SPOILERS for the horror concept of Nope.
The horror concept of Nope, in which a horde of innocent people are digested inside an alien creature (nicknamed Jean Jacket by the protagonist) for several hours, fucked me up in a way few horror concepts have. Horror is often scary to watch in the moment, but my favourite horror tends to be things that dig into my brain intensely; one of my favourites is The Enigma of Amigara Fault, which was never scary to turn the pages on but fucked me up for days imagining being trapped in that awful position. Nope’s concept bounced around my head for about four days before it worked its way out of my system; it really took the thought ‘Hey, I could write an essay on this!’ for my mind to finally move on. It’s interesting specifically because of the number of layers to the horror that made it seem like an awful fate to me – that is to say, the number of fears it merged together.
CLAUSTROPHOBIA
This is a really obvious one. My boyfriend found the actual visualisation of the digestion process underwhelming, but this is a rare case where seeing it definitely made it all the worse to me. Jean Jacket’s digestion is mechanical, crushing his victims between large blocks, and we see how badly trapped they are. I know for a fact that if I were to be suddenly trapped in a small space in which I couldn’t move, I would immediately have a panic attack. Ricky Park (Steven Yuen) could arguably be said to deserve what happens to him – I wouldn’t agree but I could see the argument – and, at least, is the one who could have foreseen terrible consequences for what he was doing, if not this specifically.
But part of the horror is that all the other people were just tourists going to see a show, and it disturbs me to think of going out for a day to see entertainment and suddenly, quite brutally, being tortured to death. Of course, this is something that could happen whenever one leaves one’s house (and often within it); Nope contextualizes that within an entertainingly weird story. The major theme of the story is the entertainment industry’s exploitation of young people and animals; there is an extent to which audiences are complicit in this, and I don’t believe the audience here could at all be considered responsible in any way for what happens to them.
PHONOPHOBIA
Like many people on the spectrum, I have a terrific fear of loud noises, and screaming in particular is a sound I do not care for. The thought of being immobilized and painfully crushed to death is bad enough; the thought of having people screaming in my ear for that long would be unbearable. Writer/director Jordan Peele makes it clear that these people are dying over the course of hours and screaming the entire time; Peele has the good taste to interpolate this into the soundscape in a way that’s obvious without being overpowering, so that the idea of this constant screaming is present and unpleasant without being unbearable to sit through, which forces me to contemplate the horror of hearing it.
ANTHROPOPHOBIA
Piling on all of this is a specific fear of dying around strangers. In contemplating the vivid nature of the main horror sequence in the film – weighing up that idea of being brutally killed on a day out – I really considered the notion of having to die around a group of people I’d never met, and it struck me how disturbing I found that. In the context of certain doom, I think I’d prefer dying alone to dying around strangers; dying strikes me as a particularly intimate experience, and doing it around people I don’t know sounds like an ultimate example of social awkwardness. I tend to go internal during intense emotional experiences, preferring to process things alone, and being unable to do that would burn me up as much as, you know, the dying.
On the other hand, Nope also goes out of its way to present this awful experience in as palatable a way as possible. Chiefly, obviously, is it being part of a story, in which someone is presenting ideas in a particular way and to a particular purpose. It’s not just an awful thing happening – there is a reason Jean Jacket is the way he is, given to us by an author with an agenda. The process of telling stories is the process of giving meaning, and as Nietzsche pointed out, any experience is bearable for the sake of meaning. But there are a few other reasons too.
CHILD MURDER, TEE HEE
As someone who is fundamentally an edgelord, I am delighted whenever any horror storyteller uses child endangerment and in particular kills off a child in their stories. Jordan Peele does not just one, but three better – he goes out of his way to draw as much attention to the children in this movie as possible, having them pop up at a crucial point, and even having Ricky point them out just before the big sequence. I forget if we actually see them being digested, but it’s impossible not to think about them anyway.
This on top of the trauma Ricky suffers as a child himself, in which he witnesses his costars and fellow crew members brutally massacred by a monkey (leaving one of them permanently maimed) and then has the monkey’s brains blown all over his face. Again, this serves the broader theme, drawing attention to the way children are exploited by the entertainment industry, and making it infuriating (and sad) that Ricky ends up inflicting worse on his own children.
THE BITCHIN’ ALIEN AESTHETIC
On one level, it’s disappointing that Peele presents a basic trope and then completely unends the point of it; rather than being a vehicle for aliens that are kidnapping and probing humans, Jean Jacket is an animal who is eating them. On another, it’s a thrilling opening up of the universe through creative possibilities. The initial use of UFO symbology is enough to catch my attention; Peele zigging hard in the exact opposite direction feels fresh and exciting, as well as setting off my fascination with animals and the biological processes that drive them.
People often prefer to think of personal taste as a mark of their own superiority, but another way to think of it is that you’re an easy mark. I’ve sat through some dogshit because it had time travel, or robots, or a splitscreen effect that had the same actor playing off themselves. Peele uses the imagery of UFOs as a jumping off point for more vivid originality, in story, structure, and ultimately in more original imagery itself; that said, Jean Jacket’s design and even the way he sucks up his victims is still insanely cool to a kid that tore through UFOlogy books.
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
And this is why I will never watch this movie, though I cannot deny that Peele is our ranking horror genius now.
Yeah, getting eaten is a major fear of mine so I was literally squirming in my chair.
What did we watch?
Red vs Blue, Season One, Episode Four
This opens with a callback to the opening scene of the first episode, which works at making this feel like a full-circle moment. In terms of process, the crew have perfectly clarified what they’re doing and established all the characters, the premise, and the humour, and the rest will be riffing on that. This has the first messing with the core concept by introducing the medic Dufresne, formally renamed Doc, who wears purple and is basically neutral – this is part of the underlying joke, later run away with by Team Fortress 2, that both sides are run by the same people, as well as an underlying joke that Caboose has been possessed by something murderous (“Oh, so you’re saying you didn’t threaten to rip off my head and give it to Church as a birthday present?” / “You know, I think you’re taking my words a little out of context.” / “What? What context?”).
As part of this, the crew have started making lots of what I call offscreen gags. This, again, is something The Simpsons does a lot – implying even greater absurdity happening offscreen, like Mr Burns thinking a bird has become petrified, lost its sense of direction, and flown through his window, and then doubling down by saying he wants a laboratory to look at it. It’s actually funnier in Red vs Blue because it’s a result of, and draws attention to, the limitations of the medium. Doc says he cured Caboose of a bullet wound to the foot by running aloe vera on his neck, and part of the reason this is so funny is because we know it’s impossible to show this in the Halo engine, and so we have a ludicrous mental image of the game characters doing this.
There’s also jokes about Church possessing a robot body; my favourite scene is them trying to find a switch that will let him fix Sheila, Tucker finding one on his crotch area, and Church being completely unable to let him flip it without being an asshole about it, but there are also jokes like Church turning his ears off or flipping on his Spanish setting.
“Alright. Here’s the plan.” [explodes]
“I thought we established by now: I don’t like either of you! So competing for my attention is not gonna work.”
“I’m a pacifist.” / “You’re a thing that babies suck on?” / “No, dude, that’s a pedophile.” / “Tucker, I think he means a pacifier.” / “Oh right. I think I was thinking about something else.” / “Really classy, Tucker.”
(That one caught me offguard)
“Hey Doc, how’s the patient?” / “Doing well. He seems very alert and responsive.” / “He’s talking about Caboose, right?”
“I would just like to let everyone to know that I suck.” / “And?” / “And that I’m a girl.” / “What else?” / “And that I like ribbons in my hair. And I want to kiss all the boys.”
“We have to get him away from Griff. Coz, you know, it’s kinda cruel and unusual to have to talk to him.”
The Swimmer – A movie very much of its time and yet I found it devastatingly relatable. The devastation isn’t too big a surprise since the overwrought score insists on gnashing of teeth from the get-go (by a novice Marvin Hamlish! He got better). But the magnitude of the cumulative effect of Ned’s stopovers in the pools of his neighbors actually goes a long ways to justifying the orchestration (the several minutes of gauzy montages of horse jumping… less so).
Some are more successful than others, but there’s plenty to talk about in any given vignette. But it’s the whole shape of the thing that I love most – Ned’s route rolls downhill, like something else in common saying, from the luxurious hillside mansions to the lowly public pool. He’s too interesting to fit in with the idle rich bragging on their purchases and rarely using their private pools, but he’s spent too much time on the hill to be accepted by the general public frolicking in their water. An affecting portrait of class conflict and loneliness.
The Naked Gun 2 1/2: The Smell of Fear – Remember when conservatives were allowed to have concerns about the environment?
The EPA stuff in Smell Of Fear is the most bonkers thing in the movie now — not just its existence but its unquestioned existence, the way Drebin is automatically on the side of good. Also, beating the shit out of Barbara Bush is hilarious.
I don’t know if it was any influence but The Swimmer feels like a bougie Heart Of Darkness.
There is definitely a metaphor of swimming pools as a river into repressed memory.
“And how are the children?” “We never had any children, Frank.” “Ah, yes.”
Final three episodes of Andor – A generally satisfying not-quite-end to the series (I mean, we all knew going in it was going stop where Rogue One begins). I have a few nitpicks, and I was a bit disappointed how easy it was to get Kleya off Coruscant in the last episode, but overall things lined up very well. More on Sunday. Though I will add that I hope this time around there is some Emmy love for the actors.
Kojak, “The Halls of Terror” – A killer is targeting staff at a hospital, and Kojak has to work with the chief administrator (Michael Lerner) and the chief psychiatrist (Zohra Lampert) even though both think he’s stepping on their toes. A decent attempt to have a real mystery but the resolution is a bit underwhelming. Better is the interaction between Salavas and the main guests, both of whom turn out to be overworked and incredibly alone in this world. Other guests include Ken Kercheval (Dallas) and child actor Meeno Peluce, highly in demand in the 70s and 80s.
Frasier, “The 1000th Show”/”Voyage of the Damned” – In the former, Seattle celebrates the 1000th edition of Frasier’s radio show, but Frasier has the worst time getting to the Space Needle. A bit over the top but there is a heartfelt ending where Frasier ultimately skips the rally to help someone having a really bad time of it. (The fictional rally was tied to a real event marking the show’s one hundredth episode, and closes with Kelsey Grammer leading the crowd in the theme song.) The latter sends the cast (minus Daphne) on a free cruise that coincides with Niles’s anniversary. Things soon get messy when both Frasier and Martin have pushed Maris to change her plans and come on board as a surprise. This one just barely holds together but it has its moments. We are, however, kind of going in circling regarding Niles and Maris.
Superman The Animated Series – first three episodes and the Metallo episode. (Malcolm McDowell is so good at signaling John Corben’s aesthete status, and why he’s so pissed when this sense of pleasure is taken away, merely with his voice.) Not surprisingly, the Krypton fate is increasingly affecting, but there’s also the idea of a planet relying on a gluttonous robotic intelligence while assuming the intelligence is never wrong and is also inherently on their side. Hmmmmm! I’m still gonna be the cool asshole here, however: Batman is inherently more compelling than Supes, much as I like the Man of Steel’s pure goodness, because he’s a subject, a person of will and determination and interiority, where Superman often feels like an external object. He is big and powerful and clunky, and the villains he fights are typically big and powerful and clunky*, usually thanks to the technology of Luthor and Metropolis, and the result is very material, at its worst action figures thrown at each other.
*Toyman is a huge exception, a freaky, psychologically damaged Batman-style villain.
You got Big Blue all wrong. He has just as much depth as Batman. He just too conscientious to let it spill over to anyone else. (This is why I do not like the trailer for the new movie — Superman doesn’t yell in frustration.)
Maybe it’s not depth but lack of charisma? You have to really work to make pure or largely uncomplicated goodness interesting in fiction. Good example is Paterson but even he has his dislike of Marvin.
StAS doesn’t often hit the highs of Batman but it has its own pleasures. We also don’t get Justice League without it, so I’m grateful. You’re not going to be shocked that the casting remains God-tier. I know that Clancy Brown initially auditioned for Supes, and I want to see that tape, but he helped bring us a definitive Lex Luthor.
I love Clancy’s Luthor, though it still shocks me that my wife finds him too thuggish.
Very much a feature for me, but I can see how that could feel off. I don’t think they ever mention Luthor’s rough upbringing, but it’s there if you want to see it.
It’s pretty well known that this version of Lex draws some visual inspiration from Telly Savalas so I’m not coming out of nowhere to suggest that Corben looks like ’60s James Coburn, right?
He has one of the best line readings here when Metallo says “Well, I’ve got nothing to lose” and Lex just laughs as he says “No, you don’t” with visceral, gleeful pleasure. Such a terrific performance. I do like the show to be clear.
I am a much bigger Superman fan that many, but I have to admit, the number of writers who know what to do with him consistently is tiny. S:TAS never quite achieved it. So much so that I have only once in a blue moon felt the need to revisit it (and never finished the show). Doesn’t help that I think Bruce Timm is a mismatch for a purely good Superman (which is probably why the show ended on such a dark note).
Cotton Comes to Harlem
More on this week’s Streaming Shuffle, but this is a lively, engaging portrait of a 1970 Harlem, and it’s a movie where pretty much everyone wants something and complicates the plot by going after it, which is one of my favorite styles of storytelling.
The Swimmer
For Movie Club. Seconding everything C.D. Ploughman said: not exactly everything here works, but it’s still a rich, intriguing film that rewards attention and is incredibly fun to think about. The slow collapse of Burt Lancaster’s self-image–initially idealized, heroic, adventurous, romantic–is both inevitable and heartbreaking, and by the time we get to the humiliation of him having to spread his toes so a pool worker can check between them, it’s devastating. One of the things that really pays off later are the little hesitations we see early on from the people he’s interacting with, even the ones who are on his side and happy to (at least temporarily) bolster his illusions: the reaction he gets when he mentions wanting his daughters to be married in his house is an especially nice touch.
Klute
I never enjoy Klute as much as I would like to and feel like I probably should: a paranoid 1970s neo-noir suspense film is ostensibly right up my alley and knocking on my door, but somehow I always find this a little too languid and lifeless for a good chunk of its runtime. By the end, though, it develops a powerful sense of dread–“Then everyone knows. Then it doesn’t really matter what I do now”–and almost turns into a horror movie, and in that genre framework, the feeling of lifelessness becomes a feeling of helplessness instead, amplifying the effects of the terror.
The Novice
Watched this with a friend who hadn’t seen it before, and we spent a lot of time praising Fuhrman’s intensity and how good she is at showing Alex Dall’s obsession slipping beyond the limits of her control. Somebody get her more of a career! But the person I’m most eager to see more from is director Lauren Hadaway, who creates so much tension and psychological claustrophobia, grounding us in the landscape of Dall’s troubled mind while also giving us necessary infusions of oxygen–and options–in the form of other characters reaching out, however badly or tentatively. You can see the world that Dall is moving away from, and that makes her retreat feel all the more agonizing.
The Cooler
Macy and Bello are both very good here, but Alec Baldwin–brutal, romantic, and incredibly dangerous–makes the movie for me. A lot of films have trouble making violence feel genuinely shocking, but Baldwin’s eruptions here are gasp-inducing. I also like how his eventual fate makes the whole movie feel even more cynical in retrospect: no worries, the change of management will only mean the loss of Old Vegas’s taste, not the loss of its violence. Everything will be more corporate and sanitized, but it’ll all still run on crime and human misery.
Plus a lot of TV that I’m currently working on writing up for Nath’s round-up.
We are in the same boat on Klute — that final confrontation is incredible but there is a fair amount of meandering to get there. The good thing is the meandering looks absolutely incredible, Gordon Willis finding a rainbow in browns.
And hell yeah Cotton Comes To Harlem! The “everyone hunting for something” story is great, I feel like this turned into the more schematic machinations of post-Tarantino crime but in the 70s it feels freewheeling and loose, the location shooting helps a ton in this regard.
Seconded on KLUTE, which I’ve never been able to see from beginning to end without breaks. I found the meandering Florida section of NIGHT MOVES frustrating, but now think its the best part of the film. In relation to THE SWIMMER it follows an iconic type of character (the private eye) into middle age male menopause, using a missing persons/murder case to refocus his declining private life but finding his involvement to be just another manifestation of his failure.
I can only speak to my experience but I am guessing it is not unique — my knowledge of Klute was “the paranoid Jane Fonda movie” so imagine my surprise that “Klute” is the name of Sutherland’s character. Your comparison with Night Moves is illuminating, because this starts off being Sutherland’s story in a similar way to Hackman’s there but the movie so clearly belongs to Fonda — I’ve seen readings that praise Sutherland for realizing this in his performance and I think that is true to an extent, but the movie itself is still giving him more space than he should get considering who and what is driving things. The crisis is Fonda’s, not his.
Hell yeah, The Novice. Hadaway should be given bigger shots, or at least should have made another film by now. Maybe the uncompromising characterization she gives her protagonist is a little too descriptive and tough for making sales in the room. On the otherhand, her mentor Damien Chazelle declared himself competitive to the point of difficulty with his first movie and they gave him an Oscar.
It didn’t come up in the discussion, but I think there’s something strangely magnetic about the premise of The Swimmer in its weird specificity. “Man decides to swim pool to pool through the backyards on the way home” doesn’t sound like much to hang a story on, but it’s intriguing enough that I’d certainly read a human interest story about it and can immediately see several routes for dramatic potential and I’m curious to see which ones they pick. Now, it’s not inherently grabbing enough to justify Burt Lancaster staring into the distance in closeup and declaring “It’s possible! I could do it!” as though he’s just uncovered an alchemical secret of the universe, but such is the movie’s mood.
I remembered having checked Hadaway’s IMDB before, but I checked it again this morning, hoping that she would’ve gotten another project on the books since last time, but nope. I hate to think of all her talent not finding an outlet.
Very much agreed on the premise of The Swimmer (though, yeah, the “alchemical secret of the universe”–perfect phrasing–moment is overplaying it). I was indeed instantly curious to see how that would go. It implicitly promises a kind of Odyssey-in-suburbia feeling that I think it succeeds in capturing.
I saw “Cotton Comes to Harlem” and immediately imagined it as a lost King of the Hill episode, which I now need to exist.
I remember in 2006– long after the corporate takeover, unless Ace Rothstein lied to me– playing some drunk 2/5 no-limit late at night at Caesars Palace, and seeing a guy being dragged literally kicking and screaming into a back room by several security guards.
Snowpiercer — I feel like the infamous babies line has become a bit of a joke and but in the context of the movie it works well, sadly it also played in the context of Mrs. Miller waking up at that precise moment after sleeping through everything else and wondering what in the unholy fuck was going on in this movie I was watching, so it became very funny again. Still very good, the momentum of being on a train certainly helps but Bong brings his own relentless sense of pacing and reversal. Allison Pill steals her scene and Song Kang-Ho is of course the god damn man, Evans has to be a bit of a humorless grind as the lead and if Song is not comic relief he is a great balance in his cynicism and care.
Scanners — on the big screen! I saw this 20 years ago and while certain parts were extremely memorable I had forgotten much of this, in particular how much of a straight action flick this is, Cronenberg has as many firearms as a Cannon movie. I had remembered that Stephen Lack is pretty wooden, he is here for that uncanny stare and that is effective but his dialogue is less so. But the movie moves well through this and into odder places than I had remembered — the computer hacking/scanning got laughs from the theater crowd (and it is not unfunny in certain expressions and destructive setup/punchlines) but it is an extension of bodies and capabilities, which Cronenberg keeps following. And of course Ironside owns, and that final showdown also owns — it too got some laughs and folks, what the fuck are you here for if not this, telepathic Eastern Promises shit.
Rififi — finally watched an all-time great and spoiler alert, it’s an all-time great. The heist scene is everything it’s safe-cracked up to be, Michael Mann probably watches this instead of taking Viagra. It is WORK, something Dassin is so good at capturing in his crime films, the labor and vision and skill to pull this off and also how this is tied to its illegality — there is no tut-tutting here but also no easy Robin Hood morality, this is hard because it is outside of society and Dassin understands that is a challenge, not a justification. And then things blow up in the last act because of simple greed (the law plays almost no role here) but also because of non-crime connections — the heist is the big setpiece but the most shocking action is Jean Servais (incredible, we used to have faces, etc.) beating his ex and that doesn’t just show us who he is but inserts him back into the gangster world that is all too ready to insert itself into his scheme. The final ride is an inversion of the one in True Grit, of all things, and Dassin finds odd fatalism in what could be sappy heroism. He also shoots an execution without showing the act or even the faces of the victims and it’s one of the hardest things you’ll see. Crime doesn’t pay, but it still rules.
I think it’s the extra step of declaring that babies test the best of all the peoples you get to eat in the back of the train. Like, Evans is being driven into confessing the unthinkable act of cannibalism, but absolutely nobody solicited his opinion on the relative merits of the human meat options. It’s a hat-on-a-hat moment for sure and Bong is usually one of the best at pushing past where we think things are headed, but in this case the delivery is distracting. Great movie, though.
Well, it’s not about “getting” to eat people, right? It’s about how that is the only option. And “absolutely nobody solicited his opinion on the relative merits of the human meat options” is true, but also absolutely nobody wants to have the knowledge of the relative merits of human meat options and Evans does. Because he’s eaten a lot of it, because he’s in the back of the train. I agree the delivery is sadly not quite there and I think that is 99 percent of why it’s led to laughter, but for me the larger stuff at play carries it, and I like that Bong goes there. What is amusingly off-pitch for me is the protein bar reveal! Perhaps a gross thing to be confronted with at that scale but bugs are healthy, and more to the point YOU ATE BABIES. Fucking A I will have cockroach Paydays instead of that!
Apparently the protein bar reveal was actually supposed to be human shit but that’s one place Weinstein (or possibly the MPAA?) got his way. It would make a lot more sense both thematically and in terms of their reactions – there are people who eat bugs willingly under normal circumstances for protein. Looks like a pretty good solution!
And I’ll agree with the delivery of the line. Maybe it would work, or at least be messed up in a more interesting way, if the the line were be spat back at Harris – angry that this is something he knows.
Oh the shit thing makes sooooooo much more sense! Well, as metaphor at least, I think you run into the opposite issue with bugs nutrition-wise.
Yeah, Lack feels like a transition point – along with Art Hindle – to Cronenberg’s weirdo protags, there’s something to how Cameron is a tabula rasa because he’s never known how to control the power, so he doesn’t have a strong personality, but it still could be more effective with a Spader or Mortensen in the lead. Lack’s much better in a small part in Dead Ringers as the guy creating the instruments for mutant women, clearly intrigued by this insane request and not needing to say much.
Great call on Spader/Mortensen vs. Lack — they all have similar wide eyes and open faces too, but Lack isn’t able to provide the depth the other two can just in expression.
Song owns, he stole the movie for me. (As I mentioned in our 2010s movies roundtable at Ye Olde Solute.)
AHH “Memo From Purgatory” (s3e10) – Writer James Caan goes undercover 21 Jump Street-style in a street gang to get material for a book he is writing. Things go sideways for him when the gang finds his notes. This is notable for being adapted by Harlan Ellison from his own book, “Memos From Purgatory” detailing his time hanging with street toughs and spending time in jail doing research for his first book. Is it gonzo before HST? I don’t know, I’ve never read it. Maybe Cameron Crowe took some inspiration. Ellison said the teleplay is “hardly consistent with the truth of what really happened”. A decent hour long episode is hard to believe and drags a bit with some melodrama, especially when the gang puts Caan on “trial”. But it’s also very tense at times when the gang is causing havoc and during the last ten minutes or so. Caan was only twenty-four at the time, but you can already see the swagger and intensity. A pre-Trek Walter Koenig as the gang leader isn’t much older. Zalman King who created The Red Shoe Diaries and other Skinemax fare in the 90s has a prominent role as a gang member. From Hitchcock’s intro – “The game of hockey seems to combine all the best elements of ice skating, polo, and World War II.” Worth a watch for Ellison and the cast. Alas, I couldn’t find anything about Ellison suing Hitchcock. I guess everything went off without a hitch.
This does sound like the Hell’s Angels backstory where the gang knew he was a writer, but eventually didn’t trust him when he spoke out against them hurting some women and kicked his ass.
A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy — Yesterday being midsummer, I returned to my Woody Allen retrospective for this, which I saw once years ago and didn’t care for. I liked it more this time, although it’s never going to be one of my favorites. In 1906, three couples spend the weekend in the country — Inventor/spiritualist Allen and his wife, the frigid Mary Steenbergen; his best friend, a lothario doctor played by Tony Roberts with his freethinking nurse (Julie Hagerty); and Steenbergen’s cousin, the pompous professor and natural philosopher José Ferrer and his soon to be wife, Mia Farrow (making her debut in this retrospective), who is for Allen’s character the one who got away years before. Assignations are made, and broken, and remade; secrets are revealed. Just the sort of thing you’d expect from the title.
We really see Allen settling in to what will be the dominant mode of his career now after sort of discovering it in Love & Death and Annie Hall — relationship drama (even melodrama) leavened by comedy. Here, neither the drama nor the comedy is particularly heavy, but the light touch fits in with the bucolic setting. And there is some truly beautiful nature photography here courtesy of Gordon Willis. This is not something we are going to see much more of in Allen’s filmography, although it echoes the architectural montages in Manhattan and Hannah and Her Sisters. I think I laughed out loud only once, but I felt charmed throughout. And the ending, which I really didn’t enjoy last time, although silly, fits with the period and the confectionary texture of the work. On this viewing, it seemed to be a statement from the artist not to take things too seriously.
Finally, Ferrer is fantastic as the sophisticated and urbane genius who want to pop in the nose at any opportunity. Roberts also does his best work in an Allen film yet. Usually he exists just as the interlocutor for Allen’s characters, but here he has a great, quick-speaking scene where he pours his heart out to Farrow’s Ariel and convinces her to give him a shot through loquaciousness and personal charm.
Midsummer is next to the solstice? I thought the word meant the halfway point through Summer. Shouldn’t they call it Startsummer then?
It was the term given to the solstice in the medieval period by alchemists. It is inconvenient in that it *should* be the midpoint of summer, but it isn’t because the Earth’s atmosphere takes a long time to heat up. So it ends up being closer to the beginning.
THE SWIMMER– I have nothing more to add to what was already said, except that one of the most sublimely saddest shots in film history, that of a latch-key kid staring into an empty swimming pool shot from the bottom of the basin, perpendicularly posing him against the vertical lines of the rim and the sky. This is definitely an east coast upper class suburban thing. On the west coast he’d have a skateboard (even in 1966) and shredding that puppy up.
PALE FLOWER– What begins as a Yakuza set variant of Gun Crazy, with gambling substituting for guns, evolves into an inspiration for Michael Mann( pitting existential resistence against a sharply defined urban context) and Paul Schrader (in which existential codes necessitated by that resistence are fundamentally at odds with addictive fixes). The sound design, score, and high contrast cinematography are dramatic as hell, providing a dynamic example of cross cultural influence contributing to a new understanding of international cinema, breaking down the paradigms of nationalism dominating traditional film study discourse. NOT OPTIONAL!!!
Reportedly, this is Mann’s favorite film.
Andor s1e3-9. I tried watching the first two episodes when they came out and just couldn’t really get into it, then everyone raved about it for years. So I hopped back in. Once they get to space-peru in episode 4 this show really takes off. (You can tell it’s star wars by it getting good with episode 4). Episodes 4-6 give us a heist. It’s a really well executed heist plot. The production design is great. The secondary characters are great. We get a mix of true believers and guys only in it for themselves. We get a nice little
han shooting first moment. One of the cleverest writing choices is that Cassian is specifically not political or ideological. He hates the empire for mostly personal reasons, but (again like Han Solo—this whole thing is just gritty Han Solo, or what Solo could have been if it was motivated by character arcs instead of filling a release date) has a strong, innate yet inchoate moral
compass that keeps him from actually being as selfish as he thinks he is. Two characters in the Aldhani plot line show up as paths Cassian could take. He rejects the idealism of the young manifesto writer, but also the pure in-it-for-me approach of the greedy scoundrel (Ebon Moss Bacharach doing brilliant character actor work here—if the fantastic four movie is at all functional it’s going to be just because of him and Pascal).
Meanwhile, stellan skarsgard is chewing up scenery all over coruscant as the man behind the curtain organizing rebel activities. Every scene in his antique shop is great; the scenes where he’s talking to Mothma and her driver is out front are almost comic, as skarsgard changes personas based on how he’s facing.
I’ll say more about the prison arc after finishing it with, I assume, a jail break.
doctor who s1e6 “Dalek.” RTD was really on a tear this season. This uses the doctor being “the last of the time lords” to good effect and puts Eccleston up against the last Dalek. The plot is overall very simple. RTD understands how one dalek can be scarier than 100 daleks, something he would later forget.
My favorite bit of acting in this episode comes from the dalek puppeteer. When the dalek first wakes up and tries to blast the doctor his blaster doesn’t work and he looks down at it confused, which is a hard emotion to convey for a dalek.
The 6 year old requires frequent assurances that live action tv is pretend. After the dalek blasts some guards she asks “are they really dead” and I explain that it’s just actors playing make believe. Then she asked me if the dalek knows the guards are just pretending.
“You would have made…a good Dalek.”
Hell yeah on Andor, although the Dhani people on Aldhani (and their “relocation”) is more meant to evoke Scotland, I’m pretty sure.
Haha, imagine if it were otherwise. “No, Cassian just rots in there, and we didn’t even try to reconcile that with Rogue One.”
(Seriously, though, the last episode of the prison arc is one of the best of the whole series. Probably the best episode of TV of 2022.)
Just 15 more episodes of prison labor (those thingies are
death star parts right?) and at the end of andor season 2 K2 breaks in with no explanation and grabs him to go get Erso.
Hahaha. “I’m looking for Cassian Andor.” “That’s me.” “Hey, you said your name was Keef Girgo!”
It would be totally inappropriate, but how funny would it be if they changed the opening title card to “GIRGO.”
This would be a great bit and would also involve changing about half of the title cards for the series. (Not all to “GIRGO,” mind you, but you’ve already seen the “CLEM” episodes so I figure you get that.)
There’s a reason Nemik chose to bequeath his manifesto to Cassian.
(And there’s also a bit of irony in Cassian being the openly hired mercenary on the heist, yet also being one of the ones with the surest moral compass. Especially compared to Skeen, who gave the team a bullshit story about why he’s a true believer, when it turned out he was always in it for himself.)
What did we play?
Finally finished Assassin’s Creed: Origins which after a lot more sprawl than usual at least wound up a suitably so-ridiculous-it’s-almost-cool ending wherein
I could do without these repetitive and ungainly games but they’re a comfort food for the Ploughwoman so it’s probably not the last that will be played in this house. Possibly the last I’ll be asked to sit through.
Mega Man X4 – Mega Man X Legacy Collection on Nintendo Switch
Started this after beating X3, played the intro and level a couple of the main levels. My first impression is that you can play the whole game with either X or Zero, which on one hand is good since it ensures it will be worth it playing with Zero, which wasn’t the case in X3; on the other, I have a feeling it would be better if you could swap between them. As it is, my first impression is that if the game keeps the downward quality trajectory this series is having, it might lead to playing a middling game twice rather than making the most out of switching between them. It’s also quite talkier and slower than previous games, though the animation is very good and the production value has aged quite well for an early PS1 title. I won’t jump straight to this game but there’s promise here; I’ll leave it for a rainy day, probably later in the year.
X-Men: Children of the Atom – Marvel vs. Capcom Fighting Collection: Arcade Classics on Nintendo Switch
Started a run on arcade mode, have barely beat two fighters. Started with Psylocke, then switched to Cyclops after coming across a Sentinel, thinking that his long range attacks would help me beat him, but it hasn’t worked. I expected a tough game, given that this is one of the few one-on-one Marvel/Capcom fighters, but this has really tested me more than I thought. I’ll keep trying this week, eventually I’ll have to do better/catch a break/crack the code.
“Peele has the good taste to interpolate this into the soundscape in a way that’s obvious without being overpowering, so that the idea of this constant screaming is present and unpleasant without being unbearable to sit through, which forces me to contemplate the horror of hearing it.”
Heck, now I want to watch just to see how he accomplishes that!
“What’s a bad miracle? They got a word for that?”
Religious horror doesn’t hit me harder than any other kind, but that line from the trailer put me on the fucking floor. That the first word I found for the concept is “monstrum” did nothing to bring me up from said floor.
This all really got to me too. The noise, the pain, the tight space–and, for me, especially the slow, inescapable nature of it, that it’s just this horrific agony these people are stuck in, and there’s no way out, and it’s going to go on a while. This is a great breakdown of how many angles Peele’s attacking from.
It’s really theatrical as a visual too with the digestion tubes and skin looking like cloth, you could do this on stage without too much adjustment.
You make a lot of good points, I really wish I had seen the same movie a lot of its fans did. Maybe on a rewatch it will click but so much of what you lay out here either seemed lesser to me — specifically in the context of Spielberg’s War Of The Worlds for the physicality of the attack — or muddled. Jaws was brought up a lot as a counterpoint and I think Peele is inviting/acknowledging this so I don’t feel too bad about using it as a critical brickbat — if the leads are not dissimilar to the boat crew, then Stephen Yeun is the mayor, the guy whose foolish actions exacerbate the situation, and he is given too much time to be a side character and not enough time to be a lead so he unbalances a lot of the movie. And the mayor is greedy and willingly blind to a situation forced on him, which is pretty understandable; Yeun is working through his extremely specific trauma in a dumb and active way and I don’t really care that he fucks up or that he fucks up everyone who comes to his act.
I’m actually with you on a lot of this, and I think a lot of people are – the most common complaint I’ve heard about the movie is that Yuen dying two-thirds of the way in leaves a lot of people wondering what the point of he and his flashback were, and that was actually my reaction too in the moment. In the larger context of the movie, it’s obvious that its meant to make the statements on animal and child exploitation clearer; this is what happens when you’re not as respectful as OJ, and I’m convinced by arguments that Ricky fistbumping the monkey is what makes him think he could control Jean Jacket. More importantly, though, I’m willing to have it in my head as a thing that is Cool – the scene is ultimately redundant, but the imagery is cool to think about.
I also enjoy – and this comes off meaner than I mean but I’m genuinely trying to be funny anyway – that you can’t get on with a guy trying to deal with a fucked up personal history but a guy trying to make money feeding people to a shark is sympathetic. Actually, how does this factor into your preference for active decisions over passivity?
(I will also concede that I haven’t seen War Of The Worlds)
Lol, let’s try responding to the actual comment here.
Well, as good as Yeung looks in cowboy getup he does not have a rad anchor suit, so he’s behind the Jaws mayor already. But more to the point — for the mayor, the monster is fucking up his normal deal of tourism. So he finds ways to downplay and deny the monster, even though there’s a lot of evidence the monster is out there. But not proof! He is choosing to not see that evidence and gamble lives, he is not “making money feeding people to a shark” but making money on a bet they won’t get fed to a shark. This is a morally terrible decision but it’s one that feels very real to me. It’s an extension of how lots of people react to problems that aren’t as blockbuster as a giant shark, and it is active in its willful ignorance (Brody goes through a smaller version of this with the dead kid’s mom slapping him, he made a choice and pays a price). Yeung has proof of a monster and decides to make a theme park around it because he has issues, this may fit his character but a lot of that stuff is operating on the level of metaphor before character to me (your 100 percent accurate read of the fist bump, for example). As action, it’s the kind of thing that sets up a story, say, one about reincarnated dinosaur island. Further elaboration needs to be THE story, not the halfway stuff Peele does here. Nothing wrong with ambition, but it is too unwieldy in this instance.
WotW is not without flaws (the very ending is bad) but when it is on it is on, the aliens are terrifying and on a scale that Spielberg is primed to pull off. I also think Spielberg is up to some extremely dark business later in the game with what goes down with Tim Robbins and that this has often been misinterpreted. Very much worth a watch.
Well, as good as Yeung looks in cowboy getup he does not have a rad anchor suit, so he’s behind the Jaws mayor already. But more to the point — for the mayor, the monster is fucking up his normal deal of tourism. So he finds ways to downplay and deny the monster, even though there’s a lot of evidence the monster is out there. But not proof! He is choosing to not see that evidence and gamble lives, he is not “making money feeding people to a shark” but making money on a bet they won’t get fed to a shark. This is a morally terrible decision but it’s one that feels very real to me. It’s an extension of how lots of people react to problems that aren’t as blockbuster as a giant shark, and it is active in its willful ignorance (Brody goes through a smaller version of this with the dead kid’s mom slapping him, he made a choice and pays a price). Yeung has proof of a monster and decides to make a theme park around it because he has issues, this may fit his character but a lot of that stuff is operating on the level of metaphor before character to me (your 100 percent accurate read of the fist bump, for example). As action, it’s the kind of thing that sets up a story, say, one about reincarnated dinosaur island. Further elaboration needs to be THE story, not the halfway stuff Peele does here. Nothing wrong with ambition, but it is too unwieldy in this instance.
WotW is not without flaws (the very ending is bad) but when it is on it is on, the aliens are terrifying and on a scale that Spielberg is primed to pull off. I also think Spielberg is up to some extremely dark business later in the game with what goes down with Tim Robbins and that this has often been misinterpreted. Very much worth a watch.
Yeah, I follow, that makes sense.