On long weekends, I like to haul out the projector, which I hadn't done in a while because our garage has become cluttered with boxes and building materials for the fence we are erecting between our front lawn and the sidewalk.
And with the inevitable double features that result when the projector is out, I had an unintentional theme the very first day.
Both Nyad, whose existence I only became aware of on Friday, and Nowhere are streaming on Netflix, and they both deal with women at sea in great danger -- one by choice, one by an unlikely sequence of circumstances.
The former is a profile of swimmer Diana Nyad, who also used to host a three-minute recurring segment on KCRW in Los Angeles called The Score, which was a mini essay on something occurring in the sports world. You might think it's a documentary because it's directed by the husband and wife team of Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, more famous for the rock climbing documentaries Meru and Free Solo. But this is their transition to narrative filmmaking and it stars two former Oscar winners, Jodie Foster and Annette Bening. (Oops, Bening has never won, but she's been nominated four times.)
I had somehow forgotten that the thing Diana Nyad is most famous for is her attempts to swim from Havana, Cuba to Key West, a distance of 103 miles that had only been completed twice before, and only with the assistance of shark cages. I won't tell you how many attempts there were because I myself didn't know as I was watching and that was key to the suspense, though I suppose if a movie isn't even half over and the swimmer has started the swim, you know that's probably not going to be a successful attempt. However, you can probably also guess that she had to be successful, eventually, because otherwise they wouldn't have made a movie. Also that she was not very young when she completed it, as she's played by Bening, who is now 65.
I was pretty impressed by the transition of the two filmmakers to the conventions of narrative filmmaking, especially since they got into the biz as an outgrowth of Chin's own involvement in extreme sports -- not, I believe, because they had aspirations to be filmmakers. There's a ceiling for just how different a film like this can be from its brethren, but Nyad gets pretty close to that ceiling.
The second film was a bit more dire.
Nowhere has a very catchy premise in the "survival under impossible circumstances" subgenre of films, as it involves a pregnant woman stranded inside a shipping container trying to retain its buoyancy in the middle of the ocean. Let's just say she's very pregnant without getting into too many more details, but you can make your own assumptions about some of the things that might occur.
The Spanish film is pretty harrowing in getting us to this point. As the woman and her husband attempt to escape an unnamed totalitarian regime and emigrate to Ireland in this shipping container -- I kept trying to figure out what Spanish-speaking country in Europe could possibly be under such totalitarian control, and decided that the characters are speaking Spanish just because that's the film's country of origin -- large numbers of people traveling with them are eliminated under brutal, nightmarish circumstances.
The time in the shipping container involved some details I didn't quite believe, some unlikely endurance of a cell phone battery and a few other highly dubious occurrences, but overall I did find it was a good new environment to explore this familiar type story.
After kicking off my November blog posting with Nyad and Nowhere (love the alliteration), we'll see what other themes emerge as I try to watch three or four more projector movies between now and the end of Tuesday.
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