One more who had a good year

Each year in my year-end wrap-up post, when I honor "three who had a good year" and dishonor "three who had a bad year," it always feels a bit limiting that I'm forced to discuss primarily actors and actresses. That's because I'm trying to establish a trend of greatness or lack thereof, not just honor a single work that is either a feather in someone's cap or an embarrassment. Typically, significant creative types other than actors and actresses don't have more than a single work in a year, and I'm not digging deep here to let you know which key grip gripped it the best. Or, I suppose, the worst.

So I was a bit disappointed to realize Sunday night that I missed an obvious candidate for 2019, who would have broken me out of my restriction to only those appearing in front of the camera. He did appear in front of the camera, but he also appeared behind, and both were films I really loved.

I am speaking of comedian Stephen Merchant, who made his solo directorial debut in 2019 with Fighting With My Family, my #28 film of the year. (He directed a film I've never heard of in 2010 called Cemetery Junction, but that was co-directed with long-time collaborator Ricky Gervais.) He also appeared in front of the camera in a small but crucial role in Jojo Rabbit, which rounded out my top ten. For good measure, I only just noticed he was also in a small role in Good Boys (#45), which I wouldn't have been able to produce from memory but which I think I can now remember as a selling point for that film as well. Since I'm a little foggier on that one, this will be its only mention.

That's three 2019 feathers in one cap, so I thought it was finally time to give Stephen Merchant his due.

I watched Fighting With My Family again on Sunday night, as this year's second entry in an informal series I think of as "Showing My Wife a Film I Loved from the Previous Year." The first was Midsommar on New Year's Eve. Both have been comparative deep cuts, as both films landed in my 20s from last year. I'm sure the really heavy hitters will be on their way. (Both films also feature Florence Pugh, but that has to be a coincidence ... right? Winky emoticon.)

It took this second viewing for me to notice Merchant's sterling year. He's in this movie, as well, playing the father of the girlfriend of the main character's brother (whew) in two scenes. When I first saw the movie, I thought Merchant's scenes, the longer of which is near the start, were too broad by half, making me worried about the prospects of the film on the whole. I didn't find that to be the case this time, which I suppose could just be because I now know how much I like the movie. But maybe I was predisposed to be too hard on Merchant, and I'll tell you why that might be.

I've been really wearied by Stephen Merchant for a number of years now. Coming on the scene as the creative partner of Gervais, he was of course in my good graces straight away. But his on-screen persona became a tiresome shtick more quickly than I thought it might, to the point that seeing Merchant appear in a film or TV show was a sure sign for my brain to prepare my eyes to roll. Such lowlights included Movie 43, I Give it a Year and Table 19. I truly thought Merchant had shown us everything he had to offer, and it was just more downhill from here. (And my new perspective on him was such that I ignored his work in films I liked, like Hall Pass and Logan.)

Then at the start of 2019 he started to win me back into his good graces by surprising me. Not only did I find it unlikely for Merchant to direct a feature film, I found it particularly unlikely for him to direct a feature film about professional wrestling. It would be like Wes Craven directing a film about people who play the violin. (Wait, that actually happened.)

The surprises continued -- he was great at it. Watching it a second time on Sunday reminded me not only how he gets just the right performances from all -- literally, all -- of his actors, but how he's clever with the camera too. I marveled at one shot where the camera has to cross a ring of wrestlers and into an office set in one unbroken take, and how the set would have had to be constructed just so to allow that to happen. Then I noticed a great use of rack focus late in the movie. In one shot, it crystallized the main character's resolve not to quit -- without any words, just changes of focus on the three different planes of the mis en scene. There isn't a wasted shot in this film, nor one set up incorrectly. You could credit the DP with that, but the director tells the DP how he or she sees it all playing out.

The surprises continued to continue late in the year with Jojo Rabbit. Not only was his role as an officer in the Nazi secret police not his usual shtick, it was pretty much the exact opposite. There's some use of his gifts (albeit slightly withered lately) for comic timing in the performance, but this is not a comedic role in the slightest. He exudes a menace I never thought was possible from the man, as his eyes shoot daggers even as his face grins. He's solely responsible for the enormous amount of tension that builds in his scene. There's a weird physicality to Merchant's gangliness, but I've never before seen it purposed to its best possible usage in terms of discomfiting us. He reminded me a bit of one of those creepy tall men in Dark City.

At this point, I can't decide what I'm looking forward to more, Merchant's next trip behind the camera or his next trip in front of it.

That's a year worth honoring indeed.

The mystery of the unknown birthdate

We live at a time when it's possible to know everything about a famous person. A quick trip to Wikipedia gives you a host of factual details about that person, the amount of which is largely dependent on how famous they are, and gossip sites take care of the rest. In fact, you can easily find ten people someone is alleged to be dating, even if they are not actually dating any of them.

So it always surprises me when a person has attained a certain level of success, and a piece of information as foundational as a birthdate is not officially available.

You can debate whether Molly Gordon has attained that level of success yet. I've only seen Gordon in two things, but she made enough of an impression on me that I was able to remember what the first thing was when I saw the second thing. The first thing was the Melissa McCarthy vehicle Life of the Party from last year, and the second thing was Good Boys, which I saw on Friday night. (Actually, she was also in Booksmart, though I apparently didn't make the connection to Life of the Party when I saw that, or even remember that she was in it.)

Gordon has also been in a couple other things that plenty of people have seen but I haven't. She's a regular on the TV adaptation of the David Michod movie Animal Kingdom, plus she's appeared in Ramy (two episodes) and Orange is the New Black (one episode). Those are just the titles that seem worth mentioning. 

Yet despite her firmly entrenching herself on the landscape of young working actresses, we don't actually know how old Molly Gordon is.

She's either 23 or 24, according to Wikipedia, because she was born in either 1995 or 1996. Of course, that could also make her 22, since not everyone who was born in 1996 has turned 23 yet. Just to make sure it was not an omission on a website with crowd-sourced information, IMDB confirms the lack of specificity on a birthdate.

What a strange thing that this definitely ascendant performer, who could soon start to find herself the subject of magazine profiles or the modern equivalent thereof, could be anywhere from 22 to 24 years old.

It also makes me wonder how we even know that much about her. Did she coquettishly once tell someone she was born in 1995 or 1996 and leave it at that? Or was it just an estimate somebody ventured based on circumstantial evidence and second-hand information?

It's a bit of an old-fashioned scenario that hearkens back to a time when it was impolite to ask a woman her age. I remember somewhat regularly seeing women on IMDB whose exact birthdates were not known. For an actress in particular, not revealing your exact age might be a strategic move to continue getting cast in roles they might have otherwise considered you to have aged out of. Whether you can play 40 or not should be a function of how you look, if it must be a function of something, but knowing that you're actually 51 is going to be a dealbreaker for some casting agents.

This is also an old-fashioned topic for this blog, I think, as I remember addressing this issue once before, though I can't remember how long ago, or regarding whom. It definitely wasn't someone as young as Molly Gordon. Actresses who came up pre-internet may have successfully hidden their exact ages and the internet may have never caught up with them. But Gordon was born at least a year and as many as two after I got my first email address. The internet should have been on her from the start.

I'm going to see if I can remember to check on this periodically. At some point, Molly Gordon or a person who represents her will come forward with this information, and Wikipedia will update accordingly. And it will interest me to try to tie it back to some particular moment when her seemingly inevitable stardom (she's both talented and pretty) breaks through a particular ceiling of her previously enjoyed obscurity. You can't really be a big star and not have your birthday be a matter of public record, and it will happen for her at some point. 

In the meantime, casting agents will continue to have no definitive evidence that she can't be cast to play a senior in high school. 

A first!

I wrote back in April about the exquisite tease of working in the same building as a movie theater, but never being able to align my schedule properly so I could actually see a movie in conjunction with any part of my workday.

Well, the stars have finally aligned and that monkey is off my back, to shove together two unrelated metaphors.

Yesterday was the last day of the school term, which means all the school staff I usually work with for my job vacate school grounds by about 1:30, and no later than 3. It also happened to be a night I was not going home after work, as I had an awards ceremony for my baseball team starting at 7.

That made a 4:30 showing of Good Boys my best yet chance to accomplish this elusive feat.

So I cut out of there 30 minutes early -- when all my co-workers had long since stopped working and were standing at each others' desks or throwing things around the room -- and made it happen.

To give you an idea of just how close this cinema really is, I left my desk at 4:30 and still had time to see at least ten minutes of trailers before the movie started, including a Zombieland 2 trailer I would have preferred not to see so as not to ruin its jokes.

And yup, I watched the movie, no other interesting details really to share. I had enough time before the baseball ceremony to get a bite to eat and everything. But I can share the sense of joy I experienced at finally doing this thing I had wanted for so long to do.

I can also share the joy of Good Boys. I think my expectations might have been a bit low. I knew the kids in this movie were young, but I expected them to be snarky and act like adults in kids' bodies, especially since it's from Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg.

One of the sublime pleasures of Good Boys, though, is how much they act like 12-year-olds. It's not only the organic (rather than forced) misuse of words, or failure to understand concepts about sex and drugs that they'd easily get in a couple more years. It's how they proudly embrace their own childishness. Particularly in the case of the character played by Keith L. Williams, who I want to see in everything, they repeatedly profess pride at their own desire to squelch their impending teenagerdom, as when they try to make a citizen's arrest regarding a drug transaction, or unfailingly confess their own misdeeds to adult authority figures, or reject the basic premise of a kissing party. Not only were these the truest parts, they also made me laugh the most. I was charmed as hell by this movie and I even got a bit emotional at the end. No actual tears, mind you, but they weren't far off.

Good job, Good Boys. You helped me see my work adjacent movie, and you were also more than worth the time.