I write so much about viewing coincidences here -- and so regularly consider that a valid reason to write a blog post, when otherwise there would be none -- that I have officially launched a new label for it. That's right, going forward you will be able to click on a label to read other posts about coincidences. Will I go back and retroactively add this to all my previous posts whose sole existence can be attributed to a viewing coincidence? Well surely not, but I'll definitely add it to some, over time, as I am reminded of them for other reasons.
The coincidence du jour is that on Saturday, I watched two movies that can be said to be about a monkey man, one of which was actually called Monkey Man.
I actually started Dev Patel's directorial debut on Friday night, but after two naps in the first 30 minutes, I could tell I was not going to make it through. If you want excuses for that, we were ending a week where a) I am backfilling for my manager and everything is a blur of meetings and cc'd emails, and b) we have just started a new walking challenge at work, so I've been doing at least 10,000 steps per day. The heavy Indian accents (mostly in the supporting cast, I can understand Patel just fine) and occasional subtitles were just too much for my little brain to compute on that particular occasion. Instead I finished off the night with two episodes of Friends (I'm rewatching the series) and pushed forward the remainder of Monkey Man to Saturday early evening.
Despite not being as oriented within the plot in the first 30 minutes as I would hope, I ended up really enjoying this movie. And part of that was: It's not a very complicated plot. Dev Patel wants vengeance against a corrupt police chief and a charlatan religious guru for having raped and killed his mother and then lit her on fire. That was just the police chief, but it was the guru who ordered the clearing of his village, which involved burning it. He's thought of as Monkey Man because he wears a monkey mask while engaged in his side hustle of rigged wrestling matches, presided over by a particularly oily Sharlto Copley.
Anyway, Patel impressed me in multiple ways in this movie. He's got a keen eye as a director, as I found this a terrifically kinetic action movie with not only great fight scenes, but an innate understanding of how to capture details within the scene and to marry his images and editing to a killer soundtrack. It was akin to the feeling we got from certain "showy" directors -- maybe Guy Ritchie -- when they first came on the scene, but I'm not saying that as a backhanded compliment. Those feelings of excitement were real when we first saw those directors, and it was only because some of them couldn't overcome their core aesthetic that they ended up feeling a little hacky. We'll see if this is the only mode Patel has, but for now, I'm digging what he brings to a movie, and hoping he'll get opportunities to make more.
And then, he impressed me as an action star -- but more than that, a movie star. I'm sure I've realized this before, but Patel has "it," the thing that makes a personality rise above the level of mere actor -- a station that requires a certain amount of charisma to begin with -- to enter that stratospheric zone of star. He looks the part as a lean, mean fighting machine. He's got a smoldering intensity, and though there were likely stunt doubles used in a variety of his fighting scenes, some are clearly all him, and he pulls them off incredibly competently. Simply put, I could watch Patel in a dozen more of these John Wick-style outings, and in fact, I liked Monkey Man more than I've liked any of the four John Wick movies. (I'm not a huge fan of that series so the first one is the only one that would even challenge this.)
In any coincidence, we have to evaluate the second movie, the one that makes it a coincidence, to determine if the coincidence arose organically, or if it was engineered once a theme was identified. And I think I can pretty clearly make the case for the coincidence here.
The second movie was David and Nathan Zellner's Sasquatch Sunset, about sasquatches. And since the sasquatch is often thought of as the missing link between man and ape, obviously we are dealing with a monkey man here as well. (Or four of them, to be exact. Or actually three of them, since one is a monkey woman.)
But here's why I did not connect my own missing mental link between Monkey Man and Sasquatch Sunset when I chose it:
1) The reason for choosing the movie was that I am trying to watch two movies that will be playing at the upcoming Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF), which starts this Thursday, that are already available to me through U.S. iTunes, so I can write a MIFF preview post on ReelGood. Last year I started the tradition by watching Biosphere and BlackBerry, the latter of which I'd actually seen a couple months earlier, and I decided to continue it with two this year.
I was planning to watch the first of those, Pamela Adlon's Babes, on Saturday night. But in reviewing the MIFF films list on Saturday afternoon in order to find my second movie, I came across Sasquatch Sunset, and spontaneously decided to make that my first movie in the sense of watching it first. I'd watch Babes one of the next few nights. (I'm dragging my heels a bit on Babes because I don't like Ilana Glazer. We'll see if this movie helps change that impression.)
2) I didn't actually make the connection between a sasquatch and a monkey until I started watching the movie.
You see, we don't actually know how a sasquatch is supposed to sound, because they are, as far as we know, mythological creatures rather than actual ones. Maybe "mythological" is too strong. Maybe "unverified" is better. Anyway, we've never heard one before.
The Zellners choose to have them go "oo oo" like a monkey.
Which, if they are indeed the missing evolutionary link, would make a certain sense.
When I first learned that Jesse Eisenberg stars in this -- you can barely make out that it's him if you know what his eyes look like -- I thought the sasquatches might speak English to each other, and make the sort of Woody Allen-lite observations about their world that Eisenberg would do particularly well.
But I probably should have guessed that the Zellners wouldn't do something so broad. They're eccentric alright, as you can tell from the fact that they made a movie about a Japanese girl who thinks the movie Fargo is real and travels to Minnesota to find the money buried in the snow (Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter), but nebbishy sasquatches who discuss their anxieties is not the form their eccentricity takes. (Incidentally, because of the similarity of their last names, I tend to get these brothers confused with S. Craig Zahler, who made the very bloody films Bone Tomahawk and Brawl in Cell Block 99. Very different sorts of movies made by the two.)
So no, these sasquatches don't talk, they go "oo oo."
About 15 minutes in, I thought 88 minutes of this would exhaust me long before then. But watching these four characters (four at the start anyway) interact with their environment and face various challenges eventually became more profound, as well as being very funny in parts. I'm still settling on an exact star rating for the movie, but it'll be higher than I thought Sasquatch Sunset might be at the start.
What will my next viewing coincidence be? Only time will tell.
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