite), the older one had fairy floss (i.e. cotton candy) and a corn dog (and a Sprite), and I had churros (and a hot chocolate). 

A hundred ten dollars later, we left.

It didn't occur to me until afterward that it made a good pairing for that night's expected family viewing of Jungle Cruise, which itself is based on an amusement park ride. It took about as long to watch the movie as to kill two hours at Luna Park, but it was not as fun.

I did enjoy especially the first half of Jungle Cruise, but in the second half it got bogged down in too much CGI and too many strange choices about what to reveal about the characters and their relationships to one another. (And no, I'm not talking about the fact that Emily Blunt's brother, played by Jack Whitehall, is gay, as that was a revelation I could gladly get behind.)

The combination of the two events sort of inspired my opening of my Jungle Cruise review, which I wrote last night and posted today. In fact, that's the only reason I'm writing this post really. (You can read the review here.)

It occurred to me, as I say in my review, that the word "amusement" is a funny word to describe the place you go and get on rides and eat food and try to win an oversized stuffed animal. "Amusement" has kind of a negative weight to it. If you are amused by something, there's a certain superiority over it. The thing that amuses you is a trifle. An element of disdain must always be present.

That's not how I feel about most amusement parks I visit, even rinky dinky little Luna Park, which will be 110 years old next year, bless its heart. (And still has the original old rollercoaster that circumnavigates the park walls from their very top, though it has certainly been refurbished over the years, and is due for another as it is not currently in operation.) Most amusements parks are a genuine thrill, even, dare I say, a "blast."

Jungle Cruise, however, was amusing.

It's okay. Not every movie can reproduce the charm of the world's best movie based on an amusement park ride, Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, though this one tries and has occasional moments were it lands in the vicinity.