Seasons four and five of LOST are where the show has all its truest talents brought together in perfect harmony. A wide scope, in terms of time, space, and morality, where a million characters across decades are acting in a way that pushes us to one specific and literally explosive action, like watching a massive Rube Goldberg machine or some kind of intricate clockwork creation play out before your eyes in a satisfying way. Season two, on the other hand, is where the show fully locks into what it initially believes it wants, which is its own kind of fun.
The thing about Recognition is that you have to go through what you think you are first, which means burning through things you think you desperately want. In the context of television, most shows are very messy their first season and then come together into a clear process in their second; that is to say, they’re working out what they want and how their tools will get them there, and then they go after it. Most shows will then repeat this process over and over until they run out of ideas and the goal is unable to sustain itself.
LOST, whatever its reputation for wheel-spinning, did not do this. Season two pulls out something the show wouldn’t do again until season six: a philosophical conceit up there with the Ship of Theseus, Plato’s Cave, or the Trolley Problem. It’s interesting that, for all its larger-than-life expression and bizarre lore grounding, the button is about as simple a concept as you can get: you have to push it every hundred-and-eight minutes, or the world will end.
It’s work on my part to convey what’s so specific about this, and why it didn’t come up again: it’s that it’s incredibly abstract as a problem. The writers go out of their way not to explain why the characters must do this, reducing it to a simple matter of principle. Any real-life example of the Ship of Theseus tends to have contextualizing information; for example, game studios in which every staff member is fired and replaced by someone else, sometimes with staff members recongregating in another studio. If I’m looking for a game much like the one they made, I’ll follow that new studio.
The button, on the other hand, has no context, and the fun is watching people get different emotions about it. Jack will violently reject it on general principle because it strikes him as stupid right up until someone begs him for help. John will waver between extremes depending on how humiliated he’s made to feel. Characters seem to mostly respond depending on how stupid it seems to them.
This strikes me as the show’s desire to hit upon a really abstract, universal concept; to inject something as simple as “push the button!” with intense emotion. Of all things, there’s a Law & Order: SVU episode with a very similar desire and concept, when a character played by Robin Williams keeps trying to demonstrate the absurdity of authority through convincing people to push a button. Note that LOST never really depends upon this kind of thing again; occasionally, it’ll work in some big thing like “turning the wheel”, but this becomes a useful way of pushing the plot forward rather than tooling with a thought for the sake of tooling with a thought.
And we gotta remember it really does hit upon some beautiful, profound truths about the human condition doing this. LOST is a show about faith; about having it, about pretending you don’t have it. When asked how he can find it so easy to believe in something so silly with no evidence, John famously replies, “It’s never been easy!” Terry O’Quinn finds a lifetime of humiliation and rage in that line. The button’s abstractness creates a vivid plot about people who want their faith rewarded. Conversely, when asked if he ever questioned whether the button was just some prank played upon him by scientists to drive him mad, Desmond, who has been pushing the button for three years (several months of which alone), replies: “Every. Single. Day.” Sometimes faith is, unfortunately, the more practical option.
This is life, I suppose. If LOST can at best only be regarded a qualified success, what success it did have came from moving from one goal to the next. Season three was weak not because it kept repeating ideas – it never really hit upon another image as brilliant and arresting as the button and had the sense not to try, and the third season suffered not from the quality of ideas but from the lack of them. Unfortunately, we can perceive the past and future, but we live in the present, where we can only work on one problem at a time; past problems are solved and future problems can wait until we get there, and we have to have the good sense to know which problem is where.
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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.
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"Obi-Wan never told you about your father."
"I love you." / "I know."
"I'm terribly sorry - no no, please don't get up--"
"I don't believe it." / "That is why you fail."
Department of
Conversation
What did we watch?
Hacks
Over at Nath’s Sunday post. It was a good one.
Red vs Blue, Season One, Episode One
This is on Tubi again, and I decided to give it a revisit. Red vs Blue is one of the original machinima, which is to say, it was a webshow created entirely in a video game – in this case, Halo. Part of the reason it was one of the first big ones is because it was made with a genuinely professional mindset; an actual team of filmmaking students who put out their episodes with a regular schedule and an aim to entertaining audiences; the version I’m watching is a remaster that combines the first dozen-ish episodes into the first ‘episode’, but the original airing was in five minute episodes that were released, if I remember rightly, weekly.
The other part of the reason was because it was a comedy, which tends to be pretty easy to sell even when it’s difficult to make. There are very obvious growing pains already; the voices sound like they were recorded over the phone, the acting is often awkward and stiff, the characters aren’t quite worked out, and it’s pretty light on ideas early on. But there’s a really solid grounding here, and I’d say it already works overall. There is a genuine, solid sense of comedy structure already; many of the characters pair off into solid comic duos, with the main standouts being Church and Tucker on the Blue side and Simmons and Griff on the other. Michael Burns already stands out as the best actor on the show; he plays Church like Dennis Reynolds, where he’s legitimately smart enough to notice the dumb shit and builds up into volcanic rage (classic moment: he’s already ranting about something as music builds up until he can no longer ignore it).
Meanwhile, the plot actually does escalate into a farce with Gilligan cuts holding the thing together (favourite example: the Blues see Donut is running away with the flag and remark how cunning he must be to take the back way out. Cut to Donut, horribly lost). The flaw with much gaming comedy is how much of it is based entirely around pointing out that video game mechanics make no sense in reality; this goes a step further and actually builds a plot out of these absurd mechanics. Both sides get a raw recruit; the Reds trick Donut into going out for headlight fluid and elbow grease, and Donut not only stumbles onto Blue base, he gets past their defences entirely because Church mistakes him for the Blue recruit and is too angry to even turn around and confirm his identity.
From there, the plot is simple and elegant as the Blues try to fix this situation and the Reds escalate when they figure out what’s going on; this episode finishes after Caboose has gotten in a tank, failed to drive it around*, and eventually cornered the Reds. On top of the plot turns themselves being inherently funny, it captures the feelings of dicking about in a video game with friends and functioning in an incompetent workplace without actually, specifically being those things. Both sides instantly haze their rookies (though Blue team get the funnier dialogue: “My dad always says, why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?” / “Hey, rookie. Did you just call my girlfriend a cow?” / “No, I think he called her a slut!”).
*The show has a strong sense of background comedy and how to make jokes out of framing that must have been learned from The Simpsons. My other favourite is Simmons continuously firing a minigun and shouting taunts in the background of three scenes in a row.
Most of the really inspired stuff is basically between beats or occasional insane character beats; there’s not much actual characterisation yet, but you do have Sarge inexplicably not knowing what a puma is, Tucker coming through teleporter and, through simple misunderstanding, believing he’s gone back in time, and a bunch of great bits of dialogue.
“Simmons, I want you to poison Grif’s next meal.” / “Yes, sir!”
“I’m telling you, I heard four shots. Like, bam, bam, bam.” / “Wait a second. That’s only three shots.” / “Bam.”
“You know, in hindsight, we should have brought the tank.” / “Hey, Tucker, what good is a tank if nobody here knows how to drive it?” / “Yeah, I could see how hiding behind a rock is a much better strategy.”
“I just refuse to call him Private Donut!
Personal Property
Another one of those movies that fits into Lauren’s Streaming Shuffle ethos. This is a B-movie about two criminals who hide out in an open house and fall in love with a married woman, and if it has a flaw, it’s that it takes too long to escalate the plot. Otherwise it’s a gorgeous movie with gorgeous dialogue and a trio of performances so beautiful I nearly cry; the two men (one of whom is played by Warren Oates!) feel like they’re outside time entirely, observing life with cruel detachment; there’s a voyeuristic element to this that Hitchcock would appreciate, and it even goes further in that the woman is a kind of morally good voyeur. There are a lot of shots holding on her as she soaks up the things her husband says and reflects back a pure love, and this means later when she’s talking to the men, her mixture of curiosity and reserve feels stronger, and her slowly coming to appreciate and feel attraction to one of the men hits more intensely.
Final Destination 3 and The Final Destination
The former is when the series fully becomes formulaic; there is still a plot, but it’s basically going through the beats at this point, and the fourth film follows suit. The third film takes on more satirical elements to its detriment; characters are reduced to mean jokes, especially the first two girls, whereas even when previous films had caricatures of teenaged stereotypes, they were still afforded some humanity. Not coincidentally, it also has more leering at naked teenage girls. That said, it still has a lot of great moments; the ‘villain’ amongst the humans is a riff on the geeky self-superior philosopher teenagers, and he has an interesting arc, and the basic concept is the characters having photographs that give them clues about how they’ll die.
The fourth is downright cheap and sloppy, slathered in CGI that the previous entries were more artful about, and clearly in need of a few more passes at both the script and the performances. The plot is significantly less clever or interesting, and the setpieces occasionally outright cheat.
Immediately adding Private Property to the watch list. And it’s on Tubi, which obviously dovetails with “fits into Lauren’s Streaming Shuffle ethos,” and correctly so.
Final Destination 2 was the one that had the logging truck pile-up on the interstate, right? It was all downhill from there. That’s a spectacular set-piece, but I’ll confess the rest of the series generally leaves me cold: the Mousetrap-style deaths are fun, though, and someone should eventually reinvent all this as a kind of ABCs of Death where a bunch of directors each tackle one complicated hand-of-fate death.
If I had to cancel all my streaming services (and stop leeching off other people), I could easily live off Tubi forever, though I would sorely miss blasting The Simpsons and Futurama on my phoen whenever I have to do things I don’t wanna (and, obviously, I’d lose Hacks as well).
That’s the one – I mentioned that I was working through the series to my slightly-older-than-me boss, and she was scandalised that I hadn’t been traumatised by the log-truck-pile-up the way she was. But it really doesn’t hold up to repeated riffs on the concept, even by slasher movie standards. I saw a trailer for the latest movie when I took my friend to see Sinners on the weekend (even better on a second viewing) and the concept for that one is that someone had a premonition , dodged death, and ended up having a whole couple of generations that Death is planning to wipe out.
I now need a cartoon of you and your boss where you have major Mr. Darcy vibes and are looking at the log-truck scene all, “Not handsome enough to tempt me.” I respect that this would have an audience of one, i.e., me, but it keeps making me laugh to think about it.
I still quite enjoyed The Final Destination although it probably helps that I went into it knowing that it’s the one people hate. The CGI is terrible but there are still some wonderfully mean set-pieces that made me wince and laugh simultaneously. Excited to hear your take on #5.
There were bits I liked about it, though it was more cool individual scenes; most of the stuff I liked was where it almost ‘broke character’, like a tonal break where they find the black guy having attempted suicide and then realise he’s still alive, or when the redheaded woman actually seems to panic at points. Stuff that felt like the actors caught off-guard and getting real emotion out of them.
Something Oates and Goggins have is a sense of real tenderness – Oates in Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia makes me weep. It’s rare in past and present for a male actor to have that quality.
Dying at the initial misread of this as Oates and Loggins, a super-duo of moonlighting duo members.
Andor, season tw0, first two episodes – More to say on Sunday in the New TV place. But also want to withhold comment till I watch the third episode since apparently each set of three is once again a whole story, or close to it. I am sort of miffed that Disney is releasing these in such a hurry since we never have time to watch this or anything quickly. But also because, darn it, this remains a very propulsive show. We had no plans to go straight from the first to the second, but there we were.
The Avengers, “The Thirteenth Hole” – Why was an agent keeping an eye on a British missile expert murdered on the links? Fairly pedestrian episode, but it revolves around a new Soviet communications satellite, which must have seemed exotic and threatening in the 60s.
NBA Playoffs, OKC vs DEN – Possibly one of the worst playoff games I ever saw. Denver had its chance and blew it.
The Addams Family – Never been entirely my jam – the whole “fake Fester” plot is a dud of an idea from the start – but the zany production design and the incendiary chemistry between Huston and Julia make it well worth the time. The film is quite proud of getting Thing out of his box and never misses a chance to show it off, and generally finds funny enough bits for all the weird characters. But I think the next one might be the rare superior comedy sequel and it’s understandable to get a little impatient for it.
I’ve always been a big defender of this one, great as Values is it does split the family up whereas here you get everyone together and they’re all having such a good time. But yeah if you’re not into the Fake Fester plot then I can see how it would mess things up a bit.
I understand the original idea was that Gordon wasn’t Fester, or at least that it was ambiguous whether he was or wasn’t, but would be accepted as family by the end. Raul Julia and Angelica Huston thought that Gomez giving up on the search while his brother might still be out there was bullshit. Christopher Lloyd, to all accounts, didn’t care either way.
It is such an odd plot in retrospect, but they had to do something and at least this something brings in uncouth Dan Hedaya. But yeah, the sequel is superior and it is a better spin on the dynamic — the original is “we need to get the family together” and that is dumb, they’re the damn Addams Family, we know they’re supposed to be together! But “lunatic wants to join the family” is a stronger plot.
Hell yeah Dan Hedaya.
I also didn’t find the fake Fester idea compelling — how would Gomez not recognize that this guy wasn’t his brother? Which meant that the ending was telegraphed from Lloyd’s first scene. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen the sequel all the way through.
Part of the merchandising for this movie included a tie-in pinball machine produced by Bally. It is to this day the highest-selling pinball machine of all time.
I have much nostalgia for that pinball machine, which was always in operation at Dragon’s Lair Comics near my house, turned up way too loud for such a small store (“THE-MA-MOOOSH-KA!”)
Hacks, “Mrs. Table”; Poker Face, “The Game Is a Foot,” “Last Looks,” and “Whack-A-Mole”
All over at Nath’s TV post.
The Remarkable Life of Ibelin
Part one of this weekend’s double feature of films written up by The Ploughman!
Ibelin, a World of Warcraft private eye, was also Mats Steen, a young man with Duchenne muscular dystrophy, whose condition meant his physical capabilities deteriorated steadily and inexorably over the course of his too-short life. His parents understood why he would embrace online gaming as an escape, but they were also sorry to see him “retreat” into what they assumed was a shallow fantasy world; when he died, they initially assumed that, beloved as Mats was by his family, his life was in many ways a lonely one, without purpose, romance, or even real friendships. Then they discovered that Mats’s online life as Ibelin had led to him having a circle of friends–some of whom he’d helped in substantial, life-changing ways–and that he’d fallen in love and even had affairs online.
It’s really moving to see Mats’s family embrace this discovery, and I love that the film embraces it too; a lot of my closest friendships formed online, a lot of my favorite socializing happens there (hi, guys!), and it’s nice to see a documentary treating all that as real and valuable, as it’s always certainly felt real and valuable to me. The film is also a good portrait of the necessary give-and-take of vulnerability in relationships: Mats spends some time hurting the people closest to him in the game, and part of that’s because he’s in an understandably bad mood and lashing out, but part of it’s because his reluctance to share the life he wanted to get away from eventually does become a stumbling block. People who opened up to him and leaned on him feel hurt when they’re not allowed to return the favor, or when he doesn’t seem to trust them enough to tell them what’s really going on. It makes sense on both sides, but the movie eventually comes down on the idea that, as unpleasant as revealing yourself and your problems can be, it’s also the only way to have a deeper, more sustainable connection. (Actually made me think a lot about David Graeber’s book Debt, where Graeber talks about how cancelling out debt in personal relationships is also a way of cancelling out the relationship: society, and social connection, functions to a certain extent on interdependence.)
I 100% cried at that eventual gravestone reveal.
A River Below
Part two of The Ploughman double feature!
Thoughtful and rich. The layers of complications here are interesting–the later development where the dolphins are being killed to use as bait for a scavenger fish that can successfully be passed off as another, better fish (give or take some toxic levels of mercury) is a great, bleak “it just never fucking ends” turn in the real-life plot–but the standout might be Richard, the NatGeo star who reaches frustrating heights of self-mythologizing bullshit here. “Favorite” part with him may be when the documentarian points out that Richard told the villagers he filmed killing a dolphin that the footage would never be aired on TV, and Richard immediately says right, and it never was. There’s a slight pause, and the filmmaker points out that no, it famously aired on TV, and Richard just says, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it actually was, yes.” Then he asks if they can cut for a while, and when he comes back, he has his whole story much better prepared: it’s a “can we break for a second so I can come up with some better lies?” pause that is, even as jaded as I should be by now, kind of shocking in its brazenness.
No, actually, the real highlight may be Richard visiting the villagers he lied to. (He’s there because he needs to mend fences: he wasn’t interested in apologizing to them until he heard they want to kill him.) “I will never betray you,” he tells the people he recently betrayed, who have just been talking to him about how he betrayed them, and somehow he gets a hug out of it. Scientist Trujillo, on the other hand, is realistic enough, and empathetic enough, to recognize that by trying to save the dolphins and by campaigning against toxic levels of mercy, he’s hurting the fishermen whose scant livelihoods depend on all this, so he doesn’t try to talk them out of being aggrieved. He ends the film with his life still in danger, as Ploughman points out, because it never occurs to him to falsely tell the people he’s hurt that he only ever acted in their best interests. This is all good, messy, dramatic stuff.
Memories of Murder
Incredible film, even if I can’t quite get behind how the Criterion edition has altered the colors. But this is still superb: not as detail-intensive as Zodiac, but with a lot of the same ache of obsession and the unknown, of getting just so close but never any closer and seeing lives fall apart in the process. And the ending is one of my favorites of all time: I get chills just thinking about it.
While Zodiac is indeed the obvious Fincher comparison here, there’s also a lot of Seven in its DNA, especially with the sense of confronting something darker and stranger than the detective have ever faced before: “Do you see this kind of thing in Seoul often?” “Never.” Song Kang-ho’s delivery on that first line is phenomenal, because Park’s been so blustery up until that point, so eager to pretend, even to himself, that he’s capable of squaring off against this case and coming out on top … and with each slice of peace wetly thunking into the kidney tray, he loses that pretense, and finally all he can do is hope that Seo knows more than he does. And he doesn’t. (Seo’s equivalent moment is “This document is a lie,” but that’s just not as good. Park’s moment, on the other hand, will replay equally well almost at the end: “Fuck, I don’t know.”)
Copycat — a very dumb movie that Criterion got the rights to and put in its “Coastal Thrillers” collection, come on you guys. It has a pleasurable 90s slickness to its images and production design, not big budget but money spent to a standard that is not really around any more, but it also has a real 90s dopiness to its serial killer nonsense, Silence Of The Lambs’ non-union San Fransiscan equivalent. Especially regarding Holly Hunter’s Not Clarice Starling, the movie feints at the “all guys are menaces” stuff SOTL did so well but just sputters around. It does have an incredible bit of po-faced hilarity as a cop gets fatally shot and director Jon Amiel cuts to a slow-motion shot of a donut falling to the ground; later we see crime scene tape around a pool of blood and a box of donuts. Amazing stuff but not enough to pretend this is anything but a Tubi-coded timewaster.
Shutter Island — also a Coastal Thriller but much, much better. This was a rewatch, I liked it well enough on first view and it remains full of Guys and Gals and great settings cranked to a feverish pitch, but it also resonates more strongly. Sam’s superb piece on this — https://www.the-solute.com/year-of-the-month-shutter-island/ — does a great job of tying the conspiracy threads together and makes the bold statement that “Shutter Island suggests the entire history of the 20th century is so horrible it can only be processed as a paranoid delusion.” Scorsese and screenwriter Laeta Kalogridis (and possibly Dennis Lehane, I haven’t read the book) are playing with fire here, that all of these horrors reduce to one man’s trauma, but there is a throwaway line from a person DiCaprio meets about how the conspiracy will result in brainwashed soldiers doing things “no sane man would do” and what does that make Dachau? No brainwashing needed there. And what really echoes back now is how this is the tale of DiCaprio and his wife and what he does to her and how he hides from that, and that is the plot of Killers Of The Flower Moon. Which is also the story of the horrors of the 20th century but with no stylistic delusions or uncovered conspiracies, everything is out in the open. Toward the end of Shutter Island Scorsese stages a shot of DiCaprio entering a large room and seeing a bunch of people he knows, it opens the doors to what is really going on here, and it is 90 percent of the way there to that gut-churning back room of the town gentry of KOTFM and DiCaprio’s welcoming there, I don’t know if Scorsese purposefully echoed it but it’s undeniable. He’s been threading something horrible together (and the massacre at Dachau definitely echoes to the WWII scenes in The Irishman) over the decades and the end of Shutter Island does not offer relief or even acknowledgment of the horror. Serial killers look so small in comparison.
Copycat isn’t worth it, but if it were, it would be for that great central performance from Weaver of someone with genuine, debilitating agoraphobia. I found it genuinely hard to watch at points.
I didn’t get into it above but what in the fuck is going on when the cops first visit her? Weaver’s performance is quite good and “I am agorophobic because a serial killer nearly murdered me in a gruesome and painful fashion” is pretty damn sympathetic, but the cops roll in and are basically making fun of her? And they throw a bunch of gnarly autopsy photos at her and she has a panic attack and they laugh it off? It’d be one thing if their cruelty were the point of all this but the movie seems to share the cops’ viewpoint completely, it’s mind-boggling.
Great read on what Scorsese’s been quietly doing over the past twenty years, with The Aviator being largely the flipside of that 20th century horror.
Oh man, hadn’t considered The Aviator at all through this lens — it’s one of the few Scorseses I’ve seen that did not do much for me (the skill behind it is plain though) but I will revisit with this in mind. The way of the future!
I liked Harry Connick Jr., then known exclusively as an urbane crooner, as the sleazeball killer who had attacked Weaver. I don’t remember much else about the movie.
Shutter Island didn’t do much for me while Killers of the Flower Moon will certainly be one of the best of the decade. Didn’t care for the fan dance, I guess.
Done with Hacks S1, which is just a really strong season of TV. It seems to nail how much of show business is driven by loyalty, or lack thereof, like how Jimmy and Kayla are both nepo babies but one is driven to live up to the apparent competency of his dad while Kayla, however well-meaning, has no consequences for her gloriously confused actions. (They also make a very funny duo as a result, like Jimmy’s reaction when he sees Kayla’s “pajamas”.) Also some funny satire of “progressive” comedies: “It’s a COMMENT on a society that believes women are crazy – that happens to feature a crazy woman.”
Ironically Deborah’s lack of communication with Ava does spur her to communicate directly with the other people in her life, like giving Marcus a promotion and sincerely asking DJ whether she wants her to talk about her addiction on stage. This is a good drama that makes me laugh out loud.
Great point about the loyalty. It comes up so often here–even in the first few episodes, we get Jimmy’s attachment to both Ava and Deborah neatly encapsulated in terms of loyalty (Ava is the first real client he signed; Deborah stuck with him and treated him as his dad’s natural successor when a lot of other clients didn’t)–and always in really interesting ways.
DJ being so startled that Deborah would ever ask for her permission to do some particular material is such a poignant grace note in their relationship. And DJ doesn’t even feel the need to test that by accepting it: you can tell it genuinely matters to her that Deborah would offer at all. And since she’s gotten better at valuing herself, she doesn’t need to affirm her value to her mom in the same way, which helps.
Jimmy seemingly sincerely breaking when he says Deborah always treated him with respect once his dad died, and Kayla undercutting it immediately, made me bark.
That second bit made me think of my own relationship with my art and my family – my dad told me once “Never ask for permission [if you write about me]” and that’s not bad advice, sometimes this will get in the way, but it also means you’re not really valuing those people in your life.
Sinners – I was a… little disappointed with this, to be honest. It’s good fun but felt bloated and messy to me, like Coogler has carried some of the Marvel house style along with him in a film that really didn’t need it. Flashbacks that felt like the film didn’t trust me to remember things, a post-credits scene that made me roll my eyes, major conflicts resolved in unsatisfying ways – I really wanted to love this like so many other people seem to have done, but I left it with a bunch of complaints, even if for the most part I had a pretty good time. It does have excellent performances, some gnarly gore and the music is used well, and I’m happy to see a big original movie doing so well, I was just a little frustrated that it didn’t totally work for me.
Scrapper – a low-key British film about a 12-year-old girl reconnecting with her absent father after the death of her mother. A friend recommended this after catching it at the cinema a couple of years ago and I finally got around to it. For the most part it has that likeable Shane Meadows-esque authenticity although there are a few more stylistic quirks deployed, mostly to good effect. It’s sweet, sad and funny and I liked it quite a bit, will be keeping an eye on the director.
Doctor Who, “The Story and the Engine” – an odd episode, with a strange premise that I never quite clicked with. I want to celebrate the bigger swings on this show but find myself leaning towards the more straightforward sci-fi ones so far this season.
Live Music – on Friday night, a couple of Australian bands with kinda retro garage-rock vibes. The headliners, Chimers, were a duo with a lot of energy but maybe a bit of a samey sound. Their touring pals Grinding Eyes had a heavier Stooges-esque sound that mostly worked although when they lightened up a bit there was an unexpected (and unwelcome) hint of Oasis. The band that played before those two, Tiger Island, was my favourite – similarly garage-y but with a synth added to the mix which always makes a difference for me.
Yesterday I made the last minute decision to fit a fifth (!) gig into the week and saw a couple of bands at a free fundraiser gig (never quite sure how free and fundraiser work together but I’m not complaining). Slime City from Glasgow, witty new-wavey punk that I saw previously in a worse venue, great to see them with sound that did them justice. And Irked, a pretty full-on punk band with some great riffs, glad I made it out to this one.
I don’t think they ruin Sinners, but I’m with you on the flashbacks – occasionally used well, frustrating at the climax – and the post-credits scene, which undermines the horror of the vampires for me a bit. Genuinely had ideas percolating for a vampire movie where the vampires are fully evil monsters that
I’m not really sure what the post-credits scene was really supposed to add to the film, aside from a pretty wild cameo. But yeah nothing that ruined the experience, it just left me wishing I could see the film that people have been raving about rather than the fun but very uneven one that I saw.
Agreed on that aspect of the ending. It has the effect of retroactively lessening the whole movie’s tension, because then it’s like, “Oh, I guess this wouldn’t have been so bad after all.”
Woooo live music! Laughing at unwelcome the hints of Oasis, I’m picturing a frowning sommelier knocking a few points off an otherwise pleasurable wine.
“Pardon me, monsieur. This bottle has been in the cellar a little… too long”
“For the love of God, Liam!”
“Oi, for the love of God!”
I’m more pro-Sinners than this, but those are all still criticisms I can see and understand. (Especially the bit about the flashbacks. Those are my big pet peeve anyway, but also, yes, I remember the characters I saw in this same sitting.) I feel like it should have ended with the cut to the older Sammie.
Added Scrapper to Kanopy based on this: it sounds charming, and I always like stories where families have to build or rebuild their emotional connections to each other.
Scrapper is also a sweet 84 minutes, love to see it. Hope you enjoy!
Wooooooo live Australians!!
SATURDAY
The Conversation
First time. An excellent thriller but even better character study. Hearing the titular conversation over and over really did a number on me, as did the day-to-day minutiae of wire-tapping. Hackman is fearless and selfless at capturing a guy who’s become a top technician at the cost of extreme self-suppression. Incredible direction in and out of the party sequence. I did think the movie hit a bit of a lull after but it more than picks up in its conclusion and Harry’s inevitable self-destruction.
SUNDAY
Just Like Heaven
First time. Visited family and they had this one while we chatted. Pretty agreeable romantic comedy, solid performances from Mark Ruffalo and Reese Whiterspoon, kept threatening to become more interesting but never did in part because, like in so many other romantic comedies with two strong stars in the middle, everything else is nowhere near the same level of quality. In this movie’s case it’s the script, the bland production design and the supporting cast where even the always reliable Donal Logue is giving nothing good to work it.
Also, every now and then I’m stuck by the idea that maybe the TVs in my house have motion smoothing turned on and my eyes don’t notice it anymore so I go into the menus and look around until I convince myself that’s not the case, then some time later I get the same doubts all over again. But my family did have motion smoothing on for his and I realize now I needn’t have worried and the difference is plain as day: it’s really awful, especially when the movie in question involves one ghostly character (Witherspoon) phasing through objects and long scenes in hospitals and brightly illuminated gardens. I did try to turn of motion smoothing in their TV before we left but I couldn’t figure out their controller in time. Maybe next time.
The repetition of “When the Red, Red Robin” gets so haunting as it goes (bob-bob-bobbin’) along. The film feels like it reverses the usual direction of loss you get when you hear/read something over and over again, where it becomes sound or shape over meaning–here, Hackman memorizes what he thinks is the meaning and stops hearing the actual cadence of the words, missing the crucial inflection until it’s too late.
Think this might be Coppola’s best and tightest movie for my money. I enjoy the man in post-vineyard excess, but there’s something challenging about the structure of The Conversation that reins in his worst impulses.
Any TV stuff as usual will be on the weekly post. But also…
LA Confidential
First time in a long time, but it still rules in every way. The cast is fantastic up and down (hey, it’s the Mentalist!), the period details make great setting without overly calling attention to them, there are a lot of little details I’m not sure I noticed before. (You can see the heroin being taken in a split second if you’re careful; for a split second you can see Patchett in his chair when Exley and White break in; even to the point you can see “Ingenue Dykes of Hollywood” if you don’t blink and miss it on the first Hush-Hush cover, just a few minutes before Hudgens mentions that story to Vincennes.)
Exley = Aceveda really snapped into focus this time around; the parallels in their ambitions, their ability to play politics, and that they’re college boys who got their police education in the academy and not on the streets are obvious, but what I noticed this time is that Exley fucking owns whenever he gets thrust into action, like with the Nite Owl suspects breakout, or of course the climax.
James Cromwell as Dudley Smith of course fucking owns in this, but it’s also very funny that he filmed this in between the two Babe movies.
Interestingly, despite a night spent indulging in delicious tequila, this viewing was probably the easiest time I’ve had following the plot.
What did we play?
More Slay the Spire. I was finally able to complete the game with Ironclad, my least favorite character to play–if I don’t get a Demon Form card for him that lets become ludicrously overpowered (my preferred outcome), I’m stuck with his more ordinary advantages of exhausting cards for block, energy, etc. (which I’ve never done often enough to feel confident about managing it well) or strategic self-injury (which has dramatic potential but is not as fun to me on a game-play level as other approaches)–so I’m technically done. But it took me longer than my first Ironclad victory to unlock all Ironclad’s remaining cards and relics, so now I’m committed to winning now that all my options are available. I have promptly become much worse. Can’t wait to accomplish this meaningless goal no one has forced me to take up so I can get back to playing the characters I like more.
Finally decided that I’m 100% done with Blue Prince. Probably. And now I’m mostly bouncing between two games depending on whether I want narrative or action:
Citizen Sleeper – a text-heavy sci-fi RPG about an android (kinda) struggling to stay alive on a decaying space station. Heard really good things about this and definitely finding it compelling so far, the writing is good and my choices feel important. Visuals and music get a good atmosphere going too, even if the bulk of the actual game is the text.
Lonely Mountains: Snow Riders – I played a fair amount of the mountain bike version of this on the Switch a while back but this skiing-based sequel has hooked me a little more, possibly just because the snow looks gorgeous. It’s all about trying to reach the end of a course within certain limits (time and number of crashes) but the mountains have enough alternate routes and shortcuts that it’s a lot of fun figuring out where to shave off a few seconds. Too twitchy to be relaxing, perhaps, but it’s a nice game to drop into for a few runs and it feels great crossing the line with a new best time.
Marvel vs. Capcom: Clash of Super Heroes – Marvel vs. Capcom Fighting Collection: Arcade Classics on Nintendo Switch
Beat the arcade mode, started with Chun Li and Captain America, swaped Cap for Morrigan Aensland for the final boss. I feel a bit like a hypocrite by saying that I liked it less than Marvel vs. Capcom 2 because it feels more limited when I also complained that MVC2 has too much going on at times. I think MVC2 has the better system but I wonder how much better I’d like MVC if the assists weren't randomly assigned. Still a very fun game though. I liked Onslaught as a final boss better than Abyss from MVC2 though both games kinda force you into playing a different game for the final bosses. I’d probably hate it if I played them on arcades with actual money.
I did beat Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, although some of the bosses took me a few tries. (the fights with Vahram in particular– I had to look up some guides on those, which I don’t mind doing as I still have to execute; I just need a strategy.) I did beat Darius in my first try, though. And afterward I was able to use the maps to clean up missing items, leaving me… uh, 99.35% complete. (I wonder if the rest is just all the stuff in the shops that I haven’t yet bought.)
And then I decided to finish playing through the Mask of Darkness DLC. That one got a lot more frustrating at times, mostly because there are long, long stretches of platforming with little break and even worse that send you back very far if you die. And I was struggling a lot just with my controller not doing what I wanted it to do (no after we get to the end of this section I don’t want you to dash directly off the wall into the spikes across, I didn’t press the dash button or that direction, what the fuck are you doing). So I’ve gotten to the final boss fight of that, although I still have not come close to beating it. I did better on my attempts last night, but I’m gonna keep trying.
Not sure what I’ll play after that. The itch of more Metroidvania platforming is strong, and the free time to game right now is ample. But I’m also debating focusing on other things instead. I’m not even sure what I’d want to play or what game I could buy for cheap enough to justify it.
Last note, I watched a couple speedruns of the last couple of games I played through, and they can be pretty funny. I mean, there’s an impressive amount of skill on display, but more to the point, there are enough goofy glitches that, like, a Lost Crown run with no restrictions involves a lot of, well, exploiting a bug to make you float and then triggering a bunch of events out of sequence by entering rooms from places you’re not supposed to be able to enter them.)
And yet, as much I agree with the above, when you say “push the button,” the next word is still “Frank.”
I had the exact same problem when I was writing it over and over.
Was about to post the same thing.
The next words for me where always “The time has come to”.
https://youtu.be/Xu3FTEmN-eg?si=2S-e6ZefvH0RikgI
I knew this was going to happen. But I also heard it again on the radio on Friday so it was pretty fresh in my mind too.
There’s a car commercial that plays on Hulu or Tubi that has that, and for a while it was running all the dang time.
Year of the Month update!
May’s year will be 1962, so you can write about any of these movies, albums, books, et al!
May 15th: John Bruni: L’Eclisse/Il Sorpasso
May 16th: Gillian Rose Nelson: Big Red
May 19th: Bridgett Taylor: D’Aulaire’s Book of Greek Myths
May 23rd: Gillian Rose Nelson: Almost Angels
May 30th: Gillian Rose Nelson: In Search of the Castaways
And coming in June, we’ll be moving on to 1983, including all these movies, albums, books, et al!
Jun. 9th: Sam Scott: El Sur
Jun. 23rd: Sam Scott: Codex Seraphianus
Jun. 24th: John Bruni: Legendary Hearts
Jun. 30th: Tristan Nankervis: The Big Chill
WORLD
The time has come to