Spectre Collie

Category: Arts & Entertainment

  • The Locked Door of Chuck

    The Locked Door of Chuck

    When I saw The Life of Chuck, I thought that its strength came from its execution, not its ambiguity. Its big ideas aren’t completely original, self-consciously so: it explicitly references ideas from Carl Sagan and Walt Whitman, and has characters deliver lengthy monologues explaining what they mean. I thought that it was a straightforward story, well told, with the fantastic elements and the story structure making its familiar ideas have more impact.

    But not everything fits together perfectly neatly. I was having a conversation with my friend Rain where she pointed out how the story didn’t seem to fit the theme: if Chuck as a teenager had a vision of his death, reminding him that life is fleeting and wonderful and we should make the most of it, then why did he choose an occupation that he said bored him?

    The middle act, which almost entirely consists of his spontaneously dancing with a stranger, has a definite sense of melancholy and regret to it. He can’t — or possibly chooses not to — explain why he did it. He has brief flashes of happy memories, which we see played out later, but also suggest that he’s all but forgotten them as an adult.

    I’d thought that the predominant, overarching theme of the movie is that every one of us, even those of us whose lives seem mundane or unremarkable, contains an entire universe of lived experiences, connections with other human beings, and moments of joy. An excellent message, but it seems to be at odds with the image that we’re shown at the end: a young man ignoring his memento mori moment and instead living a life of quiet regret. The rest of the movie asserts that we shouldn’t be quick to sum up anyone’s life so simply — he’s not “just” an accountant — but the second act devotes so much time to the idea that these moments of expansive joy are rare and fleeting, and that he’s disappointed to be just an accountant.

    The locked door to the cupola, which is ominously hinted near the beginning of the movie, and makes up the bulk of the last (first?) act, seems almost superfluous. Honestly, I’d thought it was simply King wanting to insert a supernatural element into the story as a vaguely horror-tinged reinforcement of the idea that “life is fleeting.” And it was a little bit of a shame, since I thought the idea was so much more beautifully and memorably expressed in the first (last?) act. That seemed to say everything it needs to, on a grand, cosmic scale: “even in the face of the end of everything, our connections to each other are most important.” Why follow up with so much story about the cupola, if the characters don’t learn anything from it?

    It was starting to feel like one of those “lights out” puzzles, where flipping one switch on ends up flipping another two off. There are three mostly-related but distinct ideas in the story, and settling on any one dominant theme seems to invalidate the others.

    But I think it’s interesting that the story1As I said before, I haven’t read the original, so I don’t know what was changed for the movie, but a synopsis gave me the impression that they’re largely identical. chose to explicitly highlight two themes that are kind of at odds with each other. Sagan’s idea of compressing cosmic time into a single calendar year not only illustrates the vast scale of the cosmos, but also emphasizes how ephemeral we are not just as individuals, but as an entire civilization. Whitman’s declaration that “I contain multitudes” suggests that our existences are vast; we contain entire universes and limitless potential.

    So what if the story isn’t just illustrating those ideas, like I’d originally assumed, but is deliberately setting them against each other? Not just repeating the ideas, but putting them in conflict with each other, to ask the audience to reconsider what they really mean?

    I suspect that I was too quick to assume that The Life of Chuck was essentially three separate stories, each with a theme that stood on its own:

    1. Basically a modern, fantastic, and apocalyptic version of An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, showing characters making and re-establishing important connections with each other at the end of the world; i.e. even if our time with each other is limited, it’s the only thing that matters
    2. A moment of uplifting joy and genuine connection with strangers; i.e. even the most seemingly mundane life can be filled with unexpected wonder
    3. A Stephen King short story about a boy learning about love and loss and what makes him special, meeting the dozens of people who will continue to live on in his memory for the rest of his life, all with a supernatural horror element of a room that foretells death; i.e. life is short, so make the most of it

    And I’d been too quick to assume that the choice to present the three parts out of order was a stylistic flourish, a wry acknowledgement that we know how the story’s going to end, because we all know how every story ultimately ends.

    But what I hadn’t considered was the possibility that The Life of Chuck wasn’t a case of King taking a break from horror to tell a life-affirming story, but instead using horror to tell a life-affirming story. I think I’d gotten so distracted by the “life is beautiful” and “young boy coming of age” moments that I wasn’t thinking a lot about Chuck’s grandfather (Mark Hamill) and his role in the story.

    We do see the locked door earlier, when Marty sees it but passes it by. This plants the image in the audience’s mind and suggests that it’s the big mystery that will unlock the “meaning” of the movie. If I remember correctly, he passes it by in favor of going out on foot to reconnect with his ex-wife Felicia.

    Later, Chuck’s grandfather warns him not to go through the locked door, finally accidentally revealing one night what he saw in the cupola. This just makes Chuck even more curious, so he sneaks up one night to open the door while his grandfather is sleeping. He’s stopped by his grandfather, who has the vision himself, and warns Chuck that he just can’t open the door. It’s only years later, after his grandfather’s death, that Chuck enters the cupola and has the vision that ends the movie.

    We also see throughout that Chuck’s grandfather is kind, loving, and takes care of his family, but he spends all of his time inside with his accounting books and his alcoholism. I’d taken this to be just a contrast against Chuck’s grandmother, who’s shown to have a more joyful life, teaching Chuck to love dancing. I thought it was a “two roads diverged in a wood” lesson for Chuck, which made it even stranger that he seemed to end up choosing his grandfather’s path.

    It doesn’t feel like a horror story in the slightest, since everyone involved is safe, content, and loving, their lives filled with periods of extreme sadness, but ultimately able to rebound into happiness. They just happen to have this weird locked room in the house. (And we find out that the building was eventually torn down, seemingly with no supernatural Poltergeist-like consequences).

    So it hadn’t fully occurred to me that going into the cupola leaves a person cursed. Not cursed to die, since it’s strongly implied that it only shows what’s already fated to happen, but cursed to know. It’s one thing to know that we’re going to die; it’s an entirely different thing to be certain of it, because we’ve seen it. They’re not even granted the knowledge of specifically when it’ll happen, but just the undeniable certainty of it.

    The curse didn’t kill Chuck’s grandfather, and it didn’t really ruin his life, either. It just kind of numbed it. He wasn’t haunted enough to be driven mad by it, but he did seem to be entirely focused on practical concerns and on preparation for his own inevitable death. He says “the waiting is the hard part,” which is a line that Chuck repeats at the end, after he has his own vision. In the moment, it feels like an ominous underscore of the “memento mori” idea — we all know this is coming, so make the most of your life while you can.

    But in the context of everything else, it feels entirely different. It suggests that from the moment they went into the cupola, their lives slightly shifted from living them into waiting for them to end. The end credits play over a peaceful, sunlit view of the empty cupola, which in the moment, after the first act of a coming-of-age story, suggested a bittersweet conclusion: “this is the final missing piece of the story of a good man with a life well lived.” But taken in context with everything else, there’s a more ominous undercurrent: “this was the moment when Chuck’s life changed from living it, to waiting for it to end.”

    In effect, it’s not an expression of “memento mori” but a rejection of it. It says that if you spend your whole life thinking of its ending, it doesn’t spur you to live life to fullest. Instead, it causes you to think of it as a story with a finite conclusion. Where everything that happens is leading up to and informing that moment, and you can only make sense of the entire thing once it’s all over.

    By starting the story with its ending — and not just the end of one life, but the end of an entire universe — The Life of Chuck is essentially saying, “Yeah, no shit this is all going to end. That’s not the important part.” It’s about living in the moment. Treasuring all the moments of connection we have with other people, not because they’re imparting valuable lessons that will be meaningful at some point in the future, but because they’re meaningful right now.

    The signs saying “39 great years!” and “Thanks Chuck!” are a little more ominous in that context. I’d initially taken them as an uplifting send-off, to take the edge off of the existential horror: he’d led a good life, and he was appreciated by the people who loved him. Plus a reminder that there’s so much more going on with people than what we can see on the surface: just looking at a sweet retirement message for a seemingly average man gives no indication that he “contained multitudes.”

    But reconsidering them after seeing the rest of the story, there’s a more sinister idea, which is that his life was largely defined by that simple summation at its ending. He was almost entirely absent from his own story, between the moment he saw his own death and the moment he died. All except for that one remarkable time that he chose to live in the moment, for reasons he couldn’t quite explain.

    • 1
      As I said before, I haven’t read the original, so I don’t know what was changed for the movie, but a synopsis gave me the impression that they’re largely identical.
  • Tuesday Tune Two-Fer: Mrs Peel, We’re Needed

    Tuesday Tune Two-Fer: Mrs Peel, We’re Needed

    A couple of weeks ago, we visited Broken Compass, a tiki bar in Burbank that we’d never been to. Verdict: pretty good! Neither too small nor large, good separation of the waiting area and the reveal of the interior, a food menu that had a lot of variety, tiki drinks that were even better than the food, and overall a strong vehicle for everything you want from a tiki bar. I spent too much money on a pair of earrings shaped like Moai heads.

    What makes this relevant to Tuesday Tune Two-Fer, though, is that in addition to the exotica you expect to hear inside a tiki bar, they were also occasionally playing Bond music. I heard one track that was extremely familiar, but I couldn’t place it exactly: was it from Thunderball? You Only Live Twice? Shazam wasn’t able to pick it up, so I had to wait until I got home and listen to every John Barry Bond score on YouTube until I reached it: On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. One of the only Bond movies that I’ve never seen, something I should correct soon if only for Diana Rigg.

    It seems kind of obvious in retrospect, but Bond music works very well in a tiki bar environment. Maybe because they all suggest the 1960s, adventure, and the tropics. (Even when they’re mostly about skiing, I think?)

    Speaking of Diana Rigg: Laurie Johnson’s music from The Avengers would also be an excellent addition to your tiki bar soundtrack. Yes, I know that it mostly conjures up images of extremely un-tropical England. But it’s so cool. (Incidentally, I don’t like the version of the theme included below, but it’s the only one available on Apple Music. Find the version actually included in the show, or in other compilations of Johnson’s music and/or 60s TV themes).

  • One Thing I Like About The Life of Chuck

    One Thing I Like About The Life of Chuck

    My favorite moments in The Life of Chuck are in the scene when the world ends, and I don’t consider that a spoiler. It’s simultaneously wonderfully fantastic, ominous, and so grounded, with near-flawless performances from Karen Gillan and Chiwetel Ejiofor. The full weight of the entire story rests on that scene, and the movie nails it.

    Which is a relief, since I think The Life of Chuck spends its entire running time walking a tightrope over a chasm of either apocalyptic nihilism or overly maudlin, Forrest Gump-style sentimentality. I thought there were several moments when it stumbled, threatening to go over the edge, but in the end, it made it. And delivered a tasteful and understated flourish.

    For me, most of those stumbles were due to the narration. The movie was written, directed, and edited by Mike Flanagan, adapting a novella from Stephen King’s collection If It Bleeds. So periodically, we get extremely King-sounding descriptions delivered by Nick Offerman. (I haven’t read the book, but I wouldn’t be surprised if entire passages were lifted directly). The casting and the performance are as good as they can be, with Offerman reading everything with his very recognizable tone; I can easily imagine it’s the tone that King had in mind when he was writing it. It’s blunt and matter-of-fact, giving everything an edge that keeps it from becoming too maudlin, but is also just flippant enough to remind you that it’s not a horror story. This is one of the life-affirming ones.

    So my issue with it isn’t the performance, but the choice to have it at all. I hate narration in adaptations of literary works, because it just feels like the filmmakers throwing up their hands and taking the easier way out. It feels clunky but acceptable when it’s just giving exposition like characters’ names and backgrounds. It veers into the annoying when it jumps in to describe exactly what a character is thinking or feeling in a particular moment, instead of trusting the performances to get the point across.

    But even that is part of the one thing I like the most about The Life of Chuck — do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself — which is that I overwhelmingly got the sense that this was a very heartfelt, sincere, and personal project from Mike Flanagan. I know enough about him to know that he loves cinema and that he’s a big fan of Stephen King, so it’s very easy to imagine that he included passages of narration when he thought that the author had described the character or the moment perfectly.

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  • One Thing I Like About The Phoenician Scheme

    One Thing I Like About The Phoenician Scheme

    After Asteroid City, I was concerned that my time as a Wes Anderson Movie Enjoyer had come to an end. He’d gotten so enamored of his own affectations and mannerisms that everything became completely impenetrable, and I was left like one of his characters, staring blankly at everything and unable to feel anything.

    So it’s a relief that I thought The Phoenician Scheme was actually pretty funny. It’s still in love with all of its own affectations and mannerisms — and rigid compositions, and flawless art direction, this time set in 1955 and delivering a mid-century modern take on an alternate-reality Europe and Mediterranean — and it’s still about the familiar themes of dysfunctional families, odd people unable or unwilling to connect with their own emotions, unexpressed grief, and flawed men trying to make sense of their own legacy. But it has a lot of fun with it.

    As usual, it’s the side characters who are the most interesting, since the main characters are invariably forced to deliver perfect performances all delivered in a deadpan monotone. Here, the standouts are Jeffrey Wright (playing almost the exact opposite of his character in Asteroid City), and Michael Cera as a tutor turned administrative assistant with an absurd accent. I’m not the first person to say it, but it immediately feels as if Cera has been part of Wes Anderson’s ensemble all along, instead of this being his first time.

    One thing I really liked happens in a scene in which Benicio del Toro’s character Zsa-zsa Korda is getting a blood transfusion from his business partner Marty. The two men are lying with another man sitting in between them, manually pumping the blood. Korda is being grilled by his daughter Liesl (played by Mia Threapleton) asking pointed questions about her mother.

    The scene is shot like a fairly typical argument in a Wes Anderson movie, cutting back and forth between POV shots of Korda and Liesl as they give short bursts of dialogue. Korda says something offensive, and Liesl slaps him. But we see the slap from Korda’s POV, meaning that Liesl pulls her hand back, and the camera whips to the side to show Jeffrey Wright’s character looking alarmed. The argument continues a bit, and she slaps him again, and the camera once again whips around to show Marty.

    The reason I like it so much is mostly because it surprised me. It took me a second to realize what exactly had happened, and it was only after the second slap that I put it all together. These movies are so rigid and so formalistic — and here, even the camera movement is a perfectly level 90-degree quick pan, instead of like reacting to an actual slap — that they’re so rarely surprising. Even when there is a dramatic jolt, like in the first few minutes of this one, both the characters and the camera tend to react completely dispassionately. I feel like I’ve seen a similar scene dozens of times in Anderson’s movies, where a character displays a sudden burst of emotion, and they’re all filmed the same way: the camera remains static, and all the characters immediately reset to default. It was a surprise to see the camera become more than just a silent observer, and to realize that we were actually seeing things from Korda’s perspective.

    And it was a surprise to see a Wes Anderson movie having fun with the format. Or more accurately: all the movies I’ve seen have the feeling that the filmmakers are having a lot of fun, but this felt like an attempt to let the audience join in.

    There’s another bit later on, where Korda is talking to Liesl about his possibly getting baptized as a Catholic. During the scene, his dialogue and his delivery both subtly change. His speaking throughout has been very tightly controlled and reserved, but here it gets slightly more naturalistic. Less regimented and like self-consciously written dialogue, more like the character is trying to say what he’s actually feeling in the moment.

    It all feels a little bit like small cracks in the ice, like the movie is very cautiously considering the possibility of maybe slightly breaking through all of its layers of deliberate artifice. As if it’s trying to be playful in a way that engages with the audience, instead of playful in a way that’s presented to the audience, and we’re expected to politely clap and say, “yes, quite delightful, that. Good show.”

    Before going to see the movie, I’d read several reviews that complained that the movie was too detached and impenetrable to be enjoyable. But I thought that’s just baseline levels of Wes Anderson Movie, where you’re occasionally not even sure if it’s trying to be classified as a comedy. I didn’t think The Phoenician Scheme was quite as funny as the movie itself seemed to think, but I was pleasantly surprised to see a Wes Anderson movie that could surprise me.

  • One Thing I Love About Poker Face: “Sloppy Joseph”

    One Thing I Love About Poker Face: “Sloppy Joseph”

    Earlier I said that I was hoping that Season 2 of Poker Face would start leaning away from the comedy a bit and more towards detective stories. Episode 6, “Sloppy Joseph,” isn’t really much of a detective story, but it was so well plotted and executed that it’s already become my favorite of the season.

    The setting is an elite private school for young children, and the concept of pitting an adult against a horribly-driven over-achieving child seems like it’d turn into a younger version of Election. They even used an equivalent to that movie’s use of Ennio Morricone-style music to show Tracy Flick’s rage; in “Sloppy Joseph,” whenever demon child Stephanie goes on the warpath, we hear “Spitfire” by The Prodigy.

    The unsettling black comedy about teenage politics in Election would be horribly tone-deaf with prepubescent children, so Poker Face wisely keeps it low-stakes. The murder here is upsetting enough to make you intensely dislike the villain, but isn’t on the same scale as, say, a man murdering his wife with a fireplace poker, or a woman murdering her sister by pushing her off a cliff.

    And yet, I loved how thoroughly this episode manipulated me. I really wanted terrible, life-ruining things to happen to that child. And for Charlie to bring down her horrible boss, who was clearly enabling the villain. So when we got the reveal of who was giving Charlie insider information to help bring the murderer to justice, I had to pause the episode. Just to say out loud how much I loved how they put everything together.

    My favorite moment in the episode is when Stephanie becomes outraged that Charlie’s figured out a way to use the kids’ kindness to defeat her, and she takes off to do the worst thing she can think of, “Spitfire” playing to represent her blind fury. There’s a camera cut and the music suddenly stops, just to remind us that this climactic moment is just a little girl running down a hallway. A teacher calmly and quietly says, “No running.”

    I loved having the realization that I’d gotten so caught up in the story, and so caught up in the injustice of the whole situation, that I’d started to think of it in the same way as the other episodes, which deal with actual murders.

    It culminated in such a sweet ending (before the final stinger!) that was a reminder of what seems to be turning into the season’s overall themes: having sympathy for and showing grace to even the seemingly irredeemable. And recognizing that “justice” doesn’t just mean punishing the guilty, but getting a resolution where everyone gets what they need and they deserve.

  • One Thing I Like About John Wick

    One Thing I Like About John Wick

    After over a decade of cultural diffusion — marketing campaigns for four movies and now a spin-off, countless memes, the character’s appearance in video games — the act of actually watching any of the John Wick movies seemed like just a formality. I assumed that whatever magic was inside had dried up a long time ago, and I was impossibly late to the party.

    But after watching the first movie, I suspect that it might’ve been excellent timing. This is a movie about a character whose reputation precedes him. So much of John Wick is devoted to scenes establishing what a fearsome bad-ass John Wick is, without actually showing him being a bad-ass. I’d imagined it would be an hour and a half of non-stop slow-motion gunfights in purple-lit nightclubs, but that doesn’t really make up the bulk of the running time. Instead, we get lots and lots of people telling us how scary he is.

    This is delivered best by the bad guy Viggo, a mobster who talks about Wick as if he were a fairy tale. He’s not the boogeyman; he’s the guy they send to kill the boogeyman! Much of this is in Russian, with stylized subtitles filling much of the screen, certain words given particular emphasis.

    They’re light on specifics. The only actual story I can recall is when Viggo says that Wick once killed two men with just a pencil. A pencil! I felt like I wasn’t sufficiently impressed by this detail, though: I’ve already seen The Dark Knight and don’t consider it that much of a stretch to imagine how a pencil could be used as a lethal weapon.

    As it is, the first time we see Wick really show his stuff is when he kills a bunch of dudes (presumably; they’re in masks) trying to get into his house, in a vain attempt to stop his pending killing spree. We know that he kills twelve of them, but I’ve got to say it feels like pretty rote stuff. Certainly more home intruders than I would be able to kill, but not exactly an unprecedented number for an action movie.

    But by that point, the movie has done a really good job of establishing its vibe. I was already familiar with a lot of the “Wick-iverse” from the aforementioned cultural diffusion, so I knew about the hotel that catered to assassins and had a strict code of no-killing-allowed. But I’d imagined that all of it would be bigger, or given out in small dollops of lore across at least the first two movies.

    Instead, I was pleasantly surprised by the restraint in John Wick. It’s a fairly simple, straightforward story, coasting mainly on vibes and mood. Apart from repeating what a bad-ass John Wick himself is, there’s very little exposition, and it’s all streamlined and economical. You know very quickly who each character it is, and which role they play in this story. The simplicity really does give it the weight of modern mythology: a bunch of archetypes playing their parts in a simple story about revenge.

    And about this recurring idea of “honor among killers,” which is bullshit in the real world but makes perfect sense in an action movie that’s presented almost like a fable.

    If anything, I wish they’d gone farther into making Wick a super-hero. Have him doing five-finger death punches and the like, without ever breaking a sweat. When commenting on one of his many wounds, he admits that he’s “rusty.” But it creates this weird dissonance where everyone talks about him as if he’s a super-human killing machine, but the movie also wants us to relate to him as a John McClane, seat-of-his-pants type. I think it would’ve been stronger if they hadn’t bothered to put any tension around his getting wounded or kidnapped, but instead made the stakes all about his allies being in jeopardy, or simply the chance that his target will get away.

    I definitely wouldn’t add John Wick to my list of favorite action movies, but I was impressed by how confidently it seemed to know exactly what it wanted to do. And how it seemed to suggest a story, a history, and a world much bigger than anything they needed to actually show us.

  • Tuesday Tune Two-Fer: Horny for Fan Fest

    Tuesday Tune Two-Fer: Horny for Fan Fest

    At the beginning of the month, we went to the Fan Fest Nights at Universal Studios Hollywood. This was the first year of the event, which was structured like Horror Nights, but for non-horror licensed IP. On the whole, it was better than I’d expected, and we enjoyed it a lot.

    Two of the properties were anime, one of which (One Piece) we were aware of and the other one neither of us had even heard of. We don’t go to anything in the Harry Potter section of the park anymore, because of the asshole author who still profits from it. So it was just Dungeons & Dragons, Star Trek, Back to the Future, and lower crowds in Super Nintendo World.

    The D&D walkthrough was definitely the highlight, with an extremely impressive Beholder animatronic. We went through twice, and as far as I’m concerned, that alone made the night worth it. I appreciated what they were trying to do with Back to the Future — give fans a chance to walk around the actual backstage set, combining photo ops with a mini-LARP and live music on the prom stage — but neither of us are big enough fans to get the full effect. And the Star Trek walkthrough was let down a bit by its scale and scope; I just felt like I’d been spoiled by the permanent Las Vegas attraction years ago. But all the cast and team members were super friendly and seemed to be having fun, so the whole night just felt like a good time.

    One thing that I especially appreciated was the loop of 1980s background music that was playing over the escalators to the lower lot and around the tram tour. If the point was nostalgia, they nailed it, because I spent the whole time having vivid sense memories of middle and high school. I felt especially at home when they started playing “Centerfold” by The J. Geils Band, which I was a little bit obsessed with back in 1981 or 82.

    And I can’t say with 100% certainty that they also played “She’s a Beauty” by The Tubes,1Mad props for the titty drums, guys! because the tram ride down to the Back to the Future section played “The Power of Love” on a constant loop, which (along with “Take on Me” by a-ha) drove every other song out of my mind. But even if they didn’t, this was 100% the vibe they seemed to be going for. And I was eating it up. I was tempted to just stay on the escalators all night.

    It genuinely never occurred to me just how many of the favorite songs of my adolescence were all about guys being horny for unattainable women.2These two and also “Photograph” by Def Leppard and “I’ll Wait” and “Hot for Teacher” by Van Halen. I guess it should be obvious in retrospect, since that’s what adolescence is for most guys. I was just in it for the vicious guitar solos.

    • 1
      Mad props for the titty drums, guys!
    • 2
      These two and also “Photograph” by Def Leppard and “I’ll Wait” and “Hot for Teacher” by Van Halen.
  • Your Taste, Should You Choose to Accept It

    Your Taste, Should You Choose to Accept It

    Apparently there’s a new Mission: Impossible movie out? Who knew? You’d think they’d have at least put up a poster or something.

    I don’t know how it is in the rest of the world, but at least in Los Angeles, the advertising is inescapable. The other day I went to a mall that’s not even attached to a theater, and coming out into the atrium, I was confronted with a positively gigantic LED screen, 25 feet tall at least, showing Tom Cruise’s face squinting out over his domain. It was like being in a modern update of 1984 where a bunch of Hollywood producers had said, “Well of course our main objective is to stay true to Orwell’s original vision but also we think obviously, Big Brother should be more handsome.”

    I had plans to see the new movie, but was feeling an odd combination of gastrointestinal distress and extreme lack of interest. It seemed more or less guaranteed to be an entertaining action movie with some stunts that take full advantage of the IMAX screen, but I’ve been unable to work up even the smallest bit of enthusiasm for it.

    But heading into the weekend, I felt like I needed to do some prep work to get the full effect. I’ve still only ever seen the first three movies in the series, after all. (Or in other words, I stopped right before they started to get good, by most accounts). But then I saw a recap of the franchise that made me realize I actually had seen at least one of the other ones, but had forgotten everything about them. But then I realized that all the details have blurred together, and while I think I remember seeing a scene of Henry Cavill beating the hell out of somebody in a bathroom, it might’ve been The Man From UNCLE or Casino Royale or maybe it was when he was wailing on me, in one of those dreams I’m not supposed to mention in polite company?

    Whatever the case, the Mission: Impossible movies just don’t resonate with me at all, and I’ve been talking a lot of shit about them on social media lately. So much so that I’ve been concerned it comes across as the type of person who is super-quick to volunteer that they have no interest in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Where I’m never quite sure how we’re supposed to react. Congratulations on your sophisticated and refined tastes, I guess?

    So it’s important to be clear that whatever it is that makes Mission: Impossible movies pass through my like fiber, it’s solely a matter of preference, and no value judgment is expressed or implied. (Except for the second movie, which is just not good). I love a high-budget, well-made action movie, and I love a summer blockbuster that everybody can enjoy at the same time as a Big Event. I have less than no interest in letting my obnoxious, pretentious movie snob come back to life after I’ve done such a good job of silencing him over the past several years.

    Which is something I’ve been very wary of, since I’ve gotten back into Letterboxd. I like their YouTube videos, I like the social media aspect of it, and I especially like the idea of having a movie-watching diary that doesn’t require me to devote a couple of hours to farting out a post on this blog. What I don’t like is that it keeps reminding me of everything I hated about film school and about online film and popular media commentary.

    And I start to waste time thinking about stupid stuff I absolutely don’t need to think about, like whether this movie “deserves” three stars, or do I bump it down to two and a half? Do I need to add a review to clarify my rating, even if I don’t have anything particularly insightful to say? Would it be fun to write something nasty about a movie I strongly dislike, instead of just ignoring it?

    It’s all in danger of becoming performative instead of participatory. Like not just wanting to engage in interesting conversation about a movie (whether positive or negative), but needing to have your tastes recognized and validated. Where it’s not a celebration, like it should be, but a challenge that you can and most likely will fail at.

    For example: choosing the four favorite movies that will go at the top of your Letterboxd profile, which is part of the site’s branding, since they ask celebrities on red carpets to list their four favorites. Mine are shown at the top of this post — The Empire Strikes Back, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Miller’s Crossing, and Rear Window. I mean, obviously.

    But I’m gradually getting the impression that the rules for choosing these are more complex than I ever imagined, and I’ve done it wrong. For instance: I’ve just outed myself as basic. You’re supposed to choose something under-appreciated, to demonstrate that you’ve got more eclectic tastes. Ideally, something that is obscure enough that few others will have chosen it, but popular enough to dispel any sense that you specifically chose the most obscure and pretentious movie that you could think of.

    “What’s wrong with Empire or Raiders?!” I protest, making even clearer that I’m missing the point. It’s not that people dislike them; it’s that so many people like them that it says nothing to list them as your favorites. You want to pick something that says, “this choice tells you something specifically about me.”

    But each of those movies does say something specifically about me, to the point that it almost feels like a victory. For one thing, my memory is absolutely terrible, but I still vividly remember seeing each one for the first time1At Phipps Plaza for the Atlanta premiere, at Septum Cinemas in my hometown for a birthday party, at the Tate Center at University of Georgia, and in a cinema studies class at NYU and realizing I was seeing something that was unlike anything I’d seen before. For another, each one changed how I think about art and what I value in it. Two of them obviously played a big part in my moving to California. Rear Window was like a light bulb going off2No pun intended; not a flash bulb and changed the way I interpret movies. And Miller’s Crossing carried itself like both an art film and a gangster action movie, suggesting the distinction wasn’t as rigid as I’d always assumed.

    And for about as long as those have been my favorite movies, I’ve gone through cycles of being a pretentious snob, to rejecting pretentious snobbery and becoming an arrogant snob instead, to just being kind of a self-righteous contrarian, to trashing stuff if I thought it would be funny, to whatever phase I’m in now. And honestly, it just feels like a victory to realize I just can’t get that concerned about highbrow vs lowbrow, knowing that I’ve seen a lot more blockbusters that resonated with me than “art” films have.

    It feels like a victory to grow up feeling like a nerd, seeing all my nerd favorites become enormously successful business to the point that you were a weirdo if you didn’t like them, and then seeing that whole fandom fracture again. It feels like a victory to know that I’ve grown out of my arrogant phase where I scoffed at Stephen Spielberg as being too “corny” or “maudlin.” And it feels like a victory to realize that absolutely none of this matters at all, but I can still find a way to try and turn it into an introspective metaphor for self-discovery and growth or whatever.

    But the most valuable reminder, at least for me, is just to remember why we’re fans of stuff in the first place. Ostensibly it’s to celebrate the stuff we love, instead of knocking down the stuff we hate. To discover new details about our favorites, or to discover new favorites. And resist the urge to let out the inner arrogant film critic, and instead just choose to enjoy things and let other people enjoy things.

    • 1
      At Phipps Plaza for the Atlanta premiere, at Septum Cinemas in my hometown for a birthday party, at the Tate Center at University of Georgia, and in a cinema studies class at NYU
    • 2
      No pun intended; not a flash bulb
  • Literacy 2025: Book 19: Victorian Psycho

    Literacy 2025: Book 19: Victorian Psycho

    Book
    Victorian Psycho by Virginia Feito

    Synopsis
    Winifred Notty arrives at Ensor House to begin her employment as governess for the wealthy Pounds family. She finds herself not terribly impressed by her employers or their children. But she continues on, learning more about the house, the family history, and the servants, while tolerating the misanthropic or sullen behavior of the children, the jealous cruelty of Mrs Pounds, and the lecherous intrusiveness of Mr Pounds. Her account culminates in the surprises she has planned for the family and their high-society guests during an extended Christmas celebration.

    Notes
    I don’t want to say too much about this one (but of course, will anyway), not because it’s unremarkable, or because it has significant surprises beyond what’s promised in the title and the premise, but simply because it so confidently and completely speaks for itself.

    Knowing that it was so popular, and that it’s appeared on so many lists of recommended books, I went in unsure of which route it was going to take. Was it going to be a mass market black comedy, aimed at a very specific type of reader who grins as if they’re being naughty and describes it as “deliciously wicked?” Was it going to take the Lemony Snicket approach, with an understated account of the horrors and cruelties of those wacky Victorians, along with fun facts like “can you believe they used arsenic in their make-up?!” Or was it going to be a more lurid horror novel, excusing its scenes of explicit graphic violence with the reassurance that it’s okay because you see, it’s all satire?

    As it turns out, there’s aspects of all of those, but it’s too insightful and confident in tone to settle into any one of them. I could immediately tell that I should stop making assumptions and just let it do its thing, when I read its excellent opening chapter, with its perfectly evocative first sentences:

    Ensor House sits on a stretch of moorland, all raised brows and double chin, like a clasp-handed banker about to deliver terrible news.

    I meet its mullioned eyes from the open phaeton, rolling across the moor to my destiny, my breasts jiggling in my corset.

    It adopts the format of Victorian fiction, and it makes frequent explicit references to Dickens, but it never comes across as a simple parody. Instead, Feito uses the narrator’s mindset of psychopathy to make her a dispassionate observer of a society that is deeply cruel and built on a foundation of gross injustice, hidden under a performance of sophisticated manners and upstanding morality.

    The subject isn’t entirely new, but the voice is. Notty isn’t presented as an anti-hero or a villain, but as someone who was created by this society and also stands outside of it. As a result, the misogyny, racism, classism, repression, and backwards science — which here, isn’t allowed to be cast as simple ignorance, but as a tool to perpetuate all the existing systems of misogyny, colonialism, and classism — isn’t allowed to be safely compartmentalized away as a product of its time. They’re universal.

    Meanwhile, Notty is prone to hallucinations or delusions, and curious obsessions, but she also seems to be the only person capable of seeing what’s actually going on.

    As I was reading, knowing that the book had become popular, I kept thinking, “I hope they’re not trying to turn this into a movie, because everything that makes it special is what makes it unfilmable.” But of course, they are. However, it sounds like it’s on exactly the right track, both by having Feito herself write the script, and by the perfect casting of Maika Monroe as Winifred Notty. If it is even possible to adapt what makes the book work, these are exactly the people to do it.

    Verdict
    A confident take on a premise that could’ve easily gone too far in any predictable direction, but manages to be both insightful and entertaining. Creates a character that refuses to be sympathetic or relatable, in a story that satirizes misogyny but never settles into a simple you go, girl! tone, and still somehow leaves the reader with the feeling that she “won.”

  • Two Things I Like About Poker Face Season 2

    Two Things I Like About Poker Face Season 2

    My take on the first episode of season 2 of Poker Face was that I appreciated that they committed to being unapologetically goofy, instead of launching into a long story arc and saving the silly episodes for mid-season. As it turns out, that does seem to be less of a fun and clever misdirection, and more a like a genuine mission statement for the season.

    All of the new episodes have been leaning hard into the idea that this is a comedy show first, a detective show a distant second.

    Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, since there’s been some really good stuff in every episode. It’s still a very clever and funny series, and it’s doing stuff unlike any other series in recent memory. But as someone who really enjoys over-thinking popular entertainment, it doesn’t give me a whole lot to work with.

    A lot of the funniest and most satisfying moments in season one came from the format: seeing all of these weird connections forming as we go back in time and re-contextualize everything knowing Charlie was somewhere in the background, making pieces fall into place for later. Unfortunately, some of the clunkiest moments in season one came from trying to do straightforward comedy. Charlie running around wearing a horse’s head and doing slapstick being the prime example. I love it when smart, clever people let themselves be goofy and silly, but there’s a very fine line between silly and corny.

    Anyway, my favorite bit in episode 3, “Whack-a-Mole,” was when the mole was using an FBI lipreader to dictate a conversation through binoculars. Hearing tense dialog delivered in a flat monotone: always hilarious. Especially when the conversation diverged into musical theater.

    My favorite bit in episode 4, “The Taste of Human Blood,” was when the Flopa Cops award was being announced for Best Undercover Operation. As the winner “Diego” “Verbinski” “the Third” is announced, we see a nondescript janitor hiding behind a curtain at the back of the theater silently give himself a fist pump. Solid gold.1Yes, I’m aware that they had him show up later on, remove his fake beard, and announce that he’s a cop. I’m choosing to ignore that because the joke was perfect without it.

    Even though the jokes are broad — and Kumail Nanjiani’s Florida Panhandle accent is horrible, even taking into account it’s trying to be over the top — the episodes still fit squarely into the “voice” of Poker Face. The guest stars are John Mulaney and Richard Kind, Gaby Hoffmann (who, like Natasha Lyonne, is a New Yorker who acted as a child and teenager and had a career resurgence as an adult) and John Sayles as a cop trying to put an end to the “Florida Man” stereotype. And the transcendent moments when a character looks into the eyes of Daisy the alligator are the kind of surreal touch you don’t expect in a detective series.

    But more than that, there’s a strong sense of good-hearted morality to both of these episodes.2And the second episode, for that matter, although I didn’t have anything of interest to say about it. The first season had a recurring idea of Charlie being driven by a sense of justice, and we always had to see the bad guys get what was coming to them.

    So far in season two, there’s more a sense of sympathy for the villains. Even with the mostly irredeemable character that Giancarlo Esposito played, there was an attempt to get him out alive. A lot of the time in season one, I was yelling at the screen to try and get Charlie to stop walking into danger; with episode 4 of season 2, I was yelling at Fran the cop to stop before she went too far. And even mob boss Beatrix Hasp was given more sympathy than John Mulaney’s character. Maybe it’s because killing both Richard Kind and Rhea Perlman in the same episode would’ve gone way too far, but I was happy to see her get the promise of a life in witness protection.

    And that’s the last thing that makes Poker Face feel so unique: it’s eager to change up its formula and experiment with new things. The season one finale clearly set up the next season to have the same overall structure, which was abruptly wrapped up in episode 3. I’m not sure whether they planned it to be a curveball from the start, or whether they got partway into plotting the second season and realized they were bored of repeating themselves. Either way, I haven’t seen a series so willing to change its episodic TV structure and go off in new directions since The Good Place.

    I’d be lying (and everyone would be able to tell I was lying) if I said I weren’t a little apprehensive about where the rest of the season is going. I’d like it to lean back into the murder mystery side of things, and hit more of a balance between comedy and detective story. But I’d be even more disappointed if it settled into boring predictability and stopped trying to do weird, new things.

    • 1
      Yes, I’m aware that they had him show up later on, remove his fake beard, and announce that he’s a cop. I’m choosing to ignore that because the joke was perfect without it.
    • 2
      And the second episode, for that matter, although I didn’t have anything of interest to say about it.
  • Literacy 2025: Book 18: Close to Death

    Literacy 2025: Book 18: Close to Death

    Book
    Close to Death by Anthony Horowitz

    Series
    Book 5 in the Hawthorne and Horowitz series

    Synopsis
    When one of the residents of a small, gated, community in London is murdered, the neighbors are all the most obvious suspects. It became one of Daniel Hawthorne’s first cases collaborating with Scotland Yard since he left the police, and it seems like straightforward material for Anthony Horowitz’s fifth book about the brilliant detective. But Hawthorne is reluctant to give Horowitz much information about the resolution of the case, or about his partner at the time. As Horowitz wonders if he’s even got enough material for a book, he starts to learn that there are a lot of people who don’t want him digging up the past.

    Notes
    I’ve already been getting increasingly annoyed by this series, but keep getting them because any Anthony Horowitz book is almost always an engaging, fun read. I think this might be the point where the gimmick has finally run out of steam. The book was fine overall; it’s a decent murder mystery, even if the “locked room” component was a little bit of a cheat for most readers, and the resolution was a bit implausible. But while I really appreciated the attempt to change things up a bit with this one, while still keeping the “meta-murder mystery” feel to it, the changes left it without enough of a hook to make it interesting.

    The concept behind the series is really clever. Horowitz casts himself as the Dr Watson to a brilliant fictional detective, but describes the case as if everything really happened. So there’s often a neat ambiguity between what’s real and what’s fictional, and he’s describing the process of writing the book and solving the mystery while the story is still in progress.

    My main complaint with the series is that Hawthorne is such an abrasive character, without enough eccentricities to make him as appealing a character as Poirot or Sherlock Holmes. That’s not as much of a problem here, but only because Hawthorne is more or less a cipher. There’s barely any characterization at all. And his previous partner is, somehow, even less interesting. Meanwhile, Horowitz has greatly dialed back on setting himself up to be a hapless punching bag, as he throughout the other books, but ends up just mentioning his Alex Rider books over and over again.

    Verdict
    Still a reasonably solid murder mystery, and I do like the attempt to present the story as a work in progress, taking place at the time of the case and also in the present day. But there are very few interesting characters, and not much of a hook.

  • Tuesday Tune Two-Fer: Ask For It By Name

    Tuesday Tune Two-Fer: Ask For It By Name

    Episode 2 of season 2 of Poker Face is called “Last Looks,” and it prominently features the song “Sleepwalk” by Santo & Johnny. I’d recognize that steel guitar anywhere, and I feel like I would even if I didn’t spend so much time in tiki bars. But I never knew the title until this episode.1The episode also features the song “Ring My Bell” by Anita Ward, but if you don’t know the title to that one, you just aren’t listening.

    There must be dozens of songs like that, instrumentals that I’ve heard dozens if not hundreds of times, but have no idea of their titles, artists, or the stories behind them. Shazam can rarely hear well enough over the background noise of a bar or restaurant, and with all the talk about “AI” there’s still nothing that will answer the question “what’s that song that goes doot doot doot doot doot?” I’ve made the point of learning a few over the years, which are so ubiquitous that you hear all the time, but everybody just assumes you already know the title: “Caravan,” “Baby Elephant Walk,” and “A Taste of Honey.”

    A recent victory, after years of hearing the tune but never being able to associate a title, was when I finally learned that this song is called “Afrikaan Beat” and is by Bert Kaempfert. My hope is that as I’m lying on my death bed, a familiar song comes on in the background, but nobody in the room can place it, and my last words will be “That’s ‘Girl in a Sportscar‘ by Alan Hawkshaw,” and my journey will be complete.

    • 1
      The episode also features the song “Ring My Bell” by Anita Ward, but if you don’t know the title to that one, you just aren’t listening.