Finish What You Started: Paddington

This is the fourth in my 2020 bi-monthly series finishing movies I had to abandon the first time.

I almost forgot to do this series this month. Halfway through the day on Sunday, the 30th of the month, I realized that I had blithely let the entire month elapse without watching my one movie for this series. Which seems even more ridiculous when it only involves one movie every two months.

But remember in time I did, and watched it that night I did. Thank goodness, as the world would have surely exploded had I failed to watch it in time.

Paddington is a bit of a cheat in this series, as it is the first movie I've watched for Finish What You Started that is actually already on all my movie lists. That's right, I gave myself credit for a full viewing of Paul King's movie back over Christmas break in 2014, when the movie was released in Australia a couple months before it hit American theaters, and in a few moments you'll see why.

My older son -- who was only four at the time -- and I went to see it in Tasmania, where we were visiting his grandmother. But we had to leave the theater with about 15 minutes left in the movie.

Not because he had to go to the bathroom, though at least that would have been something. I mean, we are all prisoners to the tyrannical needs of our own bodies, especially when we are four.

No, we had to leave because he was too scared.

In a Paddington movie.

It seems illogical, but maybe I shouldn't tease him. I mean, the main villain, played by Nicole Kidman, does want to actually kill Paddington. She's a taxidermist, and taxidermy requires more than just stunning your target.

I wanted to explain to my son that Paddington was not in any real danger, because that's not how these movies work, but you can't explain away the fears of a four-year-old. She does actually shoot him with a tranquilizer dart, so I wouldn't be surprised if his mind translated that as a fatal shot, even with the irrepressible bear appearing again on screen almost immediately afterward.

So, with me grumbling probably more than I should have, we did leave.

Ordinarily I don't give myself credit for a viewing I don't finish, but with so little time left, and so little doubt how it would resolve, it seemed warranted in this case.

A little less than six years later, I finally did see that ending on a Sunday night during the great pandemic of 2020. It involves all the characters on a rooftop and Paddington creating a diversion by throwing his "emergency marmalade sandwich" (the one he keeps stashed in his hat) in range for a bunch of pigeons to kick up a storm in their attempt to eat it. The fluttering causes Kidman's character to lose her balance and fall of the building when Imelda Staunton unwittingly opens a trap door at her feet. Of course, in keeping with the non-fatal overriding principles of the entire movie, Kidman is left hanging on a pole, and ultimately, shoveling shit at a zoo.

The value in this second viewing, and first complete viewing, was not in finally seeing how the movie ended, which I probably could have easily predicted. (Rooftop endings are always a good fallback, don't you know.) It was in realizing that this movie is much better than I've given it credit for.

I'm not sure why I wasn't totally enjoying Paddington the first time around; I was mildly biased against it even before the premature departure. I remember not particularly liking the scene where Hugh Bonneville dresses up like a maid to infiltrate the historical society, but it's harmless enough.

This time, not only did I like it much better, but I don't even see how it is significantly less delightful than the universally beloved Paddington 2. So now I guess I like the sequel slightly less than most people, and the original slightly more.

One takeaway was how Wes Andersonian the whole thing is, which I don't remember thinking the first time I saw it. There were two main style elements I thought King had "borrowed" from Anderson, one being the quick pan and return, to action on the side of the screen before coming back to the original focus of the shot. I'm sure there would be a way to describe that more articulately, but I'm guessing you know what I'm talking about. Then perhaps even more explicitly, King twice includes scenes where we look into a miniature version of the Brown household from the perspective of a removed wall, as the camera travels around to see the different rooms and their occupants. This is direct out of the submarine in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, and Anderson has used that same trick elsewhere. Instead of accusing him of total theft, though, I was charmed by it.

Then I found myself marvelling over exactly how adorable Sally Hawkins is. She's not what you would call traditionally beautiful, but there is something so quirky and alive about her face that you can't take your eyes off her. I've certainly noticed this before, but it was like I was having a moment with it during this viewing.

Okay, I've got two more candidates to watch and two more slots to go in this series. See you in October ... if I remember..

The not-so-sudden sudden death of Chadwick Boseman

Damn.

This one hits hard.

In some kind of tragic coincidence that just screams #2020, Chadwick Boseman, the man who played Jackie Robinson in the film 42, died on the very same day that Major League Baseball was recognizing Robinson's breaking of baseball's color barrier in 1947.

That actually occurred on April 15th of 1947, not August 28th, but since there was no April 15th on the baseball calendar in 2020, August 28th was -- as far as I can tell -- randomly chosen as a substitute date.

It might have seemed logical just not to recognize the anniversary this year, except as it turned out, honoring Robinson was something that ended up feeling very important not only this year, but this week, as the country reels anew from another heinous police shooting of a Black American.

Instead, there's a kind of cruel irony in this day, as Boseman ended up passing from colon cancer on the same day. He didn't just play non-fictional heroes to the Black community -- like Robinson and Thurgood Marshall -- but he also played one of the Black community's greatest fictional heroes, T'Challa, otherwise known as Black Panther.

It didn't feel like Wakanda would last #forever on this particular day.

Boseman's death would have been painful anyway, but what made it especially painful was that I had no idea he was sick. None. And had been so for four years. I don't suppose most people knew. Last I heard, Black Panther 2 was all systems go and he would be front and center. He had been revived from Thanos' snap and could live to fight another day, many other days, on into Phases 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 of the MCU.

Now ... he's gone.

Just like that. In a snap.

I did a double take when I read the headline. I guess that's always the reaction when someone so young, so vigorous, so apparently overflowing with joie de vivre, is taken from us. I mean, he played an incomparably gifted athlete and a superhero so lithe, so quick and so agile that his character's name evoked the feline. There wasn't a thought in my head that we were about lose him.

You walk around with a number of names in your head of people whose obituary you could expect to see any old time. Like, when Olivia de Havilland finally died at 104, it was almost like a sigh of relief that someone else could finally occupy one of those spots. Someone like, say, Sean Connery, who just turned 90.

But Boseman? I didn't wake up Saturday morning (my time) thinking Chadwick Boseman could die today. And yet he did.

I was not as big a fan of Black Panther as most people were, but I was a huge fan of Boseman. Being the baseball fan that I am, I was more of a fan of 42 than most, I think. Those were some pretty big cleats to fill to play Robinson, one of the all-time baseball greats and baseball ambassadors, and yet he was the perfect choice. Quiet dignity, inner fire. That was Boseman to a T.

The Robinson biopic was where I first learned of Boseman, who got a late start on his movie career, only appearing in his first movie role after age 30. (He had been appearing on TV for five years before that, but not on shows I watched.) But he shot up quickly into other immediately interesting work. 42 was followed the next year by Draft Day and Get on Up, the latter a biopic of another hero of the Black community (though a bit more problematic than Robinson or Marshall), James Brown. I don't really remember him in Draft Day (though I liked that movie), though of course he's the central force in the highly effective Get on Up, a role that was expected to earn him awards consideration.

At this point his career became quite occupied playing T'Challa in four Marvel movies, though he did continue to make what I assume was interesting work, as I have not yet seen Marshall, Message from the King or 21 Bridges. The last movie released in his lifetime was Spike Lee's Da 5 Bloods, in which he plays a character seen only in flashback, because he died during the Vietnam War. Died young -- just like Boseman.

Because Boseman got a late start in movies, he seemed even younger than 43. And because he radiated star power, that contributed to the sense that he was just at the beginning of a long and rich career that would alternate between serious and crowd-pleasing work -- and in the best cases, work that would be both at once.

My heart aches. Rest in peace, Panther.

The right amount of Capone

Josh Trank's Capone didn't do much for me, as you know from this post, but what it did do is whet my appetite to revisit for the first time in yonks (to use the Australian phraseology) one of my favorite movies as a teenager, Brian de Palma's The Untouchables.

This is the amount of Al Capone we need.

Robert De Niro appears on screen for less than 15 minutes of a two-hour movie, but you know what? Each and every one of his scenes is memorable.

There's the opening scene, where he talks about crime in Chicago while getting a shave, and you wonder if the barber nicking his neck with his razor is going to be cause for the man to be immediately killed.

There's the famous baseball bat scene, where he murders a capo who disappointed him in front of all the other capos, to send a message to them all to stay in line, to "play for the team."

There's the scene where he talks about wanting Elliot Ness and his family dead, and keeps hitting the word "dead" so you know how serious he is.

There's the scene where both parties have to be held back on a staircase so Ness and he don't get into a fist fight with each other.

There's the scene where he's sitting at the opera and gets a big grin on his face upon learning that one of the untouchables has been taken out.

There's the scene where he starts punching his lawyer during his trial when the lawyer changes his plea from not guilty to guilty.

And there are no more scenes.

This is a stark contrast with Capone, where Tom Hardy is on screen for nearly every damn shot of the entire movie, excepting for a very few brief scenes between federal agents discussing their surveillance of him.

Now, the performances these actors are giving is one of the things that makes the contrast so stark. In The Untouchables, it's the great Robert De Niro, who can make a role iconic just by playing it. Notably, he doesn't strain for some kind of absurd accent. He just plays Robert De Niro, and if you think that's a criticism, have you ever seen a Robert De Niro movie? He's menacing without even making a specific effort to be, with just a look from those steely eyes. He leaves us wanting more.

Tom Hardy's performance in Capone is nothing but accent. Joe Morgenstern, in a review tabulated to equal a rating of 10 on Metacritic, describes him as "growling in a voice that evokes Marlon Brando, Lionel Stander and Stephen Hawking's synthesizer." (This is a hilarious description even though I don't know who Lionel Stander is.) In my previous post I suggested Hardy should win an award for most acting. He's all flinches and ticks and drools. You know the type of performance I mean, the type that makes you want way, way less. (In another review, which I can't seem to locate at the moment, the critic referred to him as showing a curious disregard for the normal binaries of good vs. bad acting.)

The real problem, though, is that by spending so much time with Capone in Capone -- and Trank's artistic choices don't help -- it's clear we are meant to sympathize with this man on some level, almost like it's a tragedy that he's lost his physical and mental faculties from neuro-syphilis. The film sets the tone by opening on a scene of Capone playing hide and seek with his grandchildren, in which he appears loveable and easygoing. I actually found this to be the film's most effective scene, as it overturns our expectations -- Capone is shown carrying a blunt instrument through his silent mansion, as though he's paranoid about an intruder trying to kill him, only for it to be revealed that he's playing the role of villain in a game with these children. However well it works on a narrative level, it lays the groundwork for us to see this monster as human.

In The Untouchables, it's clear Capone is a monster in every moment. He demonstrates nothing but malevolence, which I think is correct. Oh, I'm sure Al Capone loved his family and maybe helped an old lady across the street once or twice. But I think it's correct that our takeaway should be that this man is evil and was responsible for a great many ruined lives, while not paying nearly the price he deserved to pay for his crimes. In Capone, there's a line of dialogue where one of the feds says "What's the difference between Al Capone and Adolf Hitler? Adolf Hitler is dead." And while that line is potentially problematic in some respects, comparing ethnicity-based genocide to a much smaller scale mass murder driven purely by business interests, it does indicate the extent to which people at the time considered Capone a menace.

Capone as a movie, though, does not make us believe it.

The Untouchables as a movie was not as beloved to me in 2020 as it was in 1987, though it certainly didn't suffer the same kind of hit in my affections as another Kevin Costner movie I recently rewatched, Field of Dreams. I still like this movie quite a bit and really enjoyed watching it, but it probably doesn't quite deserve the five stars I had given it on Letterboxd as a retroactive estimation of my affections.

More Batman, eh?

I watched the new trailer for The Batman.

Yawn.

I wouldn't have normally done so, since I try not to be spoiled on too much of the imagery for big new movies. I've been generally avoiding trailers for years and have talked about it many times on this blog, so I won't bore you by going back into that now.

But this year, I'm so starved for any kind of moving cinematic images that do not seem to have been designed for, or easily optimized for, a phone, that I'm willing to go against my usual rules of thumb on this.

Yawn.

I'm sorry, but is this really the best someone has to offer on a "reinterpretation" of the character? Somehow these images look exactly halfway between the way Christopher Nolan envisioned the character and the way Zack Snyder envisioned him. Just because it's not exactly like either doesn't mean it's not so in the neighborhood as to seem entirely superfluous.

To be honest, I've already forgotten half of what we even see in this trailer -- or maybe 75%. I do remember there's a part where Batman beats an opponent so vigorously, it sounds like he's pounding his fist into the squishy remainder of a corpse's face.

Yawn.

I've seen Batman be "dark" before. Like, a hundred times.

No no -- this is darker! 

Puh-leeze.

I recognize that a fair number of people whose opinions I trust are looking forward to this quite enthusiastically, maybe because for them, it'll have been nine years since they got the kind of Batman they wanted on screen. They're probably happy to just erase Batfleck from their memories entirely.

For me, the Nolan films are still fresh enough in my memory that I wouldn't feel like I needed a new Batman reboot now, even if there hadn't been a botched reboot still leaving a bad taste in our collective mouths.

It seems clear now that they are just going to keep rebooting this character ad infinitum, every seven years or so, which will coincide with the previous version running its course. If they do, maybe at least next time they can make Batman a POC.

The only really new way to left to reboot him, it seems, is to go back to his origins -- to his silly, slap-happy, sound-effects-on-screen origins.

Make Batman a comedy -- and not just Joss Whedon trying to add funny lines to a dour story -- and maybe I'll be genuinely excited again.

Watching an iTunes movie at the touch of a button

Forgive me as I have another moment that many of you probably had months, even years, ago.

Earlier this week it was my first taste of Disney+, which you couldn't have had years ago, as it hasn't been around for a year yet. But tonight it was Apple TV, which has been around years, but in the format we know it now for only about three.

Yeah I used Apple TV earlier this week when I used Disney+, and yeah, one of its main expected values to us would be as a conduit to that streaming service. But I didn't realize the probably more useful value of it, to me and my own viewing habits, until tonight.

For any number of years now -- as few as eight or as many as a dozen -- I have been utilizing iTunes as a primary source for renting movies. Some small number of those I intended to watch on an Apple device -- an iPad, or when it worked, my old iPod. A slightly larger number were to be watched directly on my laptop, through the iTunes application itself.

But the vast majority have been intended to be watched with my computer plugged in to a proper TV by HDMI cable.

This has not always been a smooth arrangement. As I wrote about extensively most recently in this post, my HDMI setup has been plagued with difficulties over the years. If the HDMI connection itself is not acting up, then sometimes the streaming of the video is held captive by the pathetic processing speed of my computer. At the lowest level of inconvenience, there's making sure the laptop screen is pointing away from you, so you aren't seeing two screens at once -- the adjustment of which sometimes meddles with the HDMI connection. It's a tedious business.

No more.

As Apple TV connects directly to my iTunes account, anything I purchase on my computer is suddenly available on the TV itself. I know I sound like some kind of grandfather here, but the simplicity of it just blows my mind. Just press a couple buttons on the adorable little Apple remote (again with the grandfather tone) and you're watching that movie.

In fact, it was the appearance of Capone, the only movie I happen to have rented from iTunes right now, on my Apple TV menu that told me everything had worked as I'd hoped. Tom Hardy's ugly mug was beautiful to me in that moment.

Why mightn't it have worked?

Because I am still practicing a wee bit of chicanery when it comes to Apple -- chicanery they allow, but which feels like it could disappear at any moment, if any new devices becomes aware of the chicanery.

Namely, I still connect to my American version of iTunes. Have been doing so since moving here in 2013. Continue to do so with peril, with worry that it all may just go away at any moment.

The reason it's important for me to keep doing this is it allows me access to many movies way before they come to Australia. In fact, in the extreme case, I can get the movie for a 99-cent rental even before it's hit Australian cinemas. Not something I want to give up.

Yet every time I register a new device, as was the case here, I worry it'll all go belly up. I mean, I had to basically lie by saying my region was the U.S. rather than Australia. And that is the region of my iTunes account, so it's not really a lie. But by giving this device access to my wireless, I thought it might detect I was not in the U.S. and start sparking and smoking. I disallowed the activation of location services, which may have been the key to keeping my setup as it's always been.

Truth is, I'm not sure if Apple really cares if you are connecting to a different iTunes store from the country where you are currently located. Take the example of the diplomat who is sent overseas for a year. Is that person really meant to link up to iTunes in Saudi Arabia while he or she is there? Do they even have iTunes in Saudi Arabia?

So I guess setting up Apple TV confirmed what I thought I knew, though it was still an occasion for holding my breath.

Was Capone the perfect movie to test out this new functionality?

Hell no! It's really bad! Hardy's makeup is shitty and his performance is comical. He should get the award for most acting. Josh Trank, a director I do not like, who made a movie I do not like (Chronicle) and then got fired from a Star Wars movie (I haven't seen Fantastic Four), has made another turd. He's not talented.

But I don't care. I rent movies for 99 cents not because I expect them to be masterpieces, but because at worst, they fill out the bottom section of my annual rankings. Capone accomplishes that just fine.

And now, if I want to see a good or a terrible movie through iTunes, it's easy as clicking a button.

I just rented two more, and can't wait to watch the next.

Captain Marvel passes the test

Captain Marvel may not be my favorite Marvel movie -- it's somewhere around the middle, probably -- but there was a lot riding on it last night.

As you know from yesterday's post, it was my son's tenth birthday yesterday, and also our first full day of having Apple TV and Disney+. Captain Marvel had been lined up for his surprise birthday evening viewing, something my wife officially agreed to it at some point after I wrote yesterday's post.

The questions I had before watching were many:

1) Will I have miscalculated terribly? Will this be too intense for my kids, if not the ten-year-old then certainly the six-year-old?

2) Will my wife shoot daggers at me throughout the movie for twisting her arm into something she never really wanted to do?

3) Will they like it?

Since I don't love Captain Marvel, the last one of those shouldn't matter as much. But when you show someone a Marvel movie, you're not just getting them to buy in to that particular movie. You're trying to sell them on more than 20 movies, and the viability of watching the rest of those movies hangs in the balance.

For the children, I didn't think that would be a problem. I mean, superheros punching each other, flying, and shooting laser rays out of their fists? What kid wouldn't like that?

But my wife has only seen maybe five of the Marvel movies, and kind of turns her nose up at them. In fact, the only ones I can say for certain she's seen are Iron Man, Captain America: The First Avenger and Thor: Ragnarok. I'm sure she's seen one or two others, but they would have all been under my direction and without very much excitement.

I don't care if she likes these movies, really -- I've already seen them all so I don't need a viewing partner. But her liking them might also be instrumental in giving her blessing for the kids to keep watching them, which I do want them to have the chance to do. Especially now that we have D+.

Probably the more worrisome issue, though, wss whether anything in this movie would scar my kids, especially the younger one. I did a cursory check on the internet -- more than cursory, I guess, as I read the entire parental recommendation section on IMDB, as well as sought out counsel from my Flickcharters Facebook group. It didn't really seem like there would be anything too scary.

And in fact, there were only two moments when I thought the kids were actually disturbed, the first of which was previewed on IMDB.

That first was the autopsy of the dead Skrull, when you can see the flaps of his chest and abdomen held open with medical instruments. You don't see any actual alien guts, but apparently, the whole idea of looking inside the body of what had once been a living thing was a bit too much for my ten-year-old. I think he might have just thought it was gross rather than the kind of thing that chills him or makes him consider his own mortality. He looked away from the screen and asked us to tell him when it was finished.

Then the second thing was with my younger son -- who didn't care about the autopsy, it should be noted -- and was something that would never come up in a parental guidance report for Captain Marvel. When Carol Danvers is under a trance near the end and is "visiting" an incarnation of her mentor, Annette Bening's Mar-Vell, she tries to punch the vision in the face. The face, a projection as it is, subsumes the fist, so that the fist sinks into it up to the wrist, and the mouth disappears entirely. "That is the weirdest thing I have ever seen," said the six-year-old, who may have indeed dwelled on that for a few minutes after it left the screen.

Well did they like it?

"It's the best movie I've ever seen," said the birthday boy. He's prone to exaggeration -- what kid isn't? -- but I do think I've only heard him say it about five times before. So that means that Marvel beats DC, I guess, as he had previously favored Shazam.

"Yeah," said the younger one, who is not given to talking about and ranking favorites. I guess he takes after his mother in that regard.

"Oh yeah," said my wife, in a way that hits the word "yeah" and suggests "could there be any other reaction?" Captain Marvel was a strategic choice on my part, you see. First and foremost, it was something my son had mentioned. But as it's Marvel's first female-fronted movie, that had been a potential draw for my wife from back when it came out, to the extent that she may even have intended to see it in the theater. That doesn't mean she's going to automatically green light the other Marvel movies, but having sat with her kids and seen how they reacted -- both their attraction to the material, and perhaps more importantly, their lack of aversion to it -- can only help.

Me? I liked it a lot more.

I had been a bit cold on Captain Marvel from my first viewing -- not because I didn't think it was a good movie, but because, as with Black Panther, I just didn't think it was anything special. Well, I do find there to be special aspects to this movie on second viewing, and I don't just think I'm being influenced by my family's obvious affection.

Although I think the female empowerment messages are great, and I do like the performance of Brie Larson in the title role, I hate to say it, but it's the performance of the two lead men that really raises this up a notch. Samuel L. Jackon is in rare form here, even more charismatic than usual, and looking great with the aging down technology (which is more a compliment to the special effects than the performance, I realize). But I think it's Ben Mendelsohn who really clinches the tone that Jackson gets started. My wife pointed out that it's lovely that he got to keep his native Australian accent, and I think that helps sell his persona here. I'm having trouble putting it into words -- neither "flippant" nor "aloof" capture it perfectly. But his personality is key to selling the mid-movie transformation of our understanding of who this character is.

Now that I think about it, I'm wondering if this transformation played a role in why the kids like it so much. It made for a number of mid-movie questions about who was really the good guy, as they were surprised to have their expectations overturned like they may never have had them overturned before. But I think it also helped them understand a couple core lessons that we would like them to take away from any piece of art: Don't judge a book by its cover, and don't trust everything told to you by authority figures.

It reminded me a bit of my own blow-your-mind moment around this age, maybe a year or two older, when I saw the Dennis Quaid-Lou Gossett Jr. space movie Enemy Mine. If you don't recall the particulars of that one, it's the one where Quaid's human and Gossett's alien -- a Drac by species name -- get stranded together on a planet they are unable to escape. They are enemies in a raging war between their species. The film cleverly puts you in Quaid's shoes to start, so you assume he is fighting a just fight against a truly reprehensible enemy, and the fact that the Drac is "ugly" (by human standards) helps cement your core perspective. Of course, as the movie goes, you realize just how kind and worthy of our sympathy this Drac -- this enemy -- really is.

I'm not sure if the other Marvel movies have such useful messages to impart as female empowerment, racial tolerance and skepticism of authority, but hopefully, we'll get a chance to find out.

I celebrated my new D+ subscription by watching ... Cool Runnings

Today is my older son's tenth birthday.

It is, of course, also a milestone for me: ten years of parenthood. Ten years of putting someone other than myself first. (I sometimes put my wife first, but you know what I mean.) Ten years of the pitter patter of little feet. It probably warrants its own post, but I'll save that for another day.

It is also the first quarantine birthday in our household. My younger son and my wife are in January and February, and I'm in October, so even though it feels like we've spent most of this year inside our home, the reality is that it hasn't even been half a year yet.

A quarantine birthday is, of course, not very special for a kid. As we were in America this time last year and ultimately decided not to have a birthday party for him at all -- we celebrated on his birthday, but it was only with extended family -- this makes two years in a row without a real birthday party for him. We're doing a little zoom thing on Saturday so he can see his friends, but it will only compensate so much.

So we're doing a number of things to shower him with the feels today. I've already started the day with Krispy Kreme donuts, and his favorite mango juice will follow, once he can come into the kitchen to drink it. (Donuts are fine on the couch in front of the TV; mango juice, not so much.) He'll only have to do half a day of school, and then it's his Fortnite and Clash of Clans for the rest of the day after lunch. We're ordering from his favorite hamburger restaurant tonight, and will eat during a family movie. And there will, of course, be presents sprinkled along the way.

The family movie is finally what I want to talk about, along with the introduction of today's other big surprise.

We have been hemming and hawing for a while now about ordering Disney+. The debut of Hamilton almost clinched it, but we also had a debate about whether to watch it in that form or wait until our opportunity to see it on the stage first. Well, as of yesterday morning, we purchased tickets to see Hamilton in Sydney next April, so that question has been definitively answered.

The other problem was that there was no way to watch Disney+ through our TV, since our smart TV does not have it as an option, and we don't do Chromecast or anything like that. Considering how much I expect our kids to use it, it needs to be something they can control directly through a remote control, and not need one of our computers to operate.

So the arrival of my son's birthday seemed like a good time to pull two triggers: To purchase AppleTV, another thing we'd been hemming and hawing about, and then to purchase Disney+.

I set it up last night so we could watch Captain Marvel tonight for his birthday. He's never been allowed to watch a Marvel movie before, but he saw Shazam a full year ago so I'm not really sure the difference. My wife has her trepidations about exposing our six-year-old to objectionable content that may haunt him, but I told her it can't be any worse than The Goonies, which we showed them earlier in quarantine. He was afraid of Sloth (and had to leave the room, even after Sloth had been revealed as a softie) but it didn't stay with him. Anyway, hopefully the viewing will happen.

But as I basked in the glow of the unwrapping of two shiny new objects last night, I couldn't just put the whole thing away until we unveiled it to him today, even though it was 10 o'clock and I was coming off a terrible night's sleep. I had to watch something to break it in, didn't I?

Enter Cool Runnings.

Although this is, in some strange way, a classic of 1990s cinema -- if not in quality, then as a zeitgeist representative of the era, in part because it recreates such a memorable moment in Olympic history -- I had never before seen it. As soon as it popped up on the menu I knew I had to rectify that. It would be short, and no one else in the house would care one way or another about seeing it ... right?

As I was watching, my wife came in and said "Oh, I wanted to see that film! I wanted to show it to the kids." My response: "It's 27 years old!" You can't lay claim on a 27-year-old movie, or at least, you can't be surprised if someone decides to watch it in your house without checking with you first.

Well, I'd watch it again. Over time I've gone from thinking this must be really silly and not worth anyone's time to figuring it probably had a ton of heart and would be very sweet. The latter is most assuredly the reality of the situation. In fact, though the execution is surely no better than totally competent, I gave the film four stars on heart and sweetness alone. (And it's funny. And it's got John Candy.)

I still think it's a bit of a funny way to celebrate subscribing to D+. In fact, my first instinct was to watch an episode of The Simpsons -- a primary driving force behind our subscription -- but I worried my son would wander out into the living room (he stays up late sometimes) and would deduce that we'd made the purchase. At the very least I should have watched 20 minutes of a Star Wars movie.

But no, Cool Runnings was and always shall be the first movie I watched on our Disney+ subscription.

And I am more than okay with that.

Happy birthday J. Here's to many future viewings together.

MIFF: First closing night film

This has been a year of a lot of firsts at MIFF, mostly related to the online format of course. The whole thing is kind of like one giant first.

But there's a first for me that also works in context of the traditional festival and its structure.

At the end of my seventh MIFF, I finally saw the closing night film.

It's not a huge surprise, really. The tickets for the opening and closing night films are always extra, like several times as much as a normal ticket, and the only reason I even went to the opening night film last year was that my wife had a film in the festival and she got complimentary passes.

The prospect of attending the closing night film was always complicated by this extra expense, but more than anything, I think the melancholy of the end of the festival may have been a key determining factor in my not attending. It's not like I actually get depressed when MIFF ends, but it's always an exciting time of year for me -- even watching from home -- so attending the film that signifies its ending has always seemed fraught with sorrow. If I'm going to get all gussied up, it should be for a film that looks ahead to two-and-a-half great weeks of movie-watching rather than one that looks back on that period in the past.

Anyway, my complimentary tickets this year included two passes to the spotlight films, something that MIFF could afford to give me since they were priced at only $6 more than the regular films, $20 as opposed to $14. If you're not going to have a gala evening with free alcohol and passed hors d'oeuvres, I guess you don't need to charge people in excess of $100 per ticket.

Since the opening night film First Cow sold out, as you will recall from this post, I spent my complimentary spotlight tickets on Wendy, the middle weekend spotlight film, and the closing night film, Pablo Larrain's Ema.

Yes, it's a bit confusing that I will have films called both Ema and Emma on my year-end list this year. The former is certainly not a Chilean version of the latter.

In fact, it starts off as something visionary and mesmerizing. The opening shot is of a lone traffic light hanging over an empty intersection, aflame, placed in an additional context of eerie melancholy by Nicolas Jaar's immersive score. (You may recall that Larrain likes a good in-your-face score, from his work with Mica Levi on Jackie.)

We then start to meet the main character, played by Mariana Di Girolamo, via the jaw-dropping production of her modern dance troupe. The poster above gives some indication of this. The dancers are in a giant warehouse space with a huge, almost tangible hologram of the sun taking up what looks like more than half the room. Whether this would be possible in real life or not, I can't say, but it is a hypnotizing vision here, as the dancers slink and gyrate in front of this fiery orb whose heat you can almost feel.

I wish the film maintained the momentum of this opening passage, whose vibe continues strong for at least the film's first 30 minutes. It starts to lose the thread as it goes, and left us with a lot of questions by the end -- and not the good kind, due to intentional ambiguity by the filmmaker. The story revolves Ema and her husband, the choreographer of the troupe (Gael Garcia Bernal), who give back a child they adopted after his firebug tendencies cause her sister to get severe burns across the side of her face. (No big surprise, I guess, since Ema is handy with a flamethrower herself.) The film should be about the emotionally impossible decision to give up on a child, but it strays from that to its peril, and gets sidetracked on inexplicable tangents like whether reggaeton music is considered good or not.

I recommend it for the vision and for the incredible cinematography and score, but there are a lot of asterisks on this one.

And I'm not reviewing this for ReelGood as I am done with that for this year, thank goodness. (Why review a movie that people have already missed their opportunity to see, is the thinking.)

Thus ends another MIFF. It was a really good one. I saw 11 films, which is pretty typical for me, two of which are very strong contenders for my top ten for the year, which is also pretty typical.

I'll look forward to returning to the brick and mortar version of the festival next year -- we hope -- but the online one has been good to me, and I'm so glad they did it.

MIFF clean-up: Just 6.5 and La Llorona

Blame it on the Democratic National Convention, blame it on baseball, blame it on writing three actual reviews of MIFF films, but I just haven't been very motivated this week to keep you updated on all my MIFF happenings as they happened. There's also a bit of burnout when you're coming to the end of a MIFF, even if you never even had to leave your house to participate.

So I'll just jam together two mentions of my mid-week MIFF films and link you to their corresponding reviews if you want more.

On Tuesday night I kept alive a tradition of watching Iranian films at MIFF that is not actually as extensive as I had thought. In fact, I have seen exactly one previous Iranian film at MIFF, that being Asghar Farhadi's The Salesman in 2016, which I didn't even like all that much. There seemed like more. (Maybe it's because I saw Everybody Knows at MIFF 2018, which was directed by Farhadi, but set in Spain and in Spanish.)

This year's Iranian film makes it a tradition now, at least. It's called Just 6.5, and it stars Farhadi's lead actor in A Separation, Payman Maadi. I really enjoy this actor from several other exposures (he's crossed over into English language films), so adding this one to my schedule was a no-brainer.

It's a The Wire-type look into the war on drugs in Iran, Tehran specifically, and it was surprising for a number of reasons. For one, I didn't expect this type of movie from Iran, essentially a genre movie, as the movies that are allowed to be made have always been very closely monitored by censors, leaving a relative paucity of permissible subjects -- family drama, usually. All of Farhadi's movies basically qualify as that. But director Saeed Roustayi, with whom I was unfamiliar, managed to get this idea of cops and mules and drug dealers the green light from his government. I tried to find out online how he did it, but the internet was not very forthcoming on the topic.

The second thing that surprised me is that I didn't realize Iran was a country that had a big, visible drug problem. The film depicts slums and shanty towns where literally hundreds of addicts lie around smoking crack and heroin, only to scatter like ants when the police come to clear out the joint -- the punishment for some drug offenses is death, after all. 

I really enjoyed the movie. It does have the grit, determination and moral complexity of a show like The Wire, though the execution is also at sort of a TV level -- before the days of prestige TV, I should say. I gave it only 3.5 stars out of 5 on Letterboxd, but it obviously stuck with me, as I had boosted its rating up to the equivalent of four -- 8 out of 10 on my site's scale -- by the time I reviewed it. (You can read that review here.)

The second was the second movie in the themed "dark dramas" package my wife had picked up, the first being The Killing of Two Lovers, which I loved so much. Well, this package was clearly the MIFF winning move in 2020 as La Llorona immediately became my second favorite of the ten films I've seen. 

I did carry a small bias into the movie, which was that there was just a schlocky horror movie, an extension of the Conjuring universe, made on this subject last year. That was The Curse of La Llorona, or The Curse of the Weeping Woman, as it is known in Australia. Fortunately, this had only the bare minimum to do with that, as both were inspired by the same Latin American folklore. This, though, was groundbreaking new prestige horror that had me in its spell straight away.

The technique itself was groundbreaking -- I was entranced by director Jayro Bustamante pulling his camera away from the subjects in the frame one centimeter at a time -- but I'd have to say the primary new elements for me were the subject matter itself, and the country of origin. I'll take the second first. I am not sure if I've ever seen a film about Guatemala, let alone made by a Guatemalan director and technically a production of the Guatemalan film industry. As a matter of fact, I was not even sure such a thing existed. It's a French co-production almost by necessity, one would imagine, but if this is what Guatemalan film has to offer us, why have they been hiding it from us?

Then there's the subject, which is, yes, more or less a haunted house movie where the main ghoul is this physical embodiment of folklore about a weeping woman who drowned her children. But it's set in and around the trial of a Guatemalan general who has been accused of genocide for giving orders, back in the 1980s, to exterminate large swaths of the native Mayan population. That the haunted house is a palatial estate barricaded by protestors gives it a very #2020 feel, as it mixes in a social justice message that is very in keeping with the world events of our year.

Plus, it's super scary.

But I say pretty much all this stuff in my review, which can be found here.

MIFF ends this weekend, as all streams must be complete by the end of the day on Sunday. Though I'm tempted to fit a few more in, remember what I said about burnout, and you'll know why I am content to finish with 11 films when I watch the closing night film on Saturday, Pablo Larrain's Ema. 

MIFF weekend wrap-up: A prayer for two lovers named Wendy

Although a movie about religious lesbian lovers with the same first name would be great, and would be right up MIFF's alley, this is actually three movie titles combined into one, covering the MIFF movies I watched on Saturday and Sunday nights.

Saturday was supposed to be a MIFF marathon of sorts for my wife and me, as it was our fourth Anything Day during the pandemic -- Anything Day being that pandemic invention where everyone gets to do what they want all day, including the kids. Or, I should say, including the adults.

But we didn't get to our first movie until 6, rather than mid-afternoon as we might have envisioned, and then my wife ended up bailing on the second movie, with good reason. So it was more of a MIFF trickle than a stream, though it was of course all a "stream," since this year's festival is entirely online.

That movie we didn't start until 6 was by far the best of the bunch. It's called The Killing of Two Lovers, and it's set in Utah, where a husband and wife are undergoing a trial separation while trying to figure out if the only reason they're together is because they married young and had four kids before they were 30. It is deceptively part of what was billed as a "thriller package," or something along those lines, that my wife bought -- part of a concerted effort to take some of the guesswork out of picking MIFF films this year. But without giving anything away, I'll just say there's more to that title than there may seem.

Loved this. It's shot in the 4:3 aspect ratio that Kelly Reichardt favors, and I now get what she was talking about in a recent interview I heard on Filmspotting, where she said close-ups never look right in widescreen. There's one scene between the two main characters in the front of a pickup truck where it is basically trading off close-ups of both of their faces, and I really appreciated the more square close-ups that Reichardt was talking about in that interview. There are a number of other distinct but unobtrusive filmmaking choices that make Robert Machoian's film really memorable and actually quite difficult to execute, while remaining very low-key. It gets at its themes really smartly while not cluttering things up by being too on the nose.

The movie my wife bailed on, and rightly so, was the MIFF Showcase Centerpiece, Benh Zeitlin's Peter Pan movie Wendy. To be fair, she had one foot out the door before the movie even started. She had forgotten that the movie had to be watched within the hours of 7 p.m. to 11:59 p.m. on Saturday, and was no longer sure she wanted her Anything Day evening to be hijacked by this movie. And we both admitted we didn't much care for the Peter Pan story in general. I can think of two really bad adaptations right off the bat in Hook and Pan.

Wendy is better than those, but not by the margin one would hope, nor is it significantly different from the director's breakthrough feature, Beasts of the Southern Wild. It even has the same kind of driving bombastic score as that other film. I liked Beasts of the Southern Wild quite a lot, but even that film slips into self-parody pretty easily, while this one is there right from the start. And though I didn't consider this to be a problem with Beasts, or at least I didn't identify it as such as the time, Wendy indulges in a fair bit of what I would call "poverty porn." Perhaps my biggest issue with it, though, was how it renders the Peter Pan character as essentially hopeless, always making the wrong choice and barely redeeming himself, if he does so at all. Isn't Peter Pan supposed to be more of a manic pixie dream boy, whose wrong-seeming ideas all end up being the right ones?

Sunday night concluded the weekend with my only documentary of this year's MIFF, if my current schedule holds, which is the Quebecois film Prayer for a Lost Mitten. And yes, I was taken in by that title.

From the description in the MIFF catalogue, I thought the film was going to focus on the deceptively profound experience of watching a wide selection of Canadians haunt the public lost and found as they search hopefully for some insignificant lost item. Say, a mitten. In reality, that is a pretty small part of the film, and the loss discussed by the majority of the interview subjects is less material in nature -- the loss of a child's love, the loss of a romantic love, the loss of the use of part of one's body, etc. Although that seems possibly deeper subject matter for a film, and is certainly worth exploring, I was expecting something a bit more eccentric, and that just isn't what this movie is.

It is gorgeous to look at, though, as Jean-Francois Lesage's film is shot in black and white, and during a Montreal winter, with lots of scenes of swirling snow looking ever so beautiful on that particular film stock.

Only one night off from MIFF this time -- tonight, as I write this -- before I return Tuesday with this year's Iranian entry, Just 6.5.

The waters came quickly

There are a lot of takeaways a person could have from his first viewing of A.I. Artificial Intelligence in 19 years, and only second overall.

Mine was what the humans did, or did not do, as they saved themselves from the ocean levels rising.

As we know from the opening narration, the movie takes place in an unspecified future time when the polar ice caps have melted and have left Earth with a lot more water than it had before. Most if not all climate change theories, though, posit a steady increase over time, a steady loss of the shorelines and, eventually, the cities situated close to them.

Given how much water engulfs Manhattan -- like, up to maybe the 20th floor of the skyscrapers -- A.I. must take place in a very distant future indeed if we are going to go with this idea of a slow encroachment.

But even if there was a sudden increase in temperature that made the water levels rise more rapidly over a shorter period of time, they still wouldn't flood the cities in some gush of unexpected water. Humans would have time to get their affairs in order, wouldn't they?

And so it was that I became a bit fixated on why the makers of the Pinocchio-themed section of Coney Island did not have time to disassemble their creations and move them inland.

Now, if you lose your house to a fire, you take only a handful of beloved belongings with you, if that. Kind of depends how quickly it all happens. But if you lose your house to the equivalent of creeping damp -- something that will destroy it, but over a long period of time -- you take everything that isn't bolted down, and even some things that are.

I argue that those who made this wondrous Pinocchio land would have enough love for what they had made -- the same love that Geppetto has for his own creation -- that they would uproot it from its moorings in Coney Island and move it to -- I don't know -- Davenport, Iowa. Or wherever they planned to create New Manhattan -- because that's what humans do, what they have always done. Make new versions of old places they had to leave.

It's certainly nice for the story that the blue fairy is still down there, able to endure 2,000 years of the hopeful stare of our robot boy David -- which remained one of my most profound moments of melancholy during this viewing. But in reality, she'd probably be somewhere inland, enduring that version of the death of the human race.

Is it a major plot point? Worth writing a blog post about?

Nope.

But those are my thoughts on a Saturday morning in August in the great pandemic of 2020.

MIFF: Approximating the MIFF "matinee"

One of my favorite MIFF traditions is the days, usually two or three times per festival, when I go
straight from work to my first movie. No going home and having to wrangle the kids or their dinner. I only need to worry about my own dinner as I stay in the city after work and eat something yummy before the 6:40 start.

Just because I'm doing MIFF from home this year doesn't mean I couldn't do something sort of like that.

And so it was that yesterday afternoon I watched Emma Seligman's Shiva Baby in the late afternoon, even starting my stream before I had technically finished work. (As Shiva Baby has not had proper releases anywhere and does not yet have a poster that I could find, I'm including the poster for the 2018 short.)

The 71-minute film would have been easy to sneak in before dinner even without starting at 4:30 rather than 5, but starting a little early also allowed me to take an impromptu snooze in the beanbags in the garage, where I have been afternoon-napping throughout quarantine. That's where I moved my computer once I was officially clocked off for the day.

The reason I needed to see it then was that I was overdue for my next MIFF review on ReelGood, having posted my review of Marona's Fantastic Tale on Monday. I needed to get another one up by Thursday, no doubt, and watching it in the afternoon on Wednesday was my only hope of doing that. (If not for the sake of the site, then to make good on my implicit promise to cover the festival for those who have given me my free passes.)

That's because the second MIFF movie I was watching on Wednesday -- the second half of a true MIFF double feature, unlike Saturday's partial double feature that I billed as a true double feature on this blog -- would prevent me from watching Shiva Baby in the evening. Lawrence Michael Levine's Black Bear, starring Aubrey Plaza, is a so-called "spotlight film," meaning it could only be watched between the hours of 7 p.m. and 11:59 p.m. on Wednesday night, unlike most of the rest of the films, which can be streamed throughout the festival.

As that's the higher profile film, for sure, I might have reviewed that instead of Shiva Baby. However, there's limited utility to reviewing a film that my readers are not actually going to be able to see. So, Shiva it was.

I liked both films a fair bit. The first is certainly more traditional than the second, though I won't go into any detail about what makes Black Bear unusual, because it's best not to know. I will say that Black Bear reminded me a bit of the other movie that was part of my first MIFF/not-MIFF double feature on Saturday, The Rental, in terms of its core dynamics. Until it doesn't.

And Shiva Baby is just a nice little independent cringe movie, but with heart. The logline tells it all: A confused college senior is stuck at a shiva while trying to avoid both her ex-girlfriend and her sugar daddy. It's an expansion of Seligman's eight-minute short from 2018, also starring Rachel Sennott, and it's really enjoyable. You can read my full review to the right.

Okay, another two days off and then more MIFF on Saturday.