Margie Soudek’s Salt and Pepper Shakers (2023) dir. Meredith Moore
A filmmaker’s personal perspective is often apparent, but not usually as literal as in this case. This short cuts from footage shot by Moore of her grandmother Margie’s vast collection of salt and pepper shakers to her computer desktop. The film returns to this desktop periodically to add context and whimsy as Moore opens and closes folders, types a memo, books plane tickets, etc. The familiarity of a first-person view of a mouse pointer in action has the juice of voyeurism (this trick has appeared in a prior Lunch Link). Moore’s digital effects students, practicing their rotoscoping and animation insertion skills, add a third perspective to the film. Moore seeks to get her aging grandmother on camera and her students look for opportunities to add explosions.
The contrast is funny but when the film asks (out loud, in another instance of subtext literalization) what this is all about, Moore tells Margie “it’s just about us.” It’s a charmingly succinct summary, but I think the synergy between subject and format is a little more tangled than that. Of all her grandmother’s lifetime of possessions and memoires, Moore focuses on the dozens of shakers, shelf after shelf of knickknacks that go on past the edges of the frame. This appears to be a project outside her work as a visual effects artist and teacher, but that’s her way into the story. There’s a common trait passed between generations (“obsession?” as more than one desktop note suggests), and it seems Moore delights in seeing that trait in her grandmother.
Another note opines “objects bear witness to our lives.” Much of Moore’s live – and, imagine, yours and mine – are witnessed by computer screens. Given the wonderful things we can do with them – like make it look like an elderly lady is zooming through a green meadow under a perfectly arced rainbow – the long hours of witness by digital devices isn’t bad. But it’s also fun to listen to Margie fawn over shakers and recall their origins, each unique form its own witness of a time or person in her long life.
About the writer
C. D. Ploughman
The weary Ploughman is a writer and filmmaker, focusing these days on documentary and educational projects. He obsesses over movies with his very patient wife and children.
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Department of
Conversation
What Did We Watch?
Kojak, “By Silence Betrayed” – Trouble on the waterfront! And not unlike a certain movie, there is a code of silence, this time regarding any crimes committed on the docks, even hijacking and murder. Better to handle it yourself than go to the cops. But for one dockworker of great loyalty and limited mind, things turn befuddling and tragic. Another messy plot, but familiar 70s face Cliff Osmond gives a touching performance as the poor longshoreman caught between the crooks, the cops, his friends, and his conscience. But the deck is stacked in Kojak’s favor since if the longshoremen had gone to the police, none of this would have happened. Other guests include Paul Mantee (Robinson Crusoe on Mars), future Oscar nominee Sally Kirkland, and 80s familiar face Charles Siebert.
“Trouble on the waterfront! And not unlike a certain movie, there is a code of silence” — heh, I know what movie you’re referring to here (the Chuck Norris flick Code of Silence).
M*A*S*H, Season One, Episode Twenty, “The Army-Navy Game”
This is a pretty good comedy episode – not quite on the level of “Tuttle” but the double-punchlines that a) the bomb that fell on the camp is from the CIA and b) it’s a propaganda bomb and they were all stressed over nothing is fantastic. It’s the ‘incompetent bureaucracy’ theme hitting the hardest it ever would over eleven years; not only bombing their own camp, but doing it with a bomb that would have been futile even if it had hit the right target. It’s coupled with the great detail that there’s a football game on the radio between the Army and the Navy, so everyone they call is currently listening to it and making jokes about it.
It creates a lot of room for smaller scenes and gags about our characters. McClean Stevenson actually gets the lion’s share of the gags (which possibly might be because he came up with the story) – he gets a great scene where he’s telling Radar a story about his college football days, and he’s sentimental and sweet (setting up the punchline), as well as a comedic concussion where he thinks he’s talking on the phone – also, the moment where he snaps out of it realising Hawkeye is looking at a bomb.
Outside him, there’s Larry Linville pulling a great fainting gag (as soon as he draws the short straw to check the bomb, you know what’s going to happen); the first real dive into Klinger’s mind, when he shows Mulcahey the suit he was drafted in and explains he simply respects life too much to want to fight in a war; Mulcahey himself is really great in a lone gag at the end, when he wins the football pool. Hawkeye asks him who he knows, and he simply looks up (“Namedropper.”). You have to be real sincere as an actor to be able to pull that off.
Of course, there is no way the Army-Navy Game was being played while it’s daylight in Korea. As much as it might have been nice for the troops if that were the case. (MASH’s grasp of the 13 hour time difference varies from week to week, season to season. On occasion, it’s used well, usually not.)
The Pitt, “2:00 PM” and “3:00 PM”
Some good progress in the doctor-centric plots, especially when Santos gets explicit about her suspicions re: drug-siphoning and makes a deft deduction that (after an act of possibly strategic selflessness) gets her a line-crossing dressing-down from a frustrated Langdon.
I had a very emotional reaction to the honor walk for the dead teenager and to the reveal that the drowned child died because she saved her little sister: one of the things this show is good at is making big emotional moments work, even in a simplified form and without much time.
A+ subplot with the road rash patient, especially with Mel’s delight at the Zen-like gravel removal–Langdon knowing how much she’d love it is a great detail–and the patient’s relationship with his dog. Lots of lovely material for Whitaker, culminating with him killing one of the invading rats and getting a round of applause for it. Little worried about Collins staying on shift after her miscarriage. Excellent bit of local Pittsburgh history with the patient who’d worked with the Freedom House Ambulance Service; that’s another “take time for a teaching moment” bit that feels old-fashioned and network-y, but in a pleasing way. Langdon asking the anti-mask, anti-vaxx patient if she wants them to go mask-off for her surgery is a rare bit of hilarious ownage. Dramatic ending to “3:00,” but damn, dude, that was a stupid decision that should immediately bite you in the ass.
I made the mistake of checking out some other discussion for this show, and I had somehow forgotten how virulently a lot of the internet hates abrasive female characters. Well, I am now reminded.
Lower Decks thru series finale – They could easily revisit this at a later time, either with the same characters or a new crop with the central cast popping in now and then. For my wife’s sake, I hope they do because this is a Star Trek love letter to itself, particularly the network heyday (TNG/DS9/Voyager). It has an enormously appealing cast and if I wish they had more funny things to say, what they were given was delivered with aplomb.
Also still slowly making our way through Discovery which throws us a good episode just often enough to keep us going. This one was a good one, balancing a problem of the week while furthering the longer game stories for a couple other characters. It’s wild to think where this series started to where it is now, and I think moving itself out of the core of established continuity was the best move, maybe one they should have done from the jump. Exploring new territory is ostensibly what ST is about, so it’s good to have a series that attempts to do that.
That’s a perfect way to describe DISCO — it gets better over time, but it’s never consistent. But, even from the start, it has the ability to deliver enough good episodes intermittently that you keep going to the next one.
Have you watched the Short Treks minisodes? The first four came out between S1 and S2 of DISCO, and a couple times they’re referenced in the show. (They’re also pretty good.) The rest came out after S2 and are even better, although they’re less directly connected narratively.
I haven’t, was only made aware of them by a “previously on” montage where my wife and I looked at each other and confirmed our memories hadn’t collectively failed.
First two Hacks S1 episodes and they’re REAL good, nailing these characters’ mutual self-absorption that are practiced in very different ways, with Ava being performative about caring for others (and, to be fair, recognizing this when she’s called out) and Debra’s ego and seeming stubborn indifference to how she is perceived (except of course when it is obviously very important to her). Nails a tricky balance too between being very funny – “Oh, I’m SO glad Liberace’s butthole was nice and loose on your couch!” – and actual, dramatic decisions (Ava with the vase, Debra pursuing Ava’s car with a better version of her cancelled joke). Excited to properly sit down with the rest of the season and see where the show goes.
I’m so glad you’re picking this up! That Liberace joke is one of the highlights of the pilot for me–just how they trade the reference back and forth, with it evolving from a generic slam on Deborah’s taste to a specific personal anecdote that’s also a subtle power-play (I actually know the people who make up your pop culture references!) back to a funnier, more specific slam: it’s already an excellent example of how they can riff together and build off each other to achieve something better.
On 30 Rock last night there was a joke about Liz’s shoes that would be perfect for Deborah to use on Ava: “When he [Milton Greene] saw my shoes, he asked when my cult was committing suicide.”
Live Comedy – got a last minute invite to see Tom Lawrinson, a comedian I had not heard of previously, after a friend’s babysitting plans got messed up. Turns out we had front row seats which is always a bit nerve-wracking with stand-up comedy but there were only a couple of crowd interactions and I managed to get a laugh in my brief moment in the spotlight which was fun! Tom and his support were both good, fairly straightforward “here are a bunch of funny stories about my unusual childhood” stuff rather than anything high-concept but delivered well, I had a very good time and I should really get out to more live comedy as it’s been a while.
What’s the deal with I mean Woooo, live comedy!
You see, comedians perform like this, but musicians perform like this.
Stardust Memories — Allen plays film director Sandy Bates, hounded by fans during a weekend retrospective of his work. While there Bates juggles additional commitment with his girlfriend (Marie-Christine Barrault) and a new romance with the charming but shadowed Jessica Harper. But a significant portion of the film is given over to his reminiscence of his sometimes wonderful but clinically depressed ex Dorrie, played by an astounding Charlottes Rampling. (“Two days a month she’s wonderful, but impossible the other twenty eight” “Oh, but what a two days!”)
I didn’t quite jibe with this screening as I have in the past. The critics savaged it at the time because they thought it hostile to them. Last time I watched it I thought I saw more empathy with the hordes than is superficially plain. This time I’m not so sure. It really challenges the comfortable illusion that “oh, sure, fans are vampires, but I know he’d like me — I’m so sophisticated!” But in hindsight can we say the hostility is misplaced? — in the movie a fan shoots Sandy. Two months later it happened to John Lennon for real. And in fact, many of the obnoxious fan characters are actually asking for Sandy’s help in pursuing charitable causes which Sandy agrees with. Hardly all of them, but it’s the unrelenting pressure that is grinding Sandy down less so than any particular experience.
And the movie is still really funny — Allen here saddles himself with the notion that people preferred his “early, funny” films, a line that has followed him for decades. But of course the real Allen never abandoned comedy, even as his pictures became increasingly sophisticated dramatically — this is his tenth feature as director and so far he has made only one that isn’t at least partially a comedy (and that ratio continues through the rest of his career).
I think the biggest problem I have with the film is that it’s really two movies and they don’t quite link up. Half is the adventures of of Sandy at the retrospective, and this is both very funny and very mean. The other half is his reminiscence of Dorrie. And Rampling really steals most of the scenes she’s in. She’s so glamorous and sophisticated, but also so tempestuous and irrational, one is drawn to her like a moth to a flame. Two of the best sequences of Allen’s career (here aided by Gordon Willis behind the camera) are Rampling’s last two scenes, one of an unmoored Dorrie in the immediate aftermath of a breakdown and another of her happily reading a magazine on the floor of their apartment,. Rampling brings both enormous range to these very different scenes but also a continuity — this is believably the same person in both extremes. I don’t exactly wish we’d gotten two separate movies — one about Dorrie and one about the braying fans at the retrospective — each would be hard to take for the full length of a feature. But even as I understand the narrative link between the two I wish these two halves were less disjointed. All in all a success, and a definitive statement that Allen is moving past the pure comedy of his earliest films, but not wholly successful, and he’d do a better job of balancing comedy vs. drama in a bifurcated form in future works such as Crimes and Misdameanors or Husbands and Wives.
MONDAY
Adolescence
Episode 1. “Episode 1”. First time.
My wife and I started this this week after a lot of good word of mouth, and it’s easy to see where that comes from. This is very impressive television, with the plot hanging on a teenage girl getting killed in a small English town, the police arresting the teenage suspect at basically the break of dawn, then proceeding to grind him and his family through the booking and arrangement process, not only in real time but in one seemingly continuous shot. It’s very impressive but not ostentatiously so, and it has three big results: a) It grounds the unadorned performances (specially Stephen Graham playing the ordinary, blindsided father of the suspect; Graham also co-writes the show, and the writing feels authentic so far) and the mundane millieu; b) It makes the little action in the show feel like it comes out of nowhere; and c) Adds up to feeling of dreadful claustrophobia, right as the noose starts to grip the characters’ necks (figuratively). It adds to a huge moment at the end, where we finally get an answer to the big question hanging from the very beginning of the episode, and it lingers enough to let us feel the weight of it in Graham’s shoulders
TUESDAY
Adolescence
Episode 2. “Episode 2”. First time.
We skip ahead two days as the local detectives we met in the first episode go into the victim and suspect’s school and, slowly and surely, the show’s modus operandi make us feel trapped in what feels like hell on earth, surrounded by angry, moody teenagers and adult caretakers at the end of their wit. At the same time, a second family drama unfolds, since one of the detectives handling the case also has a son in the school, and after evading each other they finally come together and share info that might actually crack the case, and get a small moment of bonding after another brief but impactful action scene. It’s a great episode in that it not only advances the central mystery, but it opens the cans of worms that kids are carrying with them these days, and once you see that shit you can’t unsee it, you can just hope they get out of it.
deli boys, . It’s promising. A little arrested development, a little breaking bad, a lot of blood, and everyone’s Pakistani. I’m willing to give it a couple more episodes.
On the other hand, remember before streaming when sitcom writers had exactly 22 minutes to put in enough gags to make sure you didn’t change the channel? They need more gags here. Maybe after the time needed to lay out the set up (even though they could have just said “hey guys. It’s pakistani arrested development breaking bad”) they’ll have time to up the joke ratio. Or I’m turning into grandpa simpson. “Sitcoms used to have jokes! Animation used to involve art! Fight scenes used to require spatial coherence! It used to get cold in the winter!” “sure thing gramps. Let’s get you back to the home.”
As much of the ICU World Cheerleading Championships as I could access and stay awake for. Team Australia gold in Youth Coed and Junior All Girl, bronze in Youth All Girl. All Girl Premier in eighth going into finals.
USA are the business as usual, but Japan and NZ have been standouts in the youth and junior divisions. Looking forward to getting into the good stuff with Coed Premier and Elite later today and tomorrow.