Coincidences/observations from a birthday weekend with Kristen Wiig

Kristen Wiig was in the first movie I watched for my birthday weekend away at the hotel.

She was also in the last.

Plus two in the middle.

This was, indeed, a coincidence, the first of many I will point out in a bullet point format in this post, because I don't have the energy for much more than that. I had more than 20 physical DVDs with me, as well as four movies rented on iTunes, and then, for good measure, I ended up watching two streaming as well. I watched 12 movies between Friday afternoon and Sunday morning, and because of technical difficulties that I will briefly touch on, there were maybe ten others that I tried to watch but couldn't.

I say all this to say that with an attempt to watch as many as 22 different movies, the fact that Wiig was in four of them is, indeed, a coincidence and not something premeditated. I don't think she was in any movies that I had but didn't watch, but I could be wrong about that.

Anyway, the first Wiig movie and first of the marathon was Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, in which she plays Dewey's first wife, whom he marries when she's 12. She's played by Wiig even when she's 12, which is hilarious.

Three movies later it was mother! Did you remember she's in mother!? She's a press agent turned guerrilla warrior. Her character in that film kind of typifies what I think is brilliant about it.

That took us through Friday night. My second movie Saturday morning was The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, in which she plays Ben Stiller's love interest.

Then I wrapped the weekend with The Skeleton Twins on Sunday morning, in which she plays the unstable twin sister to Bill Hader's gay would-be actor.

Wiig makes a good opportunity to segue into my first coincidence/observation:

• I watched two movies in which someone plays David Bowie's "Space Odyssey" on a guitar. The first was Wiig in Walter Mitty as seen in the poster above. The second was Seu Jorge in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, which I only watched because my first attempt to watch a Wes Anderson movie, a long overdue re-reckoning with The Royal Tenenbaums, succumbed to technical difficulties.

Maybe before I continue my bullet points I should quickly explain those difficulties.

My projector worked fine. My DVD app on my computer did not.

I feel like laptops should come with built-in ways to play DVDs, but they don't seem to anymore. When I got this laptop in 2015 I had to install an app to play DVDs, and that app was Power Media Player, which has worked fine since. Now, not so much. I think they finally want me to pay for this product, or upgrade it, which requires a login of some kind. But I didn't want to mess around with that, so instead, I suffered a severely compromised version of the app all weekend. Would upgrading it or getting a new app have been easier? Sure. But instead I did the tedious thing I'm about to describe in the next paragraph.

So the app will no longer autoplay movies from the start. It gets stuck on the status "Detecting Disk" and never gets off it, even once it has obviously detected the disk. I say "obviously" because the name of the disk came up in the folder list on the left side of the screen, and when you opened it in the folder, you could get access to the raw video files themselves -- chunks of the movie broken up in segments running anywhere from 19 to 21 minutes. I could usually get these files to play in the correct sequence, though it took me until about the third movie I'd watched this way before I realized I needed to change a setting for them to play automatically without having to manually launch each new video file. However, in some cases, I just couldn't figure out how to open the right video file for the start of the movie. Royal Tenenbaums was one such example. I had to bail. 

Oh, and then there were another couple DVDs that were just too scratched or in other ways incorrectly encoded for the computer to even properly recognize them. Anyway, a number of prospective movies were lost either through incorrect sequencing or an inability to be recognized by my geriatric laptop DVD player. 

And that completes the summary of my technical difficulties. 

Where was I?

• I saw two (consecutive) movies in which a washed up performer looks back on the mistakes he's made in his life, and also cannot smell. (Dewey Cox is stricken without the sense of smell after accidentally chopping his brother in half with a machete, and Riggan Thomson in Birdman can't smell the flowers at the end of the movie because he's blown his nose off in a botched suicide attempt.)
• I saw two consecutive movies in which a character draws an unhappy face on a mirror with lipstick. Jena Malone does that in The Neon Demon (my last movie Saturday night) and Hader does it right before his suicide attempt at the start of Skeleton Twins. 
• Speaking of which, it struck me as interesting that Hader stars in It Chapter Two -- spoilers for that about to come up, so watch out! In both Skeleton Twins and It he plays a character who's gay and who uses humor to deflect pain, and It 2 also begins with a suicide attempt in a bathtub -- though it's not successful in Skeleton Twins, and it's not Hader's character in It. 
• I saw two consecutive movies in which characters are trying to use clues to find a person who doesn't necessarily want to be found, those being Margot in Paper Towns and the Life photographer Sean O'Connell in Walter Mitty. 
• This could be the weirdest one: In both Birdman and Skeleton Twins, characters compare their own success or lack thereof to that of George Clooney. Riggan confesses his fear that Clooney would be the one on the front page of the newspaper if the plane they had both been flying in had crashed. Then there's the great exchange in Twins where Maggie says, in trying to comfort the unsuccessful Milo, "No one's a famous actor." Milo counters with the example of George Clooney, and Maggie says "Okay, I guess George Clooney is one exception."
• There was a weird prediction of the future in Paper Towns. Justice Smith appears as one of two best friends of the main character played by Nat Wolff. There's a scene in this movie where the three of them sing the Pokemon theme song before going into a scary situation, believing it will make them less scared. Four years after this movie Smith would play the lead in Pokemon: Detective Pikachu.
• It was funny to see a young John Amos and a pre-Jesus Christ Superstar Ted Neeley in Vanishing Point, Richard C. Safarian's 1971 car chase movie that supposedly inspired Quentin Tarantino in Death Proof. That they're in the movie is not funny so much as the fact that neither of them appears in the credits, which is especially strange in the case of Amos, as he appears in a half-dozen different scenes and even has a couple lines of dialogue.
• On this, my third viewing of mother!, I saw the environmental metaphor more than the biblical metaphor. I love a movie that keeps shifting in meaning every time you watch it.

This has been a bit discombobulated but here's the whole lineup, in order:

Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story

Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)

Wonder Woman

mother!

Paper Towns

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

Heartbeeps

Vanishing Point

The Breadwinner

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou

The Neon Demon

The Skeleton Twins

However, I would have watched these if I could get the DVDs to play or if they were still on the streaming services I swear I'd seen them on recently:

Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping

Monty Python's The Meaning of Life

Paris, Texas

The Royal Tenenbaums

First Reformed

The Rocky Horror Picture Show

Melancholia

The Blackcoat's Daughter

Those of you who have not stopped reading already, you can do so now. 

Positively volcanic

I "finally" saw Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom on Friday night after farewell drinks with a couple coworkers whose last day was that day, it being the last day of the financial year, and their contracts not having been renewed. I say "finally" because usually I don't wait a full eight days to see new releases -- if I do, usually the next week's big new release takes precedence. I thought having a few beers might help, but it didn't really.

In fact, I planned to write nothing at all about the movie on my blog, and would have, had it not kicked off a weekend of seeing movies with erupting volcanoes in them.

You know me with the noticing of the patterns and the like.

If it had just been two movies, I might still have written nothing. But when a volcano erupted in the third consecutive movie I saw, well, I had to share it with you, dear readers. For your own good.

I hadn't watched any trailers for Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, so I didn't actually know that volcanoes played any role in the movie. (Didn't see this poster either, apparently.) But yes indeed, Isla Nublar, the home of the theme park (both theme parks?) in these movies, is swallowed up by lava when a previously dormant volcano goes active. Now, maybe it's just me, but I hardly think you build an expensive dinosaur theme park on an island that has even the remotest possibility of volcanic activity. But maybe they never consulted any seismologist. Anyway, good thing Indominus Rex et al destroyed it three years earlier.

The second movie was the previously discussed Hotel Transylvania 3 on Saturday afternoon. Not previously discussed was the fact that the cruise Dracula et al have boarded starts in the Bermuda Triangle and then visits a number of ocean-related stops where monster activity would be implied and/or welcome. One of these is an erupting underwater volcano. I made a mental note and said "Huh," but as I said, I expected that would be all.

Until that night when I watched the previously discussed The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. In the title character's search for the elusive Life magazine photographer who is the very definition of off the grid, because he needs to find the negative that is going to be used for the magazine's final issue, Walter ends up in Iceland right as a volcano is about to erupt. Which it does, leaving the Jeep he's escaping in covered in soot.

The streak did not continue when I watched Agnes Varda's The Gleaners & I on Sunday night.

The unlikeliest movie not to have seen

I'm not talking about the movie I'm most embarrassed not to have seen. I've had a clear answer for that over the years, but I don't really have one now. Informally, it might be the original King Kong, but there's likely something that deserves the honor more than that.

No, I'm talking about the movie it seemed most likely I would see in the theater, or at least very soon after that, but never did.

That's Ben Stiller's The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, as you can see from the poster.

It seems almost incomprehensible that it's taken me nearly five years since it was released in 2013 to see it. But them's the facts.

Why is it so unlikely I wouldn't have seen it before now?

1. I really like Ben Stiller as a director. The Cable Guy is among my favorite films all time, full stop, and I also really really like Reality Bites, Zoolander and Tropic Thunder. In fact, he has yet to direct a film that hasn't worked for me, as I was even pretty positive on Zoolander 2. (Though his directing page on IMDB really needs to be updated -- he's got a 2007 movie known only as Untitled Christine Taylor Project that I kinnnnda don't think is going to still come out.)

2. I really like any movie that appears to be "Kaufman-esque." The Secret Life of Walter Mitty really looks like something Charlie Kaufman could have written, and reminds me of other movies that are more directly indebted to Kaufman, like The Science of Sleep and Stranger Than Fiction. I have a boundless optimism about the quality of such movies and always prioritize seeing them in time to rank them in the year of their release. Present company excluded, I guess.

3. It was released in time for me to see it before my ranking deadline that year. That's not always a given in Australia with late-year releases that have awards ambitions, some of which don't come out until February, well after I've closed off my rankings around the 20th of January. But this one came out on Boxing Day in 2013, giving me nearly a month to grab it before that deadline.

4. I also heard it was good. Early buzz was that it wasn't, but then after it actually got released, I heard nothing but good things. So skipping it was not even a decision motivated by having better uses of my time.

So why did I skip it?

Well, I did have better uses of my time.

December 26, 2013 -- its release date -- was just under a week before my younger son was born on January 1st. I had bigger fish to fry. Well, smaller fish, I guess.

I did see one movie in the theater that week between Christmas and New Year's, but it was The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, which actually is my least favorite of those six movies. So I would have been better served on Walter Mitty. Then on December 31st they wanted to induce my wife, and for a while we didn't know whether my son was going to be born in 2013 or 2014 (or even, at that time, that he was a son).

It's not like I didn't get out to the theater again after that, though I made only three more theatrical visits before my deadline, one of which (Frozen) had the benefit of being able to get the older son out of the house with me. It was actually only two visits, since my wife also consented to a double feature of two must-haves just before my ranking deadline: Inside Llewyn Davis and Her. Llewyn Davis actually ended up at #3 for the year, and would have been higher if I were doing those rankings today.

What can I say. When you've got a new baby in the house, there are sacrifices that must be made.

So, no room for Walter Mitty, even though it was directed by Ben Stiller, was Kaufmanesque, was released in time and was supposed to be good.

The reason I'm telling you all this is that I have finally corrected this oversight ... though it took some rather unusual circumstances to do it.

Ever since I skipped Walter Mitty that year, I've had my eye open for easy opportunities to see it. But in that whole time, I didn't once see it available on a streaming service or to borrow from the library. It's the kind of movie that would have made my hand leap forward with extra urgency to pull it off the shelf, but it never appeared on any shelf that I saw. Oh yeah, I could have rented it from iTunes, and our neighborhood video store was actually still open then. But after the time of its greatest relevance to me -- pre-ranking deadline -- had passed, I guess I just decided to watch it whenever my first free opportunity arose.

And that never did actually happen.

When I finally acquired The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, it was as a purchase at a used video store. Which is particularly unusual because I almost never buy movies I haven't seen. In fact, I cannot immediately think of another instance of that happening.

You may remember the video store I discussed in this post, where the shelves are full of stacks of undifferentiated movies, and the store's owner had a look on his face like he was going to go out of business any day now. To contribute my small little share to preventing that from happening, I made a conscious decision last weekend to take my kids and buy a bunch of titles for both them and me. We spent $60 and came away with about two books (they also sell books and CDs) and about ten movies, one of which was Walter Mitty. It was never going to show up for free, it appeared.

The owner actually seemed profoundly grateful. I couldn't tell if he remembered me from the last time we came in and I briefly commiserated with him about his dwindling customer base, or if he was just grateful in isolation. But I hope the mere act of someone spending $60 in one fell swoop will convince him he still does have enough customers to stay open.

Anyway, that lined me up to finally, finally, FINALLY watch the movie Saturday night.

It did not disappoint. The Kaufman comparisons were correct, though I like it better than either of those movies mentioned above. It's no genuine Kaufman -- Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine and Synecdoche, NY are all better films -- but it's near the tops among "Kaufman imitators," if that doesn't sound like a backhanded compliment. I was toying with whether to give if four or 4.5 stars, and ultimately went with the latter.

I was also really impressed by the actual direction of the film. However well Stiller had done in the films he's directed previously, they are all comedies that feel scaled a bit smaller, which suggested a certain comfort zone. This one paints on a much bigger canvas, and paints exceedingly well, as it looks fantastic (thanks also to DP Stuart Dryburgh) and also has a lot of far-flung locations, including Greenland and Iceland. Much as I like him, I thought this would have been beyond Stiller. It totally isn't, and it makes me kind of sad that he had to follow this up with Zoolander 2 (even though I like that movie). I hope he gets a chance to do something on this scale again.

I also really liked how the film functions as a love letter to print journalism, of which I am refugee. The film is centered around the end of Life as a print magazine, something that actually occurred long before 2013, but which feels forever current in an age of ever-dwindling readership of, and publication of, print media. It lends an additional poignancy to the material that lingered with me, and does still.

So going from not having seen it to owning it is a positive development. I'll be eager to see it again.