This is a good movie. I was a little trepidatious, since third movies of trilogies sometimes fall off.

Also, I was a bit protective since it was clearly based on 20th century “locked room” (“impossible” crime) mysteries, which I like a lot. One review even said that it name-checked John Dickson Carr.

I talked about Carr here, including this:

(I will mention specifically The Three Coffins – also known as The Hollow Man – which is a classic locked-room mystery. It even includes a lecture by Gideon Fell about different methods of carrying out a locked-room murder. He does not, of course, describe the method that figures in that book itself, and in any case Carr originally got that one from The Kennel Murder Case by S. S. Van Dyne. It’s a good gimmick, and in fact I’ve used it myself, though I’m not going to tell you where.)

Wake Up Dead Man not only names John Dickson Carr, it also refers to his book The Hollow Man, and Dr. Fell’s lecture on “impossible” crimes. And the particular method used here was also used (later) by Rex Stout, the writer of the Nero Wolfe mysteries. There are also two or three elements which remind me of Ellery Queen’s books and stories, but I don’t know if that’s deliberate or not.

In any case, research was obviously done, but that isn’t why this is a good movie. I’ve seen some people say that it’s “darker” than Knives Out or Glass Onion, and that word may have been suggested by how often light sources are featured in the film (from sunlight on down), but I would tend toward the word “deeper.”

This is certainly a more emotionally resonant movie than Glass Onion (I’m not sure yet relative to Knives Out), which doesn’t make it “better” or “worse” — it just makes it different, which is always a good for an individual movie in a series like this.

There’s at least one moment in this movie which made me tear up a little, and I’m pretty sure that wasn’t true of the earlier ones. Plus, of course, there are lot of laughs. Definitely recommended.

By the way, watching the trailer (above) now, I see that it reveals one key element of the plot, but it doesn’t advertise it. and it went right past me until I had seen the film. No spoilers from me. 🙂

I have declared, probably more than once, that I’m not interested in “artificial intelligence.” But until now that’s been a pretty abstract thought, like deciding that I’m not going to watch some new and (theoretically) exciting television show that everybody else seems to be watching.

But, okay, this did get my attention: “AI firm plans to reconstruct lost footage from Orson Welles’ masterpiece The Magnificent Ambersons“

In general, I don’t like art that’s “finished” by someone else after the artist is dead (unless the artist made it clear that this was okay, as with Robert Jordan and the “Wheel of Time” fantasy series, for example).

I’m not strict about this. I did see and enjoy The Other Side of the Wind, which was assembled and completed after (long after) the death of Orson Welles, largely by Welles’ friend and acolyte Peter Bogdanovich. For one thing, all the footage was shot by Welles — the hangup was getting it edited, and then Welles, who was desperate to get it finished, lost legal ownership of the footage (very long story). But when you look at it on screen now, everything you see was shot by Welles, and assembled by someone he trusted.

With Touch of Evil, the film was taken away from Welles and re-edited by someone else (and a few new scenes were shot) and that version was released, but Welles wrote a 58-page memo describing how it could be repaired, and then, again long after, the legendary film editor Walter Murch took all the available footage, and Welles’ memo, and did his best to honor the director’s wishes. I’ve seen the original release version (in fact, I believe there are two released versions and I may have seen both of them), and I’ve seen the “restored” version, and the “restored” version works. The film makes sense on a whole different level than the earlier version(s).

But with The Magnificent Ambersons, the movie was shot and then edited, shown to one or more test audiences (while Welles was out of the country), and then the last 45 minutes was removed and (as far as anybody has ever been able to find out) destroyed by the studio.

It annoys me, I will admit, that some machine will be trusted with a task which is far more challenging than what Bogdanovich and Murch undertook on the other Welles films.

Other than film students and film buffs, probably few young people these days have ever seen an Orson Welles film, let alone all of them (as I have, and some many times, and all of them in a theater at least once). What if this machine-created version is shown in theaters and people go and think this is somehow the work of Orson Welles?

Orson Welles made very few films (compared to most directors of his stature), and many of them ended up out of his hands and released in forms over which he had no control. So, maybe this is just one more instance of that.

On a positive note, I just watched Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme, which was wonderful (and which is obviously very influenced by Welles’ Mr. Arkadin — also called Confidential Report).

Unrelated to Orson Welles, here are two recent articles on artificial intelligence which I found interesting.

1. From the New Yorker: “What if A.I. Doesn’t Get Much Better Than This?“
2. From the New York Review of Books: “The Parrot in the Machine“

I really liked this article about an Altman retrospective: “The Brattle celebrates 100 years of Robert Altman with summer-long series“

I particularly liked the comments on:

Shelley Duvall. So many people these days seem to know her mostly (or entirely) from The Shining (and all the stories about how Kubrick abused her to get that incredible performance), but she was wonderful in a wide variety of roles in Altman films during the 1970s.

“Altman pioneered a multitrack recording system that allowed his actors to talk over each other the way we do in real life, conducting glorious cacophonies during which he’d ride the mixing faders, foregrounding stray scraps of dialogue until they turned into punchlines.” I spent a fair amount of time in recording studios and mixing sessions in my youth, and, yes, I can see him in that setting very clearly.

“His highly regarded 1993 ‘Short Cuts’ (Aug. 19) stitches together nine Raymond Carver short stories in a brilliantly acted tapestry of misery, one that I can respect but never quite bring myself to love.” Yes, but I don’t even respect it that much. Overrated, I’ve always thought (though I will concede the “brilliantly acted” comment, especially Lily Tomlin and Tom Waits).

“His last picture, 2006’s ‘A Prairie Home Companion,’ was maybe the most self-reflexive final movie from any director this side of John Huston’s ‘The Dead,’ with Virginia Madsen as a gorgeous grim reaper stalking the hallways during the last broadcast of a beloved radio show. It’s a sunny reflection on the inevitability of endings, full of tears and terrible puns.” Agree completely, about both movies (I’ve drawn that parallel myself, in fact).

My Robert Altman reviews are here.

“Tonight’s program takes us backstage to witness first hand the creation, start to finish, of a new play mounted on the American stage.

“Asteroid City does not exist. It is an imaginary drama created expressly for this broadcast. The characters are fictional, the text hypothetical, the events an apocryphal fabrication. But together they present an authentic account of the inner workings of a modern theatrical production.”

— the first words of the movie Asteroid City

A couple of articles I read recently in the New York Review of Books clarified some things about my reaction to the movie Asteroid City which I discussed recently.

Here’s a quote from “Bodies That Flow,” which is about Peter Paul Rubens, the Flemish painter:

“If it is possible to sum up, in one work, the way that Rubens respected the beauty of women, then this is it,” writes Jennifer Scott, the gallery’s director—one might add that it is equally a hymn to the beauty of oil paint. We can forever learn from Rubens about the latter. I am less sure whether he tells us how women and men should relate.

And this is from “Cartoon Rules,” which is about Ernie Bushmiller, who created the comic strip Nancy:

Nancy’s main characters included the titular mischievous girl, her aunt Fritzi, and her pal Sluggo; its perfectly generic fences and houses seemed to resemble the view outside Griffith’s window. The strip was Bushmiller’s decades-long exercise in joke construction, accomplished with a rigorous set of rules and an absurd imagination. As Griffith writes in Three Rocks, his graphic biography of Bushmiller, “Nancy doesn’t tell you what it’s like to be a child. Nancy tells you what it’s like to be a comic strip.”

The more I think about Asteroid City, and re-watch it, the more I think that it’s about movies themselves and how they work (and how they are similar to, and different from, theater). It’s a movie about a television program which is presenting a play, and the play is shown to us in the form of a movie. At one point, an actor steps “on stage” at the wrong time, and later another actor “leaves the stage” in the middle of his performance because he’s stuck on one action which his character takes which makes no sense to him. (That’s Jones Hall, who’s playing Augie Steenbeck, who deliberately burns his hand on the Quickie Griddle, for some reason. Jones Hall is played by Jason Schwartzman.)

Also, in one of my favorite bits, other than the laugh-out-loud moments I mentioned in my earlier post, a car drives at high speed through the tiny town of Asteroid City, being pursued by a police car and a motorcycle, and various guns are fired. The main characters watch this, and then, when the speeding vehicles are gone, resume whatever they were doing before. This happens three times, and it seems to be saying, “Yes, you could be watching a movie with gunfire and fast cars and violence, or you could be watching this.” And, in blatant (and, I’m sure, deliberate) violation of Chekhov’s Law, two civilian characters go armed throughout the story and neither of those guns is ever fired, or used or referred to in any way.

Asteroid City is a movie about how movies work. As I said before, characters look directly at the camera a lot, and sometimes address the audience, but it’s not really a “fourth wall break,” since there is no fourth wall. There is never a moment when we’re supposed to forget that “the characters are fictional, the text hypothetical, the events an apocryphal fabrication.”

Pirandello, or Beckett, or Stoppard would understand.

Why does Augie burn his hand on the Quickie Griddle? To paraphrase that kid in The Matrix, there is no Quickie Griddle.

1) “Denis Villeneuve: ‘Frankly, I Hate Dialogue. Dialogue Is For Theatre And Television’“

“Frankly, I hate dialogue,” the filmmaker told The Times of London in a recent interview. “Dialogue is for theatre and television. I don’t remember movies because of a good line, I remember movies because of a strong image. I’m not interested in dialogue at all. Pure image and sound, that is the power of cinema, but it is something not obvious when you watch movies today.”

First off, no. If I bothered to have an all-time list of my Top Ten or Top Twenty movies, Robert Altman, Howard Hawks, and Orson Welles would be heavily represented, and they were all very focused on dialogue.

However, what caught my eye about this quote is that this is exactly how I feel about Villeneuve’s movie Blade Runner 2049. I have long wanted to watch a version with the visuals, the music, and the sound design, all of which are amazing, with the dialogue buried way down in the mix somewhere. Once you know the plot of the movie, the words aren’t important, and none of them are memorable, but the rest is a constant pleasure.

 
2) There are rumors that Paul Thomas Anderson is going to make a movie based on Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland.

There are a few reasons that I should not be excited by this news.

One: It may not be true. (Anderson is apparently directing a movie right now, but it’s not confirmed what movie.)

Two: He directed Inherent Vice, also based on a Pynchon novel. I enjoyed that movie, or at least parts of it, but it is not, I would say, actually good.

Three: Vineland may be my least favorite Pynchon novel (with the necessary caveat that I still haven’t read Against the Day).

Nevertheless, I am curious, and if the movie actually exists at some point (see point one above), I imagine I will go see it.

Update: Yeah, Vineland is my least favorite Pynchon novel. By a wide margin. I just checked Wikipedia to make sure I wasn’t forgetting a novel, and, no, I remembered them all.