Everything Everywhere All at Once

Saw Everything Everywhere All at Once.  It was a lot to see!  It's about a woman who's life is spinning apart due to a combination of her perfectionism and her struggling business.  She's trying to organize her paperwork for an IRS audit on the eve of Chinese new year.  On top of this, her relationship with her lesbian daughter is strained to the breaking point by the mother's inability to accept her daughter as she is.

And so also (I'm still explaining the premise of the film here,) it turns out that there is a multi-verse of parallel dimensions which are all under assault by some super-powerful monster named Jobu Tupaki (which apparently translates to "pocket gun") which can only be stopped by some version of her (the mother.)  Jobu was once a human whose consciousness was scattered throughout the multi-verse.  Experiencing all possible worlds all at once has driven them mad: if some version of us does all things, it doesn't matter what we do.  If all things happen to some version of us, then it doesn't matter what happens.  Jobu just wants all of this to stop.

The film is gloriously overstuffed.  There's a heavy dose of whimsey and absurdity to the film.  In addition to incredibly absurd parallel universes based off of half-remembered movies, characters jump between universes by making unlikely choices, such as singing Ave Maria or blowing into someone's nose.  The characters (heroes and villains both!) will begin licking walls or singing Ave Maria in order to jump to a parallel universe where they have super-powered pinkies.  The overwhelming parallel universes however are the main weapon of Jobu, the antagonist.  Thus, all the whimsy and silliness takes on a sinister tone.  The childish absurdity of a parallel universe where people evolved to have hotdogs for fingers just serves to underscore the insultingly childish absurdity of our everyday life.

The film's simultaneous mixture of silliness and seriousness reminded me of the work of Don Herzfeld.  It's all sad and funny at the same time.  How much you laugh or cry is all up to you and your mood.  Will you let yourself be swept away by the dizzying kaleidoscope of imagery, or will you ruminate on the existential dread of infinite parallel universes sucking all meaning out of every choice?  Is the absurdity beautiful, or is it just absurd?

I really enjoyed the film.  Not only is there eye-popping imagery (which I am a huge sucker for) but there's parallels between the big and the small: can the mother not only control the chaos unfolding in infinite dimensions but also solve the chaos of her own life?  of her business? of her daughter?  Is it better to try to manage and control it all or to just walk away and escape it all?  The family drama is wonderfully interwoven with the philosophical questions of meaning and purpose.  This was a really good film!

30 Days of Night

Saw 30 Days of Night, a solidly okay movie about a small town in Alaska that is raided by vampires during the height of winter when the sun does not rise for 30 days.  The film was based off of a comic book and the comic book roots still show in the form of unnecessary sub-plots that are briefly alluded to and never discussed again.  In print media, you can sort of pause and ruminate over these threads, but in a movie it's sort of distracting to watch two characters rehash their breakup after fleeing from vampires.

The movie started off very shaky.  The town is sort of softened up by a sleeper agent who cuts telephone wires and power lines and so on.  The main character is the sheriff of the town and we start out with a very abbreviated investigation of the telephone and power-line vandalism.  The film is very disinterested in this angle however, and the reason it's so abbreviated is so we can get to the meat of the film: the siege of the town by the vampires.

Once the siege begins, things get more interesting.  There's some grim and realistic portrayals of what trauma does to people and how folks react.  There's also a palpable sense of dread and fear as the vampires pick off townsfolk one by one.  It's more survival horror or action-horror however, which is not my particular cup of tea, but it was well-done here.

The film uses a lot of close-ups and shaky cams, which is a blessing and a curse.  Some of the close-ups are absolutely lovely.  There's an older woman who is one of the core survivors and every shot of her lined face was gold.  Unfortunately, sometimes the fight scenes are shot in close-up (possibly to save budget?) and it's frustrating to not really know what's going on because all we can see is the sheriff's giant face.  (The sheriff by the way, is played by Josh Hartnett, who is quite attractive, but who does not look a day over 20.  I found it hard to buy him as a grizzled, divorced sheriff.)

One last gripe: the vampires all wear suits and flowing dresses.  Vampires are often analogues for city-folk (pale, clothed in black, exotic hair-cuts and sophistication) but this film makes that reference fairly explicit.  At one point the sheriff rallies everyone by reminding them that they live in Alaska because they're the only ones tough enough to live there (which is not a great reason to live anywhere.)  It feels a little creepy post-2016.

But the film is pretty okay.  It's not amazing and has a rocky start, but it has moments.  The vampire makeup is good, and the vampires seem very creepy.  There's some lovely scenes with the ragged vampires standing in the snow.  There's some nice, grim drama around how far one might be willing to go to survive.  It has its lumps, but you could do worse.  I wouldn't recommend watching it now (there's better films about either vampires or trauma) but if you happen to catch it on TV or at random, you could do worse..

Monsters Vs Aliens (2009)

Saw Monsters Vs Aliens, an animated film about an epic battle between a team of monsters and an alien.  The film has essentially two acts: in the first a woman is exposed to space-based magic which makes her grow to enormous sizes.  She's scooped up by the government and kept in a gigantic holding pen with a few other monsters, all loosely based on 1950s creature-features (the blob, the creature from the black lagoon, the fly.)  Then, in the second act, the alien attacks and the motley crew of monsters have to defend the earth.

So, I didn't really dig this film.  It was supposed to be a comedy, but it wasn't very funny.  It was filmed in the very early days of 3d cinema and you can clearly tell.  In an opening scene, someone's playing a paddle-ball game and paddling the rubber ball directly into the camera.  The film often plays around with sizes.  The giant woman (who is the main character) is sometimes dwarfed by a yet-more-gigantic thing and I suppose that might have been really neat to see in 3d.  On my 2d screen however, it's just sort of arbitrary, like those school-yard fights you'd have about whose imaginary character was more powerful ("My guy has infinity strength!"  "Well mine has infinity plus one!"  etc.)

The film's supposed to be an action comedy but I didn't find the jokes very amusing and I didn't find the action very gripping.  I think it suffers a lot for being on the small screen.  I found the emotional arc of the main character lady much more interesting.  It is this: initially she's a very traditional woman, minimizing herself and her desires for the sake of others in her life, however when she becomes literally huge and powerful, she discovers that she is capable and worthy of regard, and is capable of being more than someone else's support.  Very fulfilling and well-pulled-off.

Apart from that, I'm not sure what else to talk about with this film.  Nothing's very interesting or fun or funny.  It reminded me of Bee Movie, in as much as it feels half-baked and sort of cheap.  I'm sure a ton of work went into this, but the end product is not very good.

Two-Lane Blacktop (1971)

Saw Two-Lane Blacktop, a spacy, breezy film which is loosely about two guys in a grey car racing against some cravat-ed dude in a yellow car from California to Washington DC.  The film is really about singularity of mind and focus however.  It's like one of those samurai or cowboy films about the purity of mind that comes from a singular focus.  For the samurai it's on sword-fighting; for these dudes, it's racing cars.

The film let me in on what it was thinking by making the race a kind of battle between style and substance.  They in the grey car are the substance: their car is not pretty, but it's fast and they are of one mind.  The diver of the yellow car is style: he lies constantly to the hitchhikers he picks up, he uses drugs to stay awake during their race, and is clueless about how to navigate small-town America.

The race is the engine of the plot, but it's not the main point of the film.  After a few minutes of racing, the grey and yellow teams meet up to discuss routes and to give each other advice on engines.  It's not about the competition: it's about travelling and moving fast and building the best car you can.  Why building the best car you can?  Why not?  If we must invent our own meaning in this world, then a car may as well do.  The driver of the yellow car picks up a hitchhiker who mournfully explains that we all only have like 30 or 40 more years left, so it doesn't matter where he goes.  The driver does not understand him, so the hitchhiker symbolically commits suicide by asking to be let out.

The film is spacy and slow.  Because the main characters are some kind of automotive monks, there's not a lot of dialogue and we spend a lot of time floating down roads, looking under hoods at gas stations, eating burger at a diner.  My personal taste is that there should be more consideration for others in the world.  Single-minded devotion is all well and good, but you eventually have to sacrifice for that single thing, and I just hope it's worth it, although I suspect that it never is (he typed, completing his 1,250th movie review.)

Different from the Others (1919)

Saw Different from the Others, a very early German film which is about the pointless suffering of homosexual men due to blackmailers and societal understanding.  It feels funny to call it a propaganda film, but it has that feel: half educational, half narrative, there's always a learned professor to explain to the shocked audience-inserts that these men are harming no one, and that their love is as valid as anyone's.

The film was silent and I watched it with an ambient album on in the background, full of crashing waves and windy forests.  It made the whole thing much more dismal than it perhaps otherwise would have been.  The gay main characters suffer a lot and although you're supposed to feel pity, it was much more visceral for me than I think it was intended to be.  If I had been alive in 1920s Germany, I for sure would have been blackmailed or just so deeply closeted as to be functionally asexual.

Alas, worse things were to come.  This film was a plea for understanding in 1920.  Twenty years later, the Nazis would take over and do their best to destroy this film, and to destroy histories of gay and trans folks that had been collected in Germany.  Now of course, the reactionaries are claiming transsexuals are a brand new phenomenon.

So this film was pretty sad.  It's in rough shape due to the efforts of the Nazi party, and anyway contains some dated information: they conflated gender and sexual attraction back in those days and theorized that a homosexual was a sort of mild case of transsexuality.  The most main character is a fairly florid and femme violin player which is very interesting to see in silent black-and-white (and is still fairly progressive - I can't think of another film with a sympathetic femme male protagonist (edit: it's been a while.  Does Breakfast on Pluto count?))  The film is sort of an oddity.  It's very clear about its message which gives it a propaganda-ish feel and, unless you're interested in gay history, there's not a ton else to recommend it.  It's interesting as a time capsule and very sad.

French Cancan (1954)

Saw French Cancan, a pretty cream-puff of a film about the creation of the famous Moulin Rouge theater.  The film is a typical sort of show-biz film about sexy primadonnas sleeping their way to jewels and fame, pretty ingenues being inducted into the scene, wealthy backers who suddenly pull funding, or grant funding, causing sudden tonal gearshifts as the production is doomed or rescued, respectively.  Also typical of the genre, I thought the most interesting lens was to examine fantasy and exploitation.

The most main character is the theater manager who conceives of and creates the Moulin Rouge: it's supposed to be a middle-class sort of burlesque hall.  A place where people can look at pretty, sexy ladies for a reasonable price.  It's supposed to evoke the fantasy of wealth and sophistication enjoyed in gentlemen's clubs, but to be financially accessible to the general public.  It's not luxury but the illusion of luxury that's being sold.

Similarly, the manager recruits a new starlet by essentially seducing her, both with his own charms and with the charms of the theater: attention, praise, lofty but vague promises about great art and immortality.  Contrast this new girl's eager excitement with the aging prima-donna's hunt for security.  The fantasy is an easy sell, but it comes at the cost of comfort and conventionality.

Now: is anyone being exploited?  Is the manager tricking this new girl or is she running forth eyes open?  She is eager to be on stage but the manager and the audiences are fickle: they always want the new thing, they quickly discard the old favorite.  The warmth of the applause is wonderful, but the silence after the applause dies is always waiting to return.  In all of this fantasy, surely someone is being lied to.

On top of all of this, the Paris of this film is a sanitized, picturesque one, shot on a sound-stage, lit by technicolor, populated by charming characters.  The new girl's home is in a spacious laundry, with a little man outside, painting pictures of the Seine in the background.  It is all painted faces and rented clothes, a hair's-breadth away from prostitution.

The film is dated and a little quaint, but fun.  It's a theme I like thinking about anyway.

Ironweed (1987)

Saw Ironweed, a beautiful bummer of a film about an alcoholic bum living in skid row in Albany, NY.  The film is very pretty to look at.  It has the fuzzy colors and dim lighting of a Rembrandt painting.  It's set in the 30s and contains many gorgeously weathered faces.  There are weird characters and nice observations, but I have a hard time tackling the film.  I have a hard time of telling what, apart from sadness, was the film about?

Now, films don't have to have a message to them to be good, and sad films have a place: they force us to confront uncomfortable topics and to feel bad for people we may otherwise just dismiss.  This film explores the main characters' life, flitting through his childhood and exploring his present-day misery.  We learn early on that he's wracked by guilt over the death of his son and the film may just be that this man's hell is of his own creation, however the events are more ambiguous than that.  some childhood sexual abuse is implied, and he is literally haunted by his past.  It may be of his own making, but it is not clear that this is his own choice.

Meryl Streep steals the film in a supporting role as another drunk homeless lady.  Her performance is (as always) perfect and simultaneously sympathetic, believable, and repellent.  Her past is more obscure however and we only get hints of some past life on the stage.  At one point she drunkenly screams about her mother and sister who she refers to as thieves.  Is she too wallowing in self-pity?  What about Tom Waits' character, who is dying from cancer but who is too bemused, distracted, or crazy to be bothered by that fact?

The film is beautiful and sad, austere and spare.  I liked how small but dense everything was.  The characters have a full on physical fight, melt-down, and reconciliation within the space of about 10 minutes and within the physical space of an alley-way.  It had a stagey feeling of confinement and containment to its scenes.  It was also gorgeously shot in muted, warm, period-picture browns and blacks.

It's a film that feels ambiguous to me, but maybe I just haven't found the key to it yet, or am misreading it: looking for something that isn't there.  It's a pretty and sad film, and I'm not sure what it is beyond that.

Fate (2016)

Saw Fate, a film about time-travel.  It follows a young attractive physicist who is trying to prevent his fiancé from dying via time-travel.  I think it was trying to be like Primer, a low-budget but cerebral puzzle of a film, however the filmmakers didn't quite have the puzzle-making instincts and just made a really dumb movie instead.

Now, the film is not atrocious or like obviously incompetently made.  It's not The Room, however it's not well thought-out and is kind of obvious all of the time.  The most glaring example of this is the time travel mechanism itself.  In time travel stories, they need some way to deal with the "grandfather paradox": what if I go back in time and shoot my own grandfather when he was young?  Shouldn't I pop out of existence?  But then wouldn't my grandfather remain un-shot?  so, time travel movies pick one of two resolutions to this: either my grandfather is shot and events progress in a sort of parallel-universe where I was never born, however the "me" from the alternate universe where I was born continues to exist (and can sometimes even return to my home universe to see that my grandfather remains un-shot there,) or the film decides that there's only one universe and that although I may intend to go back in time to shoot my grandfather, I must have been prevented in some way because if I weren't then I wouldn't exist hence paradox.

Films that make the first choice are usually more unrealistic day-dreams about unintended consequences; that killing baby Hitler unleashes an even worse mega-Hitler.  Films of the second type are usually more grounded films about accepting reality: you can't change the past, so better to spend your energy on the present.  This film seems to lean towards the latter category, with the physicist's wise, avuncular, wheelchair-bound mentor frequently telling the physicist to move on and to accept Fate, but then this thing happens: the physicist goes back in time, is hit by a car, shows up in modern time with a limp and is told: "next time avoid the car, then you won't have been hit and will not have a limp."  This puts the film in neither category:  if the character can make himself be un-hit by a car, will he still remember it?  If his brain does, why doesn't his bones?  It seems like we really can prevent the fiance from being killed.  Why then is the mentor being such a dick about it?  This film is really about moving on from an un-winnable situation, but the mechanics of the film's time-travel don't support that world-view.  Why would they do this?

I feel this is sort of a nerdy nit-pick, but this sort of half-baked thinking is endemic in the film.  There's shadowy government agents who seem to be trying to prevent time-travel from happening, but why, no one knows.  They also seem to be funding the physicist's time travel research however which is counter-intuitive and never really explained.  The whole film is both very obvious and arbitrary.  It's clear what we're meant to feel, but the facts of the film don't justify the emotional reaction.

Also: at one point the main character is mourning about his fiancé.  He sadly looks at the coffee table to see Time magazine and Travel magazine serendipitously line up to form the words "Time Travel"!  This doesn't support any point I'm making, it was just so dumb that I want to tell people about it.

This was not a good film.  It was clumsy and inelegant and not entertainingly campy or strange.  Watch it with friends and booze.

Seven Chances (1925)

Saw Seven Chances, a Buster Keaton comedy.  The plot is that in order to cash in on a $1M inheritance, Keaton must marry someone by 7pm that day.  The end of the film is clear before the action even begins: we are told he's been pining for this one woman but can't pluck up the courage to ask her to marry him.  She is offended by his proposal now because she assumes she's just "any" woman who will do.  With this refusal, he goes hunting for another woman, ultimately resorting to newspaper advertising.  The film has three acts: Keaton asking random women to marry him, Keaton being overwhelmed by too many brides, and finally Keaton running a lot.

I enjoyed the film a great deal.  I particularly liked the second act, when he suffers from his own success. There's something deeply funny about Keaton running from an angry mob of dainty, wedding-dress-clad brides.  Just the volume of them is great!  Also, of course Keaton is a master of the dead-pan and of telling stories in little micro-motions and gestures.  There's a great mix of subtle acting and extremely un-subtle stunts.

Alas, the film was made in the 20s and there's some gross-ass black-face we have to deal with.  I also felt like there's something Freudian about the image of a man fleeing from brides.  Generally the women come out on top in this film however.  They are the gatekeepers of their sexuality in this film and poor Keaton spends a lot of time being jeered at by failed partners.

So the film was pretty good.  Weird 20s-politics aside, I thought the film was funny and exciting.  There's all kinds of gags that I rewound to watch again.  Good film!

Pin (1988)

Saw Pin (thanks Lea!)  It was a psychodrama from the 80s about two children (a daughter and son) of a doctor who has an anatomical dummy in his office which he uses to put patients at ease.  He uses ventriloquism to make the dummy "talk."  This is sort of creepy on its own, but within the realm of misguided adult attempts to comfort children.  Alas, this has a profound effect on the son of the doctor, who reaches adulthood, still firmly believing that the dummy can talk.  Over time, the dummy's "personality" takes a more sinister, demanding turn.

Although it came from the 80s, the film has a Hitchcockian, giallo feel to it.  There's pop psychology, and attempts to placate and fool the psychopathic antagonist.  The over-the-top premise is handled seriously and the film wrings some genuine freakiness from the bizarre dummy and the creepy son.  Ultimately, the true horror of the film is about psychological abuse and seeing the damage wrought by the son is something to behold.

There's also something thematic going on with graven images and reproduction.  The son and daughter, perhaps unconsciously, mirror their parents' seating positions and postures.  They are not just the children of their parents, they are becoming their parents in some way.  Similarly, the dummy is called "Pin" which is revealed to be short for Pinocchio, the puppet who wanted to be real.  The doctor father tries to make the puppet into another sort of parent for the children, but as the generational divide collapses, the son takes over that roll.  All very neat!

So the film was solid.  It's obscure for no reason which is very obvious to me.  I guess it was out of step with its time.  It doesn't have a big scary villain that will launch 1,000 sequels and instead uses more 1970s psycho-horror to drive its scares.  It holds up now however.  Go see it!

A Place in the Sun (1951)

Saw A Place in the Sun, a fairly grim but frothy melodrama about a man who is hired to his wealthy uncle's factory.  There, he is ignored by his wealthy relations' family, but he starts to climb the ladder slowly, slowly.  He starts dating one of the other factory workers, in spite of regulations, and he seems to be making a small life when tragedy strikes: he falls in love with one of the women from the world of luxury his uncle inhabits.  Now he's torn between two women: the poor one he's with vs the glamorous dream that's just out of his reach.

The film is about the corrosive effects of the American dream: the lie that capitalism works as a meritocracy.  The film was based on a novel titled An American Tragedy which makes the aims of the story more clear.  The central trouble is that a relationship with this un-glamorous girl he's involved with means a life of poverty and hardship.  She's not as well-dressed as the other woman, but she's sweet and she loves him and cares for him.  In isolation with her, he could be happy.  But how on earth can he be happy when a far more luxurious life of money and power is calling to him, just begging him to abandon his current girl?

And so too with our own lives.  We may not live the most glamorous or comfortable existences, but they could be enough for us, if only we did not have the dream of more always hanging out of our reach.  How can we enjoy what little we have when we know that if only we were a little more cut-throat, if only we were willing to do a little more evil, we could have so much more?

I don't know what the solution to this is.  The main character is meant to represent us and therefore remains sympathetic in spite of it all.  He comes from a religious background which he has abandoned, foreshadowing greater falls from grace to come.  Is a stronger morality then, the proposed solution?  Ironically, the woman who played his religious mother was a communist in real life and would be blacklisted after this film as part of the Red Scare.  She next appeared in Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon in 1970.  Clearly, America was not ready to think about alternative systems just yet.

The film is a bummer, of course.  It's got a lot of glorious melodrama (fainting!  Smoldering close-ups! Silhouettes!) but it ends on a dour note.  It's intended to provoke and to force engagement, so it leaves you unsettled.  It's an interesting film.

The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms (1953)

Saw The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, the American precursor to Japan's Godzilla.  The film was a standard giant-creature special-effects film from the 50s.  I was very surprised however to learn that the first pre-historic monster awoken by atom bomb tests seems to have been filmed in the US, and I kind of suspect that there is nationalist-tinged controversy over this (ala who discovered the number 0 first, or paper, or stuffed cabbage: which brave nation dared to dream of giant nuclear lizards?)

The plot is that a giant lizard is woken by nuclear tests in the north pole.  After a few high-intensity lizard scenes, the meat of the film consists of a scientist trying to prove that his lizard-visions are legit, and trying to prove he's not crazy.  In the style of early Hollywood, the film must also be everything to all people.  So, it has romance, thrills, mystery, lizards.

I didn't really dig the film.  Here were the interesting bits: the lizard was animated by stop-motion pioneer Ray Harryhausen, and although the technique looks simple by modern standards, some scenes really stand out, such as when the lizard attacks a lighthouse.  Also of course, the broader context of post-world-war America coming to grips with its world-ending nuclear capabilities.  Outside of that, there's the novelty of this being the first Godzilla-ish movie.

So, the film was not great, but solidly okay and at lest brief, so it didn't wear out its welcome.  The special effects are pretty good for its time, and the plot is ridiculous.  There are square jaws and army men using peculiar slang and pretty lady-scientists and a big lizard.  What more do you ask from this film?

Bee Movie (2007)

Saw Bee Movie, which opens with the following bit of misinformation: "According to all known laws of aviation, there is no way a bee should be able to fly" (debunked here).  This is only the opening salvo in a virtual avalanche of bee-related misinformation and mis-truths.  Here are 10 more that I quickly identified, in a bulleted list:

1. Bees cannot speak English
2. Bees do not drive little cars in their hive
3. Beehives do not have little roads inside of them for little cars to drive upon
4. Beehives do not have whimsical honey factories, involving buckets, and conveyer belts, and taffy-pulling machines
5. Bees do not collect nectar via a gun called a "nectar collector"
6. A travelling arc does not move up a bee's antennae like a Jacob's ladder when they are electrocuted
7. Bees do not wear little sweaters
8. Bees cannot use an emery board to surf on flushing toilet water
9. When injured, bees do not need an intravenous honey drip
10. There has in fact been no record of a woman in New York dumping her chef boyfriend for a bee ever at all

So, you can see this is not a very realistic movie (and actual bit of bee trivia you wouldn't know from this movie: male bees are for reproduction only, don't leave the queen, and don't have a stinger (so Seinfeld's character is canonically lesbian.))

Ok, moving on to the plot: the main character bee feels oppressed by the nanny state of the hive.  He desires to fly outside of the hive to hunt for nectar (which, again, in real life is not done with a gun) but in the outside world he meets a woman who he talks to, despite bee law being firm about banning this.  The main plot of the story is the romance between the bee and this human woman, intercut with the bee's quest to stop the exploitation of his people by the humans.

The movie is not great.  It's certainly not bad, but very unpolished.  The humans look strange and lumpy, the bees look much better, but there's a strange mix of movie references, and pointless cameos (Ray Liotta voices himself) and strange whimsy.  At one point, they reveal a hive job is to wear a hat with a finger on top to scoop up the last drop of honey, but at another point, the girlfriend's plane explodes when it rams into a cliffside, during the bee's romantic fantasy.  This second joke feels like something out of the sinister humor of Adult Swim, but the former is just whimsical.  Lumpy, uneven.

The plot bumbles along and has its moments but feels over-long, even at 90 minutes.  There's a few moments of odd politics left in there (strong "if people don't need to work, society will collapse" vibes in the final act, plus also the main bee is dissatisfied that everyone enjoys their jobs (???)) and many of the jokes are recognizably joke-shaped, but only inspire an exhalation.

So, DreamWorks went for broke on the marketing budget of this thing, coating the billboards with ads in the hope of gulling a few hopefuls on opening night, and then letting the film sink into obscurity.  Alas, like Shrek before it, the internet caught hold and made those 2016 edits of the film, after it became clear that DreamWorks had no intention of enforcing copyright.  And here we are today.  See it for the memes if you have to (and I had to) because it's not very good on its own.

The Obscure Object Of Desire

Saw The Obscure Object Of Desire, a film by Luis Buñuel, famed absurdist director.  The film is frustrating and sexy, a good culmination of Buñuel's career.  It tells the story of a mutually exploitative, mutually abusive relationship between Mathieu and Conchita.  Mathieu is a wealthy man who falls in love with Conchita, a novice maid who he believes he can have some no-strings fun with.  She out-maneuvers him however, by never succumbing to his advances, but always teasing him, giving him just a taste, never giving him what he really wants.

Neither one of these people are blameless: the girl is quite cruel to this sentimental old man, flagrantly carrying on with boyfriends while pretending to be a shrinking virgin, afraid to have sex with Mathieu.  Then again, Mathieu really has a lot of the cards here: he's got the money and the influence and he's able to wreck some serious damage to her too.  In the manner of a toxic relationship, they are both ambiguously addicted to the other, damaging and enabling in turns.  He keeps coming back either out of sentimentality or to see if she's finally been beaten down enough to let him bed her, and she returns either out of guilt or to feed her ego; to see if she can flirt her way out of this last one.  They are both eagerly participating in this toxic relationship however and both are somewhat to blame.

The film works well as an allegory for class struggle, a frequent theme of Buñuel's work.  The girl is the underclass whom the upper class eagerly seeks to screw over and exploit.  She gallantly exploits right back, stealing and humiliating and celebrating in her successes over the upper class man.  The older Mathieu has all the power and no honorable intentions (at one point he's asked why he doesn't marry her.  Answer: Then I'll be giving up my strongest weapon!) however he is only powerful as a result of his network of servants and frequently he's made pathetic by hold-ups when he's on his own.

Surely the right move for these two is to break up and not see each other again.  In the class struggle reading of this however, this is impossible.  How can the upper class "break up" with the proletariat?  This thought brings coherency to all of the random terrorist bombings and violence depicted in the film: they are trying to break it all up, to tear it all down.

This is a somewhat unpleasant film.  It's interesting to decode, but the characters and the world it depicts are unpleasant.  It's a depiction of life and inter-class struggle under capitalism, and is therefore necessarily unpleasant, but it's unpleasant nonetheless.  Further, the central struggle of whether or not this old guy will get into this pretty lady's pants is tawdry and kind of exploitative in its own right.  Which, maybe there's something there too.

Finally: I was streaming this film and the streaming service kept freezing and buffering, coyly denying me what I wanted.  I felt exploited.

The Lighthouse (2019)

Saw The Lighthouse, a striking black and white film from the same guy who directed The Witch.  As with that film, this one is a supernaturally-tinged psycho-horror about two lighthouse keepers slowly driving each other mad.  In one corner is a quiet but stern Robert Pattinson and in the other corner is hoary sea-dog Willem Defoe.  It's quite the film!

I generally like psychodramas however this one didn't thrill me the way they often do.  It's very glum and serious and keeps us the audience in the dark right up unto the ambiguous ending.  Several times we are shown dreams and visions which may be real.  It's left to us to puzzle and guess at what really happened; how much magic we're willing to indulge in.  The result is frustrating, tantalizing.  I enjoyed the ambiguity, but I also wish I understood more of the characters' insanity or powers.  I wish I knew what was "really" going on.

The central horror of the film in this case is the madness of isolation.  The two men's pasts and their power struggles curdle into mythic fantasies and mad cavorting as they try to stave off madness that roars like the sea storm, right outside their door.

There's a lot going on in this film.  It's drawing a lot from old sea stories of the 1800s, so we get the didactic moralizing, gods and monsters, sublimated homoeroticism.  It all spirals more and more out of hand until frankly murder-suicide begins to seem like a pretty reasonable option.  Kudos all around!

I Was Born, But… (1932)

Saw I Was Born, But…  It was a fairly cute film about two kid brothers whose family moves into a suburb.  There, there's a new school and bullies to contend with as well as, most troublingly, their father's boss's kid.  The film is silent and mostly follows the kids, however we dip into their father's life here and there a little.  It's very cute and observational.

The film felt a little staid to me, but I often struggle a little with silent films.  There's something about the sound of the actor's voice that allows me to connect and enter into the film a little more easily.  That said, this film reminded me a lot of the Sazae-san comic strip, or My Neighbors the Yamadas, mostly concerned with the small foibles of small domesticity.  The dramatic climax of the film however is quite serious.  It's handled with a somewhat light touch but is a portrayal of a significant familial earthquake.  I was surprised it got that serious, but it makes the rest of the proceedings feel all the sweeter in contrast.

Other surprising elements: we see the boys performing military drills at school and hear that they dream of becoming great generals.  This film was prior to Japan's de-militarization and it's strange to see it.  We also get to see a film-within-the-film in the form of some home movies.  Their father is made to look a little foolish in these home movies, which upsets the boys, however this film (ie: I Was Born, But …) has been making everyone look a little silly the whole time, so there's an interesting thought to think about fiction vs reality, about observing vs living an experience.

So, it was an okay film.  It was a little dry, a little precious, but sweet and not difficult and from a culture which is different enough to my own to be interesting.  I wouldn't recommend it highly, but I've seen worse.

Tick, Tick … BOOM! (2021)

Saw Tick, Tick … BOOM!, a movie that I feel suffered somewhat from my never having seen the musical Rent.  This film is a biopic about Jon Larson,  the writer of that musical, Rent.  It follows his struggles to make it in the overcrowded world of Broadway musical theater as his resources dwindle and the aids crisis looms.  The film is one of these films that's sort of about following passions vs giving in an taking the easy, mediocre road.  I didn't like it very much.

In order to be really fantastically successful, it's not enough to be talented.  You also have to have such faith and confidence in yourself that you are able to shut up your own self-doubt and keep on striving, even in the face of reality.  The plot of this film is about Jon coming very close to a reality in which he  just does not make it.  He keep sacrificing more and more of his life to his talent but, you know, maybe the sacrifice won't wind up being worth it.

Unfortunately, as he alienates the other characters, they accurately call him out for being selfish and self-absorbed.  He's not just sacrificing his own life to his art, but he's also sacrificing pieces of the lives of those around him, stranding and abandoning people who want to abandon this quest.

I think the film is meant to be uplifting, but I started to really turn against Jon part-way through.  There's a confrontation where he's scolded for abandoning one of his friends and it ends up with him dashing off into Central Park to cry by himself.  He's just so upset, you see, that someone might be upset with him.  This is the moment, for me, where he shifted from "loveable guy with a dream" to "narcissist making everything about him."  This moment happens shortly before the love-fest ending where we celebrate the heck out of his legacy.

So, this film was not for me.  I am maybe too old and mediocre to be uplifted by a "follow your dreams, even in hard times" kind of message.  Maybe I would have liked it better if I had known and loved Rent, I don't know.  Not for me.

Nostalghia (1983)

Saw Nostalghia, a fairly crazy film from Andrei Tarkovsky.  It follows a Russian male poet and an Itallian woman travelling to Bologna Italy to research a Russian composer who lived there for a while.  Early on in the film, the poet scolds the woman for reading a book of translated poetry.  Poetry is untranslatable, like all art, he claims.  The Italian woman counters: if Russian poetry cannot be translated into Italian, how can they ever hope to understand each other?  This is the question at the heart of the film: how can we ever understand each other?

The poet's attitude is that people are too fundamentally different to understand each other perfectly.  We are so caught up in our own understanding of the world, that we cannot fully understand anyone else's.  Contrasted with this, there's the philosophy of a mad-man that he runs into which can be summed up with 1+1=1.  We are all the same, claims the mad-man, understanding is consensus.

The film is much more on the poet's side of this debate.  The nature of his relationship with the Italian woman is understood differently by both of them, to disastrous results.  Also, the mad-man once imprisoned his family in their house for 7 years.  If we are all one, why is he locking himself away like this?

The poet's name is Andrei and I believe he's supposed to be a Tarkovsky self-insert, hence why the film takes his side.  It also makes a lot of sense that someone involved in creating art for others to consume would quickly run up against the subjective nature of art.  The film is also filled with Tarkovsky-isms: endless slow of water in still pools, or raining down, flowing down window panes, German shepherd dogs, religious iconography, moss-eaten stones.  It feels like he's reinforcing his point with this self-indulgence: these symbols mean so much to him.  Do you see them how he does?  Do they do anything for you?

The film concludes by examining how the poet and the mad-man try to communicate with the world: one in an explosive spectacle which moves no one, and the other quietly and intimately in a way which also seems to reach no one, but which seems profoundly meaningful to the communicator if to no one else.

It's an interesting film, however a little slow.  It's not the most entertaining film to watch, but it's interesting to think about and sort of decode.  Even when the imagery is inscrutable, it's striking.

In Fabric (2018)

Saw In Fabric, a strange, somewhat funny horror film about an evil red dress that brings disaster to the people who wear it.  The film includes great sequences and deep weirdness, but also a hefty dose of the absurd.  It's an interesting film, but sort of a curiosity - more camp than bravura.

The film is not set in any particular time, but looks very 70s-ish.  It's a throwback not only to colorful horror like Suspiria, but also to the sillier giallo films.  There's wonderfully creepy scenes of the dress floating above the beds of the character, like a cat balefully gloating over its prey, but there are also other scenes where the dress "creeps" along the ground, obviously tugged by someone offscreen, in a way that evokes Death Bed: The Bed That Eats.  There's also more obviously intentionally funny moments, such as a running gag where a washing machine repairman's jargon hypnotizes his listeners.

A major location for the film is the department store that sells the dress in the first place.  It's a deeply creepy and brightly-lit place populated by witchy women in black dresses who speak in a dense jargon of consumerism and marketing consultancy: "Did the transaction validate your paradigm of consumerism?"  They are fairly funny but deeply strange and creepy.

The film mines the strangeness of retail fashion: selling the idea of a more glamorous vision of you, but also predatory; seductive, hypnotic, fetishistic, and artificial.  A commercial for the store is shown many times, with the store worker women eternally beckoning you in.  Delightfully weird!

I enjoyed the film for the most part.  I didn't understand its sense of humor, but the horror elements were effective.  It contains a fair helping of silliness, but is a creepy, sensual, psychedelic exploration of clothing stores first and foremost.

Muriel (1963)

Saw Muriel, a challenging film that opens one a woman visiting an antiques store.  The banal dialogue plays out over a rapid-fire series of close-ups, of the proprietress smoking, a coffee maker bubbling, the woman crossing her ankles, a ring on a finger.  This is a disconcerting introduction to a disconcerting film.  The entire film feels like glimpses and missing reels from a different, longer film which is more coherent, but which is also perhaps more boring.

The plot of the film centers around the woman who runs the antique shop, her (maybe) ex-boyfriend, the boyfriend's current girlfriend, and her son.  The antiques owner and her son have both been impacted heavily by the recent Algerian war.  She missed her opportunity to marry her ex-boyfriend.  Obsessed with what could have been, she surrounds herself with the objects of the past, to preserve and dream.  Her son meanwhile, is haunted by the war, and obsessively collects documentary materials as "evidence".  Both are obsessed with the past, but the mother's obsession centers on what could have been while the son's centers on what was.

The themes of the film are interesting, but you need to pay very close attention to the film to avoid getting lost.  Many times there was a blink-and-you-miss-it shot, coupled with a sudden musical sting which indicates an important scene in a normal film, but here we're rapidly moving on and whatever it was that was dropped, I missed entirely!  After an hour or so of feeling confused and paying close close attention just to figure out what's going on, I got very tired.

The film is too difficult for me.  It's shot like a short story: full of little scenes and observations.  Unlike a short story however, we can't linger on the scene to understand it.  We're always rushing along to something else ergodic and evocative.  The same director directed Last Year at Marienbad, another film that was too inaccessible for me to enjoy very much.

So, this film got the better of me.  Under all of its strange editing, the story is relatively straightforward, but the editing is something to contend with.  This film may benefit from multiple viewings, or perhaps from none at all: the editing is all in the script, written by a poet.  It might be better to read than to view.

The Florida Project

Saw The Florida Project, a film about a little girl living with her single mother in a long-stay hotel on the strip outside of Disneyland.  It's a sweet although sort of sad film about this girl finding fun and life and existence on the margins of society.  It's similar in theme to Beasts of the Southern Wild, but this film is somewhat more tame both in terms of style (there's no apocalyptic CGI boars in this one) and in terms of the characters' poverty (the adults here can afford a hotel room.)  But both films are a child's-eye view of the effects of poverty and how they do and don't impact these kids.

The child acting is amazing.  Apparently a lot of the children's dialogue was improvised which helped it feel more natural and more strange and creative and kid-ish.  There's a few scenes in the climax of the film where you can hear a script-writer's words coming out of the kids' mouths, but this is understandable, given the importance of the climax of the film!  Also, that climax is still very raw and moving.  We see the hard shell that this little girl built up crumble, crushed under the weight of poverty and forces outside her control.

The film also takes place in the shadow of Disneyland, an expensive resort that the kids don't even dream about attending.  Nonetheless, they are often seen walking under giant Disney signs, past novelty shops with garish mascots and frequently interact with tourists on their way to the Magic Kingdom.  The main character herself lives in the Magic Palace hotel, a castle-themed hotel painted an eye-searing pink.  She has friends in Future-land, another hotel with statues of rockets in the parking lot.

The contrast between the fantastical names of the hotels vs the poverty of the residents is cutting and ironic, but the film is generally kind to its characters, so it never feels cruel, this juxtaposition.  There's also poignant parallel to the children's imaginary lives.  To them, this is a magic palace, a future-land.  They uncritically accept their surroundings and do their best to have fun, make friends, and go on adventures.  The childhood wonder on sale at Disney only a few miles away is alive and well, even in the ghettos of the magic kingdom.  It's sort of sad but also sort of hopeful.

It's a Gift

Saw It's a Gift, a W C Fields comedy about a grocer who wants to move out to the sunny orange groves of California.  In the manner of comedies, the plot is secondary to vignettes of relatable suffering and bad behavior.  The film is okay, but prepare for some tame, old-timey fun.

The main drawback of this film is just how unpleasant every character is.  I'm used to seeing W C Fields as a sort of rogue character, a con man or grifter.  Here he's the straight man, humorously under-reacting to his proud wife, his flirty daughter, his bratty son.  But absolutely everything goes wrong in this guy's life.  Simply trying to shave becomes a test of ingenuity and dexterity as he dances around his family's interruptions.  A day at work leaves the grocery in a ruin.  This is all played for laughs, but I began wondering why this grocer guy didn't just leave.  Just walk down the road and continue until he died from exhaustion.  Surely that would be better than being perpetually tormented like this.

The film is okay, but a little aged.  There's nothing very objectionable about it, but it leans heavily on the comedy of enduring through suffering, which I get tired of pretty quickly.  I enjoyed the film okay, but it was a little tame and staid by modern standards.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012)

Saw The Perks of Being a Wallflower, a nice little coming of age film about a boy who is just starting high school.  He has no friends and his high school is played up as one of those movie-places where letterman-jacket-clad jocks are always hazing the freshmen.  His life begins looking up when he meets a to-cool-to-be-popular brother and sister who introduce him to cool music and Rocky Horror Picture Show.

The film reminded me of Silver Linings Playbook in as much as it's a fairly fluffy film which is not afraid to delve into some darker psychological waters.  In particular, there's a freakout sequence near the end of the film which I adored.  The film leading up to that point is fairly standard attractive teen melodrama (which I greatly enjoyed since I have a fondness for melodrama) but the ending tips into sublime psychodrama (which is the drama that I like best of all!)

The film is very slickly shot but with some elements of subtle story-telling.  We get the sense that something is wrong with the main character, that he has some troubled past, but we don't get to know exactly what's eating him until far into the film.  But he drops little clues here and there that presage the ending and help explain why he's such a non-entity in most of the film.

I liked the film alright.  It felt like a slightly updated John Huges film, with sweetness and sincerity that feels a hair manufactured, but which is nonetheless.  Unlike John Huges however, this film is shot in a more modern, cozy way, with handheld cameras lending an air of intimacy and close-up shots galore.  It's not the most trenchant film, but as teen fare goes, you could do worse.

Kes (1969)

Saw Kes, a sort of sad film about a little boy who lives in a Yorkshire mining town with his single mother and drunken older brother.  He is bullied by his brother, bullied by teachers, bullied by other kids.  Things change a bit however when he starts training a kestrel.

The film starts off with the brother bullying the main character boy, signaling that this will not be a happy movie.  The small town is not a slum, but everyone is visibly struggling and worn out by the struggle.  At one point the boy buys some meat to feed the bird and in the background you can hear a screaming match going on.  That's just life here.  Similarly at school the teachers are indiscriminately cruel, not so much arbiters of justice as terrible ogres to be avoided at all cost.

The kestrel symbolizes the main character's soul: his desire for something more and his bright personality, not yet worn down by his harsh life, but already beginning to be subdued.  The bird is what he aspires to be like and, in one scene where he talks to his classmates about the bird hunting, the bird makes him unique and fascinating and splendid.  Of course we viewers know that it's hard to maintain any of that in the slums.

The main character is fairly young but acts with great naturalism, apparently improvising a lot of his dialogue.  The film is shot almost entirely via hidden camera, which gives the film a grainy look.  Often the corners of the shot are cut off, making everything feel cramped and dim.  In contrast, the scenes of nature are shot more conventionally, giving them the feeling of comparative light and space and beauty.

The film is relatively dismal, but not without its moments of tenderness and happiness.  It's the sort of film you show to teenagers to inspire them and to try to get them to be empathetic.

The Golden Door (2006)

Saw The Golden Door, a very narrowly focused film about an Italian family immigrating to America in the 1920s.  The film opens following a small family and, as they proceed through immigration, it widens into a broader look at specifically what went down in Ellis Island back then.  The film employs elements of magical realism which are at first jarring but become lyrical at the end.

Combined with this trip across the Atlantic, there is a budding romance developing between the patriarch of the family and another immigrant woman.  The film uses this relationship as a mirror for the excitement and anxieties of immigration.  On the one hand, they strongly desire to immigrate, but are they fit enough?  Are they worthy?  These questions are reasonable for a relationship but less so for immigration.  At one point, one of the immigrants berates the officers, demanding who they think they are, to judge ones worth?  This contrast is brought to a peak in a scene where "brides" must be identified by their American "grooms" in a highly ritualized, government sanctioned ceremony overseen by a disinterested bureaucrat.

Early in the film, we spend a lot of time in the nearly medieval squalor of rural Italy, but the latter half of the film involves a lot of scenes of bureaucratic cruelty.  The film has a spare, floating quality to it, featuring long silences and sudden tonal shifts.  I found the film engrossing, although it was a bit of a downer.  It feels like a glimpse into another time, another world, one which still exists to some extent.

My Life as a Dog

Saw My Life as a Dog, a sweet coming of age film about a little boy who is sent to live in a remote town with his uncle's family due to his mother's poor health.  In this new remote town, he makes friends and has fun, haunted and troubled by his mother's illness and the chaos it brings to his life.  He deals with the sweet and the bitter, trying to resolve them in his mind.

The film is one of those coming of age films that are sweet and melancholy, acknowledging the pain in the protagonist's life, but stridently dusting him off and hustling him on to new adventures.  We ruminate, but we don't mope.  The child's view of the world is accepting but uncertain.  Is this the way things are?  Or just how they happen to be?

I enjoyed the film okay.  It didn't make a huge impression on me, but it's a serious and kindly film.  You could watch it with your parents if you wanted.

Entranced Earth (1967)

Saw Entranced Earth (1967), a political film about a power struggle in the fictional South-American country of Eldorado.  The hegemony as personified by a media mogul is squaring off against a populist democratic leader.  The protagonist is a poet who works for the media mogul but backs the populist.  The film starts off by giving the ending away: that the populist candidate wins, but immediately calls in the army to quell dissent and to disperse crowds.  He is as bankrupt as the media mogul.

The film has the feel of a Goddard film: lots of high-falutin' talk about the people and the masses and socialism and religion and democracy etc etc and lots of men in suits smoking and talking.  Also like Goddard, the film is full of little stylistic flourishes.  Several times people talk directly to the camera, clips of future events are dropped in early, or fantasies are spliced in as reality.  There's a long sequence at the end where a politician is crowned with a pope hat, laughing and laughing.

The film is aiming at political unrest and discontent.  It's even-handed in that everyone comes off looking somewhat bad.  The central protagonist wants what's best for the people and the country, but he is an intellectual idealist, and even he is revealed to be somewhat bankrupt, when he threatens a peasant who is asking that his land be returned to him.  The film gives away that this is going to be a downer in the opening scene, where the populist leader starts calcifying into yet another dictator.  It feels true to life, but also cynical, bitter, rabble-rousing.

I didn't really dig this film (just like a Goddard film!)  It was a little dreary and frustrating to watch and, frankly, if I want to see depressing failures of the political process, I need look no further than recent headlines.  There's plenty enough to be depressed about.  I frankly could use a more up-beat, optimistic take on democracy.  My general feeling is too pessimistic already, leading me to embrace a kind of not-very-productive isolation.  Enough already.

The Witches (2020)

Saw The Witches (2020), an adaptation of the Roald Dahl story which follows a young boy and his grandmother battling a secret society of witches who plot to transform all children everywhere into mice.  I wanted to see this film because I had fond memories of the 90s adaptation and wanted to see how this film's deep south setting would inform and inflect the film.  I guess I had forgotten however and deeply strange and paranoid the premise of the film is.  The final result is mostly harmless kiddy fare, but there are barely-hidden undercurrents which play uncomfortably in these modern, conspiracy-haunted times.

The chief protagonist, the Grand High Witch, is played extremely broadly as a CGI cartoon evil monster, hissing and belching out her lines.  We are told that witches such as she are not human at all but demons in female form.  The witches appear to be wealthy, single, white, and bent on destroying humanity for seemingly no reason.  In the 90s, I think this may have already had unfortunate associations, however in modern days, as the political right associates more and more with godliness, they cast their political enemies as satanic, demonic, child predators.  Although the film is (I guess) trying to be a fun little romp, it felt deeply sad and depressing to see this lovely, sensible grandmother earnestly telling her wide-eyed grandson about demons in female form.

The film is directed by Robert Zemeckis who is known for interesting visual effects (Forrest Gump, Who Framed Roger Rabbit) and for what it's worth the setting is used to great effect.  The trees and beaches and the hotel itself looks just gorgeous and the main characters are well-drawn.  The film opens with a sequence showing the grandmother melting her grandson's trauma and welcoming him into her life.  To me, this magic is far more impressive than merely turning someone into a mouse, and the witches themselves and their magic feels like a paranoid delusion taken too seriously by comparison.  They (the witches) are wacky and cartoony, neither scary nor amusing, but sort of off-putting and strange, like a nightmare someone else had.  I didn't like one.

Love Streams (1984)

Saw Love Streams (1984), a film I started off hating but which grew on me as it went on.  It revolves around a brother/sister duo, Robert and Sarah, who both have complex relationships to love and sex.  Robert is a creep who buys a whole house-full of prostitutes for a weekend.  He drunkenly steals a lounge singer's car and flirts with the singer's mother.  He's a hideous drunk from the depths of the 70s.  Sarah meanwhile is a woman with a big heart who is pathetically obsessed with her ex-husband and daughter who she seems to have smothered with affection and neediness and who she is lost without.

The film opens with Robert boozing and whoring and working his shaggy charms on ladies, and I thought this was going to be a another one of those films that lionizes this pickup-artist, celebrating him with faint condemnation, ala The Wolf of Wall Street or Scarface.  The film takes a turn however, showing Robert abandoning a newly discovered biological son to go whoring and stumbling down hotel hallways, stumbling into walls.  He's an alcoholic and probably a sexaholic as well.

Similarly, Sarah is played by Gena Rowlands, at first appearing to be a somewhat controlling woman who is hurt by a messy divorce but ultimately descending into a reprise of her character in A Woman Under the Influence.  She relies upon all of the men in her life, including taxi drivers and bellhops, to take care of her, using their squashy sensibility to balance her obsessions and manias.  

The film is fascinatingly strange.  It starts out as a standard 70s lionization of independence and excess but contains wild stylistic choices and plot points.  It feels like a satire that was taken seriously.  There's lines that are goofy one their faces but which are delivered with great seriousness, brittle and sincere.  I wouldn't recommend the film as a crowd pleaser; it's very complex and strange.  I enjoyed the film for its strangeness however, for what it made me think.  There's a scene where a pit bull turns into a nude man.  Seeing this, Robert erupts into gales of laughter, shouting "who the fuck are you?" and that's amazing and strange and delightful.

Chip 'n' Dale: Rescue Rangers

Saw Chip 'n' Dale: Rescue Rangers, a film in the vein of Who Framed Roger Rabbit which follows the (fictional) cartoon chipmunk actors behind the hit(?) 1980s TV series of the same name.  One of the duo, Chip, has moved on with his life, becoming an insurance salesman.  Dale continues to hang on to fading glory, getting a "3D operation" in a desperate bid to stay relevant and marketable.  The film is much more on the side of Dale however, both in spirit and in execution.

The film is a fairly straightforward nostalgia cash-in.  It features the same old homey characters re-treading the mystery-thriller formula of the TV show.  There's some funny jokes involving well-known cartoon characters behaving out character, but nothing your sarcastic friends couldn't come up with.  It has a made-for-TV feel to it: the characters are un-nuanced, the plot is straightforward.

But, it's good for what it is.  The film attempts to cash in on 80s nostalgia in a self-aware way and it more-or-less does just that in an acceptable way.  It's not a film I think I'll re-watch, but it's a film I wanted to see once, which I think is all it's trying for.  Not a classic, but a pleasant waste of time.

Encanto

Saw Encanto, a cute Disney movie about a family of demi-gods who live in some secluded mountain village, keeping everything together with their magical powers.  The protagonist is a girl who seems to have no magical power at all (or does she???)  Although this is the premise of the film, the conflict comes in the form of toxic family dynamics.  Although everything seems joyous and whimsical on the surface, the family is a roiling mass of repression, perfectionism, and constraint.  The final showdown is more about healing than triumphing, which was nice.

This film reminded me a lot of Tangled.  In keeping with more modern, post-Ghibli movies, this film has no antagonist unlike in Tangled which has a very accessible depiction of a pathological narcissist.  In Encanto, there's a matriarch figure, but she is not Mother Gothel and even admits to her own faults in the denouement (which, I snark, is far more unbelievable than mere super-strength or super-hearing).  This is nice and gives anyone struggling in a toxic family dynamic hope for the future, but I feel like it's a lesson miss-applied.

In Spirited Away there's an evil witch who turns out to not be truly irredeemable, but to have a family and clear, non-vindictive priorities.  This choice was hailed at the time as sophisticated and true to life.  In Encanto, the matriarch admits her faults and all is made whole again.  But this is not true to life.  I don't have the numbers or the lived experience, but it does not feel believable to me that a harmful family dynamic can be recognized and solved so directly.  The process requires space and an acknowledgement that some people will not change.  I mean, right?  To change oneself is a tall order but to change a group dynamic seems nigh-on impossible!

But I'm picking nits here.  My gripe above is that it could perhaps be better.  This film is no slouch as it is.  It's a slickly produced and packaged song and dance which is thrilling and heartwarming with fun, loud musical numbers and fun jokes.  The sad bits are sad and the fun bits are fun!  The film wraps up a bit too perfectly for me, but it's a fun ride!

The Lady From Shanghai (1947)

Saw The Lady From Shanghai and oh boy how I loved it!  It was a fairly classy noir film written, acted, and directed by Orson Welles.  It follows a Irish sailor who saves a pretty, rich woman from being raped and she, in return, hires him on to the crew of her husband's yacht.  From there, they discover that he has a criminal past and he begins to be pulled into their webs of semi-serious games, as they taunt each other and threaten divorce and humiliation and murder.

The film is fairly by-the-numbers with rich old men and beautiful broads, hats and guns.  The engine that drives much of the film for me is to see how innocent the pretty wife is.  Is she the naive bait being dangled by her sinister husband?  Or is she the true Svengali, pulling everyone's strings?  But all of this is beside the point for me.  I just loved the excesses of the noir genre on display here.  At one point the wife mumbles a song to the camera as her face fills the screen.  There's hideously ugly old women who scream and point at the gunman, a courthouse scene with a befuddled judge, and there's even a climactic shootout in a fun-house hall of mirrors that has to be seen to be believed!

If the behind-the-scenes trivia is to be believed, the film was fit so firmly into the noir mold by studio execs.  Indeed, the film doesn't achieve the levels of restraints and polish of, say, The Magnificent Ambersons (or Citizen Kane of course, for that matter) but I appreciated the simplicity of the results.  This film isn't interested in subverting or reinventing anything.  It's interested in digging so deeply into the noir groove that it strikes gold.

Vox Lux (2018)

Saw Vox Lux, a film about a pop star's childhood and rise to fame.  Once the rise is established and just starts to begin, we quickly skip directly to the denouement: the staggering, drugged, drunken, weeping mess she has become in adulthood (ie: 31)  I watched the film hoping for some glorious over-the-top pop numbers and theatrics, maybe some delicious melodrama, but unfortunately the film felt more tawdry and kind of sad than glitzy or dramatic.  It was more tabloid and less music video.  Maybe I've become old, or maybe the film just had something else on its mind.

The film is fairly dismal and dour.  Everyone is dressed in rhinestones and leather, but they are all miserable and concerned and sad.  The film opens with a narration by the deep, dry voice of Willem Dafoe, telling us in true-crime tones about the girl's childhood.  She's catapulted to fame after she sings a song during a memorial service in the 90s and later on, during her rise to fame, 9/11 coincides with another pivotal life moment.  Finally, in the present day of 2018, some terrorists wear masks styled after one of her music videos.  The arc of the main character's life mirrors the evolution of modern American fears.

The end of the movie provided the best payoff for me, where it's revealed (spoilers here.  Highlight to see) she sold her soul to the devil.  This brings a lot of the film into coherency but makes the parallel with real, post-9/11 history confusing and muddy.  What's the parallel?  It feels muddy and muddled and kind of in poor taste.

I don't know.  This film disappointed m.  This may be my fault for judging a fish by its ability to climb a tree, but I went in hoping for hysterics and hopefully some catchy tunes, but left with dour, pessimistic meditations on America's continued descent mirrored by the dissipation of this pop star.  A grim, taught little film.

The Dead (1987)

Saw The Dead, a film based on the James Joyce short story of the same name (which I know I have read but which I do not remember.)  The film depicts a family party hosted by spinster aunts sometime in the early 1900s (I suppose.)  Like a visit to grandma's house, the film is fairly slow and tame and quaint, but also touching and strangely poignant too.

The film's most main characters are a husband and wife who are both sensible and pleasant people.  They get along well, but there's a foreshadowed undercurrent of tension between them though.  The wife is strangely intent when a guest recites a poem about a woman breaking a man's heart, and there's a few scenes where the husband seems oblivious or cold to the wife.  What's going on between them is explored more at the end, so I won't spoil it here.

As you might guess from the name, the theme of the film is death and memento mori.  The spinster aunts are nearing death and are precious in their fragility.  They reminisce over dead singers and there's talk of monks who sleep in their own coffins to keep the certainty of death near by.  The closing of the film has a long monologue about the dead and us the living.

The film is very soothing, very stultifying.  It's slow and quaint in a kind of BBC Charles Dickens kind of way.  It's really like a visit to gandma's.  It's not a blast and it's not the most fun you might have, but you feel better for having watched it and you feel lighter as a result.  It was a sweet little film.

The Witch (2016)

Saw The Witch (or is it VVitch?)  It was a claustrophobic period drama about a family who is exiled for over zealous religiosity.  They settle in a new place, but soon the weather turns against them.  The crops fail, animals will not be snared, and when a baby vanishes, they finally suspect witchcraft and begin to turn against each other, petty cruelties and betrayals culminating building on each other to a hysterical climax.

The true horror of the film, the horror beneath the talk of witches and devils and so on, is betrayal.  Several times the characters betray each other in small and large ways, or they betray their own ideals through cowardice or self-indulgence.  The supernatural forces which eventually show up almost need not bother: the family is primed to turn against each other and to fall apart after their baby vanishes.

The film was produced by the A24 studio and has the signature house stylish austerity to it.  It's very dark and, although the forest and the frontier look very lush and beautiful, it looks very cold and bare.  This austerity extends to the dialogue as well, unfortunately.  The characters talk in a very authentic olde English which is reasonably straightforward to understand but which I had a hard time with as the characters muttered and sobbed out lines like "I have become as the wife of Job" or "would you like me to visit you oft?"  I had to turn on subtitles a few times, old man that I guess I now am.

I enjoyed the film okay.  It was interesting and fairly brief.  It didn't tickle me the way psychodramas often do, but this film is more grim anyway.  It's not the fun sort of everyone-turns-against-everyone kind of film.  It reminds me of Hereditary and The Crucible (of course) which are both more intense than this film.  It's not a bad film, but it didn't grab me, alas.

Some Came Running (1958)

Saw Some Came Running, a delightfully frothy film about an army man coming home to his small home-town.  There he meets with his older brother whom he has a bad history with and he (the army man) brings with him a half-finished novel, an alcohol problem, and a ton of money from the army.  The film then follows the small-town politics he sets in motion, culminating a choice he has to make between two women and, ultimately, the lifestyles (or sort of levels of integrity) they represent.

The film gets better as it goes along.  It starts focusing on the oh so mysterious and oh so troubled main character as he swills whiskey (it's a man's drink he says) and flirts with bar-room ladies and dramatically throws out and then un-throws out his manuscript.  I was all set for this to be a film about a put-upon man who is angry that the world won't recognize his obvious and incredible genius, but since this is the 50s and not the 70s, it stays a bit more sensible.

The main character slowly demonstrates more integrity as he interacts with his hostile brother and teams up with a card shark.  He is self-centered and impulsive, however he is also sincere and knows what he wants.  He is not living the most measured life but he is not hurting or judging anyone.  This being the 50s however there is an unfortunate amount of forcing oneself upon the dames which is unfortunate but such is life.

As the film goes on, it works itself into a fever-pitch ending which starts with the black silhouette of a man against a red, neon-lit background, gun in hand, gulping down booze.  A paragon of the form!  Amazing!  I loved it.  There's lots of great declamations and showdowns before then as well, but they remain a bit muted, more natural than stagey.

I thought the acting was a tad weak.  It's Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra, and I'm just some guy, so what do I know about it, but one of the two women Frank must pick between is some flavor of prostitute and the other is a somewhat restrained professor.  During one of these showdowns, the professor hisses that she isn't one of "your barroom tarts!" and I think this is supposed to be sort of torn out of her as a guilty admission, however I think she doesn't say it that way.  Similarly, Frank is sometimes a little flat.  He underplays things (he is a man, you see) but sometimes it's too faint to register.

Anyway, these grouses aside, it was a deliciously frothy and dramatic film.  The characters are enjoyable and the central question of which woman and what they represent is a nice one to discuss.  The ending is amazing, but you have to kind of endure the opening bits.

Cruella (2021)

Saw Cruella, a live-action reboot/reimagined prequel of 101 Dalmatians from the antagonist's perspective.  So, we meet Cruella as a budding but rebellious fashionista, being kicked out of school and coming to the big city where she meets up with Horace and Jasper, not just semi-anonymous henchmen, but her Artful Dodger-style cockney friends.  From there, the bulk of the film follows Cruella trying to upstage a villainous Baroness, the current reigning queen of the fashion world.  The film is a lot of slightly empty fun, but it is fun though.

The fashion war gives rise to a bunch of fanciful costumes and outrageous set pieces which I enjoyed thoroughly.  At one point Cruella literally stands on top of the Baroness, overshadowing her under her enormous, parachute-like dress.  There's also a lot of deliciously campy super-villainy (on both Cruella and the Baroness's parts!)  They both get to humiliate and outplay each other, craftily sabotaging and subverting their dress-related schemes.

I also enjoyed that they made Cruella genuinely unpleasant for a fair stretch of the film.  With Maleficent, the reboot nice-ified the main character to the point of her not even being that interesting to me anymore.  With this one, Cruella is ultimately sympathetic, but we do see real cruelty and indifference.  There's a moment when her allies abandon her and I was completely on their side.  Good show, Disney.

There's also a great queer character in this film in the form of Artie, a guy who owns a second-hand shop and dresses very femininely.  This is a big step for Disney which, for all of its progressive posturing, is absurdly conservative with same-sex representation.  Often we only get gay panic gags or throwaway, "oh my same-gendered partner would love that!"-type one-liners.  Artie's character is probably permitted because he does not have a relationship, but his sort-of cross-dressing and arch mannerisms I feel count and are great to see.  There's also a sub-theme of chosen families vs genetic families which will also resonate with many queer folks in the audience (and which may be an even more disruptive notion to the nuclear family than mere homo love.)

The only bum note is that since it's a Disney film, it kind of dithers in different philosophical directions.  Yes there's talk of chosen families, but blood relations drive the plot.  There's like girl-power stuff, and heist stuff, and there's kind of no point to it all.  This is not a disaster (not every film has to present a philosophy, after all) but it makes it feel a little muddly to me.  I sort of feel this is by design however.  If it takes a strong and unambiguous stance on some topic which is even remotely controversial, it will turn off some part of its audience and that's precious dollars you know and we can't have that.  Eh - this is a small thing.

I enjoyed the camp excesses of the film and the familiar 60s hits (despite how literally everyone dresses, the film is set in the 60s.)  There's also a lot of arbitrary dog-related imagery and references which were fun to spot.  Also plenty of references to 101 Dalmatians which I have fond memories of.  These all made me feel smug and smart for spotting them.  All in all a comfy, stylish film which I happily enjoyed.

I Know Where I'm Going! (1945)

Saw I Know Where I'm Going! A sweet and kind of pokey film about a headstrong woman who is very self-determined.  She is going to marry a wealthy businessman however she is waylaid in Scotland and begins falling for the wrong man.  The main thesis of the film is about inner wealth (as personified by the simple honesty of the Scottish fisher-folk) vs riches (as personified by her entirely off-screen fiancé.)  The film has a couple of visually interesting elements, especially near the beginning and end of the film, and although it starts out very arch and unreal, it works itself into a lovely melodrama by the end.  I enjoyed the film, however it was a bit of a snoozer.

True to the 40s, the film comes off a bit anti-feminist and retrograde to my eyes.  The protagonist lady is forced to abandon her carefully laid plans and to humble herself before the unknowable mysteries of love.  It's not like she's blameless either however.  There's a dream sequence where she fantasizes about all the wealth she will have access to.  She seems to be marrying not for love but for money.  I feel she should be allowed to be as mercenary as her future love will allow, however it's not like she's making the best choices.

This fantasy also ties in to the theme of money vs decency.  Later in the film, she meets up with a snobby rich couple who are (according to her fiance) the only people on the island worth knowing.  They are vapid and speak in shrill tones and are unpleasant.  They are juxtaposed with a rich woman who reminisces about the honest peasant parties.  It's very snobs vs slobs.

The slobs however are not even that slobby.  Not to give too much away, but the new boyfriend (ie the wrong man that she falls for in Scotland) has plenty money of his own, he just also happens to be friends with friendly people, and is able to commune with the common man.  These signifiers indicate he is a man of worth, but the message of the film is sort of undercut by being not money vs morals, but money vs morals+money.  The new boyfriend is just clearly the better choice.  The only conflict is within this woman's mind: her self-determination vs jumping on new opportunities.

The film has its moments however.  There's a goofy sequence in the start of the film where her train, on a model set, crosses from rolling green hills into rolling tartan hills, signifying her journey into Scotland.  Similarly, there's a daring sea crossing late in the film that feels like a spare reel from the Poseidon Adventure or something.  It's a sudden sharp turn into disaster-movie territory that I was surprised and delighted by.

The majority of the film however is this woman interacting with variously colorful Irish folks and trying to decide which man to marry.  It's a little precious and a little tedious.  It's an entertaining and tame film that your grandparents might enjoy.  Wholesome and kind with moments of excitement and excess.  It was a bit of a snoozer, but not a bad film by any means.

Call Me By Your Name (2017)

Saw Call Me By Your Name, since I'd just seen Luca and wanted to understand the jokes online.  This film was good and subtle, but I think somewhat over my head.

The plot is this: we follow Elio, a teenager in Italy where he lives an a palatial villa with his archaeologist father and mother.  His life is complicated by the arrival of Oliver, a hunky grad student.  They have a mutual unstated attraction which results in them circling each other, attracted but shy and uncertain.  The emotions are the top level of the film here and there are a few swooning moments where Elio's face is covered with flickering colors, or he lays in bed, fretting and dreaming.

The film reminded me a lot of some French new wave films.  There's the familiar European sense of ennui and possibility.  The characters' actions are not as well-explained as one might hope and there's a lot of wistful stares and indolent lolling.  There are excellent, naturalistic performances but they are portrayals of uncertainty, hope, brave faces, and other ambiguous stances.  There's a moment when Elio touches his lip, suddenly uncertain if he's done the right thing in following Oliver to town which combines such guilelessness and honesty.

Speaking of touching lips, there's a few moments where characters touch each other's lips with their fingers.  A sunken statue of a wrestler is pulled up from the ocean and Oliver strokes the statue's mouth.  What this repetition indicates beyond just strong desire is not clear to me.  There's also some other theme going on with fruits and their association with fertility, maturity.  A piece of fruit features prominently in one of the sex scenes and there's an early discussion of the etymology of "apricot" which, Oliver claims, means the "the precocious one".  Since the film is centered on Elio, I feel (not to be too crass) that he is the fruit - both in terms of being precocious and also in the sense of being desired and desirable.

Alas, there's a significant age difference between Elio and Oliver which made me a bit uncomfortable.  Elio is supposed to be 17 but looks younger and Oliver is supposed to be 23 but looks older.  It's appropriate for being set in Italy and being surrounded with statues of wrestlers and slave boys.  The relationship feels like the prototypical Greek teacher and student relationship which Oscar Wilde named as the "love which dare not speak its name."  The film portrays their relationship as being only a good thing, but I would quietly feel uncomfortable about it in real life, and doubly so when writing the above about ripe fruits and so on.

So, I feel I mostly experienced the film as an aesthetic experience.  I appreciated the beauty and class of it.  Similar to French new wave, I felt there was something deeper on its mind which I could only sense via murky symbolism, but that symbolism was not clear enough for me to interpret.  The central relationship is golden and impossible, and the film is a sort of nap in an Italian villa: sophisticated, intelligent, slightly decadent, a little dull, very beautiful.

Voyage of the Rock Aliens (1984)

Saw Voyage of the Rock Aliens (thanks, Nina!)  It was a fairly wacky rock musical in the style of those pokey old teen musicals that Grease kind of perfected.  The film contains a lot of nonsense, but primarily revolves around a love-triangle between teen Deedee, teen Frankie, and ABCD who is an alien come to Earth to research the inhabitants.  Also, there's a tentacle monster in the town lake, and also homicidal chainsaw-wielding maniacs.  The film keeps expanding and expanding in confusing directions.  It's a fabulous mess but it's the sort of film that I think is supposed to be collaborative: they provide the scenario, you provide the commentary.

I saw this solo, alas, which made the film a bit of a slog.  The film has a very wholesome and kind of sweet energy however, so it's not a bad watch, just a bit tedious.  Although it's deep in the 80s, its heart is clearly in the 50s with juke boxes and school cotillions and so on.  This was always meant to be a camp film.  There's a lot of broad acting and bewildering moments.  At one point, during a music video, the aliens arrive atop a tractor on a beach.  Everyone claps and one of the girls welcomes them to town.  Is this real?  Is this the music video?  Where did they get the tractor?  Other moments are confusing and strange, but this one nearly breaks the reality of the film.  By far the most confusing moment.

One saving grace: the people are all fairly attractive, so that's nice.

The Power of the Dog (2021)

Saw The Power of the Dog, which is one of those noir westerns: very moody, very ominous, full of ugly dirt and cruelty.  This film is divided into a few acts, however the story falls roughly into two pieces in my mind: in the first half, a rancher falls in love with a restaurant proprietress in town and marries her, much to the sinister, passive aggression of his brother, an unsmiling, cruel, loud man who begins a campaign of terror on the new, demure wife.  In the second half, the new wife's son comes home from school.  The son is bone-thin and effete, his formal language and emotional flatness indicating a spectrum disorder.  He soon becomes the target of the brother's cruelties.

The film is restrained and hypnotic.  Seemingly innocent scenes are freighted with dread significance by groaning cellos and horns.  It reminded me a lot of Meek's Cutoff in its grim, subtle ambiguity.  Midway through the film, the cruel brother's behavior to the new wife's son changes from cruel to kind.  He offer to weave a rope for the son as a peace offering.  Why this change in his attitude?  Is it real, or just a trap for further cruelty?  Or perhaps will his kindness be more damaging than his cruelty?  Even his gift is ambiguous and seems sinister.  A rope is for tying and capturing, after all.  What better symbol for the capture of the new wife's son?  The intentions of this cruel brother for the son was the most interesting part of the film for me.  The question is both fascinating and repellent and is a microcosm of the film as a whole.

And, as opposed to Meek's Cutoff, the ending of this film is supremely satisfying.  It is subtle enough that one of the first suggestions when you google "The Power of the Dog" is "The Power of the Dog ending explained" but just pay attention and you'll see what happened.  The hypnotic soundtrack tipped me off that this was a film to really watch.

I enjoyed the film.  It was essentially a psychodrama, most interested in the girl-world-style power struggles between the wife and the brother.  What the characters are up to and what they want are kept a little obscured (particularly the motivations of the brother) and this kept me worrying over the film in my mind after the credits rolled.  I did see the ending coming however which made me feel clever and smug.

Luca (2021)

Saw Luca, the film by Pixar rumored to be an animated Call Me By Your Name, but which is in fact, a sort of low-key, typically sweet and imaginative coming-of-age film about a pair of outsiders integrating into an intolerant society which can be read as a sort of queer allegory, but which is not so overt as to be unmistakable or even unambiguous.  This is a Disney subsidiary we're talking about after all, they are primarily a business and will continue to cautiously bide their time before dropping yet another First Gay Character Ever.

The film follows a boy from a race of sea monster people who can assume a human disguise when they go above water and dry out.  Ala Ariel, Luca is curious about life above the waves and follows a more adventurous sea-monster-boy above the waves.  They dream of further exploration and world-expansion in the form of a Vespa scooter.  This central yearning for more freedom and more experience eventually drives a wedge between the boys, however as they fall apart, they grow into more whole individuals.

The film is very small and intimate for a Pixar film, however it's no less touching or sweet.  There are many delightful moments and also a few heartbreaking ones.  It is a minor film for Pixar, that's a high bar.  It's a pretty great film for children's entertainment.

Lola (1961)

Saw Lola, a film by Jacques Demy, who is most famous for directing The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, a musical about a woman reuniting with her long-lost lover not altogether happily.  In keeping with that film's theme of love sort of vs life, this film is about doomed, innocent love, juxtaposed with the trappings of tawdry sleeze.

The film follows a couple of people as they meet and interact with each other.  There's the titular Lola who is a cabaret dancer, Roland who is a bored young man with nothing but time on his hands, Frankie, an American sailor in town for some fun, and young Cecile, a girl in a hurry to grow up with her single mother.  These characters - show girls, sailors, bored handsome young men, teenage schoolgirls, are the archetypes of pornography and there's even a reference to the novel Justine by the Marquis De Sade.  Despite all of this however, everything is kept mostly innocent and kind of sweet.  It may have been quite risque for its time but it's tame enough now to see with one's mother.

The theme of the film is doomed love.  The prostitute Lola hopelessly loves her one-time boyfriend.  The innocent young man Roland burns a candle for Lola, and the schoolgirl has a crush on the sailor who treats her with the restrained affection of a father who she never had.  It's all very surprisingly sweet, a sort of inversion of most of these stories involving the sex trade.  Instead of moralistically ending on a down note, the film mines sincerity and hope out of these depths.  As one character neatly sums things up: "there's some happiness to be had just in hoping for happiness."

The film is French and filmed in the 1960s.  It's an interesting film, but was not quite what I was in the mood for, alas.  I was too young and snobby to really enjoy Umbrellas of Cherbourg and (alas) I think this one also missed me by a bit.  I enjoyed the uplifting attitude of the film, and I guess I can recommend it to anyone out there who has a hankering for 60s-era non-new wave, but was a bit dusty for me - a bit homework-ish.

A Moment of Innocence (1996)

Saw A Moment of Innocence (1996) a chilly, slow, fascinating film by Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf.  It strongly reminded me of Close-Up, another Irianian film which similarly plays with reality and make-believe in weird, post-modern way.  I feel they're leap-frogging the movies-about-movies of Fellini and Truffaut and jumping straight into a reality-television-inspired morass of reality and artifice.  A dizzying kayfabe which is impossible to untangle.  It's not the most gripping, but it's very intersting.

This film is about a ex-policeman who wants to become an actor.  So, he goes to Makhmalbaf (the actual director of this film) to ask for a part.  Makhmalbaf decides to film a re-enactment of the time when, as a young man, Makhmalbaf had stabbed this policeman.  So, they cast young actors as young-Makhmalbaf and young-policeman and start to work establishing these young actors as clones of the actual men: they have similar ideals and attitudes, they naturally fall into re-creating the conversations the real versions of their characters must have had.

The film hovers in this arch, shadowy realm of not being real and not being totally imaginary.  Scenes are re-created over and over, from different perspectives, sometimes even with the director of this film shouting instructions from behind the camera.  There's a scene early on where the cop talks with one of his friends about the film.  "Will you be a good guy or a bad guy?" They ask.  This is a natural question, but this is an autobiography - there are no good guys and bad guys, only different perspectives.

The film ends on a sublime, lyrical freeze-frame, just before the stabbing (perhaps.)  The story of what happened is muddled, complicated by the recreation.  The question of who was innocent, of what was the moment of innocence suddenly has many conflicting and reflecting answers.  I really enjoyed the film.

Love, Simon (2018)

Saw Love, Simon, a fairly heartwarming film about a gay teen navigating coming out and highschool.  I really liked it, but it was also very hard to watch sometimes.  Being gay, any time I watch a film about gay guys, it's a lot more visceral for me.  Normally, there's a bit of remove for me in romance films and I have to sort of translate in my head,  projecting my empathy over a slightly wider gap than most people.  It's not a big deal usually, but the gay films seem a little too close, uncomfortably real.  So, the romantic scenes made me cry, and the awkward scenes (of which there's many!) had me shouting at the TV, horror-movie style.  I really enjoyed it, but I'll bet it's not high on anyone's "must watch" list.

The film takes place somewhere warm where you can wear a hoodie outdoors during Christmas.  The attractive protagonist Simon goes to an enormous school where he hangs out with a clique of similarly attractive, friendly, decent, popular kids who have enough freedom to just fuck off to a house party some night.  He lives in a mansion with his dotingly permissive and successful parents and he begins the film by narrating that he's "just like you" only gay.  Ok.

This is standard John Hughes-type stuff though (and this is a very John Hughes-type movie).  It should be regarded as escapism and wish-fulfillment and as a simple way of making sure only the central struggle with sexuality is the focus.  The film is half for adult gays who want a window into a kinder universe and half for struggling teens, trying to figure themselves out and to judge when to commit publicly.  It's a very kindly world which does not actually exist for many kids, but it's there to grant wishes and to show what could be - it's not there to be a documentary.

Anyway, the film is very standard, teen-movie stuff.  There's drama and big shouty show-downs and bullies and parents who just don't understand!  And yeah, I recognize all of this, but oh my god I loved it!  It was so sweet and so nice and it just melted my heart.  I make no claims to objectivity - this movie was for me.