Bullshit scenes that were actually real

Most people were fans of Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation, but not me. I mean, I thought it was fine. I didn't get what all the fuss was about.

If you asked me to think of one thing to exemplify the problems I had with it, it was that scene where Ethan Hunt has to stick some doohickey in some slot while submerged underwater for what seemed like ten minutes. The scene went on for so long, with so few breaths taken by Hunt (i.e. none), that I remember myself thinking "Oh come on. It's a movie so you can strain credibility, but why would you strain it so far that you leave me no choice but to call bullshit?"

But here's the thing. It wasn't bullshit.

I read today that in the filming of that scene, Tom Cruise actually held his breath for six minutes.

My estimation of this guy's physical capabilities is already sky high after seeing all the stunts he's done in these movies. Now I learn he can also hold his breath for an ungodly amount of time?

(You probably knew this already, but what can I say. People learn things at different times. If I haven't learned it, it's new to me.)

Have you ever submerged yourself in a pool and tried holding your breath? I max out at about 90 seconds. And that's with turning purple in the face and forcing myself to the brink of unconsciousness. Granted, I think part of that is not knowing how long it's been, and maybe thinking you've been down there longer than you actually have. But I'm saying it takes superhuman abilities even to get to two minutes ... or maybe I just have weak lungs.

Cruise can hold his breath for three times that long.

I've read up online and and it is possible. It has something to do with a couple big inhales and a couple big exhales, and ultimately putting yourself into some kind of meditative state.

That's all well and good. But when I think "meditative state," I think of a person sitting in a yoga position, you know, with their palms facing the sky and their thumb touching their fingers. I don't think of a man thrashing around and trying to stick a doohickey into a slot.

The thing is, I don't really know why he had to hold his breath for six minutes. Unless I'm remembering it incorrectly, the action in that scene was way too complex to be captured in a single take. In fact, I'd guess there isn't a single take that lasts longer than 30 seconds. It wasn't Cruise I believed couldn't do it, because I understand how making movies works and I know he didn't need to. It was the character.

I might be able to read up more and find my answer, but I'm guessing it was the positioning necessary to do the 30-second take that required the held breath. He probably had to get down to his mark, do the shot, then swim back up for breath, all without passing out. And presumably with a flotilla of the world's best divers and medics standing by.

And though I probably should read more before posting a post like this, the point is not what the logistics were. The point is that he could actually do the thing I thought was such bullshit that it took me out of the movie.

Anyway, the legend of Tom Cruise grows.

Bautista blowing up, Stewart selling out

If you were writing a movie featuring a movie star whose career was taking off, you’d likely show his or her face on a billboard, and then the side of a bus, and then a TV ad. The protagonist, assuming he or she was jealous of this particular character, would become increasingly frustrated with each new appearance of his or her rival's beautiful mug.

I got kind of that impression Thursday night when going to the movies to see Spider-Man. Everywhere I looked, there was Dave Bautista.

Fortunately, I love Dave Bautista so it was a good thing.

It was only two instances, but the fact that it was two different movies made me sit up and take notice.

When I first summited the escalator at the Village Crown Casino, and looked up to the big screen above the snack bar, they were playing the familiar trailer for Stuber, Bautista’s upcoming mismatched cop buddy comedy that co-stars Kumail Nanjiani. I say it’s familiar only because I’ve seen it once before. I like both guys so this looks like something worth seeing.

When I took my seat in screening room 6, the trailer playing also featured Bautista, so at first I thought it was Stuber again. It was not. Bautista is apparently following in the footsteps of big action lugs before him – Arnold Shwarzenegger in Kindergarten Cop, Vin Diesel in The Pacifier and Dwayne Johnson in The Tooth Fairy – by starring in a movie with a kid. This one is called My Spy.

Although I welcome the ascendance of Bautista, I do wonder if he’ll be able to sustain what we love about him in a leading role. So far he has excelled as side characters, most notably Drax in Guardians of the Galaxy and the replicant in Blade Runner 2049. He may have played the lead in a straight-to-video movie of some kind, but Hollywood hasn’t come knocking for the big budget wide releases until now.

I guess part of me suspects that as much as I love the former wrestler, he may not actually be a “movie star,” like the guys I mentioned above. He’s probably closest to Diesel, who doesn’t cross over to the same extent as Schwarzenegger or Johnson. Of course, I’m sure he’d be plenty happy if he ended up with Vin Diesel’s career.

Another funny thing about him is that he is already 50 years old. I suppose that makes sense, but if you asked me to guess I likely would have put him at 45. Fifty is indeed a strange age to finally become a leading man.

The next trailer was the first I had seen for Charlie’s Angels, and I was surprised to note something I would have already known if I followed film/social media gossip more closely: It stars Kristen Stewart.

I’d suggest that in signing on to play Batman, Robert Pattinson had made it safe for Twilight stars turned serious actors to go mainstream again. Except that if anything it would be the other way around, as Stewart obviously signed on first.

Both former Twilight stars have worked overtime in the past five to ten years to put that phase of their careers behind them. If one of the two of them were more dedicated to shunning the spotlight, I’d say it was probably Stewart. After finally sloughing off the yoke of the Twilight series in 2012, Stewart has worked for name directors like Ang Lee and Woody Allen, but none of the projects she’s taken could be confused as attempts to earn a paycheck. Pattinson has been more obscure in his choices, with David Cronenberg being about the only household name he’s worked with, but he was never as vociferous as Stewart in how much he hated the trappings of fame.

Yet Stewart has made the choice to earn money again through a movie that seems a bit less likely to be good than The Batman. I wonder if she liked the opportunity to work with a female director, Elizabeth Banks, who also stars as Bosley. It certainly doesn’t seem like we need another Charlie’s Angels, though we haven’t needed any more Batman movies for a while now.

So while I don’t take lightly accusations of people selling out, and appreciate actors who work in both big and small fare, I do think that it seems like Stewart might be doing this, sort of.

Plus I couldn't resist the chance for the alliteration in the title of this post.

Blockbusters far from home

Who knew that National Lampoon’s European Vacation would be a trendsetter 34 years after its release?

Whether it’s something in the air in 2019, or just a variation on the whole Deep Impact/Armageddon phenomenon we’ve been seeing for decades, blockbuster movies are getting out of the U.S. this summer. Which is certainly an instinct I understand, with Donald Trump in office. But it’s enough of a pattern that I finally had to make mention of it.

They aren’t all going to Europe, but two out of my three examples are. And in all instances, they’re series typically set in New York that are fleeing for foreign shores.

Most recently it’s Spider-Man: Far From Home, which released this week and which I saw last night. The rejuvenated Peter Parker and his Brooklyn classmates, having weathered “the blip,” are now on their way for a trip to Europe, chaperoned by the hi-larious comedy duo of Martin Starr and JB Smoove. They seemingly arbitrarily ping pong around the continent just so the action can have a number of different European backdrops. Is this what’s meant to be injecting new life into the MCU? (As you can see, I’m skeptical about the value of the film on the whole.)

Then before that it was the not-just-middling but legitimately bad Men in Black: International, which has basically the same goal. As the guys in a podcast I was listening to yesterday pointed out, is the thing that’s supposed to blow our minds about this movie that the previously Manhattan-set MIB has offices in London and Paris? Really?

The first in the series was John Wick – Chapter 3: Parabellum, which I also consider legitimately bad, but far better than Men in Black: International. Although I don’t remember all the details of Chapter 2, all the shootouts in this series have heretofore taken place in Manhattan, if I’m not mistaken, with a possible trip to the outer burroughs on occasion. This time, some of them took place in Casablanca.

The weird thing is that none of these movies are taking Asian vacations. Isn’t this the age when we are supposed to be blatantly pandering to the Chinese?

The problem is that these movies cannot take vacations from themselves. You can change the scenery, but wherever you go, there you are.

And after seeing all three, I believe they are all arguing for their franchises to take permanent vacations from our viewing schedules.

That cameo from that movie

Spoilers are traditionally thought of as major story twists that, if revealed, would ruin the emotional or intellectual trajectory of your viewing experience. You’re supposed to only know what you’re supposed to know when the filmmaker wants you to know it.

But spoilers can also be cameos. In that case, you’re not usually trying to avoid ruining someone’s experience of the film’s plot. You’re trying to preserve their sense of delightful surprise.

Take the Tropic Thunder cameo. Since I don’t think there are likely to be many people reading this who have not seen Tropic Thunder (but get out of this paragraph now if you haven’t), I will ruin that “surprise” by alluding to Tom Cruise’s amazing turn as the bald, corpulent producer who megomaniacally shouts into a phone for a couple scenes. It’s priceless, and you would surely agree that a large part of that is because you didn’t know it was coming.

And so it is I recommend to you the new(ish) Netflix romantic comedy Always Be My Maybe, telling you there is a terrific cameo … but not who it is.

You may already know who it is, as this person has been particularly hot over the past few years after experiencing a career resurgence. Plus, you know, social media.

But if you don’t … well, I’m not going to be the one who tells you.

I will tell you about the movie. It stars Randall Park and comedienne Ali Wong as San Franciscans who have been friends since childhood, when their best friend relationship turned “will they-won’t they” after an awkward sexual experience in the back seat of his car. Flash forward 16 years, when Park and Wong no longer need to play themselves at 17 (which, granted, is funny). They’re adults navigating success (she’s a celebrity chef) and failure (he can’t get his band off the ground), living in different cities, but reunited when she has to return home to open a new restaurant. They haven’t spoken since they were teens.

Typical fodder for a romantic comedy, just like my favorite romantic comedy (and one of my favorite films, period) of last year, Crazy Rich Asians. I’m not sure if it’s the fact that both films star Asians that I liked the movies better, which would be strange because I’m not inherently pro- or anti-Asian. (I mean, I’m “pro-Asian,” but in a neutral, not a fetishistic, way.) But aside from their casting, both films reminded me that it’s really simple to make a satisfying romantic comedy, and we should attempt more than we currently do. You don't have to reinvent the wheel. All you have to do is do it well. (Ha, easier said than done.)

The cameo, which comes about midway through, is certainly the movie’s funniest part, but I don’t know how significantly it contributes to my overall assessment of the film. Surely the cameo will be the reason why many people want to see it, and if so, it’s done its job, which is to expose people to superior material that they will, indeed, find very satisfying on its own terms. Which is also the aim of this blog post, I should say.

You could say that even knowing there is a cameo is a sort of spoiler, because the best cameo is probably when you didn’t know there was a cameo coming at all. But Always Be My Maybe is probably not enough of an inherent draw to enough people for me to just say “See it, I promise you won’t be disappointed, there’s something great in it” and expect you to run out and do that. The revelation that there’s a cameo is the carrot I need to entice you.

So hopefully you’ve been enticed. And you have Netflix, so you know, run out and do that.

One last recommendation: Don’t google the title. If you do, Google will autofill this person’s name and ruin the surprise for you.

And all my tiptoeing will have been for nothing! 

Never Look back

I usually don't like to go to the theater to watch a movie from the previous year even in February. Once I've closed off my year-end rankings, it's on to the next year. All theatrical visits need to be reserved for new material.

So July? When I have about three other movies that I already need to see?

It's not normal, to say the least. I did go to a critics screening of A Monster Calls in 2017, corresponding with its delayed Australian release, but that was a bit of a different story given that it was a "free" screening and I was reviewing it. (Of course, all my screenings are free since I have a critics card that lets me in to movies without paying, but for some reason I think of a critics screening as different -- maybe just because it feels special.)

Never Look Away has also gotten a delayed release in Australia after having picked up a surprise Oscar nomination for best cinematography last year (to go along with its less surprising nomination in the best foreign language film category). Instead of relegating it to an eventual viewing on DVD, however, I trekked out to the theater Tuesday night to see what all the fuss was about.

That sounds a bit dismissive, considering that I have genuine reason to buy in to the fuss. The debut film from German director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, The Lives of Others, was among my top ten films of the previous decade. He temporarily derailed his career with the Johnny Depp-Angelina Jolie vehicle The Tourist in 2010, but I suspected that a return to his native country and tongue, wrestling with similar material as he wrestled with in Others, would be a promising sign for this undeniable talent. And yes, after nearly a decade out in the wastelands of presumed unemployment, he's been allowed to return with a new movie.

But the decision to see the movie in the theater was further complicated by two factors: 1) its imposing length, and 2) the other movies currently in theaters that demand my attention. The movie is 189 minutes long, which is no joke. It immediately became one of the ten longest films I've ever seen in a theatrical setting. At least they had the decency to start it at 8 p.m. Then you've got the fact that I've already been trying to figure out how to schedule Yesterday, Under the Silver Lake and Spider-Man: Far From Home, which weirdly opened two days ago, on a Monday -- unheard of unless that Monday is also Boxing Day, the year's biggest release date. At this point I've resigned myself to the fact that Lake is getting relegated to an eventual digital rental. (I said "DVD" earlier, but who am I kidding?)

What ultimately clinched it for me was the mandate to see great films on the big screen. And Never Look Away sure had the potential to be great, I figured -- at the very least I knew its cinematography was big-screen worthy, which is really the biggest loss from watching a beautiful film on a small screen. As much as I was looking forward to it, I was also kind of eating my vegetables and being a good cinephile by choosing the three-hour German film over the Beatles and Spider-Man.

Well ... I could have watched the first hour in the theater, popped over for a 9:15 screening of Yesterday, and finished the rest of Never Look Away at home at an unspecified later date.

The first hour of the movie is everything I would have hoped for in terms of a World War II historical epic that bleeds over into the Communist rule over East Germany. It left me fairly tingling. I had made the right decision, and my thermos of licorice tea would get me through.

Unfortunately, that's only a third of the movie. The last two-thirds deal primarily with the protagonist discovering himself as an artist. And that is ... not as good. And the tea was ... not enough.

I still liked Never Look Away on the whole, but as the scale dropped from epic to more intimate, even the things the movie was doing right -- which, to be fair, was most things -- felt something less than grand. And since the most interesting part of the movie was clearly in the rear view mirror at this point, the scenes started to feel plodding and indulgent, even as the filmmaking remained at a very high level. If you are going to run 189 minutes, you have to really justify that, and this film did not.

I'll have a review up in the next few days if you want to read more of my thoughts, but that sums it up pretty well.

So maybe my usual philosophy of never looking back is the right one. Never Look Away had already lost its chance to be one of my best films of 2018, but I wanted to give it a go at being one of the best of the decade. Spoiler alert: It's not.

Damsels snubbing distress since 1997

I've become hyper aware of the ways modern movies try to address the persona non grata cinematic trope of the damsel in distress, who has been basically scrubbed from movies released today. In fact, most movies will try to have a woman save a man, just to be sure to they are on the right side of this issue. The only movie I could imagine having a woman in danger saved by a man would be something funded by conservatives who were trying to thumb their noses at the "liberal snowflakes."

But this isn't really the recent corrective we sometimes think it is. Yesterday I re-watched Disney's Hercules as a movie night with my kids, and I noted that they were already engaging in the meta satirical activity of teasing the trope way back in 1997.

When Hercules first comes across Megara trying to fight off the river guardian -- a blue centaur about six times as big as she is -- she lets out a definite effeminate squeal that sets us up to think she's in need of Hercules and his muscles. And as he closes in to help, receiving her somewhat indifferent welcome, he tries to clarify that she is, indeed, a damsel in distress ... isn't she?

"I'm a damsel, I'm in distress, I got this," Megara says to Hercules, dripping with snark and sarcasm. "Move along, junior."

We later find out that she was actually negotiating with the river guardian on behalf of Hades, so yeah, I think she can take care of herself. (But he did make her "an offer she had to refuse" ... presumably sexual in nature.)

Near the end, Megara does actually save Hercules, pushing him out of the way of a falling column that lands on her instead.

It makes me wonder why we've gotten so worried in the past five years about whether female characters can save themselves, when in fact Disney was trying to be on the right side of this issue more than two decades ago ... and you would never consider them at the forefront of gender progressiveness. I think maybe Megara was one of Disney's first reactions to the criticism of its under-empowered princesses.

Yet the idea of the damsel in distress, and that it is a hallmark of Disney filmmaking, has lingered on to such a powerful extent that the company had to specifically address it and try to exorcise it in last year's Ralph Breaks the Internet, with a scene devoted to a coterie of Disney princesses enumerating the stereotypes related to them. (A fairly tedious scene, I might add.)

It's not that I don't think we still have far to go; we do. It's that Hercules made me realize we've already been on this road for a long time ... and that the perception is still that we're not doing enough.

I'd say that's sad, but it's nothing compared to the perspective of a bunch of African Americans who thought we might have reasonably "solved" racism decades ago. Some things, unfortunately, take time ... more time than most of us have to breathe in this lifetime, probably.

Not your Alien

I can’t see why Harmony Korine wanted to make The Beach Bum, but it’s easy to understand what attracted Matthew McConaughey to the project.

He saw Spring Breakers, marvelled at James Franco’s gonzo performance and thought “I’d like to do that.”

But this is not your Alien, McConaughey. Nor is it your The Dude, which is also in there.

It’s easy to tell that The Beach Bum is from the same director as Spring Breakers. Both films are set in sun-dappled Florida. Both films use a montage approach to the narrative. Both films feature kind of a “pimp lifestyle,” one of which seems appropriate to the subject matter and one of which seems vaguely absurd. Both feature a setting with an outdoor piano, as well as other excesses of the rich. There’s a similar kaleidoscopic color scheme and both films were shot by Benoit Debie. Both films even include a High School Musical alum (Vanessa Hudgens there, Zac Efron here).

Oh, and both feature an over-the-top performance by a character with an outlandish nickname.

In the superior Spring Breakers – which a friend of mine has recently dubbed “Korine’s Citizen Kane” – that character is Alien, played by Franco.

In The Beach Bum, it’s, er, Moondog.

Moondog is played by McConaughey, channeling Franco.

It’s not that Moondog is anything like Alien, in the overt sense. Alien is a drug dealer with corn rows and gold teeth, while Moondog is a stoned space cadet hippie poet. But McConaughey is channeling, or trying to channel, the go-for-broke commitment to a particular character that Franco delivered for Korine in Spring Breakers, imagining that he might carve out his own spot in the cinematic cult character hall of fame.

Nice try, but no.

Moondog is one of the most face-punch-worthy characters I have met in recent memory. He spends all his time in a stupor – sometimes drunk, sometimes stoned – which, miraculously, the other characters consider endearing. He floats around the greater Miami/Florida Keys playing bongo drums amidst semi clad women, constantly smoking joints. He crashes the vows of his own daughter’s wedding – massively underdressed, mind you – in order to grope the groom’s balls in order to prove he’s not man enough, or something. The guests love it. “That crazy Moondog.”

Also, his poetry is shit.

I suppose that’s why some critics have called The Beach Bum an “epic goof.” Then again, some people also thought Korine was punking his audience with Spring Breakers. I pity those people, but they were out there.

Is how I felt watching The Beach Bum how other people felt watching Spring Breakers?

I hope not, because I really wanted to punch this movie in the face, along with its main character.

Of course, I could have wanted to do that with Alien, as Franco’s performance is as stylized and filled with tics in its own way. Except in that case, all the specific wardrobe and hairstyle choices, and curated mannerisms, work. Here, none of them do.

I suppose at this point you might want to take a better look at Moondog. Here he is:

You can probably see why the choices remind me of Alien, in a way. He’s festooned with eccentricities. Probably the most laborious of these is the sunglasses, which are flipped up here. When down, they look more like those sunglasses old people wear, which I guess is meant to provide additional blockage of rays, or possibly help with their glaucoma. When up, he also sometimes wears reading glasses in order to better read his terrible poetry to an adoring audience.

Who knows, maybe he actually has glaucoma, and that’s why he smokes that much weed.

We’re supposed to believe that Moondog was a renowned poet who once made something genuinely great, although old VHS video of him also makes it look like he was once a motivational speaker of some kind, only a tad less wacko than he is now. That’s how he attracted the attention of his wife, a bit of a trainwreck herself but also quite the catch in many respects, played by Isla Fisher. What she would want to do with him, the film never tries to argue. We’re supposed to just believe his blend of carefree free-loving goofiness is an aphrodisiac to everyone he meets. He's kind of like the words used to describe Cosmo Kramer -- "do nothing, fall ass backwards into money, mooch off your neighbors and have sex without dating" -- only without the charisma, and completely insufferable.

The Beach Bum wastes all this time with Moondog without us ever learning what really drives him or why we should care about him. In the end, it has utterly no meaning. People said that about Spring Breakers, but you can see the difference between having no specific viewpoint – i.e., not celebrating or criticizing the behavior you present – and just having no meaning at all.

Un-lee-shed: Mo' Better Blues

This is the third in my bi-monthly 2019 series watching (most) of the Spike Lee films I haven’t yet seen.

June brought my first audible in Un-lee-shed. I had to call it when I couldn’t find the movie I was intending to watch, Get on the Bus, available on any streaming service I subscribe to, at the library, or on iTunes. In fact, most of these services returned a strange message when I searched for the title, which was (and I’m paraphrasing here) “I haven’t even heard of this movie. Go get stuffed.”

So I did, and watched Mo’ Better Blues instead.

Which was fine, as I actually thought of Blues as the more “significant” Lee movie I hadn’t seen than Get on the Bus, and iTunes obviously agrees. The main reason I preferred Get on the Bus for this series was that I wanted to do a bit of a jump forward in time, rather than watching a third movie within a span of five years on the calendar after She’s Gotta Have It and School Daze. When paired with Four Little Girls, which I intend to watch in August (assuming availability), the summer months could make a good “middle section” to Lee’s career.

But instead it was the best fashions 1990 had to offer in Mo’ Better Blues.

I was indeed a bit distracted by the fashion in the movie, which of course I remember only too well from the time, but which now seems hopelessly specific and dated. And since the 1990s have not yet been fully reclaimed as an era for us to nostalgically revisit at the movies, I felt only the mild repulsion to that fashion, rather than the sentimentality.

But this movie is not about fashion. It’s about jazz. Or blues, I guess, though to me it seemed a lot like jazz.

It stars Denzel Washington as Bleek Gilliam (great name), a trumpeter who leads his own band (featuring the likes of Lee, Bill Nunn, Giancarlo Esposito and Wesley Snipes, all regular Lee collaborators, though this was the first for both Washington and Snipes). Bleek is two-timing two women with each other, though they kind of know it. One of these is Lee’s sister, Joie, who was in almost every Lee movie to that point and still appears in them today, most recently Da Sweet Blood of Jesus. (She’s also on the She’s Gotta Have It TV show, which Lee produces.) The other is an actress I knew I recognized, Cynda Williams, ultimately identifying her (with the help of the internet) as the star of One False Move. That’s a really good movie I need to see again.

Story? What story? It’s pretty much a slice of life of these characters over a number of years as Lee’s character gambles himself to within an inch of being beaten to death, Bleek tries to juggle the women without losing either one, Esposito bristles over the band’s treatment of his white (and French) girlfriend, and Snipes wants to break out on his own. There are a lot of musical numbers incorporated in, to good effect. And a lot of “Lee-isms” are being played with here, like cameras that swoop in to close-ups, dolly shots, a forlorn jazz score, and Brooklyn street life.

But I felt toward Mo’ Better Blues as I did the two previous films in the series, though I guess I gave 3.5 stars to She’s Gotta Have It and three to School Daze. I’m at three stars again here. All three of these films provide useful insight to Lee’s growth as a filmmaker, but I guess I’m not shocked that I missed them. They aren’t essential, and this is probably the least essential of them.

As I was watching this, I wondered how well the movie he released next, Jungle Fever, would hold up today. It didn’t hold up well for some people at the time it came out, but for me it seemed nearly as urgent in its own way as Do the Right Thing, though obviously for different reasons. The Samuel L. Jackson performance in that movie was the real standout, as I remember. If I watched it today – either for the first time or as a revisit – I’d probably be just as distracted by the fashions, but hopefully still engaged by the themes.

As I said, Four Little Girls is on tap for August, if the gods of availability see it fit to oblige me. Otherwise ... Girl 6? Clockers? We'll see. 

High tea with the High T

Before I get started, I just want to tell you that Men in Black: International is not a good enough movie to warrant the type of whimsical subject line I’ve chosen for this post, which implies affection. In fact, I’m not even sure if it’s good enough to watch on an airplane.

But I have a reason for choosing the subject, which I’ll get to presently.

We’re going to America in a couple months, and I’m trying to lose a little bit of weight. Ever since I dislocated my shoulder (nearly five weeks ago), my fitness level has dropped considerably. Not only am I not playing baseball, the culprit behind my dislocation and also a source of some exercise, and not jogging, though my injury doesn't specifically prevent it, but I’m also not riding my bike to work. And though walking to and from the tram stop also gives me some exercise, it’s clearly not as much as riding.

This has exacerbated the effects of an already bad habit I have of scarfing down whatever snacks you have in the vicinity. That’s a bit of an exaggeration, but for some months now I have been eating whatever I like, whenever I like, which we all know is a recipe for bad things.

A particular habit I have that contributes to the problem is that I like to take sugary things with me when I go to the movies. This is based on the largely false assumption that a hit of chocolate will help wake me up if I start fading. And even if the assumption is false, it doesn’t change the fact that if I’m not going to have chocolate with me, I need to have something that can have a similar effect, even if it’s a placebo on some level.

How about tea?

Tea does not have as much caffeine as coffee, of course, but it also does not stimulate my bowels the way coffee does. Having a coffee during a movie is a good idea in theory, but in reality, there’s nothing that sends me to the toilet faster. And watching a movie is exactly when I don’t need to be sent to the toilet.

Tea has never had that effect on me. If I needed to wake up emergently, it probably wouldn’t have the necessary effect on me either. But if I just need a little something, maybe even a repetitive motion that would keep me awake and would contain considerably fewer calories than repeatedly eating M&M’s, tea might fill that roll perfectly.

I tried it out for the first time last night for Men in Black: International.

I got a large thermos and filled it with hot water, then dunked in two tea bags, screwing in the string with the cap when I closed it, so I wouldn’t have to fish the bags out of the brew later on. I favor teas with a little licorice in them, and this was one of those. I then slipped this thermos in my backpack, where I ordinarily smuggle large bags of gummy worms, and brought it with me to the theater.

The first thing I noticed is how damn well the thermos works. Even halfway through the movie, the tea was almost still hot enough to burn my lips. That’s because I kept screwing the cap back on between sips, but still. I needed to make sure I was sitting sufficiently upright not to pour it down my neck for that very reason. I suppose sitting upright, rather than slumped over as I am accustomed to, also prevents you from falling asleep.

My next takeaway was how far the tea went. Even sipping from it regularly, I didn’t come close to exhausting it – I’m sure in part because it did remain so hot, so a sip could never become a gulp. In fact, I found myself continuing to drink it on the way home, not wanting to waste it (as if wasting tea is a thing people think much about), and even then had to dump out a third of it when I got home.

Then I noticed that you know what? It actually worked.

Now, it’s difficult to get a true test of its efficacy because I don’t know if I would have fallen asleep without it. You’re sleepier at some movies than you are at others. Even though I didn’t like Men in Black: International, maybe it was diverting enough not to put me to sleep. Of course, the quality of the movie itself is usually less a factor in my drowsiness than whether I slept well the night before. In any case, I can’t know for sure.

But the circumstantial evidence of, you know, not falling asleep – or more importantly, not struggling against falling asleep – was pretty good.

I’m lying a bit as I did nod off once, just for a second. But that was a weird kind of anomaly, as I didn’t feel particularly tired either beforehand or afterward. The real struggle is the struggle against sleep, and that I didn’t experience at all.

I should note, however, that it didn’t function as a full replacement for food. About two-thirds of the way through I surprised myself by foraging through my bag for something to eat, found a granola bar, and ate it.

Simple solution: Don’t have any food in your bag.

So I guess this is something I’m going to go forward with. At least until I lose some of those pounds and return from the U.S. in early September.

Oh, about that subject. There’s a character in Men in Black: International named High T, played by Liam Neeson. Considering that most Men in Black agents are called Agent _, where the _ equals a particular letter of the alphabet, it seemed especially funny to me that there was an agent with the anomalous name of High T on the night I drank tea watching the movie. And that “high tea” is a social event in Britain and countries of British extraction, like Australia.

I suppose for it to be a true “high tea” I could have smoked a doobie before the movie.

Maybe next time.

Oh, and if you want more on what I did (very little) and didn't (most of it) like about the movie, my review is linked to the right, or will be soon. 

June 17th is Pixar Sequel Day

I knew there had to be a reason I have a Microsoft Word document in which I record a running list of what movies I've seen on each day of the calendar year.

I don't mean just a list of movies watched. I mean a list that starts with January 1, and has next to it the movies I've seen on January 1, dating back to 2002, with the year I saw them in parenthesis afterward. And then goes on from there throughout the rest of the year.

Without that, I would have never noticed that I've seen a Pixar movie on June 17th, three years running. And not just a Pixar movie. A Pixar sequel.

In 2017, it was Cars 3. In 2018, it was Incredibles 2. Now 2019 has rolled along and I am among the first to have seen Toy Story 4.

What makes this especially strange is that you usually only go to the movies on particular days of the week, especially when you go with your kids, which I did for each of these. So if you've seen a kids movie, any kids movie, three years running, one of those days has to be either a Friday or a Monday. Unless you've got a leap year factored in, in which case a Tuesday or a Thursday is also a possibility.

No leap years here. I watched these movies on a Saturday, a Sunday and a Monday, all June 17th in consecutive years.

A lot of things had to go just right for that to happen.

The first year, they had to schedule the Cars 3 preview screening for a Saturday, instead of the usual Sunday. My family and I went to that for free so I could review it. The movie opened that Thursday, June 22nd.

Incredibles 2 opened a week earlier than that in 2018, on June 14th, but for this to work out I had to not get invited to a critics screening of that. I can't remember why I didn't. My editor might have flubbed something. I had to instead take my kids that Sunday, on what was a really rainy day if I remember correctly.

But the strangest turn of events had to be this year, when for some reason the advanced screening of Toy Story 4 was not on a weekend at all. When I saw it was scheduled for a Monday, I thought I couldn't go, since some of these screenings are planned for weekday mornings or afternoons. But then I noticed it was set to start at 6, and realized that not only could I go, but the rest of the family could as well. We all went even though it was a school night, because the alternative was to shell out more than $50 for their three non-free tickets this weekend.

The streak of Pixar sequels on June 17th will die here, as the next Pixar movie, Onward, a) is not a sequel, and b) comes out next March. I suppose I could end up watching it with my kids on video in June, but that seems unlikely.

Given that the original Toy Story is in my top ten films of all time, and the sequel was my #2 movie of 1999 (I didn't yet keep rankings when the original came out, but it would have been my #1), I probably should be writing a Toy Story 4 post that doesn't exist just to point out a coincidence. Maybe in the coming days I will. But my review will also post in a day or two, or may have already by the time you read this (check for the link to your right).

I'll save my soapboxing about why the series did not stop at three (but that I liked the movie anyway) for that forum.

This woman is CGI

I haven't finished watching The Meg yet. I started this nearly two-hour movie last night around 10:45, which is always a recipe for disaster, but I guess Friday night is the night you think you are invincible to sleep and could stay up until 4:30 a.m. if you so chose. Well, I so chose to sleep through much of the first half -- pausing each time, mind you, but I still don't remember most of what happened.

I did remember, though, that I wanted to write a post about Ruby Rose, who I did not realize was RUBY ROSE when I saw her on screen.

So obviously I've heard Ruby Rose discussed more than I've seen her on screen, because I didn't recognize her on sight, and in fact think that John Wick: Chapter 2 is the only movie or TV show I've seen in which she appeared (though I've forgotten a lot of that movie). I've heard her discussed in terms of her gender fluidity, which I've read up on a bit more now. The Australian model turned actress apparently grew up wanting to be a boy, but then eventually decided that her identity was most accurately described as a lesbian who embraces the ideas of gender fluidity that have been allowed to enter the public discourse in recent years. She uses female pronouns but also says if forced to choose a gender she would choose male. I guess that's the very definition of fluidity.

But that's not what I want to talk about today.

I want to talk about how I don't think I've ever seen an actor or actress who looks more like they walked out of a cut scene from a video game. (Wikipedia says "cutscene," but for some reason that word looks vaguely obscene to me.)

I had this weird experience of watching The Meg and saying "I know I'm watching a movie with live actors, so how did they get that CGI character in there?"

The combination of Rose's eyes, physique and hair style in this movie make her the embodiment of female badassery that video games having been trying to capture for years now, probably ever since the inception of Lara Croft.

And since that iconic image is supposed to be inherently feminine, as it is undoubtedly meant to appeal to heterosexual male gamers (some of them incels), it's all the more interesting that Rose has toyed with androgyny in her various public manifestations and modeling campaigns.

I looked her up in John Wick 2 and I get sort of the same impression of her there, but her hair is quite different, so maybe it's really the "female renegade hitwoman" hair style she has here that's making me think of video games. Although to say she looks "real" in Wick doesn't exactly capture her either:

I suppose when you come right down to it, Jason Statham's bald head, square jaw and superhuman fighting skills make him no less of a video game icon than Rose. But since I know The Meg's male lead from countless other films and contexts, he doesn't strike me as the creation of a keyboard and a bunch of code the way she does.

Anyway, The Meg wasn't nominated for any visual effects Oscars last year, so I guess I must conclude that Ruby Rose is flesh and blood.

Real love and spoiling what can't be spoiled

If you started reading this for a substantive analysis of the themes or filmmaking techniques of Olivia Wilde’s Booksmart, I’m sorry to disappoint you. I haven’t seen it yet. It doesn’t come out for another couple weeks in Australia.

But even without having seen it, I can tell you that it doesn’t seem like the type of movie that would be discussed on something referred to as a “spoiler special.”

That would be The Slate Spoiler Special, a recurring Slate podcast in which a roundtable of hosts (often featuring film critic Dana Stevens) goes through a recent film or TV show without worrying about keeping its secrets. I hate-listen to this podcast. Every once in a while it yields something I find genuinely useful, but more often than not, it inspires snark in me.

I won’t dredge all that up now because I’ve written about it before, but I often think the show is more appropriately referred to as Slate Plot Synopsis. That’s because the roundtable usually passes around the conch in a kind of tag team recitation of the plot, blow by blow, rarely providing what I would consider to be true analysis.

But the thing that’s annoying me in this case is that rarely does it actually involve spoilers. Oh, they tell you what happens in the plot, but more often than not, the plot is not particularly “spoilery.”

As in, it would seem, Booksmart. Now I understand that they have chosen to call the show this and they aren’t going to adjust the name of the show based on what movie they’re talking about, but I might suggest that it’s not that interesting to talk about a film on this show if it does NOT contain what we would traditionally think of as spoilers. As in, it would seem, Booksmart.

It just makes me laugh when they have this dramatic intro with lines of dialogue from the spoileriffic films The Sixth Sense, Soylent Green, Chinatown, Citizen Kane and Seven, then someone straightforwardly tells you that they’re going to be spoiling a teen romantic comedy that I understand has queer elements to it. (Maybe that’s the spoiler?)

If you’re wondering about the second half of my subject line, well, I’ll get to that now.

I didn’t listen to the Spoiler Special episode on Booksmart because I of course have not seen it yet. I did, however, listen to the segment they did on it on The Slate Culture Gabfest, on which Dana Stevens also serves as a co-host. And in a true case of the two shows cannibalizing each other, making the choice to cover it on Spoiler Special all the more ridiculous, Dana started by saying she thought she was all talked out on the movie after talking about it on the other show.

Dana did say she “really loved” the movie … which is not the same as loving it. (She went on to admit multiple problems with it.)

It made me realize that “really loving” something is kind of a ridiculous phrase.

When you say you “really love” a movie, that should be an instance of amplifying the degree to which you love it. But in reality, it’s a kind of backpedalling. If you really “really love” a movie, you just say you love it.

Which of these statements is stronger?

“I love Booksmart.”

“I really love Booksmart.”

Well, I guess the tone of voice factors in as well. And in Dana’s tone of voice, you could tell that “really loving” it meant being defensive about your affection for it and simultaneously acknowledging the reasons you might need to be defensive.

Love is love, someone wise once said.