Self-aware genre work has become somewhat unfashionable these days; I sense that audiences are getting tired of Whedonesque quips in particular, and I notice that use of meta gags has gotten somewhat lazier and one of the performative signs of genre – that is to say, something storytellers throw in because they think they’re supposed to. Which is what makes Final Destination: Bloodlines so interesting. It’s a belated sequel in the franchise, coming fourteen years after the previous entry and a full twenty-four years after the original film; the movies, while limited in influence on the genre as a whole, have a cult following spanning a generation (the log truck sequence opening the second film having instilled a fear as powerful as that caused by Jaws).
What’s fascinating is that it has a deeply self-aware understanding of its unique qualities which only expresses itself as three crude meta-gags. Otherwise, the movie uses audience expectations to more effectively tell the exact kind of story these movies have always been telling. The most obvious move is when one character, Erik (Richard Harmon), appears to go through a very typical-for-this-franchise death scene in which he gets his nose ring caught on a fan and falls onto a pile of glass and fiery oil, only for protagonist Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) to nearly hit him with her car as she drives over to his tattoo shop in a panic; he easily survived the situation.
It’s a move so obvious that I’m shocked nobody thought of it before – set up an entire elaborate sequence that does not kill anybody! Like all shock value, it’s something you can only really do the once, although it works to make the rest of the film more tense; the films have long trained their audiences to track little details and speculate how they’ll pay off – Final Destination 5 had a sequence where a screw falls on a pommel horse, setting us up to think the victim will step on it, only for someone else to step on it later and set the kill in motion – and now we’re not even sure a kill will happen at all!
Bloodlines doesn’t simply rely on these gags to push the film forward; they understand their goals fully, and the film is largely pushed forward by them. The first real kill of the film – not counting the spectacularly violent prologue – has a shard of glass fall into a drink and move around a party, making us wince as we believe multiple characters are going to swallow it, only for it to tip out and get stepped on as part of the setup to the kill. The aim of the film is still to racket up tension as we watch someone unknowingly walk into a brutal demise.
They even find a particularly clever way to deliver this pleasure, when Stefani correctly predicts exactly how someone will die, but not only did she get the target wrong, the typical elaborate setup ends up happening in one shot in the background, and the movie swiftly switches from comedy to horror as the Stefani fails to save the victim. Which is a good setup for exploring the most subtle but most effective way self-awareness factors into this movie being entertaining: character motivation.
The most famous and frequent criticism horror films get is “why are these characters acting in a way that will cause their own deaths?”. Two of the most beloved Western horror films – Alien and The Thing – are beloved specifically because everyone acts in a completely rational way, and the horror is simply too big and too powerful to really fight against, and part of the popularity of Japanese horror the past two or three decades has been in its tendencies towards arbitrary horror you don’t deserve and can’t fight.
In its meta-awareness, Bloodlines has its characters act in ways various audience members would assume they would if they ended up in the character’s situations. Erik ends up one of the most interesting; he starts out a cynical nonbeliever but switches to full belief as soon as he sees his sister die in front of him, and from that point he becomes what he thinks is pragmatic; he’s sincerely motivated to protect what’s left of his family, but he tries to game a system based on its literal wording without taking into account that the guy running the game is a spiteful motherfucker. He is, in essence, the viewer who thinks they could rules lawyer their way out.
But Stefani herself is fairly interesting too. The basic aesthetic of the films is using basic filmmaking to induce paranoia; David Fincher once said that a close-up is an underlining, and much of the film involves underlining things before the dramatic reveal, letting you try and figure out how they’re going to kill someone. Stefani effectively has that as a power; you may be familiar with how the characters in The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly don’t see anything that the audience doesn’t (famously, not noticing a massive camp until the camera pans over to it), and this amplifies that, with Stefani effectively ‘seeing’ the closeups.
(Less interesting, but still worthy of bringing up: Erik’s younger brother Bobby, who is less intelligent, unable to see the closeups, but also mostly has the sense not to push his luck. He ends up having one of the less brutal deaths – ‘less brutal’ being relative – and it comes because he trusts his brother against his better instincts)
It’s an interesting idea, making a character sympathetic simply by aligning their interests with that of the audience. The climax is thrilling specifically because it plays as a constant back-and-forth between the characters and Death, totally fair but unable to lower their guard for even an instant; my favourite part is when a character is killed by a falling pole that’s in the background like two seconds before it ‘attacks’. One popular archetype is the Reluctant Hero, or at least a lengthened Refusal Of The Call section; it’s my observation that, however artistically necessary, audiences tend to find such characters unsympathetic, and storytellers can use this.
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?
Red vs Blue, Season One, Episode Three
I’m hitting the point where I’ve basically laid out the morality, situation, and functioning of this show pretty well (and so has the show), and now it’s mainly riffing on that. The most serious element is Church’s attempts to protect Tex; out of all the characters, he is the strongest comic foil, generally catching the idiot ball the least. The most clownish he gets is when Sarge temporarily dies and he tries conning him out of (decreasing amounts of) money. Meanwhile, Joel Hyneman’s performance as Caboose officially goes deliriously insane – Caboose ends up sitting in the same space as Dr Zoidberg, as innocent as he is needy. His emotions jump to extremes and he’s reduced to things like pestering Tucker when he’s on the radio to Church (which makes it really funny that he’s always responsible for the sniper rifle).
This is also where a bunch of great moments of imagination come in – Donut gets his iconic pink armour, Simmons is revealed to be Dutch-Irish (a joke about his actor’s Latin-American heritage), and Lopez is revealed to be a robot when his speech unit is installed, but glitches out so he only speaks Spanish. This also has quite a few sequences where the plato stops in a Seinfeld-like manner; my favourite being when Church is outraged that his body has just been left out in the sun (“What do you want me to do? Shoot you a grave?”). Not to say that there isn’t any farce storytelling, my favourite of that being when Caboose shoots Church possessing Sarge, mistaking him for a Red.
“There’s no ‘l’ in it. It’s pronounced ‘both’.” / “That’s what I’m saying! Bolth!” / “Both.” / “You sound like such an ass the way you say it!”
“Who spit on my visor?”
“If he gives you mouth-to-mouth, I’m leaving.” / “Maybe you should try mouth-to-mouth.” / “I’m leaving.”
“And the fact that he sleeps standing up and drinks motor oil didn’t get your attention?” / “I did think the motor oil thing was a bit odd. I just thought he was trying to impress me.”
“Lopez! He just said Lopez! I understood that! … I can speak Spanish!”
“Why are you speaking so slowly? He understands us just fine. Maybe you should try listening slower.” / “Lopez. Shoot Griff.”
I generally watch more TV than movies and save that for the Sunday roundup, but I will mention that after a long day of poker Sunday I decided to binge all of (except the first episode, which I’d already watched) The Four Seasons— the Netflix show, not the movie it’s based on. I rather enjoyed it. I guess like three of you will find out more specifically how and why in six days.
It was already on my list, but now it’s topical so I’ll put it ahead of Andor this weekend.
No, you should still put Andor first.
Live Music – charity gig on Saturday night with some excellent local bands, bunch of non-local indie-punk bands on Sunday night including the solo project of one of the members of Martha, who are one of my favourite bands. Amusingly his solo project has more members than his main band. Good times, very tired, etc.
Woooo live music! Wooo charity!
WHY DID YOU SAY THAT NAME
Ha, it took me a moment to figure out what you were referencing here.
Has it been that long? My how time moves mercilessly forward…
Wooooo live music for charity!!
Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning
With SPOILERS.
I have an abiding love for this series, but this is probably supplants Mission: Impossible III to be my new least favorite entry. It has highlights–my actual favorite moments weren’t even the stunts (though, yes, the wing-walking is cool and incredibly fun to watch) but some of the supporting character bits. The series has framed Ethan Hunt as a man who will prioritize saving his team over saving the world because he’s fanatically devoted to the idea that there will always be a way to do both eventually, and here, we see sympathetic characters who don’t accept that. Benji loves Ethan, but there’s the suggestion–“I thought he’d never leave,” he says, only revealing a possibly fatal bullet wound after he’s gotten Ethan out of the way–that he (correctly) sees Ethan’s love for him as a kind of liability that could, you know, get in the way of the world-saving. Similarly, it’s incredible to have the return of the once-hapless Bill Donloe here, but while he gets one of my favorite lines after his near-heroic sacrifice–“Where did you learn to do this?” “Never said I did”–his plotline would be better if he’d died sending out the coordinates, going down in flames while doing what he can to save a future he won’t be a part of.
(Also, that would spare us the scene where he tells Ethan that he owes him his life. I like seeing Donloe again, I like that he’s been happy and built an incredibly cozy and romantic life for himself in Alaska, etc., and I see why he would have come around to not holding a grudge, but having him explicitly talk to Ethan about it and exculpate him is Way Too Much. I say this as someone who likes Ethan and generally does find him endearing: this movie hops on his dick way too much. Way too much. The President doesn’t need to send a personal message begging for his help! Luther doesn’t need to devote his recorded message to praising and encouraging him!)*
* I think this is also why Luther’s death left me mostly cold. It’s too much about Ethan, whereas Benji’s and Donloe’s almost deaths are allowed to be more about them. The best and most effective bit, the part that did hit home, was his last words being a callback to his old hacker identity: him taking pride in being Phineas Phreak right before the bomb goes off was nice.
I’ll remember bits of this fondly, but yeah, my new least-favorite in the series. (Which is, admittedly, probably my favorite movie franchise.) Those flashbacks are my mortal enemy.
Lola Montès
For Movie Club. This is an interesting, flawed film–and interesting in terms of how it’s flawed–and I think it made for an especially good discussion.
The circus spectacle in this is terrific and gloriously weird, with the red-masked ushers and the coin-collecting buckets shaped like Lola’s head, and all the colors look fantastic; this was just a pleasure to look at throughout. This has a melodramatic core–or at least a core of attempted, signified melodrama–but the best and most effective bits of emotion and storytelling are the smaller ones, from the little asides that establish the workaday reality of this fantastic circus to a wife calmly (if a bit painfully) accepting her husband’s impending affair to Peter Ustinov (A+) making Lola a pragmatic, illusion-free business offer.
The problem, as basically everyone in Movie Club and also the film’s historical reception agreed, is that Lola herself is fairly flat, and Martine Carol doesn’t offer the performance or the natural charisma that would alleviate that; everyone is drawn to her, but she feels like a beautiful void. I do think there’s one exception to that, and it’s in an early and intriguingly out-of-place flashback to her relationship with Franz Liszt, a “typical” excerpt of her courtesan career rather than a key part of the romantic-innocence-to-jaded-heights narrative. In this one segment, Lola feels more human to me, more like she is–as she’ll later tell Ustinov–guided by what she genuinely wants. She likes Liszt, but she doesn’t like him more than the freedom to leave at any moment (she has her own carriage trail behind them on their holiday, ready to take her away alone should she so decide); she can feel this particular romance is near its end. But there’s a genuine bittersweet pull to them as two people who care about each other, know it’s over, but can’t help wistfully imagining brief reunions where the old feelings will return.
I’m not usually much for “the part of the film that seems weaker is actually weak on purpose, and it’s a clever storytelling move,” but I am curious if that was at least the intention here: we see Lola in an actual private moment, a bit of non-story (Liszt gets name-dropped in the circus performance, but the narrative isn’t recapitulated in any detail, and we never see the beginning of it, just a snippet of the end; it’s not packaged for consumption for the circus or for us), and she feels a trifle more real, self-possessed rather than vacant. Considering the film ends with Lola in a cage in the circus’s menagerie, peppered with questions about her life but decisively framed as an exhibit rather than a person, maybe there’s the idea here that exposure strips away our humanity, and our stories are less real, and less human, the more often they’re revisited, and the more eyes and ears pick up on them.
9 to 5
Watched for in-person movie night with friends. I had never seen this, and I’d been imagining it as more of a restrained workplace comedy, with Jane Fonda, Dolly Parton, and Lily Tomlin gradually banding together to show up their boss in ways that would not involve rat poison, the temporary theft of a dead body, kidnapping, bondage gear, etc. I was, needless to say, wrong. This is charmingly over-the-top, with endearing performances and a lot of funny lines. I could have done without the fantasy sequences, which feel like they go on a tad too long, but it is fun to see the fantasy actions replayed in a less-murderous fashion as the film goes on. Definitely an enjoyable movie, and I liked that it zigged at the end where I’d expected it to zag: I thought Hart would frantically disavow the changes they’d made and shove the “blame” off on them only to find out that they’d been effective, but it’s actually much, much better to have him take credit again but have it work out in a hellish way for him. Sterling Hayden reusing his own bullshit “teamwork” speech on him is excellent. (It’s also a great, bitterly funny detail that Hayden approves of only 99% of the progressive changes the women make: “But that equal pay thing, that has to go.”)
And now I have the song from this stuck in my head again.
Eight Men Out
I like how this is structured a bit like a crime movie without having most of the trappings of the genre (other than, of course, the crime): some of the 1919 White Sox decide, for reasons I find pretty sympathetic, to throw the World Series and collect the kind of payday the team’s owner would never give them, and matter-of-fact corruption, competing interests, interpersonal conflicts, and guilt steadily make everything go wrong. It’s an important detail here that these professional ballplayers are far from professional criminals, and one of the reasons the fix is so obvious from the start is because they can’t calibrate it correctly: no one seems to think of getting the easier plays right and only messing up the iffier ones. A generally effective movie (it eventually sells the tragedy a little too hard and suffers from that; it’s better when I’m feeling it on my own) with a very strong cast. Straithairn, Mahoney, and Sweeney, and Sayles were my personal highlights.
I will save Heathers for tomorrow, because I also listened to the cast recording of the musical version, which means it’ll pair well with the WDWLT thread.
I love Tomlin’s animated fantasy, her tartness is a great mix for the Disney animals. For me the movie goes a bit awry with the mortuary stuff, which takes up a lot of time and there’s already great early 80s morgue comedy out there, I thought this was about workplace shenanigans! But the ship rights itself by the last half hour and like you say, the ending is really well done.
Ah, 9 to 5 is so much fun. I haven’t seen it in decades, though. For some strange reason, it was a popular pick for our parents to put on to let the TV babysit us when I was young, which, knowing them, makes me think they didn’t actually watch the movie.
Fonda’s fervent mixup of S&M with “M&Ms” has stuck in my memory for some reason, as has “I’ll turn from a rooster into a hen!”
The M&Ms line was probably the biggest laugh line of the night for me and my friends. Like you said, it’s how fervently she delivers it, with absolute conviction that she has the right to eat M&Ms if she wants to, dammit!
This is a good point, that Liszt scene really gets lost because even though it’s formally fantastic (shooting inside that massive carriage, the large outdoor set for no other purpose than to give the characters some space to get away from each other instead of trapped in the same small rooms) we’re still reeling from our first exposure to the circus so it doesn’t make as much of an impression (and the first image in the sequence of Carol lounging and smoking is the most French thing I’ve ever seen). Would be interesting if that were shuffled toward the back half somehow or, probably better, if Carol were a stronger screen presence so we could be intrigued by the person minus the literal circus around her.
On the M:I:FR front, I can do no better than the Letterboxd review by Demi Adejuyigbe:
https://letterboxd.com/demiadejuyigbe/film/mission-impossible-the-final-reckoning/1/
You know, the absurdity of the knife detail mentioned in this review occurred to me, but I did not put it half so well, even in my own mind. Beautiful.
Great point about the formal excellence of the Liszt bit–I hadn’t even thought about how well it uses space. But yeah, ultimately, it all really does require Carol to make more of an impact than she does.
Much has been made of the flashbacks/memory scenes being set in non-chronological order but this is the only mement where that actually takes place, and I don’t think it works for the audience in understanding Montes’ arc. The moment of her disillusionment with notions of everlasting romantic love (involving the circumstances and brutality of her first marriage) comes a bit late to the proceedings, and I think the scene detailing Montes and Lizt’s decision to move on needs more of an explanation as to why she would choose the tangible feelings of personal freedom over the ties of commitment founded on erotic love. They will always remember the passion but the time spent on pursuing their own interests is limited. This is more dramatically fleshed out in the Bavarian sequence.
This more worldly view of handling the temporality of romantic love is, as you say, where Carol’s otherwise wan performance feels suited for the material, and if the film’s emphasis on the failure to sustain a romantic attachment were more conventional I think her lack of charisma would sink the film entirely. As it is, she manages to support much of the thematic weight of the movie within a modulated emotional range. I got the impression that for almost everyone last night this was everyone’s first round with Ophuls, and for reasons you and The Ploughman state, I think it might not be the best introduction, even if represents the culmination of a director’s realization of an artistic vision.
Live music — Thalia Zedek record release! First openers Harsh Foxing were … not my thing, very janky clattery stuff that did not really hit (the soft parts in particular), but Vivid Bloom as middle band fixed things, they kick so much ass live and I hope their recent Boston Calling gig brought them some more attention. And Zedek and her band were great, they basically just played the new album and that’s fine, it’s damn good stuff and “Disarm” in particular has a riff that I realized is indebted to the “Sunset Theme” from Home Movies, which is a great thing to build a song around.
Friendship — Tim Robinson is very hit or miss for me and a reaction early on here had me worried, but this finds and expands a groove of oblivious frustration that works really well, especially with Paul Rudd as counterpoint. Andrew Deyoung is in some ways Ari Aster without the autoerotic asphyxiation, he’s interested in the line between comedy and horror but is looser with his camera and less tied to precious structure, even as there are some excellent callbacks and bits here. Most impressive is the tone, there are a few missteps but the heightened and slight unreality here really works, there is a lot of discipline in not trying to explain too much and instead rely on the interactions to carry the vibe. An actual comedy by an actual comedy director! This deserves the hype.
Hell yeah record release shows!
There’s a Harsh Foxing now? I listened to some regular Foxing and thought it was plenty harsh.
Fleet Foxes really went in a strange direction
They got all weird and angry after being deprived of Foxygen.
Wooooo record release live music!!
Godland, a really striking Danish/Icelandic movie that begins with a “true story” text akin to Fargo but the result is closer to Aguirre: The Wrath of God, all about hubris and colonization as well as, because it’s set in the late 19th century, what is recorded and captured via imagery, language, and the written word, and what is not. However, it’s also hypnotic and very funny at times, especially how the supporting characters play out. Could’ve been sponsored by the Icelandic Tourism Board given the immense landscapes and waterfalls but there’s also a sense of the landscape threatening to consume this arrogant Lutheran priest, trying to photograph the people while never really understanding anything around him. (One not unreasonable person asks why he didn’t sail instead of traipsing across the rocky, harsh, literally lethal countryside, and he doesn’t really have an answer.) Very good and on Criterion.
Beautiful film, makes Iceland look like the most unforgivable terrain that might be worth the risk (so long as you don’t pack a big wooden cross like an idiot).
Lola Montès – Strategically reporting after Lauren so I can copy/paste the accent mark in the title. I knew nothing about this, apparently one of the most expensive European productions ever at the time of its making, before putting it on and so was blown away by the elaborate sets, throngs of performers and moreso the way it’s all put to use in concert to fill every frame, creating layers of astonishing costumes and sets. Ophüls (nuts, hoped he would make an appearance in Lauren’s write-up) sets everything in layers and also has characters climb multiple towering sets via stairs, ladders, and trapeze. The framing “circus” portions are so constantly astonishing (even better with ringmaster Peter Ustinov!) that the more traditional, if also often inventively framed, flashback story portions act as almost a relief. On visuals alone this is a masterpiece, which maybe makes the flaws that has kept it out of the major public consciousness all the more glaring. There’s some debate as to whether the blankness of Martine Carol as Montès is by design or miscasting, and for me I didn’t really notice until the longest and most consequential flashback session among the Bavarian royalty. The tendency of the characters – even the central one – to get lost among the spectacle makes a certain amount of sense, but I’d stop short of saying it’s a feature. And if I’m hard-pressed to come up with a strong motivation for our protagonist, I found the final shot, featuring her center of frame, enormously affecting. Really an amazing accomplishment of a film and one I suspect I’ll find more meaning in the next time I drink in its technical delights.
I’ve got les accents grave et aigu mostly down (thank you, college French), and at this point I can do the umlauts without looking them up, but I absolutely stole Skarsgård from Nath’s article when I needed to use it the other day. I don’t even know what that one’s called!
That really is an incredible final shot, especially with the camera moving back, which only makes the bars more visible.
Until the discussion I was not aware of how fall Ophuls had fallen in terms of cinephile notoriety over the years. However, his untimely death before the rise of a relatively American acceptence of European cinema, and his embrace of a more melodramatic aesthetic filtered through a deconstructive Reinhardt/Brecht framework might have made him an outlier to the dominent art house style of the time, which could be understood on a more direct and naturalistic level. Not surprisingly, his most prominant contemporary American defender was Andrew Sarris, who, among mainstream critics, probably had the greatest grasp on the connections between European aesthetics and Hollywood melodrama. Ophuls influence on subsequent filmmakers, both mainstream and avant-garde, however, is enormous.
Ricochet – Underneath the stock title is a bonkers and wildly entertaining 90s shlock thriller from director Russell Mulchahy. Rogue cop Denzel Washington in nothing but his underwear arrests insane John Lithgow who swears revenge on his humiliator, now a rogue assistant DA, by breaking him down and destroying his career and family. Mulchahy injects the movie with a no logic and plot holes be damned attitude in some unusual and novel over the top scenes – the initial arrest, a samurai sword fight in prison, the parole board meeting, the arm wrestling, and Denzel running around in his underwear, again – despite some essentially formulaic genre tropes. Everyone is in on the joke with Denzel giving his usual 110% against John Lithgow, who was probably the best villain of the 80s and 90s. Denzel gets an assist from crack kingpin with a heart of gold Ice-T. Kevin Pollack does his Captain Kirk and Columbo impersonations. Stephen E. de Souza’s script is excessively violent, dark despite the cartoonishness and full of convoluted, plot hole jumping nonsense. Jesse Ventura gets on the bad side of Lithgow leading to a sword fight in prison with seemingly no repercussions for anyone involved. De Souza’s dialog has some great one-liners. He inserts some satire like the COPS spoof and a cable news debate show. De Souza returns Mary Ellen Trainor’s Gail Williams making this part of the Die Hard universe. A hearty meal of trash for trash connoisseurs.
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story – Still a little wobbly in its first two acts but builds to a crackerjack third act. As a standalone Andor’s character is nonexistent, but after the Andor series there is much more gravity and urgency to his mission. Maybe the best looking post-OT entry in the series. Two seasons and a movie makes a pretty good trilogy.
Oh, fuck yeah, Ricochet. This movie is absolutely bananas, and I love it. One might think Denzel Washington fighting crime by strategic stripping is the wildest it’s going to get, but then you get to the Aryan gladiatorial fights in prison, and John Lithgow booming out that he flossed “WITH YOUR WIFE’S PUBIC HAIR!”, and nail guns, and and and.
I thought I was the only person who considers RICOCHET to be a great guilty pleasure.
Ricochet fucking rules, not the least for making Lithgow winning that sword fight look completely believable. He’s that fucking bonkers! So Washington has to get even more nuts to beat him, what a hoot the movie is.
This weekend featured a pair of completely different rewatches.
City Lights (1931)
I watched this one with a commentary from a Chaplin historian. Lots of good details here, and it turns out that watching a silent film with commentary is a very good combination. The film is still an absolute banger, and I think Chaplin’s facial expressions are underrated. The scene at the nightclub where they’re eating spaghetti and the Tramp accidentally starts eating a streamer and stands up to keep eating this streamer while his face starts freaking out with determination to defeat this spaghetti is great. Insane to learn that the meeting between the Tramp and the Blind Girl is pretty much the most takes ever done for a single scene. The end result is so fluid and natural that I would have never guessed Chaplin took over a year to figure out the car door slam as the reason she believes he’s wealthy.
Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971)
My big issue with the film last time I watched it was I got kinda bored with scenes of Melvin van Peebles running. The film has a lot of those, but for some reason it played better this time. Van Peebles does enough with his imagery and sound that the film is consistently engaging. The way he edits and the way he integrates sound and music is borderline insane, and I love it. Sometimes it feels like he has two different musical themes intersecting and making a 20 car pileup on the soundtrack, and it’s so bizarre that I can’t help but appreciate the sheer gall.
I got the impression that the sound in Sweetback was a window into the inner life of the character that he otherwise so fully represses (even in private).
doctor who, current season finale.
Doctor Who is spent as a creative force. Time to let it lie fallow for at least 16 years again.
In 100 Years of Solitude, the repetition of names is used to help signify the decay of the eternal regression of the Buendia family and the town of Macondo. Coronel Aureliano Buendia devotes the latter half of his life to making and unmaking and remaking 18 little golden fish trinkets, which become collector’s items owing to the fame he achieved in the vigor of his youth when he led 32 revolutions and lost them all. I don’t think Garcia Marquez necessarily intended to create a metaphor for anglophone culture in the 2020s, however it is what it is. We can’t even riff iteratively on established concepts without immediately quashing any good ideas in favor of retreads.
Am I overreacting and a single bad doctor who episode does not actually signify the exhaustion of western culture as a creative force? Yes. But I think I’m on firmer ground if I say Disney has been exhausted as a creative force. Bringing back
is of the same bankrupt impulse as bringing back Tony Stark as Doom and bringing back young Mark Hamill on Mandalorian or bringing back Palpatine. This is an institution that no longer has a present or future and doesn’t even really have a past.
The episode was not great before that. There were reshoots motivated by behind the scenes stuff. The best version of the story would be that
but that is not what’s on the screen. The story ends up flattening Belinda’s character instead of giving her depth, and the callbacks to the Rani and Omega are gratuitous nostalgia bait. Of course, maybe it’s silly to complain about nostalgia bait in doctor, but if you’re building the plot around these references they should either just be easter eggs or make sense.
I should just stop watching doctor who season finales.
You’re not wrong, but I liked it. I laughed out loud at the final shot.
Iron Man — Had a hankering to toss this one on and it’s just so good. Downey is an amazing casting choice and the film works because Favreau lets him be his irrepressible motormouth self. You can see in Tony the same allure of bad decisions that had sent Downey to prison some years prior, and therefore you can empathize with his decision to put all of that in the past — and how this seems like just another temporary mania to his friends and colleagues.
Captain America: Brave New World — Contrasted with this. The actions scenes aren’t bad albeit too long, and Mackie (who is the best part about the movie) rides the line well between an innately competent and confident guy who can’t help but recognize that he’s in an untenable position. And I like the idea of General Ross (an antagonist in these movies for many years) trying to make up for the mistakes of his past with even more mistakes, although that would work better if they hadn’t had to recast after William Hurt’s death. But the political plot around which the movie is built is real stupid. Comics are notoriously bad at understanding politics or law, much worse at it than Hollywood usually is, but this is a Hollywood movie that imports that stupidity from the source material. I wish they’d come up with a better script for Mackie.
Yeah, Iron Man struck gold with Downey but I think Bridges is underrated as a bad guy who is also pretty charismatic himself. And he’s very interesting as a one and done dude, obviously the stinger at the end sets the stage but this is about Downey’s journey more than anything larger and that’s what makes the movie work so well.
La Cocina
First time. Further evidence that Alonso Ruizpalacios is the top Mexican filmmaker currently working. Stunning black and white photography (with some pointed flashes of color), precise direction and a raw look at the behind the scenes of a shitty Times Square restaurant, mostly staffed by immigrants such as Raúl Briones’ Pedro, a mercurial Mexican cook, as well as down-on-their-luck people like Rooney Mara’s Julia, who’s pregnant with Raúl’s child. From this simple setup Ruizpalacios’ draws a sympathetic and often fanciful look at life in the margins of society, where everyone scraps to get by and waits for a chance to go after dreams that never come. Terrific central performances from Briones and Mara, but the supporting cast is more than up and become pretty memorable on their own. Could easily have been called “Güeros Part II”.
Oh, this sounds right up my alley. Adding it and Güeros to my list of things to check out.
I have always loved the Final Destination trope of the psychically sensitive characters perceiving the gathering danger signs by, as you said, being aware of the close-ups (and the needle-drops): it’s a clever, fun bit of cinematic storytelling while also feeling like it really does capture the jumpy, heightened, doomy awareness of paranoia.
This is a great breakdown of how Bloodlines in particular uses both the specific traditions of its franchise and more general expectations to have a better time, creating effective surprises and effective story beats. Another miniature fake-out that I loved was the one with the rake, where you’re set up to believe it’s going to stab someone through the trampoline, only for someone to move it for safety and wind up triggering poor Howard’s lawnmower-to-the-face death.
Year of the Month update!
This June, we’re covering 1983, including all these movies, albums, books, et al!
Jun. 23rd: Sam Scott: El Sur
Jun. 24th: John Bruni: Legendary Hearts
Jun. 30th: Tristan Nankervis: The Big Chill
And next month is 2005, including all these movies, albums, books, et al!
2005 has a few of my favorite albums, but… in both cases I can think of I’ve already written almost 1,000 words on each of them, so a column would just be a slight expansion of my previous writeup.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084994/
NBC had a casablanca prequel
series that sounds incredibly ill advised but also something that should get brought back for late-period prestige tv. Let’s see if I can find this streaming.
It’s me, the audience member who finds call refusal extremely unsatisfying! Get off your ass and do some shit, losers. It is easy to come up with exceptions to this, particularly if answering a call is counter to already-clear goals and there is bargaining to be done (any time a person with particular and illegal skills needs to be drafted into a scheme — “what’s in it for me?” is a fine question here), but broader hemming and hawing is annoying. And the larger implications of this — “making a character sympathetic simply by aligning their interests with that of the audience” — are important to keep in mind; the inverse of this is the Skyler White Problem, a character becoming unsympathetic because their interests are completely unaligned with the audience.
What, like a nuclear bomb or something?
guy who knows two things about Japanese history (me): “I’m getting some real nuclear bomb and/or earthquake vibes from this.”
“Was your village destroyed by samurai or Godzilla?”
My conversations with Germans are even more awkward. I have to connect everything to either luther or, you know, the other famous german.
I think Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider are both more or less equally famous.
Surely you meant one of the most beloved Western horror films, Alien.
*grimly shaking head* There’s no way to stop him. He’s the living manifestation of anti-Thing destiny.
What Did We Play Last Week?
Hexcells and Hexcells Plus
Both are old friends, but every now and then, I crave puzzles. Tametsi is probably the most challenging example of this particular form, and I do love it, but the Hexcells series has the edge for being so pleasing to the senses: the color scheme, the little chimes of clicking the tiles, the way the non-mine tiles poof like confetti.
There’s such satisfaction to both following a cascade of logical tile-flips and stalling out and mulling over the seemingly unyielding array for a bit before some deduction suddenly leaps out and I know what to click next. Will undoubtedly go on to attempt another 100% at Hexcells Infinite once I wrap up Hexcells Plus.
1. Gradius: The Interstellar Assault – Nintendo Classics Game Boy on Nintendo Switch
They added this last week so I gave it a try and ended up beating the whole thing. This is a surprisingly great shooter, pushing the original Game Boy hardware pretty hard and getting the most out of smart level design and carefully-rendered backgrounds. All the trademark Gradius gameplay elements are here and rock-solid and the enemies also have a new look to make them work on the tiny GB screen while remaning close to the Gradius spirit. Also boasts some terrific presentation, with cutscenes, chase scenes and impressive multi-part bosses. Terrific quality all around.
2. Gradius – Nintendo Classics Nintendo Entertainment System on Nintendo Switch
Finishing the previous game inspired to try and finally finish this one, and it worked. I ended up liking the Game Boy title (probably because of the surprise factor) more but this one’s pretty masterful, with fantastic colors and bold levels that never become impossible for all its difficulty. I think this is a bit more lenient than the arcade version but I also like its controls a little better. I may give the arcade version a go some day but I’m happier with the NES version as it is.
3. Life Force on New Nintendo 3DS Virtual Console
I felt on a roll with Konami shooters so I also tried to see if I could finish this one while I was it. Unfortunately I ran out of continues midway, and the 3DS doesn’t offer rewind (not that I abused it on the Gradius games anyway), so I’ll have to try again another day. Still, this is just as great as the Gradius games, which it resembles in gameplay while also adding vertical shooting levels and a more alien, organic, Giger-esque aesthetic. It’s tougher in some ways but again, not so much that I can’t get done with some more practice.
4. Mega Man X3 – Mega Man X Legacy Collection on Nintendo Switch
Finished the first eight Mavericks. The level design on this is all over the place, with a bunch of spare levels, next to some long and tedious ones, as well as extra midbosses that appear seemingly at random and stall your momentum, plus Vile from the first Mega Man X game coming back from the dead to become another optional(?) midboss that doesn’t make much sense. Also, the extra weapons are kinda lousy so far, and secrets in these game feel very counterintuitive to get. Which doesn’t mean that this is a totally bad game, but instead one where you can get a good run of fun levels come crashing down on you thanks to coming across a miniboss with the wrong weapon or having to farm health and trying to get lucky you don’t get killed before you even get to the boss. Going to mop up for all the secret upgrades next week before I get to the endgame in earnest.
5. X-Men vs. Street Fighter – Marvel vs. Capcom Fighting Collection: Arcade Classics on Nintendo Switch
Beat the arcade mode. It feels very much like a dry run for Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter, which I beat first. It’s still fun though, and I like what they came up with for the final “boss” (i.e. not Apocalypse, who was also a boss in MSH vs. SF), where you fight one of your pair of fighters against the other. It’s a neat surprise and more fun to play than some other bosses in this series. I realized that I can’t wrap my head around X-Men characters as fighters, and I had to beat this one with Ryu and Chun Li. Moving on to Marvel Super Heroes next, which lacks any Street Fighter characters at all, so I might be in trouble.
I was looking for something to play last night, and I was feeling the Shadowrun itch again, so I was hoping to find a new game that could scratch it. But I didn’t have the inclination to try to learn something new so instead I just fired up SNES Shadowrun. I’m already out of the Caryards and through the cortex bomb sequence, which is the point where the game becomes a fair bit more open-ended.
Always tough for me to decide which 16-bit version I like better. The Genesis one, I think, feels a lot more like Shadowrun (it’s got the far superior Matrix sequences, and is the one with actual, you know, shadowrunning), but it’s also got a lot of rushed design mechanics and not a lot of direction and can be very frustrating if you don’t already know what you’re doing. Whereas the SNES one is a bit more linear and clear on what you have to do and doesn’t have the same “rushed to market” design flaws, but… the Matrix sequences are lame and you don’t really do any actual shadowrunning, and it doesn’t have that sense of a much bigger world that the Genesis one does.