Movies

mixed movie feelings

~ Anthony Lee Collins ~ Leave a comment

I have mixed feelings about the Wes Anderson movies I’ve seen.

(This is not a question of “love/hate,” by the way. People use “love/hate” quite often for things which — as far as I can tell — never rise to the level of “love” or “hate.” This is just mixed feelings.)

Some people say all of Anderson’s movies are basically the same, and either you like them or you don’t. There are reasons this theory comes up, but it doesn’t apply to me.

I saw The Royal Tenenbaums years ago and I couldn’t stand it. Too many people who were all miserable for no apparent reason. I don’t remember if any of them changed in the course of the movie, but if they did it was, for me, too little and/or too late.

Quite a bit later, I have no idea why, I watched Moonrise Kingdom, and I immediately watched it every night for a week. I’ve talked about that before.

Then, when The Grand Budapest Hotel came out, I saw that. At first I found it to be so-so, but I’ve grown to like it much more over time. I believe I’ve been won over by how funny it is (it has a lot more laughs than either of the other two I’ve mentioned, or both combined).

I skipped The French Dispatch. It sounds like it was based on how much Anderson likes The New Yorker, and I grew up reading the magazine myself, but a movie? Really?

But now I’ve seen Asteroid City, and it’s a hoot.

First of all, there were two moments which made me laugh immoderately and repeatedly. I think the last time I laughed like that at a movie was American Hustle.

Asteroid City has a nested structure, a story within a story within a story, like The Grand Budapest Hotel. A moment when that structure breaks is one of the two laugh-out-loud moments I mentioned above.

Here, that means that you never forget you’re looking at the actors playing actors playing characters (one of whom is a famous actor). The whole thing is all really just the writer/director talking to us (which is further emphasized by how often the characters address the camera directly).

Will Augie end up seeing Midge again? The question is moot, since, as we are reminded on a regular basis, neither is a real person, even within the movie.

So, the fact that the characters are, in some cases, wounded can be examined while maintaining a certain distance. With Anderson’s movies (as opposed to some of Robert Altman’s movies, or Les Miserables, for example) that’s what works best for me.

Also, enjoyably, it’s a movie of a play where both the actors in the play and the playwright himself are confused about what the play actually means. YouTube has tried to get me to watch various videos about “The Real Meaning” of this movie, but I haven’t watched them, just like I ignore all the videos which want to “explain” Mulholland Drive to me.

Explanations aren’t always necessary. When I was younger, I had a beloved cat for over twenty years. I never once had the urge to dissect him.

hamlet, and the hateful eight

~ Anthony Lee Collins

One paragraph in this article in The New Yorker popped out at me:

Before the show opened, Hüller read an essay that portrayed “Hamlet” as a critique of the conventions of Renaissance revenge tragedy—and of the society from which those conventions emerged. “Shakespeare wrote the play at the edge of these times when blood revenge was still a thing,” she told me recently. “Shakespeare’s showing it one more time, but in the most absurd way—because everybody’s dead at the end. The play is saying, ‘This can’t be the way.’ ”

It’s rather embarrassing that I never thought of this (or perhaps I did, way back when I studied Hamlet in school*). I’ve read and seen some of the classic “revenge” plays (The Duchess of Malfi is the one which sticks in my mind, although ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore may also qualify).

Rounding around to my actual point (and I do have one 🙂 ), this is something I haven’t seen commented on about Quentin Tarantino’s film The Hateful Eight.

[SPOILERS (obviously)]

As with Hamlet, The Hateful Eight takes the form of a revenge plot to its natural conclusion: Everybody dies. As has been pointed out, the eight characters break down into an obvious series of icons of the United States at that time (and in general): White/Black, North/South, Mexico, England, Cowboys (and no Indians, which is interesting). A bunch of men and one woman, but (to take the charitable view) this does make sense for a movie about male violence. And these various characters mostly seem to know each other, or at least know of each other, to a degree which would be unusual if they were intended to be real and/or random.

(The question of male violence also makes me think about Once Upon a Time… In Hollywood — how even the violence of Charles Manson’s female acolytes is fundamentally his violence. To quote from Kill Bill, “I could see the faces of the cunts that did this to me and the dicks responsible.”)

I’m not entirely endorsing Tarantino’s approach, by the way. I think his enthusiasm for wild violence — and his skill at it — does get the better of him sometimes, but I think he does have his deeper purposes and points to make.

But I think that this is the point of The Hateful Eight: to step back and look at the revenge framework, which Tarantino has used, less critically, in other films. As with Hamlet in the quote above, I think his point is “This can’t be the way.”

 
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* I studied the play in both high school and college, and in high school we got so caught up with it — dissecting it week after week after week — that we ended up having to blast through Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in just a few days (the semester was supposed to be fifty-fifty between the two).

attention span for what?

~ Anthony Lee Collins ~ Leave a comment

I had May 5 marked on my calendar (yes, I still use paper calendars, in addition to electronic calendars). That’s when Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3 came out.

I also had May 19 marked. That’s when Fast X opened.

I saw, and enjoyed, the first two Guardians of the Galaxy movies (and also the Guardians Holiday Special). I’ve also seen and enjoyed some of the Fast & Furious movies. Without thinking about it very deeply, I had assumed I would probably see the latest installments of both franchises, but when the premiere dates approached my enthusiasm was almost completely lacking.

There are a few factors, but the one which struck me as interesting was that Fast X is 141 minutes long, and the Guardians movie is 150 minutes long.

(I should mention that Martin Scorsese and James Cameron have produced very long movies recently, and they have both complained about the various complaints about that. I have not seen those movies, but that’s mostly because at this point I’m not interested in either director. I don’t believe run time was a factor.)

However, recently I have been watching and studying and enjoying David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (146 minutes), Quentin Tarantino’s Hateful Eight (168 minutes), and Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 (163 minutes).

Is this apparent inconsistency because I’m sick of superheroes and related subjects? No, I’m still looking forward to the final episodes of the show Doom Patrol, and the upcoming third season of The Witcher, and I’m hoping for another season of the wonderful Harley Quinn cartoon show.

Thinking about this, I realized one difference between the various long movies mentioned above: The Guardians movie and Fast X are, I’m sure, full of non-stop stuff — explosions and quips and rushing around and family and cliffhangers, plus endless callbacks and references to earlier movies (and TV shows), and foreshadowing about the next movie or TV show.

Even thinking about this feels exhausting. What do Mulholland Drive, Hateful Eight, and Blade Runner 2049 have in common (in addition to being, in different ways, amazing to look at)?

They take their time.

They’re not based on the assumption that I have no attention span.

As Major Marquis Warren says around the middle of The Hateful Eight (which was not going at a fast clip to begin with), “Let’s slow this way down.”

Now, I’m not advocating that modern movies get even longer than they are — many movies are much too long for my taste as it is, but what’s most tiring to me is the quantity of stuff, not the number of minutes.

Also, the movies I do enjoy watching, as listed above, all stand alone. You don’t have to prepare by doing homework to understand what’s going on.

By the way, I often wish for a version of Blade Runner 2049 where the music is at full volume but the (mostly forgettable) dialogue is somewhat muted. Now that I know the plot, just allow me to focus on the amazing music and gorgeous visuals.

Speaking of amazing visuals, I still remember seeing The Avengers and Prometheus on the same weekend, and noting that every frame of Prometheus was better to look at than any frame of The Avengers. That doesn’t make Prometheus a “better movie” — it has massive flaws in areas where The Avengers has, at minimum, competence — but sometimes it’s enjoyable to see a movie which takes advantage of what a film can be and do.

I also think of this when I see YouTube reaction channels, accustomed to modern movies, go back and watch The Shining or Apocalypse Now or 2001 or The Godfather or Dr. Strangelove, or Rio Bravo (there’s a movie which really takes its time).

Or maybe it’s just the difference between movies made to be seen in theaters and movies which will mostly be seen on smaller screens in surroundings with many possible interruptions. Going back and watching old TV shows now, even when the commercials aren’t there, the rhythm is still the same, where right before each commercial break there had to be something to try to hook you into not switching the channel.

reading, writing, and commenting

~ Anthony Lee Collins ~ Leave a comment

1) I miss director’s commentary tracks.

One thing that I miss about DVDs is the director’s commentary tracks (or commentary tracks in general, although, in general, directors and writers are — in my experience — more interesting than actors to listen to). Not that DVDs don’t exist anymore, but in a lot of cases they no longer have commentary tracks, presumably because more and more people watch movies on streaming services and fewer and fewer on DVDs, so it’s not worth the effort.

So, it was pleasant to find that Rian Johnson recorded a commentary track for Glass Onion, a movie I enjoyed a lot. (I enjoyed Knives Out, too, and I have no interest in thinking about which is better, but Glass Onion is much more full of cameos and funny background details, so the commentary track is fun.)

 
2. Writing.

I’m holding off on starting a new story for the moment, since the four I’ve posted so far all needed a little sprucing up.

I’m not rewriting or anything like that — just a little tweak here and there. Mostly swapping out words for better words, and adjusting (and, I hope, improving) punctuation. “The Marvel Murder Case” and “The Town Hall Mystery” are done. I’m currently about halfway through “The Deacon Mystery.”

I know, that leaves out “The Heron Island Mystery.” That’s the longest of the four, by far, and it’s the only one which needs more than tweaking. I was constantly aware when writing it that it was going to end up much longer than I’d hoped. It’s 35,000 words, definitely a novella, and longer than “The Town Hall Mystery” and “The Deacon Mystery” put together.

But stories find their own length, and in worrying about how long it was becoming, I see now that I left out at least two small scenes which should be there. So, in addition to the tweaking, I’ll be adding a couple of things. Ironically, despite being, so I thought, “too long,” it’s actually been, until now, a bit too short.

 
3. Reading.

This article caused a bit of a stir earlier this year: “The End of the English Major.”

Here are a couple of responses from the New York Times:

I think this is interesting, but not, for me, personally compelling. Of the enduring cultural enthusiasms of my life, none of them were acquired at school. James Joyce comes the closest, since I did study that in college and I don’t think I’d read much Joyce before, but that’s not a top tier passion. My experience of formal education is that it has squashed more possible passions than it ever encouraged (to this day, I cringe at the idea of ever opening Moby Dick again).

That being said, I do like the idea of college as a way of educating people, rather than just training them for some future job. I had a friend when I was in college who wanted to become a doctor, and he said that a lot of his fellow future doctors had chosen a pre-med major very early on, but he’d chosen another major (I forget what), partly because he wanted a broader education, and partly because his research had shown that a lot of top medical schools were leaning toward applicants who had a more general undergraduate education, because there was a theory that they made better doctors.

I thought of this when I was considering the movie Eyes Wide Shut recently. I hadn’t liked it much when it was in theaters, but I’ve been watching some videos about it recently, and that’s made me think about it again. The central character is Dr. Bill Harford, a very successful M.D., and it suddenly struck me that he might be a perfect example of what happens when you focus throughout your higher education on the single goal of becoming a doctor.

Being a doctor is clearly his entire identity. He flashes some sort of medical ID card at everybody like it’s a badge, he barely interacts with his daughter, and it’s clearly never occurred to him that his wife is a three-dimensional human being. Has he ever read a book or seen a play? He treats the rich and powerful, but he has no idea how money or power actually work. He is amazed and alarmed to find out that his wife has a history and an interior life. He’s like a boy from junior high school who was yanked from the playground, given medical training and a degree, and who has been completely insulated from reality ever since by lots of prestige and cash.

So, yes, let’s focus some energy on the “humanities.”

please, sir, i want some less

~ Anthony Lee Collins ~ Leave a comment

Some days, it seems like everybody is watching House of the Dragon, or The Rings of Power, or both. And it definitely feels, on most days, like everybody is watching Marvel movies and shows.

(Of course, some days it seems like a lot of people are watching one or two or all three primarily in order to complain about them, but that’s a separate question. That’s not what this is about.)

I’ve read Lord of the Rings several times, starting back in the late 1960s or early 1970s. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Quite a satisfying end, actually. I saw the movies when they came out, and I’ve seen them since as well. Similarly: beginning, middle, and end. Very satisfying.

I don’t need more. I may have seen one of the Hobbit movies, but I don’t remember much of anything about it. There was a dragon, with the voice of a famous British actor.

I’ve seen a lot of Game of Thrones, including the end. Not as satisfying an ending as Lord of the Rings, but it was an ending. So, I’m done with that. Time for something else.

I was never as attached to the Marvel movies (except for Guardians of the Galaxy) as I am to Lord of the Rings, but Endgame was a big finale, so I’m mostly done with that whole thing also. (Well, except for Moon Knight, which was excellent.)

Once again, as usual, I have my finger very far from the pulse.

Even with The Witcher (which I’m still obsessed with), I’m mostly impatient for Season 3 to come out, but I haven’t seen the two spin-offs (one movie and one short series) yet, because they’re not about the same characters. Maybe that’s the problem in general. No Ser Davos or Ser Jorah, no Samwise (or Samwell), or Geralt or Yennefer or Cirilla? No thanks.

 
On a possibly related note, it occurred to me recently that I’ve never listened to the 10-minute version of Taylor Swift’s song “All Too Well.” I really like the original (especially this version from the Grammy Awards show), but I don’t need 4.5 more minutes of it.

Actually, that’s probably different. I wrote a lot of songs, way back when, and a big part of the art of songwriting is editing and paring down and ruthlessly cutting. Hemingway’s “Iceberg Theory” definitely applies to songwriting, as much as it does to short stories. I don’t need (or want) to read the stuff Hemingway trimmed from “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.”

 
I have been watching The Peripheral, which is good so far. It works because the present day (near future) stuff in rural North Carolina and the future-future stuff in London are both interesting. There’s never that feeling when you’re in one location and timeline, and you’re just impatient to get back to the other one (at least for me).

I also saw the movie Amsterdam, which was really good. I want to see it again. The first time I saw it I was constantly distracted by all the familiar faces which kept popping up (“Hey, that’s Taylor Swift… Okay, she’s gone.”). It was written and directed by David O. Russell, who also did American Hustle (which I liked) and I Heart Huckabees (which I liked more).

 
Later:

1) I thought of adding that nothing mentioned here compares to Doom Patrol, but it seemed unnecessary, but then I just read that the current season of Doom Patrol will be the last. Sigh.

2) I liked this article: “The Lore of the Rings,” particularly this paragraph:

This is an imperative of the contemporary franchise: everything must be connected somehow in an endless feedback loop (or ring). This is usually achieved through “fan service,” knowing winks and nods to characters and events the audience already knows, but an overreliance on such references seals the worlds off, and the air in them soon turns stale. There is no room for the organic happenstance of real life, for the inexplicable and strange, like Tolkien’s immortal weirdos Tom Bombadil and Goldberry, who were jettisoned from Jackson’s adaptation.

glass onion & knives out: horizontal vs. vertical

~ Anthony Lee Collins ~ Leave a comment

I just watched Glass Onion: A Knives Out Story, and I enjoyed it a lot. It is similar to Knives Out in some ways, and different in others, but there’s one major difference that I haven’t seen anybody write about, so I thought I would talk about it here.

I will try to avoid significant spoilers. Both movies are recommended.

In terms of time, Knives Out was vertical. The victim was, if I remember correctly, in his eighties, and the suspects were his children and grandchildren. His mother was also involved in the story. The setting was an old house, obviously decorated to the owner’s particular taste. Inheritance was a major plot point.

It’s also pretty timeless. It could have been set decades earlier, and it will be just as enjoyable decades from now. The Agatha Christie influence, often commented on, includes the fact that Christie could easily have written it herself. The characters have cell phones, for example, but the story could work just as well without them.

Glass Onion is horizontal. The main characters are all roughly the same age, and none of them, as far as we know, have children. [Update: The governor apparently has one or more children.] One has a mother, who is clearly the most intelligent character in the movie, but he constantly ignores and shushes her, and she quickly leaves the story, probably to go get involved in something more interesting.

The story is also completely of this moment. It’s set in the early days of the pandemic lock-down, and several of the characters have jobs which didn’t exist ten years ago and may not exist ten years from now. The movie is full of name drops and cameos, all of which make sense at this moment in history, and most of which will probably need footnotes fairly soon.

The central character in Knives Out had a very long and successful career as a mystery writer. None of these people will have long and successful careers in anything, and in fairness they don’t seem to want that either. They just want clicks and likes and votes, and enough knowledge of the world to know whose names to drop when (and some of them fail pretty spectacularly even at that — like the [white] “influencer” and fashion designer who, we’re told, went on Oprah’s show and compared herself to Harriet Tubman).

Another difference between the movies, as I think about it, is that Knives Out was a mystery with some comedy elements, and Glass Onion is mainly a (very funny) comedy with mystery elements. In other words, Knives Out was Sleuth (the interior decoration was a clear homage to the earlier picture, in fact). Glass Onion is Clue. The mystery is in service of the comedy, not the other way around.

This is not a complaint, by the way — it’s a very clever way to keep a franchise fresh, similar to following Alien, a claustrophobic horror movie, with Aliens, a science fiction action movie. And, since I like comedies and mysteries about equally, a good combination is fine with me.

One thing that pleases me about both movies, as somebody who has written mystery stories, is that each introduces an element or two early on which seems ill-advised and cliché, but then it pays off by the end. I love it when a movie is smarter than I am. There’s a scene early in a Tarantino movie that switches languages in the middle of the scene, and at first I thought it was just the writer wanting to show off, but in fact there was a solid plot-based reason for the switch. I’m sure Tarantino was aware of, and had engineered, my incorrect initial assumption, and I enjoyed my being wrong as much as he did.