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mytimetravelcollector · 2 years ago

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Ben Affleck only regrets one movie: Daredevil. That’s what the actor once told Playboy about the 2003 superhero misstep. “It just kills me,” said Affleck. “I love that story, that character, and the fact that it got f***ed up the way it did stays with me.” Released on 14 February 2003, Daredevil was an attempt at a darker, grittier superhero film – gritty in a pre-Nolan sort of way, at least. It tells the story of blind lawyer Matt Murdock, who avenges his murdered father (that old chestnut) by cleaning up the grubby streets of Hell’s Kitchen. Blinded as a child by toxic goop, Murdock has enhanced senses as an adultre, which manifest as a kind of super-powered radar. Twenty years on from its release, Daredevil looks like a proto-franchise player – an attempt to get a Marvel movie series off the ground before filmmakers had quite figured out the formula. It leaves it an unwieldy if occasionally interesting relic.

Daredevil’s divisive reputation is neatly summed up by its most offending article: Affleck’s fanboy-riling leather suit, which was very much not the spandex version of the source material. Even Charlie Cox, who has played Daredevil since 2015 in both an eponymous Netflix series and the MCU – most recently cameoing in Spider-Man: No Way Home – once commented that “the suit sucks”. What fans didn’t know was that writer-director Mark Steven Johnson had to fight with the studio for any costume. For Johnson – a diehard Daredevil fan – production was “a non-stop battle.” The executives wanted to replicate the success of Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man – released a year earlier – but didn’t understand the Daredevil character. “They didn’t want a costume,” he later said. “They didn’t want horns. They didn’t want anything.”

Like other superhero films, Daredevil was in the works for several years before Affleck finally suited up. Marvel was in financial peril in the 1990s and hadn’t yet started to produce its own films. Film adaptations of their biggest characters stalled. Twentieth Century Fox nabbed the rights to the X-Men in 1993, though the film didn’t reach cinemas until 2000. Sony picked up Spider-Man after a years-long web of complicated rights wrangling. The eventual films, however, were super-sized hits. The Los Angeles Times wrote that “franchise fever” had seized Hollywood.

Twentieth Century Fox had optioned Daredevil in 1997, with Chris Columbus (of Home Alone and Harry Potter fame) in line to direct. When that didn’t work out, Disney flirted with buying the rights but soon dropped out of contention (amusing, considering that Disney now owns Marvel and, subsequently, the rights to Daredevil). The character went to Sony, then New Regency – with Twentieth Century Fox distributing. Johnson, who’d first been hired to write the script at Sony, had to pitch to get back onboard the project. Studio executives were unsure if he was the man for the job. Johnson had written the Grumpy Old Men movies and, at the time, had just one directing credit to his name – the quiet 1998 comedy-drama, Simon Birch.

Kuljit Mithra, who launched the popular Daredevil fansite Man Without Fear back in 1996, tells me that Johnson contacted him at the time. “He said, ‘I’ve got some stuff I want to run by you’,” says Mithra. “Back then, it wasn’t like everybody was an insider! He emailed me storyboards. He sent me all this three years before it was even greenlit. He asked me how it looked.”

Back then, Daredevil was still a niche hero, despite being created by Stan Lee and Bill Everett in 1964, Marvel’s golden age for superhero creation. “I read the comics as a kid,” says Mithra. “As I got older, I noticed that Daredevil was in his own world – he didn’t cross over with a lot of other titles. But he seemed to attract the best writers and artists. They’d always ask to try Daredevil because he was not a high-prestige character. Marvel was like: “Does somebody want to work on this character? We’ll just print it.”

In the 1980s, Daredevil got a gritty reinvention with writer Frank Miller. Mark Steven Johnson drew mostly from Miller’s stories. If anything, says Mithra, the film may follow Frank Miller’s stories – which featured many of Daredevil’s closest allies and villains – a bit too closely. “I think he tried to fit as much as he could in one movie,” says Mithra. “He basically did the whole Frank Miller arc. If he had the space and time of the Netflix show, maybe he could have made it work.”

Before Affleck was cast, the role of Matt Murdock/Daredevil was offered to Vin Diesel, Guy Pearce and Affleck’s real-life BFF Matt Damon. Not everyone loved the idea of Affleck as Daredevil – he was also in the midst of a run of poorly received films, including Pearl Harbor and Gigli – but he was a fan of the comic and a close friend and collaborator of filmmaker and comic-book devotee Kevin Smith. Smith, following films such as Clerks, Mallrats, and Chasing Amy, had even written an acclaimed run of the Daredevil comic, and cameos in the film itself.”

Surrounding Affleck was Jennifer Garner as assassin and love interest Elektra; Colin Farrell as crack shot henchman Bullseye; Michael Clarke Duncan as Wilson Fisk aka Kingpin; and Jon Favreau as Murdock’s lummox lawyer sidekick, Foggy. Favreau later directed Iron Man, the 2008 film that kicked off the Marvel Cinematic Universe and rendered films like Daredevil almost obsolete – mere footnotes in superhero

Clarke Duncan, who died in 2012, was unsure at first about playing the oversized crime lord, Kingpin. “He’s cool,” he once said. “But he’s white.” These days, the casting might cause a meltdown in the most toxic corners of online fandom, but there was no doubt that Clarke Duncan – a 6ft 5in, 300lb powerhouse – was the right man for the job. “Mark Steven Johnson wanted someone who embodied strength,” says Mithra. “All the fan casting was ‘let’s have some gigantic wrestler play the Kingpin’, but you’ve got to have someone who can act.”

Elsewhere, Farrell seems to be having a blast as Bullseye, a petulant, gobby hitman with a target carved into his forehead and who kills people by any means necessary. He’s always mid-flick, whether with knives, paper clips or peanuts. “I want a bloody costume,” Bullseye says at one point, nodding to the fact that his (admittedly daft) costume had been lost in the transition from page to screen. Indeed, these were the days when producers didn’t want to see the proper costumes on their heroes and villains. Look at the Power Ranger-like Green Goblin in Spider-Man, or the leather-clad X-Men. “What would you prefer,” Cyclops asks Wolverine in 2000’s X-Men. “Yellow spandex?” There was a hint of embarrassment about it all. For Johnson – who understood comic book fandom – Daredevil’s costume represented a significant behind-the-scenes battle.

“It was ridiculous,” he said in 2019. “They were like, ‘We’re not going to put a man in devil horns! They call him Daredevil because he does daring things, not because he dresses up like a devil’. I was like, ‘You have to! Otherwise, he’s not Daredevil’.” Eventually, Fox executives conceded on the costume, but then fought Johnson on the colour red. The studio wanted black. They eventually compromised on something in the middle, more or less the colour of blood. Johnson added: “And then some people go, ‘Bah, he’s got a leather costume, that’s bulls***, he should be in spandex. You ruined my childhood’. And I’m like, ‘Dude, you have no idea – I fought so hard just to get horns’.”

Daredevil was initially seen as a modest actioner with a budget of $50m (£41m). The character didn’t have the brand name value to warrant a mega budget. (Producer Gary Foster recalled that whenever he told people he was making a Daredevil film, they thought he meant a biopic about the stunt motorcyclist, Evel Knievel.) But when Spider-Man was released in 2002 and grossed around $800m (£667m) at the global box office, Fox boosted Daredevil’s special effects budget. “They saw what Spider-Man had done at Sony and tried to replicate it,” says Mithra. “Because they really didn’t know Daredevil well. They tried to do the same marketing and promotion – even the soundtrack.”

While Spider-Man plumped for Nickelback, Daredevil is packed with banging, turn-of-the-millennium nu metal, as well as two (!) infamous Evanescence needle drops. To say Daredevil has aged horribly is harsh, but it has aged very specifically. “It’s definitely an early 2000s film!” laughs Mithra. But there is something about Daredevil – a film that moves like Spider-Man but has the darker heart of Tim Burton’s Batman. Particularly good is the “shadow world” effect, which brings Murdock’s radar-like sense to life. The film is also shrewd enough to dump some of the rigmarole of origin stories, belonging to a generation of superhero films that hadn’t figured out how to sidestep the trappings entirely.

When Playboy asked Affleck what went wrong, he replied that it would be “impolite” to say so. Though he admitted that he bears some of the blame: “You can’t divorce yourself and say it was everybody else’s fault and not mine. I was there.”

Like so many films of that time, Daredevil is hamstrung by abysmal CGI. See the decidedly ropey punch-up between Daredevil and Bullseye. A scene in which Daredevil kills (or deliberately doesn’t save) a villain was also criticised by fans – something that no true superhero would do in the comics. “I think that’s part of what upset people,” says Mithra. “It was the big chance to showcase this character and they got it all wrong.”

In 2018, Affleck took a more serious stance. He recalled being less interested in superheroics and more interested in understanding what it felt to be blind. He enlisted the help of a blind actor to follow him on the set and help refine his performance. It would be a nice sentiment – albeit if Matt Murdock wasn’t able to somehow push through his blindness and sense when a beautiful woman is nearby, then follow her down the street even when she’s asked him to leave her alone. The following flirt-off between Murdock and Elektra in a New York playground is soul-curlingly cringeworthy.

The biggest issue, perhaps, is that among the studio politics and behind-the-scenes battles, Johnson had to cut about a quarter of the film. Producers wanted a 100-minute movie. “They cut it down,” says Mithra. “They wanted more showtimes in the theatre – they didn’t want the full version that the director wanted.” Mithra – who’d seen Johnson’s storyboards before production began proper – had a good sense of how the film changed from Johnson’s initial vision. “I could see what didn’t make it,” Mithra says. “He probably [experienced] a lot of studio interference.”

Contrary to its rep, Daredevil was not a flop. From a budget of $75m (£62m), it grossed $179m (£149m). In its opening week in the US, it dominated the box office. The New York Times said it was “passable”, but “too worshipful of the idiom’s conventions. [Johnson’s] affection for the character leaves overly sincere puddles every step of the way.” The Independent didn’t much like it, and thought that Affleck was “a man for whom the word ‘obnoxious’ was surely invented”. The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw argued that Daredevil was “far funnier and gutsier than [2002’s] wimpish Spider-Man”.

Mithra says fan responses to the film were “an even split” between love and hate: “I don’t know anybody who just said, ‘Yeah, it was alright’.” The film didn’t do much to help Daredevil’s mainstream rep, either. “When I told people I run a Daredevil website,” says Mithra, “they’d go, ‘What, about Ben Affleck?! Why?’”

In 2004, a director’s cut of Daredevil was released on DVD, with around 30 minutes of added material: more Kingpin, less schmaltz, and a deeper understanding of Matt Murdock. A year later, a spin-off was released: Elektra, which proved to be one of the first attempts at an interconnected superhero cinematic universe. But it wasn’t confident enough to celebrate its lineage: Affleck filmed a scene, reuniting with Garner, but it was cut. Even a Daredevil spinoff didn’t want anything to do with Daredevil. “They did everything to not say it was a Daredevil sequel,” says Mithra. “They didn’t do any promotion to say it was a continuation. The trailers would always say ‘from the studio that brought you X-Men’.”

It was a curious moment for superhero cinema. After the multi-film successes of X-Men and Spider-Man, Daredevil was part of a run of Marvel standalone projects. All were attempted franchise starters, but none were especially good. “It was way before the MCU,” Johnson later said. “The Marvel characters were all over different studios, but no one quite knew what to do with them.” Also in 2003, Ang Lee directed Hulk – an oddity of early 2000s blockbusters. Then came The Punisher, starring Thomas Jane and John Travolta, followed by two Underrated Fantastic Four films, and the Nicolas Cage-starring Ghost Rider, also written and directed by Johnson. The MCU has made these films feel oddly pointless.

Affleck later said he had “inoculated” himself from playing a superhero again. “Wearing a costume was a source of humiliation for me and something I wouldn’t want to do again soon,” he said while promoting Hollywoodland, a film about the suicide of Superman actor George Reeves. A few years on, he explained that he took the role of Batman in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice to make amends for Daredevil. He wanted to make a superhero film and “do it right”. Ahem.

Still, as an artefact from a very specific time in superhero cinema, Daredevil has its fans. As Johnson explained in 2019: “Sometimes [people] apologize, like, ‘Can I say something? I really like Daredevil’. I’m like, ‘It’s OK, I’m not going to tell anybody!’”

#2003 daredevil #ben affleck #mark steven johnson #20th anniversary of daredevil 03 #jennifer garner #20th century fox #marvel #michael clarke duncan #zack snyder #batman v supeman: dawn of justice #marvel mcu

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letterboxd · 3 years ago

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In Focus: The Truman Show.

Inspired by Letterboxd data that revealed it to be a lockdown favorite, editor-at-large Dominic Corry looks at the ever-evolving importance of contemporary masterpiece The Truman Show.

It has long been apparent that The Truman Show is an unnervingly prescient film. The story of a man who becomes aware that his superficially idyllic life is, in fact, a live-streamed television show has gone from being high-concept to every-day.

Thanks to the three Ps—the prevalence of mass urban surveillance, the proliferation of reality television and the pervasiveness of video in social media—the notion of cameras filming our every move is no longer a paranoid fantasy, but real life. The twist being that, for the most part, we all willingly signed up for it, and did all the filming ourselves. As Yi Jian saliently observes in his review: “Not to get all ‘we live in a society’ on Letterboxd but I know a person or two in real life that would actually give anything to trade lives with Truman, it do be like that sometimes”. It indeed do, Yi Jian.

So it’s something of a cliché at this stage to point out how we are all living in some version of the The Truman Show, and you don’t have to be a member of the royal family to feel that way. Yet, somehow, the film has become even more pertinent over the last eighteen months. And it’s a pertinence reflected in the massive uptick in viewership for the film as seen in Letterboxd activity.

During the month of February 2020, the last moment of the Before Times, The Truman Show had a modest 1,235 diary entries. That number tripled in April of that year, by which time the seriousness of the pandemic had become clear. And by July, deep in the worst of the pandemic, Truman fervor peaked, with a further 178 percent leap over April’s numbers, firmly placing it in the top 200 films watched by our members in a year of lockdown. (By the way, ‘diary entries’ mean activity where the member has added a watched date; many thousands more also marked Truman as ‘watched’ in those dark months, but didn’t specify a date.)

It’s not difficult to imagine why we might become more interested in revisiting this eminently re-visitable film. During lockdown, social media—including Letterboxd—took on a greater presence in terms of how we communicated with each other. We got used to seeing footage of faces more than actual faces. We were all the stars of our own ‘Truman Show’, and simultaneously the audience of everyone else’s ‘Truman Show’.

Christian Torres boiled it down effectively when he wrote: “Now every movie I see seems to be related to my life in quarantine. I am Truman and I want to escape.” And Sonya Sandra eloquently captured the film’s increased contemporary significance in her review: “This is a real-life daylight horror film. The best kind. Even more relevant in 2021 than ever. We are all Truman, we all want to find what is real in our fake lives filled with media, capitalism and ideology. And it’s our job to fight the storm and get to the truth of it all. Nothing is real, everything is for profit, and everyone is selfish. Go out and find what is real, because it’s definitely not here.”

With its deft, dazzling blending of the profound and the humorous, the optimistic and the cynical, it’s difficult to think of anything released since The Truman Show that comes as close as it does to being a modern-day Frank Capra movie. It’s hopeful, but has its eyes wide open. There’s a darkness in the themes of the film that is never replicated in the colors on display.

While everyone involved delivers career-best work, we must principally credit the triumvirate of talent at the center of the film: director Peter Weir, screenwriter Andrew Niccol and star Jim Carrey.

Star Jim Carrey and director Peter Weir on the set of ‘The Truman Show’ (1998).

Weir is a director who inspires much online love whenever his name is mentioned, but he isn’t really mentioned all that often. Or at least as often as he should be. The Australian filmmaker has delivered masterpieces across multiple genres, and it’s extremely sad that he hasn’t directed a movie since 2010’s not-quite-true World War II drama The Way Back, arguably one of his lesser works. That’s also, insanely, one of only two movies he’s made since Truman, the other being Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, the wide and rabid affection for which regularly kicks up on Twitter (not to mention demand for a sequel).

Weir doesn’t do many interviews, and while this 2018 Vanity Fair article marking Truman’s twentieth anniversary has many quotes about the film’s modern relevance, Weir doesn’t offer any commentary to that effect, presumably preferring to let the work speak for itself—though in this 1998 interview he did talk about the relationship between the media, the general public and the people we become fascinated with, as a “complex situation”.

The Vanity Fair article does, however, reveal a fascinating ‘what if’ scenario relating to Christof, the god-like director of the in-movie TV show played by Ed Harris, who offers up a pile of pretentious auteur clichés: mononymous, beret, etc. (beyond the whole god thing, that is). When Dennis Hopper, originally cast in the role, wasn’t working out, Weir considered playing the role himself, which would’ve added yet another meta layer. It brings to mind how George Miller styled Immortan Joe (played by Hugh Keays-Byrne) after himself in Mad Max: Fury Road, or how Christopher Nolan’s haircut shows up in most of his films.

Ed Harris as Christof in ‘The Truman Show’ (1998).

And, at one point, it could have gone mega-meta. Weir, in the 1998 interview, talked about a “crazy idea” he had, a technical impossibility back then but easily achievable with live-streaming now. “I would have loved to have had a video camera installed in every theater the film was to be seen [in]. At one point, the projectionist would … cut to the viewers in the cinema and then back to the movie. But I thought it was best to leave that idea untested.” Imagine.

Weir also played a role in helping to shape the originally much more overtly dark screenplay into the cheerier (on the surface at least) shooting script, which is solely credited to fellow antipodean, New Zealand-born Niccol, also a producer on the film. Both men have done the majority of their work in America, but it’s tempting to credit the film’s tone-perfect sense of heightened Americana to the degree of separation offered by their foreign provenance. In any case, it’s clear that open-air mall designers were paying attention.

Niccol’s original screenplay made his name in Hollywood, and revealed a storyteller excited by big ideas. He moved into directing with the smaller-scale Gattaca, released a year prior to Truman (itself delayed to meet Carrey’s availability). Niccol’s subsequent filmography includes several legit bangers (Lord of War hive step up!), and his endearing dedication to lofty allegories in a genre setting makes him an increasingly rare breed in Hollywood.

Like Weir, he is not the greatest fan of giving interviews, but the Vanity Fair piece quotes him making an interesting point: “When you know there is a camera, there is no reality,” thereby making Truman “the only genuine reality star.”

It’s a sentiment echoed by MusicMoviesMe, who writes that “‘Truman Show’ beats all other reality shows out there like Bachelors, Survivors and Kardashians. Come on, when you know there’s a camera at your tail, there’s no reality. So yes, Truman beats all reality shows out there bar none!”

The role was perfectly suited to Jim Carrey’s affected mannerisms, and his status as one of the world’s biggest stars meant he could relate to Truman more than most people. Then, at least. Nowadays, of course, we are all Truman.

“It is always incredible to see how far The Truman Show was ahead of [its] time,” observes The Closer79. “In a world where celebs are monitored 24/7 and we are showered with unnecessary private information on the web, where talent-free wannabes become famous and where you sometimes [wonder] what kind of surreal show society you are in—Truman and his fake show life cleverly have anticipated all of this. Only Truman knew nothing of his luck and he was granted an escape from his glass prison. We don’t really have this possibility… Aren’t we all Truman? Sometimes even voluntarily…”

Austin Burke concurs: “I have always known that I really enjoyed this film, but I had no clue that it would hold up so well years later… Could this be because the strange world that he finds himself in is far more similar to our world today? Possibly, but the idea and themes are so much more relevant now compared to when this originally released.” And while DallasFrance is conscious of piling on about the film’s prescience, his review highlights how there really is no limit to the film’s meta qualities:

“Instead of writing a review about how this film predicted social media, or how we’re all Truman, or yadda yadda yadda, I’ll instead fixate on the miraculous fact that two absolute legends were cast as primary viewers of the Truman Show:

1. The old lady from The Running Man who starts betting on Ben Richards (Arnold Schwarzenegger). ‘He’s one bad motherf*cker!’

2. The villain from The Karate Kid Part II:

‘Live or die, man?!’ ‘Die!’ ‘Wrong!’ *hooooonnnkkk*

I’ve never seen either of these actors in any other roles. With the second one, I felt like I was watching a character from my childhood watch a character from his childhood come to realizations about the characters in his childhood. So actually… the movie’s really about me.”

Never change, LB membership.

We are all generally pretty aware of how ahead of its time The Truman Show was, but that doesn’t lessen its impact. Maddie’s review shows that there’s always some new angle to consider: “Imagine being an extra in this movie… You would be an extra, playing an actor, playing an extra. Think about that long enough and tell me that doesn’t make you want to walk into the ocean.”

Kev goes even further: “Watching other people watch somebody else while also watching that person while also watching the person watching over that person is a great reminder that watching is weird, and to be watched is to not own yourself. Don’t watch, don’t try to be watched. Just live.”

Or perhaps Will encapsulates the film’s ability to present an ever-evolving message best, writing that, “clearly, this is video proof that we live in a simulation.” Beyond mere prescience, The Truman Show is a telling mirror to whatever era it is viewed in. Its message will continue to evolve.

Now that we’re finally (touch wood) emerging from the pandemic, it will be fascinating to see what The Truman Show has to say about its audience and the world they live in, in years to come. Rest assured, it will be well-documented by you, the Letterboxd audience.

Also: can Peter Weir please make another movie? Like, seriously.

Related content

A Meta-Reality: Robert’s list of layers of film in life and life in film

Follow Dom on Letterboxd

#the truman show #truman #peter weir #jim carrey #andrew niccol #letterboxd #lockdown #quarantine #coronavirus #pandemic #movies #comfort films #comedy #truman show

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mindctrlaltdel · 4 years ago

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Random Reviews: Mulholland Drive

This movie is BASIC INSTINCT, written and directed by Salvador Dali.

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Recently, I watched MULHOLLAND DRIVE for the first time for my friend Shawn Eastridge's podcast, MISSING FRAMES (www.thenerdparty.com/missingframes/episode-103-mulholland-drive).

As I watched this odd, funny, disturbing, interesting flick, I took the following notes. Is it, as some critics say, the BEST FILM OF THE 21ST CENTURY? Here's an inside look at my viewing experience as I mulled over MULHOLLAND DRIVE...

[PRESS PLAY]

I love how the first five minutes is basically a bad late 90's Gap commercial, all swing dancing, no point...

The Mulholland Drive sign is calling to us. The street, Mulholland Drive, is Bali Hai for perverts.

Justin Theroux gets top billing over Naomi Watts??

I gotta admit, I saw one of the movie's original posters and thought "Naomi Watts AND the lady from the first MEN IN BLACK is in this? It's the triumphant return of Linda Fiorentino." When I DIDN'T see her name in the opening credits, I was disappointed. She's NO Linda Fiorentino... for this role, she's even better. AND she's a countess (seriously, look it up). Oh, and Robert Forster shows up for 10 minutes.

Not-Linda Fiorentino has some hustle in her for someone who just survived a horrible head on collision.

I like how the street signs kind of tell us where we are and what kind of world we're in. It's like a surreal, dramatic version of that Californians SNL sketch.

You mean to tell me that the red-headed older woman didn't see not-Linda Fiorentino under her kitchen table? UnbeLIEVable.

Holy crap, the wide-eyed guy in Winky's - he plays Jimmy Barrett, the comedian in MAD MEN... and MAD MEN is an interesting connection here, because everyone talks in this measured, paced deliberate way throughout that series, kind of similar to how the characters usually speak in the David Lynch productions I've seen... When I started watching MAD MEN, I thought the actors were purposely directed to speak that way, so everything to seem more "real" as opposed to that fast-talking, old-Hollywood style that you'd expect to see from outspoken, big idea-types. I imagined that Matt Weiner wanted people to seem - at least to modern audiences - the way people actually were - particularly, the inhabitants of the intelligent and cerebral world of ad men, working behind the scenes, on the fringes of show business. But then Jimmy Barrett, an old-timey comedian ALSO spoke that way. And it just didn't seem authentic to me. Anyway, back to THIS movie...

OH and that dingy woman behind the dumpster! She's like if Captain Howdy moved out West and got all LA on us. Is that Cloris Leachman covered in mud? And the music... for some reason, there's nothing scarier than the sound of an HVAC vent on full blast. (According to this article, www.vulture.com/2014/10/mulholland-drives-evil-hobo-breaks-her-silencio.html,the actress who played Evil Hobo #1 said of her audition process: "I don’t mean to brag, but David Lynch said he was looking for the most incredible face he could find. I actually met him at a Twin Peaks party, and he was like, 'Look at that face!'")

I love the X-Files-style synth strings that play over Naomi Watts (Betty) and gram-gram (Irene) as they walk through the hotel, I mean the airport... Aw, these two old people love Betty. What a different life she's living than that countess who's not Linda Fiorentino who's squatting in that redhead's apartment that Betty's about to move into.

Even then, Naomi had a good American accent. (Although I learned she's technically British but split her time between England and Australia), those Australians are great at spitting out neutral American sounds. But once I learned that Betty is supposed to be Canadian, I was very disappointed. It's not THAT authentic. Where are her "Aboots"? And she didn't put maple syrup on anything in this whole movie.

Oh my God, are Irene and her husband, riding in this towncar, ALSO going to get held up, like not-Linda Fiorentino at the beginning of the movie? Oh okay, they're not. We just followed them for no reason other than to see that they look happier than an old couple in a Cialis commercial. I guess meeting Betty really improved their sex life or something.

Coco - of course she's a fading hollywood starlet... AHHH, Coco is played by Ann Miller - good for her. She's basically that kooky old landlady from SEINFELD, the one who worked with the Three Stooges that Kramer met when he went to LA. Look at all these connections!

"Prize-fighting kangaroo who shits all over the courtyard" - do you think Naomi Watts is going to come out and say, "as an Australian, I was actually offended by this line, but I was scared into silence by that power-hungry monster, David Lynch."

The countess - who now goes by "Rita" - does kind of look like Rita Hayworth. I like the connections to old Hollywood and to noirs and how it's all wrapped together. Rita Hayworth is also a redhead, like Betty's aunt. She's of Spanish descent as well... and the actress playing Rita in this movie is of Mexican descent... Connections, connections.

I love that this casting session is basically run by a deep state shadow organization with a weird waiter in a red blazer... This is how Disney cast WandaVision.

HAHAHAH "That is one of the finest espressos in the world sir!" - this is DEFINITELY how Disney casts their movies. And Justin Theroux is the only man with integrity in this room! Does anyone have any class in this town!? They don't even validate his parking.

This is my favorite movie about making movies since BOWFINGER. And I may not be lying. And somehow less weird than THE ARTIST.

Is everyone gonna start killing each other over Ed's famous black book? This is oddly funny.

"Something bit me bad!" This incredibly long fight scene between the blond guy and secretary... it reminds me of the Uma Thurman/Daryl Hannah trailer fight in KILL BILL VOL. 2 but with less snakes.

These closeups of lingering looks on Rita's cash-filled purse are great... She's pulling wads of cash out of that purse one at a time, like Leslie Nielsen pulling eggs out of that blond lady in AIRPLANE!

I want to know what direction David Lynch gave that braless woman who's following the blond assassin around. It's like she's doing an acting exercise... like you know, when you're told to fill the space... "walk around the room, and clear your head. And now you're walking really fast. And now you're slow. NOW, imagine what it would be like to walk with your nose as the furthest point in front of you. Lead with your nose..." And David Lynch did that and told the braless woman to lead with her chest.

Justin Theroux is basically Robert Downey Jr.'s character from BOWFINGER, except NOW, he's the protagonist.

Betty is loving Rita's amnesia a bit too much. If this were my life, Rita would be the most interesting thing to happen to me too. Hell, if I was from Ontario, getting off at LAX would rock my world.

When Justin Theroux enters his glass-walled home to find his wife with another man, well... Justin Theroux may never star in something like HOBO WITH A SHOTGUN, but I can definitely picture him in YUPPIE WITH A GOLF CLUB.

That slinky theme song playing in Justin Theroux's/Laraine's house is a song that I actually listen to in my tiki, lounge playlist - to give you a hint of my music tastes. What I listen to for fun, Billy Ray Cyrus puts on to drown out his love-making.

By the way, BILLY RAY CYRUS!!! WHAT? Is this how Miley was conceived??? I think yes.

Pink paint in a jewelry box! This is much better than the usual throwing-all-his-belongings-out-a-second-story-apartment-window-scene that happens in every other movie.

I wouldn't be THAT excited if I learned MY name was Diane Selwin. BUT the sexxxual tension with the waitress Diane at the diner is palpable!

So, not-Linda Fiorentino has amnesia. How does she know that answering machine is NOT her voice!?

Justin Theroux/Adam Kesher's wife is very aggressive with the large man who's so dedicated to finding Adam Kesher that he keeps calling Adam's name in vain like the secretary in my doctor's office.

I watched this movie in pieces, the first half late at night. The second half the next morning. In between, while sleeping, I had a dream where Betty and Rita were looking over a map and any time one of their hands brushed over another, their hands would turn gold. As if this was a stylistic choice made by the filmmaker directing my dream to show that there's some kind of deeper relationship between these two women. So I've started dreaming in Lynch.

I like how this film is so utterly connected to not only Lynch's subconscious, but the audience's as well. Lynch is TAPPED IN. I don't always love when a film goes all in with a surreal style, because sometimes that's just a cover for something lacking in the storytelling department. But I do feel there's more to it here, in MULHOLLAND DRIVE.

The hooded woman, Louise... I feel like I've run into her on the streets of New York. A Louise will ALWAYS find a way to give you a portent of doom that ruins your day. Friggin’ Louise.

This movie is so moody, you really have to be in the mood to watch it.

There's something magical and prophetic about the cowboy, like he's the seer that the old general sees on the eve of battle... Also, I love how the lead female role in Justin Theroux's movie is his sword of destiny. There's a glitz and gleam and nostalgia to Old Hollywood that naturally gives this movie, set in "modern" Hollywood," a total fantasy vibe.

Hahaha that "You're still here?" scene rehearsal between Betty and Rita is an excellent transition.

James Karen - the real estate guy from POLTERGEIST - is handling casting! "He moved the headshots but he didn't cast the bodies!!"

The casting direction: "Don't play it for real until it gets real." It's interesting how the characters, who work in the "business," seem to control their reality. Betty seems unsure of where the scene is going, then she gets into it. And it really speaks to her conversion from a bright-eyed new arrival to someone who surrenders to the darker impulses of the city.

HEAVY BREATHING.

Ugh friggin' Bob...

I love how Lynnie, the casting director, pulls the rug out from under that scene. There's always a jaded casting person who totally wrecks any good feelings about every audition. It's a thing.

David Lynch uses nostalgia and a latent love for Hollywood to draw the characters (and us) into his world and then subverts our expectations. A lot.

Why is the screen test just a lip-synching contest? ...I think it feeds into the nostalgia element for the movie at large but it seems like a waste of studio resources here. Early-aughties Hollywood spending, amirite?

Rita's reaction to finding the body is played very much like the reaction a character would have in an older film... The horror! The fear! The silent gaping terror while possessed with the inability to scream. I was watching the original KING KONG before this (which is may be a sign from the universe that I had to watch this Naomi Watts vehicle, as she starred in the remake), and specifically remember the scene where the director Carl Denham is coaching Ann Darrow/Fay Wray on how to act in a horror film - "now look up, and you see it, you see it in all its horror. And your jaw drops and you try to scream but you're so frozen in terror that you can't!" - I imagine that's what Lynch is doing to not-Linda Fiorentino off-camera as they filmed this scene.

Uh-oh, Rita is single-white femal'ing Betty now... She doesn't have a personality of her own, so she's going to take Betty's.... And now we're just getting NUDE with each other. This erotic thriller immediately turned from skintillating to Skinemax.

"I'm in love with you" - is Betty just saying that to convince herself? It feels more lusty than real. Betty's so bright-eyed and bushy tailed. Rita is gonna chew her up and spit her out!

I like the shot when they're sleeping together and, as they rest, their faces overlap thanks to the perspective of the framing. How much of the same person are they becoming? Where does one personality start and the other end?

The weird 2am theater. How'd Rita and Betty find this place? I love how this pop-up slam-poetry reading in this opera house is as terrifying to Rita and Betty as finding the dead body.

So Betty starts convulsing in her seat and then the poet disappears in a kind of old-style, cinematic I'm disappearing effect. I dig it.

Wait... is this a mysterious, magical show that just appears in LA, like Hamunaptra, the City of the Dead, that town in THE MUMMY that only shows up at sunrise on the third day or something like that? Or is this just a poorly attended Spanish-language talent show that could only afford to book this theater at 2am on a Thursday?

I love that Betty and Rita are tearing up over Rebekah Del Rio's performance (Rebekah Del Rio is a real person, by the way). Then, Rebekah faints as her voice keeps singing - is NOTHING real? Has Betty totally given into this weird world to the point that she doesn't really know what's authentic and what's fake anymore OR was Betty fake before she got to LA so it was easy for her to get acclimated.

This movie is like THE MATRIX, from the perspective of characters who only took the blue pill and didn't look back.

OOOH, Betty has the box and Rita has the key! But the box is empty except maybe its the Gom Jabbar pain-box from DUNE. Is David Lynch using MULHOLLAND DRIVE as an excuse to make good on his promise to produce a good version of DUNE.

WAIT A SECOND, the cowboy knows the dead girl? Does this even matter?

Now, wait ANOTHER second. Is Betty performing or DREAMING when she's Diane or is something else going one??

What's the BLUE KEY doing there?

"Two Detectives"??? Is she talking about Betty and Rita OR Robert Forster and the pudgy guy? OR someone else entirely - the two guy's from Winky's???

The movie became more interesting the moment the perspective shifted to "Diane" and "Camilla." When that happened, Naomi Watts really amped up her performance... reaching a level of intensity we hadn't seen since Betty's audition... it does take 2 hours to reach that point.... But then, when Betty and Rita are topless on the couch, I couldn't tell who they were supposed to be until Rita/Camilla called her "Diane."

Wait, now Rita's acting?? OH, so Rita was an actress? And Diane wasn't? Or Betty looks exactly like Diane?

The weird shifts in focus. The sad masturbating. This is the most depressing soft-core ever made!

Did Betty get killed and have amnesia too?

They take a shortcut to Eddie's house which looks EXACTLY like where Rita/Camilla was taken at the beginning of the movie by the hitmen in the towncar before that wild accident with those teenagers made her life weirder... OR less weird. You be the judge.

IS this a flashback or the future. Eddie and Camilla are having an affair?

MY MOTHER? COCO - what's real and what isn't????

The jitterbug competition.... Diane/Naomi wanted the lead so bad, Camilla got the part but in Mulholland Drive, Naomi is the star.

Then, Camilla is kissing that other blond actress who Betty watched screen test...

MULHOLLAND DRIVE is just David Lynch telling us that LA is a place for lust and jealousy and no matter what, purity gets ruined.

WHAT, the blond waitress is BETTY? And Diane hires the blond guy, who's officially labeled as a hitman.

Diane is also from Canada...

Are Diane and Betty just different versions of the same people in nearby parallel universes? I certainly HOPE so. This is too much insanity for ONE universe to handle.

The blue key will be found where the blond guy told Diane. Okay, that makes sense. But if this were to mirror real life, the key was in her hand the WHOLE time!

OH, and hobo-Cloris Leachman comes back... AND she's holding the blue box/Gom Jabbar... WHY the hell did those two old people wander out of that paper bag??? Do they represent longstanding guilt? Seems like it. Because they've just crept into Diane's apartment.

MULHOLLAND DRIVE is almost silly to the point of pretentiousness at points - at least with the last word to be uttered on screen - "silencio." That said, it does evoke the HAMLET line: "And the rest is silence," so THAT's poetic.

Sadly, Robert Forster was barely in this movie...

Oh, and Lee Grant played Louise - the old-Hollywood connections keep coming!

I can't believe this movie was intended to be a pilot?

***

Now, some final notes:

On the swapping of characters and relationships in the last 30 minutes -- my first thought was that Betty/Diane and Rita/Camilla look similar and/or they're connected by a parallel universe, and the diner is like the central hub between worlds, and hobo-Cloris Leachman is the gatekeeper between the two worlds... I buy the "dream world" explanation that some critics espouse, that's something I considered myself as I watched. But I'm not sure I believed Betty is Diane's dream version of herself. Also, I think David Lynch has a feeling about how everything fits together, yet I don't know if he's even settled on an explanation for everything. He just trusted his subconscious and he's so confident in his latent abilities, that we trust him to show us everything we need to see and take us everywhere we need to go.

I enjoy how it's a surrealist answer to SUNSET BOULEVARD. I hope in 2050, someone makes "The 405" really tying all these movies and Los Angeles roads together.

MULHOLLAND DRIVE is weird but good. Still, I don't know if, to me, it's more weird than good. It's also funny. But is it funny because it's weird or because it's actually, genuinely funny? Are these questions David Lynch actually wants me to ask or does he make it weird on impulse to cover for the fact that the film is simply just weird and based entirely on impulse? MULHOLLAND DRIVE is almost like a parody of a film noir, made by an inter-dimensional alien life-form who studied a bunch of movies from the 40's through the 90's but doesn't have a full grasp on human behavior, and DESPITE THAT, it's more of an emotional experience than a logical one. It's somewhere in between. It's self-indulgent in a way but also very giving. It's a paradox wrapped in an oxymoron wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a coffee-stained napkin covered in cigarette ash locked in a small, blue box.

***

Summing it up: I don't think there's a world where this movie would get a perfect score from me. Because ultimately, for all it's interesting and exciting moments, it's more of a passion project for David Lynch than a piece of entertainment for the audience, no matter how entertaining it may be. To me, it's a vision board more than it is a complete film. And yet, it IS a complete EXPERIENCE. And there's nothing wrong with that.

All of that said, I know David Lynch doesn't really like to give viewers a clear cut, traditional narrative. So, I had a feeling the mystery was just that, a mystery. Or even moreso, the FEELING of a mystery. It's not about where we're going, it's about the journey to the destination. And while the general atmosphere is moody and evocative and often powerful, MULHOLLAND DRIVE plays more like a 2.5 hour piece of music than a cohesive narrative. Maybe that's the best thing about it.

In the distant future, when our way of speaking has become as archaic as the words of Shakespeare are to us, it's the feeling and emotions and images of movies like MULHOLLAND DRIVE that will still have a timeless impact on the future audiences who view them.

#Random Reviews #movie review #review #Mulholland Drive #David Lynch #Missing Frames #Twin Peaks #Naomi Watts #Laura Harring #Ann Miller #Justin Theroux #Dune #existential #surreal

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paralianprince · 4 years ago

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The Crown Prince of Sealand gives an exclusive glimpse into life on the off-shore platform

AS A principality, it doesn't quite have the glamour or style of Monte Carlo. There's no castle for the Royal Family and even basic luxuries, such as soap, are in short supply. Sealand is, in truth, a rather ugly, lonely pile of concrete and rusting metal which rises above the choppy waters of the North Sea some seven miles off the coast of Suffolk.

Yet the “hard as nails” Bates family have put their lives on the line on more than one occasion to remain the undisputed monarchs of their self-styled kingdom since 1966. For them it’s certainly not just two giant concrete legs rising out of the sea to support a thin metal platform measuring 120 feet by 60 feet – roughly the size of two tennis courts. “There is a very powerful family bond with Sealand which is difficult to explain but it won’t be broken,” says ruling monarch Crown Prince Michael Bates, 68, in a rare and exclusive interview.

He is currently involved in discussions with Hollywood filmmakers planning a movie about Sealand, and a book is published this week chronicling its fascinating history. Suddenly, Sealand is attracting an awful lot of attention, mainly because of a public yearning for wild tales of English eccentricity.

Built in 1942 by British engineer Guy Maunsell, it was one of a handful of his so-called Maunsell naval forts put up off the East Coast to stall a German invasion force which never arrived. Marines occupied the forts to pound enemy aircraft with 28lb anti-aircraft shells, destroying 22 planes, one submarine and 33 doodlebugs, a record which justified the cost of building them.

However, at the end of the war the forts were abandoned. Their purpose had been served and nobody knew what to do with them. For years, they lay empty and unloved, convenient rest stops for passing seagulls.

Then former soldier Roy Bates, Michael’s father, had a brainwave. Injured in fighting in Italy in 1944, Roy hadn’t adapted well to life in civvy street.

After literally hurling his bowler hat and briefcase into the sea near his home in Southend, Essex, he told his wife Joan, a former beauty queen he married in 1948 – six weeks after meeting her at a dance hall – he wanted to lead a more exciting life.

He bought a boat and adapted well to the rigours of North Sea fishing but found it difficult to make a good living. The couple also tried running a chain of butchers and an estate agents, but neither business satisfied Roy’s yearning for adventure.

While sailing off Essex, Roy became fascinated with the naval forts. When he learned that one, Knock John, was being used as a base for a pirate radio station he decided to set up his own.

With the help of some Southend musclemen, Roy turfed off Radio City and claimed Knock John as the base for his pirate station, Radio Essex, which began broadcasting on October 27, 1965.

As the listenership grew, advertisers started coming on board but the authorities took a dim view of his activities on Knock John Fort and successfully prosecuted him for broadcasting illegally.

Paying the £200 fine meant genuine hardship, so, undeterred, he decided to take over another fort, called Roughs Tower, which was further out in the sea and did not come under British jurisdiction.

The only problem was the pirate radio station Radio Caroline was using Roughs Tower as a base. But that issue was resolved when Roy and his mates arrived with iron bars on Christmas Day 1966. Unsurprisingly, the Radio Caroline crew agreed to share the platform.

However, the first chance he had, Roy took the opportunity to seize full control and ejected the competition.

“I was a 14-year-old lad at a private school in Wales at the time, but I loved visiting Roughs Tower in the holidays,” recalls Michael.

Roy certainly needed him to shore up their defences, especially when Radio Caroline unsuccessfully attempted to retake the tower. To deter them Michael tossed molotov cocktails down from above.

A later attempt was foiled when one of Michael’s petrol bombs started a fire on the invaders’ boat. His sister Penny, who was three years older, was also on hand to brandish weapons at any aggressor trying to land on what had now become the self-styled Principality of Sealand.

“One of the guns we had was taken from a German soldier my dad shot while he was fighting in Italy,” says Michael.

“The other was a 9mm Beretta Dad brought back from the war.”

There is a famous picture of Penny brandishing the weapons on Sealand, sending a clear signal to anyone else thinking of muscling in. Force would be met with force.

Other weapons in the Bates’ arsenal included a flamethrower and shotguns. Old gas canisters were strategically placed to drop on unwelcome vessels arriving with the intention of scaling the dangling rope ladder, the only way to get to the platform.

The defiance of 6ft 3in “hard as nails” Roy Bates was drawn to the attention of then Prime Minister Harold Wilson, who instructed the armed forces to switfly reclaim the fort.

But when Royal Marines arrived, Michael and his mother armed themselves with weapons and made it clear they would not leave without a fight. Rather than risk bloodshed, the Marines beat a retreat.

On another occasion, when the crew of a navigational installation boat came a bit too close and made cheeky remarks to a sunbathing Penny, then 19, Michael fired a couple of warning shots across their bow.

However, by then Penny was tired of holding the fort and wanted a more normal life back in Southend.

“My father was very demanding,” admits Michael. “I don’t blame my sister for not sticking with it. It was a strange kind of upbringing for sure.”

Penny told Dylan Taylor-Lehman, author of the new book, that life as a Princess was not all it was cracked up to be. Just getting to the principality was gruelling.

“It was hours and hours on the boat going chug, chug, chug. I used to sit there in a blanket and think, ‘For God’s sake will someone kill me please’. It was horrible, horrible.”

While Michael kept himself busy securing defences and fishing for lobsters over the side, Penny survived on rationed tin food and biscuits made from flour and distilled sea water. When the water tanks ran dry, they had to rely on rainfall.

In the late Sixties and Seventies, Sealand stamps, passports and coinage were produced to satisfy the curiosity of an increasing number of people.

There were also plans to go into business with some Germans who wanted to build a casino, a heliport and duty-free shops.

But while Roy and Joan were discussing the options in Salzburg, the crafty Germans teamed up with some Dutch allies and staged a coup. “I was on Sealand when I heard a helicopter approaching,” Michael recalls. “We had a big mast to stop helicopters landing but they came down on a winch and said my father had signed a contract with them to sign the fort over to them.

“I knew my dad would never do that. I kept telling them I needed to speak to my father. I was armed but I didn’t really know what to do.”

By now, effectively kidnapped, Michael was locked up in a room for several days. When he was finally let out there was a physical fight.

“They tied my ankles together and my wrists and I heard one say they were thinking of throwing me over the side.”

He was forced off the platform and dispatched back to land. But after regrouping with his father and friends, they vowed to take back Sealand and, appropriately, employed a helicopter pilot who had worked on James Bond films to assist them.

“When we took the fort back it was the biggest adrenaline rush in my life,” Michael says. “Sliding down a rope with a shotgun around your neck is very exciting.”

After he fired one shot in the air, order was restored and Sealand was back in the hands of the Prince of Sealand, Roy Bates, who died peacefully in 2012, aged 91.

After the death of his mother Joan in 2016, Sealand was pretty much run by Prince Michael, although Penny, now 70, takes a close interest. Michael’s grown-up sons Liam and James spend time on Sealand, along with caretakers to deter potential invaders.

Through the Sealand website, knighthoods can be purchased for £99.99 and dukedoms for £499. England cricketer Ben Stokes was given an honorary lordship, along with the singer Ed Sheeran. Founder Roy has become a revered figure among Sealand supporters who see him as a patriotic ex-serviceman who fearlessly realised his swashbuckling dream to create his own kingdom, complete with its own black, white and red flag.

When a journalist once asked him why he took over the fort, Roy replied: “I’ve asked myself that question many times and I’m damned if I know the answer. But it was a challenge, and I can’t resist a challenge.”

Michael spends most of his time in Southend with his Chinese wife Mei, who served in the Chinese army. Last year he faced the rather more pleasurable challenge of judging a beauty pageant in China, just one of the many perks of being a Prince.

“Life is a lot quieter now but we’ll never give up Sealand. You never know what will happen but we’re ready for anything,” he says with a laugh. If the movie version of Sealand is made, the scriptwriters certainly won’t be short of material.

#i have this book but havent read it yet im excited that there might be anything new in it!!#anyway i dont notice any fact errors in this article which is (rare) nice!!#sealand

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weekendwarriorblog · 4 years ago

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The Weekend Warrior 10/16/20: SYNCHRONIC, FRENCH EXIT, TRIAL OF THE CHICAGO 7, LOVE AND MONSTERS, HONEST THIEF, THE KID DETECTIVE and More!

After the last couple weeks, I really need a break, which is why I’m writing most of this in transit to Columbus, Ohio to see my mother, sister and all (or some) of the friends that I made during my sabbatical to the city seven years ago for cancer treatment.

On, and look... Variety wrote about the movie theater chains and NATO lobbying Governor Cuomo to reopen movie theaters, showing that there’s been no proof of any cases leading back to movie theaters. (And more from The Hollywood Reporter…) New York leads and the world follows? More like ED leads and the world follows. Been saying this shit for months now and putting up with all sorts of needless abuse for it.

This week’s “Featured Flick” is actually a movie coming to theaters on October 23, but since I’m not sure I’m writing a column next week, I’m gonna review it this week! Cool? The movie is SYNCHRONIC (Well Go USA), and it’s the follow-up to Aaron Moorehead and Justin Benson’s amazing sci-fi film The Endless from a few years back. This ome stars Anthony Mackie and Jamie Dornan as parademics in New Orleans who have been coming across a series of bodies that have died in gruesome ways, all connected by a designer drug they were all taking.

I’ll just say right from the start that I loved almost everything about this movie from the amazing performances by Mackie and Dornan to the entire look and tone of the movie, which shows the duo taking huge steps forward as filmmakers, particularly Benson as a screenwriter. Unfortunately, I’m not sure what I can say about the movie and its plot without spoiling other’s enjoyment. I will say that it involves a designer drug and time travel and Mackie’s character has something odd about his brain that makes him better suited to figure out what is happening to the victims than others might be. Also, Dornan’s character Dennis has family issues, particularly with his daughter Brianna (Ally Ioannides), who disappears mysteriously, but it’s so nice seeing Katie Aselton as Dennis’ wife, as well as in another movie out this week.

I’ll also say that people who watch this movie will inevitably make comparisons to the work of Alex Garland and maybe even the more-versed ones might see a little of David Cronenberg’s Videodrome in the film’s trippy nature. The thing is that the movie is super-smart, and it’s obvious that Moorehead and Benson must have done a lot of research to make every aspect of it feel authentic. It’s just amazing what this duo can do with a small fraction of the money that Christopher Nolan had to make Tenet, and yet, they can create a complex and unique premise that’s actually easy to understand. Things like the camerawork, the music and sound design all add to the amazing tone and the mood that the duo have created.

I also think it’s Mackie’s best role and performance in many years, maybe even going back to The Hurt Locker, so as a long-time fan, I’m glad he connected with Moorehead/Benson to show that he’s more than capable of leading a movie like this.

Again, Synchronic will be in movie theaters and drive-ins NEXT Friday, October 23, but I want to give you an advance heads up, because Synchronic is likely to be the most original sci-fi or genre film you see this year. If you can’t get to the drive-in and don’t feel comfortable going to a movie theater, then I’m sure it will be on digital soon enough, but you definitely shouldn’t miss it!

Next up is Aaron Sorkin’s THE TRIAL OF THE CHICAGO SEVEN, streaming on Netflix starting Friday and the movie I was most looking forward to seeing this week. I was such a huge fan of Brett Morgen’s Chicago 10 documentary, which opened Sundance in 2007, especially with how he recreated the court trials using animation and a talented roster of voice actors including Hank Azaria, Mark Ruffalo and Geoffrey Wright. Sorkin has just as an impressive list of actors for his version, including Mark Rylance, Eddie Redmayne, Sacha Baron Cohen, Frank Langella, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and many more.

If you don’t know about the protests outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago – you see, back in those days, the Democrats were the bad guys… how times have changed!! Those protests led to a number of arrests but a few years later, the federal government charged a number of individuals with inciting the riot. The accused include Black Panther leader Bobby Seale, played by Yahya Abdul-Mateen II from Aquaman and Watchmen, Abbie Hoffman (Cohen), FBI agent Tom Hayden (Eddie Redmayne), Jerry Rubin (Jeremy Strong), David Dellinger (John Carroll Lynch) and two more. The six white guys are defended by Mark Rylance’s William Kunstler, who faces the tough Judge Hoffman (Langella) who is not putting up with any guff from these young revolutionaries.

All of the characters are quickly introduced with a quick-cut opening montage with actual newsreel footage, but then we’re quickly moved to a meeting to the Attorney General (Keaton) with the trial’s prosecutor (Gordon-Levitt). From there, we’re right into the trial about 16 minutes into the movie, although Sorkin frequently cuts back to the actual day of the Chicago protest to recreate what happened as testimony is given. Probably the part that will have the most impact and resonance is the way Seale was mistreated compared to the others, getting so riled up at the judge that the judge orders him chained and gagged. The trial would end up taking place for almost 7 months even though the results were eventually overturned.

This really is perfect material for Sorkin, and maybe if I hadn’t seen Chicago 10 first, I would have been a lot more fascinated by the trial sequences, though Morgen did an equally great job working from the transcripts. Basically, what happened happened. Where Sorkin’s screenplay and film excels is showing what’s going on outside the courtroom, whether it’s the recreations or just conversations taking place between the plaintiffs. As might be expected from Sorkin, the screenplay is great with lots of fast talking, making for a movie that moves at a kinetic pace for its two hours.

If I had to pick a few of the best performances, I’d probably focus on Cohen’s Abbie Hoffman, which is more than just an accent, he and Strong’s Rubin bantering back and forth like a seasoned Vaudeville act; Rylance’s Kunstler is spot-on, and Langella is just great as the crusty judge, the film’s only true antagonist. I also appreciated John Carroll Lynch and in fact, all the performances, although I felt that with so many characters, Sorkin wasn’t able to give Bobby Seale the time his story truly needed. Still, I would be shocked if this isn’t considered a SAG Ensemble frontrunner.

Ultimately, The Trial of the Chicago 7 is a fine recreation of a certain moment in history that still feels relevant and timely fifty years later, even if it’s so heavy at times you either need to focus or, like me, watch it on Netflix in two sittings. I still liked Steve McQueen’s movie Mangrove that takes place in a similar era and also culminates in a trial just a little bit better.

Before we get to the rest of this week’s new movies, I have one last review from the New York Film Festival, and it’s the closing night film, FRENCH EXIT, from director Azazel Jacobs and writer Patrick Dewitt, who has adapted his own book. The film stars Michelle Pfeiffer as Frances Price, a Manhattan widow from wealth who discovers she has no more money, just as her son Malcolm (Lucas Hedges with longer hair than usual) has decided to marry his girlfriend Susan (Imogen Poots) though he hasn’t told his mother that yet. With no other options, Francis takes her son on a ship to live in Paris for a while at the home of one Mme. Renard (Valarie Mahaffey), an elderly woman who is a genuine fan of Francis and welcomes them as her guests.

This is one of those ensemble character dramedies that I wouldn’t even be able to begin to tell you why you should see it unless you miss seeing Pfeiffer in a semi-decent performance, but one that doesn’t do much as the film itself is so boring and insufferably pretentious most of the time I’m not sure I can even recommend it for that.

Jacobs and Dewitt previous made the movie Teri maybe ten years ago, and I was never really a fan, so I’m not sure why I thought that Dewitt adapting his own book would bear better results. Once Frances and Malcolm get to Paris, there’s just an influx of odd characters who show up, some who have more impact than others. I liked seeing Danielle Macdonald as a psychic medium the duo meet on the ship across the Atlantic who Malcolm bonks. She’s brought back when Frances wants her to conduct a séance to communicate with her late husband who she thinks is now inhabiting an omni-present cat. Like everything else, the relationship between Malcolm and Susan and how that’s affected by her meeting a new guy just never goes anywhere.

For the most part, the whole thing is just dull and uninteresting, and so pretentious it never really leads to anything even remotely memorable. I have no idea why the New York Film Festival would decide to close with this one. (Although the 58th NYFF is over, some of the movies will hit its Virtual Cinema soon, so keep an eye out! For instance, this Friday, FilmLinc begins a Pietro Marcello retrospective as well as showing his latest film Martin Eden in FilmLInc’s Virtual Cinema.)

Liam Neeson stars in Mark Williams’ HONEST THIEF (Open Road), a crime-thriller in which he plays Tom Carter, the uncaught robber behind 12 bank robberies who decides to settle down with Kate (Grey’s Anatomy) Walsh’s Annie Wilkins, who he meets while renting a storage space to hide all the money he’s stolen. After a year of things getting serious with Annie, Tom decides to retire so he calls the FBI and says he’s ready to give back the 9 million, but two crooked FBI agents (one played by Jai Courtenay, the other by Anthony Ramos) decide they’re going to take the money instead. Their plan to steal the money Tom’s trying to return leads to a number of deaths, including putting Annie in the hospital. When that happens, Tom has had enough, and honestly, there’s no one better at getting revenge than Neeson. (Did we mention that Carter is ex-Marine? I mean, of course he is!)

Many will go into Honest Thief expecting the typical Neeson action revenge flick ala Taken or maybe one of his high-concept thrillers, but Honest Thief isn’t nearly that exciting. It starts out fairly slow and dry with no real crime or action elements, although Williams does throw them in from time to time. The whole thing is pretty dry, and it’s a good 54 minutes before we get to the revenge aspect of the story and that’s after a lot of bad decisions being made across the board. Anyone who is still wondering how Jai Courtney has a career won’t be changing that decision by his turn as the villain, and it’s a lot odd when the movie tries to make a sympathetic character out of his partner, played by Ramos.

Regardless, any elements that make Honest Thief unique from other Neeson action movies are quickly tossed aside for the same usual cliches, and the action scenes aren’t even that great. While Honest Thief may not be an awful or unwatchable movie, it’s probably not the action movie you might be expecting from Neeson – more like a bargain basement The Fugitive with one plot decision that almost kills the whole movie.

Delayed a number of times and now dumped to PVOD (with minimal theatrical) is Paramount’s LOVE AND MONSTERS, which is written by the prolific Bryan Duffield (The Babysitter, Spontaneous), directed by Michael Matthews and produced by Shawn Levy’s 21 Laps Entertainment. In the movie, Dylan O’Brien plays Joel Dawson, a young man surviving the apocalypse with a small community after the government’s plot to blast a couple asteroids heading to earth backfires. Instead, it creates giant, carnivorous monsters out of the earth’s animals who eliminate 95% of the earth’s human population. (We learn all of this through a Zombieland-like animated prequel getting us up to speed.) Before the earth fell into disarray, Joel was in love with Jessica Henwick’s Aimee, but they were separated by the fateful events. Seven years later, they’re reconnected via radio and Joel has sworn to travel the 85 miles across the creature-covered wasteland to reunite with her. Hence, the title “Love and Monsters.” Get it?

I actually didn’t hate this movie, although it’s not really a family film or one meant for young kids, because it’s PG-13 for a reason, including mild violence i.e. people being chomped by monsters, and some sexuality. Dylan O’Brien does a decent job carrying it, but it relies just as much on the other people he meets, particularly Michael Rooker’s Clyde and his young ward Minnow, played by Ariana Greenblatt, the latter who is such a scene-stealer that it’s disappointing they’re only in the movie for a small chunk. They’re probably the funniest part of the movie.

I like giant monsters and these ones are certainly … interesting. They seem to have been toned down a bit maybe to be more kid-friendly, more like the kid-friend Godzilla than the terror we’ve seen in recent incarnations. There are also a number of great action set-pieces, and some good post-Apocalyptic ideas we haven’t seen, especially when Duffield’s dark sense of humor is able to come out and keep things fun.

Still, Love and Monsters is not a kids’ movie, and there’s something about it that might make people wish the filmmaker just went full-on R, because going further towards PG would have made even the best parts quite painful to get through. As it is, Love and Monsters is a suitably fine boy and his dog adventure – oh, did I mention the dog? – that would make a perfectly fine streaming movie.

We’ll get back to some of the other theatrical releases in a bit, but I wanted to get to two movies that were pleasant surprises, maybe because I went into them with absolutely zero expectations.

I wasn’t really sure what to think about Cooper Raiff’s SH#!%HOUSE (IFC Films) at first, maybe because it’s title is a little off-putting and not really particularly representative of what the movie is. Raiff himself plays Alex Malmquist, a fairly new arrival at his college but already missing home and his mother (Amy Landecker) and not really adjusting to the crazy college lifestyle as exemplified by his roommate Sam (Logan Miller). After a party at a frat called “Shithouse” (hence the title), Alex meets and connects with his dorm’s R.A. Maggie (Dylan Gelula) and the two spend the night bonding and hanging out.

Obviously, someone at IFC Films loves these platonic indie two-handers about people meeting and hanging out over the course of a night, because Shithouse is the second such movie after Olympic Dreams earlier in the year. They also must know that I’m a sucker for these kinds of semi-rom-coms, because just like with that other movie, I totally ate up everything Raiff was trying to do and say with his movie. The chemistry between the two leads is undeniable, and maybe it won’t be a surprise that Gelula also appeared in Raiff’s previous movie.

As with any relationship, things do come to an end, and this one crashes and burns in a very sad way for Alex the very next day. Maggie starts to pretend she doesn’t even know him, and she ignores his incessant texts saying how much he enjoyed their night together. Boy, I have been there back in my reckless and romantic days of youth.

At first, I wasn’t that into Raiff as an actor – remember what I’ve said about filmmakers casting themselves? – but Alex definitely grew on me. Gelula is absolutely amazing, and frankly, I can see someone “discovering” her in ten years and becoming a new Parker Posey, Kate Lynn Sheil or other similar indie ingenue.

The combination of the two is what makes Shithouse such a special experience, since their situations are quite relatable and Raiff does a great job with the characterization in his writing to make this quite enjoyable to see how things will resolve themselves.

I also wasn’t quite prepared for how much I’d enjoy Steve Byrne’s THE OPENING ACT (RLJEfilms), maybe because I was unfamiliar with Byrne, and as usual, I didn’t read the description of the movie before sitting down to watch it. If I did, I would have known that Byrne is a stand-up comic and presumably this movie is somewhat based on situations that have happened to him. It stars Jimmy O. Yang from Crazy Rich Asians (a great comic in his own right) as Willy Chu, a young comic who has always dreamed of making it in stand-up but instead, has been stuck trying to get slots at an open mic night, while holding down a day job working at an insurance company. One day, his friend (Ken Jeong) sets him up for an MC gig in Pennsylvania at the Improv where his idol Billy G (Cedric the Entertainer) will be performing, so Willy quits his job to pursue his dream.

Much of Byrne’s movie deals with Billy’s “adventure” in Pennsylvania with the club’s womanizing featured act (played by SNL’s Alex Moffatt) and trying to face the struggles of stand-up in hopes of getting to the next level. There have been better movies about the subject, like Mike Birbiglia’s Sleepwalk with You, but Byrne’s film is a nice addition, particularly because Yang plays such a likeable, benevolent character you want to see him do well even after he crashes and bombs on a Saturday night and is at risk of losing the Improv gig.

It’s obvious that Byrne pulled in a lot of favors from friends to get such a great cast of comics – even getting Whitney Cumming to make a cameo – but the likes of Bill Burr actually take on key roles, like Willy’s boss in that case. Moffatt is particularly hilarious expanding on some of his outrageous SNL characters to play a stand-up who actually does help Willy, even as he puts him in pretty awful situations. Cedric also gives another fantastic performance as Willy’s idol who gives him the cold shoulder at first but eventually comes around and offers him the mentoring that Willy needs.

The Opening Act isn’t anything particularly revelatory, but it is thoroughly entertaining, and a nice little indie that I hope people will discover for themselves, especially those who like (or perform) stand-up.

Edward James Olmos directs THE DEVIL HAS A NAME (Momentum Releasing) starring the great Oscar-nominated David Strathairn as almond farmer Fred Stern, who has been running his orchard for three decades with trusty second Santiago, played by Olmos himself. Things are going well until they notice that some of the trees are rotting. It turns out they’re being poisoned by the water that’s been sullied by crude oil run-off from the nearby Shore Oil rigs. Around the same time, an opportunist named Alex Gardner, played by Haley Joel Osment, offers Fred a very low-ball offer to buy the farm, though Fred suspects something is up, and sure enough, Shore Oil is responsible.

Another movie I didn’t know what to expect other than a few cursory elements is this movie “based on a true story” movie about the little farmer taking on “The Man.” In this case, Shore Oil is represented by Kate Bosworth’s Gigi Cutler, a tough exec. at the corporation who thinks their lawyers (one of them played by Katie Aselton!) can crush this local troublemaker. When Stern’s lawyer (Martin Sheen) sues the oil company for 2 billion, they need to start taking things seriously, bringing in a tough “fixer” played by Pablo Schreiber.

I’m not sure where to begin with this movie that certainly has noble intentions in telling this story but suffers from quite a few issues, mostly coming from the script. I was a little concerned once I knew the premise, because I was not a huge fan of Todd Haynes’ Dark Water from last year, although I did enjoy the Krasinski-Damon-Van Sant ecological venture, Promised Land. This one falls somewhere in between, and probably its biggest issue is that it tries to create some humor out of the erratic behavior of the characters played by Bosworth and Schreiber; both performances are so off-the-rails at times it regularly takes you out of Fred’s story. (Osment is also pretty crazy but at least he fits better into his role.) Strathairn is great and well-cast, and Olmos is equally good, and I imagine that it’s partially because many of their scenes are together, allowing Olmos to direct with his acting. Aselton and Sheen are also decent, especially in the courtroom scenes.

Oh, and did I mention that Alfred Molina plays the Big Boss, who is interrogating Cutler as a needless framing device? Yeah, there’s a lot of characters, and when you hold this up against something like The Trial of Chicago 7, it’s just obvious that the film has too many elements for any filmmaker to be able to juggle at once.

Because of this, The Devil Has A Name is an erratic real-life dramedy that’s too all over the place in terms of tone, it ends up shooting itself in the foot by trying (and failing) to be funny despite the serious subject matter.

Next up is 2 HEARTS (Silver Lion Films/ Freestyle Releasing), another movie based on a true story from the Hool Brothers, who I really wasn’t very familiar with. I assumed this was going to be a faith-based movie, and maybe in some ways it is, but not really. It essentially tells two stories set in different time periods that you assume will somehow be connected. Ooh, boy.

First, there’s Jacob Elordi of Euphoria and The Kissing Booth – neither of which I’ve seen, mind you – who plays Chris Gregory, a college kid who connects in a meet-cute way with Tiera Skovbye’s Sam. Before we get too far into their story, we cut back to what looks like Cuba in the ‘50s and 60s, and meet Jorge Bolivar (Adan Canto), the son of an alcohol magnate, a soccer player who suffers a serious lung issue that puts him in the hospital. Years later, Jorge is travelling to Miami when he meets Radha Mitchell’s Leslie working as a flight attendant.

Both guys are pretty suave smooth-talking pick-up artists, and the movie spends almost an hour cutting between two very corny and cheesy romance stories that really don’t offer much in terms of story. Instead, it keeps following Chris and Sam’s life as they have kids, taking forever to get to the connection between the stories. I was getting pretty bored of the movie, but I felt like I had to stick it out to see what happens.

When you call a movie “2 Hearts,” you kind of expect it to be about a heart transplant of some kind, right? But no, it’s actually about a dual lung transplant that Jorge receives. Want to take a wild guess who the donor is? I certainly don’t want to spoil what happens, but for a movie that spends a good hour setting up the relationships between the two men and their pretty blondes with ups and downs that makes it seem like a Nicholas Sparks movie, it really throws a spanner into the fairy tale with all the melodrama that’s to come. It’s such a whiplash in terms of tone it pretty much destroys any chance of one enjoying the movie for what it is. It also loses a lot without Elordi, since the actors who play his family aren’t very good at all.

I had to actually look up the story to see how much if it was true, only to learn that Jorge was based on Jorge Bacardi who actually received a double lung transplant from one Christopher Gregory, inspiring him to create the Gabriel House of Care. The problem is that the time periods get so messed up by setting one story decades in the past. Using the same actors to play the people over that time with pretty shabby make-up just makes things that much more confusing. The big problem is that it spends so much time avoiding the actual plot and point of making the movie that by the time it gets to it, you just don’t care about the characters anymore.

The whole thing is very by the books and predictable, but ultimately, it’s hard to believe any of it, despite it being based on a true story. If you go into this movie expecting love and romance and all that kind of mushy stuff from the title, you’re likely to be disappointed when the movie finally gets to its point. (In other words, it could have used some giant monsters.)

Here’s another movie that I didn’t really know what to expect going in and that probably should have helped me enjoy it more… if it was anything resembling a good movie. Picked up at the Toronto Film Festival where it premiered last month, Evan Morgan’s THE KID DETECTIVE (Sony) stars Adam Brody as Abe Appelbaum, the “kid detective” of the titles, who as a child was one of those super-smart kids who have the deductive powers to help the people in his community, but as a 32-year-old, he just isn’t taken as seriously any more. When a high school girl named Caroline (Sophie Nélisse) comes to Abe to find out who murdered her boyfriend, Abe finally realizes that he has his first grown-up case, though he’s still obsessed with the disappearance of the mayor’s daughter (and his kid receptionist) Gracie many years earlier.

I’m sure there’s gonna be people out there who watch and appreciate The Kid Detective for what it is, a wry and slightly clever noir pastiche pseudo-comedy, but anyone who has seen Rian Johnson’s first film Brick or the underrated Mystery Team (starring Donald Glover very early in his career) might feel that this doesn’t live up to either. Besides the fact that Brody really hasn’t developed much personality as an actor, the film rolls along with a fairly flat, deadpan tone that just never gets remotely exciting. The humor is subdued and yet it feels like everyone is constantly trying too hard, particularly Morgan, while at the same time not really taking any chances. This is a movie that could have been edgier but instead, it milks its flimsy high-concept premise as long as possible before giving up.

Like Love and Monsters, Sony is releasing The Kid Detective into theaters on Friday, and hopefully parents will check that rating before assuming it’s a kid flick. Although there isn’t so much bad language or anything that wouldn’t warrant a PG… other than the fact that it’s not particularly funny or even entertaining and kids will be super-bored.

I can’t believe there’s still more! Amazon’s “Welcome to the Blumhouse” anthology series continues this week with two more movies in the series of eight, which you can now watch on Prime Video:

Easily my favorite of the four movies I’ve seen is Zu Quirke’s NOCTURNE (Amazon), which follows a pair of twins, Julie (Sidney Sweeney) and Vivian (Madison Iseman), who are both competitive concert pianists at the Lindberg Academy, although Vivian is clearly the better, as she’s heading off to Julliard while Julian is taking a gap year.

Before we meet them, we see a young violist jumping off the balcony to her death for some reason, and we learn that she was the finalist to play a concerto, so now that slot is open and both Julie and her sister desperately want it.

Nocturne is certainly more like the horror movies we expect from Blumhouse, which is both good and bad. The good is that it is indeed quite scary as Quirke’s team uses really eerie lighting effects and other things to create suspense. But there’s also an artiness to what Quirke does that elevates Nocturne above the normal high-concept horror-thriller.

Quirke, who also wrote the film, delivers all the characterization you expect from a good horror film so that you really care about the characters, and she’s put together such a fine cast, particularly Sweeney who has to run a gamut of emotions as Julie. I also like Rodney To as Julie’s tough instructor Wilkins

Again, I won’t say too much more about the actual plot, although if you can imagine a Faustian bargain and how that plays out for those around Julie, you can probably understand why a super-fan of The Omen might dig what Quirke did in this environment.

The fourth movie in the “Welcome to the Blumouse” series is EVIL EYE (Amazon), from Indo-American filmmakers Elan and Rajeev Dassani, a relatively innocuous thriller based around the relationship between Pallavi (Sunita Mani from last week’s Save Yourselves! and GLOW) and her mother Usha, played by Sarita Choudhury. Pallavi is in her late 20s and single and her mother keeps wanting to get her set-up with a nice man, as a good Indian mother is wont to do. When Pallavi meets Sandeep (Omar Maskati), things are going well since he has money and her mother thinks her daughter has hit the jackpot, until she realizes that Sandeep has a dark secret.

Here’s another thriller where it’s really tough to talk about the plot, because obviously the filmmakers want the story to unfold in the specific way it was written. Apparently, this one was once an Audible story, and the first thing I noticed was how amazing Sunita Mani looks from her fairly glammed down roles in other things. I think she’s just wearing make-up and has her styled different but I’m not sure I would have known it was the same actor in Save Yourselves! Because I had to do a double take.

The problem with Evil Eye, and it’s been a problem with some of the other “Welcome to the Blumhouse” movies, is that it isn’t necessarily what I’d consider horror. It really plays a lot more like a romantic drama, other than the fact that Pallavi’s mother has visions and believes in astrology enough to send her daughter trinkets to protect her from the “evil eye.” In fact, the movie just gets weirder and weirder, as it starts introducing supernatural elements, and without giving the big plot twist away, it does expect one to believe in reincarnation.

I wish I could have liked this more, but it really seems like it would be better suited for a show like “The Outer Limits” or “The Twilight Zone,” since the premise is stretched so think for about 30 minutes longer than necessary. I think the filmmakers did perfectly fine with what they had to work with – the two main actresses are just fab – but I think I’d need to see some of their other work to see if the issues I had were just cause the story isn’t that interesting or by their limitations in making it.

(And I promise that I do have a feature on all the filmmakers from the first four “Welcome to the Blumhouse” series coming over at Below the Line, but it’s been a pretty tough piece to write.)

I reviewed Alex Gibney’s new doc Totally Under Control (Neon/Participant), co-directed with Ophelia Harutyunyan and Suzanne Hillinger, in last week’s column but it’s now available to watch On Demand and then it will be on Hulu starting next Tuesday, October 20. Obviously, everyone wanted to get this out there and make sure people see it before they get too in-deep with the election.

I also reviewed David Byrne’s American Utopia (HBO), directed by Spike Lee, a few weeks back, but it will be on HBO and presumably HBO Max on Sunday night. Not as big an event as Disney+’s Hamilton but still worth watching, especially if you’re a fan of Byrne or his band the Talking Heads, because it actually acts as a nice counterpoint bookend to the late Jonathan Demme’s fantastic Stop Making Sense, one of the best concert documentaries ever made, or at least top 5. I’m bummed I missed Byrne’s show on Broadway, and it doesn’t sound like Broadway will be coming back anytime soon so I guess this HBO documentation is the best any of us can wish for.

Of the movies I didn’t have time to watch this week, the two that I’m hoping to still get to are two docs: Inna Blockhina’s SHE IS THE OCEAN (Blue Fox Entertainment) and Rick Korn’s HARRY CHAPIN: WHEN IN DOUBT, DO SOMETHING (Greenwich). She Is the Ocean explores the lives of nine women who all have a passion for the ocean. The Harry Chapin doc may be more self-explanatory, and I wish I was a bigger fan of Chapin, the famed singer/songwriter/activist, because maybe I would have watched this movie earlier. (But seriously, look at how many movies came out this week, when I was hoping it would be “slower”!) Also, I’m a little bit interested in the K-Pop doc #BlackPinkLightUpTheSky that will air on Netflix, just because, I dunno, I like adorable, young Asian women, so sue me?

Premiering on Disney+ this Friday is Justin Baldoni’s CLOUDS, starring Fin Argus as musician Zach Sobiech, who has only months to live when his cancer starts spreading, but he follows his dream to make an album and becomes a viral music phenomenon. I’m not sure if this is a true story but it certainly sounds a lot like a faith-based film called I Still Believe that hit theaters just before they all shut down due to the pandemic. Coincidence? I think not.

Also this week, the 32nd ANNUAL NEWFEST LGBTQ FILM FESTIVAL begins on Friday, running through October 27 with opening night being the well-regarded Ammonite, starring Kate Winslet and Saoirse Ronan, but it will be done as a drive-in, so I’m out. Over in Los Angeles, the AFI FEST starts on Thursday and runs through October 22, and that’s also showing a lot of cool festival/awards films that I haven’t had a chance to watch yet like The Father, I’m Your Woman and more. I missed my chance to get press accreditation, so yeah, I guess I’ll be waiting on that.

And then we get to all the movies that I didn’t have time to see or didn’t receive a screener, so here we go. This week’s unfortunate dumping ground:

Lupin III: The First (GKIDS) (This anime film is being released as a Fathom event on Oct. 18 – dubbed, and Oct. 21 – subtitled)

Belly of the Beast (I’ve actually heard good things about Erika Cohn’s doc about illegal sterilizations being conducted in a woman’s prison.)

Don’t Look Back (Gravitas Ventures)

Rom Boys: 40 Years of Rad (101 Films)

The Antidote (Cinetic/Brand New Story)

Monochrome: The Chromism (Tempest)

J.R “Bob” Dobbs and the Church of the Subgenius (Uncork’d)

Monster Force Zero (WildEye Releasing)

Ghabe (GVN Releasing)

The Accidental President (Intervention)

In Case of Emergency (Kino Lorber)

I’m not sure how much of a column I’m gonna write next week since I won’t have nearly as much time to watch movies or write about them in the coming week, while I’m in Colmbus. There are a couple high profile movies I hope to get to, so we’ll see what happens.

By the way, if you read this week’s column and have bothered to read this far down, feel free to drop me some thoughts at Edward dot Douglas at Gmail dot Com or drop me a note or tweet on Twitter. I love hearing from readers … honest!

#TheWeekendWarrior #Movies #Reviews #VOD #Streaming #Synchronic #TrialOfTheChicago7 #FrenchExit #LoveANdMonsters TheKidDetective #Nocturne #2Hearts #Shithout #THeDevilHasAName #TheOpeningAct

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prorevenge · 6 years ago

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Got my nightmare professor fired, might've indirectly gotten him deported too

Before this tale even begins, this is obviously a throwaway account. This is a big bitch of a story spanning two semesters, so I'm putting the tealdeer at the beginning and at the end for those who are short on time.

TL;DR - My French professor was so terrible that I decided to get him fired on behalf of my classmates. After he got fired, my partner that I worked with to do this tipped him off to an immigration agency to get him deported.

Last semester, I enrolled in an introductory French course at my university. This was to learn at least a little bit of French so that I could read French papers about French filmmaking techniques since I'm a pretty hardcore film student and I really love film as an art form. Plus, I needed some gen ed credit for my degree, so it made sense to take the course.

I went to the first lecture kind of dreading the course. I was in 19 credit hours, which is taking six classes in a single semester, and the class was 4 credit hours, meaning we met four days out of the week, every week. Very overwhelming schedule, indeed. Needless to say, I didn't work a single job that semester.

The professor, who will be referred to as Baguette because it's one of the few French words I actually know, began to go through the syllabus and I watched as the excitement that is usually present in students on the first day slowly left everyone's faces. Before I explain why, I have to address that this is the most basic French class that the university I go to offers and is really meant for people who never took a lick of French in high school. Like me.

Baguette announced that not only would he be teaching the entire class in fluent French with no English whatsoever, he wouldn't be answering questions in English at all, and if you asked him a question in French but got even a word or a conjugation wrong, he wouldn't answer you either. Attendance was mandatory as well, and you could only miss 4 class periods before he started dropping letter grades. Now, this attendance policy is unfair bullshit because we met for class just under 60 times that semester, meaning you would fail the course if you missed 8 class periods, which is only about 7% of the total course. I was looking around the class and people looked like they couldn't drop this class fast enough.

Then, he announced that not only would we not be using a physical book, we'd be using a free website online, a site called Francais Interactif. Now, this got some excitement back in the air. Textbook prices suck, and anything to lower the cost of education for students is great. You can even use the site yourself to practice your French skills, if you want. It's open source, knock yourself out.

That said, the site isn't meant to replace a textbook. There's a free workbook and audio files to help with aural comprehension on it, and that helped me and some of the other students pass some of the exams, but the site's equivalent to the part of a textbook that actually teaches you the material is extremely lacking, sometimes only having a couple of paragraphs about a really important concept in the language. In short, it gives you a ton of ways to practice concepts but almost no ways to learn them in the first place.

This would have been totally fine if Baguette would have explained things better in his lectures. But, as you'll recall, he gave them entirely in French, and in fast fluent French. So, picture this; you have to sit through four classes a week that you understand literally nothing of for an hour at a time while the professor rambles on in a language that you don't understand but are desperately trying to learn, and on top of all that, you can't even ask him any questions in English because he won't answer you and you can't ask him any questions in French either, because you don't know how to do that properly yet, and you won't for 3/4ths of the semester, because the unit that covers question words and phrases was arbitrarily put a few weeks after midterms, and on top of all that, you can't even really do your homework or study for exams because you have no fucking idea what any of this nasally shit means. Naturally, we, as a class, slowly started to get more and more frustrated as time went on. A few of us decided to band together and be friends and study partners to weather the storm. I'll call the important ones to the story R and S.

S was a foreign exchange student from Spain who spoke perfect Spanish and was taking the class to learn French for when she goes back to Europe. Now, we dug into what all other classes Baguette taught and found out that he taught Spanish, too. Perfect. We found a loophole. We could ask S a question in English, and she could ask him in Spanish, since it wasn't asking him in English, and he could answer in Spanish and she could translate that back to us in English. Now, you might be saying to yourself that this a fucking stupid and no self respecting educator should teach in this broken, shitty, ass-backwards way. You're right.

This worked for a bit, but he started answering S's Spanish questions in French to combat our little exploit of the rules. We were defeated and back to square one. We needed to devise a new plan, because most of us were failing at this point and we were stressed beyond belief.

R, a frat lad, and I, decidedly not a frat lad, became unlikely friends. He was a pretty naive kid, and he was a hardcore drinker. It visibly took a toll on him. He had a beer gut at 22 and addiction kind of mentally hollowed him out and made him flippant and emotional. The guy was super easy to piss off and he overreacted to everything. I felt bad for the guy and even outside of the struggle in class, I tried my best to be there for him. We were talking one day and we decided to meet up at the library and just theorize ways to crack the class to get at least a 60.

At the library, R was playing around on Francais Interactif trying to find the videos the professor would use for the aural part of the exam (basically, you'd listen to the video and copy down whatever the person was saying for credit. problem was, it was hard as shit and it was easily the part of the exams that took the biggest chunk out of the class's grade). He couldn't find them on the site anywhere and he got frustrated and gave up, so he started filling in the slots where you put answers on the homework pages of Francais Interactif with random words.

That's when we realized that when you do this, the site gives you the right answer regardless, no matter how wrong you are. Essentially, we now had access to the entire course's answers for the homework section and all we had to do was put one character into the answer boxes and, since all we had to do for the homework assignments was copy and paste our answers into a Word document and submit them online, we could theoretically do all the homework while knowing zero material whatsoever if we just changed the answers in Word. We sat for about 45 minutes and did the rest of the homework for the entire course this way in one sitting.

We agreed to not turn it all in at once so we couldn't get caught and we agreed to keep our mouths shut and only share this with people who wouldn't rat on us. Obviously, we told S.

One of the things I'll never forget about that first French class was that, during the final, one of the students started to quietly weep. Then, the weeping got louder, then louder still. The student was clutching his head in his hands and you could feel the palpable impotent frustration at his inability to do French correctly. After I finished the final, I saw him outside the class staring out a window in the hall. I asked if he was alright and what he was crying about and he told me he couldn't answer even the most basic questions asking for words for things like left and right and up and down and that was thing that finally broke him. That got to me, man.

Most of the kids failed the course, even some of the ones who used the homework exploit. R and S passed with a D and I passed with a C, surprisingly. The professor actually liked me, for some reason, and graded my exams a bit more fairly. Even still, I'm an A/B student, one in the Honor's Program at my university, so a C kind of stung my GPA. But, seeing as more than half the class failed, I counted my lucky stars that I got off easy.

I went to enroll in my classes for the next semester, and I had completely forgot that I still had to take another French class for my degree. I checked the class list and the second class you're supposed to take in the progression was only taught by Baguette. No other professor taught Beginning French II, apparently. This struck me as kind of odd, so I checked the rest of the French classes that were available. All of them, all 6 courses in the French department, were taught by Baguette. He was the only fucking teacher the department had. My stomach dropped as I realized I had locked myself into yet another class taught by the worst professor I've ever had, to this day.

This is class where the revenge begins, and I'm sorry if that preamble was too long, but I had to give context as to how horrible Baguette was. Even still, I'm frankly not doing him justice. His class was an artful trainwreck of incompetence, in the slowest slow motion available over nearly 60 class periods. And I had to do it again, only this time with harder material.

I had been keeping up with R and S over the winter break and S was going back to Spain, so she wouldn't be in the next class with me. But, I got R to enroll in the same section of Beginning French II as me.

Baguette passed out the syllabus to Beginning French II and it was the exact same as French I, down to us using Francais Interactif again, just in the higher chapters instead of the basic chapters. Now, here's the thing about learning a foreign language; you have to build from the basics, or else none of the other stuff makes sense. None of us in that class, not one person, knew any of the material past maybe Chapter 3. Most of us didn't even know how to ask questions. I did, so I asked questions for people who didn't, since S wasn't there.

Well, if you thought we bumbled through the basic material, no harder bumbling took place then when we started on things that have no direct English translation like y and en. When he asked students questions in this class, they'd just kind of look at him dumbfounded and shrug.

We got a study guide for our first exam and I was going to study my ass off so that I could get a better grade than a C. Besides a brief stint with depression my first semester that made me not be able to go to classes and fail one of my courses, a C was the lowest grade I had gotten at university. I must've studied for twenty hours over the course of a week before the exam. I hadn't even put that much effort into classes for my major. I got into class on the day of the exam, and nothing that I had spent all that time studying was on it. I bombed that test spectacularly, getting a 30%.

At this point, I was pretty much done. I was willing to go to my professor's office hours and ask him how I was supposed to study for his exams effectively, and his response is what began my quest to get revenge on him. He told me to watch YouTube videos. I don't know what it was about this that got me so pissed, but I was fired up.

But, that wasn't all that drove me to take the revenge I took on this fucker. No, what drove me to go after this guy was R calling me up crying after getting his exam back. He did worse than I did. He got a 15%. He kept repeating through sobs that he just wanted to be a good student and that he didn't want to disappoint his mom again. I'm not ashamed to admit that I cried at this. I thought back to that kid in French I after the final, about my peers and about R and something inside me snapped. I was going to get this guy fired and peacefully do anything else I could to ruin this guy's life one way or another, and R was going to be my Right Hand Man.

We met at his dorm and started brainstorming. It was about halfway through the semester, after our midterms. We both had a job, a significant other, extracurricular activities and I was taking 19 hours again this semester. We were going to need time on our side, a commodity that neither of us had, and we were going to need it quickly. We knew that the professor was going to be gone for a week at a conference right after spring break, so there was a two week window there. But, even still, we needed more time for what we started planning to do. I faked a doctor's note for two weeks absence and R agreed to use all four of his absences to meet at the same time French was supposed to occur and plan our peaceful academic coup.

Now, I knew I was eventually going to get caught from word go. But, I was so confident that I could get this guy fired before I would have a disciplinary hearing that I took the gamble, and Baguette took the bait. He excused me for two whole weeks.

So, you're probably wondering what we actually did. Well, the reason we needed so much time is that we needed time to both conduct interviews from the class as well as collect data on scores. We got a total of thirteen out of the seventeen students to make a statement about Baguette's performance in his Beginning French II class and all of them were negative. This was just in one section of the course.

Then, we asked if we could have their exam scores so that we could have some hard data to nail this guy with. All but two complied. We did some quick maths, and determined that more than half the class failed the exams, with most scoring between 30 and 50.

But, as it turns out, we didn't even need the exam scores given to us. We figured out that the online grade database site that our school uses so students can monitor their grades without asking their profs has a built in feature that shows the class average of every assignment that's put into the gradebook. Not a single assignment had a class average above a 50 except for the homework, which had a class average of around 80, no doubt thanks to the stupid exploit in the website.

Sure enough, I got tagged with a notice that I broke the discipline code of the university because obvious shop is obvious. But, it didn't matter. I had everything I needed to go to the Foreign Language department chair and sort this shit out. So, I did.

I showed the department chair all the data, let him listen to the audio from the student testimonies as well as gave my own testimony on the course. After showing him all this, he was dumbfounded. Not only did the chair not know that Baguette was a shitty teacher, almost nobody did course evaluations for French I, so he thought that Baguette was doing a decent job. He took all my evidence and gave it to the dean of arts and sciences and a couple weeks later, I get an email saying that Baguette was Bag-gone and that I was going to be withdrawn from the course along with everyone else who would've likely failed. Those who would've passed got to get a Credit Received grade without having to take the final. He got fired one semester before he qualified for his tenure.

But, that's not the juiciest fucking morsel of this tale. You're probably wondering how he got deported and how I found out that he got deported because of his firing. Well, after my disciplinary hearing got thrown out because the complainant was no longer affiliated with the university, I got more than I bargained for.

During his lectures, one of the few times he spoke English was after he introduced the syllabus on the first day. He had everyone introduce themselves and he started the exercise by introducing himself. Well, in his introduction, I remember him saying something about him being an immigrant from Venezuela. I live in the States (Etats-Unis for you Bonjour Bois), and some of you might know that we have pretty strict visa policies.

Well, R is pretty conservative. After our work got Baguette fired, we celebrated by getting some beer and shooting the shit. We talked about random aspects of the course and the fact that he was an immigrant got brought up. Apparently, R didn't know this and he was pretty upset about it. I tried to calm him down, but he went on a rant that I tried to politely nod along to while tuning out since I'm not really about that. I didn't think anything of it until a couple of days later.

He called me up and told me that he tipped Baguette off to a certain immigration agency for a "visa check" (his words, not mine) and that now all we had to do was wait. I was shocked. I didn't think this would go this far. I feigned that I was pleased with this but in reality, I was kinda bummed. Since he was probably here on an academic visa since he was a professor, he probably is going back home to Venezuela. I am glad, though, that he won't be teaching any more of my fellow students at my uni, because I wouldn't wish his classes on anyone.

edit: formatting

(source) story by (/u/ouiouirevenge)

#prorevenge #by /u/ouiouirevenge #pro revenge #revenge stories #pro revenge stories #pro #revenge #last10

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zilabee · 5 years ago

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"Starr spoke about the upcoming documentary Let It Be, created by Kiwi filmmaker Sir Peter Jackson, saying this one will be "more expressive and more like we were” [...] “Prior to us doing [the rooftop concert], we're all hanging out, and it's a lot of fun, lot of humour, and not like the one that came out. There was a lot of joy and I think Peter will show that." - Ringo

“the film will be “funny, uplifting and surprisingly intimate.” - Peter Jackson

I don’t know how to have my thoughts about this, I am so terrified of it and I need it and I need to look at it and then pretend it never existed because that is the only thing to do with 1969. Uplifting. Nobody who worked on that album called it uplifting, people who were near the beatles in 1969 do not have quotes about what a joyful experience it was of watching four friends who loved each other. I fear that Peter Jackson has had some sort of mental break, I fear that watching the beatles in 1969 for long stretches damages people, I feel like he’s fallen into them too deeply and now he’s going ‘LOOK, LOOK AT HOW THEY DON’T LOOK AT EACH OTHER, THAT MEANS THEY’RE VERY CLOSE... LOOK AT HOW THEY HALF SMILE WITH THEIR DEAD EYES, THAT PROVES THAT THEY’RE HAPPY’.

I feel like he’s probably cgi-ed love into them out of desperation at the truth of the world and I am not judging him because that is what I would have done and I think it’s a nice thing to do for paul mccartney and the world, but if he has cgi-ed happiness into them he could cgi their younger selves in there, that’s what I want more than a real proper set of footage of the world crumbing to pieces and breaking my soul apart before I was born, I want their younger selves to just rush through the studio smiling and joking during pauses of quiet, I want 1969 Paul on the piano, with 1964 John leaning over it watching him, I want young George quietly strumming in the background ignoring everything Paul and John do and then glancing up to catch judgemental eyes with 1969 George and then go back to his playing. I want Ringo to leave the beatles and for his younger self to fill in for him while he’s gone. I want 2019 Paul to stand quietly at the back and look at them all with kind eyes until 2019 Ringo comes and gives him a hug and tells him they have to go now, and leads him away. I need all of this, and then I need the raw footage streaming on a loop at a cinema near me, why on earth are we having a film when we could have raw footage and eat it WHOLE?

(I also need someone to film Paul McCartney watching it for the first time, I need that total invasion of his privacy, I need it for my heart. I need so many things and I’m worried that Peter Jackson doesn’t understand anything.)

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netflixandgrill-blog · 5 years ago

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We’re Just Not That Into He’s Just Not That Into You

9 Netflix and Grill Takeaways

1. Ginnifer Goodwin Acts Her Ass Off

We both had a sudden realization when watching this movie: Ginnifer Goodwin is (or at least should be) America’s sweetheart. She’s cute, likable, intelligent, vulnerable, and funny, and she carried this movie like she was Atlas and this turd of a movie was the world resting on her shoulders.

2. It’s Chock Full of Stars

Even the smaller roles are played by like A-List actors. How they got all these assfaces to sign on for three total minutes of screen time in this dud is the biggest head-scratcher of 2009 (and that was the year everyone was still trying to figure out what caused the financial crisis.) There are roughly 700 major characters in this film, and their lives all loosely intersect like a way-shittier Magnolia or a slightly-shittier Love Actually.

There are so many characters, in fact, that perennial star Drew Barrymore pops in and out so infrequently that you forget that she’s in the movie. It seems Drew Barrymore’s character’s sole function is to plug the barely-still-relevant MySpace in the 3 scenes she’s in. We half-expected Tom to make a cameo.

3. Jennifer Connelly Is Way Too Intense for This Romcom

Someone shoulda told J-Con, “This isn’t Requiem For a Dream, this is just some light viewing for couples on date night or boozed-up quarantiners. Let’s take it down about 5 notches.” But instead, J-Con swings for the fences in this fairly banal role as if she can smell an Oscar within reach. Like when she flips out on her poor home renovator (Luis Guzman), delivering a diatribe aimed at him with the same intensity that Liam Neeson directs toward the kidnappers in Taken. And over what? She suspects he and his fellow workers have been smoking. (Cue members of the audience clutching their pearls.)

In fact, the whole subplot of her paranoia about everyone around her enjoying a cig on the down-low feels like a “truth” anti-smoking ad. She even lets husband Bradley Cooper off the hook for nailing ScarJo behind her back as long as he wasn’t smoking during it!

4. Jennifer Aniston is Somehow a Pathetic Character

We are supposed to buy that the other characters in the movie look down on the still-unmarried Jennifer Aniston like she is a pitiable, kooky old maid with 39 cats when in actuality she is literally the most beautiful woman in the world (see People Magazine in 2004 and 2016).

To both of their credit, Jennifer Aniston and on-screen beau Ben Affleck prove their star quality with a touching proposal scene that could easily have become a romcom cliché. Heidi definitely got a bit misty-eyed. Mike wept openly.

5. And Justin Long Is Somehow the Heartbreaker

Remember Justin Long as Warren Cheswick, the super dorky teen in the TV show Ed? Well, that’s how we will always remember him. How did he make the insane leap from that (very appropriately cast) role to one where he is slaying puss like Leo at Cannes? The world may never know.

6. ScarJo Is Apparently a Rising Music Star and We Never See Her Sing

A struggling musician, ScarJo connects with music exec Bradley Cooper and they exchange numbers, so at their next meeting he obviously he comes to see her at a venue where she’s performing, right? Wrong, it’s at a yoga class that she apparently teaches, as if yoga has anything to do with anything. E from Entourage also has the hots for ScarJo and is chasing her all over town, so we see him catching up with her at an open mic, rehearsal room, or recording studio, right? Wrong, wrong, and wrong. When does she perform/rehearse? ScarJo’s character might be the least disciplined artist since, well, us.

Then, at the end of the movie, we finally see a snapshot of ScarJo performing without sound as if they are hiding the fact that she can’t sing, which is completely bizarre, as ScarJo has released two albums in real life and, oh, by the way, has a song on the film’s fucking soundtrack.

Of all the silly choices the filmmakers made for this movie, and there are many, this bungled subplot is by far the most baffling.

7. The Story Incorporates Pointless Confessional Vignettes

The writers of this movie evidently watched When Harry Met Sally, saw the confessional interviews interspersed throughout the movie, and said, “Let’s just copy those and make them strange non-sequiturs instead of using them to connect the narrative.” It’s almost as if the writers were getting paid by the movie minute, making this already-too-long-movie even longer.

8. E From Entourage’s Character Is the Most Hard-Up Person in History

E from Entourage has it bad for ScarJo, his friend who he used to date. ScarJo exploits his attraction to her in order to gain emotional support, but that’s fine with him because he is obsessed with her and will take what he can get. She’s all, “Could you just tell me I’m beautiful?,” and he’s all, “Could you just touch it, blow on it, look at it for a second, literally anything?” In one scene where she greets him with a hug we expected him to immediately need a change of pants.

9. Heidi’s Favorite Song Is In the Movie

It’s the Talking Heads’ “This Must Be the Place,” which is ironic, cause this 41-per-cent-on-Rotten-Tomatoes chick flick is the last place she wanted to hear this song.

#hesjustnotthatintoyou romcom chickflick badmoviereview cheesymovies quarantine datenight scarjo bcoop netflixandchill

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thisguyatthemovies · 5 years ago

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Why so quirky?

It took more than 14 years to get around to it, but the other night I watched the 2005 Cameron Crowe train wreck “Elizabethtown,” a film that sometimes shows up on Worst Movie Ever lists. It’s bad, but its “worst” status is more about disappointment, given the writer-director’s previous track record {“Say Anything…,” “Almost Famous,” “Jerry Maguire,” “Fast Times at Ridgemont High”). Still, did I mention it’s bad? A ridiculous premise, plot lines that go nowhere, obvious and heavy-handed symbolism, multiple and sickeningly sweet (and annoying) “meet cutes” and quite possibly some of the worst casting in a major motion picture ever all add up to a movie that deserves much criticism.

“Elizabethtown” also is notorious for inspiring the term “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” (or MPDG). The phrase usually is credited to Nathan Rabin, who wrote a piece about the movie, “The Bataan Death March of Whimsy Case File #1: ‘Elizabethtown,’” for AV/Film nearly 15 months after its release. In it, he describes Kirsten Dunst’s character, Claire, the inexplicably bubbly love interest of suicidal-but-handsome protagonist Drew Baylor (Orlando Bloom), as the embodiment of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl. Rabin describes the type as such:

“The Manic Pixie Dream Girl exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures.”

By that definition, applied retroactively, Dunst’s Claire isn’t the first MPDG in movie history (some include Katharine Hepburn’s early roles on MPDG lists), nor is she even the best example of one (think Natalie Portman in “Garden State,” or Zooey Deschanel in “Yes Man” or the TV show “New Girl”). And the term, which Rabin reportedly now regrets coining, has become better defined with attributes that don’t necessarily fit Claire, even though she will forever be considered the epitome of the trope.

In case you have not seen “Elizabethtown” (and you’ll probably be just fine never seeing it), Bloom plays a shoe designer who works for a company not unlike Nike. Somehow, he is saddled with all the blame for a shoe that is so bad that it is recalled and will cost the company (somehow) nearly a billion dollars. Bloom’s Drew Baylor is fired and decides to off himself, but a phone call about the unexpected death of his father interrupts him during his first attempt. Drew, a West Coaster, is enlisted by his family to travel to Elizabethtown, Ky., his father’s hometown and where the elder Baylor has passed away, to bring the body home for cremation. Relatives in Kentucky have other plans for his final resting place.

Drew takes a flight to Kentucky and – wouldn’t you know it? – is the only passenger on the plane. That’s where Claire comes in. She apparently is the lone stewardess, and she is a talkative one at that. She won’t leave Drew alone from the get-go, and she (somehow) senses Drew is troubled and needs help because, for a guy who had a relatively important position with an internationally known shoe maker, he has no idea how to live this thing we call life. She does what any upstanding MPDG would do – she makes the repair of his damaged soul her sole purpose in life.

Claire would seem to vary from the standard trope in that she has a life of her own, at least when she and Drew meet. Her career would afford her at least a modest independent existence. She seems to have a nice place. She even has a boyfriend, though it is not clear if the guy really exists or, if he does, he is all that into her. But Claire quickly becomes a genie let out of the bottle; Drew’s every wish is her command. She just happens to show up wherever Drew is so much that if the roles were reversed, Drew would be accused of stalking. She says all the right things, even as Drew continues to hint at ending his life. She even (somehow) has the availability to, within a brief period of time, piece together a scrapbook (including hand-drawn illustrations) that will help Drew navigate a soul-discovering solo cross-country road trip AND (this being a Cameron Crowe movie) has provided the soundtrack via mix CDs that are (somehow) timed perfectly to coincide with landmarks during Drew’s travels. So omnipresent, so magical is Dunst’s character that some have suggested she was written to be a guardian angel sent to save Drew’s life. That interpretation at least makes some of Claire’s story semi-plausible and almost tolerable.

Claire is selfless to a fault, and she certainly is strange, maybe unstable. But, if anything, Manic Pixie Dream Girls lost even more sense of self and picked up more strangeness as the stock character turned into a full-fledged trope. Think Deschanel as Allison in the 2008 Jim Carrey vehicle “Yes Man.” As is always the case in these things, Carrey is a cynical, disillusioned man looking for meaning in life. He happens upon Allison, who hits a lot of stock MPGD notes. She zips around town on a moped. She wears mismatched clothing from vintage stores. She performs avant garde (and awful) music. Her primary means of supporting herself (?) is by teaching a class that combines jogging and photography. She is everything Carrey’s Carl Allen is not, mostly carefree. They, of course, engage in romance, even though Carl is notably older than Allison (that’s the case in many films, not just MPDG movies).

In 2010’s “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World,” two characters combine for the role of MPDG. The titular character, played by Michael Cera, is a slacker musician a few years removed from high school. That doesn’t stop him from dating a high-schooler, Knives Chau (Ellen Wong), whose sole purpose is as a superfan for Scott’s band. Then Scott meets the girl of his dreams (literally), Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), who is at least older than Knives but still is quirky (she works delivering packages while on roller skates) and impulsive (she often changes her hair color) but is too aloof and serious to be a full-on MPDG. She does, however, end up being a sort-of trophy, to be won if Scott can defeat her seven evil exes. So, her existence still is minimalized.

Some movies have addressed the MPDG thing head-on. Though sometimes cited as a MPDG, Kate Winslet’s Clementine in 2004’s “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” is actually the anti-MPDG. Sure, she wears orange hair and gloves with the fingertips cut off, and she’s impulsive. But she also is flawed, sometimes dark and independent (MPDGs typically don’t get any of those traits). And she says this, which seems like a direct response to the trope, even though the term didn’t yet exist, as written by Charlie Kaufman: “Too many guys think I’m a concept, or I complete them, or I’m gonna make them alive. But I’m just a fu**ed-up girl who’s looking for my own peace of mind. Don’t assign me yours.”

Those are sentiments Claire in “Elizabethtown” never would have expressed, her focus being on a lost, sensitive young man and his happiness, not hers. Nor would she be allowed to even think such, given she and MPDGs like her are the products of writers and filmmakers who want to believe that this idealized version of young women is out there. That will probably be the case as long as men are writing movies, just as the male equivalent of the MPDG – the ridiculously handsome man with washboard abs who manages to accumulate much wealth despite always being around to tend to a woman’s needs and whisk her off to beaches on his private jet – will always exist as long as women are fantasizing about them and flocking to see them in rom-com-drams and reading about them in romance novels.

A little healthy fantasy is fine, but movie tropes and stereotypes are not, if we believe they can shape how we live in real life. Manic Pixie Drew Girls, though not totally a thing of the past (Joi, the A.I. girlfriend in 2017’s “Blade Runner 2049,” comes to mind as an updated version), are becoming outdated as more and more females are having their voices heard in Hollywood. MPDGs are being replaced by independent women who are the focus of the story and don’t have to be bubbly if they don’t feel like it, who aren’t required to be quirky and can chase their own happiness. These characters, unlike Manic Pixie Dream Girls, are multidimensional. They give a movie depth, not just gloss.

Imagine if that’s the kind of character Dunst’s Claire could have been. “Elizabethtown” wouldn’t show up on so many Worst Movie Ever lists. And it wouldn’t have been forever linked to a tired movie trope and the terminology to describe it.

#movies #movie review #movie tropes #manic pixie dream girl #elizabethtown #kirsten dunst #eternal sunshine of a spotless mind #kate winslet #yes man #zooey deschanel #ramona flowers #scott pilgram vs the world

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bodhirook1138 · 5 years ago

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The Problems with Aladdin: Orientalism, Casting, and Ramadan

Originally posted on Medium.

Edward Said and Jack G. Shaheen did not do the work they did so that movies like Aladdin would still get made.

I say this as someone who has had a complicated relationship with the 1992 Aladdin animated feature. I loved it when I was a kid. For a long time, it was my favorite Disney cartoon. I remember proudly telling white friends and classmates in third grade that Aladdin was “about my people.” Although nothing is said in the movie about Aladdin’s religion, I read him as Muslim.

When I grew older, I read Jack G. Shaheen’s book, Reel Bad Arabs, which analyzes about 1,000 American films that vilify and stereotype Arabs and Muslims. Among these films is Aladdin, which Shaheen reportedly walked out of. Shaheen spoke out against lyrics in the film’s opening song: “I come from a land from a far-away place/Where they cut off your ear if they don’t like your face/It’s barbaric, but hey, it’s home.” Although he convinced Disney to remove the lyrics for the home video release, the final verse was still there: “It’s barbaric, but hey, it’s home.” As a 1993 op-ed in The New York Timeswrote, “It’s Racist, But Hey, It’s Disney.”

In Edward Said’s seminal book, Orientalism (1978), he described orientalism as a process in which the West constructs Eastern societies as exotic, backwards, and inferior. According to Said, orientalism’s otherization of Arabs, Muslims, and Islam provided justification for European colonialism and Western intervention in the Middle East and Muslim-majority countries, often under the pretext of rescuing the people — especially Muslim women — from themselves. In addition to orientalism’s practices of constructing the “Orient” as the West’s “Other,” Said asserted that another major facet of orientalism involves a “western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the ‘Orient.’” In other words, it is not the Arab or Muslim who gets to define themselves, but rather the West does.

There are plenty of excellent and detailed critiques out there about how the original Aladdin is filled with racist, sexist, and orientalist tropes, so there’s very little, if anything, to say that already hasn’t been said. In her extensive report, “Haqq and Hollywood: Illuminating 100 Years of Muslim Tropes And How to Transform Them,” Dr. Maytha Alhassen argues that Hollywood’s legacy of depicting Arabs and Muslims as offensive caricatures is continued in Aladdin, where the main characters like Aladdin and Jasmine are “whitewashed, with anglicized versions of Arabic names and Western European (though brown-skinned) facial features” and speak with white American accents. Alhassen notes the contrast with the “villains, Jafar, and the palace guards” who are depicted as “darker, swarthy, with undereye circles, hooked noses, black beards, and pronounced Arabic and British accents.” In another article, “The Problem with ‘Aladdin,’” Aditi Natasha Kini asserts that Aladdin is “a misogynist, xenophobic white fantasy,” in which Jasmine is sexualized and subjected to tropes of “white feminism as written by white dudes.” Not only does Jasmine have limited agency in the film, Kini writes, but her role in the film is “entirely dependent on the men around her.”

When Disney announced plans to produce a live-action remake of Aladdin, I learned through conversations that the Aladdin story is not even in the original text for Alf Layla wa Layla, or One Thousand and One Nights. It was later added by an 18th century French translator, Antoine Galland, who heard the story from a Syrian Maronite storyteller, Hanna Diyab. Galland did not even give credit to Diyab in his translation. Beyond the counter-argument that “the original Aladdin took place in China,” I am left wondering, how much of the original tale do we really know? How much did Galland change? It’s possible that Galland changed the story so significantly that everything we know about Aladdin is mostly a western, orientalist fabrication. For a more detailed account about the origins of the Aladdin tale, I recommend reading Arafat A. Razzaque’s article, “Who ‘wrote’ Aladdin? The Forgotten Syrian Storyteller.”

Disney has been boasting about how the live-action Aladdin is one of the “most diverse” movies in Hollywood, but this is an attempt to hide the fact that the casting of this film relied on racist logic: “All brown people are the same.” It’s great that an Egyptian-Canadian actor, Mena Massoud, was cast in the lead role, but there’s inconsistency elsewhere: Jasmine is played by British actress Naomi Scott, who is half Indian and half white; Jafar is played by Dutch-Tunisian actor Marwan Kenzari; and Jasmine’s father and a new character, Dalia, are played by Iranian-American actors Navid Negahban and Nasim Pedrad, respectively. The casting demonstrates that the filmmakers don’t know the differences between Arabs, Iranians, and South Asians. We are all conflated as “one and the same,” as usual.

Then there’s the casting of Will Smith as the genie. Whether deliberate or not, reinforced here is the Magical Negro trope. According to blogger Modern Hermeneut, this term was popularized by Spike Lee in 2011 and refers to “a spiritually attuned black character who is eager to help fulfill the destiny of a white protagonist.” Moreover, the author writes that Lee saw the Magical Negro as “a cleaned up version of the ‘happy slave’ stereotype, with black actors cast as simpleminded angels and saints.” Examples of the Magical Negro can be found in films like What Dreams May Come, City of Angels, Kazaam (which also features a Black genie), The Green Mile, The Adjustment Bureau, and The Legend of Bagger Vance. In the case of Aladdin, the genie’s purpose is to serve the protagonist’s dreams and ambitions. While Aladdin is Arab, not white, the racial dynamic is still problematic as the Magical Negro trope can be perpetuated by non-Black people of color as well.

I need to pause for a moment to explain that I don’t believe an Aladdin movie should only consist of Arab actors. Yes, Agrabah is a fictional Arab country, but it would be perfectly fine to have non-Arabs like Iranians, South Asians, and Africans in the movie as well. That’s not the issue I have with the casting, and this is not about identity politics. My problem is that the filmmakers saw Middle Eastern and South Asian people as interchangeable rather than setting out to explore complex racial, ethnic, and power dynamics that would arise from having ethnically diverse characters existing within an Arab-majority society. Evelyn Alsultany, an Associate Professor who was consulted for the film, states in her post that one of the ways Disney tried to justify casting a non-Arab actress for Jasmine was by mentioning that her mother was born “in another land.” However, this seems to have been Disney doing damage control after they received some backlash about Jasmine’s casting. The result is convenient erasure of an Arab woman character. Moreover, the change in Jasmine’s ethnicity does little, if anything, to reduce the film’s problematic amalgamation of Middle Eastern and South Asian cultures. Alsultany writes that “audiences today will be as hard pressed as those in 1992 — or 1922, for that matter — to identify any distinct Middle Eastern cultures beyond that of an overgeneralized ‘East,’” where “belly dancing and Bollywood dancing, turbans and keffiyehs, Iranian and Arab accents all appear in the film interchangeably.”

Other examples of how the film conflates various Middle Eastern and South Asian cultures is highlighted in Roxana Hadadi’s review: “Terms like ‘Sultan’ and ‘Vizier’ can be traced to the Ottoman Empire, but the movie also uses the term ‘Shah,’ which is Iranian monarchy.” Referring to the dance scenes and clothing, she writes they are “mostly influenced by Indian designs and Bollywood styles” while “the military armor looks like leftovers from Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven.” An intersectional approach to the diverse ethnic communities represented in the film would have made for a more nuanced narrative, but this would have required a better director.

Speaking of the director, it is amazing that, of all people, Disney hired Guy Ritchie. Because if there is any director out there who understands the importance of representation and knows how to author a nuanced narrative about Middle Eastern characters living in a fictitious Arab country, it’s… Guy Ritchie? Despite all of the issues regarding the origin of the Aladdin story, I still believed the narrative could have been reclaimed in a really empowering way, but that could not happen with someone like Guy Ritchie. It’s textbook orientalism to have a white man control the narrative. I would have preferred socially and politically conscious Middle Eastern and Muslim writers/directors to make this narrative their own. Instead, we are left with an orientalist fantasy that looks like an exoticized fusion of how a white man perceives South Asia and the Middle East.

Lastly, I have to comment on how this movie was released during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan. In fact, the film’s release date, May 24th, was just one day before the last ten days of Ramadan, which are considered to be the most important in the month. During Ramadan, Muslims around the world fast — if they are able to — from dawn to sunset every day for 30 days. The time when we break our fast, iftar, typically involves dinner and prayer with family, friends, and/or the community. But Ramadan is more than just about fasting, it’s a time of self-reflection, compassion, and strengthening our connection with Allah, our loved ones, and community. I don’t believe Disney released Aladdin during Ramadan intentionally. If anything, I think the film’s release date is reflective of how clueless and ignorant Disney is. It’s so ridiculous that it’s laughable.

I don’t want to give the impression that Muslims don’t go out to the movies during Ramadan. Of course there are Muslims who do. I just know a lot who don’t— some for religious reasons and some, like myself, for no other reason than simply not having enough time between iftar and the pre-dawn meal, sehri (I mean, I could go during the day, but who wants to watch a movie hungry, right?). Even Islamophobic Bollywood knows to release blockbuster movies on Eid, not towards the end of Ramadan.

But this isn’t about judging Muslim religiosity during the holy month. No one is “less” of a Muslim if they are going to the movie theater or anywhere else on Ramadan. My point is that Disney has not shown any consideration for the Muslim community with this movie. They did not even consider how releasing the film during Ramadan would isolate some of the Muslim audience. It’s clear that Disney did not make efforts to engage the Muslim community. Of course, there is nothing surprising about this. But you cannot brag about diversity when you’re not even engaging a group of people that represents the majority of the population you claim to be celebrating! In response to Shaheen’s critiques of the original Aladdin cartoon, a Disney distribution president at the time said Aladdin is “not just for Arabs, but for everybody.” But this is a typical dismissive tactic used to gloss over the real issues. No doubt Disney will follow the same script when people criticize the latest film.

I don’t have any interest in this movie because it failed to learn anything from the criticism it received back in 1992. The fact that a 1993 op-ed piece titled, “It’s Racist, But Hey, It’s Disney” is still relevant to the live-action version of a film that came out 27 years ago is both upsetting and sad at the same time. As I said earlier, Edward Said and Jack Shaheen did not exhaustively speak out against orientalism, exoticism, and vilification to only see them reproduced over and over again. Of course Disney refused to educate themselves and listen to people like Shaheen— their Aladdin story was never meant for us.

#Aladdin #aladdin remake #Orientalism #Disney #Muslim

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