Year of the Month
“I’ve done a lot of bad things, Joey, and maybe it’s comin’ back to me.”
One of the questions that comes up in pop culture discourse is ‘why would you make a story about a bad person?’, or, more frequently, ‘why would I watch a story about a person I don’t like?’. Jake La Motta (Robert De Niro) definitely ranks up there in terms of shitty guys. It isn’t just that he does bad things – violent outbursts, cheating on his wife, sleeping with teenage girls (including his second wife) – it’s that he’s also just miserable, pathetic, and above all, stupid. He reacts to any perceived slight with violence and threats of violence; his go-to tactic is to simply repeat himself louder until he gets what he wants, which is usually some kind of submission. He’s incapable of thinking about any kind of long-term consequences for his actions.
The first reason I can think of is that this film feels like a beautiful object. A beautiful thing doesn’t have to justify its existence to me; I’m hypnotized by this film at points. The question isn’t ‘why should this have been made’, it’s ‘why does this compel me so’, which might sound at first like a mere slight rewrite of the same idea, but the difference is all-important. The former is second-guessing a decision that’s already been made; the latter is asking what one’s decision will be in the future, something that strikes me as enormously more productive.
As always, I think it’s that the film invites empathy and introspection, often in ironic contrast to its protagonist. The interesting thing about Jake is that he isn’t actually stupid – well, maybe stupid in the sense that he lacks a varied toolbox of social skills and doesn’t think too far ahead, but he’s also calculating. We see him soak up data and respond to it, and his emotions are coming from a real place; he’s just as capable of crude love as he is crude violence. This kind of shared connection across time and space is what I engage with fiction and art for.
Which brings me to the second reason: I watch movies to see myself from another perspective, and that doesn’t just mean ‘characters exactly like me’, or even ‘characters like me presented in a perspective outside my own’, I mean ‘emotions I feel in a violently different context’. I first watched Raging Bull at around 25; I’m now 35, slightly older than Jake when he retires from boxing and slightly younger than when he’s incarcerated, and unfortunately, I see a lot of both my youthful and current rage in the character. I was never fucking teenagers or throwing women across the room, but there was anger at the world that, like the older Jake, I’m still trying to walk away from (both in terms of material consequences and in terms of inner rage).
One thing that’s always confused me is how hard it is to get many people not only to see that two separate, materially different situations can have the same emotions attached to them, but that this fact is important. Roy Greenhilt of Order of the Stick, of all characters, has practical examples of this in action, like this strip, where he recognises that getting snarky is acting on the same emotions that drive his father (“Every time I stoop to the level of engaging you in an angry tirade, I’m a little more like you and a little less like Mom.”). Jake works as a guide for where I don’t want to go; every time I reflexively act upon my temper, I’m a little more like him and a little less like Solid Snake.
Which now brings me to the third reason: I like uncomfortable movies. It’s always funny to me that people, as a whole, engage with fiction in order to be made comfortable, so that you get this weird situation that someone will go to work doing something physically or emotionally miserable for eight or more hours, but watching a movie about someone acting like a dick makes them uncomfortable. I’m not stupid – I know most people are working because they need money to live and raise their kids or whatever, and when they get home, they want to return to a sense of comfort – but the thing is, I find when I work long hours doing draining shit, I even more desperately need something intellectually stimulating. When my time becomes precious, I have to prioritize movies like Raging Bull over escapist trash or I go nuts.
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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Department of
Conversation
What did we watch?
Under Milk Wood
A stage version of Dylan Thomas’s radio play; I thought the script itself weak and frequently tedious, but the presentation was gorgeous. The stage had a victory-podium-like construction, with an actor (playing the Captain, and I think the only actor with only one role) playing a cello to underline everything; usually to provide mood, sometimes to provide cartoon-like emphasis to the action. I particularly liked it when he was strumming chords on it under one woman’s monologue, providing a Lemmy-like bassline to emphasise her points.
Red vs Blue, Season Two, Episode Ten
“Well, surprisingly, my medical training didn’t include internal combustion.”
“Sounds like a shitty medical school.”
“Yeah, where did you go? The University of Jamaica?”
“Hey, everyone is looking at me! I love when they do that – hi everybody!”
“Mutual in what way? Mutual in that you were both single the moment she dumped you?”
“Sorry, Sarge, he’s not sleeping. He’s doing drugs.”
“Tex, I think you are pretty and you haven’t hurt my body in a long time, so I was thinking we could be friends and hold hands, and you could go with me, and when you went with me, you could be my real girlfriend.”
“I don’t know how that bucket of baby oil got up there in the first place. That was weird.”
“Hey Caboose, I think it’s wrong for us both to die just because you’re stupid, so I’m gonna take off now.”
“I got a hard line Tex can use. Bow-chika-bow-wow.”
“How did you even hear that?!”
“Grif doesn’t know what he’s talking about, eh? Stop the fuckin’ presses.”
“All the red lights are red and all the blue lights are blue.”
“What about the green lights?”
“Those are black.”
“Can I kill him?”
“No, I’m saving him in case we ever need him for food.”
“WHY DO PEOPLE KEEP HANGING UP ON ME?!”
This feels like the point where the story is taking itself too seriously (though the characters continue to keep making jokes). This is the third-last episode of the original run. There’s a little thing where people whose first story is a comedy and also the one that makes them famous, and they feel the call to suddenly take it seriously, especially towards the end. It’s an interesting variation on the idea that people undervalue comedy; I could give two fucks that the Academy doesn’t give out little gold statues to comedies that made more money than I’ll ever see and defined language as we know it, but it’s interesting to me that some comedians – especially amateurs stumbling into success – feel the need to justify having ‘just’ made people laugh, as if to rationalise having put their life into something superficially silly – as if making people laugh isn’t inherently a morally good act.
“It’s just like ripping off a band-aid. Quick and incredibly painful!”
Cimarron, Best Picture Winner 1931
A progressive myth in all ways possible; cutting edge at the time but embarrassingly dated today*, aggressively melodramatic and didactic, not a bit self-congratulatory. Really, this sets the model for the Oscar Bait. That said, it’s surprisingly well-made; a strong respect for dramatic structure and individual character perspective that makes the gaps in its morality interesting. Yancey, the protagonist, sometimes has massive and obvious blinkers the movie only partially grasps, like him steamrolling over every woman and child in his life and abandoning them at the drop of a hat, and his condescending attitude towards women and minorities as he expects to fix things for them without ever really listening to them.
*The most embarrassing and difficult element being a Black comedy side character. At one point he’s excited when spotting watermelons. Though he does get a heroic death.
I have never seen Cimarron but I have a Freddie Quimby-esque loathing for its title. IT’S CINNAMON! CINAMMON! I’LL KILL YOU! I’LL KILL ALL OF YOU! ESPECIALLY THOSE OF YOU IN THE ACADEMY!
Spirit: Stallion of the Cinnamon
Now that’s more like it!
I see CIMARRON referred to on a lot of lists as among the worst Best Picture winners, but I can easily see why it won over Academy voters in 1931. It’s mixture of epic family drama and social awareness was a growing trend when it came out. Edna Ferber, a major novelist at the time whose work has fallen out of favor, specialized in this mix. SHOWBOAT and GIANT, which you will encounter later, also are based on her books.
The Practice, “Small Sacrifices” – The season of faith based cases continues as Ellenor defends a Santeria minister against animal cruelty charges that are really a veiled attack on his faith (Ellenor certainly proves that the slaughter of a goat is about as a cruel as any other thing done to animals for food). But the main story has Bobby and Jimmy defending a child molester who definitely did it, but the judge in the case (Paul Dooley is back but playing Judge Swackheim a bit less wacky) makes it clear they have to do their job well. And sure enough there is reasonable doubt, at the cost of making the victim look like a liar. Bobby, disgusted with himself, and confronted by his former priest and called a hypocrite for defending the exact sort of person he was angry that the Church was hidng, goes so far in his closing to say “yeah, he probably did but the state has not proved it.” Robert Prosky is back as the priest, able to say what he wasn’t able to sat to Bobby before; and Anton Yelchin is excellent as the poor 12 year old kid forced to testify he was raped.
Miss Marple, “Nemesis” – Miss Marple is given a mystery from beyond the grave by a millionaire she encountered previously. Though she isn’t actually told what she is investigating as she travels on a bus tour of fancy homes and gardens. The set-up is more interesting then the solution, and it’s all very contrived. Also, this was the final Marple novel written, and grows out of a previous one, only because the previous one had been made into a movie already, it wasn’t filmed till the very end of the series, which sort of messes with things a bit. All that said, this is Jane as her Miss Marple-est, relentless in the name of justice but also just a somewhat silly old lady.
MASH, “Lr. Radar O’Reilly” – Radar is promoted way up to officer as something of a gag, and hates it. Somehow Hawkeye and BJ get this done and undone and no one is the wiser. While we get some nice character moments for Radar and for other noncoms, it’s all a bit silly. And certainly not how it works in the real world.
Doctor Who, “Web of Fear,” first three parts – Robots called “yetis” have made the London Underground unsafe, and only the Doctor, a scientist who knows all about the Yetis from forty years earlier (and from a previous serial), and the British Army’s new man on the scene, Colonel Lethbridge-Stewart, can stop them. Very much at a good level of creepy and mysterious, filmed in sets so effectively evoking the Underground that London Transport thought the show sneaked into the tunnels to film without permission.
I think Web is a good sequel to the earlier serial. I’m glad some of the Brig’s first serial survives and it’s good to have the complete serial. But the animation is the poorest of the animated episodes. They all don’t have the biggest animated budget but this is the cheapest. I wish Nu-Who would do something with the Yeti, as goofy as they are. I’m surprised they haven’t.
Siege
My pick for Movie Club. I wrote this up for The Solute back when I first watched it and don’t necessarily have any new insights, so I’ll just say that it led to a really fun discussion. Also, if you’re a fledgling film director with a clear sense of space and any gift at all for structure, the low-budget siege movie is the way to go.
Quatermass 2
I watched this thinking I’d put it on Streaming Shuffle, like its predecessor, but it wound up being a bit too lackluster for that without being either entertainingly or infuriatingly bad. This loses the crystalline clarity of the first film, and while it has action, the story is too shapeless to give it much meaning until close to the end. Still, Quatermass discovering a lookalike for his own planned moon base out in the countryside is an incredible visual, and the doughy, seething alien effects are very well-done. Very low level of characterization continuity here, which I think I’ll find less distracting once the series switches to a new actor entirely.
The World’s End
I’ll always love the way the Cornetto Trilogy is structured in an almost musical way, both within each movie—especially via lines of dialogue: “It’s pointless arguing with you”—and within the trilogy as a whole. More annoyed this time that Wright seems to have a hard time writing female characters with as much humor and depth as his male ones; the waste is more obvious when you’ve got Rosamund Fucking Pike here playing a relatively thankless role. But this is still a great film: dark, funny, well-structured, and emotionally resonant. Pegg gets to go all-out here, and he’s up for the task.
Feels like Vince Gilligan must have seen this.
Inside No. 9, “Merrily, Merrily”
Lovely episode where three old friends—who have all since fallen out of touch with each other—reunite (with one new-ish girlfriend as a plus-one the organizer didn’t anticipate) go out on a pedalo ride, and there’s a mournful purpose to it that not all of them know about going in. Makes the most of real-life personal and professional history in the casting, giving the relationships a lived-in feeling. This moves nicely from comedy (“Have you been in Five Guys, Callum?” “Oh, at least”) to sorrow to messy, poignant humanity (the way Pemberton’s reveal recontextualizes some of his earlier lines is beautifully done) to bittersweet transcendence. Great acting showcase for everybody.
Taskmaster, “A 1970s Camping Kettle”
“I didn’t like the eye contact when you said, ‘Maybe I go deep.’”
“I have never seen a puppy in a park and picked it up and gone, ‘Oh, oh, it’s so credible.’”
“What I will say is that I think in this society that we live in, it’s become quite a godless state. Something has filled the gap of the church, and I think it’s Boots.”
“My God, this is all true, isn’t it?” (Phil and I could bond over attending bizarre family funerals.)
“That’s flour, by the way.”
“Yeah. Don’t taste everything.”
“When you put the silver trousers on, you said, ‘Now you are future sexy.’”
“Knee pads: sexy, ‘cause they suggest you’re gonna be on your knees.”
“I mean, Reece’s—without wishing to be crude—looks like he’d throw you around the room.”
“But I can’t make myself black and white. Can I? … I could paint my face.”
“Which color?”
“Ooh—white …. Very white.”
[on replay] “I won’t dwell on it too long, Maisie. But I would say I’m quite a Luddite, but even I know how to make pictures on my phone black and white. I don’t think you necessarily needed to contemplate a hate crime.”
“I imagine there was a strong message in there.”
“There was.”
“And what was that message?”
“It’s … ‘be nice.’”
“Oh, and the floating banana …?”
“Yes.”
“Represented …?”
“Exactly.”
“Maisie’s will be censored for the children’s edition of the show.”
“Why?!”
“’Cause I can see her tits.”
“Ironically, in this bit, we’ve had a little less conversation.”
“And I think I can sum up what everyone’s thinking: Ania has not drawn Elvis.”
“I’m young.”
Task injustice: Ania’s trolley absolutely crossed the line. She shouldn’t have been disqualified!
Task ownage: Everyone’s short films, but Ania’s stop-motion paper cut-outs moving across her face (with sound effects written on her eyelids) and Reece’s A Trip to the Moon were my favorites. Nice to see everyone take home five points on this one. Good stuff. Also, Reece’s art in the on-stage task! Loved his reaction to Phil asking if he could have the skiing supermodel picture.
Very fair point about Pike in End — Kate Ashfield in Shaun is more acceptable as a frustrated girlfriend because of how callow Shaun is and Hot Fuzz dispenses with female love interests entirely; here everyone is older if not wiser but Pike doesn’t have the depth of the guys (compare her to Marsan in particular). She’s largely there as part of Paddy Considine’s story (both as teen and adult), and her checking out for a big chunk of the late action doesn’t affect much. The best relationship moment in the movie is Frost getting his ring back.
When I struggled with my own substance issues last year, “Gary, mate, how do you know you’re drunk if you’re never sober?” genuinely helped me consider where I was at in life. Pegg’s performance here is quietly devastating too for a purposefully loud and ridiculous character.
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You — Byrne as good as advertised, but let’s give some praise to the men here. O’Brien is pretty funny/awful, but Christian Slater is especially good in a performance that is 95 percent vocal only — his voice is familiar but dweebed up a bit so I didn’t recognize it and he’s incredibly unhelpful and infuriating while staying just on the right side of being unable write off completely, he’s a hugely effective ratchet for the tension Byrne is under. But also creating herself, because Slater does get something done and it raises questions about what Byrne is letting be undone. The visions/dreams/hallucinations are less interesting in this regard, the movie has already made a certain elliptical visual choice that is frustrating but interesting (not showing her daughter) and this stuff is gilding the lily and less immersive into Byrne’s head than intended. But the ending is good and chilling, yet another man says something unhelpful earlier on and is shown to be right, that is just left there to sit.
Best In Show — showed to my mom, she thought it was great and her dog was intrigued whenever a toy got squeaked. Still hilarious of course and it’s funny how the movie walks the line of O’Hara banging hundreds of dudes but also being sincerely tied to Levy, the two really have great chemistry in this regard (if not good pitch). MVP is Larry Miller though, his hostage negotiation with his son destroys me, I shit you not you little freak.
ER — watched a rando episode, a blizzard means the hospital is empty and everyone is goofing around until all of a sudden it is not, a massive highway pileup sends a hundred people in and we enter Chaos Mode. The real hero of the episode is longtime director Mimi Leder, who explores the empty space early on and then orchestrates superb one-shots of multiple people dealing with multiple problems that do not feel ostentatious at all, in fact they don’t feel “cinematic” in part because of the show’s aspect ratio I think, but mainly because they are serving this TV drama before all else. Doctor Carter gets pranked early on, will this guy ever become a top doctor?
A Knight Of The Seven Kingdoms — pretty good stuff! Great songs, which GoT had to a certain degree but this packs more of them in there. An odd “season,” this could have been a movie (the plot and setting are not complicated) and sometimes feels padded, but the small episodes also work for hangout stuff. This is positioned as the anti-GoT in a lot of ways, starting with its kinder attitude to sex work, but it relies on the heavy shadow of GoT for its larger thematic stuff — GoT is where this show leads and chivalry as a concept with royalty as the means by which chivalry is enforced (or not) is known to be untenable. “Train my boy so he doesn’t grow up to be a murderous insane despot ruling your country” is a philosophy even a guy like Dunk knows is bullshit, the case for killing all these alien psychos is very strong. But the small scale lets this stuff sit in the background, too bad the next season is going to Dorne and thus will suck.
Hi, Nellie! — once again the Criterion Channel outright lies in its description, saying this is the story of a newspaperman busted down to love advice columnist who “marshals his army of lonely hearts to get the goods on a mobster.” This is not true at all, he winds up making one connection off a person who wants help with a called-off wedding to pry open the story but there is no army here! What is here is a lot of fun on its own terms, Paul Muni as the editor turned columnist and Glenda Farrell as the columnist who used to be a star reporter until her own screw-up are quite good and all the 30s newspapering stuff rules (the last act is investigative goodness), but I was set up for something else here. And it is hard not to watch this and see the bones of a rom-com, maybe one that does have that army of lonely hearts — Muni initially hates the job but then gets yelled at and gets good but there is no demonstration of his skills here, no harnessing of love gossip for stories (a huge thing!), not enough back and forth between him and Farrell. It’s not fair to criticize a movie for what it is not, this is more of an idea for what could be done with its setup, but I am still annoyed at Criterion for the misdirect. But very much worth a watch before it expires at the end of the month.
Hmm, had to pick between Sirat and Legs for tonight’s cinema trip and went for Sirat on the basis that it looks like a movie that needs to be seen Big and Loud, but Legs sounds pretty intriguing too. Hopefully the Oscar buzz will keep it around in cinemas for a little longer.
I can see Legs playing better on the big screen than at home, I think its tightly-focused perspective and sound design would be harsh but really effective.
Saltburn – there’s obviously been a lot of Emerald Fennell talk of late, most of it mixed-to-negative, and I hadn’t seen any of her movies so I wanted to at least understand her whole thing. I enjoyed quite a bit of this but did find it a little empty by the end, there are some hilarious moments (Rosamund Pike’s withering putdowns, mostly) and I kind of wish it had leaned a bit more into the black comedy to offset the “look out how shocking I am!” talking-point bits. I’m in no rush to see her other two films but I don’t regret watching this one.
Casualties of War – a DVD that has languished on my shelves for ages because I love De Palma but am rarely in the mood for bleak war drama. I didn’t realise quite how much this one was tied to his later film Redacted, which I have seen and thought was a little better than its reputation. The gritty approach there suited the material in my eyes whereas the glossier Hollywood approach here felt a little off, particularly Ennio Morricone’s sweeping score. Obviously he’s a great composer but in this context it felt wrong, as did some of the stirring monologues where the Big Acting was very clearly visible. It still packs a punch though, and the last 20 minutes or so had me gripped. But yeah, not the mode where I really love De Palma even if his intentions are admirable.
Live Music – had the offer of a guest list spot for The Wave Pictures if I got done with my February songwriting thing in time, and I just about did. They’re a band I don’t feel the need to see on every tour as their “we really, really, really love guitar solos” thing gets a little tiring, but on the other hand they’re always charming and funny and have some great songs. They really leaned into the dad-rock this time though with CCR, Grateful Dead and Van Morrison covers I could have lived without. Support was a US folky guy called Turner Cody who had some pretty great lyrics.
Woooooo live *eight minute guitar solo* music!
*looks up from guitar*
YOU’LL HAVE TO SPEAK UP. I’M SHREDDING
Wooo live music! Don’t think I could say no to a Van the Man cover.
That was the best of the three covers to be fair, and it was a song I’m not familiar with which helps! The CCR one was “Bad Moon Rising” and I kinda feel like that should be on some kind of cover-version black list at this point.
I remember when my guitarist wanted to play Soft Boys’ “I Wanna Destroy You” in my old band and I had to gently say there had been three or four beloved live covers we’d have to equal.
This is why “Queen of Eyes” is the smart play! Love that song.
Ah, I love that song, maybe my favorite Soft Boys. (Although its immediate predecessor “You’ll Have to Go Sideways” makes a good case.)
Should try to convince him to go for “Old Pervert.”
New Pitt episode which has the excellent dramatic complication of the hospital having to shut down it’s entire online grid so everyone has to go analog. Apparently there was a Newsroom episode with a similar cliffhanger that never fulfilled it’s premise; here, the result is delicious chaos (charts needing to be placed in different sections, felt tip pens not getting through to the pink sheets where ball points would) and good character beats such as Joy’s photographic memory coming in handy and Robby chortling about AI being down. Only false note was everyone not knowing how to use the fax machine. I worked in a dental school and they’re still used to get HIPPA sensitive data back and forth.
Subplots: Langdon working on a drunk sorority patient who bit her tongue alongside Santos, her needling him about blood alcohol content. The patient going through the process of the rape kit continues to be devastating and there’s a careful, humiliating proceduralism to the process. (With Dana realizing in rage that the police never bothered to pick up the previous kit.) The show depicts how the deaf woman has a pretty simple neck injury yet waits for hours because the Pitt doesn’t have good accommodations for her without underlining it.
Started the next The Great episode (S2E7) but the show is losing me a bit. I don’t share the creator’s disdain for historicity and the view of the past as inherently backwards and stupid. In fairness, Catherine’s own rationalist POV is getting challenged throughout the season, but McNamara’s stubborn Enlightenment liberalism can be insufferable regardless. Can imagine Robert Eggers watching and responding with “Don’t you get bored thinking this way?”
What did we play?
Draw Steel
So, we’re fifth level (out of a possible ten, at least until the next update), and I gotta say, I’m sold on preferring this to D&D for the most part. First of all, I see now how smooth the gameplay is and how it constantly forces you to think tactically and make decisions. Part of the thing about D&D is that you have an action, a bonus action, a reaction, and a free action, but not every class uses all three things on a regular basis (famously, wizards have very few bonus actions relevant to their class and barbarians rarely do more than just attack). In this game, every class has options for every move they can do, with triggered actions (or reactions) being the big innovation here – it means you’re constantly paying attention to what’s happening and working together.
What has really sold me is when, last week, my character risked dying, so I quickly started whipping up a new character just in case. Except I found I really had to make decisions for it that were too complicated to do while keeping track of the game; it isn’t just that you decide what class you are and where you came from, but that you have to work out their story – characters don’t just have abilities, they have skills and often individual quirks. One of D&D’s flaws is that one person usually ends up carrying water for specific skills and problems (like one guy doing all the perception checks). This, by design, requires everyone to have skills they try and apply to different situations.
At long last, we returned to the Curse of Strahd, and encountered Mother Night. Who is: a) not the Kurt Vonnegut novel; b) the mother of Strahd’s illegitimate baby (maybe); c) utterly mad, and d) the Baba Yaga with the serial numbers filed off. Naturally we have to fight her. Yay?
Balatro – finally 100% finished! Great game, glad to have squeezed all of the enjoyment out of it and now happily uninstalled from my phone so I can try to be more productive with my time, ha. There have been time-sink games I’ve ended up regretting by the end but the design here is so clever and balanced, it felt good figuring out a way to win with every single joker in the game.
Bionic Commando (Game Boy – Nintendo Classics) on Nintendo Switch
Beat the game over the week. Excellent game, with very impressive production by GB standards. The end bosses are very tough, of the kind I might not have managed them without save states and rewind. Wonder how much overlap there is between it and the NES game, which I’ve never finished. I will try, and I hope finishing it on Game Boy gives me some pointers, though of course, I will have to do it without save states and rewind.
Started Mio: Memories in Orbit over the weekend because I felt like taking a break from RPGing to do some Metroidvaniaing. It’s pretty new, so far pretty fun, gorgeous hand-drawn art. I’m not very far in though and I tried to learn as little as possible about it before playing.
Unfortunately I’m in the Raging Bull Haters Camp although I will definitely give it another go at some point (maybe when Scorsese inevitably wins this year’s Blank Check March Madness poll). I’m not averse to movies about Shitty Guys but the particular way Jake La Motta is shitty just felt exhausting and uninteresting to me, even if the filmmaking around him is beautiful.
I’m not a hater on this movie. In fact, I intensely love its overall production (the editing, photography, art and costume design and sound mix are staggering in its visceral, if grimy, beauty) but I don’t share an emotionally compelling identification with LaMotta. His propensity to violence feels too easily explained as a product of his urban working class environment (a virulent cliche that is seldom critiqued in analyzing this film, and others which influenced it). His quest for self actualization seems based in a struggle to maintain a sense of personal autonomy within that environment and associating that with purity in the union of action and soul, a motivation that feels too abstracted in Catholicism to resonate with me. Frankly, I don’t think the film makes a compelling case that LaMotta has redirected his aims and goals at the end to make a compelling case for his motivational shift to be less self absorbed by being less of an asshole.
“The question isn’t ‘why should this have been made’, it’s ‘why does this compel me so’, which might sound at first like a mere slight rewrite of the same idea, but the difference is all-important. The former is second-guessing a decision that’s already been made; the latter is asking what one’s decision will be in the future, something that strikes me as enormously more productive.”
This is very good, although I think the first question is useful from a historical analysis perspective — the answer to “why should this have been made” might be “Canadian tax credits” or “local car dealer wanted to launder money” and that can be very interesting and relevant to the production. But yeah, as straight up artistic/personal insight it’s not very rewarding.
And the comfort issue is very real. I think it’s absolutely rewarding to stimulate your brain with discomfort or difficulty, not in an abstract way but like you put it, as a way to counter the day and not escape it. What makes this hard is the buy-in on the viewer’s end, the initial lift — you have to bring something to the movie and meet it on its terms instead of just sliding into the comfort food, and that’s the appeal of the comfort food.
Year of the Month update!
This March, you can write about any of these movies, albums, books, TV, etc. from 1980.
Mar. 2nd Tristan J Nankervis: Raging Bull
Mar. 5th: Cori Domschot: The Music Man
Mar. 16th: Tristan J Nankervis: 9 to 5
Mar. 19th: John Bruni: Gaucho
Mar. 23rd: Bridgett Taylor: Magnum PI
And next month, you can write about any of these movies, albums, books, etc. from 1949.
April. 9th: Cori Domschot: I Was a Male War Bride
Apr. 16th: Cori Domschot: On the Town
Shit, it’s 1980? I don’t think I’ve ever done the Soft Boys’ Underwater Moonlight. Got a couple of other things to finish first, but I’ll try to fit it in.
I’m with you on two of these three points. For reasons that I reveal in the comment I posted alongside Vomas comment, I don’t feel that sense of empathy that you feel towards it. Besides the problems mentioned above, I’m not a person who processes frustration and anger in the way LaMotta does, and in fact am quite fearful of those who do. I feel I can understand that process, but I can’t personally relate to it.
I’m with you that I’m finding “difficult” films more worthwhile of my time and energy than escapism, and I keep returning to Scorsese film’s. particularly his 1990’s films and beyond, for their breadth and scope of History and sociology. His craftsmanship, which reached new heights in RAGING BULL, is a big plus as well.