Boy, people sure weren’t kidding about how racist this movie is, huh? Every moment of horror I had at the dehumanization of black people was beaten out by something else the movie indulged in; at first, the black faces we see are actual African-American actors, only for white people in blackface to start popping up. What’s particularly disturbing is how racism is baked into the very dramatic structure of the film – which is, itself, actually quite elegantly constructed.
The film begins with its white heroes in a comfortable, normal state of being surrounded by people they love. They’re attacked, horrifically, by the Northern aggressors, losing loved ones who heroically sacrifice themselves to keep the hordes at bay. Lincoln ends the aggression with the South humiliated, but willing to make peace, only for the hordes to take advantage of the confused peace and seize power, violently humiliating the white locals further, until a noble force rises up against them.
Like, I hated typing that out, even under the metaphorical heavy quotation marks, but it’s a compelling narrative. If there’s any value to watching The Birth Of A Nation, it’s a reminder that this is what bigots actually believe. The nice thing about straightforward dramatic structure is that it reflects somebody’s reality perfectly. Racists genuinely think of themselves as defending a beautiful way of life that their heroic forefathers nobly sacrificed themselves for against a degenerate horde.
And it kind of goes the other way. I was shocked at how this movie feels like it dehumanizes the white people, which is largely me projecting my disgust onto them; images of hundreds of white, smiling faces were repulsive to me, given the context that they had their freedom and pleasure on the backs of black slaves we saw not ten minutes ago. The violence dealt to them felt like a just result for, you know, using people as cattle.
Conversely, there’s a scene in the middle when the black abolitionists have risen to the government, and they lounge about with their bare feet up on the desks making jokes, and I automatically read them as the coolest people in the movie (it helps considerably that these were the few actors not hamming it up in the style of performance popular at the time).
I think this speaks to how this kind of narrative is very attractive. One of the ironic things about the Right’s obsession with calling the Left ‘professional victims’ is how much of its more extreme ideology is based around the injured pride we see in this film, where the Confederates are rising up against unjust and evil oppression and are just trying to preserve their way of life, right down to climactic imagery of someone clutching their crying preteen daughter as black Union officers beat down their door.
What’s fascinating is how particularly American this film’s take on these ideas is. One interpretation of America is that it’s racist, hyperindividualistic, and capitalist, and the film textually deals with the first two and subtextually deals with the second. The villains aren’t just villains; they’re an example of government overreach, forcing destructive rules on the little guy just trying to get by. Government law is presented as an absolute evil here, even when done by innocent, naive Abraham Lincoln who is hectored into the law.
Director DW Griffith also relies heavily on citing historical precedent; I suppose one advantage of silent film is that it gives opportunity to have footnotes, and he cites many sources for his clearly revisionist take on America’s Civil War. The obvious manipulation here compels me as a storyteller; I almost admire the way he makes his villains grotesque caricatures for his audience to be disgusted by; this is a product invented by a capitalist to make money, and nobody is more willing to give up their money for a comforting illusion than an American white supremacist.
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
i am not 100 percent sure this is the book I read, but I definitely read about how the Black community, led by a once-famous and now obscure Black newspaper editor named Monroe Trotter, pushed back against Birth of a Nation and how that led to the forming of the NAACP. And also how this movie was screened in the White House by Woodrow Wilson, whose racism has been downplayed by his admirers for over a century but was hardly a secret in 1915.
https://www.amazon.com/Birth-Nation-Legendary-Filmmaker-Crusading/dp/1586489879/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_product_top?ie=UTF8
One thing I was frustrated by as I wrote this was how difficult it was to find contemporary reviews of Birth Of A Nation. Be good to read this.
Yeah, this is another cultural memory that has been lost over time. I think only the most fringe (which is not to say non-existent) elements would say “you couldn’t make that today” about this movie, but importantly people were up and arms about its racism at the time it came out. I think sometimes it’s thought that just because something exists that it was accepted by all corners when it was made. Distaste for racism wasn’t invented in the 2000s.
What did we watch?
Venom: The Last Dance
Of a piece with the last two movies; they were always refugees from 00’s era superhero schlock where everything was gritty and ugly, with the hooks of a) Tom Hardy having a wacky dynamic with himself, b) a running commentary from a weak internet comment section and c) a bit more gore and violence than these movies usually have. This follows through with that; it does actually have a pretty great, inherently dramatic setup, where Venom reveals he put a macguffin in Eddie that is being hunted down by a terrifying being trapped outside the universe, and the things chasing him will only chase him if they do the full Venom thing, and meanwhile, the army is also chasing Eddie.
But this is more about wacky setpieces, so the movie doesn’t really get dramatically structured until the climax; indeed, there’s long scenes of setup and lots of the characters moping about their situation and its broader meaning (like Venom talking to Eddie about being a dad), something that only really works for me on the climax when Venom sacrifices himself for Eddie. And then the movie ends with a goddamned sitcom style set of clips as Eddie remembers Venom!
X-Men ‘97
This is one of the dorkiest stories I’ve ever seen. This is as much attuned to the fandom instinct as Free!, but in a very different way; it’s basically what the loudest and whiniest fans are begging for, where it’s exactly like the thing that came before but more technically ambitious, a little more horny, a little more gay, and a lot more violent. Importantly, it exaggerates the soap-opera aspects of the original series into turgidness; the original series took itself seriously, but this descends into absurd navel-gazing at the drop of a hat, with even characters like Magneto torturing themselves over their decisions.
In my experience, fans – especially comic books fans – love this shit. it works for me with characters like Cyclops and Xavier, prone as they are to these thoughts; indeed, Xavier seems to reach his full potential as a character in this approach, with the first episode focusing on him being one of my favourites (especially because it gets psychedelic*). If it doesn’t work for me in total, it’s because the writers are trying to use the superhero genre the way I use pop culture essays: as a search for genuine moral truth. Stories aren’t quite as good at that as just writing an essay; I can be factually and morally incorrect as I chase a thought around all day, but characters have to make decisions, make them now, and live with the consequences.
*This is also true of my other favourite episode, where Storm fights a demon (played by the same actress!) in order to get her powers back, with some sick dialogue and animation. In general, the fight scenes are the best part of this show, with some influence from Neon Genesis Evangelion of all things.
“Jeeeaaan!” [Wolverine every time he’s dazed, injured or in a fugue state.]
I liked X-Men 97 a lot, perhaps because I am, in fact, dorky as hell. My biggest problem was actually the pacing, which didn’t give the characters as much time to breathe and probably made it feel clunkier because they were busy rushing from plot point to plot point.
Yeah, I was curious how fast this played to a true fan – the fast pace (which the navel-gazing speeches helped slow down) is how a lot of superhero comic stories come off to me, powering through a hundred spectacular things happening without really processing any of them.
(Also, I hope ‘dorky as hell’ comes off as value neutral when I say it)
Runaway Jury — not as good as The Firm or The Rainmaker, Gary Fleder (director of some Shield episodes, apparently) is no Coppola and weirdly uses slo-mo a bunch in his pop legal drama. But the bones, altered as they are (guns replacing cigarettes as the lawsuit topic) are strong and the cast is great, Hackman is wonderfully amoral and mean about it, he owns Hoffman’s ass at one point and the movie’s big failing is how it works overtime at the end to introduce not just dramatic but moral comeuppance. You don’t need to do that when you have Luis Guzman shaking his head with a disappointed look on his face! He’s just one of the many Guys here, the god Bruce McGill as a blustery judge is a great pull but there’s also Bill Gunn and Bruce Davison and Stanley Anderson and Nora Dunn and my man Leland Orser. Nick Searcy is here! Movies used to have Nick Searcy in them, why don’t they anymore?
“Searcy is an outspoken conservative; his political and interpersonal behavior on social media, such as Twitter, has been highlighted in several news outlets. Searcy has stated, “I know people have feelings. That’s why I try to hurt them.” … In 2014, Searcy responded to several individuals in a discussion of same-sex marriage and incest, during which he mocked individuals and journalists on the basis of their weight, after they had called him and other Republicans “racist.”[15] Searcy also routinely ridiculed people because of their weight in 2015, again in response to their charges that those who opposed Democratic policies were “racist””
Oh, he’s a huge piece of shit, that’s why. Leave that to Hackman doing it in a movie, pal.
Hey, Runaway Jury synchronized viewing! And even synchronized slo-mo complaining!
The cast really is terrific: Orser and McGill were particular second-tier highlights for me, aside from the amoral excellence of Hackman.
I remember seeing Searcy being obnoxious on Twitter once–in particular, constantly retorting that he’s super-successful no matter what they think, and they should see his house! I’ve liked him in various roles (he’s great on Justified), but I’m very glad his star is waning.
Hahahaha that fucking slo-mo! It’s such a TV move, which is why it really sticks out beyond just being out of place as a device. Robert Elswit is giving you some classic 90s warmth even though it’s a 2003 picture (which perhaps accounts for some of the odd vibes, the update of this story not even a decade later is off) and you’re doing this with him. Shameful.
I was very happy to see Orser be a relatively normal dude with no physical/mental degradation for a change! Let my guy not have shit bursting out of him/into him for once!
I kinda liked this one more than The Firm or The Rainmaker even though the filmmaking is more meat-and-potatoes. The cast is absurdly stacked and it makes the mechanics of jury selection into such a compelling plot device. I think I watched it immediately after being sent home from jury service without seeing any action though which may have given it extra context points. Also Rachel Weisz kept phoning me up and asking me to add another star on Letterboxd.
I checked up on the book and there is a lot more Runaway in its Jury (Cusack gets up to a lot more shenanigans) and I could feel the lack of that here. Especially after the juror-focused Juror #2, the jury as characters are all great but they too sidelined by the end.
I have a soft spot for Runaway Jury, in that my dad specialized in interviewing jurors in civil cases in order to see if there were potential reasons to appeal a verdict, or whether the sentiment of the average jury was so dead set against his clients to begin with that an appeal probably wasn’t worth filing. The film is a total fantasy but fast paced, notably well acted and cast, and twisty enough for repeated watches when cleaning the den.
Den of Thieves 2: Pantera
Possibly more competently made than the first movie, but it feels like it loses some of the shaggy, angry intensity that made that movie stick. This sort of glances off me, even though parts are enjoyable. It does carry on the now-series tradition of lacking any new ideas and not fully digesting its influences; it’s more like Ready Player One for crime and action nerds. Yeah, I remember that from Ghost Protocol. I too have seen Rififi. Out of Sight with two dudes, but don’t make it gay, apparently. The Avengers, seriously? I’ve seen the “steal from a lot of things, not just one thing” theory, but you have to do more than stitch this stuff together into a quilt! At a certain point it starts actually borrowing primarily from real crimes, which is at least refreshing.
The New Centurions
For movie discussion group. The ending feels like it reaches too hard for significance (and while I like Stacy Keach, his acting in the last scene is a little too flat), but the slice-of-life cop drama, complete with the sense of managing a living and eccentric city, is really solid and entertaining. Great George C. Scott as a veteran officer so thoroughly knit into the job that he can’t make a life outside it, can’t go from an urban scale to a domestic one, from a community-level existence to a familial one.
Runaway Jury
So much of this is dumb, and I don’t really care. (I do care about all the slo-mo, though. There have probably been under a dozen justified uses of slo-mo in all of cinema, and rest assured, none of them are in this movie.) Sometimes you just want plans, real-world stakes, a dash of humor, and Gene Hackman playing a man so secure in his own apathetic evil that he might as well be the devil himself. Essentially a heist movie at its core, and an entertaining one, even if it’s far from great.
The Shield, “Bitches Brew” through “Family Meeting”
And so it’s over, until the next time. Still and always the TV love of my life.
I need to watch Pantera but this is good calibration. And similar to my reaction to the first one — I was not on board with its blatant borrowing and only fully appreciated its meatheadedness on a second viewing, maybe something similar will happen here.
The smartest thing that the producers did on THE NEW CENTURIONS is build up Scott’s character from a walk on in the novel (albeit one whose wisdom was spoken of in reverence and legend) to a full on paternalistic character, providing a connective spine to the mentor/mentee relationships and a sense of mournfullness to the proceedings. I think my main complaint is that, in moving the action forward about 6 or 7 years, that sense of an organic state of urban tension and unrest doesn’t lead up to the conflagation of the Watts Riot, which would galvanize the festering tensions between the populace of certain sections of the city and the police throughout the late 1960s through the 90s. I love the grittiness and sometimes surreal episodes in the film (I wonder if the hooker wagons still operate) but it feels a bit slack. The problem with the ending, I think, kind of results from that.
The Killer Elite – James Caan, in the employ of a private contractor for the CIA (think Blackwater but spies instead of soldiers), is betrayed by brother in arms Robert Duvall, and shot in the elbow and knee. A year later, able to walk and to fight again, Caan gets a chance for his revenge. Sam Peckinpah tries his hand at a cynical post-Vietnam/Watergate thriller, but as much as he might have been a cynic, he doesn’t really make it work for his style. Doesn’t help that, to borrow a phrase from Blank Check, one of the producers was cocaine. Or that Caan was given input into the story, only to make it ever less coherent. Strangely, the best scenes are of Caan rehabbing himself, falling for his nurse, and holding himself together. We don’t get a lot of the sort of over the top action we might expect from Bloody Sam till the end, and it was actually tamped down to get a PG. And then it’s glorious to watch if like that style but utterly incoherent. The movie’s saving graces are Caan’s steady performance, good work from Mako and Bo Hopkins (and Burt Young some of the time) and Peckinpah’s use of San Francisco and environs. The closing scenes are shot at a now-dismantled mothball shipyard in the Bay Area, row after row of decommissioned US Navy vessels just turning to ghosts. And in case you asked, Duvall is not in this much and seems to have phoned it in, and shows no connection with Caan in the brief Godfather reunion.
March Blandness – Got to see the one buzzer beater and parts of others games, but the sheer chalkiness of it all, and the endless praises for coaches, made this year’s first week a snooze. Just really hard to care about the SEC invitational.
M*A*S*H, “Bombed” – The camp is pounded by artillery from the UN forces, even as wounded roll in. A few big leaps here to make this happen, like hours of shelling that don’t cause much real damage and your own side being THAT inept for that long. But some good moments, such as Margaret and Trapper being stuck in a supply shed and seeing just how they react, followed by a jealous Frank proposing to Margaret and immediately retracting it. We also get a radio broadcast from Seoul City Sue, somehow on the same station as a Bob Hope show. Seoul City Sue was real, North Korea’s version of Tokyo Rose, whose fate remains unknown.
Frasier, “Kisses Sweeter than Wine”/”Sleeping with the Enemy” – In the former, Frasier’s apartment needs a set of last minute repairs just as he is hosting the wine club he took years to gain admission to, and the repair crew is led by someone who Daphne is instantly smitten with. Naturally Niles tries to but in, but Frasier makes things right. A fairly sweet if forgettable episode. The latter has Frasier leading a staff revolt against Kate once more, but when things come to a head, a different sort of sparks fly. It’s all very funny, but it just feels like no one knew what to do with Kate if they fell back on essentially an upscale version of Sam and Diane. To be continued…
Burt Young is much more interesting in Killer Elite than either Caan or Duvall.
Young has some great moments – talking to the cop about the bomb stands out – and a few really bad line reads. For some reason, Burt as the voice of the exhausted grunt saying to hell with both sides in the Cold War doesn’t resonate at all, even if the sentiment is earned.
Complete agreement, Burt Young forever. Such a boss here.
I think Killer Elite has a really bad reputation that it does not live down to at all, it’s not great by any means but has lots of good moments and a great cast (like Young in particular). If anything, I was surprised by how much I was enjoying it and then felt disappointed it wasn’t better, not angry at a turd. I do think Peckinaph’s editing is slipping hard with the first ninja fight though, although the big shipyard finale helps make up for it.
Peckinpah, after a cerain point, seemed incapable of disguising his attitude towards his material, actors, or conditions on the set imposed by the producers, which resulted in films like THE KILLER ELITE, which reeks with utter contempt for the script (by Stirling Silliphant, who adapted THE NEW CENTURIONS) and the film making process and extreme disinterest in dramatic and stylistic coherence. It’s a bad movie but an undeniable auteurist statement.
Silliphant – never a major figure but a workhorse with credits things like In the Heat of the Night and The Poseidon Adventure – didn’t help things by insisting his future wife Tiana Alexandra-Silliphant be in the movie (as Mako’s daughter). A bit of a pity that Peckinpah didn’t take more advantage of her martial arts skills, though (she studied under Bruce Lee).
Silliphant’s early credits are pretty solid, particularly THE LINE-UP, which was discussed on the previous site on numerous occasions. His work post POSEIDON was pretty dire.
Interiors — The rap on this is that it was Allen trying too hard to break away from his comic reputation even as he had already realized the hybrid comic drama style (in Love and Death and Annie Hall) that would be his most successful mode for the rest of his career. Every character and every scene is morose and plodding, at least until the third act. Indeed, this was my own view when I first saw it maybe 20 years ago. But that’s wrong! This movie is great and constantly enjoyable. It’s not funny but the characters are always dramatically entertaining as they wrestle with the emotions that drive them. And it’s not buttoned up at all — quite the opposite. Everyone is communicating their grievances and insecurities very openly in a way that is almost thrilling to a Midwesterner like myself.
Geraldine Page, an interior designer with a rigid and severe aesthetic sense, is the mentally ill matriarch of three daughters, the legitimately talented poet (Diane Keaton), the passionate but hapless middle sister (Marry Beth Hurt), and, in a smaller part, the modestly successful Hollywood actress (Kristin Griffith). Page’s husband (E.G. Marshall) has recently left her, and throughout the movie she constantly expresses what is plainly a ridiculous hope for a reconciliation. Page is astounding here, both fragile and indomitable — no one can stand to contradict her, partly because she simply ignores and blows past any critique and partly because she might take something the wrong way and have a complete collapse. It’s a difficult line to make real. Hurt is also great as a woman who is so empathetic and striving but also so wounded that she sees any comment as an attack and immediately lashes out. (Which is aggravated by Keaton, who is so burdened by the false bravado she feels she must offer her mother and her husband that she sees Joey as the one outlet for any opinion other than unwavering support.) And then in swans Maureen Stapleton as Dad’s irrepressible new squeeze. Hijinx ensue.
I can’t say I was looking forward to this as my Allen retrospective approached it. But it’s to my mind one of Allen’s most successful films so far.
Black Dynamite – Unintentional article counterprogramming! Is this the funniest movie made in the last 25 years? It’s definitely the best parody made since Airplane!, lovingly mocking not just exploitation movies, but a very particular vein of exploitation movies, a thousand titles that have fallen out of public consciousness but whose aesthetic have seeped into the collective. On a technical level, it’s not just mimicking the era’s grain and scratches (eat shit, every other indie horror movie released last year), it mimics the framing and zooms of a hurried 70s production and cuts like it was mounted on a flatbed with a deadline. It even has the inconsistent coloring from using mismatched film stock and occasional vignetting at the corners like they were using a long lens that didn’t quite cover the full frame.
The performances are also in perfect sync with the tone, playing the comedy of the scene in deadpan jokes (“If your mother were alive to see this she’d turn over in her grave”), and also suggesting a behind-the-scenes story of a cast of actors thrown into a particularly bad genre movie. Michael Jai White pivots between supreme confidence in his kung-fu and uncertainty about the lines he’s been given. Nicole Ari Parker is playing someone who is a much better actor than anybody else in the movie, attempting to bury her bewilderment with professionalism (would that they had made room for an extra scene during the credits where she goes comatose during a particularly meandering Black Dynamite speech before leaning into a perfunctory kiss). Credit to director Scott Sanders for doing an imitation of a sloppy director that only an assured director could pull off, varying up the performances to suggest a troupe of actors with different and unmodulated performances, some attempting to steal the scene and others standing around politely waiting to deliver their next line.
And speaking of those lines, a hilarious script, written from the point of view of an author losing their train of thought while trying to grope for the next story beat. Black Dynamite’s rival from the police force sneaks up on him with guns out, reminds him of their time in ‘Nam together unprovoked, then tells him they need him desperately before warning him not to get involved. The over-the-top punchlines have a much higher hit-to-miss rate than most parodies, and for every head smack on a boom mic there’s a half-dozen subtle jokes for enjoyment on repeat views.
I’m going to have to restrain myself for the rest of the day now, lest everything turn into a non-stop Black Dynamite quotefest. Guess I know what I’m watching this weekend.
This and Walk Hard were just a couple of years apart, I don’t think we’ve had anything close to that level ever since? Am I forgetting anything? Anyway I also want to rewatch this now, haha.
White’s charisma is off the charts here, both in rad badass mode but also in comic dupe mode — Vomas brings up Walk Hard and John C. Reilly is at a similar level but is also not beating up anything more threatening than a wall of sinks. It’s really frustrating how he hasn’t gotten that material or direction since, one of my bigger frustrations is a would-be franchise he starred in called Falcon Rising about a badass guy named Falcon yadda yadda yadda asses kicked etc., and it is so fucking juiceless you can hear the planned sequels drying up in real time.
My favorite moment there is the actor White is playing as Black Dynamite looking incredibly annoyed at that damn boom mic smacking his afro, you can’t blame the guy for getting pissed.
Whenever an in-movie joke would come up lame, he switches it to a meta-textual thing that makes it funny again. My favorite is when they encounter two young kids who both say their dad’s name is Black Dynamite. His response (“Shut up kids, lots of cats have that name.”) is delivered like with the energy of just having lost a debate with the director.
Live Music – three days in a row! A friend hosted a show to launch a book he’d “written” (it’s kind of a book of creative prompts but the whole thing is mostly a comedy bit) and reunited his old band that I never saw to headline it, which was cool – I drifted out of the local music scene a bit in the late 00s and there are a few acts that people talk about fondly that I regret missing, at least now I’ve seen this one!
Saturday was an all-day electronic music festival at the next city over, really enjoyed the social aspect (this is the city I lived in previously, so a lot of people I hadn’t seen for a while) but none of the music REALLY grabbed me, there were some theoretically interesting cult synth bands but things got a bit samey, maybe I should have done more homework and checked out some of the smaller acts.
Sunday I went to see British jangle-pop band The Tubs, they’ve had a bit of hype recently and put on a great show with a lot of fun on-stage chat (the drummer seemed to genuinely believe that he’d “seen a ghost” just before they played) and some excellent tunes.
Justified, S5 “Weight” – I didn’t have Mary Steenburgen on my “Justified Guest Star” bingo card but here we are. Always happy to see her but I possibly enjoyed the return of Dickie Bennett more, I love that little weasel. Danny’s fate in this episode is hilariously cruel, couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.
Wooo, live music!
Always good whenever Dickie Bennett turns up. I know it doesn’t even come up this season, but this his “you’d better h-h-h-hold your horses,” complete with reining-in gesture, absolutely kills me and is engraved in my mind forever.
Kinda makes me a little sad that we get so little Dickie and so much “any of the Crowes”, although Dewey unhitching his drug-filled car on a hill was some pretty entertaining stupidity. Good to see that Dickie has maintained his ridiculous hair in prison, while Ava’s hair possibly looks better now that she’s incarcerated? Maybe I would also benefit from a prison makeover, food for thought.
Woooooo live music!!
*a day passes*
Wooooo live music!!
*another day passes*
Wooooo live music!!
CHORUS
Woooooo live music! 3x
Then you’re Justified!
Bridesmaids
You know, I’d never seen this. Pretty good. We watched the unrated version, which supposedly just has extended versions of a few scenes– I don’t know which ones. Maybe didn’t enjoy it quite as much as its reputation led me to believe I would– even the showcase comedic scene everyone talks about was somewhat understated from what I was led to expect. (“Somewhat”– the part in the bathroom was still quite funny.) I think they needed a little more development for Rose Byrne’s character– I didn’t really buy the whole “Helen’s just been treated her whole life like she’s expected to plan everything!” rationalization when she’s just blatantly undermining and sabotaging Annie the whole time. It kind of just pissed me off that Lillian or anyone else couldn’t see that. Still, great showcase for Kristen Wiig, and Melissa McCarthy still nearly steals the film out from under her.
Abbott Elementary, “Audit”
A pretty fun, high-energy, high-stakes episode, as the consequences for bribing that new golf course for supplies are coming due for Abbott. The show got a little sloppy on some of the logistics, though (like, the teachers try to plan out how they’ll make sure their classes are all covered while they hide the equipment from the district, and then… they just seem to drop worrying about that), and structural / logical issues like that tend to bug me a little. Still, pretty fun episode, though. We’ll see if they’re serious about the ending twist or not.
The Righteous Gemstones, “To Grieve Like the Rest of Men Who Have No Hope”
Jesus fucking Christ, all the Cape and Pistol Society shit had me howling. Maybe the comedic highlight of what was already an extremely funny, and at points moving, episode.
The past is never dead. It’s not even past.
It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, “Mac Day”
I got inspired to rewatch this one after a really funny line from it was posted on social media in reference to some current events. It’s still funny as fuck, especially for how pathetic Mac is (“There’s nothing badass about breaking the law!”) and how much Country Mac is everything he wishes he was. And, hey, that meant seeing Seann William Scott on my TV twice this weekend!
The shitting scene is probably the worst (comedic) part of Bridesmaids! (I am exempting all of the boring non-comedic emotional crap, and even that isn’t that bad.) It works in the story but feels out of place in the comedy, like a “women can be gross too! Yay!” add-in. McCarthy, on the other hand, is in god mode throughout, incredible timing and as you note near-thievery but with the restraint to not shove Wiig out of her own movie.
The idea of the fanciest place possible turning into a shit- and vomit-covered mess is pretty funny in concept, but not quite as much in execution. Wendi McLendon-Covey getting her head puked on was pretty funny, though.
There are also some great bits like the third-act sequence when Wiig is trying to get Chris O’Dowd’s attention and finally just rams his car.
Chris O’Dowd’s utter meltdown about the busted light gets me right in the feels. I think part of it was that people had acted like the shitting scene was the height of both comedy and the movie, but having lower expectations for it meant I was pleasantly surprised by how much the movie was a character study and about relationships. I think we’re meant to read Byrne as doing the same kind of unhinged overcorrection that Wiig has been doing, it just seems much more inexplicable and mean because we see her through Wiig’s eyes.
white lotus
Mike White perfectly captures the sensation of getting black out drunk and getting flashes of increasingly mortifying memories the next day, in a heightened, comical way.
What makes this a perfect dramedy is on display in two scenes with Jason Isaacs. His conversations with the guru and with parker posey about, respectively, death and whether it would be good for Piper to be less
materialistic, use dramatic irony in a way typical of farces. We of course know why Tim is talking about death and poverty; the honest responses he gets are almost perfectly calculated to trigger a response and his interlocutors could not know that.
Meanwhile the 3 blonde ladies are growing increasingly tense, but have not quite reached the fireworks factory.
scene 1: [frasier wearing a harvard sweatshirt, holding marty’s service pistol to his forehead]
“oh I just do it. What would they say? That Niles’s Jungianism is better than my freudianism.”
scene 2: “niles, what do you think death is like”
“the philosophers regarded death as just the undiscovered country. Seneca regarded it as nothing to fear.”
“I ‘ad a friend ‘oo ‘ad a near-deaf experience once. She said it was terrifying. Full o’ smoke and angry people and explosions. An’ I said ‘your majesty. That’s just the irish.’”
scene 3: “eddie, how would
you handle being poor?”
[howls, plays dead, whimpers]
What did we play?
Haven’t had time to start anything new really so I’ve just been dipping into Balatro when I have time to kill. It’s a really well balanced game, sometimes the random elements screw you over but sometimes they combine to form some high-scorin’ magic. I’ve unlocked all but one of the decks now so getting that last one is my current objective. Not a game where I feel like I’ll need to achieve everything but it definitely does the job when I’d rather not be doing something else.
Sister-in-law was in town with her kids which means lots ‘o games! We introduced them to Deep Blue and I teamed up with my ADHD nephew, who pushed our luck to and sometimes over the limit. But that turns out to be the way to play, perhaps, as we finished middle of the pack once and then eked out a victory in a high-scoring game. Not sure I would follow him on a real expedition deep-sea diving, but it sure worked out on cardboard. The grown-ups had a successful venture in Viticulture World, though we’re getting a little nervous that a win/loss depends almost entirely on whether a certain bonus tile gets drawn or not. Probably never going to supplant OG Viticulture in our hearts, but what could? Plenty of rounds of a Super Mario card game (nice and quick) and a nostalgic turn of a GameBoy e-reader Mario card game (boring as hell, hopefully she eBays that stuff before the price drops). A late-night Alhambra where my magnificent wall wasn’t enough.
Also had time for some tennis and didn’t completely embarrass myself, though my endurance needs a lot of work.
Game Boy e-reader Mario card game?
More Animal Well. I’m having a really good time with this, it’s just that I’ve only had a little bit of time to play on the weekends, so progress is slow. But now I am equipped with both a slinky and a bubble wand! The slinky may be my favorite of the tools so far, even if it sometimes rudely insists that I’ve left it too far from the stairs to work, when I know it knows that I thought I was close enough. Have also had my first boss fight with the chameleon, and it feels very typical of this game (again, instead of a weapon, I have a slinky) that the “fight” is really just “avoid the giant chameleon for long enough, letting it feed off everything else until it gets satisfied and leaves.”
The slinky puzzles are nicely satisfying, especially when you’re having to run between different buttons to raise certain bits of ground and keep it moving. I do love that bubble wand though.
Bubble wand is a lot of fun. One of the few (of the very, very many) hidden / optional / odd puzzles I haven’t yet completed requires it… and it’s just been so goddamn difficult to do right. (And I thought the puzzles in this vein that used the disc were tough…)
F-Zero 99 on Nintendo Switch
I didn’t have much free time this week but I did play a few races, notably winning a race with the Fire Stingray at Big Blue II. It’s the first race I win in that track, and the first normal, 99-driver race I win with the Stingray (I had only ever won with that car in Classic mode, with goes by SNES rules). I’m fairly certain that was the only car I had not won a 99 race with, so I’m quite happy at the moment.
My second playthrough of The Final Fantasy Legend, my mutants weirdly weren’t gaining health at all, and so when I got to Warmech (sorry, “Machine”), they couldn’t survive his second round of attack. That’s kinda lame and I don’t know if I have a solution to it. So I might just quit this one.
My buddy recommended a couple of games to me recently, so I might play Nine Sols this week. Try to catch up to where he is before I have to go in for wrist surgery and can’t play for a while.
Even just from reading this review, it’s easy to see how embedded this movie is in the American consciousness. Probably one of the more indelible examples of racist mythmaking, even though that’s a regrettably crowded field. And 100% to how the Right cherishes its own professional victim status without ever admitting to it, and how this point to how long that’s been happening and how deep it goes.
The contemporary horror novella Ring Shout does some interesting things with this movie as a catalyst and opening for a supernatural evil, and there’s a particularly bravura sequence with a public outdoor screening of it that goes epically haywire. Good stuff.
“The film begins with its white heroes in a comfortable, normal state of being surrounded by people they love. They’re attacked, horrifically, by the […] aggressors, losing loved ones who heroically sacrifice themselves to keep the hordes at bay.”
This has obviously been used over and over again in movies but in particular it is the opening of Horizon: An American Saga and that is pretty fucked up for Costner to pull. And like you say, in the structure and depiction it is extremely compelling.
Year of the Month update!
This April, we’ll be looking at 1999, so you can write about any of these movies, albums, books, et al!
TBD: James Williams: 10 Things I Hate About You
Apr. 7th: J. “Rodders” Rodriguez: The Scooby Doo Project
Apr. 8th: Bridgett Taylor: …One More Time
Apr. 16th: Sam Scott: Spongebob Season 1, Wakko’s Wish, Elmo in Grouchland, and/or Bartok the Magnificent
Apr. 18th: Cameron Ward: The Mummy
Apr. 28th: Tristan J. Nankervis: The Sixth Sense
And here’s how we’re wrapping up Silent Era Month!
Mar. 27th: Sam Scott: Peter and Wendy
Mar. 30th: Lauren James: The Well of Loneliness
Mar. 31st: John Anderson: The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog
Worth noting that the KKK did not exist in 1915. There had been a KKK during reconstruction but it hadn’t been active in 40 years. By this point all the actual veterans of the war were ancient. There is a direct causal line between this movie, the existence of the KKK, the red summer massacres, Tulsa, etc. It’s not like DWG invented racism single-handedly, obviously these currents were already there, but basically no directors or movies have come anywhere close to having the same magnitude of real
world impact or the same level of real world harm. Anyone can make propaganda for an existing fascist movement; this asshole invented his own fascist movement and made a propaganda film for it.
The only directors who might achieve a similar level of impact are cameron and verhoeven, inadvertently, since we clearly have fascist movement that is modeled off of the bad guys in starship troopers and they want to build human-killing robots.
Interesting how the KKK is one of the evils to be both created and destroyed by works of fiction, seeing as that Superman radio show made them look stupid.
(I am aware I am exaggerating the effect that show had in wiping out the KKK)