Technically accurate but semantically dishonest

Which of these "award-winning movies" is not like the other?

Awards for Past Lives, according to Wikipedia:

Best Woman Screenwriter - Alliance of Women Film Journalists
Top Ten Films of the Year - American Film Institute Awards
Best Director - Asia Pacific Screen Awards
Outstanding Achievement in Casting - Artios Awards
Best First Feature - Astra Film and Creative Arts Awards
Best Original Screenplay, Best First Film - Austin Film Critics Awards

And that's only the A's. Point proven, I will stop there.

Awards for Prey, according to Wikipedia:

Outstanding Sound Editing for a Limited Series or Anthology, Movie or Special - Primetime Emmy Awards
Best Streaming Film Premiere, Best Costume Design, Best Creature FX - Fangoria Chainsaw Awards
Outstanding Achievement in Sound Editing - Non-Theatrical Feature - Golden Reel Awards
Best Original Score - Streamed Live Action Film (No Theatrical Release) - Hollywood Music in Media Awards

Awards for Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, according to Wikipedia:

Feature Big Budget - Comedy - Artios Awards
Best Supporting Actress - Critics Choice Movie Awards
Best Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy - Golden Globe Awards
Best Actor in a Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy - Golden Globe Awards
Best Original Poster - Golden Trailer Awards
Best Supporting Actress - National Society of Film Critics Awards
Best Supporting Actress - Online Film Critics Society Awards
Best Adapted Screenplay - Writers Guild of America

Awards for Movie 43, according to Wikipedia:

Worst Picture, Worst Director, Worst Screenplay - Golden Raspberry Awards

Now, some of these awards may be a bit fringe, but at least you would write home about them.

Not so for the "accolades" for Movie 43.

So I am trying to figure out Amazon's angle here. 

They are promoting four random movies to us that all are considered "award winners" -- a technically true statement. The thing that separates them from being completely random, I would guess, is that perhaps they are all new to the service within the past few weeks, or at least returned to the service after a temporary departure.

But wait -- Borat Subsequent Moviefilm was an Amazon original movie. It debuted there. There would be no conceivable reason it would have ever left, because where would it go? Streamer originals are on the service forever and ever after, amen. 

So that doesn't explain the pairing of these four movies. And surely, if they just wanted four awards winners, they'd have literally hundreds of other movies on the site that would qualify, especially given the number of existing bodies that lavish formal praise on movies that are never going to get an Oscar nomination. (I mean, even the Teen Choice Awards and MTV Movie Awards exist.) 

What possible incentive could Amazon have for elevating Movie 43 alongside these other films, all of which were critical favorites in one way or another, with maybe only a few detractors for Borat and essentially none for the other two? 

The movie was an all-time turkey, and any of their customers who watch Movie 43 will surely know this right away. They may then investigate why Amazon promoted it to them as such, and find out the technical accuracy of the term "award" -- while still grumbling at the deception.

Because technical accuracy only matters in the legalese that comes at the end of an ad for a new erectile dysfunction drug, or a bargain basement attorney. It only matters if you are trying to indemnify yourself against an angry customer who wants to sue you because something happened with your product that you didn't tell them was going to happen. So you tell them what could happen, and wash your hands of it, and basically live with the fact that you may end up burning some of your future customers, because that's the nature of your particular industry. There are enough potential future customers to compensate for the loss. 

There is no good reason to burn a potential steaming customer, given the comparatively small value of encouraging them to watch any individual thing on your service. Streaming content is inherently a crapshoot, and any streaming customer knows that. The streamer's job is to make the content available, to suggest that you might like it if you liked something similar to it, and to give it a certain visibility in accordance with the streamer's own belief in the content, its own advertising philosophy and perhaps its own agreement with whoever leased the content to give it a certain amount of prominence for a certain amount of days. The rest is just caveat emptor.

But then if you go out of your way to label garbage like Movie 43 as an award winner -- and place it next to three other movies that won awards for legitimate reasons -- you are engaging in actual dishonesty toward your customer that could damage your brand. 

And for what? What do you gain if an additional ten thousand people stream Movie 43? (Answer in the comments, if you know. I really want to know.) That is not an exaggeration given the way ads like these tend to flood our devices, likely going to millions of us, if not billions. (Okay, not billions.) 

You're more likely to lose those ten thousand people as customers than to get them to watch another movie that might be recommended according to their interest in Movie 43, or whatever the flimsy value is that Amazon might get out of this. 

They won't leave because they didn't like this one movie. That can happen any time you click play.

They'll leave because you told them they would like this movie because it was an award winner, when the only awards it won were named after that universal gesture you make with your mouth and tongue, expelling breath outward and creating that farting sound that unmistakeably indicates your disgust.

Leave technical accuracy to the pharmaceutical companies.  

Limping my way to a Coming 2 America post

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

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

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

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

Coming 2 America? I gave it 2.5 stars.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It may be. 

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

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

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

The spirit of Michael Moore is alive and -- well, it's alive anyway

I clearly remember Michael Moore releasing Fahrenheit 9/11 in the summer of 2004, and me thinking "Wow, right in time for the election! That'll knock their socks off alright!"

It didn't. George W. Bush still beat John Kerry. Relatively easily, in fact, despite some optimistic exit polling early in the day, which still feels like a tease all these years later.

I'm sure that wasn't the first time a polemic had been released in an election year with the hope of influencing the outcome, but it is something I tend to associate with Moore. He's tried it twice during the Trump era, once to prevent the era from starting (Michael Moore in Trumpland, from 2016) and once to effect change on the midterm elections (Fahrenheit 11/9 in 2018). I guess the latter could have helped, as there were a lot of Democratic wins in 2018. He appears to have been willing to let Barack Obama fend for himself, which turns out to have been a perfectly good decision. 

Maybe he's run out of gas, as there is no Michael Moore movie trying to take down King Donald in 2020. 

However, that doesn't mean there aren't plenty of other filmmakers who have taken his place. 

In fact, this past weekend alone I watched four movies released during this "most important election of our lives" election season, each of which could reasonably be construed as trying to prevent the second term of the Donald Trump presidency. I hadn't started our three-day weekend with the intention of watching all of them -- in fact, I watched October horror movies the first two nights, Thursday and Friday. But once I got started, I kept going, and I thought I'd recap them for you now. 

1. Feels Good Man (dir. Arthur Jones)
Watched: Saturday late afternoon
Released: August 28th

The first, and ultimately the best, is the heartfelt documentary that tries to restore the innocent roots of the internet's most awful right-wing meme, Pepe the Frog. No, Pepe was not originally envisioned as a sadistic, politically incorrect dog whistle to any person out there inclined toward racism, violence or one in the name of the other. His creator, Matt Furie, drew him as a happy-go-lucky stoner living with three other animals, playing video games and peeing with their pants dropped all the way to the floor. The latter action contained the fateful origins of the character's meme-ability, as he explained his pants-dropping freedom by quipping "Feels good, man." That line made its way into the first not-very-sinister, then the extremely sinister parts of the internet, where incels initially adopted Pepe as a sad frog that they thought resembled them, and then as a mad frog that wanted to burn the world.

The progression -- regression, really -- from innocent comic book character to embodiment of the alt-right is told with a highly engrossing narrative competence by Jones et al. It's moving and angering and by the end, you just feel bad for this character with the gentle soul who was transmogrified into the personification of evil, not to mention the gentle soul of its creator. The movie also really details the life cycle of a meme on a place like 4-chan, where these anonymous users were first adopting him as a kindred spirit, then ultimately shoving him in the face of the various "libtards" they wanted to own as they worked to elevate Donald Trump to the White House. One nice thing about it is that it does not overtly campaign for the end of the political fortunes of Trump, but that message is a clear subtext in the story of a benign cartoonist and his attempt to wrest back control of his intellectual property.

2. Borat Subsequent Moviefilm (dir. Jason Woliner)
Watched: Saturday evening
Released: October 23rd

If you had to intuit that the director and stars of Feels Good Man want to see Trump go down in flames, no such intuition is necessary here. Oh, Sacha Baron Cohen doesn't say that either -- he doesn't need to. His relentless, merciless attempts to ensnare members of Trump's inner circle -- and his success at catching one big fish, Rudy Giuliani -- really speak for themselves. 

I did end up reviewing Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, as I told you on Sunday I would. If you want to check that out, you can find it here. So I won't go on at length about it because my review captures most of what I'd like to say, even though I probably could have written a review twice the length. (In short, I really liked it.)

However, I do think it's worth noting that Borat, in a way, shares a spirit with Moore the most. Like Moore, he relies on confrontational, cringey humor. Although Moore might not like to hear his work reduced to this, both also rely on pranks to either embarrass their subject or to try to make them understand the error of their ways. This time around, Borat has to disguise himself to better pull off his schemes -- Moore never bothered with any of that. And both have produced, at their best, riveting results in unveiling the malevolent prejudices of right-wing jerks. 

3. #Unfit: The Psychology of Donald Trump (dir. Dan Partland)
Watched: Sunday morning
Released: August 28th

What was it about August 28th that made it such a good day to release anti-Trump films? Feels Good Man also came out that day. Oh, I know -- it was the day after the end of the Republican National Convention. Or, maybe it was just a Friday in late August, when they figured there would not be a huge amount of competition from high-profile theatrical releases. (Ha, joke's on you -- there was zero competition.)

This is the first (though not the last) of the movies I watched to rely heavily on the talking head format. The talking heads in this case are mostly psychologists breaking down their diagnoses of Trump, which mostly come down to that he's a malignant narcissist. This I knew, but what I didn't know was that there was a rule of thumb growing out of Barry Goldwater's run for the presidency in 1964 not to diagnose a patient from afar. Goldwater was apparently done a disservice when all sort of psychologists were quick to declare him unfit, a judgment that many of them later consider to have been rash. Nowadays, though, the theory has shifted with someone like Trump due to the sheer quantity of information about him they have access to. Some even declare that this gives them a better chance to diagnose him than if he were sitting on their couch, feeding them what he thought they wanted to hear.

The lion's share of interviews with people we know are with George Conway and Anthony Scaramucci, one-time Trump voters or actual Trump employees who came to Jesus about this man and the threat he poses the country. I thought this was very well put together and fairly enlightening, even though I did probably know most of it. The pillars of malignant narcissism really rang true with me, especially as one of them involved sadism.

4. Totally Under Control (dir. Alex Gibney, Ophelia Harutyunyan & Suzanne Hillinger)
Watched: Sunday night
Released: October 13th

The final film was the one I thought had the potential to make the most impact, as it involves an inevitably rushed attempt to analyze the mistakes made during the pandemic under Trump's watch. I say "inevitably rushed" because the final chapter in the story has, of course, not been written. The reason to make the movie now, rather than waiting until a vaccine was out there and the whole breadth of the disruption and loss of life could be measured, is to influence the outcome of the election. And while I support that as a mission, I think in this case it made the film a bit less effective.

For more than two hours -- Gibney has never been accused of brevity -- I watched as the film took us back through the critical junctures and big news headlines of the pandemic, following an on-screen timeline across the bottom of the screen, and interviewing key figures along the way, mostly virologists. Although I obviously did not delve into every single one of those moments at the time they happened, I did live them, so some of this felt like regurgitating things to me that I already knew. Gibney is always a thorough filmmaker, but I felt this movie got a bit bogged down, and was at times quite dull. A 90-minute film would have worked better, especially since the "ending" hasn't been written yet.

Still, it was useful to have all this stuff in one place, and I thought the movie was worth making. I have to acknowledge that burnout was also a factor for me in this viewing, as I was coming to the end of a weekend in which I'd watched seven movies total going back to Thursday night. 

So if I liked all of these films, some of them very much, and some not as much for a reason that could help explain that reaction, why do I only say that Michael Moore's spirit is "alive," not "alive and well"?

Because ultimately, I'm not sure if any of these films is going to mean anything. 

I don't mean that I think Trump is going to win. I think he's going to lose. But I don't feel like any of these films will have played a meaningful role in bringing about that loss. 

We like to imagine this set of undecided voters out there, selecting from the available movies and television programs and articles and books to help eject them from that camp one way or another. But I'm just not sure this is really true. Especially in the case of the later releasing films, I'm just not sure there are people sitting out there, marking their calendars for October 13th, waiting for a single film to eviscerate Trump on his failed handling of the virus. They've got so many other outlets more immediately providing them that information. 

What's more, I think these films are mostly preaching to the choir. Liberals like me gobble them up and dream ourselves away into a fantasy that these are big, influential conversation pieces. When in fact, particularly in 2020, they are just small drops in a very big bucket of election-related noise. In fact, by having four such movies (and certainly more that I didn't watch this past weekend), the filmmakers are essentially cannibalizing each other as viewers make choices among an ever-growing pool of entertainment options. And who could blame them if they'd prefer escapism in 2020, rather than yet more election discussion?

The good news is, I'm pretty sure the end result will have made it seem like these movies had an influence, even if they probably did not. 

Before leaving I'd like to mention that I considered watching a fifth movie this weekend, just to be balanced. If there's a true corollary to Moore in our cinematic landscape, it's not on the left side of the aisle, but the right. Even more doggedly than Moore perhaps, conservative filmmaker Dinesh D'Souza times new films to the elections, trying to do for conservative candidates what Moore tries to do for liberal ones.

Just for the sake of being fair and balanced, and to see what it was all about, I did watch, back at the time, his 2012 movie 2016: Obama's America, whose title alone probably suggested he did not expect it to help Mitt Romney beat Barack Obama. I thought it was bad, but not awful -- I disagreed with his politics, but the worse part about it was just that he's not a very good filmmaker. 

Since then he's made a conservative screed every two years, only two of those having been timed to presidential elections: Hillary's America in 2016 and Trump Card this year. I thought it would be "fair" of me to give D'Souza another viewing, even though I disagree with his politics as well as his filmmaking. 

I had the movie up on iTunes to rent and everything, but I just couldn't bring myself to do it. I saw his smug face on the poster and thought "If I contribute even one $4.99 rental to this guy, it will boost his worldview and his sense of his own importance just that little bit more." Just as every vote counts in a presidential election, every rental counts in determining the success of a film. And I don't want either Trump or Trump Card to be considered a success.

Hey, who ever said I had to be fair? Donald Trump has run roughshod over the very notion of fairness, in every day of his life, in everything he does. I can't wait until we send him packing. 

Why I'm going with the shorter title for Borat

I've watched the new Borat movie. 

I should tell you about it now, but I'm going to write a review of it for ReelGood, plus touch on it qualitatively here in a day or two. So you'll just have to wait. 

Today, I want to talk about its title.

If a movie is willing to have an incredibly long title, I'm usually willing to go along with it. There are those I like more and less, as discussed here. I may not write the full title every time -- blog labels being a place that particularly requires an abbreviation -- but I will laboriously type out the whole thing on all my various movie lists. 

I would also do it on my Most Recently Seen for the First Time area to the right, but you will notice, if you read this soon enough, that I only called the new movie Borat Subsequent Moviefilm. I'm about to explain why.

This movie does have a longer title, but it can't seem to settle on it.

When we first learned the extended title for the new Borat, it did not have the Subsequent Moviefilm part, and contained the subtitle Gift of Pornographic Monkey to Vice Premiere Mikhael Pence to Make Benefit Recently Diminished Nation of Kazakhstan. 

While that was laugh-out-loud funny -- I believe I did LOL -- it was always incredibly cheeky, and may have only existed as a leak in order to troll Republicans, Pence in particular. Or, maybe they thought they'd get sued. Either way, the movie now has, more officially, the following title:

Borat Subsequent Moviefilm: Delivery of Prodigious Bribe to American Regime to Make Benefit Once Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. 

This is not as funny. It's still funny, but it would have been far funnier if it were the first title released. As such, it seems like a censored compromise of the originally leaked title by taking its specific elements and rendering them generic.

They're not the only two titles that have been revealed. The first teased title was Borat 2: Great Success, though I have to imagine this was a placeholder, because it always seemed best to continue the unwieldy titular standard set by the first movie. 

But part of the reason the subtitle, even the one they eventually went with, seems sort of indefinite to me is that there's a running gag in the movie that the title keeps changing. I believe it goes through both of the above incarnations, as well as a number of others that start to name-check Rudy Giuliani rather than Pence. As the gift Borat is planning to give undergoes changes as the plot rolls forward, the unwieldy title keeps adjusting, along with adjustments to the adjectives describing Kazakhstan. (I'd list them, but I don't want to give away the plot -- plus it would involve scrolling back through the movie to find them, and I just don't feel like doing that.)

Borat Subsequent Moviefilm is funny enough on its own, as the funniest part of the first movie's title is the inexact translations of its broken English. I don't need to humiliate Mike Pence for it to be funnier (it's just an added bonus). 

Plus, going with the shorter title prevents us from having to acknowledge the fact that they had to, or decided to, make it more generic in anticipation of potential lawsuits. 

Then again, having watched the movie, I really don't know how they avoided all sorts of different legal entanglements, and maybe if I did a bit of googling I'd find that they actually didn't.