Whether to legitimize parochial French cinema

My editor has been away in Europe for the better part of a month, so I’ve been doing my best to tailor my theatrical viewings to things I thought it was important to review in his absence. He can still post my reviews from the road, but he’s only had the time to see and review one movie himself while he was gone: Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, which he saw in Rome just for the novelty of seeing a movie while on holiday. It’s a sentiment I can relate to as I enjoy that quite a bit myself. In order to keep the site feeling current, I’ve been trying to write about two reviews per week to compensate for the absence of his usual output.

Though there are always things out that a person can review, I’ve got this idea that we really should review something within the first week of its Australian release if we don’t want to miss the boat on it. He differs with me slightly on that, thinking of every review as contributing long-term to the repository of our searchable reviews, which means it doesn’t really matter whether you review it a week or a year or a decade after it’s released. You can tell I was once a newspaperman, as I have the old-fashioned interest in there being a “news peg” for something you write – even if, in the case of a movie, the “news peg” is the release date itself.

Anyway, that brings us to this week, surely one of his last out of town (though he hasn’t actually told me when he’s returning). Thursday is a bit light on new releases. Hotel Transylvania 3 is coming out, but I’m not going to see that on Thursday night when it will make a perfect movie to watch with my kids – though whether that will happen this weekend, in time for me to review it, or next, when it will be past my preferred seven-day window, I can’t be sure. In any case, a lot of the time they don’t even schedule evening viewings of kids movies, though I do remember having the odd experience of watching Finding Dory at like 9:40 at night.

One thing that’s coming out is a movie whose trailer I have seen a number of times. It’s a French movie called Two is a Family – the title probably sounds nicer in French. (It’s called Demain Tout Commence, which I think translates as “Tomorrow Everything Begins.”) It stars two semi-international stars, Omar Sy (The Intouchables) and Clemence Poesy (In Bruges, 127 Hours, the last two Harry Potter movies). Their characters had a fling on holiday that produced a child – something he’s only aware of when she shows up on his doorstep, hands him the kid, and then buggers off.

My 2018 film rankings are severely lacking in foreign language films – in fact, I don’t yet have my first. I really like both the stars and it looks like a sweet movie. But I am philosophically conflicted about whether to see it at all, let alone review it.

See, this is not a French movie released to cross over to a world audience. This is a French movie intended to be seen by French people. And Australians, apparently.

What I really mean is: It hasn’t been released in the U.S., and given that the movie debuted in France in 2016, it does not seem likely to be.

For a long time I have been interested in compiling year-end lists of movies viewed based on trying to share common references with American critics, such that we are comparing apples to apples when we name our top ten. I hesitate even to include Australian films that I don’t think will receive a U.S. release, even though this is the actual country in which I review films. I’ve lightened up on that, which seems like a good stance to take when I am a member of a body called the Australian Film Critics Association, which gets me into unlimited movies in the theater for $75 a year. If I’m not even reviewing movies made by and for Australians, I’m doing something wrong. (And I’m pleased to say that one of these, Sweet Country, is still in my top five for the year.)

French movies made for French people are a bit different. The fact that an Australian distributor saw it fit to release the movie here means that there is thought to be an audience. I don’t know if the readers of our website are that audience, but I like to think they could be, and besides, I have a philosophy of seeing and reviewing films from a wide diversity of sources and about a wide diversity of people. Seeing and reviewing a movie made by French people for French people would be good for me.

But I still feel like a U.S. release is what marks a movie as “significant on the world stage,” and not just the niche product of a smaller film industry that only produces a couple dozen movies a year, if that. Two is a Family getting released in Australia means it has exceeded those modest aims, but it may not cross my personal threshold of what warrants a review.

Why is this, though? Are the tastes of American audiences really such an important standard? Especially when Americans are the people who elected Trump as president?

Would that it were so simple, to quote Ralph Fiennes and Alden Ehrenreich. Foreign language films have never been released in the U.S. because the distributor thought they would appeal to Trump voters. The distributor is targeting American intellectuals, liberals, cultural snobs. And those people’s opinions are important to me.

If Two is a Family is not considered to be a good bet for American cultural snobs, is it really better suited to the French equivalent of Trump voters?

Well that’s a big no, too. As it stars a Frenchman of African heritage, Omar Sy, it’s already alienating those people in France, of which there are many. So it passes that minimum standard of liberal correctness. If it’s good enough for France’s intellectuals, and if it’s good enough for Australia’s intellectuals, should I even care if it’s good enough for America’s intellectuals?

And France and Australia are, of course, not the only two countries where this movie has been released. Its IMDB page shows it has also opened in Belgium, Hungary, Estonia, Germany, Georgia, Russia, Ukraine, Netherlands, Greece, Croatia, Israel, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Poland, Norway, Brazil, Peru, Mexico, Uruguay, Sweden, Chile, Argentina, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan.

How can not having a release in one country – one increasingly stupid, frustrating and annoying country – give me pause?

It shouldn’t, and in fact, it won’t. Writing this blog post has given me the resolve to see and review Two is a Family. Done and done.

The only obstacle now might be that I may already be going to the movies on Wednesday and Friday nights. Wednesday, I’m thinking of going to the restoration of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Friday, I may cap drinks with coworkers with a drunken viewing of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, as I understand that may be the best way to view it. It’ll be hard to convince my wife, and myself, that I need to fit in a random little French movie on the night in between.

But dammit, that random little French movie is being supported by its Australian distributor, and I want to be the kind of film critic that legitimizes it with a review.

I guess we’ll see what happens.

Re-coen-sidering: The Ladykillers

This is the third in my bi-monthly 2018 series Re-coen-sidering, in which I’m looking (mostly) at Coen brothers films I didn’t get the first time, to see if that’s still the case.

This is supposed to be a series in which I give a second chance to Coen brothers movies others liked, but I did not particularly like. However, only one of the three films to date actually conforms to that concept.

In February, I started with a movie I love, Miller’s Crossing, just because I could only find five movies I didn’t particularly care for that I hadn’t already revisited for some other reason. Essentially, I used this series as an excuse for a second viewing. In April, I watched a movie that did qualify, as O Brother, Where Art Thou? is one others like but I don’t (that much).

This month, though, I reverted to an exception to the rule, watching a movie that pretty much no one likes.

The Ladykillers is the first of an eventual two remakes in the Coens’ career to date, the other being True Grit, which is what I’ll be watching in October according to the current schedule. It’s probably the least-liked Coens movie overall. It’s only the second lowest on my Coens chart on Flickchart – we’ll get to the lowest in August – but in the global list on Flickchart, it’s dead last. Though, I must say, still at a respectable 6718 out of 68551, putting it in the top ten percent of all movies in the database. That’s either a recognition of how much people like the Coens in general, or of how many more bad movies get made than good ones.

My first time seeing The Ladykillers was under unusual circumstances. It’s the only time I can remember having a suitcase with me while going to the movies.

It was late March of 2004, and I was on a week’s trip back to the east coast from Los Angeles. The first weekend featured my friend’s wedding in New Jersey. The second weekend featured my fantasy baseball draft in Philadelphia. In between, I’d visit with my parents in the Boston area. I also took a day in New York to visit some old haunts, as I’d lived there from 1998 to 2001. And apparently, also to see a movie at one of the theaters I used to frequent. But I believe I was staying with different friends on the Sunday night and the Monday night, so I dragged my bag with me around the city that Monday as I stopped in for coffee and meals with people.

It was also a weird time as I was deep in the throes of trying to get back together with my ex-girlfriend. She had been invited to the wedding also – something that took me aback, since she only knew the bride and groom because of me – and I’d tried to rekindle our relationship at the wedding. It was no go, and I’d say it probably put me in a bit of a funk. (But did not stop my efforts to get back together with her, which I continued on and off for the rest of the year until I met the woman I would end up marrying.)

Anyway, I don’t think any of that had anything to do with me liking or not liking The Ladykillers. Nothing about the movie had any thematic relationship to my circumstances at the time. It just wasn’t a very good movie.

However, given those circumstances, I thought there was at least some possibility I’d feel more favorably toward it this time around.

I got off to a bad start with the movie, though. Right before inserting the DVD into our player, I noticed the box said it was a full screen version of the film. You know, otherwise known as “pan and scan.” I avoid these mangled versions of the director’s vision whenever possible, but this was a library rental, and I didn’t feel optimistic enough about my chances of liking The Ladykillers significantly better to prioritize renting the intended widescreen version from some pay service. Still, as the Coens are known for their visual compositions, it was not a promising omen.

I do think I might have like it just a smidgen better than the first time. Just a smidgen.

I still don’t think this is the right role for Tom Hanks. The Coens are really self-indulgent with his dialogue, which is literary to the point of being baroque, and the overwriting very much informs Hanks’ performance. Even though some of his most famous roles, such as Forrest Gump, involve Hanks playing a character with a capital C, he’s usually better off playing some variation on his regular persona. The role of Goldthwaite Higginson Dorr – even the name is ridiculous – would be something more suited to the proclivities of Johnny Depp than someone like Hanks. He’s probably not the film’s biggest problem, but he doesn’t help anything either.

I’m also not really sure how well this film fares on racial issues. Whether it’s the Coens’ direction or Marlon Wayans’ natural tendencies as an actor, Wayans does a lot of bugging of his eyes that reminds us rather unfortunately of a history of uncharitable characterizations of African-Americans in film. There may be a reason the Coens have not had as many black characters front and center in their films as they do here, which is that the broadness of their comedic instincts may present surely unintentional but nonetheless unfortunate reminders of a shucking and jiving history of blacks on film that we are trying to put behind us. The “lady” of the title, played by Irma P. Hall, is not quite as broad but I can’t quite tell whether the film does right by her either. I do love the portrait of her dead husband, though, the film’s one bit of magical realism. It changes expressions from grumpy to bemused to alarmed to superior depending on what’s going on in the living room below.

I also have some complaints about other members of Hanks’ crew of subterraneous thieves, particularly Ryan Hurst as a football player so dumb that the only conclusion must be that the Coens asked him to play the role as mentally retarded. Like their approach to the movie in general, it’s too much.

The thing I liked a little better, though, was the way the characters are hoisted on their own pitards as they make their march to the trash barges constantly passing on the river below, one by one. I noticed this time that each of the thieves dies as some result of a fatal flaw, be it being slowed by IBS (J.K. Simmons’ character trying to escape with the cash a moment too late) or being dumb (Hurst’s character shoots himself in the face when he thinks a gun is not loaded). Like everything else, it’s at the broader end of the Coen spectrum, but I liked how it came together, mostly.

I do have to ask, though – what city produces so much trash that it has to send a full trash barge off to a trash island once an hour throughout the night?

When I watched O Brother, Where Art Thou? last month, I noticed a number of design details or other themes that had come up numerous times in the Coens’ work. I noticed only one this time that I wanted to bring up, but it relates to one of my favorite Coens movies so I thought it was worth mentioning. A recurring joke in this movie is how the widow’s cat, Pickles, is always getting out of the house and climbing up the tree in the yard. I couldn’t help but be reminded of how Ulysses, the cat in Inside Llewyn Davis, escapes the Gorfeins’ apartment and becomes symbolic of Llewyn’s Oddyssey-like journey through New York and Chicago.

There’s also a funny, though slightly gross, epilogue to my Sunday night viewing.

One thing I always remember about The Ladykillers is that it introduced me to the disorder known as IBS, Irritable Bowel Syndrome. Although I found it useful to know that this was an actual medical condition, my main association with it is how it is another too-broad-by-half element of the movie, especially since it really doesn’t play as much role in the events as the movie sets it up to play. Specifically broad is the expression on Simmons’ face as he tries to stifle a sudden onset of diarrhea before he needs to make a quick change of pants.

Then this morning, when I came to work, I must have eaten something that mildly disagreed with me in the previous 12 hours, because it was all I could do to get there and get to the bathroom before I had an accident myself. Fortunately, that was the only episode of loose stool rather than it being an all-day thing. But while trying to get to the bathroom that first time, I did have at least three instances where I focused every fiber of my being on making sure I held in the torrent that wanted to unleash itself.

I imagine the expression on my face was something like the one on Simmons’.

Okay, I teased it before, and now here you go: In August I confront the only Coen brothers movie I can truly say I hated, Burn After Reading. We’ll see how I go.

Todd Solondz: Bad taste never looked so bad

Todd Solondz is one of the "Hallowed 22." And by that I mean he directed one of the 22 films I have named as my favorite of their respective years, dating back to 1996 when I first started the practice. (And there have been exactly 22 different directors in those 22 years, as no one has ever directed more than one of my top-ranked films.)

Solondz got in pretty early in the whole shebang. He was the third director I presented this honor when I named Happiness my favorite film of 1998. He was a real dose of the eccentric after I'd handed my first two such honors to Al Pacino in 1996 (Looking for Richard) and James Cameron in 1997 (Titanic).

So you could say that Todd Solondz holds a special place in my heart.

But boy do I hate his movies.

I didn't imagine it would be this way, and it's not that I don't "get" Todd Solondz. After I saw (and obviously loved) Happiness, I then caught (and also liked very much) Welcome to the Dollhouse, his debut. I was on board with Todd Solondz and everything he was doing.

Then came 2001's Storytelling, which curdled my positive Solondz feelings right quick.

I don't suppose anything more outrageous really happens in this movie than in the others, but I could tell he was going for something more outrageous -- intentionally pushing buttons, seemingly only for that purpose. Yeah, I'm thinking of the bit about Robert Wisdom's Mr. Scott telling Selma Blair's Vi to repeat "Fuck me, nigger" while they're having sex. It just felt like empty provocation.

But that was actually the part of that movie I sort of liked. Its haphazard structure spends one third of the running time on the story of Vi and Mr. Scott and then two-thirds on a genuinely boring story involving Mark Webber. I don't even remember what it was about. I just remember it was boring and tedious.

I'm now learning that there was actually a third story featuring James van der Beek as a closeted football player. If Solondz stuck with these two other stories because he thought they worked, just imagine what a disaster this story must have been. (I think it was actually cut due to the explicit sex scene between men.)

Great Belle and Sebastian score, though.

I was so put off by Storytelling that I skipped 2004's Palindromes, and have not yet caught up with it in the 14 years since. I got the gist of what it was about, and how it featured like five different people playing the same character, and I just thought "No thanks." Apparently, it was already obvious to me that Solondz was continuing to stray from anything that was remotely digestible to anyone but himself.

I did watch Solondz' next film, 2009's Life During Wartime, as part of a series I wrote for another blog in 2013 in which I watched a movie set in each state. This one takes place in Florida. And it continues Solondz' "narrative sauciness," to put it generously, by functioning as a sequel to Happiness, only with the characters in that movie re-cast with different actors. Yep, sure Todd.

I don't hate Life During Wartime, but I think I give it a bit more credit than it deserves simply because of my feelings toward Happiness. It's an interesting failure. Its biggest problem is that it's incredibly stilted. Solondz has really lost his way in terms of directing actors.

I didn't intentionally skip 2012's Dark Horse. I knew it was Solondz and saw it available on streaming a number of times. Its running time was short, too. But no night was ever "the night" to watch it, and I still haven't seen it. I don't even know what it's about.

But for some reason I decided to come at his latest, 2016's Wiener-Dog, which I watched on Friday night, with a sense of optimism. I think it was something about the whimsical title, though I might have also subconsciously remembered that Greta Gerwig was in it. I didn't remember, until watching it, that Solondz was at it again; Gerwig's character is an older version of Heather Matarazzo's character from Welcome to the Dollhouse, Dawn Wiener. Can't you see the resemblance?

No one resembled anyone in Life During Wartime, which I thought was okay there, so I'm not going to get stuck on this one here. This was the least of Weiner-Dog's problems.

The most of its problems is what I considered its bad taste. Solondz has made his willingness to tackle taboo subjects -- rape, pedophilia, masturbation -- his calling card, and I obviously didn't mind in Happiness, which includes all three. But if you don't do something like this right, it just looks like you're trying to get attention, for all the wrong reasons.

The first of the four stories got me off on the wrong foot. The titular wiener dog has a nasty bout of diarrhea as a result of eating a granola bar with chocolate chips in it, and we get to see lots, and lots, and lots of dog diarrhea. But the amounts of dog diarrhea we see -- including a slow pan down a street strewn with it -- is probably what we'd see if a dog ate a chocolate cake or a whole bag of chocolate chips. Not half of a granola bar that, from the looks of it, had about three chocolate chips in it. So yes, if you're going to give me dog diarrhea, I'm at least asking for realism in my dog diarrhea.

But I probably should have started with the story Julie Delpy's character tells her young son about dog rape. I can't even remember her reason for telling it, though I think it had something to do with being a justification for getting the dog spayed. She goes on and on about how the dog she had when she was growing up was raped by another dog in the woods, and how this dog went around raping other dogs and giving them venereal diseases. The boy is like eight.

Funny, right? Oh Todd, you card.

Look, I'm not some blushing conservative who cannot listen to discussion of dog rape in a movie. But I just wonder what Solondz' point is. It's not delivered as humor by Delpy, or if so, it's an incredibly misguided idea about the delivery of what's meant to be comedy. It just seems to be another one of those instances of Solondz rubbing our noses in something naughty he's saying, the mere saying of which strikes him as some kind of victory. Be rude, be crude, but do it with a purpose other than just trying to show off that you are free from the shackles of other people's good manners.

The movie progresses on to three other boring stories, only the last of which I sort of liked. The second one involves Gerwig's character and a heroin addict played by Kieran Culkin, who go on a road trip to tell his brother, who has Down's Syndrome, and his brother's wife, who also has Down's Sydrome, about the death of their dad. Never mind that you would call someone to tell them about his own father's death, rather than make a long road trip there. Never mind the fact that the actors with Down's Syndrome do not seem to be very well served by this movie. The thing that annoyed me most about this sequence was that Culkin's character sees Gerwig's character in a convenience store, recognizing her as a person he went to school with, then blows her off rather rudely, then leaves the convenience store and pets the leashed wiener dog, then abruptly invites Gerwig's character to accompany him on this long road trip. Solondz would never want to give us an interaction between characters that feels realistic; oh no. To me, it just reads like something that would never happen, and what's the point.

The thing that annoyed me about the structure overall is that the movie sets us up to see how this wiener dog is passed between owners. See, Dawn Wiener works in a veterinarian's office, which is how she gets the dog initially after its near-fatal bout with diarrhea. Delpy and family took her to be put down, but Dawn saves her from this fate (despite the fact that she must have to do things like this on a daily basis), and that launches her story. All well and good, right?

Well no. After the dog is left with Culkin's brother and his wife, we have no idea how it gets in to the hands of Danny DeVito's miserable film professor, or then into the hands of Ellen Burstyn's miserable elderly woman. If you're going to start with a high concept of a dog passing between owners, and show us the first transition between owners, why just drop it after that? The answer is because Solondz does not hold himself accountable to any narrative conventions. He thinks his freedom from these conventions is what makes him great. I just think it's lazy, or worse, indifferent.

I did kind of like the last segment, but only because of this one weird fantasy sequence where Burstyn is confronted by a dozen eerie versions of herself as a young girl with brilliant red hair. The girl talks in a voice reminiscent of the twins in The Shining, and it's a discomfiting reminder to this character of the opportunities in life she passed up, leaving her as this shell of a person. But the scene lasts for about a minute, after which Solondz ends the movie with another of his bad jokes. I won't bother to tell you what that joke is.

As I write these words, I think Solondz, if he were reading this, would imagine me as being exactly the type of person he makes his movies to piss off. But see, I was not always that person. Possibly his most controversial film, when you combine its subject matter with the level of prominence that allows something to become controversial, is Happiness, my #1 movie of 1998.

I just think Solondz needs to do a better of job doing what he's trying to do, and he has not done so for 20 years now. He's capable of it. There's proof. But he seems more interested in squatting, shitting, and calling it art.

I need a lot less of Todd Solondz' diarrhea.

Not the story of a time-traveling pimp

One of my favorite jokes in a movie with a lot of them, Mike Judge's Idiocracy, is how the prostitute played by Maya Rudolph always fears the reprisals of a pimp named Upgrade -- even when she's spent 500 years in a cryogenic sleep.

He's actually not named Upgrade, technically. He's named Upgrayyed, as we learn once when we see his name in print.

When Luke Wilson's Joe tries to make her see reason by suggesting that the vengeful pimp would have died 450 years ago, Rudolph's Rita counters that Upgrayyed is determined enough to get what he wants that he would travel through time in order to come after her. Or something to that general effect.

Any time we hear the word "upgrade" -- because we almost never hear the word "upgrayyed" -- my wife and I will say it in Rudolph's voice. It never ceases to amuse us.

So you can imagine my disappointment when I went to the movie Upgrade on Thursday night and found it not to be the story of Rita's dogged pursuer.

In fact -- as you probably know since it's been out in the U.S. a lot longer -- Upgrade is about a man who is paralyzed in an attack that kills his wife, who gets an implant in his neck that not only allows him to walk, but to become a kind of killing machine in pursuit of vengeance.
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For how much Upgrade is like other movies that have come before it in general concept, I was surprised by how original it actually felt.

See, the guy is kind of like an empty vessel when the thing in his neck -- which is called Stem, and which resembles a miniature version of a woman's hair clip -- takes control of his functions. And so a scene in which he's repeatedly smashing mugs and plates over the head of an assailant is pretty funny, as it allows actor Logan Marshall-Green to look on with horror while it's happening, unleashing comments like "Oh God" as his hands complete these actions.

It even has a bit of a clever twist at the end, though don't worry, this is not the type of movie where saying there's a twist is any surprise. It's directed by Leigh Whannell of Saw fame, after all.

The movie about the pimp would have been good too.

... and incredibly close

It was really fortuitous that I went in person, three hours before showtime, to buy my kids and me Incredibles 2 tickets on Sunday. If I’d been 15 minutes later, I probably wouldn’t have gotten them at all.

I had to do it in person rather than online because that’s the only way for me to get a free ticket as a critic. And I had to do it three hours early because it was raining cats and dogs and pigs and horses, so that theater was gonna be full, especially on opening weekend.

I could have done it after my son’s 11:45 a.m. weekly basketball class, rather than before my son’s 11:45 a.m. weekly basketball class. But it was already going to be borderline ridiculous that we were going home for lunch for an hour between basketball and the movie, and stopping to get tickets would have made it even more so. (The gap was too long just to kill time, especially when it was raining cats and dogs and pigs and horses.)

And besides, if I’d gone afterwards, I wouldn’t have gotten tickets.

Even at 11:30 a.m. only the front row was still available for the 2:05 show. See, most people actually buy their tickets online.

And that’s where the subject of this post finally comes in. (You knew I was getting there.)

We did indeed see The Incredibles 2 incredibly close, though it was not extremely loud – I was surprised to notice myself straining to hear the dialogue at times. I suppose that could have just been the steady rumble of a theater filled with children on a Sunday afternoon.

And though I was initially concerned, if not for myself then for my kids, about having the Incredibles dwarf and consume us, it does not seem to have unduly affected any of our experiences. My parents and other parents of their generation used to tell us we’d hurt our eyes if we sat too close, but that seems to have fallen by the wayside these days. Kids sit too close to screens all day long. It’s a byproduct of modern existence.

Being so close did make me feel even more immersed in the tremendous retrofuturism I was seeing on screen, glimmering at me in all its glory. In my review (which you can read here) I called the movie a Rolls Royce, as that was all I could think when I watched it. Pixar movies have looked fantastic before, but I’m not sure I can remember one looking this fantastic. Which I suppose only makes sense given that they’re improving the technology a little bit each time out.

Anyway, don’t need to go into too many details on my thoughts as my review pretty much says it all.

But yeah, if any movie is a front row kind of movie, this one is.

Tron's journey from dated to timeless

The thing about Tron that likely lingers with most of us -- and which was one of the chief perceived advantages of making a modern update in 2010 -- is how dated the effects look. A good encapsulation of that impression came in that great Simpsons Treehouse of Horror episode where Homer steps into the 3D world, and it's likened to Tron -- a movie all the other characters say they have not seen (except Chief Wiggum, who quickly changes his answer to "no" so he does not stand out). I'm not sure why the writers wanted to engage in a little round of Tron bashing, but that's clearly what it is.

I would have probably subscribed to that hot take, as it had been since the 1980s that I saw it, and only had my occasional exposure to stills to go on when formulating an impression adjusted for modernity.

So I was taken aback by just how absorbing I found the world when I saw it for the first time in probably 30 years on Saturday night.

It could have just been my new TV talking, but what others call dated, I called a wondrous stylized odyssey.

Calling Tron's effects dated feels like an incredible misnomer ... but it's not because they were never dated. I think at one time they probably were.

In the 1990s they probably looked dated. Very dated. But what was originally an attempt at a "realistic" look inside a computer fantasy world now seems like something with its own particular aesthetic that just looks awesome. The new effects Tron: Legacy was capable of in 2010 may have "looked better" or "looked more realistic," but they didn't plunge me into a world like I felt like I was plunged Saturday night.

I think it's in part because we are trying to do retro science fiction more than we used to. Tron is not retro futurism, an aesthetic I would more ascribe to something like Tomorrowland (or The Incredibles 2, which I will write about tomorrow). But Tron fits comfortably into a world where retro futurism is something we crave seeing done well.

It also, ironically, fits well into a world where we celebrate practical effects. There's nothing practical about Tron, but there is something quaint about it, something the icy digital creations of Tron: Legacy just didn't understand.

But to be clear, watching Tron today is not just an exercise in nostalgia, in being pleased with the limitations of earlier modes of filmmaking in and of themselves. Tron actually looks good. If someone today could make a celebration of retro science fiction that looks as good as Tron looks, they'd be quite happy with themselves. The closest I can think of someone accomplishing that might be something like Speed Racer.

There's something about the simple, blocky designs that really works, but also feels like a conscious aesthetic choice now, even if it was not then. There's something about it that feels very clean and lean, with the pristine straight lines of the light cycle light trails, and the perfect circles in that microchip version of jai alai they play.

And again this could be the TV talking, but the depths that were conjured by the movements of the camera also gave the world a sense of space and dimension. I dove down into it.

Before you think I'm going to start proclaiming Steven Lisberger's movie as some kind of masterpiece, I'll tell you that the plot was confusing enough that I was basically left zoning out. I couldn't really explain to you what happens or why it happens, except in the broadest strokes. I also thought some of Jeff Bridges' choices on how to play the character were a bit broad.

But as a visual spectacle, it was glorious, and I enjoyed every damn minute of it.

Tron is not a masterpiece, but I think it is properly described as a "classic," one that has transcended the apparent limitations of the moment in which it was made to become something that just looks beautiful. I'll look forward to my next viewing much sooner than 30 years from now.

Mea culpa on Atlanta

This isn't a TV blog. You know that.

But I made it one momentarily by bringing up Atlanta in the context of discussing Donald Glover just a little over a month ago. (Which in itself was more about Childish Gambino's "This is America" than any of his film exploits, though I did see it as a bit of a Solo tie-in, justifying its inclusion on the blog.)

I couldn't have said anything of substance about Atlanta back then, because I'd only seen a single episode -- one I caught on the plane at that. However, I thought I knew enough about the show to be a bit dismissive of it. For some reason, I thought it was Glover's attempt to "be cool," after his character on Community had been so dorky. This is what I said about Glover in that piece:

"It reflected a conscious choice to trade in his nerd bonafides for something more clearly hip and stylish."

"... Earnest Marks was the coolest cat on screen."

I had actually wanted to be more dismissive except I was conscious of how little I did actually know about the show.

Some of that dismissiveness was a result, I will admit, of this poster. Not knowing the other two characters and finding this to be a big break from what Glover was doing on Community, I guess I thought of it as an instance of Glover "forsaking his roots" -- "roots," of course, being a very weighted word when it comes to an African American performer. But I have a long history of being mildly annoyed when someone thinks that "what got them there" is now passe, something they should turn their back on. This was my impression of Glover vis-a-vis Atlanta.

And then I actually watched Atlanta.

"This is America" re-attuned my wife and me to the fact that we had always wanted to watch Atlanta, and a very little digging made us realize we had that opportunity right now. It plays in Australia on a network called SBS, and SBS has an on demand component that allows you to pick up whatever shows you want for as long as they're sitting there. As it happens, both seasons of Atlanta were sitting there, ready for us to watch them.

And in about a month's time, we've watched all but the final two episodes of the second season. That may take us a little longer than what our pace has been to this point, simply because we want to savor what remains before we have no more Atlanta in our lives until next season.

I could never have guessed how much this show would play by its own rules. I'm not sure I knew what I thought the show would be, outside of the posturing I thought Glover was guilty of, but the one episode I saw did give me some idea of what I thought its narrative thrust would be. Episode one of season one is devoted mostly to Earn (Glover) trying to represent Paper Boi (the wonderful Bryan Tyree Henry), his cousin and a burgeoning rap star. I kind of figured it would be a fairly plot heavy show about the trials and tribulations of making it in the music industry, and though that would be interesting, it did not feel like it would be particularly novel.

Having watched most of Atlanta now, I don't think I can imagine a more novel show on television. And it's only gotten better in its second season.

It being plot heavy could not have been further from the truth. There are a couple episodes where they nudge forward the narrative of Earn's attempts to manage Paper Boi and to pull his own broke ass up by his bootstraps, and of course, that's still the narrative backbone of the series. But it's a particularly squishy backbone, and the series is happy to have three or four consecutive episodes where how or whether Earn is managing him at all is not even touched on.

What is touched on? The day-to-day lives of its characters as black people living in Atlanta, though even that makes it sound more pedantic than it is. Each episode is interested in some fashion with the social norms experienced by blacks in America, either with regards to whites or in among themselves, but there isn't a single moment of this series where any message feels obvious or foregrounded. Many of the episodes are, in fact, these weird one-off exercises in comedic drama, total departures from the story and even from any recognizable narrative convention. Like the episode where Paper Boi gets involved in a bizarre odyssey with his barber while trying to get a haircut. Like the episode where Earn's girlfriend Van (the wonderful Zazie Beetz) attends a New Year's Eve party at Drake's house. Like the episode where Paper Boi's friend Darius (the wonderful Lakeith Stanfield) tries to pick up a piano from an oddball music legend who has been whitening his skin (Glover). In fact, I think those may have been three consecutive episodes (though not in that order) in season two.

If I were trying to find the most similar TV show -- that I've watched, anyway -- it would be Louie, in its disregard for traditional episode structure, or the role of each piece within the series' overall structure. But even that is a poor comparison, and not only because Louis C.K. has been revealed as a sexual deviant. Atlanta goes outside the box in ways Louie had only started to touch on.

There were times during season one when I felt a bit frustrated by the series' unwillingness to be more like the thing I thought it was going to be. This was part of that adjustment period when I was still figuring out what Atlanta was. In season two I fully embrace everything that it is, and don't wish it to be anything other than exactly what it is. And can't imagine a better way to spend 24 minutes of viewing time. (Honestly, it feels shorter than that -- each episode flies by.)

I've got two left, and then however long until season three.

Of which there were certainly be one, but I hope it's not the last. Glover strikes me as the type of person for whom to stand still is to die. Even when a show is doing as many things right as Atlanta is, he will probably not want to make five or six seasons of it because at some point it will start to feel less vital than it currently does. At some point the ideas will start to run out, and the show will have overstayed its welcome. I suspect Glover will reach that moment before we will.

Until then, I'm going to appreciate the hell out of it. It's not, in fact, Glover's attempt to "be cool" -- Earn isn't even all that cool much of the time. It's Glover's attempt to inject something true and incisive and scintillating into the entertainment landscape, and he has done so, brilliantly.

The reason I called it "Ju-bad-ji"

My friends and I have a clever way of indicating when we think a movie is bad, one that started years ago and has unaccountably held on to the present day. And by “clever” I mean “incredibly lame but it consistently makes us laugh.” And that is to replace a word or even a syllable of a word in the title with the word “bad.”

Example: “Wild Wild West was Wild Wild Bad.” Or maybe “Wild Wild West was Bad Bad West.” I think you get the idea.

Sometimes we’ll get even more clever and use a synonym for “bad,” one that perhaps is a better phonic match for whatever syllable we’re replacing. Let’s call it growth over the years.

One of the first examples I ever remember, though, was when I saw Jumanji and made this pronouncement about its poor cinematic quality: “Jumanji? How about Ju-bad-ji.”

I’ve continued to not like Jumanji whenever I think about it, though my one viewing remains sometime in the late 1990s, likely within a year of when it was released. I’m quite sure I did not see it in the theater, but I think I also would have prioritized it within a year or two. Anyway, it’s been 20 years, but what you felt about a movie tends to be something that sticks with you. And I thought this one was bad, as memorialized in my clever (there’s that word again) alternate title for it.

But in the last six months, my relationship with the Jumanji brand has undergone a change. You’ll remember from this post that my sister gifted my kids the storybook, complete with audio CD read by Robin Williams, for Christmas. Probably not coincidentally in terms of the timing of her gift, there was also a Jumanji reboot released. We both opened the present from her and watched Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle while we were on a five-day holiday down on the Mornington Peninsula over New Year’s. The kids loved the movie and became addicted to the storybook, or rather, its audio version. We’ve since listened to Williams read that story so many times that my wife and I have a dozen of his line readings that we find particularly snort-worthy – not because we like the line readings, but because we find them kind of ridiculous. (Sorry Robin – R.I.P.)

The next logical thing to do was to watch the original cinematic adaptation of Chris Van Allsburg's story with my kids. I knew it wasn’t a whole lot like the book, which plays out in only 18 minutes on the CD, and that’s with some pregnant pauses and filler to stretch it out a bit. But I also knew it was possible they’d love it, and that I had misjudged it. I knew those younger than me consider it a childhood classic (I was in my early 20s when it was released in 1995), so maybe I was missing something, or just at the wrong age to appreciate it. Maybe seeing it through parent lenses would soften my hard heart.

Nope.

We finally watched it on Monday, which was a holiday to celebrate the queen’s birthday (two months after her actual birthday). We logically might have watched it much sooner, as it’s been available streaming on Stan all year. Our delay was because my wife wanted to be involved, but is always the one with the schedule least likely to allow it.

When we had to cancel some other plans for the day because my kids were both getting sick, I thought we’d finally landed on the right day for Jumanji. My wife seemed to agree, but then eventually realized she’d be better served using those two hours when others were occupied to catch up on some work. Still wanting her to be involved, I told her we’d try to find something else to watch instead – and she accepted that offer.

Disappointed, I listlessly poked through the other streaming options, options we’d already scrubbed pretty well. The kids are at ages where their tastes are pretty divergent. The seven-year-old won’t watch anything that he finds too baby-oriented, and the four-year-old wants things that are more baby-oriented than even I want to watch. There are a lot of classics right in the middle of those two extremes, but we’d either already seen them, or neither of them wanted them.

I couldn’t believe I was trying to sell them on the trailers for a couple movies I hadn’t seen (3 Ninjas and Shark Tale), or one I’d seen and liked, but didn’t look like it held up too well while watching its trailer (Antz). The afternoon seemed doomed.

But then I pulled a bit of a fast one.  

Jumanji is one of about a dozen titles that are writ large at the top of Stan's children's section, movies Stan is trying to push on you as some kind of featured title. You can scroll through many more if you drill down to the smaller rows of more specialized options, but the top of the page splashes the titles and artwork of the featured movies one per page, with a greater than or less than symbol on either side for you to click to get the next one.

I didn't have to actually suggest Jumanji ... but what if we "innocently" scrolled past it while considering our options, and the kids demanded it?

And that's exactly what happened. I "innocently" went and reported this outcome to my wife, who relented on her wish for us to save it -- probably because she knew deep down that the next time a situation like this arose, she'd probably opt out again.

Well, I think I saved her a pretty tedious 100 minutes at the movies. Jumanji was about as bad as I remembered it, and the two-star rating I'd given it (retroactively) on Letterboxd was more than fair.

There are any number of shortcomings I could linger on, but I'll concentrate on just a few:

1) The film has an odd ineptitude at how to raise the stakes. As the four players (two kids and two adults) work their way through an interminably protracted game, the jungle beasts that are becoming real don't actually increase in magnitude as the game moves along. In fact, the oversized mosquitoes that emerge first from the game are, in a way, some of the game's most threatening creatures. A few days later I've already blocked out the sequence that the other threats arrive, but they don't escalate in any obvious way, such that it feels like a bunch of disconnected set pieces strung together only by the characters occasionally returning to the board for someone else to play their turn, breathing deeply and looking at each other ominously. And there are like eight of these episodes, so each time it feels a little less like anything matters.

2) The visual effects. Cruel to dwell on these when obviously they would become dated within a short time, but the effects in this movie are bad. We would expect that of the visual effects, which were cutting edge for 1995, but the thing I might have found most distracting was the practical effects involved in the animatronic lion. I figure there should have been a way to train a real lion to do the fairly minimal things it needed to do, without endangering the actors. This lion looks like shit. Here:

I don't know, maybe you can't tell from that.

3) This one may be on me, but this movie is pretty inappropriate for kids my children's age. The main character, whom Williams plays as an adult, is Allen Parrish, the boy who got sucked into the game back in the 1960s. The effect of him being sucked into the game disturbed me even when I was in my 20s, so I can only imagine how it must have chilled my kids, though they didn't say anything about it. But that isn't really my bone of contention about this. Because no one believes that Allen got sucked into the game, a story develops that his father killed him "and chopped him into little pieces." The possible death of a child is a big enough deal; his dismemberment into hundreds of chunks of human flesh and viscera is quite something else.

4) And then there were just the little details that bothered me. When Allen is beaten up by bullies at the beginning, he emerges from this 30-second skirmish with a full-on black eye. Don't you know, Jumanji, that bruises like that only develop after the initial blows have had the chance to settle in?

One bonus thing that made me a bit uncomfortable: David Alan Grier as the town police officer. His portrayal is not actually "wrong" in any respect you could easily identify if you were trying to provide evidence in a court of law. But there's an awful lot of bugging out of eyes and screaming. Just didn't feel all that racially sensitive to me.

The kids loved it though. Well, liked it anyway.

I guess now I'll be due for my second viewing of The Polar Express, to see which artificially distended version of a beloved Chris Van Allsburg storybook actually fares worse.

Taking new things for spins

It's been a weekend of trying new things on the movie home viewing front.

Originally this post was going to be entitled "Taking our new TV for a spin," but then a second "new" type of experience presented itself, even though it's of a more superficial nature.

But let's start with the big one.

We got a new TV this past week. It was something of a surprise, as in, we didn't even really talk about it. In fact, it was all transacted in a couple emails while I was at work one day.

We've had a pretty modestly sized 30" TV since moving to Australia, even replacing it with the same 30" make and model when the first one died after about two-and-a-half years. The price was right so we hoped it wouldn't have the same mechanical failure this time, and it hasn't so far. But some additional stability in our finances (I got some new security in my job) and end of financial year sales tempted my wife to check out the possibilities for an upgrade. A scant few days later, a 43" TV arrived on our doorstop.

I guess that means it's nearly 50% larger, and the difference is significant.

We originally expected it last Friday, and in fact, my wife made sure she didn't stray far from the house or for very long, in order to be around for their ridiculous 12-hour delivery window. It didn't come that day, meaning I couldn't revisit a visually dynamic favorite movie from my collection last weekend as anticipated. That was the way I wanted to symbolically break the thing in. But it did arrive the following Monday, meaning I ultimately had to make my first movie on it ... High Plains Drifter, which you know I really didn't like if you read this post.

But I knew another weekend, a three-day weekend, was on tap in just a few short days. We celebrate the queen's birthday here in Australia, so no one is working on Monday. Even though the queen's actual birthday is in April. But we have like four other holidays in April and none in June. (In fact, without the queen's birthday celebrated in June, we wouldn't have a single public holiday between the end of April and the middle of September. And that September holiday was just introduced since I've moved here, meaning the drought formerly lasted until November.)

So this past Friday night I planned the real debut of the new TV after its previous "soft open." And that was ... Perfume: The Story of a Murderer.

Perfume is one of a dozen "new favorites" that I watch every couple years ... "new" being defined as "post 2000" I guess. And since I do watch these movies pretty frequently, I was kind of surprised to see it had been more than three years since my last Perfume viewing. I originally planned to involve my wife in this viewing, since she had stated a desire to watch the movie again herself, having seen it only once. But she was too tired on Friday night, for any movie let alone a 140-minute one. I imagine she saw the disappointment in my eyes, and never wanting to hold up one of my own viewings for her schedule, she urged me to continue with it anyway. (She'll probably be content to wait another two years for her second viewing, at which point I'll be ready for my seventh.)

And yeah, it looked pretty effing great on the new TV.

This is going to be fun.

I should also mention it is, of course, a smart TV, but I couldn't have anticipated the ways in which that intelligence would present itself. Without even pairing them, the TV now has dominion over our BluRay player. That's right, its remote control allows us to control the BluRay player controls. Which is no small thing, because our BluRay remote has been dead for at least two years and we've been using an app on our phones to control it. That app relies on the WiFi, so if we are having internet problems, we can't use it. BluRays or DVDs are a good alternative to Netflix if we are having internet issues ... but not if we can't play them. (There are certain things you can control with buttons on the front, but certain things you can't, and some of those things are insurmountable.) So yeah, this is big, and though I suppose it also relies on the internet in some way, it's possible it does not. Hey, I don't profess to fully understand all this stuff.

The second night of the three-day weekend didn't involve another visual feast on the order of Perfume, but it did feature my second "new" type of viewing experience of the weekend.

Namely, I've got a new supplier for my movie kiosk needs.

Even though the rest of the world has moved away from physical media, I still like going to a kiosk and renting a movie ... even if it usually involves going out of my way on the second day to return it. It's the last vestige of the experience of going to a proper video store, which is now well and truly dead.

Kiosk rentals looked to be dead too, as I have witnessed and written about the steady demise of the Hoyts kiosks I've been using since moving here. They may be entirely gone now; I'm not going to their possibly former website at this moment to find out, as it's too depressing.

But in a sign of some optimism for the delivery method if not for Hoyts in particular, the last Hoyts kiosk I used, at the Woolworth's in Moonee Ponds, has actually been replaced with a different brand of kiosk. In all previous other instances I'd witnessed of a Hoyt kiosk vanishing, it disappeared from the location without a successor. But the Moonee Ponds Woolworth's now has a Video Ezy kiosk where the Hoyts one formerly stood.

Pretty much the same deal, except I think the movies are $4 rather than $3.50. That, of course, is not a deal breaker for me. The time and gas required to get to and from the store probably cost me twice that much.

That's not my closest Woolworth's, but I was going that way Saturday morning anyway because I needed to pick up my bike from the bike shop, where it had undergone some repairs. I had gotten a glimpse of the new Video Ezy kiosk on a previous occasion, and this time I planned to use it.

And fortunately, the first movie that came up when I browsed was one my wife and I both wanted to see: Game Night.

Alas, she ended up skipping out on this viewing too. We were over at a friend's house for dinner last night, and though I thought we might return around 8:30, it was nearly 10 o'clock when we got home. I will of course watch a movie starting after 10, especially a short one like Game Night. Not so with my wife, who was ready to retire to the bedroom with the TV shows that she watches that I don't.

Unfortunately, the drawbacks of the single-night rental experience were underscored by Saturday night's example. If I'd had my druthers, I might have put off my viewing of Game Night for a time when a) my wife could also watch and b) I myself was not so tired. But if $4 won't break the bank for me, $8 might, so I couldn't/wouldn't extend my rental of the movie a second night.

And so I can barely tell you what happened in Game Night, as I slept several times during it. I paused it each time and rewound when I noticed I'd slept through some actual content, but the whole thing is a bit of a mishmash in my memory. I do know that I marginally enjoyed it.

And also that it looked pretty effing great on our new TV.

A word on the age of the Ocean siblings

Spoilers for Ocean’s Eight related to something that is literally revealed in the first minute of the movie. Proceed with caution if you don’t want the first minute of the movie spoiled.

I hate to say this, but I couldn’t help noticing in Sandra Bullock’s first scene of Ocean’s Eight how obvious it is that she’s had plastic surgery. It seems that many if not most actresses do it, so I shouldn’t be surprised. If it prolongs their “prime” – defined here as that period when they can still get cast in roles with big paydays – then it’s a worthwhile investment, I’m sure. But I guess I thought my Sandy would be willing to grow old gracefully.

Anyway, the point of this observation is not to body shame. (And to be fair, I never noticed it again the way I noticed it in her first scene, during her parole hearing.) It’s to note the incongruity between the age Bullock is trying to play, and the age her character must really be.

As you probably know, Bullock plays Debbie Ocean, the sister of Danny Ocean from the original Ocean’s trilogy. (Or, I should say, the trilogy that grew out of the remake of the original original movie, starring the rat pack.) We wouldn’t necessarily know how old Danny Ocean is, or was, if it weren’t for the fact that he is now a “was.” One of the first things we learn in Ocean’s Eight is that Danny Ocean is pushing up the daisies. Or rather, he’s entombed in one of those marble walls in a mausoleum, the dates of his birth and death engraved on the front. Anyway, he’s dead.

I’ll get back to the issue of Danny Ocean being dead later.

His age is the thing that interests me now, and not only because it contains a funny continuity error that was likely the result of reshoots. That continuity error is that his death year is alternately listed as 2017 and 2018 in this early scene in the mausoleum. When we see it in close up, it’s 2018, but there’s at least one background shot where it’s listed as 2017. I suspect maybe at one point this movie was supposed to come out last year, and they didn’t realize they still had the old death year listed in some of the shots. (Side note: Who cares if he died this year or a year ago? Does a 2017 death year make the film seem somehow less of-the-moment?)

What interests me here is the birth year, which was the same in both shots: 1958. Interestingly, this is NOT the birth year of George Clooney, who played Danny Ocean, and is a few years younger than arguably his most famous role, having been born in 1961 himself. Anyway, the 1958 birth year means Danny was anywhere from 58 to 60 when he died, depending on which death year you’re looking at.

So Debbie Ocean is supposed to be …

The movie goes to great pains to suggest she’s still in her 40s, and possibly even her early 40s if you wanted to follow Bullock’s plastic surgery to the logical conclusions of what it is trying to accomplish. Bullock is actually 53, so she’d be only five to seven years younger than her brother if we were going with the actual age of the actress. But this movie wants her to be 47 at the oldest, I imagine, which makes her a full decade younger than her brother, and not the contemporary the film sort of asserts that she is.

This is a really minor point upon which to expend 700 words.

Okay, so let’s get back to Danny Ocean being dead. And now I should probably include a second SPOILER WARNING because I’m going to spoil something that doesn’t come until the very end of the movie, though doesn’t ultimately have a whit to do with this actual story.

Such a big deal is being made of Danny being dead – like, it gets mentioned approximately every seven minutes of screen time – that the only conclusion seems to be that it’s setting us up for the same kind of long con that the movie’s narrative itself is about. You only mention Danny Ocean being dead this often if it turns out he’s not actually dead. Faking his death would be a very Danny Ocean thing to do.

Yet he is actually dead. Or, the movie never tells us he isn’t.

The film’s last scene involves Bullock returning to that mausoleum and pouring a martini to toast Danny’s memory. There was no way that scene was not going to include George Clooney strolling in as a surprise guest. No way for anything but that to happen.

And yet the credits do roll and he does not appear. I stayed around for the entire credits expecting a Marvel-style stinger in which Clooney shows up and winks at us, suggesting the possibility of an Ocean’s Fourteen or at least that he might appear in Ocean’s Nine, assuming this film is successful enough to warrant an Ocean’s Nine. But again I was disappointed.

So why exactly was Danny Ocean dead? What did that do for the story except kind of bum us out?

The only thing I can think of is that George Clooney said “Please, I don’t want any rumors of Steven making another Ocean’s sequel, and to cut those off at the pass, I’d really like you to kill off Danny Ocean.” I can’t really see the logic in it – Hollywood is traditionally about leaving open the possibility of sequels except where it’s absolutely necessary not to – but it’s possible he did it.

Or it’s possible this is just the longest of long cons and that Danny being alive will be the big surprise in Ocean’s Nine.

However, if you take this film only on its own terms, the film decided to kill him off without having any real rationale for doing so, or any payoff. Yet still felt it was necessary to keep mentioning him throughout the narrative, to keep his ghost in the background. One would think that this movie would only need a mention of the character to get it shoved off in the right direction, then could just fly on its own. Why keep coming back to him?

I suspect there’s more to this story and that it will just be some kind of delayed reveal for the sequel, but it definitely gave me pause.

When "it was a different time" just doesn't cut it

I had a far more negative reaction to Clint Eastwood's High Plains Drifter than I probably would have at a time we were all a bit less woke about gender politics in the movies. But I hope I would have had a pretty negative reaction to it even then.

We use the phrase "it was a different time" to excuse a lot of tone deaf treatment of women and minorities in films from decades past ... not to mention, I suppose, to excuse the behavior of Hollywood men who thought it was okay to massage the shoulders of production assistants and occasionally grab a little bit of their asses. We're moving past that second one I hope.

But I still don't understand what the hell Clint Eastwood was thinking in High Plains Drifter.

One of the first things his "man with no name" does in this film is rape a woman. Yes, you heard that right. When a woman comes up to him in the street and gets a bit sassy with him -- after he's just killed three men in the tonsorial parlor, mind you -- I at first thought he was going to be comparatively chivalrous and laugh it off. Even when she slaps the cigar out of his mouth, I figured his reaction would be muted. I mean, he's not going to hit a woman, is he?

Well, he doesn't hit her. He does something far worse.

He grabs her by the arm, hauls her off to a local barn, lays her down in the straw and forces himself on her.

Presumably because Eastwood had an instinct toward what he thought would preserve some of the sympathy for this character, he of course has her "get into it," of sorts, halfway through. I mean, she's a slut, and sluts like to get fucked, don't they? His character would have only done that because he could "see it in her eyes," right?

Ugh.

I was frankly aghast at what I was watching. Yes, this had happened.

I suppose you could say that Eastwood was making some kind of commentary about bad men, and including his own character in that group. This was considered to be a revisionist western even 19 years before the revisionist western he is most associated with, the best picture winner and true classic Unforgiven. You might even say it was bold and/or "brave" for him to throw away a good deal of the audience's sympathy ten minutes into the movie, assuming he had enough sensibility to recognize that an act like this would do that.

But I didn't think that. I just thought it was ugly. The "man with no name" (he really does never give his name, just like in those Leone movies) is supposed to be a badass and someone you want to emulate, and unless the movie is damning his actions in no uncertain terms, it's effectively endorsing them.

Interestingly, the movie does try to damn his actions in a way. The woman he rapes comes upon him in the bath at that same tonsorial parlor and takes about three shots at him at nearly point blank range, and later tells the sheriff that he raped her, even using that very word. But the film portrays this woman as idiotic and venal and weak-willed, a fool that it laughs at every time she's on screen. Never mind the way it makes her so incompetent with a gun that she fires three shots at him from like five feet away and can't hit him.

If the film's awful portrayal of women were limited to this one character that would be something. But the other female character in the movie -- there is literally only one other -- is the innkeeper's wife, a woman who appears to be of strong moral fiber. Until, that is, the scene immediately after Eastwood blows up the upper story of her hotel as an unnecessarily complicated way of killing them men who tried to break into his room and beat him in the dead of night.

In this scene she's understandably furious with him, as he has just essentially ruined her livelihood, not to mention blown up the very place he was hoping to sleep that night. (He had previously ordered the rest of the hotel to be cleared of guests so he could have the whole place to himself, part of the escalating price of defending the town against three miscreants who were just released from prison and are coming to kill anyone within range.) She lets slip that the only place that wasn't destroyed is "our room," meaning the one belonging to her and her husband. So Eastwood raises and eyebrow as if to say "I'll take that one, then."

So then he grabs her by the arm and escorts her down to the room, toward what end I can't say because he knows where it is, so he might as well just go there unaccompanied and make himself at home. When he suggests that he can't sleep with her because he needs a good night's rest, she's so enraged by his ego and his presumptuousness that she grabs a pair of scissors and comes at him where he's lying on the bed. You probably know where this is going. He grabs her wrist to prevent her from plunging the scissors into his neck, and twists this gesture into a passionate kiss. The next shot is of them awakening in the morning in bed together.

Now I'm really pissed.

It's one thing to suggest that women are attracted to mean who treat them poorly, an idea that has some unfortunate truth to it. It's another to have Eastwood essentially rape two of them and have them "start to like it" halfway through.

By the end of the movie I came to realize that Eastwood was probably not trying to hold up this character as a paragon of heroism. But the damage had been done by that point. Even if he has a righteous reason for putting this town in his sites and submitting them to this monstrous behavior -- a reason I don't totally buy, but okay -- you can't just go around killing people and raping people and making it seem cool because Clint Eastwood presents as a badass and he's the star of the movie. That's just irresponsible filmmaking.

Then there's just the inept staging of some of this material. The town is guilty of having been complicit in an event where the three miscreants whipped a local lawman to death in the town square, as none of them did anything to stop it, and in fact, they likely encouraged the act because the lawman was going to blow the whistle on some shady dealings that were helping prop up the town. The staging of the whipping, seen twice in flashback, is really shoddy, even though it was 1973 and they didn't perhaps have the ways of making it look convincing that they would have today.

But even this wouldn't have bothered me so much if Eastwood himself hadn't experienced one of these flashbacks. As he's falling asleep his first night he flashes back to the whipping death of this local lawman ... even though he was not present for the event. That's just lazy filmmaking.

This was only Eastwood's second directorial effort, so inexperience can be blamed for some of this. But the overall feel of the film is shocking and nauseating, and neither of those things in a good way. It feels as though he made Unforgiven almost as an apology for this movie. Will Munny had skeletons in his closet, dozens of them, and may have been guilty of worse crimes even than the "man with no name" of High Plains Drifter. But the fact that we don't see it is the right moral choice, and makes the same point more effectively.

No one protecting the copyright

I almost gave up on being able to watch Europa Europa in the month of May.

It wasn’t some arbitrary deadline I placed on myself, though on this blog that would not be unusual. Rather, it was the movie I’d drawn in this monthly viewing challenge in which I participate through my Flickcharters Facebook group. There are some 30 of us doing it, and each month, the guy who organizes it draws a name for each of us from a hat. Our assignment is then to watch the highest ranked movie on that other person’s chart that we haven’t seen.

Europa Europa (I prefer to leave out the middle comma, though I’ve seen it written both ways) was the #17 movie for the woman I drew. And impossible to find anywhere, it seemed.

I tried the library. I tried iTunes. I tried all of my streaming services. It seemed like the kind of thing that might be available through Kanopy, but it was not.

Just before I was about to move on to her next highest movie I had not seen, Gaslight, I randomly decided to check YouTube, and there it was.

Considering that copyright holders regularly scrub YouTube of anything that infringes on their copyright, often within hours of when it gets posted, I found it strange to see a complete copy of Europa Europa staring me in the face. Strange but by no means unprecedented. I’ve watched a couple movies on YouTube before, and not only the ones that have lapsed into the public domain. The strangest example was when we watched The Room there last year, especially since I understood Tommy Wiseau to be particularly tenacious when it comes to making sure people pay to see his movie.

I guess I don’t have much to say about EE being available that way. It’s tempting to say that it represents some kind of neglect of a movie that people should be properly buying on Criterion or whatever you have to do to watch it these days. But maybe it’s just someone out there being magnanimous and allowing a great movie into our lives that isn’t widely available elsewhere. If you’re an artist you just want people to see your work, and maybe even if you’re a copyright holder rather than an artist, you feel that way too.

Or maybe it is just neglect.

I got all confident and tried to find Agnes Varda’s Cleo from 5 to 7 on there, as I would prefer this to be one of two Varda movies I see when I eventually get to her in Audient Auteurs. But in order to see this on YouTube – which you can do – you have to subscribe to their movie service.

Which, honestly, might be worth doing it if doesn’t cost too much and allows me to see the movie.