Forty-eight minutes might seem like plenty of time to get there, if you didn't know where "there" was. I take a 7:42 am. train on the mornings I go into work to get there at 8:30, but I'm usually walking in the door right at 8:30 -- or was, before my office moved. Now it's more like 8:37.
And getting to Hoyts Melbourne Central requires as much hoofing, if not more, than getting to my old office. What the hell was I thinking?
So instead of enjoying a casual trip into the city, I anxiously watched the minutes count down and stressed over every perceived delay in service. When we finally arrived at Flinders Street around 6:12, I knew I would probably make it, but I also knew that the next decision was key. Do I take a tram up Elizabeth Street to Melbourne Central, or do I just walk? The former held the promise of a (potentially) faster arrival time, but the latter left the speed I got there within my own control, and the control of the traffic lights.
Well, I chose to ride the tram for those three stops -- and immediately regretted my decision. Because the intersection of Flinders Street and Elizabeth Street is a terminus point for all trams travelling down Elizabeth Street, that also means the tram operator can take an indeterminate amount of time -- up to a schedule or up to his or her own whims? -- before deciding that as many people who intended to board had boarded before leaving. And in this case, that was an interminable three minutes or so.
When we were only at the second stop by about 6:24, I decided to bail. I got out and raced the tram up Elizabeth Street, now at a full run -- or at least a full jog.
I did beat the tram there, but only just, or should I say, it was a tie, except I was already on the correct side of the road and didn't have to wait for others disembarking the tram with a lot less deliberation that I would have intended. In short, it was the right decision, but an even better decision would have been to walk the whole way. (But considering that this day already included the steps from the end of my MIFF outing the night before, several thousand of which occurred after midnight, I ended up with more than 19,000 steps for the day, so the short break on the tram was welcome in some respects.)
Scampering around people and up escalators, I actually made it before the MIFF pre-show advertising even began. I guess I was more worried about not scoring a decent seat than actually missing the start of the movie, but that turned out fine as well.
Oh, the movie was called My Old Ass, hence the subject of this post.
And it was a charmer. The premise is pretty delightful: Aubrey Plaza plays the 39-year-old version of approximately 19-year-old Maisy Stella, an actress I'd never seen before who I found radiant with charisma. Both play Elliott, but we're in the younger one's current time. She's a lesbian -- or so she thinks, more on that in a moment -- who is meant to inherit the Canadian cranberry farm that has been in her family for generations, but would rather leave that to her keen brother and move to the big city (Toronto). She's enjoying a final three weeks of summer before this move with some friends around the lake, and when they take mushrooms one night, she is visited by, or possibly conjures, the version of herself 20 years in the future.
My Old Ass is not meant to be super high concept, as it toys with some of the possible conundrums of whether this is real or not and if so, how learning about things that happen in the future will affect the space-time continuum. Megan Park's movie is more of a coming-of-age story than anything else, and Plaza is not in that much of it -- only three scenes by my count. Which makes sense for an in-demand actress who was likely doing a favor for this small production. (There are actually a couple other recognizable actors, one being Maria Dizzia -- who I often confuse with Elizabeth Reaser -- and one being Maddie Zeigler, apparently still able to get work after her performance in Sia's Music was widely panned because she was playing a character with intellectual disabilities.)
The movie has a light spirit, a lot of humor and some touching moments, but I have to say there was one thing about it that bothered me. I suppose this qualifies as a mild spoiler, but the central romantic relationship in the movie is not between Elliott and a woman. It turns out she is discovering she might not be gay, or that at least she might be bi. While I suppose that would certainly be some people's journey, I had to wonder if there was something about it that was a step in the wrong direction.
After My Old Ass I got a sort-of disappointing chicken burger from Oporto and made my way back to my favorite MIFF venue, The Capitol, for the second night in a row. This was a much shorter and much more easily travelled distance, and I arrived in plenty of time.
And here was where I had my first major MIFF discovery of 2024, my first of those moments that I've managed to find every year, even when I don't feel like the program is particularly great: The reminder of why I love MIFF to begin with.
I don't know what kind of exposure or release Grand Theft Hamlet is going to get, and in fact, there is a good chance I would never have come across it if not for MIFF. And it has quickly jumped to become among my handful of favorite films so far in 2024.
In the subject of this post I teased "Shakespeare profound," which may seem like an obvious statement. I mean, it's Shakespeare, so of course it's profound, right? (Or whoever wrote the works attributed to Shakespeare. A discussion for another time.)
But those of us who have lived to a certain age have seen so much Shakespeare that after a while, it might feel more banal than profound.
Enter Grand Theft Hamlet, which places the staging of Shakespeare's most famous? (maybe Romeo & Juliet is more famous) play within the world of one of the most popular and enduring online gaming communities.
I won't go into too much detail here, but rather, link my already-posted review here. But in case you don't want to follow that link, I'll briefly say that two out-of-work British actors (Sam Crane and Mark Oosterveen) were playing too much Grand Theft Auto at the beginning of 2021, during Britain's third lockdown, when they got the idea that they could try to put on a performance of Hamlet within the game space, using other interested gamers who happen to have an interest in Shakespeare. (There's a funny moment when they acknowledge that the Venn diagram of online gamers and Shakespeare enthusiasts yields a fairly small result.) Without conventional stages being available, all this world could be their stage.
And in a similar mix of the funny and the poignant to what I experienced at MIFF with my #1 film of 2016, Toni Erdmann, Grand Theft Hamlet knocks this concept out of the park. The game mechanics themselves result in moments that left our audience screaming with laughter, but underlying the obvious humor was the profound undercurrent of sadness and dislocation -- both of the GTA world itself, where people are constantly killing each other, and of the real world at that time, when COVID and racial strife were tearing us apart. And then there is the profound of seeing these famous speeches from Hamlet set against this immaculately designed game space.
But now I'm starting to repeat my review, so I will just leave off there. Simply put: Seek this one out.
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