The Big Chill is a movie about talking. There are a lot of movies famous for having lots of talking in them; the filmographies of both Quentin Tarantino and Kevin Smith are infamous for being particularly talky, but both of them have characters who are intending to achieve something with their talk, whether that’s dominating another person or at least trying to get a specific point across. The characters of The Big Chill, on the other hand, have talking as their end-goal. Some of them are talking because they want you to see them a certain way; they talk like the kind of person they want to be seen as.
Few of them have obstacles larger than themselves; certainly, none of them have obstacles or threats to their existence over the course of the film. Most of them are rich in some way. When they were younger, they talked about their ideals; now they’re old, and they talk about the ideals they had and deals they want to make now. Whatever threats they face are abstract; self-image, reproduction, and a sense of wanting to matter. With the exception of Nick (William Hurt), who has a sense of humour about his situation, I loathe every one of these pointless, boring, stupid motherfuckers.
This is not to say the movie is not excellent; it makes real drama out of the lack of drama in these people’s lives. This is simply a way in which I reflect the working class English culture I grew up in as well as the poverty I’ve dealt with my whole adult life, despite my autistic and artistic and philosophical leanings – despite my own fascination with the abstract. I suspect that the interest in productivity – most likely a reflection of Protestant culture, despite my family’s broad atheism/agnosticism/antitheism – will be a part of my thinking forever, and I end up asking, what do these people produce?
A casual look indicates: endless, pointless verbiage. These people spout rationalizations for what they do, what they want, what they’re going to do; neurotic wheel-spinning that rarely has a specific aim. And it’s not relaxation between intense, difficult tasks; these are people who use talking as a way of avoiding introspection. I admit to a vague class resentment at people who are rich enough that all their problems are self-inflicted, but it’s the reflexive evasion of soulfulness that rankles me.
In real life, I’ve known a lot of poor people like the characters in The Big Chill; inveterate bullshitters who evade any kind of autonomy. Leftists in my economic class have often romanticized poor people as hard-working, intelligent, and wise, which I know is inaccurate and believe is unhelpful; in my experience, stupidity is handed out to poor and rich alike, and it’s more productive to recognize that the overall social landscape is vastly improved by reduction of poverty regardless of which individuals deserve it or not.
But I must admit, the poor bullshitters I’ve known get much more of my sympathy and understanding – well, because I know where they’re coming from. I know everyone struggles to figure out the meaning of their life, and I know how much harder that is when you’re weighed down by existential threats that tax the energy and attention you have. When you don’t know what you want, you’ll reach for simple comforts as often as you can; it took the relative security of my current home to really figure out what makes me happy.
I look at these rich fuckwits and their soulless posturing, and I think – you have nothing in the way of yourself. I don’t actually resent rich people who don’t spend every second of their lives and every dollar they have trying to improve the world, because it’s not like I’m doing that either, but I do resent them not putting things into the world every day. Sam (Tom Berenger), Karen (JoBeth Williams) and Michael (Jeff Goldblum) are creatives, which is morally correct, and Nick is a drug dealer, which I softly approve of in a moral sense, but everyone else has these pointless, boring jobs that at best stimulate the economy. If the way you make a living is by selling your business for a shitload of money with a little insider trading on the side, who gives a fuck what you have to say?
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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A bunch of games I played and how they make me feel.
Yeah, I'll take a fucked up concept with everything on it, please.
Being meta without winking at the audience.
Department of
Conversation
I haven’t seen this, but “talking as a way to avoid introspection” certainly rings true as a portrait of a certain kind of person who feels self-satisfied about how well they perceive their neuroses and failings: “I can’t (or won’t) try to improve myself, even in the form of getting over this, but I can analyze my own minutiae.” I can sympathize with it if there’s a real sense of agony there, but sometimes it’s just pleasure at their own supposed complexity, which is as deeply obnoxious as it sounds like these characters are.
The movie’s more interesting in the context of “these characters sold out, now what the hell do they do,” but that’s still NOT that compelling a moral dilemma. Nagisa Oshima’s Night and Fog in Japan is a way, way stronger and more fraught movie about leftists in freefall, meanwhile.
e Good choice of a dialogic response to Kasdan’s “yuppie” opus (which was a wain copy of John Sayles’ THE RETURN OF THE SECAUCUS SEVEN, which initiates the themes of the later flick but feels quite pale compared to what European and Japanese films were doing).
One of the main problems of the film is its brushing away any acknowledgement that “selling out”, or living a conventionally materialistic bourgeois life, is a choice. I’d say that the American dialogic equivalent of this is Michael Mann’s THIEF, which underscores Tristan’s point concerning the clash between the “work ethic” world view and the goal-oriented one aimed at achieving security for familial connectedness. Mann’s protagonist has to plan out each step in achieving the latter goal, which involves modifications in how he manages his professional life. In THE BIG CHILL one feels that such comforts come from meeting unquestioned expectations rather than about meaningfully committing one’s labor to a vision of life. It never really questions the value of this latter type of commitment, or how that lifestyle contributes to the characters’ sense of ennui to begin with.
What did we watch?
Red vs Blue, Season One, Episode Five
It genuinely blows me away how much this dumb webseries from my teenage years plays on very classic comedy. There’s an extended sequence where Church, possessing Lopez’s robot body, accidentally gets the guys to break his leg functionality and simultaneously takes control of the Reds’s jeep, and he ends up causing chaos while yelling at Tucker and Caboose as the jeep interprets words like “drive” and “turn around” as commands. So you have the individual comedy of Church getting exasperated at the guys, the Reds dealing with getting brutally attacked, the comic interplay of two related events, and the perfect comic timing of cutting between them.
There’s also a few other, smaller, classic gags. Sarge rationalising everything he doesn’t want to believe is true is one of my favourites, because it’s a very easy and funny character gag. There’s also Donut perfectly and accurately articulating what’s actually going on and nobody believing him because ghosts possessing robots is insane.
“No, I was just trying to be helpful.” / “Yeah, well, you’re failing.”
“It doesn’t seem like that big a deal. You hardly used your legs anyway. I’ve never heard of a grown man asking for so many piggy back rides.” / “Hey! I told you: that was for science.”
“I’m confused. That actually seems like a good idea.” / “I know.” / “But Caboose said it.” / “I know!”
“Wait a second. Did you see something weird?” / “Yes I did. Once, when I was a small child, I saw a man who claimed to be my uncle do something with a garden hose that haunts me–”
“And Sheila will love me again, and this time for who I am, not just for my stunning good looks. But for those too.”
Sadly, as this was multiple episodes edited together and not five minute segments as originally ‘aired’, we do not get the Sarge’s Uncle story outtakes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3_NYnZkMC8
Live Music – a Sunday matinee featuring Sweet Williams, who are one of those kind of slow, churning guitar bands with big fuzzy riffs that the frontman kind of yelps over, I’m not sure who to really compare them to although I’ve definitely seen other bands in the same kind of vein before… the kind of thing that would get released on Touch & Go records I guess. Both supports were droney experimental projects, one solo and one band… both pretty good.
Glastonbury – aka Live Music, but on TV. Didn’t catch a ton of sets but really enjoyed Four Tet and Neil Young. Pulp’s “secret” set was fun but having seen them play an extended version in the flesh last weekend, nothing too revelatory. Bunch of other stuff I’d like to check out but I always seem to lose momentum once it’s no longer actually “live”.
Woo, live music! Ironically the BBC and Glastonbury’s outrage over Bob Vylan’s statements made me check out their music, as is often the case with frothing controversy. It’s pretty cool!
Haha yeah it’s pretty funny that they were so wound up about Kneecap that they didn’t realise that other bands may share similar opinions.
American politicians freaking out about Vylan now, again not realizing this might make people like them.
*googles* huh, so apparently Bob Vylan is an actual band and not some kind of vampiric Bob Dylan.
Woooo live music! Woooo “live” music!
Zelig — The technical achievement is so successful that it quickly disappears and you find yourself relating only to the work itself. And the way it’s played straight is very funny throughout. But I’m constantly surprised, even knowing his filmography as I do, how Allen’s reputation as a narrow filmmaker of relationship drama among New York intellectuals is so woefully incomplete. He’s always been a high-concept auteur, and weird swings like this are the norm, not the exception.
Farrow truly comes into her own here (and in their next picture together — stay tuned) as Allen’s muse. In this movie she has only a handful of lines, as she mostly appears in the mocked-up archival newsreel footage. But even with so little dialogue she creates a character, showcasing both Dr. Fletcher’s insecurity and her drive while also illustrating how she opens up as her personal and professional relationship with Leonard grows. Allen’s acting is also very good here, as the concept doesn’t permit his usual comic asides which are funny but not exactly immersive.
Broadway Danny Rose — Three of Allen’s last four pictures have been primarily or exclusively in black and white. I’ve seen this one so many times I hardly notice that choice any more, but it works here to heighten the unreality of this adventure story, as well as the connections to the past that are text in the script (Uncle Milty, the comics talking about the old days, and of course the reemergence of a boy singer from the Fifties). Speaking of, Nick Apollo Forte is a great find, playing Lou perfectly as a big personality who is content to let other people do his thinking for him.
Also, more excellent acting moments from Allen in this film, especially in the last several minutes as the emotional stakes become real. But Danny still has that same flamboyant walk even when walking down a hospital corridor — he really is this hustling little goofball even in a somber moment.
Two of his best movies in part because they aren’t about a very guilty man getting away with horrible crimes!
I thought Young refused to have his set televised? Did he change his mind, again, at the last second? I caught some cell video on YT. He seemed energetic.
Yeah he changed his mind for whatever reason. I’m glad he did! It was a great set, his voice sounds amazing for 79 years old.
Wooooo live music in the morning and on TV!!
Dirty Work – A fine time on Tubi before it expires! Not a perfect movie at all, sometimes 90s comedies are like digesting a fellow straight guy’s id, but this really makes a case against the Apatowian comedy I grew up with, heart and jokes often battling for dominance, and for a lazy narrative armed with nasty, crazy setpieces. (“Now you’re using the chainsaw on ME!”) The homeless guy waxing about the poignancy of his life and Cole’s emptiness, the camera slowly tilting into his face, only to get undercut every time is a truly good filmmaking joke. You want poignancy? Go see some Oscar bait.
Jagged Edge – Jeff Bridges is accused of killing his heiress wife and Glenn Close is his lawyer. Who also becomes his lover, even though that is a total violation of ethics. DA Peter Coyote is convinced Bridges did it, Close is sure he didn’t, and investigator Robert Loggia helps Close win the day. Only, no, Glenn’s been manipulated the whole time! And of course this being a movie scripted by Joe Esterhazy, it sinks into absurdity. And to make matters worse, the final shot of the dead killer is shot so poorly that it’s hard to tell if it’s Bridges or the only other suspect. (It’s not just me. Siskel and Ebert did a special segment to explain the ending to confused viewers.) There’s what to like here in most of the performances (Loggia got an Oscar nom), Richard Marquand’s direction of the courthouse elements, and the 80s-ness of it all, with Close being a divorced mom as well as a lawyer. But it really does come apart in the end.
The Practice, “”Pilot” – And speaking of courtroom dramas, time for a watch-through of David E. Kelley’s long running series about a struggling Boston law firm where the lawyers will do anything for their clients, trsding legal ethics for a possibly higher calling. The show, meant as a counterpoint to LA Law, immediately has its mission statement. One case involves lead attorney Bobby Donnell (Dylan McDermott) moving heaven and earth to get a teenager off of an unfair drug possession charge; the second case has Lindsay Dole (Kelli Williams) trying to fight Big Tobacco and butting heads with her former mentor; and the third has Eugene Young (Steven Harris) defending a man accused of exposing himself three times. All that plus hyper-competent secretary Rebecca Washington (LisaGay Hamilton) and tough plus sized Ellenor Frutt (Camryn Manheim). The cast grows from here, but this core is in place instantly. All are great but Harris come out on fire. Drected by Mick Jackson.
Sherlock and Daughter – Wrote this up in Captain’s Log, and will continue to do so. TLDR: Really mid, but Thewlis is a great Holmes and there might be a good story here.
The Avengers, “A Touch of Brimstone” – A new version of the infamous 18th century Hellfire Club plots to take over the UK. So Steed and Peel become members. And soon enough, Emma Peel is wearing that (in)famous leather corset with high boots and a spiked collar. It’s all a bit ridiculous, but the look of utter contempt Diana Rigg wears as Emma is paraded about at least questions to some degree the rank misogyny of things (she’s the one who stops the bad guy). That outfit and much of this episode would inspire Chris Claremont and John Byrne to make their own Hellfire Club, complete with Jean Grey in her version of Rigg’s outfit and the White Queen, Emma Frost (get it?). Guests include Peter Wyngarde and Carol Cleveland before Python.
Frasier, “Perspectives on Christmas” – A rotten December 25 as seen by everyone but Frasier while each gets a massage. A mixed bag because “Niles is stuck in an elevator” is a lot more harrowing than “Martin has to sing.” The most interesting bit? Daphne really has no idea Niles is into her at all.
MASH, “Payday” – Everyone gets their pay for the week, but an offhand remark by Hawkeye about losing $3,ooo in fees at home somehow leads Radar to request that money. Some good bits, such as Margaret tricking Frank into giving her the good pearl necklace he bought his wife – the relationship is starting to show signs of fraying – and a poker game, and it’s all a bit scattershot.
Club World Cup, PSG vs Inter Miami, firsr half – I don’t know a lot about soccer, but I can tell a great team from a mid team. PSG is great. Inter Miami is not.
Yeah, I found Jagged Edge to be awfully mid.
I suppose a script by a schlockmeister balanced by direction by someone who was coming into his own is going to be mid.
I think it’s in the Sliver review where Ebert has had enough of Esterhaus and points out this is at least the second movie where the killer is revealed after they are killed and it still isn’t clear who it’s supposed to be.
Disclosure
For Movie Club. Half of this is a sexual harassment quasi-legal drama with the typical roles reversed, and half of it is corporate intrigue, and those two halves do not combine all that well. The sexual harassment part is where the real juice is, but even it’s marred by not being quite sleazy enough: it keeps wanting you to stroke your chin and say, “Ah, this is really saying something, isn’t it?” And it’s not; it’s not really saying something. The situation it creates is so elaborate and overly specific and bizarrely labyrinthine that it can’t say much about anything but itself–any moments of insight are drowned out by over-complication and villainous smirking. The various moral objections I could make to it are second to my objection to not having a good time. Also, I don’t want to play Myst every time I need to save a fucking file.
That being said, this has a strong cast, and when they lean into the sleaze–Dylan Baker and Donald Sutherland are especially good at that–there’s a palpable sense of fun. And there are two scenes that are almost worth the price of admission: Roma Maffia breaking down the position Michael Douglas is in and the centerpiece sex scene, where Demi Moore is especially electric and, by the end, when she’s stalking out of her office with her blouse open, screaming down the stairs, almost feral in her fury. (I will admit to some very shallow appreciation for that whole scene as well. I mean, damn.)
Lucy
Scarlett Johansson becomes an affectless sci-fi action heroine while Morgan Freeman spouts an endless fountain of bullshit, and I become obsessed over ScarJo killing this poor cabbie. Seriously, the movie pitches her end as a grand sacrifice, nobly passing on her knowledge to humanity and becoming one with the infinite in the process, but she seemed to lose her empathy as she activated more of her brain and she still wasn’t smart enough to promptly kill one of the few guys in the movie she actually needed to kill, so I’m not sure we want her guiding our collective future.
Interesting as a ScarJo vehicle, because it is fun to see her animated and frazzled at the beginning–and movingly terrified, once she’s nabbed–before she shuts down into cool action mode and her humanity is pruned away. Her performance makes me feel a sense of loss for the person she was, even though that doesn’t feel like it’s something the movie is all that interested in. But overall, just too much wild bullshit here for me to enjoy it. This also falls into the category of uncanny valley justifications for plot, where we’re forced to listen to too many attempts to convince us this is science for me to hand-wave it as effectively magic, but also the science doesn’t remotely make any sense. Just say, “It’s a drug that activates more of your brain, and we don’t know what all that will do!” and be done with it!
The Manxman
A Hitchcock silent film. It’s a tragic love triangle story, and therefore not really Hitchcockian in feel, but I liked it very much and am looking forward to talking about it on this week’s Streaming Shuffle.
And more Andor and Murderbot, but those write-ups will go on the TV round-up post as soon as I, uh, write them.
“Also, I don’t want to play Myst every time I need to save a fucking file” — all of the computer shit in Disclosure is pure cheesy gold (golden cheese?), I love it. This is an incredibly stupid movie and ‘it keeps wanting you to stroke your chin and say, “Ah, this is really saying something, isn’t it?” And it’s not; it’s not really saying something’ sums it up perfectly, but I thought it was a hoot in its dumbness. And this is mostly because of Michael Douglas, the purest expression of Boomer arrogance/wounded realization who ever walked the earth, he is a smarmy delight but also somehow manages to retain a bit of sympathy, if nothing else as a such a put-upon dope. He may be a lech but how do you not feel for a guy being stalked by a giant cyber robot Demi Moore?
Demi Moore’s avatar moving towards him inch by inch like a satanic progress bar advancing is such a fantastic combination of hilarious and genuinely kind of unsettling.
I will freely grant you that Michael Douglas getting bullied by his wife for “sucking up to the people beneath him,” i.e., being kind of nice, is hilarious. As is him earnestly feeling out everyone in the movie to see if they’re his person on the inside: “Are you … a friend?” It was the kind of dumb movie that it was a ton of fun to watch with my wife.
The Manxman was an unexpected entry when the Screen Drafts podcast did a big Hitchcock ranking and they spoke very highly of it – been meaning to check it out since then! Thanks for the reminder.
And this was my reminder to check out Screen Drafts!
It’s a lot of fun if you can get on board with how convoluted (and often extremely long) it is. Since I mostly use podcasts to distract me during long drives and tedious chores, I consider those things a bonus!
Lol, I saw Lucy in theaters and had a dumb good time, but remember double taking when Lucy’s big revelation about humanity is, uh, some crap we talked about in dorm rooms while Morgan Freeman’s telling her how she’ll be remembered for her sacrifice. (Shades of Wandavision.)
I had that experience with The Matrix, which is part of why I’m one of the few strong supporters of the second and third movie.
I would fucking love to play Myst every time I had to file something.
Just remember not to save your final file in either brother’s book.
Petitioning Lester to replace the defunct downvote button with a Super-Upvote one for occasions like this.
Salute of the Jugger — Rutger Hauer leads a postapocalyptic travelling rugby team that plays with a dog’s skull as the ball, David Webb Peoples of Blade Runner and Unforgiven screenwriting fame writes and directs, but this is a case where the roadmap is not the territory. Nobody here is half-assing it — Joan Chen as the new player is doing a shit ton of her own stunts and getting knocked around quite a bit — and Peoples leaves a lot of stuff on the margins to make the details of this world (filmed in Australia of course) tangible; my favorite is how after every match in a new town the local girls hang out like groupies to bang the dude players and how Peoples then cuts to the local boys (dweebs one and all) doing the same thing for the lady players. But the movie is weirdly inert, and a big part of this is on the game of Jugger itself — Peoples is aiming for Rollerball but is a lot closer to Quidditch, in the sense of two opposing ball-chasers doing all the real work and everyone else just dicking around, there could be strategy in the setup but there’s none in the movie. And the film builds to a big game that looks fairly cheap and also feels like the end of the beginning of Chen’s story, not the end of the story we’re watching — perhaps this is Peoples anticipating the coming of films split into multiple parts. A cult movie but one I am not in on.
Live music — I’m not familiar with Godspeed You! Black Emperor but I know not to sleep on them coming to town. They brought Marissa Anderson as an opener and she played intricate drones building off blues and a larger project of field recordings from countries the U.S. has fucked with over the past 50 years, Syrian violin and Pakistani singing were transfigured into guitar lines. Very cool stuff and a solo guitar was a good opener for GY!BE’s eight-piece (three guitars/two bass/two drums/violin) powerhouse, the opening of plooping double bass and violin scrapes was anxious and ominous before the violin line resolved into the hope of the title “Hope Drone.” They played a lot from their new album with some old ones as well, the time they take with their pieces (not so much songs as compositions with movements) leads to its own hypnosis and while the footage they screen can provide visual cues I was more interested in watching the band work to create this racket, their drummers in particular. The music was sometimes wistful, often resilient, and in many cases relentless — myself and a bunch of other people were headbanging at points (the riotous ending of I think “Raindrops Cast In Lead”?) and “Bosses Hang” built to one of those sixth-gear assaults, where everything goes up a notch at the end. But the band closed with the unsettling “BBF3,” which is built around a vocal sample of a guy railing against the government in the form of a judge making him pay a speeding ticket and then that guy talking up how many guns he has, and how he needs to be ready for what’s coming — GY!BE is a collective that stands in opposition to larger state brutality and indifference but here was one guy’s fear and hate spinning out and feeling like it was conjuring up everything horrible and oppressive right now, and the band’s music built off of that with tension and no release, no catharsis. The music ended in a five-minute feedback ripple and drone and eventually small licks crept in until, as the wash of noise faded, that hopeful violin line crept back, muted but present. Harsh music for hard times, this will be sticking with me for a while.
And the next night I dialed it back with Florry, who only have seven members, is that even a band. Wednesday/Lenderman adjacent indie country from Philadelphia, they brought out a good crowd at a small venue and while they were exhausted at the end of the tour they brought the goods, including a great cover of Commander Cody’s “Seeds and Stems.” Lead singer Francie Medosch has a weary yowl of a voice and put it to great use on harder yells, and the band unspooled some jams, pedal steel and violin and guitar creating a sloppier racket than GY!BE but a more joyful partying one. Hell yeah.
Hell yeah GY!BE – absolutely one of the great bands. Glad you enjoyed, their last couple of albums have been a major return to form for me and live they sound even better.
They’re such a force live, they played for two hours straight and while the volume varied the intensity did not. I think they are hitting your side of the pond later this year?
They’re playing a festival here in August but haven’t announced any other dates around it as yet. I saw the current album tour last year so I’m mostly up to date but if they do come anywhere near me I’ll definitely be tempted to go again.
Woooooo live music!!
FRIDAY
F1
First time. Very curious as a commercial for the sport, since it showcases a lot of spectacle and extraordinary stuff that the FIA would probably not allow in a race in a hundred years. Realism aside, Kosinski does the spectacle incredibly well, with a handful of breathtaking action scenes and no noticeable cheating from CGI or clumsy editing, just in-race stunts, near-misses and high-speed crashes.
The story is just what you’d expect and retreads other genre pictures, notably Ford vs. Ferrari and another Jerry Bruckheimer production/Hans Zimmer score, Days of Thunder. That latter point is interesting because when I saw Top Gun: Maverick my big complaint was that it lacked Bruckheimer’s signature bad taste and played it too safe by half (hypocritical of me, since I used to bemoan that lack of taste in stuff like Bad Boys II) and something similar happens here, leading to an agreeable movie and character but nothing like the out-of-left-field lunacy of “We looked like a monkey fucking a football!” or Nicole Kidman slipping into a heavy Australian accent in Days of Thunder, and that leaves behind a less memorably story. Maybe things would have been different if Shea Wigham’s character had stayed beyond the start of the movie, although Kerry Condon picks up the slack admirably and might be the best performance/presence here.
One slight problem in terms of craft, and this might have been too much to ask for non-professional actors but I did miss some closeups with the actual F1 drivers on hand to really sell their duels and interactions with the fictional characters. At times the pilots might as well be the non-Russians from the Top Gun movies, and the movies tries to make up for it by depending on F1 TV narrators, which is not a useful shortcut, and might be my least favorite trope in this genre. For example, even the best Rocky/Creed movies suffer from it.
All in all, a good time in the theater, and well worth watching in the big screen, not only because of the action but also to hear the audience reaction here when neighboring Ensenada shows up.
SUNDAY
Straw
First time. My wife’s pick on my mother-in-law’s recommendation. As far as Dog Day Afternoon retreads go this isn’t bad but it really only goes as far as Taraji P. Henson can take an underdeveloped, repetitive script. First Tyler Perry movie I’ve seen and things don’t get as nutty as adverstised but he saves one piece of luridness last. Shame he half-hearts it.
Nights of Caribia (Le Notti di Caribia)
First time. Watched it before it went off Mubi. It’s been ages since I last saw a Fellini movie for the first time and yet all the hallmarks are here: the naturality, the love for seedy settings, the eye for Italy’s run-down beauty and the trust in an actor letting them play a bigger-yet-smaller-than-life character in full display. Giuletta Masina is incredible in the role, balancing a charismatic character with her many contradictions and guiding her into tragedy that would break a weaker, more lurid movie but here it only endears her more. Great movie.
Killer’s Kiss – Other than some of his early, obscure documentary work, I have now completed Kubrick. And there’s a pretty consistent (and very steep) upward trajectory between Fear and Desire, this, and The Killing. The last is easily the most accessible of these films – actually maybe one of the most accessible of his whole filmography – but Killer’s Kiss shows off more of the precision and style that Kubrick would become known for. And even at this early stage the decisions feel more like deliberate evocations of a feeling rather than showboating as it does with the early films of even the most talented directors. Can’t say Kubrick was fully formed from the get-go – few good artists are – but it’s astonishing how quickly he asserted his process and vantage point on the medium.
What did we play?
Rematch – a new online football (soccer) game launched last week and some friends were talking about trying it out together. So I spent some time learning the basics and then we had a bunch of games together last night. You can do 3v3 up to 5v5 and the different team sizes make a lot of difference – you get more showboating solo players in the 3-a-side games and more teamwork in the larger teams. We had five of us so we could fill a team and take on random strangers, the rest of the team were also chatting at the same time but I’m such an online-gaming “noob” (I think I’m saying that right) that I don’t own a headset, although I could still hear them strategise and do my best to join in. It was a lot of fun – especially considering we were all a similar level of “not very good” – and I guess I now need more extremely cool nerd equipment for next time. I managed to score a couple of important goals, and the slide tackles are refreshingly brutal, also you can customise your player and everyone seems to go for “let’s make my guy look as weird as possible”.
You and I also played the game of deferentially deleting our threadstarters to leave the other person’s up, which is another fun online game!
I feel like I’ve never quite worked out how online group gaming works, but this makes me wistful about it, because it sounds fun.
Haha yes we did!
Yeah I had to get the other folk to just do whatever was necessary to drag me into the game because I had no idea about any of it, haha. But it was quite straightforward once things got going and I’m definitely looking forward to giving it another go with full Voice Chat Action.
Ran some Call Of Cthulhu. I ended up running the same module for two different groups, which was fun and illuminating. This may have shot up to my favourite TTRPG ever. More on my next essay.
Our DM was in Ireland. The nerve of her not running a game in another time zone while on vacation!
X-Men: Children of the Atom – Marvel vs. Capcom Fighting Collection: Arcade Classics on Nintendo Switch
Still trying to beat Arcade Mode. Switched to Cyclops and finally beat Sentinel, then switched to Storm to beat Omega Red after a long while. Up next is Wolverine, who’s beating my ass. Tried going back with Psylocke by I think I’ll need to switch around some more before I find something that works.
Game Day! We tried a new approach of splitting into two groups/two games but staying at the same long(ish) table while we did so, and it worked pretty well. I was victorious by a point in Alhambra, but came up short in Deep Blue while the others played Machi Koro and Roborally. Then the remainders did an extremely late night Betrayal at the House on the Hill which turned out to be a fun scenario where we all had to battle our evil twins. We were victorious, if you count only a third of the group surviving to see the final twin get defeated “victorious.”
https://www.pastemagazine.com/comedy/the-big-chill/40-years-later-a-boomer-father-and-millennial-son-revisit-the-big-chill
Hey, I wrote about watching this with my dad! And also found most of the characters insufferable. (He even agreed on rewatch that the movie was much more annoying than he remembered.) Always funny when one character meant to be the insensitive, stuffy asshole is actually correct (“life isn’t supposed to be fun”) and unwittingly exposes how entitled the boomer attitude is.
“A casual look indicates: endless, pointless verbiage. These people spout rationalizations for what they do, what they want, what they’re going to do; neurotic wheel-spinning that rarely has a specific aim. And it’s not relaxation between intense, difficult tasks; these are people who use talking as a way of avoiding introspection.”
You bring up Smith and Tarantino (and accurately peg their modes of talking), for me the king of cinematic talking is Richard Linklater and he largely avoids the pitfalls you describe by making his verbiage about exploration — people talking their way into something, or toward something. It might not be direct but it is introspective, although he enjoys loopy bullshit too.
“I suspect that the interest in productivity – most likely a reflection of Protestant culture, despite my family’s broad atheism/agnosticism/antitheism – will be a part of my thinking forever, and I end up asking, what do these people produce?–A casual look indicates: endless, pointless verbiage. These people spout rationalizations for what they do, what they want, what they’re going to do; neurotic wheel-spinning that rarely has a specific aim.”
You are on to something here, in that in the late 20th Century American Cinema, “prestige” drama mirrors the therapeutic process of self actualyzing wants, needs and goals in terms of constructing a personality, as opposed to seeing work as a means of foreseeing grace. Conversation, as a replacement of action, is a trope that animates the psychoanalytic process. The sustained gratification of the ego’s equilibrium has replaced the foreknowledge, or the lack, of salvation. THE BREAKFAST CLUB, which I analyzed back on the old-but-not-oldest site, nicely charts the institutionalization of group therapy, even to the point where it appears to be self-generating.
(in that film’s defense, it works better dramaitally in that the kids have some form of authority to work against, which necessitates some means of re-approachment against institutional hierarchy.)
Although American cinema has largely secularized the latter message in terms of mythology (as Kasdan aptly managed in his screenplays for THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK and RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK [which lays on Judeo-Christian metaphysics kind of thickly come to think about it]) these types of stories tend to be critically dismissed, perhaps as holdouts of the Hays Code’s implicit moralism. If Hughes and the more respectable Kasdan films have their opposite numbers in the ’80s, it lies in the films of Michael Mann (see above) and Paul Schrader, where work and private life remain a struggle and where the foretelling of grace is paramount.