Featured Reviews

These are the ones we’ve both written about.

Tommy Tricker & The Stamp Traveller (1988)

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Tommy Tricker is a children’s film about a society ordered on the basis of stamp collecting.  This is a world where all ages can identify a rare stamp on sight, and where everyone is constantly grifting and wheedling to get ahead to improve their collection.  Tommy Tricker is a young scam artist who excels in ripping people off by using stamps. The movie spends a lot of time building up Tommy Tricker’s character, only to pull a real switcheroo and have the actual lead character be some kid named Ralph who gets into black stamp magic and is granted the power to get animated, shrink down, and travel on a stamp. This takes him to both China, and more notably Australia, which has funnier stereotypes.

Though there are plenty of wild, inexplicable moments, these are pretty well-balanced with a lot of grind, where you’re watching the movie manage its pieces in a fairly normal way while you’re waiting for the good stuff.  While there is a specific type of thrill when you realize for instance that Ralph’s parents don’t seem to know or care that he has been missing for weeks, followed by Ralph’s father’s blood-curdling scream when he suddenly appears in front of them, I found sadly that these moments were eclipsed by the grind getting to them.

I definitely don’t believe that good art necessarily has be connected to how well it achieves its intentions.  We have plenty of master classes in greatness achieved by creating a desired effect, but the rarer and potentially more powerful finds are the movies where you’re called on to create a “house effect” of your own, transforming a bunch of ill-considered choices into a meaningful and enjoyable experience.  Tommy Tricker toes the line into this kind of experience, but unfortunately the movie’s ability to coast by as a just-good-enough children’s film handicaps it. This innate understanding of a simple form keeps it from getting to the heights of a Roar, or The Room, or one of Neil Breen’s films, etc., movies where the allegiance of their intentions can have more in common with a reflex test at the doctor’s than a carefully-made plan.

There are some very inspired moments. The depth of attention Tommy Tricker pays to stamp collecting is bonkers, and everything in Australia is great, and the film operates on a different level – a highlight here is when a character “driven mad by having all of his zoo animals poisoned” chains Tommy Tricker to a didgeridoo in a pen with a bunch of “lying kangaroos.” On the whole though, I feel like this one is strictly for the curiosity heads. The movie’s director made another film called The Peanut Butter Solution, which while i think has some of the same problems as this one, I’d recommend more as it has a deeper, wilder undercurrent that comes from subbing out stamp collecting for prepubescent body horror. While there can be transcendence in ignorance of form and quality, this film as a whole reminded me of watching a meandering improv set, one that has moments of brilliance and a strangely singular tone, but is ultimately buried under a cloud of directionless noodling.

Rock Demers produced 22 movies in the “Tales for All” series between 1984 and 2004. I’ve seen “Tales for All” #2, Michael Rubbo’s The Peanut Butter Solution (1985), maybe ten times and I absolutely recommend it. It’s a character caper with seriously convoluted plotting, endless, strange non-sequiturs, and a visual humor that casually edges as readily into the slapstick as the nightmarish; its “fully-realized but completely mysterious world”-mode connects it to everything from The Room (2003), to Nightbreed (1990), to Peewee Herman, to Paper Rad. The most accurate description of the movie I have is: It’s fun to ask people to watch it, and then ask them to describe it to you. “Tales for All” #7, Tommy Tricker & the Stamp Traveller, is Michael Rubbo’s second contribution to the series (of four total), and I loved this one too.

Tommy Tricker takes place on a planet Earth similar to this one, except that all people are inordinately interested, each for their own reasons, in stamps or the mail. Many people collect stamps for their beauty, or to take pride in their rarity; others deal stamps as a speculative commodity; some have pen pals; one guy tries to commit mail fraud. There’s also a small hobo subculture of people who travel the earth by casting a spell that embeds them on a stamp for the duration of its mail-time, to be transformed back into a person on arrival.

The basic plot, unifying an episodic collection of on-location hijinks shot throughout suburban Canada, Australia, and China, is that a kid trades his hothead Dad’s coolest stamp to Tommy Tricker, and eventually figures out that he can use stamp travel to get to Australia, where he suspects he’ll be able to recover a book of extremely rare stamps, which he hopes to bring home to mollify Dad… got that? As in The Peanut Butter Solution, there’re so many unnecessary details, quirks, asides, and unanswered questions that I’m tempted to go ham and add a second post listing my favorite fifty, and possibly a third with a deep dive on the rules, physics, and various implications of stamp travel. (Me, on stage in a dark and silent auditorium, addressing no one: “And I will, if anyone is actually interested.”)

I found the movie notably more coherent on rewatch. I’m reminded that as a kid I’d view movies by “having them on,” and familiarity with the characters and “what happens” would become both assumed and total throughout all parts of a viewing, such that any given movie’s scenes could be watched in any order, partially, and so on. I appreciate that Tommy Tricker feels structured to anticipate this immersed, kid-style repetitive viewing mode, and I enjoy the particular kind of confusion it creates for me, as an adult viewer, who now sits down and watches things straight through, and usually just once.

A Scanner Darkly (2006)

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This is 3. a “Keanu in the matrix” movie, 2. a Linklater “friends partying and riding around” movie, and 1. a Philip K Dick adaptation:

1. I was 23 when A Scanner Darkly (2006) came out, and remember being disappointed by it, not having any idea what it was supposed to have been about. How could partying with your friends be ugly, unromantic, and desperate? Where do good times ever ride a precarious death-wave of paranoia and addiction? That certainly wasn’t how things were in my dilapidated punk house.

But damn, rewatching this, it felt clear that I didn’t get it because I just hadn’t experienced adult doldrums yet, or seen my reflection in the desperation, powerlessness, and chaos that flow beneath it, or understood the temptation to withdraw from the world into something small, selfish, and strange. This haunted, lonely “my shitty dream is real”-quality is, for me, the main characteristic of Dick’s writing, and Linklater “nails it.”

2. I like Linklater’s “friends partying and riding around” movies – Dazed and Confused (1993), Slacker (1990), Everybody Wants Some!! (2016) – because I too like partying with my friends and riding around. These movies remind me how my friends make me feel more like myself.

A Scanner Darkly is unique in this group because nobody’s having fun and the situation’s bad. Keanu’s depressed; his drug friends are trollish, unpleasant, en route to the bottom. The movie opens with Rory Cochrane (the stoner dude in Dazed & Confused) with hallucinated bugs pouring out of his hair, furiously itching. Woody Harrelson and Robert Downey Junior (both annoying “bad boy” actors, both here as annoying wastoids) are in drug-bender dangerous behavior/conspiracy mode, and Keanu’s girlfriend Winona Ryder claims to be too coked-out to bear human contact. Prescient Alex Jones cameo too… woof.

All of Linklater’s buddy movies (including this one) are regional, of a time, and zoomed into a small group of people, and they all do the same trick of flipping that, to be from anywhere, timeless, “archetypical.” Whether anyone “likes” Linklater, I think, has to do mainly with whether his “archetypes” are relevant to their experience, and the extent to which they “agree” with what he ascribes to them. Mostly he does this for sunshine-y stuff, but here’s an absolutely bleak and negative one to think about. What if he’d made more movies in this tonal range?

3. There’s an early scene I found surprisingly moving where Keanu narrates the situation so far. It shows him remembering an earlier point in the house with his wife and daughters, in which he hits his head on a cabinet, and says:

“How’d I get here? The pain – so unexpected and undeserved – had cleared away the cobwebs… I realized I didn’t hate the cabinet door, I hated my life… nothing would ever change, nothing new could ever be expected, it had to end. And it did…”

It cuts to the present, cluttered, dingy state of the house, and he continues:

“Now in the dark world where I dwell, ugly things and surprising things, and sometimes little wondrous things, spill out at me constantly, and I can count on nothing.”

I love the vibration between “I got bored and decided to give up my family, and here’s where it got me” (into a hell zone), and the broader PKD setup, where Keanu is doomed, has no agency, and never sees the full picture anyway. He’s a cop, tasked with surveilling himself and his friends (unbeknownst to them), but his boss is pretending to be his girlfriend (unbeknownst to him), and the entire operation is made to feed his addiction and paranoia intentionally, grooming him for sacrifice to some other purpose entirely beyond his awareness. You don’t get a darker “Keanu in the matrix” movie than that.

Richard Linklater is someone who I’ve grown to admire more and more as a filmmaker as I’ve gotten older.  He has a curious ability to zero in on the mundane spaces where you wouldn’t find the traditional story beats in a movie, expanding them to bring in realities you don’t often see represented in film.  This is especially pronounced today, where it seems like entire film types have been “perfected:” notice the easy-going structural, tonal homogeneity in Marvel films, or any time you’re watching a film that has the same lines from so many other films in the past, like an echo of an echo of a movie.  Linklater’s able to sidestep all of that, opting instead to give attention to and elevate moments that are typically mundane and neglected, though hyper-shared. Playing to this strength, A Scanner Darkly could have been really interesting, but unfortunately Linklater uses it as an excuse to experiment by trying to adopt some of PKD’s strengths instead.  The results lead me to believe, that Linklater is lacking in Fake Fake energy.

It’s been a while since I read A Scanner Darkly but I remember thinking it was good but not one of his best.  But if there’s one area where the book has an advantage it’s that the whole thing wasn’t ding dang rotoscoped. There’s a specific feeling you get from Phillip K Dick’s novels, where you feel like you’re way too deep in whatever plot or system he’s got you trapped in – Linklater might have thought that filtering the whole film would have stuck you in this valley of mysterious structure, with the unusual technology doing a lot of the heavy lifting.  The issue is that for a film to really get into your head, you should never see the hand that’s crafting it, and the rotoscoping is a heavy hand spread across the entire film.

The movie wouldn’t have worked without the rotoscoping either, unfortunately.  Way too much time is spent with Robert Downey Junior and Woody Harrelson’s characters, both of whom seem to sense that this is their opportunity to experiment as well. They’re seemingly locked in a contest to see who can torpedo this film that doesn’t know what it wants to be, each blasting off acting solos completely disconnected from what’s going on.  They also highlight the limitations in the tech by using lots of “big faces” (shades of Tom Goes to the Mayor, where the unreality was used to much better ends). Winona Ryder fares better, but is cursed with an extremely thin character. Keanu Reeves ends up being the most watchable and compelling, his minimalist acting style clashing the least frequently with the animation, occasionally even cutting through the fog and connecting emotionally, but with no one to play off.  I’m a huge booster of Keanu’s work but I’ll readily admit that that’s really not where you want him to be; he excels in creating connections and servicing the story, but isn’t a real “carry the movie” kind of actor. It should be noted that in his band Dogstar, he’s the bassist, which is his pocket in acting as well – creating structure and form, being everywhere and nowhere at the same time.

For a movie about a nationwide drug crisis that’s slowly killing the US, A Scanner Darkly felt weirdly non-relevant.  The carefree attitude it uses to portray crippling addiction b/w the driving creative force of the film being experimentation (and not addiction) doesn’t really play as well in a time that in some aspects closely reflects the world it depicts.  Nevertheless the movie weirdly comes together in the last ten minutes or so. It begins to quote from the book’s more memorable passages while Reeves’s character’s life falls apart, trained into addiction by one system of control and then sent off to work creating the root of his addiction, in a ruse of being cured. The rotoscoping gets more interesting and ends up creating a somewhat mind-out-of-body experience here, by subtly tweaking the effect we’ve gotten used to, causing deep confusion in the mind’s eye.  The movie ends with the afterword from the book where Dick lists all the names of the people he loved that were addicts coupled with what they lost, both an extremely sad and beautiful moment. Then the screen fades to black, jaunty music plays, and cast and crew are shown in font that wouldn’t look out of place in a show on Nickelodeon.

The Duellists (1977)

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Ridley Scott’s first film The Duellists is a deep dive into the dueling subculture prominent in the French military of the early 1800s.  It’s almost entirely about two guys: Armand (Keith Carradine) is pretty ambivalent about the whole dueling thing but continues to participate because it’s more or less the thing you did back then. Carradine brings a really nice laid back vibe to proceedings, complete with California accent and something of a light Wiley Wiggins vibe.  The other guy, Gabriel (Harvey Keitel) brings a heavy Harvey Keitel vibe and Brooklyn accent, which gives the film a real nice “East coast vs. West coast” feel. There’s lots of great early 1800s fashion, a fact underlined when the sparse narration refers to “the passing of 5 years and a change in military fashion,” after which cute braids are replaced by large hats.  Which is to say, the film is both very concerned with period trappings and not taking itself too seriously.

After the initial duel is kicked off, we follow both men through the years as Gabriel continually looks for new opportunities to get into duels with Armand.  According to military rules they can only duel when they aren’t actually actively at war, and are the same rank. This leads to a beautiful recurring gag: we see Armand at ease, learn his rank, see him have a conversation where someone mentions that Gabriel was recently promoted to the same rank, see Armand find out Gabriel’s in town, and then see him get roped into a duel.  And the duels are great, escalating in weaponry and danger, and full of good duel jokes, a style of humor I was barely aware of before this film, but of which I now crave more.

In between the many duels are portraits of the life of a French soldier in the early 1800s, snapshots which run the gamut from having a pipe with your buds, talking about how cool it is that you’re going to war (so you don’t have to fight a duel with Gabriel), to freezing to death in Russia.  There’s a kind of underlying madness to all of them, which helps make Armand’s obligation to keep dueling even though he’s just not that into it plausible. This is a world where there are rules to be followed that are designed to stave off the world’s brutality and chaos, even if those same aspects are the byproducts of the rules themselves. This is perfectly illustrated in a moment where Gabriel is told to walk west at the beginning of a duel and he quickly scans the sky just to make sure he knows exactly where due west is before heading out, neatly saying everything the film is telling you about its “rules over life” mentality in a wordless moment.

In terms of films about two dudes, one who can’t get enough of dueling the other, and another who is just not that into it anymore, The Duellists delivers big time.  It’s got a pretty strong “one or no duels is probably enough” message which we could all use, but more importantly it’s a super funny weird-ass period piece that features Harvey Keitel wearing cute braids.  Great film for those of you consumed with vengeance or deeply exasperated by the people seeking it.

Sometimes someone makes something that too closely and uncritically borrows or even openly steals from someone else’s idea. This is “bad” in two ways – it’s bad for the original, which the derivative cheapens thru lesser repetition, and it’s bad for the derivative, because strongly-foregrounded influence obscures whatever unique material might actually be hiding in there. Ridley Scott has made 25 movies, but his first one here is stone-cold Barry Lyndon (1975) worship straight off the rip. Made just two years before, that movie’s influence is absolutely present and unsynthesized here, in a manner that in painting, comics, or fiction, would read as hackish and embarrassing in the worst and most obvious way.

I happily found the results much more complicated here. Barry Lyndon is an optically mind-blowing but dramatically unconcerned piece of source material, and Ridley Scott is a decent stylist who tries to make popular movies with oomf and pizazz. So on one hand, The Duellists is super interesting and strange when viewed with its relationship to its inspiration directly in mind: The zoom-outs, the narrator, the Nora Brady appearance, the occurrence of the word “chevalier,” the lighting, cinematography, and even character voicing are all at least a full grade below, but the sum it manages is “bizarro remix,” not “wack bite;” it’s definitely “in conversation,” an uncanny illumination of what sets Barry Lyndon apart from pretty much everything. And on the other hand, The Duellists is a period story with oomf and pizazz that’s fun and funny and not like Barry Lyndon at all.

In that movie, we have an absolutely opaque Harvey Keitel (inexplicably in full Brooklyn mode, though in Napoleon’s army in the late 18th/early 19th century) picking a fight with Keith Carradine over some bullshit, and insisting on resolving it with a duel. The duel keeps getting interrupted and punted to a later date because one or the other guy keeps getting too injured to continue dueling, but without dying completely enough for the fight to be resolved. Carradine understandably gets super bummed every time Keitel pops back up to finish the engagement, and man does he keep popping back up over the course of changing circumstance and rank. The duel goes on for 16 years. No lessons are learned and nothing changes.

My favorite part was how nice the the sword-fighting felt. The sabres have a danger and weight that feels unusually rare, to the point of making me feel alert to how choreographed and risk-free sword-fighting usually looks on screen. There’s a part where a chunk of Carradine’s shoulder is hanging off, and another part where he nervously sneezes; both great. There’s also a gruesome “winter hellzone Russia death march” scene that’s got a Dreams (1990) / Marketa Lazarova (1967) vibe, with everyone staggering around wrapped in burlap and clutching themselves, which I always love to see.

I tried to get a better, non-Lyndon-oriented feel for this one on a by watching Black Rain (1989), Scott’s “Michael Douglas as a complete asshole NYC bad-boy cop in Osaka” movie (extremely bad), and The Duchess (2008), an unrelated 18th century peerage movie with an emphasis on gorgeous wigs where Kiera Knightley gets into a bad marriage with Ralph Fiennes (who I love and am probably about to watch in Wuthering Heights (1992)) (not bad but not great). But I’m already over word count here so I’ll abruptly conclude with the basic verdict that The Duellists is a relatively very good period movie (though it’s not the best one as much as it tries), as well as a relatively very good Ridley Scott movie, and that I would like to see a supercut of all period drama scenes where “a carriage rolls up to a manor house, and someone gets out of it while the servants watch expectantly.”

Roar (1981)

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Most writing online abt Roar is largely “what a crazy production”-focused. The movie is “about” Dad writing/directing/starring in & forcing his family to be in a movie abt how living with big cats is beautiful & chill, when the irl fact is that it is not, as evidenced by the numerous, frequently gruesome injuries sustained by cast and crew. The banner factoid is that Speed (1994) director Jan de Bont needed 120 stitches after he was “scalped” by a lion working as cinematographer on this one. So on one level the movie is a lurid curiosity – a manipulatively-edited but absolutely transparent document of an abusive, violent, lived bad idea. This is clearly manifested on screen by everyone except Dad being constantly “not acting” terrified of the mortal danger they’re clearly in, as the jaunty soundtrack plays on. I don’t put on movies just to watch fucked up documents of irl suffering, so if it feels like that’s the unavoidable way you’d end up viewing this one, probably pass.

But if you can get past that, there’s a hugely hypnotic dreamtime energy very much on deck here. The movie’s central predicament is more harrowing and strange than any “animal threat” movie I can think of – a family find themselves stranded at Dad’s river research treehouse (because Dad forgot when they get to the airport), and they are somehow 100% unprepared for the realization that the treehouse is dripping with lions – which is presented as a fun misunderstanding? In terms of non-stop alien habitat and stalking threat, there’s more wild stuff here than any animal doc I’ve seen, including Grizzly Man (2005), but none of it is grounded by anything like a plot or character development. Instead you get two classic nightmares paired and stretched to feature-length: Dad trying to get home on time but making impossibly slow progress, the family endlessly running away inside a house but never getting anywhere. There’s also a “Dad’s best friend” character who repeatedly, disbelievingly tells Dad he’s crazy and the situation is way too dangerous (the only relatable perspective in the movie, presented as demented comic relief), and a barely-there subplot about poachers (a lion kills them).

The “plot” at the treehouse is looping, edge-of-sleep horror presented as straight-up family fun comedy, where the family members repeatedly hide, run away, endlessly lose track of and find each other, fall asleep, wake up surrounded by lions, run away, fall asleep again… now it’s day, now night, now day… they run up to the roof, fall off into the water, are inexplicably dry again in some new room, then back up on the roof falling in, then running up, again, and again, and again… as lions are continuously surging through all openings, pressed tightly together as they trample thru the treehouse’s small rooms, destroying furniture, smashing down doors, hanging from rafters, swatting and sniffing, and every vehicle is meeting its doom – at least three boats and a motorcycle get sunk, tigers playfully knock over cyclists, the car catches a flat – and anything humans get inside of, such as a barrel, icebox, cabinet, or locker, is knocked over and smashed by lions, all proceeding as if it’s totally normal hijinks, a comedic misunderstanding that “the lions are actually our friends,” with a jutting, unexpectedly beautiful, distant shot of Dad riding his bike across the plains at sunset and singing to himself, Fitzcarraldo-level demonic in his lack of concern or actual urgency around his family’s obvious mortal danger. When he gets home, everyone’s fine, and the movie pretty much just ends. Forget fakes like Mandy (2018) or whatever; this is the true bonkers psychedelic reality-melter material, what my own actual anxiety dreams are in fact regularly like. And I do for sure put on movies that go to that space and  strongly recommend this one to anyone else who does too.

Roar is perfect.  The story of a man late to pick up his estranged family from the airport quickly spirals into the fun zone when they show up at his home to find him gone, and replaced with 50-60 or so untrained lions, tigers and jaguars.  Over the course of the next 90 or so minutes we get to experience a cool world where large cats party in houses, on boats, on skateboards, and in the wild, while humans bide their time hiding in refrigerators and running for their lives. The film also stars a cool elephant who acts as something of a boss character for the family each time they try to make a break for it.  While this scene is playing out, the father, portrayed as something of a way less competent Grizzly Man for big cats, goes to the airport, realizes his family is not there, then makes his way back to house.

Though it can seem like the set up for a horror movie on paper, Roar is aimed at the family – boasting a PG rating, inappropriately uplifting music playing while the family is being hunted, and adorable baby lion footage to shore up its bonafides.  Contrasting this happy go lucky vibe with the near constant mauling of everyone on screen creates an incredibly deep reality chasm, a delightful zone where we as the viewer can let go of everything we think we know about human behavior.

This kind of unreality gives a nice texture to the near-constant violence hoisted on the cast by the gaggle of playful lions.  Roar has the reputation of being the most dangerous movie ever made, with something like 70-100 injuries incurred over the course of its 11 year production.  It’s all on the screen as well, bringing a visceral realness that contrasts powerfully with the actors’ performances, not so much remarkable for the believability they bring to their roles, but that they are able to believably affect artificiality in the midst of footage that otherwise can feel very dangerous and very real at all.

This purity of vision lifts Roar above being just a particularly rowdy nature documentary or pseudo-snuff curiosity.  A large part of the joy it creates was feeling the waves rippling through the film made by the rapid oscillation between “this is a movie” to “these animals do not care that this is supposed to be a movie.”  Intended or not, this deeply bakes the themes of nature versus man’s ambition into the film, and intended or not, Roar makes a very compelling case for man’s overall helplessness and folly. The end result is one of the funniest, most insane movies I’ve seen in a long time, and everyone should see it.

Cabin Boy (1992)

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We watched this one via @walnutbatard , who also provided this introduction. 

Cabin Boy stands out as a movie that often requires a good amount of credit extended towards its creators, faith that there’s something covert or even diabolical about all of it despite every reason to believe that isn’t the case. This is of course a lot for a movie to ask, particularly in 1994, and may explain its quantum state as both one of the most derided and appreciated comedies by the few Boomers and Gen-Xers (respectively) who remember it. Its fans were invariably familiar with Elliot & Resnick’s chocolatey fingerprint on the Letterman Show (1982-1989) as well as their own network TV show “Get A Life” (1990-1992), which was somehow well-regarded but of course doomed from the start. Its detractors many and merciless, almost certainly including the guy credited for the “Fantastic Fun!” byline on the The Mask poster, which came out a few months later.

The appeal of Chris Elliott to me, and to a slightly lesser extent Cabin Boy, is that i just can’t pin him down. Despite everything I have seen (or possibly because) I still do not have the faintest idea what this person’s actual personality is like, when he’s trying to be funny, trying to be annoying, or just kinda let go of the wheel. That mystery is pretty rare, and to me, that’s the good stuff. Even when it’s the bad stuff.

Cabin Boy is about a fancy lad who prays to not break a sweat. Trained in the ways of polite society, he tries to take a trip to Hawaii, but is tricked by David Letterman and gets on the wrong boat. Once out to sea he accidentally kills the previous Cabin Boy, whose place he is forced to take, and sets the ship on a course for the Devil’s Triangle, where heavy shenanigans await. The ship is manned by an extremely sick crew of cool fisherman, who take every chance they get to humiliate/maroon/attempt to murder the Cabin Boy.  There’s also a cool cross-pacific swimmer collected from the sea, who sadly morphs into an uncool love interest. Most of the film is pretty funny stuff, with many scenes currently mulling like a fine wine in my mind-bottle (giant getting choked to death with his own belt… *kisses fingers* ; tobacco-spitting cupcake… bravissimo!). These moments of deep weirdness are the best parts of the movie; every scene bears a bountiful capacity for surprise.

However, at a certain point someone decides that Cabin Boy should start to resemble something of a normal movie, and that ends up as a tale of how a Cabin Boy becomes a Cabin Man.  Once the transition to manhood happens, the movie trades in many of its good jokes for jokes about how Cabin Boy is suddenly a man with respect and admiration, which overall are not as funny. This is also where the movie introduces the gag where he stands on his love interest’s back while she swims him places, which made me extremely bummed, and that I probably could have overlooked, except for the fact that it’s repeated for the movie’s last shot. So while there’s lots to recommend in this story, and it’s an undeniably important missing link in the evolution of comedy between 90s dumb man style and 2000s Adult Swim “dumb man” absurd style, it leaves something of a bad aftertaste.

Respect must be given to the wild trick this movie plays: I found the Cabin Boy delightful at the beginning of the film, where he’s deservedly hated by all, then disliked him in equal proportion to the increasing respect he gains as the story progresses. Was the darkness I felt at the ending born of having exposed myself as a bloodthirsty ghoul who hates Cabin Men everywhere, and wishes they would stay in a state of arrested development?  Or did this feeling come from the fear of one day being forced to become a Cabin Man myself? Am I a Cabin Man already, who the world loves but I despise? Did I just not like the ending of the movie because it seemed flimsy and rushed? Do humans have the capacity for change on a meaningful level, or do our experiences only affect the world’s perception of us, while we are trapped as fundamentally unchanging persons? Ultimately these big questions the film poses were inconsequential for me, since I was there for the yuks, and they’re where the yuks dropped off.  But if you’re up to the task, take a ride on this wrong boat, as there are wondrous sites to see.

Compared to Blockers (2018), which I also watched the other night, Cabin Boy had more jokes per minute, and more of them were funny. But unlike Blockers, which is still relatively fresh except for the already-anachronistic “butt chugging” part, chunks of Cabin Boy are past the expiration date. It features no women other than Ann Magnuson, an island goddess who Chris Elliott has sex with to become a man (until which point he is dismissed as a girl, a woman, a sissy, etc.), and Melora Walters, a swimmer whose back Chris Elliott stands on to get around. If the hypothetical reader is interested in separating rotten pieces from parts that’re totally still good, like mold from a dumpstered Trader Joe’s cheese, there’s a lot left over to get a lil stupid and enjoy here. But if you’re not interested in dumpstered cheeses I 100% get that.

Ann Magnuson has an erotic scene with David Bowie in major “billowing curtains” movie The Hunger (1983). I spent a while thinking about what it would be like to follow that eleven years later with an erotic scene with Chris Elliott, and realized this isn’t unrelated to the 2009/2019 pics I’ve lately seen ppl training the surveillance algorithms with in my social feeds – like, everyone I know is doing the transition from “I was young and kissed Bowie” to “haha I guess I’m still out here kissing Chris Elliott” in their own way right now. While this transition out of hot youth into whatever’s next has a tragic quality, I like that it’s also basically comedic and unknowably confusing. “It me” : A grinning six-armed god (age 35) on a magic island (no roommates other than my partner) married to a giant (having a full time day job) and seducing Chris Elliott for fun (doing a movie blog). That’s you too, when you think abt it.

That’s my review of “aging,” what else about Cabin Boy? Four of the five main characters are grizzled old fishermen led by Brian Doyle-Murray, and the ship most of the action takes place on is a chaos zone. The basic unromantic unpleasantness of the set and supporting cast have a fun tension with the naive staginess of Chris Elliott and the overall production design, especially e.g. the extremely fake ocean. There’s little to no action of consequence – it’s just a mixed bag of scenarios at sea, ranging from the typical (sailor songs; getting hammered below deck) to the slightly weird (fat-cheeked angry-blowing Harryhausen clouds; Dr. Jacoby as a merman) to the Mel Brooks-ian (Mike Starr as a giant… salesman?! A mafioso style… limo driver?!) to the befuddling (glacier monster fought with a coffee urn; heatstroke tobacco cupcake). In total it reads as “weird trip,” a movie feeling I love, but it def suffers from the matter of Chris Elliott’s manly education causing the best jokes to get front-loaded and the least funny, most bleak stuff to end up in act three. So if you do eat this cheese be warned that the last bites are where most of the mold is.

Deliverance (1972)

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In Deliverance (1972), an asshole with a leather vest takes a guy who doesn’t know himself, a coward, and a good man on a bad canoe trip. The good man dies, the coward is raped, the guy who doesn’t know himself commits murder and is haunted for the rest of his life. The asshole breaks his leg.

This movie is famous for a beautiful scene where the good man and a local teen experience mutual recognition through music. When their song ends, their meeting does too, as the social dynamics of their respective groups rush back in. The teen is played by Billy Redden, whose short wiki page I’m gonna quote twice: 1. “Because Redden could not play a banjo, he wore a special shirt which allowed a real banjo player to hide behind him for the scene, which was shot with carefully chosen camera angles that would conceal the player, whose arms were slipped around Redden’s waist to play the tune.” 2. “In a 2012 documentary about Deliverance, Redden says, ‘I’d like to have all the money I thought I’d make from this movie. I wouldn’t be working at Walmart right now. And I’m struggling really hard to make ends meet.’” Redden saw five hundred bucks for his part. Burt Reynolds, who plays the asshole, died with a net worth of $5 million. All of this is one description of the movie for sure.

The other famous scene depicts a rape, but it’s harder to read. It’s clear that the hunters seek to humiliate the coward and the other guy, who exacerbate the situation, but it’s not clear what the hunters’ intentions are at the outset, or if the situation could have gone some other way. This inscrutability houses the movie’s core pessimism: it’s not a question of whether this bad vacation could have been improved by the friend group upping the decency levels. Violent social ordering between men is just something that exists, and as it plays out, it escalates, and when control is lost, intentions stop mattering. Deliverance is “about” this evil magnetism that’s allowed to drive certain masculine power dynamics, not “about” depraved hillbillies or whatever. If anything, the asshole is the clearest villain here, and of course he experiences the fewest consequences.

The friend group’s camping convos are oriented around a fake-deep proto-“men’s rights” argument, about how “society” functions to curb this inherent and constant impulse to violence, providing safety and material comfort at the cost of denying men the pleasure of “playing the game” of unfettered leather vest masculinity. I found this a little distracting since it’s extremely not how I perceive society’s functions, or how I experience leather vests.

One nice thing is that you can feel the movie’s loving eye for the river, played mainly in endless lush shots of the group paddling thru rapids and getting all wet. There’s a scene where the coward points out a snake swimming along, and plenty of shots of the woods, or of rocks. Everything else aside here, it’s a nice occasion to think abt how much I’d love to go camping with my friends.

Deliverance belongs to a subset of films that work with a concept I’ll refer to as “Dude Law.” A Dude Law movie is one where a fella or group of fellas are put into a situation where they decide societal rules have been put on hold, so now they have to get creative. A cluster of important Dude Law films were released around Deliverance (Clockwork Orange, Dirty Harry, Straw Dogs; all 1971) and it continued for a while with movies generally having a more and more positive view of Dude Law, culminating in Die Hard(1988), possibly the most pro-Dude Law movie ever made. These films are generally made by men about men, and Deliverance is no exception – a pretty pure take on what goes on when you let guys be guys. (There are exceptions from this era, Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!(1965) being a shining example.)

Deliverance comes down hard on the “Dude Law is bad” side of the fence. The plot in a nutshell is a group of friends go on a boat ride down the river, get attacked, are egged on by a member of their party to declare Dude Law, enter it, commit unnecessary violence, survive, then realize they’ll forever be marked by what they did. And it’s an unusually nuanced interrogation of this concept. It’s also beautifully shot, has great stunts (accomplished by not getting the film insured, then having the actors do the stunts themselves) and has some pretty good performances.

But the film also goes way out of its way to depict everyone who lives around the river (“outside of society”) as insane, rude, terrifying backwoods mutants. The movie lightly makes the point later that the two attackers were isolated bad actors, but it still heavily lumps all the folks around the river together visually and thematically throughout. This is the movie’s central contradiction: the main characters on the boat are punished for not viewing a group of people as human, but the movie doesn’t treat them as human itself. It creates something of a feedback loop for the audience, where the narrative presents a high-minded argument on humanity, but the images aggressively depict the locals as uncomplicatedly different monsters. Those images are much stronger than the movie’s themes of men negotiating their place in civilization, and in the end that’s what Deliverance leaves you with.

So does Deliverance deserve its place in the Dude Law pantheon? I don’t know. It’s a well-crafted but fundamentally dishonest film. And there are better movies made about a group of guys going down the river in a boat – Aguirre: The Wrath of God was made the same year. What it is though is an extremely pure example of a movie having an argument with itself and then losing. For that, I think it’s worth watching.

Vanity Fair (2004)

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In Vanity Fair (2004), Reese Witherspoon plays Becky Sharp, who seems to have trained her whole life to become an expert at all things classy and charming. In quick succession she gets out of her French teaching/culture-making job, marries a soldier, and sets to work climbing the social ladder.  Eventually she makes the grave mistake of performing a Bollywood number, driving Gabriel Byrne so wild with passion that he tries to rape her, which her husband witnesses. Then he initiates a divorce and dies offscreen in India. “The colonization of India” itself is a backdrop the film delicately comments on by inserting prodigious tabla playing whenever someone mentions “India.” (A comment on this below.) Some other stuff happens but I found it hard to pin down exactly what. Vanity Fair strikes me as a movie made by someone entirely too familiar with the source material, hitting all the big beats but missing the logistical portions needed to make it comprehensible.

Almost everyone in the film is part of an undifferentiated costumed blob, so I devised a visual shorthand to help distinguish characters, using sideburn style or “being Bob Hoskins” for the men, and age or “are they Reese Witherspoon” for the women. This imperfect system caused some issues, such as in a scene where a corpse was shown with sideburns obscured.  The corpse turned out to be an important character, which I found out because someone in the movie mentioned the death later. I felt that the film frequently either killed or married an important character offscreen, then later had a character talk about it. Too polite and well-mannered to show what actually happens in the story? Relaying important plot points through subtle social cues and gossip? These methods destroy Becky for twelve years, after which she’s whisked off to India (tabla sounds!), and they destroy the movie for probably forever.

Although overall Vanity Fair is confusing and bad, there are some nice things. There’s a good scene where some guy goes to India, gets dusty and hunky, and becomes a martial arts badass; this development is never referred to again. There’s also a long sequence where Becky refuses to sell someone a horse, then trades someone else the horse for a ride in a carriage, then refuses the carriage ride. Everyone talks in a pseudo accent (from my notes: “British Accent?”). There’s also a part where not-with-child Becky becomes eight-months-pregnant Becky right in the middle of a scene (possible causes of swift pregnancy: ballroom dancing; note she placed in bodice; war breaking out with the Dutch).     

With its commitments to razzle dazzle and fast and loose storytelling it can sometimes feel as though Vanity Fair was striving to become a Transformers for the powdered wig crowd.  Although it does have plenty of “robots with lips” moments, it lacks the wit, social graces, and Machiavellian maneuvering it takes to become a truly unstoppable Victorian franchise. Perhaps it’ll be worth watching once Hollywood is done with superheroes and moves on to a period pieces phase – if only to prepare for the sequel “BECKY SHARP V. MARIE ANTOINETTE.” Until then I would urge period piece fans and innocent bystanders alike to steer clear.

I wanted to watch this because it’s a Thackeray adaptation with a Julian Fellowes screenplay; Fellowes wrote Gosford Park (2001) & Downton Abbey (2010-2015), and other Thackeray adaptations I like include Barry Lyndon (1975), so I thought this might be a valid double feature with the new Yorgos Lanthimos period piece, The Favourite (2018). (I swear not every post is gonna be abt Barry Lyndon.) But compared to Gosford Park (which rules) or The Favourite (which I liked a lot), Vanity Fair feels small.

There’s no denying the architecture, but Reese Witherspoon’sstyling and much of the overall production design looks plastic, even kinda 90s. Except in brief establishing shots there’re hardly any expansive views of anything or moments without speech; most scenes are dialogue presented in cuts between talking heads, shot head-on above the waist. Crowd scenes focus on one character, while unleashed extras scamper in the background with “unintelligible crowd shouting” copiously overdubbed. Scenes with any blocking or any physicality to them at all are awkward; in one, James Purefoy even “lounges on a settee” in a way that manages to make it look like he hasn’t figured out what “sitting down” should properly consist of.

I realized the “period movies” journey Barry Lyndon sent me on has been the wrong pursuit; what I’m looking for is another movie world that’s at least that lush, not just another good movie set in the 19th century. Still, it’s confounding that the extraordinarily beautiful $11M budget 1975 movie could somehow set a standard for lushness in the “period movie” genre that a $23M budget 2004 movie could fall so miserably short of. Were the lessons on costume, cinematography, and especially lighting somehow not totally apparent? Are they that hard to follow? Okay maybe but isn’t it at all compelling to… try?

My problem here isn’t that Reese Witherspoon’s never sweaty or that her dresses look like they were made in 2003 for the movie, but that her world fails to present as a living thing wriggling beyond the frame. The frame itself rarely shows more than a talking torso, and even some entire story locations – e.g. the best friend’s poverty farmhouse, or James Purefoy’s landing in “the tropics” – are visually left downright vague. The whole thing feels like looking at a painting with an overworked middle where the painter clearly didn’t bother considering the edges.

We saw the Delacroix show at the Met the other week; pretty cool that a productive person can keep busy enough to make a lush beguiling world of work that can survive ~200 years and the trip to NYC. Zoom in on the Faust drawings; sick at the from-the-hand drawing level. Zoom out on I dunno, “the Battle of Nancy”; sick at the room-swallowing macro level too. Pretty cool that art history continued its trek to present day NYC as well. Back in the studio, the feeling isn’t that Delacroix killed ultra-dynamic representational painting so completely that Instagram-era painters should chill and stick to making half-baked paintings of the Photoshop interface or whatever, because “that’s all that’s left.” It’s the opposite: The feeling is of the insane challenge to synthesize inspiring things, learning from and advancing them. When I see stuff that’s not interested in this challenge/conversation in whatever format, such as here, I briefly wonder what drove its authorship at all, right before I stop thinking abt it entirely.

Ready Player One (2018)

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Okay, “welcome back,” this was Davey’s pick so I’m up first here:

Ready Player One is a dark fantasy movie depicting a mid-21st century future where 20th century baby-boomer-authored mainstream American pop media fails to wane in relevance. Where this body of media once had a flame mainly tended by Gen X nerds, whose isolationist, elitist identity congealed at the meeting points of nostalgia, consumption, bitterness, and trivia in the 1990s, in RP1’s year ~2050, this media is now worshipped by all young people and ruthlessly referenced in words, gestures, winks, and callbacks. Furthermore, this nerd consumer elitist identity is now a kind of skillset.

In a 2005 Angels of Light song the Swans guy sings “let the wind wear away / the words cut in the stone” and boy do I identify with that. I love the idea that there’s gonna be a future generation that truly is just not going to give a fuck about Star Wars, and that sometime after that, that there’s gonna be a generation who has no idea who Harrison Ford is. That time keeps passing, that stuff has its time, and that stuff is doomed to shrink to infinitesimal size en route to eventually disappearing completely is, in my opinion, unequivocally good. This movie depicts a nightmare where this process somehow stops, frozen in time at Ferris Bueller references. Not that Star Wars or Ferris Bueller are “bad” (both are fine), but the notion that either represent “peaks” and not “starting points” is deeply cursed.

At the edges of this movie are threads about the global economic/daily life repercussions of everyone living in an always-online pleasure matrix, but the movie doesn’t get too far into it. When Scott Pilgrim or whoever takes over the matrix in the end, he turns it off for two days a week, because “everyone needs to spend a little more time offline,” and then it shows him kissing his girlfriend, like, welp, that’s all that follows from that decision. I’d watch a movie set in 2020 that explores just this: what if a single individual controlled every internet service provider on earth, and decided that it’d be better for the world if there was no internet for anyone on Tuesdays and Thursdays?

It’s funny to think abt Spielberg making a movie in 2018 that in a large way is a fantasy “about” how his era of classics are gonna just keep being relevant endlessly into the future, and within that, to include a part where they go inside The Shining (1980). That Spielberg’s weird ode to himself includes a lengthy side-ode to Kubrick felt strangely elegiac, giving the sense that Spielberg in his “I’m never going to disappear” movie is also acknowledging “and yet I was never the greatest.” It seems possible to read RP1 as being “about” the relationship between these two directors, where Simon Pegg is Spielberg and Mark Rylance is Kubrick, but tbh I don’t really care about this beyond kind of wanting to rewatch AI (2001). I also kept thinking abt how sick it would be if they went inside Barry Lyndon (1975) instead of The Shining, and stood like MST3K characters in front of that movie’s epilogue screen.

I coincidentally watched Paul (2011) last week, a wooden movie that’s also about Gen X-flavor nerds as heroes, is also with Simon Pegg, and also explicitly addresses the continuing relevance/legacy of Spielberg, and the utility of pop culture references as a meta-language for producing further pop culture media. At best, some people use samples like this to create a black hole energy that collapses into a whole new thing; that’s postmodernism/hyperreality for ya. But at worst, as in these movies, the references are just like a dvd collection at some uncle’s house – stacks of recognizable things taking up space.

Ready Player One is about a multiplayer virtual reality game called the Oasis that’s so good and the world outside so shitty that everyone plays it constantly. After dying, the creator sets up a contest where the winner will get control of the Oasis and a bunch of bucks. The contest is played by doing deep dives into the creator’s favorite pop culture and looking for clues. A kid (Wade Watts, the kind of character whose name you need to look up the next day) solves the first clue after five years by “going left”, a game design idea that was groundbreaking when Metroid did it in 1986 but didn’t really strike me as something that would take the world’s collective gamers five years to figure out. This kicks off a race to win the contest, with Wade and his plucky crew on one side and a giant corporation run by an evil CEO on the other. The corporation plans to blanket the game world with ads if they win the contest. Wade wants to keep it exactly as it is, a monopoly on all entertainment that has been shown to be so addictive as to bankrupt people and drive them to suicide. The moral stakes of this situation struck me as more of a Spotify or Apple Music kind of problem than an end of the world kind of problem, but I thought it was best to just go with it.

The film’s world has a ton of pop culture references but no evidence of any new pop culture created after 2018, possibly because the advent of the game has completely arrested the adoption of any new characters or stories, since the game’s world is fixed on the pre-2018 tastes of a dead old white man. Maybe Ready Player 2 will be about the people creating the art that was being ignored while everyone else was hunting for pop culture clues? Could be good!

This seemed like a weird movie for Spielberg to make, though I have a theory as to why he did. He created the blockbuster, then spent decades making money, but he hasn’t had a genuine hit in a while. He’s a great filmmaker still doing great work (check out Bridge of Spies (2015) (also with Mark Rylance – TB) it rocks), but what people on the business side are convinced people want to see is recognizable IP. So Spielberg decides his next movie will be about a world where the only thing that matters is knowing your IP, and if you know it, you become rich and powerful.

There’s one part of the movie I thought was actually captivating – when the characters go into an interactive version of The Shining (1980). Great movie, box office bomb, and one that most of the extremely pop-savvy characters in the movie declare themselves to be unfamiliar with. The amount of craft and care put into replicating scenes from the movie is mind boggling, far surpassing any other part of the movie; the whiplash from these to the climactic VR war that follows is insane. Meticulous reproductions of shots in the Overlook followed closely by a dark messy looking CGI battle intercut with shots of people wearing VR goggles flailing in the streets, followed by an Iron Giant/Terminator 2 death scene mash up, followed by Mechagodzilla fighting a Gundam… all things that feel like the opposite of The Shining. So I thought, maybe RP1 is a self-contained critique of what passes for blockbusters in the modern age, all references and noise, made for the suits by someone who knows better but wanted to prove the point. That, or it’s just a normal bad vapid movie? It’s a mystery I fear may never be solved.

Okja (2017)

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This movie is about a girl, Mija, who loves a giant genetically-modified food-pig (named Okja). The super-pig gets taken to NYC (from Korea), and Mija goes there to bring it back. She keeps chasing the pig and getting hurt in extreme ways, but she never gives up. Eventually she buys the pig back and they go home; that’s the movie.

The movie’s evil-agribusiness-mega-corp antagonist, who made/own the pig, is a thin Monsanto parody, fronted by Tilda, again here in the role of competing twins. The twins (in one scene with matching colored cigarettes that they each take one drag of, then throw away) care to use the girl for company image purposes, and to kill the pig for meat, respectively. Paul Dano plays a mod ALF cell leader, with the conversational affect of a startup CEO ripping a TED talk; he wants the girl to know that it’s his noble mission to save the pig (en route to “exposing” the evils of agribusiness GMO meat murder). Jake Gyllenhaal plays the current ad man for Monsanto; he wants the girl to know he wants to keep his job.

None of these other characters, their henchmen, or their plots matter or even intersect much. The feeling to me was that Tilda, Gyllenhaal, and Dano were grafted onto this movie from three other entirely different movies; incredibly, this also seemed intentional, and I found it effective. This side stuff gives the movie an irl feeling I rarely feel in movies: That big forces are moving around visibly and contiguously to what you’re working on, and they all have their own plots, main characters, and aesthetics, and they ultimately have nothing to do with and don’t care about you. I’m comfortable giving Bong (writer/director) the props and credit here: This quality of “the personal” (“give me back my pig”) occurring within the broader frame of the “monumental” (“evil agribusiness food nightmare”) feels characteristic of his writing, and I think it’s part of what makes his good movies good.

The ethical issues (and what the movie calls “paranoia”) around GMO foods and global food justice/sustainability are less in the movie’s focus than the somewhat more direct problems around killing and eating an animal, but they’re here. Is Monsanto providing a Nobel Prize-level service by creating a sustainable meat source? Or are they perpetrating an atrocity, by executing what the movie shows to be intelligent beings for food? This Q is unresolved – it’s a movie about a girl who wants her pig back, and that’s it.

I don’t really like hero-narratives where a determined child shows up to smash an “evil corporate”-form primarily via their individual tactical wiliness and athleticism (cf. The Hunger Games, Star Wars kinda except Rogue One (2016), etc.), and though Mija is wily and athletic, I love that that’s not what this movie is. Those kinds of stories aren’t useful for understanding (or even visualizing) modern individual powerlessness, or individual complicity within the “evil corporate”-forms of our time – they’re always abt people responsibly destroying those forms from outside of them. That option doesn’t really exist irl, where change is rarely cataclysmically realized, and individual contributions are typically anonymous.

I loved seeing individual irl-like powerlessness and smallness presented in a non-ironic and non-frustrated way here. Mija gets her pig back, literally just by interacting directly with the terms of its capture (i.e., by buying it for a fair price): Great. The girl can’t do anything (and maybe doesn’t even care) about the corporate meat farm’s hellscape slaughter yard, but anyway she gets what she wants, so she’s free to move on: Hmm, that’s sorta like me.

I eat meat, and while I understand the vectors on which that’s fucked, I don’t believe the responsibility for what I eat can reasonably be said to lie with me, or that to the extent to which it may, that my share of that responsibility “matters”; whatever chicken is already dead and it’s Tuesday and I have to eat. (But conversely, I feel that individual shares of responsibility do matter within supply chains when there are valid alternatives, and spending itself is the important act, rather than directly consuming; not using Amazon is the obvious instance.) Anyway, similarly here, it’s not Mija’s job to end the execution of intelligent super-pigs generally (and as the movie makes clear, it’s not Paul Dano’s job either): It’s Monsanto’s. I like that the movie is unblinking about the fact that Monsanto doesn’t care about this ethical problem at all, and is basically impervious to the ALF’s attacks.

(“So what does that mean?” you might ask, “Are you saying that if I vote, and call my senators, it’s still nowhere near enough, and that I would need to radically give over my life to some cause, or like run for office or something, in order to individually make a real impact, OR I’d have to somehow come to terms with my own individual powerlessness, and fundamental interchangeability with other people, as a person who basically lives a comfortable life, buttressed by complicity with the multifarious self-serving violences of capitalism?”

I’ll leave that one open! But I will say that googling, I saw at least one inevitable article like “my partner is vegan after watching okja,” which I def didn’t read, but to which I’d suggest that the partner not only missed the point, but (willy wonka meme vox) tell me again about how your inconsistent reactionary uncoordinated-private-individual-opting-out matters? Further riff here about Amazon buying Whole Foods in another movie review maybe, but uhhh, where was I here? …) (I feel that I’m making the point in this aside very poorly, but I’m gonna leave this original text and the paragraph above intact. What I think I was trying to say is that that 1. consumer lifestyle decisions shouldn’t be confused with activism, 2. that individual low-power acts (e.g. calling senators) are fundamentally impersonal and interchangeable, with a value that’s truly present only in the aggregate, not in the individual contribution, and 3. that self-righteousness is corny. – TB 12/2018)

From my view Tilda is wrong to say that people don’t care abt GMOs if the food is cheap & convenient enough; the food being cheap & convenient might just matter more in her consumer case. It seems important to try to establish for oneself where this rationale breaks down, and to try to push back in cases where it seems like common understanding or behavior could actually be shifted. (Sorry but) Imagine a “what a cast” Netflix movie that like, critiques the ethics of a vampiric convenience service like Seamless, or the community-resources-waste of something like Kickstarter.

…

– Here’s a video I like of an automated lamb deboning room in a slaughterhouse (it’s “graphic” but imo no more so than preparing a chicken); see especially the robot arm at like 1:30. Not sure why the slaughterhouse in the movie looked like something outta like, Saw.

– Okja contains a reminder of the scene in Permanent Midnight (1998) where Zoolander smokes crack (to Prodigy) and jumps against the plate glass window

– Other pig movies that spring to mind are Babe/Babe Pig In City, Charlotte’s Weeb, Gordy, Willow (see feature image; “You’re……. pigs!“), Beast of Southern Wild

– I watched this movie because The Host (2006) rules, and because Jeff told me to check it out. Thanks Jeff!

– Bela sent me a snippet from the Evgenia Markon Yaroslavskaya memoir she’s translating from the Russian… this contextless snippet feels relevant: “even in self-sacrifice, a person is still doing it for themselves, and feels satisfied with the knowledge of their own heroism”

Arrival (2016)

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In an addendum to Tom’s review of The Martian I mentioned that although I appreciated there being a movie that held such trust in a rational response to problem-solving, I pined for a time when the more acceptable cinematic solutions were those of chaotic-neutral variety. Well, I have good news for cinema goers with a yen for that particular streak of dark insanity. I predict that we’ll be seeing a lot more films about the failure of rational decision-making and its fruits in the future, as well as more films dispensing with rationality altogether.

Which makes Arrival in some ways already a dated movie. Much like The Martian it prizes a rational and methodical process, and places extreme trust in it winning out. This is an extremely optimistic film which, though it doesn’t take a completely unrealistic view of what problems people make for themselves, still manages to place rationality on a high pedestal. This can make it rather tough to stomach in current times. Luckily it has many other strong defining qualities, chief of which is heaviness. Cosmically heavy, intellectually heavy, thematically heavy and heavy emotionally. A potent brew for fans of being crushed by the cosmos and life on earth.

It’s best to go into Arrival pretty cold on specifics, so plot stuff I’m not really gonna get that far into. To skim, it’s primarily about language. This extends to its use of some well-learned tropes of film. Bits of dialogue and characters can seem lifted from other tested sources, which is usually a major bummer but in Arrival it proves to be an effective shorthand, off-loading tons of busy work so it can get to the big questions. It’s extremely visually inventive, replete with sweeping vistas, a hand-rolled visually-based alien language, and an incredible scene that uses seemingly only white and shades of gray.  Acting wise, Amy Adams is in the film and she rocks.

Arrival as well passes the Keanu test and is chock full of references to his films, including a sly reference to Speed. A film which in one of the great looks behind the curtain of film’s shared language, made clear that a relationship built upon a shared stressful situation may not truly be what it is. It as well shares a great deal with Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, a film whose undying optimism is based in the belief that an unmoored relationship to time’s (perceived) linear march is the secret to saving humanity’s soul. Denis Villeneuve has obviously studied Keanu’s films, and here it serves him well.

For these reasons and more, Arrival is definitely worth watching. I don’t really see how you can come out of it without at least a few new ideas. Like most films that seek to achieve such a high concept it doesn’t hit all its marks but I personally think it’s silly to ding something so ambitious that’s mostly successful. Such deliberateness can be seen as a sense of inflated purpose to some, and there’s something to be said for becoming the thing by scuttling towards its side. To become the thing through a mostly straight line though is important as well, and can be a valuable blueprint of understanding more complex and less intentional success.

I do feel it’s important to enjoy this particular strand of victory while we can, for this age of rational cinema may be ending. Films that can explore notions of post-humanity so purely and with such conviction will be heading the way of the buffalo, if only for a little bit. For that Arrival should be celebrated. A powerfully optimistic, mature and above all else, a reasoned approach to our reality. Long live rational cinema, all hail the new era and what insanity we can muster.

screen-shot-2016-12-04-at-10-04-24-pm

I went to the theater and watched it ($15.50; UA Court Street theater 12 “all the way at the top”) on the strength of Davey’s rec. Here’re some thoughts from my Corner.

(I’m never gonna say it again; please assume “Spoilers” from me from here on out on this blog.)

  • It’s like a core opinion of ours that it’s worth watching dumb movies because their failures generate a kind of fun set of inquiry and experience that the movies do not directly intend or anticipate. Arrival is a textbook Good Bad Movie: though it fails to hit its own marks – it’s not a Great Film, or an Instant Sci-Fi Classic, it’s not Smart, and it’s not good at all as a Serious Movie – it’s fun to watch because it maybe accidentally hits some other points instead.
  • Like uhhh if time is a construct of language, but the meaning of the alien language is only understood in translation, how does that translation act not require the inheritance of the human-language-based time-construct onto the interpretation of the pictograms. Even if Amy Adams could use the alien system to communicate human ideas, aren’t those still, ya know, human ideas.
  • And like if the idea is that you can have “future memories” because time is slippery, but you’re still experiencing it in order, I guess I don’t get how this means you can also have “perfect future recall” ? Wouldn’t this be consciousness-shattering at minimum, or like, so fully altering of your reality paradigm, that being able to perform an act like the deus ex machina with the chinese general at the big party would be fundamentally impossible through all the unfiltered noise of “constantly lived” moments? Isn’t this “way more fucked up” from a functional-reality perspective than like, being in the throes of the furthest reaches of psychedelic experience?
  • Or put another way, if language is software for perceiving and ordering reality, wouldn’t there be strict, blocking hardware requirements barring Amy Adams from running the pretty intense software update she I guess downloaded from the critters?
  • Okay okay okay and so all that aside, does everyone have time-insensitivity in the near-ish future, or just Amy Adams, and how exactly will time-insensitivity help solve the world’s problems? And like where’s the minimum viable engagement with the metaphysical implications of future knowledge? Are the rules that “Amy Adams is unavoidably gonna tell Jeremy Renner the bad news,” or does she now know in the past not to, because it’ll make her bummed and lonely, and so she won’t? Or what.

Also =

  • They truly unleashed the tropes on this one, often without bothering to change the default settings. I think Davey’s read, that this deployment of tropes was meant to intentionally reinforce the core-conceptual language stuff on a film-language meta level is extremely interesting, but, to my viewing, generous.
  • The dialogue is noteworthily sewer-grade. Consider e.g. Jeremy Renner to Amy Adams: “My whole life I’ve been looking at the stars…” can you guess where this is going?!?!…. “…but the most amazing thing I found was you.”
  • They make Forest Whittaker (Species, Ghost Dog, The Crying Game) say his bad dialogue with an unrecognizable accent = I’m into it
  • Why did Forest Whittaker take a helicopter to Amy Adams’s house at like 5am for the followup interview, and how does a college professor live alone in a baller house on the lake.
  • Good luck if you try to watch this on a laptop. Only the big screen

    arrival-inverted
    default avatar: the ship

    will do the image of the giant black default avatar/Mork-egg spaceships justice.

  • There’s no emotional commitment to the characters (or really any character development), and all the drama and tension is super artificial and thin; there’s the sense that someone at the top felt that this movie needed an antagonist, so several(!) antagonists were added, and they’re all thin too.
  • Meanwhile the critters are 100 foot obelisks with tentacle fingers for legs/hands/mouths. They live in a room full of white smoke, that has a glass wall shaped like a movie screen (or cop mirror). But the glass wall doesn’t stop an explosion from hurting one of them, and Amy Adams goes into the white smoke room via a back entrance through a rat turd she boards, and is fine, so I didn’t really get what this staging device was all about (other than “a cost-cutting measure”).
  • Amy Adams has a “crazy dream,” seemingly just to get a non-smoke room shot of a critter into the movie = I’m into it
  • Compare the ship entrance corridor/critter glass screen area to the mind-cavity corridor and behind-the-eyes thing in Being John Malkovich (1999).
  • I thought the movie did a lot of really obvious work, and was frustrated e.g. when Jeremy Renner said “zero-sum game” and the movie cut back to the memory tableau this phrase was a callback to. But Davey told me he thought this was fine – that a movie’s doing more narrative work frees an audience to do the work of dealing with challenging concepts. I definitely feel grated and don’t like it when any text does my reading for me, but I guess mileage varies on that one.
  • All computers seemed to have an inactive terminal window open? Also I guess some government rolled their own Google Hangouts video chat replacement software, and all the different language teams around the world got permission to download and install it = hell ya I’m into this too
  • Do the critters know about the Lucent Technologies logo. What about the Germs logo.