Subverting expectations by telling a story instead of setting out genre signifiers.
The Melancholy Of Haruhi Suzumiya is one of those works that landed at exactly the right time. The premise is that a Japanese teenage girl named Haruhi Suzumiya starts a high school club investigating the paranormal; unbeknownst to her, all but one of the club members is actually, secretly, a paranormal phenomenon in some way. One is a time traveller, one is a psychic (or ‘ESPer’, the preferred term in anime), and one is the avatar of a computer consciousness, and she herself (again, without her knowledge) has a mysterious and vaguely defined ability to warp reality itself. This premise, while maybe a tad overstuffed, is fairly typical not just for anime but for children’s television worldwide.
What makes it special is the execution. I came to the show the same way a lot of people did – through TV Tropes – with the show landing in 2006, two years after the site’s launch and right in the start of its heyday. Haruhi Suzumiya is a show that rewards a deep knowledge of tropes and cliches, not just because it references things you’ve seen, but because it uses those cliches in an intellectually rewarding way. In essence, it understands how those cliches work and uses them like grammar to tell something totally new.
For starters, Haruhi isn’t actually our viewpoint protagonist. The first ‘real’ episode (I’ll explain that in a minute) starts with a young man nicknamed Kyon. As he goes to school, he narrates how he used to believe in Santa Claus as a kid but grew older and disenchanted, and uses this as a metaphor for growing up in general and becoming an adult by putting away childish things. He then meets a mysterious, brooding young woman named Haruhi; he’s intrigued by how she wears her hair differently depending on the day of the week, and eventually strikes up a conversation with her.
Kyon tends to narrate in ways that would indicate very long pauses in the conversation (or at least a wandering mind outside of conversation), and the show uses that to build some ridiculous montages.
This turns into daily conversations before class, and eventually she picks up on something he remarks and decides to start a high school club investigating the paranormal, pulling in three random people alongside Kyon. Now, again, this sounds all fairly straightforward, but the show is already presenting it in a very strange way. Much of the episode is Kyon’s narration, and he quickly proves himself one of those very charming cynics; he’s aloof, but he’s curious, thoughtful, insightful about others, and inclined to use those insights to make people comfortable.
This is combined with a ludicrously hyperkinetic style that a) is pushed at points into parody and b) at ironic odds with the low stakes. Kyon tends to narrate in ways that would indicate very long pauses in the conversation (or at least a wandering mind outside of conversation), and the show uses that to build some ridiculous montages. One thing that always struck me about the show was how often it combined incredibly upbeat and fast music with incredibly slow editing and long takes, and the crew find some strange angles to look at Kyon’s face as he internally reacts to things.
When the premise starts, the show gets even weirder. The next three subsequent episodes are each other member of the club individually coming to Kyon and informing them that actually, they’re a representative of a paranormal group sent to keep an eye on Haruhi because she has a cluster of some kind of power around her that allows her control over reality. Individually, each of these episodes is fairly straightforward; the fact that you get three of them in a row with exactly the same structure is bizarre (Kyon even comments when he gets to the third iteration).
Haruhi Suzumiya is a particularly spectacular example of postmodernism, and specifically the intellectual pleasures of subverting the audience’s expectations – even denying what they think they want.
This is where you get to what appears to be the meat of the show and is, definitively, what drew people’s attention, even if they couldn’t put why into words. Haruhi Suzumiya is a particularly spectacular example of postmodernism, and specifically the intellectual pleasures of subverting the audience’s expectations – even denying what they think they want. Having three structurally identical episodes in a row is weird and tedious; they do everything possible to make that choice interesting, but it naturally draws attention to itself and it naturally makes the audience ask: why would they make that choice?
This is what I mean about the show being in the right place at the right time. Anime fans of that exact generation and at that exact point were beginning to recognize that stories are constructed, and have recurring patterns and cliches that can be used and put together. If you do something like that now, audiences in general are both too sophisticated to be impressed by storytelling tricks and too incurious to explore ambiguous questions; at the time of writing, a lot of people are complaining that youth audiences have puritan tendencies in their criticism. I think this is overstating the problem, but it does exist – audiences in the late 00’s tended to be a lot more playful.
This is a fundamental creative conceit of the show: teasing and denying audiences genre expectations. It’s not that we never see fun shit; indeed, every episode is about some wacky genre element, with one of my favourites being a reveal that a side character was also an avatar of a big computer consciousness and she gets into a battle with our avatar of a big computer consciousness over trying to kill Kyon. But the central risks of a) ever finding out what the actual deal is with Haruhi’s ‘powers’ and b) Haruhi learning she’s the centre of three different conspiracies are constantly teased and never fulfilled.
The ultimate joke of the show is that genre stuff doesn’t move forward, will never move forward, and fuck you for wanting that.
In a way, this is a pleasure too. Again, it’s intellectual stimulation; one’s creativity goes into overdrive trying to reconcile all these details we’re given and mysteries that are never solved. One very common approach to storytelling by genre nerds is what’s known in Warhammer 40k circles as ‘no story, only lore’. That is to say, there are genre nerds who are in it purely to learn more details about the fictional worlds they want to occupy; more information, more facts to organise into wikis and lorebooks and whatever. Bad genre fiction often exists entirely to serve this purpose.
The genius of Haruhi Suzumiya is how it subverts that expectation continuously and shamelessly while delivering on the actual basics of good storytelling. The ultimate joke of the show is that genre stuff doesn’t move forward, will never move forward, and fuck you for wanting that, but the characters constantly make tiny, almost banal decisions that drastically change their real relationships and emotions. The story of Haruhi Suzumiya is not some special girl at the centre of a massive conspiracy, it’s a teenage boy making some friends and getting re-enchanted with the world.
The funny thing is that the characters themselves are just as much puzzles as their world is, and the funny thing about Kyon in particular is that, as much as he seems to share every single inner thought he has with the audience, not only is he holding things back from us, he’s probably, maybe lying to himself. At the beginning, he tells us he’s pretty comfortable letting go of the childish stories he grew up with, and he repeatedly complains about Haruhi’s schemes and how irritating he finds her, but he also never walks away and, indeed, often seems to find the actual work fun.
Haruhi’s actions are explicitly her trying to run away from despair and make life magical and more interesting.
There’s one notable point early on where Haruhi schemes (extremely unethically) to get the club a new computer and website, and Kyon diligently sets it up, remarking to himself that actually it was a pretty fun process. Kyon does have a few friends before he meets Haruhi, but he also comes off as bored and frustrated with life; he doesn’t seem to have any hobbies or interests outside the club, which strikes me as a deliberate choice. And his journey is one of becoming attached to the other club members; one of the big moments in the show is when Haruhi performs at a school festival in an elaborately staged setpiece, and we see Kyon appearing to watch with total disinterest before tapping his finger to the beat.
Haruhi, similarly, has more depth than she appears. Her personality is incredibly brash to the point of entitlement and sometimes to the point of sociopathy (one gag is her repeatedly sexually assaulting the cute girl in the club, one that I admit I always found uncomfortable, although the fact that everyone around her reacts realistically made it really funny to me). The side effect to the main conceit is that she’s always loudly insisting on the existence of aliens and ESPers and such despite never having even a hint of proof.
One of the other big setpieces is when Haruhi and Kyon are walking down the street, and Haruhi explains to Kyon in a simple, long, and elaborately underlined monologue why she does what she does: she grew up thinking she was special and interesting, but realised one day that there are so many people in the world that she could, legitimately, be lost within them. That is to say, Haruhi’s actions are explicitly her trying to run away from despair and make life magical and more interesting.
But it’s also relationships that make our lives and art lasting.
This is where the show’s intellectual preoccupations and story come together. The genre stuff is fun; the clever tricks and mashups across genres reinvigorated them and made them feel fresh at the time. Ironically, while I think the pranks hold up now, a new work couldn’t really do them; the novelty is gone forever. Lately I’ve found myself more re-enchanted with fiction and cliches and tropes and shit, mainly because I’m continuing to search outside my usual faves and contextualizing them within a larger context. But it’s also relationships that make our lives and art lasting. It’s the friendship between Haruhi and Kyon that makes this show worth watching.
Oddly, this all comes together in the last episode of the first season. The premise is that the weather has gotten cold, so Haruhi sends Kyon out to pick up a heater she bought; the joke is that without Kyon there, things are really boring. Haruhi jumps from one idea to the next without any of Kyon’s focus to force her to think any of them through; the characters read and sit; Kyon himself has nothing to observe and nothing to think about. He gets back with the heater, and everyone is happy, because now they have something to do.
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About the writer
Tristan J. Nankervis
Tristan J Nankervis (aka Drunk Napoleon) has been a writer, pop culture critic, dishwasher, standup comedian, waiter, potato cake factory worker, gamer, TV worker, and various other things. You can find him in Hobart, Tasmania.
Passengers
I went back and forth on this. I remember contemporary reaction was that the premise was horrible – a man basically taking a woman’s life because he couldn’t bear to be alone. The opening scenes work extremely effectively as a metaphor for being a lonely man in a mechanised society; Jim (Chris Pratt) has his basic needs tended for with high quality dangled just out of his reach because he ‘can’t afford’ it, and his only socialising is entirely mechanical. If you’re willing to empathise with people committing awful crimes for understandable reasons, this is perfectly acceptable as a movie premise.
After Aurora (Jennifer Lawrence) wakes up, even the romantic stuff is fine because she has no reason to believe he’s lying, and when she finds out, she nearly and understandably murders him. I could even roll with Jim trying to redeem himself and going out in a blaze of glory; it’s only right at the very end, when Aurora decides not to go back to sleep, that it’s like yeah, this is romanticising an awful situation.
Also, I spent the whole time wondering why Jim didn’t just wake up crew members to try and fix the problem, and if he couldn’t, waking up passengers who were, like, engineers and scientists and shit. But of course, that would have undermined his personal heroism.
The Vvitch
It says a lot that this is a weak first effort for Eggers; every Tasmanian short film is basically like this but lacks the playfulness in language, both cinematic and oral. I suspect this is the most openly about Eggers’s particular philosophy – as much as this is about the horror of being out alone in the woods away from civilisation with only your God, your family, and nature, it’s also about how cool that is. The work required to get what we see onscreen is impressive even before you see it, and the actors take great joy in making the non-naturalistic dialogue sound naturalistic. The climax is less of a climax and more of a shrug, accepting that there’s nowhere else to go – though the actual “Wouldst thou live deliciously’ scene is delivered much cooler and more lowkey than I expected. I guess if you’re out in the middle of nowhere and your family is dead, you might as well become a vvitch.
Whiplash
In the arts, there’s two categories: performers, who use the arts for expression, and technicians, who aim to perform the most difficult pieces possible. This is about the latter. I’ve seen the responses to this film outraged at the way it ignores the Black history of jazz, at Fletcher being a bad teacher, and at Neiman’s complete, selfish indifference to his audience. To which I respond: so what? This absolutely captures one (often male, often white) approach to art, and indeed to a larger part of the human condition.
Neiman’s goals are very image-based – his outline to Nicole at the end of their relationship lays out exactly his kind of thinking – and it has the dual qualities of being very easy to quantify and almost impossible to achieve. Obviously, this has parallels to an abused person’s mindset (though Neiman has explicitly not been abused), but I also think he’s tapping into a desire a lot of people have.
I realised about a third of the way in that Neiman approaches jazz drumming the way I approach difficult video games – where the suffering of repeated failure until you finally break through is the point. The thesis statement of the movie is “The next Charlie Parker would never be discouraged.” It’s almost an addiction, to be the guy who just kept going and going and going. Fletcher is almost a demon that Neiman has conjured up as the perfect antagonist to keep the obsession going. As a representation of teaching or music, it’s horrible; as a representation of the extreme of a philosophy that can, in fact, be tempered, it works. And even if it doesn’t, now you know how they think.
There are two plot turns I consider brilliantly creative: Neiman getting hit by the car and still playing, and Fletcher getting Neiman on-stage specifically to embarrass him.
Le Samourai
It fascinates me how so many French films of this time use extremely dramatic setups – no backstory, no explanation, only action that ruthlessly pushes the story forward – as a vehicle for atmosphere. I prefer this to its American near-contemporary Bullitt if only because the action is much simpler, with very limited conspiracy bullshit. The philosophy is all under the surface; the main drive is the cool sense of control the character feels right up to the end.
From what I’ve been told by Berklee School of Music dropouts (there are many of them), Whiplash is pretty accurate to how stressful and competitive the instrumental music world can be. Fletcher clearly isn’t a GOOD teacher, based on his former student’s suicide, but he’s as dedicated as Neiman to an image and mindset. (That will kill you.)
Love that Satan is in the background of The Vvitch just for a second as a man in boots and a red coat. You only get a glimpse of him, and it’s so dreamlike and eerie.
Ha, you are hitting some anti-favorites here! I need to give Le Samourai another shot but it is the weakest Melville in a walk for me; I do not anticipate my disdain for Whiplash and Chezelle changing though. Both of them have a fundamental conflict between text and tone — Le Samourai is cool control and atmosphere but Jef is a loser and a dupe and a poseur so he doesn’t engage me (he is a dull middle ground between Chow Yun-Fat in The Killer, the only cool hit man, and Allan Baron’s seething malcontent in Blast Of Silence). And if Whiplash does not give a shit about jazz, then it should not give a shit about jazz! ‘The thesis statement of the movie is “The next Charlie Parker would never be discouraged”’ is accurate in terms of describing the movie and idiotic as a thesis statement. The next Charlie Parker wouldn’t be doing this anymore than the next Michael Jordan would be spending all his time practicing dunks — the movie says the character may be delusional but his actions are understandable when in fact his actions are delusional. In terms of people being pushed to the brink, I’ll take The VVitch any day.
” Fletcher is almost a demon that Neiman has conjured up as the perfect antagonist to keep the obsession going.”
One of the things I like about Whiplash is it’s the rare movie that has an alternate “what you see isn’t real” feeling without indulging that kind of reading at all. I’d believe Fletcher is a non-literal antagonist, a metaphor made flesh, but the movie makes him a real character and tells the story that way. The ending satisfies because it satisfies either kind of Fletcher – for just a moment, the ambition is satisfied.
(And the movie cuts away at exactly the right moment – no way this shenanigan holds up to any further scrutiny, I like to imagine a mid-credits scene with the judges shaking their heads and marking down an “F” score.)
We get a temporary shift in partnerships, as Frank takes Patel with him to turn in a dog to the kill shelter… and makes the rookie mistake of getting too attached to it. (Patel also gets attached to the “therapy goat” there.) Victoria has Shred in tow, and after she takes a tip from a man whose snake problem they solve, encourages Shred to do the same with their next call… which of course gets him in trouble. (More so because he’s supposed to have a weekend with Isabelle at a lake house, and Emily is obviously jealous but trying to act like she’s not, but if Shred’s punishment forces him to cancel, well, what can you do? Thankfully, Victoria sets her straight.) Pretty solid, in that I enjoyed it but I don’t remember any specific lines or standout moments, which is about par for the course (also a consequence of writing this several days later).
Going Dutch, “CIA”
The Enlisted connections continue with a guest appearance from Parker Young! He plays Rick, a CIA agent Maggie’s dating, who visits her on his time off while there’s a NATO summit in town. Patrick is immediately suspicious and tries to keep Maggie from seeing him, even though she’s, you know, a grown-ass adult in her thirties. It turns out he’s right to be suspicious, albeit not for the reasons he thinks. The scheming and counter-scheming of this episode between father and daughter (and figuring out what Rick is really up to) made it pretty fun.
The Shield, “Safe” through “On Tilt”
Well, now I’m mostly wondering why I even bothered to start with season 4 when I went back and did all of these anyway. I might no longer wait for my wife to catch up before I start season seven, considering she spent most of the weekend watching White Collar.
Notably, William Stanford Davis plays one of the Black elder statesmen in “Slipknot,” 17 years before he’d finally find his breakout role at 70 goddamn years old.
Suburgatory, some season 1 episodes
I missed some of these while my wife was binging ‘cause I had stuff to do. But we started at “Driving Miss Dalia” and ended at “Independence Day.” Funny details: Dan Byrd taking a break from Cougar Town to guest here as a “new student” Tessa has to show around, who is actually an undercover narcotics officer investigating steroid dealing… but Tessa, who can tell he’s keeping some secret, is convinced he’s in the closet. “Fire with Fire” has Dalia trying to get revenge on Tessa by inviting Lisa into her own group and turning her into one of her hangers-on… which Tessa flips on her by doing the same to Kimantha. And Dallas being the only white member of her sorority is pretty funny, although it’s a bummer that in the end they’re not really that fond of her. Also, Tessa being convinced the new poetry teacher is super-cool and trying to impress her and failing– while Dalia’s poetry, shallow as the subject matter may be, actually does impress her– is pretty funny. (Dalia, always more insightful than she appears, accurately observes that Tessa’s poetry is trying too hard and not honest, and also that it’s ridiculous that Tessa is so concerned about winning over “a sad, middle-aged, weirdo poetry teacher with B.O.”)
NFL Divisional Round
Well, mostly good games, even if we didn’t always get the results I was hoping for. Uh, go Commanders, I guess.
The Simpsons, some season 5 episodes with commentary
The Mrs. wasn’t feeling well over the weekend so I tried to put on some old, comforting favorites. I never get tired of the Garrison Keillor roasting in the “Marge on the Lam” commentary. Conan does some great stuff on “Homer Goes to College”; what I remember most is his story about being a poor Irish immigrant who was taken in by the Harvard Lampoon to work as a bootblack.
I grew up on Prairie Home Companion, so I’m mildly fond of it, but it is pure white people culture. The funniest non-Simpsons roast of it is still from The Wire Season 2 when Bodie is driving out of Baltimore for the first time ever, finds PHC on the radio, and is just horrified.
I did not grow up in the kind of culture where NPR listening was looked upon kindly. Of course, I don’t look upon the culture I grew up in kindly, either, but more to the point, it always struck me as Midwest-gentle-chuckle “humor” for middle-class white people rather than being genuinely funny comedy, and I have pretty much no interest in that. Both because I like actual comedy and because the kind of recognition of that Midwestern culture that I assume appeals to Keillor fans would completely escape me.
My Favorite Wife – The setup should work for a screwball comedy: Irene Dunne, presumed dead for seven years after a shipwreck, returns home on the very day that Cary Grant remarries. But it never becomes even a little funny for me. I know now that the cast had trouble finding their groove as Leo McCarey, slated to direct, was instead seriously hurt in a car accident and the daily updates on his condition were not conducive to comedy. But beyond that, at no point does anyone but the beleaguered second wife (Gail Patrick) ever act like a real person. (I felt so sorry for the poor second wife. Nothing funny about what happened to her at all.) The levels of miscommunication are painful to watch, not helped much by Garson Kanin replacement level directing. And what the heck is up with that last scene? The only things I was interested in were two side characters, the manager of the hotel where Dunne has chased Grant and Patrick and the judge who declared Dunne dead, and the presence of Randolph Scott as not-quite-a-rival for Grant’s affections, and who in real life might have been Grant’s lover for years.
Juror #2 – Wow, a new movie! I never watch new movies! If you buy the premise, you can buy the movie, but even once I bought the plot, I was not really convinced about how things unfolded, starting with how there were zero concrete evidence to prove Gabriel Basso was guilty, and sliding into a trial and jury deliberation that left a lot to be desired. But Clint does a pretty good job directing things and as ever he gets great performances out of most of his cast. Alas, I found Hoult to be rather one note and far less compelling than most of the jury. Especially JK Simmons, in the sort of performance (as ever) where when he’s not on screen everyone is asking “where’s JK Simmons?” There is also apparently some element of Eastwoodian political cynicism here but I don’t see it. Still, if this is the last movie Clint directs, it’s a good grace note. (Also. knowing what Basso’s role in Hillbilly Elegy was, it was hard to see him in a suit and not see the feckless man about to become vice president. I hope Basso can escape that.)
Frasier, “The Crucible”/”Call Me Irresponsible” – In the former, Frasier discovers the painting he thought was by a major local artist is in fact a forgery, but can’t get the gallery to return his money. Leading to a great moment outside the gallery where Niles has to talk Frasier out of throwing a brick through the window. “We might be barbarians, but we pay for our pillaging.” Fun episode that establishes how much it will be in a fairly rarified world for a sitcom, though I know that in the real world, Frasier calling the cops and asking for the “art forgery division” would be taken seriously. In the latter, Frasier tells a caller unhappy with his relationship to break it, then ends up dating the ex-girlfriend, and then giving the caller bad advice so that the woman stays with Frasier. Leading a crisis of conscience. The first of many romantic misadventures for our lead. Amanda Donohoe is great as the love interest, and Bruno Kirby has fun as the caller.
Kojak, “Slay Ride” – Attendees at a convention start falling out of windows, and Kojak’s squad has to find the connections and unravels events connected to a similar death at a previous convention. This one gets pretty dark and intense, with the Army Ranger husband of the original victim and her sister seeking revenge. Guests include Julie Gregg (The Godfather), Paul Benedict before The Jeffersons, and Gordon Jump before WKRP.
M*A*S*H, “OR” – Almost entirely set in the operating room, and therefore devoid of a laugh track for once, the stakes are high as a flood of wounded comes through. We get, among other things, Frank almost removing a man’s single kidney till Trapper stops him, and Frank being unusually if only briefly grateful; Hawkeye prolonging a life with open heart massage only for the man to die; and Sidney Freeman corralled into helping with surgery. Good stuff.
Cinematic Titanic, “Rattlers” – The movie is just a slog, and the riffs are not great as a result. But huge comedy points to just how Frank Conniff calls back to “watch out for snakes.”
Part of Simmons’ point is that the case on both sides is half-assed, right? The public defender’s got nine other cases going so he doesn’t do everything right, the DA wants a win, the cops focused exclusively on Basso without thinking about anything else (something which does happen a lot in real life, cops get a “hunch” and don’t look into other possibilities for the case), and as Simmons implies, ultimately no one really did their jobs.
Lot of other good performances here (I like Yardborough’s bitterness), but Basso has to sell that this guy did NOT do it and that Collette, looking at him, believes him by the end, and he does.
And underneath Simmons’ (accurate) read on the defense and prosecution is why he is there in the first place. He’s bored! He could’ve mentioned his background when asked but he did not, he wanted to see where things would go. I don’t think this makes him a bad person or anything but it’s another little twist on who exactly winds up on a jury.
The case against Basso being relatively slim (although the “eyewitness” is a pretty big factor) didn’t bother me, I do think it’s a bit weird that during the trial no one ever brings up the possibility of what actually happened — not the who but the what, which seems extremely possible as an outcome! But I can roll with it.
EDIT: And mostly agreed on My Favorite Wife, it has the outline of a solid screwball but never comes together. I think there is also a very weird disjunction of needing seven years (at the very least an extended period of time) to make the remarriage work — all hope of reunification has to be gone — and the whole “we were stuck on an island for seven years and apparently never banged” aspect, which come on.
Lost Highway – Kind of the angry male proto-Mulholland Drive that’s (kind of) a huge middle finger to the fantasy of a man fully possessing a woman (“You’ll NEVER have me”), indulging heterosexual jealousy and lust – Arquette is such a sexpot as Ginger, while Renee is more of a real person – and also refuting it. That last line is followed by Renee/Ginger walking away from 90’s goateed goober Getty, her back to the camera, the character confident in her nudity and power. Feels generally like the beginning of Lynch’s “late style” as a filmmaker (though I need to watch The Straight Story), with the violation of editing rules to draw out the horror, distortion of sound, and the kind of slow-moving domestic dread 90 percent of modern prestige TV would kill to have. (“What are you *reading*?”) An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge as a nightmarish, doubling time loop or maybe a malevolent purgatory.
David Lynch: The Art Life – Good portrait of Lynch’s childhood and early career, with lots of footage of his art, and the man in 2016 being interviewed, chain smoking those fatal cigarettes, seen musing or painting while his toddler daughter plays. Still very sad and strange to think of Lynch not simply making art forever. He describes his early camera work as trying to make a “moving painting” and this is (1) a great description of Lynch’s filmmaking, and (2) contrasts nicely with how Kubrick made moving photographs in his filmography. On Criterion.
Lord of the Rings: Return of the King – This is the most successful version of what Steven Universe seemed to be doing with the “I got PTSD from my adventures” crap. Much as Jack Nicholson famously dubbed the third act “too many endings,” they’re all rich, moving endings (the awe in Aragorn’s voice when he says “My friends! You bow to *no one*”), and my favorite is Frodo’s. As an adult rewatching this, the Ring resembles nothing so much as opioids, the shit that went through my home state and seemingly ate away at people’s essences, fucking up their minds and bodies and behaviors. If you get through addiction, you still will likely come back a different person, and Frodo, as a former addict, who survived death and also had to confront the Shadow self inside him and let the Ring chip away at him in order to save the world, realizing he can’t really be part of it anymore, and going West for a sense of peace and healing, was beautiful and bittersweet. I think overall Fellowship of the Ring is the strongest overall movie though Two Towers and King are not exactly slouches, but the sense of desperation and friendship in that first one is still overpowering. Stuck with the Theatrical Edition but the Saruman death scene from the Extended should be in here. (Lee’s switch from silky-voiced negotiation to monstrous spite is amazing.)
Agreed on loving the endings, no matter how many of them there are. Actually, I’m kind of like that with the LOTR movies in general: I’ll always watch the extended editions, because this is not exactly a sleekly, economically constructed series anyways, so the greater shagginess doesn’t really hurt it, and it gives me more of the beauty and emotional richness the films do so well.
Heh, Balthazar Getty’s facial hair is … unfortunate. And he’s very strange, a total noir sap and at first blush a victim or an escape route for Pullman, but he has his own issues with women. He also talks to Blake.
Yeah, I always assume Pete is another version of Fred while also being a distinct personality, the same way Mr. C/Dougie Jones are versions of Cooper. Getty was apparently insufferable on the set but he’s pretty great in Twin Peaks: The Return. (And looks cool finally!)
Godzilla vs Hedorah – Godzilla day over at one of the local independent cinemas! I headed over for the two I hadn’t seen before, both of which were from the early 70s. This one really leans into psychedelia and rock music and I absolutely loved it, the main plot is a very blunt take on environmental issues but there’s so much weird stuff going on around the edges and it cheerfully skips from heavy lecture to rock concert to animated interlude in a way that made me very happy. The actual monster action is maybe a little lacking, but that only matters if the rest of the film isn’t incredibly fun, so I have no complaints.
Godzilla vs Gigan – this one doesn’t seem to be as well-liked, it’s a more straightforward “corrupt corporation trying to control the monsters” kinda thing but with a fun theme park setting. I guess after Hedorah’s psychedelic madness it’s a bit of a comedown but still really fun and the monster action in this one is back at full strength. Good to see a big audience turn out for this kind of thing!
All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) – getting back to the unseen-films-from-the-last-100-years project, which needs a better name. Interesting how quick the transition from silent film to something like this was – one year after Hitchcock’s clunky first attempt at sound, here’s Hollywood delivering an epic with (I’m sorry) all guns blazing. I think this does a pretty good job passing the “can a war movie be anti-war?” test, there are maybe a couple of shaky moments but for the most part this is relentlessly bleak and the constant shuddering mortar fire quickly gets across what an unending nightmare it was to be on the front lines of WWI. I think Paths of Glory tops this in terms of Great War movies but that one had 20+ more years of cinematic technology and one of the best directors ever behind the camera, so no shade intended.
Live Music – hooray, live music is back. Bristol indie-rockers Langkamer on Friday night, very good band chemistry – I love it when you can tell a band just loves being on the road as much as they feasibly can. Simon Joyner over from Omaha on Sunday night, annoyed that I missed the opening act because it was an early start and none of the info seemed to convey that, but the other support was good and Simon did a great slow, sad, folky set in a venue with great sound, every lyric audible which is perfect for his style.
Last time he played here, I was one of the opening acts, so I’m sure I mentioned him then. But I think he has a pretty solid cult following too. His songs remind me a little of Leonard Cohen, which is not an easy comparison to live up to but he does a good job!
Wooo live music! Booo poor set time info! I got boned by that a month ago, I guess it is good that bands are starting earlier but it’s very different from “you have at least an hour after the doors open and probably 90 minutes” that I’m used to.
Yeah I’m very pro-early starts for Sunday shows, just wish somebody had mentioned it beforehand! The act I missed was local though so I’m sure I’ll get another chance.
Nightbitch – Marielle Heller has made some well-received films yet I still think was undersung as a director. I think that’s still the case, but unfortunately it’s because this film took a pretty nasty critical (not to mention commercial) drubbing this year when it’s actually simply okay. It feels like an idea for a short film – I’ve seen a few that have its post-partum panic – that can only support a feature in bursts. I give a lot of credit for Heller flying in the face of conventional wisdom and working with real (and real small) children and real animals. But it’s not enough to recommend this in a pretty strong indie year. A lot of this vibe was covered better in Tully, and getting beaten out by latter-day Jason Reitman is not a thing I like to say for a director I admire greatly. Hope this isn’t one of those “one strike and you’re out deals” that too many women get.
If you come in with low expectations as I did, you’ll find some stuff. There’s just not a whole lot there, unfortunately, hard to recommend spending time with it when there’s so much good stuff from the past year.
I enjoyed the book, but I figured it’d be a difficult task to bring it to the screen, so I’m not surprised Heller had trouble with it … but I doubt anyone else could have pulled it off, either. I should still see it at some point, though: I’m curious how it shakes out. Fingers crossed for Heller getting more chances.
Major League: In honor of Bob Uecker, who really is a terrific highlight here, breezy and funny and increasingly invested. There are obviously bits of this that haven’t aged well–the romance plot is my least favorite of those, and my interest essentially bottoms out during those scenes–and thank God the Cleveland Indians shed that name and (especially) that mascot, but overall, it’s still a very funny movie with a very charismatic cast. (Dorky Wesley Snipes!) And it’s always a pleasure to watch people gradually improving and committing, complete with an upturn in their overall fortunes: “Wild Thing” going from a derisive chant to a wholehearted (and lustful) anthem is a great bit.
Down with Love: Beautifully designed and unabashedly horny. I wrote a FOTI on this back in the day, and I don’t think I have anything that new to say about it now, except that it’s a lot of fun, I covet the cape dress Sarah Paulson wears in her first scene, and the double-entendres and split-screen sex shenanigans are a delightful blend of filth and technical innocence.
Such a fun movie and Zellweger’s big monologue is itself technically impressive as a feat of delivering so much dialogue. This is a tricky thing to describe, and I don’t know how much this was intentional, but Down with Love feels like it unveils 2000’s Hollywood’s prejudices as much as it does the early 60’s, with casting closeted actors Hyde-Pierce and Paulsen as the “Best Friends” at a point where Matt Bomer coming out meant he couldn’t play Superman.
The cut from Zellweger’s monologue to McGregor’s stunned, open-mouthed reaction is also one of my favorite comedic beats!
I think you’re right about the movie having an eye for the prejudices of its own time as well as the time it’s more openly satirizing, and Hyde-Pierce and Paulson’s casting illuminating that particularly well. The over-the-credits song also feels like it brushes up against that, too: for all its chipper “egalitarian romance is a possibility, and these hot, besotted people will now prove it through song!” veneer, the exact lyrics and details sometimes show that things haven’t come that far. It has the same kind of quality as that “Kens in Barbie World now have exactly the same rights and treatment as women in our world” stinger at the end of Barbie.
What really saves Major League’s premise, in terms of being about a team with a racist name/mascot, is how the movie really cares for the team and the city, the whole cross section of people slagging on the team and becoming overjoyed when they’re actually good is wonderful. The movie itself is still a ton of fun as a comedy and baseball movie but without that attitude it’d be a lot harder to stomach the Indians stuff.
The racist name/mascot doesn’t really bother me in the movie, because…
a)Well, it was the team name at the time.
b)Cleveland was the kind of perennial-loser franchise at this point that you could make this film about.
c)The writer-director grew up in the Cleveland area, so he writes from real experience as a lifelong fan of the team. “I figured I would never see the Indians win anything unless I wrote a movie where they did. That was the real genesis behind the movie.”
Point c is the big one. And I’ve mentioned this before but I think we’re or at least I am at the worst point for being confronted with the racism — it’s in my actual past instead of a historical past, so the switch is a reminder of stuff that I lived with. 30 years down the road the sting will be lesser; a movie made 30 years prior to Major League is racism I had nothing to do with so it’s easier to compartmentalize. There’s a similar vibe to Obama-era ironic racism that is different than reading a Mickey Spillane novel or whatever.
Yeah, I ordered them in ascending importance. The name is unfortunate, but the story and script come from a real place of fandom, and that wouldn’t have changed with a different team mascot. I guess it doesn’t bother me in part because of that– the movie isn’t really about them being the “Indians” specifically, it’s just the mascot at the time of the team the writer/director grew up as a fan of– and I guess because it’s not like there’s some serious material racism going on in the film, it’s not like it’s a story making fun of reservations and massacres or about how cool doing, uh, redface? is.
And maybe a little where I have the opposite reaction to you, in that because it’s in my lifetime but it’s only a mascot and not something more serious, it’s more like background noise than anything serious I have to grapple with to enjoy the film.
Yeah, I fully sympathize with (c) as a reason for making the movie. I wince every time I see the mascot, but that’s not David S. Ward’s fault: he was working with what he had. Just glad we’re past that era (uh, unless there’s a Trump executive order making the franchise revert to its former imagery).
I’m usually wishing for more character stuff, but not here. They’re darn lucky they had the actors they did for that side of it. But the baseball stuff is golden all the way around, complete with the platonic ideal of a baseball manager, the crusty, always unimpressed lifer. “Nice catch Hays, don’t ever phuckin’ do it again!”
My favorite bit of trivia about Major League is that Wesley Snipes, who’s supposed to be the most amazing base-stealer, is actually pretty slow, which is why they always change to dramatic slow-motion when he takes off running.
We watched Major League (again, for me) not terribly long ago, late 2023, and the cast and baseball stuff still holds up great. (I agree with you about the romance stuff.) One great thing about good sports movies and TV shows, whether comedy or drama, is that they really capture the sense of building team spirit and camaraderie that other genres can’t so much. (I guess maybe a war movie could?)
Especially fun to see what so many of the cast members went on to do. I mean, Charlie Sheen and Wesley Snipes we all know, Tom Berenger and Rene Russo we all know, Bob Uecker we all know… but James Gammon, long acting history aside, would take his crusty talents to Cabin Boy; that’s President Allstate Dennis Haysbert as Pedro Cerrano; and Chelcie Ross as veteran pitcher Eddie Harris, who we’d all see again eventually as Conrad Hilton in Mad Men. (I do assume they’ve all had other acting roles as well.)
Despicable Me 2 — family movie night! This was put on after Jurassic Park III proved too scary, oh well. Those Minions are actually pretty funny when they’re beating the shit out of each other, unfortunately there are human characters here and they’re doing dumb relationship shit and the story is lazy even for this sort of thing. But the nephews laughed a lot.
Eraserhead — finally watched this and somehow never knew the title is a literal joke, hilarious. The rest of the movie is a nightmare, the sound in particular — it feels like a watershed in movie sound, what sound can be in a movie, the way Al Jolson was a watershed. But even in the nightmare there is a bothness, the baby is disgusting and oddly pitiful, Henry is a passive loser and a dad (Nance’s delivery of ‘oh, you ARE sick’ and then the nebulizer is oddly touching), at least until he is not. Is everything really fine in heaven? But what is sticking with me most is an early scene of Mary X trying to feed the baby and getting nowhere and abruptly getting up and sitting in a chair more than an arm’s length away, face in shadow and body rigid as the cries continue — it is unbearably malevolent, as intense and furious as a Rothko painting.
Lost Highway — speaking of unbearably malevolent, it’s Robert Blake! Everything they say about him in this is true, most of all how his eyes are sunken and yet blazing with evil glee, they are dancing with the joy of depravity. He is singular in a world of doubles (even the cops, who are hilariously dull, all have partners) and it is hard to find happiness in this bad dream. There is a lot of fucking and the last sex scene in the desert is incredible, Arquette’s hair lit like golden wires, but this is of course doubled with her and Loggia earlier, more depravity that is all the creepier for how Arquette rolls into it — not with it, she has not choice, but taking the bad vibes of Marilyn Manson’s cover of “I Put A Spell On You” and using them. The heavy use of contemporary music feels different for Lynch and it’s interesting that pretty much everyone on the soundtrack probably spent a lot of time listening to the noise of Eraserhead before making their relatively pop-ish sounds, is this a double of the Hollywood dream factory and its processing of emotions? Eraserhead is a nightmare that ends, if inconclusively, this feels like it has no way out.
Red Rooms — a young woman befriends another young woman in their obsession with a serial killer on trial and his videos of his victims, sold on the Dark Web. TOR is discussed, more hilariously the lead uses DuckDuckGo for various nefarious searches and I wonder if those folks knew what they were signing off on. The part of this movie about obsession with crime and media coverage and the way people can go down rabbit holes is pretty good, but a lot of the movie is opaque “character” stuff that gets off on being withholding. There is a surprising amount of overlap with The Novice, another story of a young woman driven by things she can’t or won’t look at too closely, but “being the best rower” is a different goal than “getting a snuff film” and Pascal Plante’s filmmaking is restrained and cool and stylish and all the shit that current movies use to cover up the emptiness at their core. Some decent creepiness but the hype for this is out of control, Unfriended 2 covers similar ground and is superior in nearly every way.
I prefer how Mulholland Drive is more of a dream, and it feels…purer than LH, without the use of then-contemporary 90’s metal and rock that sometimes gets on my nerves, shut the fuck up Rammstein, but Highway’s time loop/purgatory energy is still powerful as hell. “It is not my custom to go where I am not wanted” is as explicitly vampiric as “I am alive, yet I am dead,” and it fits that the Mystery Man uses a camera like a third eye, peering into the next person and the next, an infinite feeding off the screen.
Hahahaha, I’ve owned the soundtrack to Lost Highway forever (thanks BMG record club) so I knew there was a lot of Rammstein here, so I was wondering where the hell it was in the movie until the last 20 minutes or so, RAMMSTEIN CITY. I have a soft spot for those Teutonic goobers anyway but I think they work here as blunt instrument, the dream is unraveling and getting more explicit in its perversion so here are some S&M Germans with grunting guitar disco. Really not all that different from Pullman’s sax scene at the beginning.
I was fond of Red Rooms when I first watched it, but reading about how the vision behind it cooled me on it somewhat. I watched most of it under the conviction that it was effectively an icily controlled revenge film–there’s an early hold on Kelly-Anne when they’re talking about the killer’s past and who could effectively “prove” his guilt, and I was honestly convinced it was suggesting she’d had a past (appalling but non-lethal) encounter with him, uniquely equipping her to understand him and leaving her willing to burn her whole minimalist life down to ensure his destruction. It left me waiting for a reveal that never fully came, but there was enough in her characterization to support it that I felt like the idea still worked and was built into the premise/deliberately implied as a possibility … but it actually wasn’t, and that does give me, as you say, a sense of emptiness at its core. I imagined the film was empathizing with her even when she went to extreme places–as I think The Novice does–but now I think it’s actually making a spectacle of her and imagining her obsession as fundamentally alien, which I like a lot less. But this all has reminded me that I should rewatch Unfriended 2, at least.
Eraserhead: I’ve also always found Nance’s delivery of “oh, you ARE sick!” strangely touching, with it suddenly clicking for him that this grotesque baby is actually suffering–that it’s vulnerable as well as horrifically off-putting–so I was delighted to see that get a mention here.
I saw a review that suggested something in Kelly-Anne’s past too and … I don’t see that at all? Not with this guy in particular — she’s well outside the age range of his victims; if he did do something to her it happened a long time ago and he seems like a guy would’ve racked up a much larger body count if that were the case — and anything deeper in her past is pure speculation. This is coupled with the movie making lots of suggestions that feel stylish without substance, I got a very bullshit feeling during one of those sequences of Kelly-Anne furiously exercising in a one-shot. Ooh, le cinema! Commitment from the actress! But it’s completely hollow, implying something that is not there, like the barrels in The Usual Suspects. All of the stuff with Clementine was far more interesting (I actually thought the movie was moving toward Kelly-Anne grooming her for a killing) and I think the very end is interestingly grim, Clementine has moved from critiquing media narratives to willingly participating in them and it seems to be out of the same desire for attention and agency and connection that drives her earlier. Why would a person feel like that? Much more interesting than Kelly-Anne’s black box. I will say that Nath needs to watch this to report back on the accuracy of its poker, it seemed pretty good to me but then again I’ve never played high-stakes poke with bitcoin to buy a snuff film.
I would be more curious about the Minions movie if I didn’t have a total distrust in the people behind the movies’ inability to not bring in the dullest of cliches and emotional throughlines, the latter in particular is bad enough but it has no business being near these little dipshits and yet I fear it will be.
Dune (Spice Diver edit) – Great, narrative incoherence made longer, you say! Not Lynch’s best or my favorite. But it may be the most influential film of his for me, implanting itself in my brain at an impressionable age. It’s not a good adaptation. But Lynch doing space opera in his own weird and quirky way is maybe what I want more. The screenplay is all exposition and some of the additions do add more of that. But the lengthy run time and added footage do attempt at giving some coherence and cohesion trying to sand down the disjointed edges of the theatrical by fixing the pacing issues. Namely in the last “book”. Where the theatrical cut felt rushed and undeveloped in the desert portions the inserted scenes add some depth and rich epic feel to the film. The biggest additions are the fight with Jemis, now we know why those two kids were following Paul around. Another is Jessica’s ascension to the Fremen’s Reverend Mother. The third is an attempt to tie the relationship of Shai-Hulud to the Fremen and Dune. It’s still far from perfect but succeeds to some degree in what it is attempting.
I still think this looks more visually impressive than any of the other adaptations looking better as time goes on precisely because they exist. The costumes and the sets look fantastic, a mix of historical styles and futurism. Lynch’s interpretation of the visions and dreams in the book is also well done. The tone of the film is unique to Lynch. He achieves some of that with his use of sound in the dialog. The power of words in Lynch’s Dune is literalized with the Voice, the weirding modules and when Paul realizes, “My own name is a killing word.” The Atreides and Fremen speak with the quiet reverence and whispers of a holy tract while the Harkonnen bark and shout like heavy metal frontmen. Kenneth McMillian plays the Baron to the back of the room but is much more menacing in behavior and appearance than Stellan Skarsgard’s low-key mumbling. Lynch is the only one to attempt the inner monologues from the book. It didn’t always work and some of that is edited out here, but I’m glad he tried it. Lynch’s choice of weirding modules, because Star Wars, instead of “kung-fu on sand dunes” does not work. Lynch go lost on the highway with the film. But at least he attempted things and experimented where other filmmakers would play it safe in future films. This isn’t Lynch’s vision but if you have a chance to see this edit it might change your mind on the film.
Babygirl
Oh, so THAT’S why y’all have been rooting so hard (heh) (heh) (heh) for an erotic thriller renaissance. Sexiest damn thing I’ve ever seen. I liked Challengers fine, but this delivered everything that one’s fans promised: the above thrilling erotica, killer soundtrack, mature for reasons that have nothing to do with explicitness. Hard to stand out in a cast with Nicole Kidman and Antonio Banderas, but I have to give credit to Harris Dickinson (on-the-nose name and all) for actually convincing me someone could actually choose him over Banderas.
I suppose there’s some thoughts to be absorbed on the role of communication in relationships and whatnot, but the real, literal suggestion of what’s necessary (as enacted by Banderas at the end), is maybe the most practical adult marriage advice you could hope to see in a movie.
Castlevania: Nocturne
Season 2, Episode 1. “A Living Legend”. First time.
Given that this is a catch-up episode and there will be few opportunities for action it’s very smart to start with a flashback and just let Alucard go and cut vampire heads in an Egyptian tomb. In classic Netflix Castlevania fasion, it ends with a dark joke and we’re back to the present. It’s easy to take for granted how good the animation is when it comes to people getting gruesomely killed. It’s effortless and always lands. Kept expecting a nod towards Portrait of Ruin‘s Egyptian section, but that’s just me.
Back in France, it’s mostly all the characters on both sides discussing the fallout from Season 1, but it’s not just plot business, the show really means to show what these characters care about: Richter is struggling with his Belmont legacy and protect his friends, Maria is furious for her mother turning vampire but still idealistic and hopeful that she can be saved, Edouard and the Abbot both want to believe that damnation can be avoided, etc. The character work has been top notch this series and it seems like they’re restarting on the right foot.
Tera has the most interesting story this episode, with that nasty bit were Bathory sends her to fetch the Abbot in the sunlight with nothing but magic ice to shield her, and then her first kill. A very promising start to her arc, very well animated and this is why you get Nastassja Kinski.
Also, the asshole Drolta is back from hell. Very bad idea. It’s going to be so entertaining.
SATURDAY
Castlevania: Nocturne
Season 2, Episode 2. “Angel of Death”. First time.
We get another flashback to Egypt to start things, this one goes way back to ancient times and shows how Drolta became a vampire. Crucial scene, good mix of action and proper horror. Back in the present the plot begins in earnest, with Richter, Alucard and Annette travelling to Paris, but not before another great fight and a classic Richter fuck up, reavealing their destination. Maria then reunites with her now-vampire mother, an interesting complication. The episode closes with another terrific set piece, as Drolta gruesomely slaughters the National Guard with no mercy. The show has plenty mercy though, as Orlox keeps Mizrak from trying to stop her, which would have certainly gotten him killed.
SUNDAY
Castlevania: Nocturne
Season, Episode 3. “The Widow’s Window”. First time.
Speaking of mercy, after the killed National Guard soldiers are turned into undead creatures, we get to hear their now-undead captain reflect on her fate with the also undead Edouard. It’s always fascinating when the show gives a voice to the monsters, and they always have something horrifying or heartbreaking to say. We get some more good fights from Richter’s party as well as Juste meeting Tera. The latter gets Maria to see something impulsive again, and I fear what this might get her. The former finally get to Paris, right in time to witness the execution of Louis XVI, a terrific set piece that lets some of the show’s themes of power and death come to the fore, even before the guillotine falls and Annette’s sees Louis’ spirit rise up and get summoned to hell.
Venom: The Last Dance
First time.
Started it before going to sleep, finished it for breakfast. The first half hour looks like the production just left Tom Hardy talking to himself but thankfully there’s a little more to it than that. The middle section is the silliest and strongest, the rest is par for the course superhero action, with lots of visual noise and characters teleporting around at the plot’s convenience. Also, the titular dance is cup up to pieces by the editing, sapping most of the fun.
Ad Vitam
First time.
Family movie night with my family, my dad’s pick. This is a French action drama about a former French Gendarmerie pregnant couple who get attacked and kidnapped by some heavies. We then get a flashback about them meeting in the academy and falling in love, with the guy getting involved in a big mess that sees him kicked out while she quits when she decides to become pregnant. That’s all quite well enough, with good chemistry between the leads and a good cast around them. Things take a dive in the last act though, as the CIA somehow gets involved, there’s some shitty parkour and things end up with a Taken/James Bond chase through Versailles, with one of the silliest vehicles you can imagine. Hint: It’s one that’s put to much better use recently in Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga. A passable way to kill a few hours, and it’s also funny how the plot hinges on French special forces types trying to negociate and use non-fatal force even during high tension situations. If they were American dudes they would shoot everyone on sight and the plot would have been over by the hour mark.
<emBabylon I did end up taking like 3 weeks to see the second half, and that certainly blunts the impact.
Flaws first; Chazelle is perhaps too indulgent. The movie is about the end of the silent era / the early talkies era and there are both Singing in the Rain easter eggs
and also (spoilers) a long singing in the rain bit in the epilogue. (Frankly, it feels like half of the movie is as if an heir of lina lamont had a vendetta against gene kelly; the other half is gee-whiz wonderment at gene kelly).
Both a flaw and a point of praise: it’s a little messy overall. It’s sprawling. And it has both caustic cynicism and real love of hollywood, but the cynicism isn’t cute with ironic distance. Not flaws per se, but if it was a little tighter or a little less bitter maybe he could have captured that la la land magic.
unmitigated praise: This probably has my favorite performances of robbie and pitt. And i haven’t seen diego calva in much but he’s incredible. His arc, starting as a plucky dreamer and ending up where he does is incredible; he and robbie have incredible chemistry, though we don’t see a ton of it (also robbie has chemistry with everyone and everything in the movie; it’s more like she has radiation). Jovan Adepo is great in a smaller role that nonetheless has an arc across the whole movie. Pitt—and I realize this sounds like an insult—is great at playing washed up. Tobey Maguire and Ethan suplee show up in brief but memorable roles.
The first half is incredibly propulsive and comic. The opening party scene is great and the two filming locations shown the next day are incredible. The movie only recaptures that energy briefly near the end in another party, an inversion of the intro. And then an overindulgent epilogue but let’s not worry about that.
I think it had been somewhat spoiled by jokesters online, but coming to that epilogue in the wild after an exhausting three hours was quite an effect. Not a perfect movie – and I would argue in a couple places an actively bad movie – but when the results flirt with the ambition brought to the project it’s pretty hard to resist.
Fair! If i’d been able to watch it on the big screen in one go I think it would have hit me like a sack bricks. It’s—and I feel kinda bad for making this comparison—almost like the portals scene in avengers endgame. If you’re not having it blasted into your skull on a screen bigger than your house at the end of a long movie it’s not gonna work. (Chazelle has the advantage for not making something that looks like cgi slop).
Chazelle loves parts in motion and he can be very good at them — the big day of filming is very good and its counterpart, Robie’s first sound performance, is excellent comic horror, all of those parts stifled and checked. This ends my praise for Chazelle.
Ratchet: Deadlocked
Earlier Ratchet & Clank games were criticised for being samey, and this appeared to be Insomniac’s response to that. It’s actually not as far out from the series’s usual gameplay as it first appears; the basic gameplay is actually still pretty much the same, it’s just streamlined a lot. It seems much further out because the broad structure of the game is changed; Ratchet and Clank are kidnapped by a big corporation and forced into gladiator combat, putting you in more straightforward levels rather than the universe-exploring mode. Secondly, the game has co-op.
This was about the time Halo got really big and made shitloads of money with its co-op mode, rightfully popularising the concept because it inherently makes action games so much more fun. This works really well in particular; in single player, Ratchet is given a pair of combat bots who can complete simple tasks for him (unlocking doors and such). In co-op, either player can take up the tasks, and it’s really fun deciding who does what, with one player protecting the other. You also share weapons and ammo, with a specific situation being only one player can use each weapon at a time, making communication really important.
Strahd two weeks in a row! We apparently have all the information we need to end the Groundhog Day side quest, which also apparently gives us big clues about the big bad lurking behind Strahd. But hell if I know what we are supposed to do.
Animal Well – finished, or at least as finished as I feel like getting. This is the kind of game where you CAN keep digging forever, but I managed to collect all the eggs and see a second ending and I’m happy with that. Really fun stuff, the sense of mystery baked into every screen is excellently done.
Stray – as The Ploughman said last week, this “what if there was a cat? and the cat made friends with a robot?” game is basically made for me. I’m enjoying it so far, very atmospheric and visually interesting, although I guess it feels a little… empty? After two games that were densely packed with goodness. But that’s somewhat intentional I guess, it’s post-apocalyptic and a certain sense of loneliness doesn’t hurt.
Ooh, nice. I eventually got to the point in Animal Well where I started looking up stuff because I’d already gotten the first ending and some stuff is wicked hard to find.
I decided to do the bunny quest to try to get the last thing I need for every single ending / bit of bonus content, but I kind of tired out with three left. One of them is pretty easy; it’s the other two I’m not sure I want to put in the effort for. (I mean, one of them is super easy, and I could probably do the other two with enough practice. But the bunny that’s known in the player community as “The Floor Is Lava” Bunny I already tried quite a bit, and it’s a bastard. Also my jump button is a little sticky, and that’s an achievement where that actually can make a difference since you need to be so precise.
Speedruns can be kinda funny. The “no wrong warps” one is pretty impressive, but the one with no restrictions is the one that cracks me up, because all you have to do is get enough eggs to get the whistle, then warp straight to the house and exit from there into the final room. (I didn’t know you could even take that exit before you beat the manticore, but apparently you can.)
Yeah the effort required really ramps up for that last bunch of stuff huh? I’m glad it’s in there but I feel like I reached a good point to feel like I’ve seen most of the good stuff without making myself angry at it, haha.
Ha, yeah, it gets really crazy toward the end, both because some of the hidden stuff is absurd to find and others are absurdly difficult to complete. (I did have to look up some eggs toward the end once I thought I’d gone through everything I could go through.)
The mural bunny… apparently that’s like an AGR thing where people get different random pieces of the mural in the guide and people had to put it together outside of the game for the whole picture. The spikes bunny was a pain in the ass (you gotta be really good at riding the disc to get it) but I got it eventually.
I could get the dream bunny easily enough once I feel like firing it up again. Dog bunny seems tougher but definitely doable. “The Floor Is Lava” bunny is difficult enough that even though people have come up with two different solutions, there’s still speculation that there’s supposed to be an easier way to get it.
All that said, though, I’m definitely glad I played as much of it as I could without knowing how to do things or where things were and figuring them out for myself.
Yeah I looked a few things up towards the end but I tried to only look at locations where I needed to go for missing eggs and then figure out the details myself, etc.
The library’s annual game swap (bring unwanted boardgames to trade) was this weekend and we picked up a few solid selection. Played Wise and Unwise with a group, where everyone is given the first half of an old saying from a variety of cultures and the players come up with their own version of the end (standard Balderdash rules). A fun party game, and The Ploughgirl was especially enamored with it as I was with that type of game as a kid. An opportunity to be clever in front of adults and to listen in on their own peculiar humor styles? Fantastic.
The Ploughboy’s favorite of the bunch is Dastardly Dirigibles, a steampunk card game where you race to build an airship. He’s very much into zeppelins, particularly the one that exploded, so he was delighted to learn you can sabotage others’ ships.
We also got a deep sea diving themed game and one lonely one that looks like somebody’s earnest attempt to change your life with a board game (made in the 1987, the era when most games on the shelf were Trivial Pursuit editions).
Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown on Nintendo Switch
Didn’t play too much this week, but I did make it to the end of the ocean stuck in time. Turns out some parts of it do get unstuck, which is a nice change of pace. I beat the area boss, who like so many other bosses seems impossible at first but I figured him out after some minutes (even though I couldn’t figure out the parry). Great fight, though I wish it went on a bit longer. I think the game has a boss mode, so I’ll defnitely try it again later.
Fallen Leaf – Well, I finished, got the bonus level finished too (boy, that one is a real challenge), and… I’m at 99% for the game. Looking through the game encyclopedia, apparently there’s one random enemy I just never encountered. Not sure how to fix that or what level it’s in– might have to do some research to find out. (There’s surprisingly little info on walkthroughs and such out there for this game. Which at least did give me the fun of having to figure out almost all of this shit on my own. (I really only used a guide for one bit of bonus content at the end– there are ten random key fragments scattered throughout the game, and I had collected five when I beat it; I did not want to go through every single stage in hopes of finding the other five.)
I didn’t love this one, but it was pretty solid and enjoyable for a platformer. Worse ways to spend 20-25 hours. Next game might be time for a JRPG-type, though. Give my thumbs a rest. And I really need to get back to poker, once I can fully get my head back in the game.
This sounds really great, and I may have to subscribe to Crunchyroll to check it out. Stories about lonely, disenchanted people gradually connecting with others and with the world again are always up my alley, and the storytelling structure is intriguing. I’ve certainly complained before about plots stalling out or simply having no interest in moving on, but what this captures–and what I’d actually been thinking about lately anyway–is that in a lot of cases, there are multiple modes a story can develop in and multiple pleasures it can cultivate, and as long as a story chooses any of them and commits to it, it can work magnificently. It’s only when the storytelling is totally paralyzed (or regularly promised but deliberately, artificially thwarted) that it becomes boring.
What did we watch?
Passengers
I went back and forth on this. I remember contemporary reaction was that the premise was horrible – a man basically taking a woman’s life because he couldn’t bear to be alone. The opening scenes work extremely effectively as a metaphor for being a lonely man in a mechanised society; Jim (Chris Pratt) has his basic needs tended for with high quality dangled just out of his reach because he ‘can’t afford’ it, and his only socialising is entirely mechanical. If you’re willing to empathise with people committing awful crimes for understandable reasons, this is perfectly acceptable as a movie premise.
After Aurora (Jennifer Lawrence) wakes up, even the romantic stuff is fine because she has no reason to believe he’s lying, and when she finds out, she nearly and understandably murders him. I could even roll with Jim trying to redeem himself and going out in a blaze of glory; it’s only right at the very end, when Aurora decides not to go back to sleep, that it’s like yeah, this is romanticising an awful situation.
Also, I spent the whole time wondering why Jim didn’t just wake up crew members to try and fix the problem, and if he couldn’t, waking up passengers who were, like, engineers and scientists and shit. But of course, that would have undermined his personal heroism.
The Vvitch
It says a lot that this is a weak first effort for Eggers; every Tasmanian short film is basically like this but lacks the playfulness in language, both cinematic and oral. I suspect this is the most openly about Eggers’s particular philosophy – as much as this is about the horror of being out alone in the woods away from civilisation with only your God, your family, and nature, it’s also about how cool that is. The work required to get what we see onscreen is impressive even before you see it, and the actors take great joy in making the non-naturalistic dialogue sound naturalistic. The climax is less of a climax and more of a shrug, accepting that there’s nowhere else to go – though the actual “Wouldst thou live deliciously’ scene is delivered much cooler and more lowkey than I expected. I guess if you’re out in the middle of nowhere and your family is dead, you might as well become a vvitch.
Whiplash
In the arts, there’s two categories: performers, who use the arts for expression, and technicians, who aim to perform the most difficult pieces possible. This is about the latter. I’ve seen the responses to this film outraged at the way it ignores the Black history of jazz, at Fletcher being a bad teacher, and at Neiman’s complete, selfish indifference to his audience. To which I respond: so what? This absolutely captures one (often male, often white) approach to art, and indeed to a larger part of the human condition.
Neiman’s goals are very image-based – his outline to Nicole at the end of their relationship lays out exactly his kind of thinking – and it has the dual qualities of being very easy to quantify and almost impossible to achieve. Obviously, this has parallels to an abused person’s mindset (though Neiman has explicitly not been abused), but I also think he’s tapping into a desire a lot of people have.
I realised about a third of the way in that Neiman approaches jazz drumming the way I approach difficult video games – where the suffering of repeated failure until you finally break through is the point. The thesis statement of the movie is “The next Charlie Parker would never be discouraged.” It’s almost an addiction, to be the guy who just kept going and going and going. Fletcher is almost a demon that Neiman has conjured up as the perfect antagonist to keep the obsession going. As a representation of teaching or music, it’s horrible; as a representation of the extreme of a philosophy that can, in fact, be tempered, it works. And even if it doesn’t, now you know how they think.
There are two plot turns I consider brilliantly creative: Neiman getting hit by the car and still playing, and Fletcher getting Neiman on-stage specifically to embarrass him.
Le Samourai
It fascinates me how so many French films of this time use extremely dramatic setups – no backstory, no explanation, only action that ruthlessly pushes the story forward – as a vehicle for atmosphere. I prefer this to its American near-contemporary Bullitt if only because the action is much simpler, with very limited conspiracy bullshit. The philosophy is all under the surface; the main drive is the cool sense of control the character feels right up to the end.
From what I’ve been told by Berklee School of Music dropouts (there are many of them), Whiplash is pretty accurate to how stressful and competitive the instrumental music world can be. Fletcher clearly isn’t a GOOD teacher, based on his former student’s suicide, but he’s as dedicated as Neiman to an image and mindset. (That will kill you.)
Love that Satan is in the background of The Vvitch just for a second as a man in boots and a red coat. You only get a glimpse of him, and it’s so dreamlike and eerie.
I am willing to accept The Witch or The VVitch. The Vvitch? I’m calling in the Vvitchfinder general to deal with that.
I’m not a vvitch, I’m your vvife?
Vvhat have I done?!
Ha, you are hitting some anti-favorites here! I need to give Le Samourai another shot but it is the weakest Melville in a walk for me; I do not anticipate my disdain for Whiplash and Chezelle changing though. Both of them have a fundamental conflict between text and tone — Le Samourai is cool control and atmosphere but Jef is a loser and a dupe and a poseur so he doesn’t engage me (he is a dull middle ground between Chow Yun-Fat in The Killer, the only cool hit man, and Allan Baron’s seething malcontent in Blast Of Silence). And if Whiplash does not give a shit about jazz, then it should not give a shit about jazz! ‘The thesis statement of the movie is “The next Charlie Parker would never be discouraged”’ is accurate in terms of describing the movie and idiotic as a thesis statement. The next Charlie Parker wouldn’t be doing this anymore than the next Michael Jordan would be spending all his time practicing dunks — the movie says the character may be delusional but his actions are understandable when in fact his actions are delusional. In terms of people being pushed to the brink, I’ll take The VVitch any day.
” Fletcher is almost a demon that Neiman has conjured up as the perfect antagonist to keep the obsession going.”
One of the things I like about Whiplash is it’s the rare movie that has an alternate “what you see isn’t real” feeling without indulging that kind of reading at all. I’d believe Fletcher is a non-literal antagonist, a metaphor made flesh, but the movie makes him a real character and tells the story that way. The ending satisfies because it satisfies either kind of Fletcher – for just a moment, the ambition is satisfied.
(And the movie cuts away at exactly the right moment – no way this shenanigan holds up to any further scrutiny, I like to imagine a mid-credits scene with the judges shaking their heads and marking down an “F” score.)
Animal Control, “Goats, Snakes, and Dogs”
We get a temporary shift in partnerships, as Frank takes Patel with him to turn in a dog to the kill shelter… and makes the rookie mistake of getting too attached to it. (Patel also gets attached to the “therapy goat” there.) Victoria has Shred in tow, and after she takes a tip from a man whose snake problem they solve, encourages Shred to do the same with their next call… which of course gets him in trouble. (More so because he’s supposed to have a weekend with Isabelle at a lake house, and Emily is obviously jealous but trying to act like she’s not, but if Shred’s punishment forces him to cancel, well, what can you do? Thankfully, Victoria sets her straight.) Pretty solid, in that I enjoyed it but I don’t remember any specific lines or standout moments, which is about par for the course (also a consequence of writing this several days later).
Going Dutch, “CIA”
The Enlisted connections continue with a guest appearance from Parker Young! He plays Rick, a CIA agent Maggie’s dating, who visits her on his time off while there’s a NATO summit in town. Patrick is immediately suspicious and tries to keep Maggie from seeing him, even though she’s, you know, a grown-ass adult in her thirties. It turns out he’s right to be suspicious, albeit not for the reasons he thinks. The scheming and counter-scheming of this episode between father and daughter (and figuring out what Rick is really up to) made it pretty fun.
The Shield, “Safe” through “On Tilt”
Well, now I’m mostly wondering why I even bothered to start with season 4 when I went back and did all of these anyway. I might no longer wait for my wife to catch up before I start season seven, considering she spent most of the weekend watching White Collar.
Notably, William Stanford Davis plays one of the Black elder statesmen in “Slipknot,” 17 years before he’d finally find his breakout role at 70 goddamn years old.
Suburgatory, some season 1 episodes
I missed some of these while my wife was binging ‘cause I had stuff to do. But we started at “Driving Miss Dalia” and ended at “Independence Day.” Funny details: Dan Byrd taking a break from Cougar Town to guest here as a “new student” Tessa has to show around, who is actually an undercover narcotics officer investigating steroid dealing… but Tessa, who can tell he’s keeping some secret, is convinced he’s in the closet. “Fire with Fire” has Dalia trying to get revenge on Tessa by inviting Lisa into her own group and turning her into one of her hangers-on… which Tessa flips on her by doing the same to Kimantha. And Dallas being the only white member of her sorority is pretty funny, although it’s a bummer that in the end they’re not really that fond of her. Also, Tessa being convinced the new poetry teacher is super-cool and trying to impress her and failing– while Dalia’s poetry, shallow as the subject matter may be, actually does impress her– is pretty funny. (Dalia, always more insightful than she appears, accurately observes that Tessa’s poetry is trying too hard and not honest, and also that it’s ridiculous that Tessa is so concerned about winning over “a sad, middle-aged, weirdo poetry teacher with B.O.”)
NFL Divisional Round
Well, mostly good games, even if we didn’t always get the results I was hoping for. Uh, go Commanders, I guess.
The Simpsons, some season 5 episodes with commentary
The Mrs. wasn’t feeling well over the weekend so I tried to put on some old, comforting favorites. I never get tired of the Garrison Keillor roasting in the “Marge on the Lam” commentary. Conan does some great stuff on “Homer Goes to College”; what I remember most is his story about being a poor Irish immigrant who was taken in by the Harvard Lampoon to work as a bootblack.
I grew up on Prairie Home Companion, so I’m mildly fond of it, but it is pure white people culture. The funniest non-Simpsons roast of it is still from The Wire Season 2 when Bodie is driving out of Baltimore for the first time ever, finds PHC on the radio, and is just horrified.
I did not grow up in the kind of culture where NPR listening was looked upon kindly. Of course, I don’t look upon the culture I grew up in kindly, either, but more to the point, it always struck me as Midwest-gentle-chuckle “humor” for middle-class white people rather than being genuinely funny comedy, and I have pretty much no interest in that. Both because I like actual comedy and because the kind of recognition of that Midwestern culture that I assume appeals to Keillor fans would completely escape me.
My Favorite Wife – The setup should work for a screwball comedy: Irene Dunne, presumed dead for seven years after a shipwreck, returns home on the very day that Cary Grant remarries. But it never becomes even a little funny for me. I know now that the cast had trouble finding their groove as Leo McCarey, slated to direct, was instead seriously hurt in a car accident and the daily updates on his condition were not conducive to comedy. But beyond that, at no point does anyone but the beleaguered second wife (Gail Patrick) ever act like a real person. (I felt so sorry for the poor second wife. Nothing funny about what happened to her at all.) The levels of miscommunication are painful to watch, not helped much by Garson Kanin replacement level directing. And what the heck is up with that last scene? The only things I was interested in were two side characters, the manager of the hotel where Dunne has chased Grant and Patrick and the judge who declared Dunne dead, and the presence of Randolph Scott as not-quite-a-rival for Grant’s affections, and who in real life might have been Grant’s lover for years.
Juror #2 – Wow, a new movie! I never watch new movies! If you buy the premise, you can buy the movie, but even once I bought the plot, I was not really convinced about how things unfolded, starting with how there were zero concrete evidence to prove Gabriel Basso was guilty, and sliding into a trial and jury deliberation that left a lot to be desired. But Clint does a pretty good job directing things and as ever he gets great performances out of most of his cast. Alas, I found Hoult to be rather one note and far less compelling than most of the jury. Especially JK Simmons, in the sort of performance (as ever) where when he’s not on screen everyone is asking “where’s JK Simmons?” There is also apparently some element of Eastwoodian political cynicism here but I don’t see it. Still, if this is the last movie Clint directs, it’s a good grace note. (Also. knowing what Basso’s role in Hillbilly Elegy was, it was hard to see him in a suit and not see the feckless man about to become vice president. I hope Basso can escape that.)
Frasier, “The Crucible”/”Call Me Irresponsible” – In the former, Frasier discovers the painting he thought was by a major local artist is in fact a forgery, but can’t get the gallery to return his money. Leading to a great moment outside the gallery where Niles has to talk Frasier out of throwing a brick through the window. “We might be barbarians, but we pay for our pillaging.” Fun episode that establishes how much it will be in a fairly rarified world for a sitcom, though I know that in the real world, Frasier calling the cops and asking for the “art forgery division” would be taken seriously. In the latter, Frasier tells a caller unhappy with his relationship to break it, then ends up dating the ex-girlfriend, and then giving the caller bad advice so that the woman stays with Frasier. Leading a crisis of conscience. The first of many romantic misadventures for our lead. Amanda Donohoe is great as the love interest, and Bruno Kirby has fun as the caller.
Kojak, “Slay Ride” – Attendees at a convention start falling out of windows, and Kojak’s squad has to find the connections and unravels events connected to a similar death at a previous convention. This one gets pretty dark and intense, with the Army Ranger husband of the original victim and her sister seeking revenge. Guests include Julie Gregg (The Godfather), Paul Benedict before The Jeffersons, and Gordon Jump before WKRP.
M*A*S*H, “OR” – Almost entirely set in the operating room, and therefore devoid of a laugh track for once, the stakes are high as a flood of wounded comes through. We get, among other things, Frank almost removing a man’s single kidney till Trapper stops him, and Frank being unusually if only briefly grateful; Hawkeye prolonging a life with open heart massage only for the man to die; and Sidney Freeman corralled into helping with surgery. Good stuff.
Cinematic Titanic, “Rattlers” – The movie is just a slog, and the riffs are not great as a result. But huge comedy points to just how Frank Conniff calls back to “watch out for snakes.”
Part of Simmons’ point is that the case on both sides is half-assed, right? The public defender’s got nine other cases going so he doesn’t do everything right, the DA wants a win, the cops focused exclusively on Basso without thinking about anything else (something which does happen a lot in real life, cops get a “hunch” and don’t look into other possibilities for the case), and as Simmons implies, ultimately no one really did their jobs.
Lot of other good performances here (I like Yardborough’s bitterness), but Basso has to sell that this guy did NOT do it and that Collette, looking at him, believes him by the end, and he does.
And underneath Simmons’ (accurate) read on the defense and prosecution is why he is there in the first place. He’s bored! He could’ve mentioned his background when asked but he did not, he wanted to see where things would go. I don’t think this makes him a bad person or anything but it’s another little twist on who exactly winds up on a jury.
The case against Basso being relatively slim (although the “eyewitness” is a pretty big factor) didn’t bother me, I do think it’s a bit weird that during the trial no one ever brings up the possibility of what actually happened — not the who but the what, which seems extremely possible as an outcome! But I can roll with it.
EDIT: And mostly agreed on My Favorite Wife, it has the outline of a solid screwball but never comes together. I think there is also a very weird disjunction of needing seven years (at the very least an extended period of time) to make the remarriage work — all hope of reunification has to be gone — and the whole “we were stuck on an island for seven years and apparently never banged” aspect, which come on.
Lost Highway – Kind of the angry male proto-Mulholland Drive that’s (kind of) a huge middle finger to the fantasy of a man fully possessing a woman (“You’ll NEVER have me”), indulging heterosexual jealousy and lust – Arquette is such a sexpot as Ginger, while Renee is more of a real person – and also refuting it. That last line is followed by Renee/Ginger walking away from 90’s goateed goober Getty, her back to the camera, the character confident in her nudity and power. Feels generally like the beginning of Lynch’s “late style” as a filmmaker (though I need to watch The Straight Story), with the violation of editing rules to draw out the horror, distortion of sound, and the kind of slow-moving domestic dread 90 percent of modern prestige TV would kill to have. (“What are you *reading*?”) An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge as a nightmarish, doubling time loop or maybe a malevolent purgatory.
David Lynch: The Art Life – Good portrait of Lynch’s childhood and early career, with lots of footage of his art, and the man in 2016 being interviewed, chain smoking those fatal cigarettes, seen musing or painting while his toddler daughter plays. Still very sad and strange to think of Lynch not simply making art forever. He describes his early camera work as trying to make a “moving painting” and this is (1) a great description of Lynch’s filmmaking, and (2) contrasts nicely with how Kubrick made moving photographs in his filmography. On Criterion.
Lord of the Rings: Return of the King – This is the most successful version of what Steven Universe seemed to be doing with the “I got PTSD from my adventures” crap. Much as Jack Nicholson famously dubbed the third act “too many endings,” they’re all rich, moving endings (the awe in Aragorn’s voice when he says “My friends! You bow to *no one*”), and my favorite is Frodo’s. As an adult rewatching this, the Ring resembles nothing so much as opioids, the shit that went through my home state and seemingly ate away at people’s essences, fucking up their minds and bodies and behaviors. If you get through addiction, you still will likely come back a different person, and Frodo, as a former addict, who survived death and also had to confront the Shadow self inside him and let the Ring chip away at him in order to save the world, realizing he can’t really be part of it anymore, and going West for a sense of peace and healing, was beautiful and bittersweet. I think overall Fellowship of the Ring is the strongest overall movie though Two Towers and King are not exactly slouches, but the sense of desperation and friendship in that first one is still overpowering. Stuck with the Theatrical Edition but the Saruman death scene from the Extended should be in here. (Lee’s switch from silky-voiced negotiation to monstrous spite is amazing.)
Agreed on loving the endings, no matter how many of them there are. Actually, I’m kind of like that with the LOTR movies in general: I’ll always watch the extended editions, because this is not exactly a sleekly, economically constructed series anyways, so the greater shagginess doesn’t really hurt it, and it gives me more of the beauty and emotional richness the films do so well.
I watched the Two Towers extended because I remembered it really working* where Return’s extended felt a bit shaggy.
* Boromir’s silent, truly appalled look when Denethor tells him “I know of Faramir’s uses and they are none” alone.
Heh, Balthazar Getty’s facial hair is … unfortunate. And he’s very strange, a total noir sap and at first blush a victim or an escape route for Pullman, but he has his own issues with women. He also talks to Blake.
Yeah, I always assume Pete is another version of Fred while also being a distinct personality, the same way Mr. C/Dougie Jones are versions of Cooper. Getty was apparently insufferable on the set but he’s pretty great in Twin Peaks: The Return. (And looks cool finally!)
Godzilla vs Hedorah – Godzilla day over at one of the local independent cinemas! I headed over for the two I hadn’t seen before, both of which were from the early 70s. This one really leans into psychedelia and rock music and I absolutely loved it, the main plot is a very blunt take on environmental issues but there’s so much weird stuff going on around the edges and it cheerfully skips from heavy lecture to rock concert to animated interlude in a way that made me very happy. The actual monster action is maybe a little lacking, but that only matters if the rest of the film isn’t incredibly fun, so I have no complaints.
Godzilla vs Gigan – this one doesn’t seem to be as well-liked, it’s a more straightforward “corrupt corporation trying to control the monsters” kinda thing but with a fun theme park setting. I guess after Hedorah’s psychedelic madness it’s a bit of a comedown but still really fun and the monster action in this one is back at full strength. Good to see a big audience turn out for this kind of thing!
All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) – getting back to the unseen-films-from-the-last-100-years project, which needs a better name. Interesting how quick the transition from silent film to something like this was – one year after Hitchcock’s clunky first attempt at sound, here’s Hollywood delivering an epic with (I’m sorry) all guns blazing. I think this does a pretty good job passing the “can a war movie be anti-war?” test, there are maybe a couple of shaky moments but for the most part this is relentlessly bleak and the constant shuddering mortar fire quickly gets across what an unending nightmare it was to be on the front lines of WWI. I think Paths of Glory tops this in terms of Great War movies but that one had 20+ more years of cinematic technology and one of the best directors ever behind the camera, so no shade intended.
Live Music – hooray, live music is back. Bristol indie-rockers Langkamer on Friday night, very good band chemistry – I love it when you can tell a band just loves being on the road as much as they feasibly can. Simon Joyner over from Omaha on Sunday night, annoyed that I missed the opening act because it was an early start and none of the info seemed to convey that, but the other support was good and Simon did a great slow, sad, folky set in a venue with great sound, every lyric audible which is perfect for his style.
Woo, live music! Heard of Simon Joyner somewhere…
Last time he played here, I was one of the opening acts, so I’m sure I mentioned him then. But I think he has a pretty solid cult following too. His songs remind me a little of Leonard Cohen, which is not an easy comparison to live up to but he does a good job!
Woooooo live music in 2025!!
Wooo live music! Booo poor set time info! I got boned by that a month ago, I guess it is good that bands are starting earlier but it’s very different from “you have at least an hour after the doors open and probably 90 minutes” that I’m used to.
Yeah I’m very pro-early starts for Sunday shows, just wish somebody had mentioned it beforehand! The act I missed was local though so I’m sure I’ll get another chance.
Nightbitch – Marielle Heller has made some well-received films yet I still think was undersung as a director. I think that’s still the case, but unfortunately it’s because this film took a pretty nasty critical (not to mention commercial) drubbing this year when it’s actually simply okay. It feels like an idea for a short film – I’ve seen a few that have its post-partum panic – that can only support a feature in bursts. I give a lot of credit for Heller flying in the face of conventional wisdom and working with real (and real small) children and real animals. But it’s not enough to recommend this in a pretty strong indie year. A lot of this vibe was covered better in Tully, and getting beaten out by latter-day Jason Reitman is not a thing I like to say for a director I admire greatly. Hope this isn’t one of those “one strike and you’re out deals” that too many women get.
Agreed as a big fan of Can You Ever Forgive Me? I’m almost curious about how this tackles the premise but you don’t make it sound that fun.
If you come in with low expectations as I did, you’ll find some stuff. There’s just not a whole lot there, unfortunately, hard to recommend spending time with it when there’s so much good stuff from the past year.
I enjoyed the book, but I figured it’d be a difficult task to bring it to the screen, so I’m not surprised Heller had trouble with it … but I doubt anyone else could have pulled it off, either. I should still see it at some point, though: I’m curious how it shakes out. Fingers crossed for Heller getting more chances.
Major League: In honor of Bob Uecker, who really is a terrific highlight here, breezy and funny and increasingly invested. There are obviously bits of this that haven’t aged well–the romance plot is my least favorite of those, and my interest essentially bottoms out during those scenes–and thank God the Cleveland Indians shed that name and (especially) that mascot, but overall, it’s still a very funny movie with a very charismatic cast. (Dorky Wesley Snipes!) And it’s always a pleasure to watch people gradually improving and committing, complete with an upturn in their overall fortunes: “Wild Thing” going from a derisive chant to a wholehearted (and lustful) anthem is a great bit.
Down with Love: Beautifully designed and unabashedly horny. I wrote a FOTI on this back in the day, and I don’t think I have anything that new to say about it now, except that it’s a lot of fun, I covet the cape dress Sarah Paulson wears in her first scene, and the double-entendres and split-screen sex shenanigans are a delightful blend of filth and technical innocence.
Such a fun movie and Zellweger’s big monologue is itself technically impressive as a feat of delivering so much dialogue. This is a tricky thing to describe, and I don’t know how much this was intentional, but Down with Love feels like it unveils 2000’s Hollywood’s prejudices as much as it does the early 60’s, with casting closeted actors Hyde-Pierce and Paulsen as the “Best Friends” at a point where Matt Bomer coming out meant he couldn’t play Superman.
The cut from Zellweger’s monologue to McGregor’s stunned, open-mouthed reaction is also one of my favorite comedic beats!
I think you’re right about the movie having an eye for the prejudices of its own time as well as the time it’s more openly satirizing, and Hyde-Pierce and Paulson’s casting illuminating that particularly well. The over-the-credits song also feels like it brushes up against that, too: for all its chipper “egalitarian romance is a possibility, and these hot, besotted people will now prove it through song!” veneer, the exact lyrics and details sometimes show that things haven’t come that far. It has the same kind of quality as that “Kens in Barbie World now have exactly the same rights and treatment as women in our world” stinger at the end of Barbie.
What really saves Major League’s premise, in terms of being about a team with a racist name/mascot, is how the movie really cares for the team and the city, the whole cross section of people slagging on the team and becoming overjoyed when they’re actually good is wonderful. The movie itself is still a ton of fun as a comedy and baseball movie but without that attitude it’d be a lot harder to stomach the Indians stuff.
The racist name/mascot doesn’t really bother me in the movie, because…
a)Well, it was the team name at the time.
b)Cleveland was the kind of perennial-loser franchise at this point that you could make this film about.
c)The writer-director grew up in the Cleveland area, so he writes from real experience as a lifelong fan of the team. “I figured I would never see the Indians win anything unless I wrote a movie where they did. That was the real genesis behind the movie.”
Point c is the big one. And I’ve mentioned this before but I think we’re or at least I am at the worst point for being confronted with the racism — it’s in my actual past instead of a historical past, so the switch is a reminder of stuff that I lived with. 30 years down the road the sting will be lesser; a movie made 30 years prior to Major League is racism I had nothing to do with so it’s easier to compartmentalize. There’s a similar vibe to Obama-era ironic racism that is different than reading a Mickey Spillane novel or whatever.
Yeah, I ordered them in ascending importance. The name is unfortunate, but the story and script come from a real place of fandom, and that wouldn’t have changed with a different team mascot. I guess it doesn’t bother me in part because of that– the movie isn’t really about them being the “Indians” specifically, it’s just the mascot at the time of the team the writer/director grew up as a fan of– and I guess because it’s not like there’s some serious material racism going on in the film, it’s not like it’s a story making fun of reservations and massacres or about how cool doing, uh, redface? is.
And maybe a little where I have the opposite reaction to you, in that because it’s in my lifetime but it’s only a mascot and not something more serious, it’s more like background noise than anything serious I have to grapple with to enjoy the film.
Yeah, I fully sympathize with (c) as a reason for making the movie. I wince every time I see the mascot, but that’s not David S. Ward’s fault: he was working with what he had. Just glad we’re past that era (uh, unless there’s a Trump executive order making the franchise revert to its former imagery).
I’m usually wishing for more character stuff, but not here. They’re darn lucky they had the actors they did for that side of it. But the baseball stuff is golden all the way around, complete with the platonic ideal of a baseball manager, the crusty, always unimpressed lifer. “Nice catch Hays, don’t ever phuckin’ do it again!”
My favorite bit of trivia about Major League is that Wesley Snipes, who’s supposed to be the most amazing base-stealer, is actually pretty slow, which is why they always change to dramatic slow-motion when he takes off running.
We watched Major League (again, for me) not terribly long ago, late 2023, and the cast and baseball stuff still holds up great. (I agree with you about the romance stuff.) One great thing about good sports movies and TV shows, whether comedy or drama, is that they really capture the sense of building team spirit and camaraderie that other genres can’t so much. (I guess maybe a war movie could?)
Especially fun to see what so many of the cast members went on to do. I mean, Charlie Sheen and Wesley Snipes we all know, Tom Berenger and Rene Russo we all know, Bob Uecker we all know… but James Gammon, long acting history aside, would take his crusty talents to Cabin Boy; that’s President Allstate Dennis Haysbert as Pedro Cerrano; and Chelcie Ross as veteran pitcher Eddie Harris, who we’d all see again eventually as Conrad Hilton in Mad Men. (I do assume they’ve all had other acting roles as well.)
Despicable Me 2 — family movie night! This was put on after Jurassic Park III proved too scary, oh well. Those Minions are actually pretty funny when they’re beating the shit out of each other, unfortunately there are human characters here and they’re doing dumb relationship shit and the story is lazy even for this sort of thing. But the nephews laughed a lot.
Eraserhead — finally watched this and somehow never knew the title is a literal joke, hilarious. The rest of the movie is a nightmare, the sound in particular — it feels like a watershed in movie sound, what sound can be in a movie, the way Al Jolson was a watershed. But even in the nightmare there is a bothness, the baby is disgusting and oddly pitiful, Henry is a passive loser and a dad (Nance’s delivery of ‘oh, you ARE sick’ and then the nebulizer is oddly touching), at least until he is not. Is everything really fine in heaven? But what is sticking with me most is an early scene of Mary X trying to feed the baby and getting nowhere and abruptly getting up and sitting in a chair more than an arm’s length away, face in shadow and body rigid as the cries continue — it is unbearably malevolent, as intense and furious as a Rothko painting.
Lost Highway — speaking of unbearably malevolent, it’s Robert Blake! Everything they say about him in this is true, most of all how his eyes are sunken and yet blazing with evil glee, they are dancing with the joy of depravity. He is singular in a world of doubles (even the cops, who are hilariously dull, all have partners) and it is hard to find happiness in this bad dream. There is a lot of fucking and the last sex scene in the desert is incredible, Arquette’s hair lit like golden wires, but this is of course doubled with her and Loggia earlier, more depravity that is all the creepier for how Arquette rolls into it — not with it, she has not choice, but taking the bad vibes of Marilyn Manson’s cover of “I Put A Spell On You” and using them. The heavy use of contemporary music feels different for Lynch and it’s interesting that pretty much everyone on the soundtrack probably spent a lot of time listening to the noise of Eraserhead before making their relatively pop-ish sounds, is this a double of the Hollywood dream factory and its processing of emotions? Eraserhead is a nightmare that ends, if inconclusively, this feels like it has no way out.
Red Rooms — a young woman befriends another young woman in their obsession with a serial killer on trial and his videos of his victims, sold on the Dark Web. TOR is discussed, more hilariously the lead uses DuckDuckGo for various nefarious searches and I wonder if those folks knew what they were signing off on. The part of this movie about obsession with crime and media coverage and the way people can go down rabbit holes is pretty good, but a lot of the movie is opaque “character” stuff that gets off on being withholding. There is a surprising amount of overlap with The Novice, another story of a young woman driven by things she can’t or won’t look at too closely, but “being the best rower” is a different goal than “getting a snuff film” and Pascal Plante’s filmmaking is restrained and cool and stylish and all the shit that current movies use to cover up the emptiness at their core. Some decent creepiness but the hype for this is out of control, Unfriended 2 covers similar ground and is superior in nearly every way.
I prefer how Mulholland Drive is more of a dream, and it feels…purer than LH, without the use of then-contemporary 90’s metal and rock that sometimes gets on my nerves, shut the fuck up Rammstein, but Highway’s time loop/purgatory energy is still powerful as hell. “It is not my custom to go where I am not wanted” is as explicitly vampiric as “I am alive, yet I am dead,” and it fits that the Mystery Man uses a camera like a third eye, peering into the next person and the next, an infinite feeding off the screen.
Hahahaha, I’ve owned the soundtrack to Lost Highway forever (thanks BMG record club) so I knew there was a lot of Rammstein here, so I was wondering where the hell it was in the movie until the last 20 minutes or so, RAMMSTEIN CITY. I have a soft spot for those Teutonic goobers anyway but I think they work here as blunt instrument, the dream is unraveling and getting more explicit in its perversion so here are some S&M Germans with grunting guitar disco. Really not all that different from Pullman’s sax scene at the beginning.
I was fond of Red Rooms when I first watched it, but reading about how the vision behind it cooled me on it somewhat. I watched most of it under the conviction that it was effectively an icily controlled revenge film–there’s an early hold on Kelly-Anne when they’re talking about the killer’s past and who could effectively “prove” his guilt, and I was honestly convinced it was suggesting she’d had a past (appalling but non-lethal) encounter with him, uniquely equipping her to understand him and leaving her willing to burn her whole minimalist life down to ensure his destruction. It left me waiting for a reveal that never fully came, but there was enough in her characterization to support it that I felt like the idea still worked and was built into the premise/deliberately implied as a possibility … but it actually wasn’t, and that does give me, as you say, a sense of emptiness at its core. I imagined the film was empathizing with her even when she went to extreme places–as I think The Novice does–but now I think it’s actually making a spectacle of her and imagining her obsession as fundamentally alien, which I like a lot less. But this all has reminded me that I should rewatch Unfriended 2, at least.
Eraserhead: I’ve also always found Nance’s delivery of “oh, you ARE sick!” strangely touching, with it suddenly clicking for him that this grotesque baby is actually suffering–that it’s vulnerable as well as horrifically off-putting–so I was delighted to see that get a mention here.
I saw a review that suggested something in Kelly-Anne’s past too and … I don’t see that at all? Not with this guy in particular — she’s well outside the age range of his victims; if he did do something to her it happened a long time ago and he seems like a guy would’ve racked up a much larger body count if that were the case — and anything deeper in her past is pure speculation. This is coupled with the movie making lots of suggestions that feel stylish without substance, I got a very bullshit feeling during one of those sequences of Kelly-Anne furiously exercising in a one-shot. Ooh, le cinema! Commitment from the actress! But it’s completely hollow, implying something that is not there, like the barrels in The Usual Suspects. All of the stuff with Clementine was far more interesting (I actually thought the movie was moving toward Kelly-Anne grooming her for a killing) and I think the very end is interestingly grim, Clementine has moved from critiquing media narratives to willingly participating in them and it seems to be out of the same desire for attention and agency and connection that drives her earlier. Why would a person feel like that? Much more interesting than Kelly-Anne’s black box. I will say that Nath needs to watch this to report back on the accuracy of its poker, it seemed pretty good to me but then again I’ve never played high-stakes poke with bitcoin to buy a snuff film.
“The movie was good except the parts that weren’t about the Minions.” I have some good news for you.
I would be more curious about the Minions movie if I didn’t have a total distrust in the people behind the movies’ inability to not bring in the dullest of cliches and emotional throughlines, the latter in particular is bad enough but it has no business being near these little dipshits and yet I fear it will be.
Dune (Spice Diver edit) – Great, narrative incoherence made longer, you say! Not Lynch’s best or my favorite. But it may be the most influential film of his for me, implanting itself in my brain at an impressionable age. It’s not a good adaptation. But Lynch doing space opera in his own weird and quirky way is maybe what I want more. The screenplay is all exposition and some of the additions do add more of that. But the lengthy run time and added footage do attempt at giving some coherence and cohesion trying to sand down the disjointed edges of the theatrical by fixing the pacing issues. Namely in the last “book”. Where the theatrical cut felt rushed and undeveloped in the desert portions the inserted scenes add some depth and rich epic feel to the film. The biggest additions are the fight with Jemis, now we know why those two kids were following Paul around. Another is Jessica’s ascension to the Fremen’s Reverend Mother. The third is an attempt to tie the relationship of Shai-Hulud to the Fremen and Dune. It’s still far from perfect but succeeds to some degree in what it is attempting.
I still think this looks more visually impressive than any of the other adaptations looking better as time goes on precisely because they exist. The costumes and the sets look fantastic, a mix of historical styles and futurism. Lynch’s interpretation of the visions and dreams in the book is also well done. The tone of the film is unique to Lynch. He achieves some of that with his use of sound in the dialog. The power of words in Lynch’s Dune is literalized with the Voice, the weirding modules and when Paul realizes, “My own name is a killing word.” The Atreides and Fremen speak with the quiet reverence and whispers of a holy tract while the Harkonnen bark and shout like heavy metal frontmen. Kenneth McMillian plays the Baron to the back of the room but is much more menacing in behavior and appearance than Stellan Skarsgard’s low-key mumbling. Lynch is the only one to attempt the inner monologues from the book. It didn’t always work and some of that is edited out here, but I’m glad he tried it. Lynch’s choice of weirding modules, because Star Wars, instead of “kung-fu on sand dunes” does not work. Lynch go lost on the highway with the film. But at least he attempted things and experimented where other filmmakers would play it safe in future films. This isn’t Lynch’s vision but if you have a chance to see this edit it might change your mind on the film.
Babygirl
Oh, so THAT’S why y’all have been rooting so hard (heh) (heh) (heh) for an erotic thriller renaissance. Sexiest damn thing I’ve ever seen. I liked Challengers fine, but this delivered everything that one’s fans promised: the above thrilling erotica, killer soundtrack, mature for reasons that have nothing to do with explicitness. Hard to stand out in a cast with Nicole Kidman and Antonio Banderas, but I have to give credit to Harris Dickinson (on-the-nose name and all) for actually convincing me someone could actually choose him over Banderas.
I suppose there’s some thoughts to be absorbed on the role of communication in relationships and whatnot, but the real, literal suggestion of what’s necessary (as enacted by Banderas at the end), is maybe the most practical adult marriage advice you could hope to see in a movie.
FRIDAY
Castlevania: Nocturne
Season 2, Episode 1. “A Living Legend”. First time.
Given that this is a catch-up episode and there will be few opportunities for action it’s very smart to start with a flashback and just let Alucard go and cut vampire heads in an Egyptian tomb. In classic Netflix Castlevania fasion, it ends with a dark joke and we’re back to the present. It’s easy to take for granted how good the animation is when it comes to people getting gruesomely killed. It’s effortless and always lands. Kept expecting a nod towards Portrait of Ruin‘s Egyptian section, but that’s just me.
Back in France, it’s mostly all the characters on both sides discussing the fallout from Season 1, but it’s not just plot business, the show really means to show what these characters care about: Richter is struggling with his Belmont legacy and protect his friends, Maria is furious for her mother turning vampire but still idealistic and hopeful that she can be saved, Edouard and the Abbot both want to believe that damnation can be avoided, etc. The character work has been top notch this series and it seems like they’re restarting on the right foot.
Tera has the most interesting story this episode, with that nasty bit were Bathory sends her to fetch the Abbot in the sunlight with nothing but magic ice to shield her, and then her first kill. A very promising start to her arc, very well animated and this is why you get Nastassja Kinski.
Also, the asshole Drolta is back from hell. Very bad idea. It’s going to be so entertaining.
SATURDAY
Castlevania: Nocturne
Season 2, Episode 2. “Angel of Death”. First time.
We get another flashback to Egypt to start things, this one goes way back to ancient times and shows how Drolta became a vampire. Crucial scene, good mix of action and proper horror. Back in the present the plot begins in earnest, with Richter, Alucard and Annette travelling to Paris, but not before another great fight and a classic Richter fuck up, reavealing their destination. Maria then reunites with her now-vampire mother, an interesting complication. The episode closes with another terrific set piece, as Drolta gruesomely slaughters the National Guard with no mercy. The show has plenty mercy though, as Orlox keeps Mizrak from trying to stop her, which would have certainly gotten him killed.
SUNDAY
Castlevania: Nocturne
Season, Episode 3. “The Widow’s Window”. First time.
Speaking of mercy, after the killed National Guard soldiers are turned into undead creatures, we get to hear their now-undead captain reflect on her fate with the also undead Edouard. It’s always fascinating when the show gives a voice to the monsters, and they always have something horrifying or heartbreaking to say. We get some more good fights from Richter’s party as well as Juste meeting Tera. The latter gets Maria to see something impulsive again, and I fear what this might get her. The former finally get to Paris, right in time to witness the execution of Louis XVI, a terrific set piece that lets some of the show’s themes of power and death come to the fore, even before the guillotine falls and Annette’s sees Louis’ spirit rise up and get summoned to hell.
Venom: The Last Dance
First time.
Started it before going to sleep, finished it for breakfast. The first half hour looks like the production just left Tom Hardy talking to himself but thankfully there’s a little more to it than that. The middle section is the silliest and strongest, the rest is par for the course superhero action, with lots of visual noise and characters teleporting around at the plot’s convenience. Also, the titular dance is cup up to pieces by the editing, sapping most of the fun.
Ad Vitam
First time.
Family movie night with my family, my dad’s pick. This is a French action drama about a former French Gendarmerie pregnant couple who get attacked and kidnapped by some heavies. We then get a flashback about them meeting in the academy and falling in love, with the guy getting involved in a big mess that sees him kicked out while she quits when she decides to become pregnant. That’s all quite well enough, with good chemistry between the leads and a good cast around them. Things take a dive in the last act though, as the CIA somehow gets involved, there’s some shitty parkour and things end up with a Taken/James Bond chase through Versailles, with one of the silliest vehicles you can imagine. Hint: It’s one that’s put to much better use recently in Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga. A passable way to kill a few hours, and it’s also funny how the plot hinges on French special forces types trying to negociate and use non-fatal force even during high tension situations. If they were American dudes they would shoot everyone on sight and the plot would have been over by the hour mark.
<emBabylon I did end up taking like 3 weeks to see the second half, and that certainly blunts the impact.
Flaws first; Chazelle is perhaps too indulgent. The movie is about the end of the silent era / the early talkies era and there are both Singing in the Rain easter eggs
and also (spoilers) a long singing in the rain bit in the epilogue. (Frankly, it feels like half of the movie is as if an heir of lina lamont had a vendetta against gene kelly; the other half is gee-whiz wonderment at gene kelly).
Both a flaw and a point of praise: it’s a little messy overall. It’s sprawling. And it has both caustic cynicism and real love of hollywood, but the cynicism isn’t cute with ironic distance. Not flaws per se, but if it was a little tighter or a little less bitter maybe he could have captured that la la land magic.
unmitigated praise: This probably has my favorite performances of robbie and pitt. And i haven’t seen diego calva in much but he’s incredible. His arc, starting as a plucky dreamer and ending up where he does is incredible; he and robbie have incredible chemistry, though we don’t see a ton of it (also robbie has chemistry with everyone and everything in the movie; it’s more like she has radiation). Jovan Adepo is great in a smaller role that nonetheless has an arc across the whole movie. Pitt—and I realize this sounds like an insult—is great at playing washed up. Tobey Maguire and Ethan suplee show up in brief but memorable roles.
The first half is incredibly propulsive and comic. The opening party scene is great and the two filming locations shown the next day are incredible. The movie only recaptures that energy briefly near the end in another party, an inversion of the intro. And then an overindulgent epilogue but let’s not worry about that.
(also, is there a way to hide spoilers here?)
guy who can’t even do italics: hey, how do I do other markup?
Note: Substitute the “()” for this> and this<. I'm using the "()" to demonstrate because if I use the others the markers disappear.
Italics: (em) text here (/em)
Bold: (strong) text here (/strong)
There's no way to do spoiler tags. I'd just use capitalized text and space.
It took me several tries to find a way to write the proper markers because they tend to disappear in most combinations.
I think it had been somewhat spoiled by jokesters online, but coming to that epilogue in the wild after an exhausting three hours was quite an effect. Not a perfect movie – and I would argue in a couple places an actively bad movie – but when the results flirt with the ambition brought to the project it’s pretty hard to resist.
Fair! If i’d been able to watch it on the big screen in one go I think it would have hit me like a sack bricks. It’s—and I feel kinda bad for making this comparison—almost like the portals scene in avengers endgame. If you’re not having it blasted into your skull on a screen bigger than your house at the end of a long movie it’s not gonna work. (Chazelle has the advantage for not making something that looks like cgi slop).
Chazelle loves parts in motion and he can be very good at them — the big day of filming is very good and its counterpart, Robie’s first sound performance, is excellent comic horror, all of those parts stifled and checked. This ends my praise for Chazelle.
Since we’ve moved the What Did We Listen To? threads to Ben’s Tuesday posts, we’re also going to move the What Did We Read posts to Friday.
Sweet, gives me a few more days to fail to read anything.
That’s pretty much how I saw it too.
What did we play?
Ratchet: Deadlocked
Earlier Ratchet & Clank games were criticised for being samey, and this appeared to be Insomniac’s response to that. It’s actually not as far out from the series’s usual gameplay as it first appears; the basic gameplay is actually still pretty much the same, it’s just streamlined a lot. It seems much further out because the broad structure of the game is changed; Ratchet and Clank are kidnapped by a big corporation and forced into gladiator combat, putting you in more straightforward levels rather than the universe-exploring mode. Secondly, the game has co-op.
This was about the time Halo got really big and made shitloads of money with its co-op mode, rightfully popularising the concept because it inherently makes action games so much more fun. This works really well in particular; in single player, Ratchet is given a pair of combat bots who can complete simple tasks for him (unlocking doors and such). In co-op, either player can take up the tasks, and it’s really fun deciding who does what, with one player protecting the other. You also share weapons and ammo, with a specific situation being only one player can use each weapon at a time, making communication really important.
Strahd two weeks in a row! We apparently have all the information we need to end the Groundhog Day side quest, which also apparently gives us big clues about the big bad lurking behind Strahd. But hell if I know what we are supposed to do.
Animal Well – finished, or at least as finished as I feel like getting. This is the kind of game where you CAN keep digging forever, but I managed to collect all the eggs and see a second ending and I’m happy with that. Really fun stuff, the sense of mystery baked into every screen is excellently done.
Stray – as The Ploughman said last week, this “what if there was a cat? and the cat made friends with a robot?” game is basically made for me. I’m enjoying it so far, very atmospheric and visually interesting, although I guess it feels a little… empty? After two games that were densely packed with goodness. But that’s somewhat intentional I guess, it’s post-apocalyptic and a certain sense of loneliness doesn’t hurt.
Ooh, nice. I eventually got to the point in Animal Well where I started looking up stuff because I’d already gotten the first ending and some stuff is wicked hard to find.
I decided to do the bunny quest to try to get the last thing I need for every single ending / bit of bonus content, but I kind of tired out with three left. One of them is pretty easy; it’s the other two I’m not sure I want to put in the effort for. (I mean, one of them is super easy, and I could probably do the other two with enough practice. But the bunny that’s known in the player community as “The Floor Is Lava” Bunny I already tried quite a bit, and it’s a bastard. Also my jump button is a little sticky, and that’s an achievement where that actually can make a difference since you need to be so precise.
Speedruns can be kinda funny. The “no wrong warps” one is pretty impressive, but the one with no restrictions is the one that cracks me up, because all you have to do is get enough eggs to get the whistle, then warp straight to the house and exit from there into the final room. (I didn’t know you could even take that exit before you beat the manticore, but apparently you can.)
Yeah the effort required really ramps up for that last bunch of stuff huh? I’m glad it’s in there but I feel like I reached a good point to feel like I’ve seen most of the good stuff without making myself angry at it, haha.
Ha, yeah, it gets really crazy toward the end, both because some of the hidden stuff is absurd to find and others are absurdly difficult to complete. (I did have to look up some eggs toward the end once I thought I’d gone through everything I could go through.)
The mural bunny… apparently that’s like an AGR thing where people get different random pieces of the mural in the guide and people had to put it together outside of the game for the whole picture. The spikes bunny was a pain in the ass (you gotta be really good at riding the disc to get it) but I got it eventually.
I could get the dream bunny easily enough once I feel like firing it up again. Dog bunny seems tougher but definitely doable. “The Floor Is Lava” bunny is difficult enough that even though people have come up with two different solutions, there’s still speculation that there’s supposed to be an easier way to get it.
All that said, though, I’m definitely glad I played as much of it as I could without knowing how to do things or where things were and figuring them out for myself.
Yeah I looked a few things up towards the end but I tried to only look at locations where I needed to go for missing eggs and then figure out the details myself, etc.
The library’s annual game swap (bring unwanted boardgames to trade) was this weekend and we picked up a few solid selection. Played Wise and Unwise with a group, where everyone is given the first half of an old saying from a variety of cultures and the players come up with their own version of the end (standard Balderdash rules). A fun party game, and The Ploughgirl was especially enamored with it as I was with that type of game as a kid. An opportunity to be clever in front of adults and to listen in on their own peculiar humor styles? Fantastic.
The Ploughboy’s favorite of the bunch is Dastardly Dirigibles, a steampunk card game where you race to build an airship. He’s very much into zeppelins, particularly the one that exploded, so he was delighted to learn you can sabotage others’ ships.
We also got a deep sea diving themed game and one lonely one that looks like somebody’s earnest attempt to change your life with a board game (made in the 1987, the era when most games on the shelf were Trivial Pursuit editions).
Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown on Nintendo Switch
Didn’t play too much this week, but I did make it to the end of the ocean stuck in time. Turns out some parts of it do get unstuck, which is a nice change of pace. I beat the area boss, who like so many other bosses seems impossible at first but I figured him out after some minutes (even though I couldn’t figure out the parry). Great fight, though I wish it went on a bit longer. I think the game has a boss mode, so I’ll defnitely try it again later.
Also, I finished a particular platforming challenge that people online get furious about. It wasn’t that hard either.
https://remapradio.com/articles/prince-of-persia-and-the-high-price-of-pants/
And I reunited a pirate captain with the last remaining member of his crew: his parrot. They seem doomed, but I got some good money from them.
Fallen Leaf – Well, I finished, got the bonus level finished too (boy, that one is a real challenge), and… I’m at 99% for the game. Looking through the game encyclopedia, apparently there’s one random enemy I just never encountered. Not sure how to fix that or what level it’s in– might have to do some research to find out. (There’s surprisingly little info on walkthroughs and such out there for this game. Which at least did give me the fun of having to figure out almost all of this shit on my own. (I really only used a guide for one bit of bonus content at the end– there are ten random key fragments scattered throughout the game, and I had collected five when I beat it; I did not want to go through every single stage in hopes of finding the other five.)
I didn’t love this one, but it was pretty solid and enjoyable for a platformer. Worse ways to spend 20-25 hours. Next game might be time for a JRPG-type, though. Give my thumbs a rest. And I really need to get back to poker, once I can fully get my head back in the game.
This sounds really great, and I may have to subscribe to Crunchyroll to check it out. Stories about lonely, disenchanted people gradually connecting with others and with the world again are always up my alley, and the storytelling structure is intriguing. I’ve certainly complained before about plots stalling out or simply having no interest in moving on, but what this captures–and what I’d actually been thinking about lately anyway–is that in a lot of cases, there are multiple modes a story can develop in and multiple pleasures it can cultivate, and as long as a story chooses any of them and commits to it, it can work magnificently. It’s only when the storytelling is totally paralyzed (or regularly promised but deliberately, artificially thwarted) that it becomes boring.
Year of the Month update:
Coming in February, you can sign up to write about anything from 2016 along with these fine folks:
TBD: Bridgett Taylor: Rogue One
TBD: Cori Domschot: Ghostbusters, Hidden Figures, and/or Sing
Tentative: Sam Scott: The Neon Demon
Feb 7th: Gillian Nelson: Queen of Katwe
Feb. 11th: Lauren James: Inside
Feb. 14th: Gillian Nelson: Milo Murphy’s Law
Feb. 21st: Gillian Nelson: Pete’s Dragon
And there’s still time to join this team for 1947:
TBD: John Anderson: T-Men
Tentative: John Anderson: Nightmare Alley
Jan. 23rd: Cori Domschot: Down to Earth
Jan. 27th: Cliffy73: Miracle on 34th Street
Jan. 31st: Pluto’s Blue Note
I have an idea for writing about Silence.
Great! When should we schedule it?
I’m gonna aim for february 18.