#went this whole rant without saying anything about the 'cheeseburger' scene

[moviegroovies]

i feel like i haven’t done an actual review on this blog in months, so get hype, everybody, for my incoherent, unedited thoughts on the fly (1986). 

(i actually watched this movie for the first time about a week ago and should have written this review at a similar point in time, but there’s nothing i can do about that now)

(just know that it’s starting to get fuzzy is all.)

so the thing about the fly is... it’s pretty gross. like before i say anything else about the quality, or even how enjoyable i found it, i’ve gotta be upfront and say that my main takeaway was really this big, resounding ew. by the end of the movie, what starts as an attractive, confident jeff goldblum has become an oozing, seeping creature of mucus and weird hairs. just for that, it’s kind of hard to watch.

which isn’t to say i didn’t like it, because i did. 

it’s a good story. the effects are pretty fantastic, and cronenberg’s trademark body horror, while nasty, made for a good, campy sci-fi/horror story, and really, all i look for in a movie is camp, sci-fi, and horror elements. so it checks those boxes pretty well.

the thing that kind of holds me back on this movie is its treatment of women, or more specifically, the treatment of the main female character, veronica quaife. veronica is the primary love interest, pursued by both main character seth brundle and supporting character stathis borans, and boy, she gets treated like shit from both of them. i’ve heard arguments that say the second act of the fly feels like a different movie entirely from the first act (the first act having a lighter, softer tone and 80% less body horror, unless you count what happened to that poor baboon), but i honestly can’t see it; there isn’t a part of the movie i can identify wherein the tone suddenly changes. it’s just been dark from the start, and getting darker.

stathis borans apparently exists as a character to be a sort of romantic foil to brundle in his treatment of veronica. at first, it’s pretty easy to identify. stathis comes off as a dick from the start, pursuing ronnie jealously and doing petty things to spite her, like threatening to run the teleporter story after veronica has shelved it. at this point, seth hasn’t yet started to ooze and drip and puke on his food to dissolve it, so he’s got a pretty good shot at coming out ahead in a comparison. still, if you’re really watching, brundle doesn’t really respect her autonomy a whole lot more. their very first scene together, brundle insists that veronica come back to his apartment with him, and won’t take no for an answer, hounding her until she eventually gives in and follows. it’s not that stathis does respect veronica, or that his treatment, at least to start, is any better, but the difference is in the way that they’re framed. borans is a dick, and we’re meant to think that about him. brundle’s unrelenting pursuit of veronica is softened by a geeky exterior that makes his harassment cute. i’m honestly not sure if we’re supposed to excuse his behavior here or not--on one hand, he’s the “hero,” and if the romantic subplot has any chance in hell of landing, then we probably shouldn’t be reading him as a chauvinistic asshole. on the other hand, it definitely does foreshadow what we see of him later on. 

hm. 

another dark shadow over seth’s character is his actions upon veronica leaving unexpectedly. they share their “is this a romance?” scene, which i’ll have to be honest and say that i found endearing, but then veronica gets stathis’s petty threat and leaves to contain it--an action she’s undertaking FOR SETH, given that it’s him who wants the teleporters to be kept under wraps until he’s ready to unveil them--and seth instantly becomes just as jealous as borans. he drinks for the melodrama, and then, despite having no actual proof that veronica is cheating (and really, no real reason to think so at all, beyond stathis’s name on the portfolio thing), he decides to rush into an extremely dangerous experiment that he wasn’t supposed to undertake for weeks. does he want to hurt himself? i’m not sure. is he spiting veronica? almost certainly.

things naturally deteriorate from there. seth comes out of the experiment feeling better than he has in his life, and for a little while, things seem to be great. he reconciles with veronica. he’s got superhuman strength. he’s suddenly become an insatiable sexual dynamo.

...which is another thing.

if the beginning of the end wasn’t seth getting into the transporter with the fly, it’s probably the scene where seth tries to pressure veronica into going another round after she’s already complained of being exhausted. his stamina is just as superhuman as the rest of him now, but she’s being worn out, and when she finally pushes back against him, he becomes manic, trying to drag her into the transporter so that she might be made as godlike as him (yeah, good luck with that, seth) and lashing out when she declines. from there, he deals with his emotions poorly again and goes out to a bar, where he breaks a man’s arm and hustles another girl into coming home with him--a girl whom he also tries to force into the transporter, only to be stopped by veronica, who’s Had Enough.

good for her!

that’s when things start getting nasty and gooey, so i’m gonna cool it with the plot summary now. let’s just say he turns into a fly, she freaks out about it, things are bad. veronica goes to stathis borans, her only confidante (as laughable a title as that might be for a dick like him), and that’s sort of the point where he becomes a little more sympathetic. 

i’ve gotta be honest. i really liked stathis, generally. not all the extra-creepy shit from the beginning, but once seth gets bad enough that stathis is preferable in comparison, he starts to be forced into a role where he acts like a goddamn human being, and the “confidante” role is played more seriously. of course, all of this with the disclaimer that i have terrible taste in fictional men and that i thought the scene where he pretended to “worship” her in the department store was kind of sexy, but he genuinely did step up to the plate, if only because of the absolute horrors that his foil was then undergoing. at any rate, his fingernails were intact, so i don’t think it’s unreasonable for veronica to have gone to him as the better option.

this is also the part of the movie where the pregnancy scare took center stage, and i have to be honest, that was the part of the movie that probably upset me the most. personally, as the unwilling owner of a uterus, the idea of pregnancy in general is fucking horrific to me. veronica’s naked horror at realizing that she’s carrying the baby of the mutated genetic horror seth brundle has become felt real, not only in the context of the actual horror she would have had inside her (although the dream sequence did a very good job of illustrating that), but also in the more personal context of the fear of pregnancy in a person who doesn’t want it. seth’s reaction to her pregnancy versus stathis’s is another reason i came to like stathis best by the end of the film. of course, seth wasn’t in his right mind by the point when he found out, but he begged her to keep it despite her fear and the probable consequences, whereas stathis’s face showed the same dawning horror i felt upon her announcement, and he helped her to get the abortion she wanted. there’s probably some comments about agency to be made here, at the risk of gassing up a character who is still, essentially, an asshole.

(side note: i haven’t seen the fly 2, but the fact that the whole plot is based around veronica keeping the baby after all that and then dying... sours it for me. to say the least.)

then, of course, there’s the grand finale. the three main players in the story settle into their final roles once and for all: veronica is the damsel in distress, for all the discussion of her agency, stathis is the reluctant hero, brundle is the monster. his ultimate plan culminates into fusing himself, veronica, and the baby into one being (a “perfect family”), removing veronica’s agency forever, along with setting up the kind of body horror i really don’t care to imagine. yuck. stathis comes in to stop him with a shotgun, and gets his hand and foot dissolved by acid for his trouble. despite that, he still has the presence of mind to shoot at the telepod with his one remaining hand, freeing veronica (his best scene, imo, but maybe i’m biased) and luring brundlefly out of his own telepod... where he gets further warped by the machine of his own creation, and comes out a horrific, bloody mess, warped together with the machine and begging for his own death. veronica grants his last request. role the credits.

so, what? what’s the takeaway with this movie? it must go beyond “flies are evil and if you merge with them you’ll become that too.” the fact is, the worst parts of brundlefly don’t come from the fly at all, but from seth. his inability to acknowledge veronica’s “no,” his jealousy; all of these come from seth’s humanity. they’re heightened, perhaps, when combined with the mindless creature concerned only with its own survival, but ultimately, the fault is his own. it would be easy, perhaps too easy, to say that the movie functions as a warning against the evils of technology. personally, i think that such a reading is bullshit. over and over, it’s drilled into our heads that computers are stupid. they only do what we tell them. yes, seth’s transformation was heralded by a mistake in the machine, but such a mistake was only possible because of his spiteful, stupid decision to get into the telepod without checking all variables in the first place. i think it’s more of a warning against hubris, if anything. the fly shows us a man with an idea that could change the world, and a disposition that makes us wonder if he’s really ready to. it’s a tragedy, what happens to brundle. but he’s hoisted by his own petard. 

[claudecat17]

Orioles Game 45: Losing Is Not Fun (Rant Alert!)

Well, they can't lose tomorrow, right? Or maybe they can. I can totally see Manny Machado playing Trouble with his spouse and smashing the hell out of that Pop-o-matic Bubble, thereby forfeiting the game. Then pouting about it real hard. Because you've gotta be a beast, right? The man! No sense in playing team baseball when you can futilely try to pile up the taters for a future ginormous payday.

Yeah, I'm tired of this shit. Real tired. It's damn near impossible to enjoy watching the O's play "baseball" anymore. It's more like watching a bunch of those big hefty middle-aged softball dudes trying to see who can launch as many balls to the upper deck as possible. Forget the score, the situation, the team, the rules of the game itself. It's all about mashing them taters, bro. Nothing else matters. Home run derby! Slam dunks! ESPN! Boobs! Trump!

This is what an extended stretch of losing can do to a guy. See, intellectually I know that these last few games have been as much about the awesomeness of the opposing pitchers as the O's insistence on rocketing baseballs to Uranus. But you reach a certain boiling point when you see the 93rd instance of Chris Davis standing there balefully watching strike three whiz by.

Or when you see Manny Machado refuse to do some of the little things it takes to not be an idiotic ballplayer, like running hard to first, ever. He's taken the cool casual thing to ridiculous extremes, and I'm over it. You think you're above hustling? Fine. Do it elsewhere. Defensive whiz, sure, but hard to like otherwise. I'll take Francisco Lindor please. Or at least the old Manny, before he decided to become Chris Davis without the hustle.

I know I'm being sorta ridiculous here, but am I far from the truth? I sooo want to love some of these guys. Nothing would make me happier than to see Manny and Davis even approach who they've been at their best as hitters. At least Davis runs everything out. That gives him somewhat more equity with me, but those backwards K's... Manny? Aside from the defense I don't like anything about him right now. And I want to! Give me some reasons!

Seeing so much bad baseball up close (OK, far away, but you get the gist) is just plain maddening. And I haven't even mentioned Ubaldo or Tyler Wilson yet! For me those aren't the guys that get under my skin though. Because you don't expect anything but bad from them You can maybe get mad at how they're used, but even then there are complex behind the scenes factors in play. I hope. It's the big guys, the ones on the billboards around town looking up at majestic taters in the sky, that get me all ranty.

And before you start thinking I've lost my entire mind in this frenzy of reactionary hot-take-itis, know this: I understand that that's exactly what I'm doing. The sad part is that there's so much truth in this hyperbolic fury. It would be hard to dispute that Manny could hustle more, that Davis K's looking far far too often. It's the predictability of it all that begins to make your baseball soul ache.

OK, got that out of my system for now. As you already know, this last game of this brutal home stand, on the heels of an even more brutal road trip, was the shits, again. Chris Tillman stunk it up good right out of the gate, yet miraculously escaped having given up just three runs. 30+ pitches, sure, but it could have been a lot worse. He'd ultimately give up four total in five innings of painful to watch pitching, which is how he typically gets a lot of his wins. Not today.

Nope. The Twins, one of last season's worst teams, one on which the O's feasted with delight, are this year blessed with not one but two fabulous starters. This Jose Berrios cat is the real deal right now. That the O's managed to hit three solo shots (no way!) off this guy is fairly miraculous. More miraculous was that the first one was hit by JJ Hardy! Later on it was Chris Davis, then Jonathan Schoop.

You almost began to think there might be a chance for some late inning magic, it being a one run game by the 7th (thanks to flawless bullpen work by "anyone but Tyler Wilson"). And yes, there were even (gasp!) baserunners (after the taters naturally). Baserunners: the tater masher's kryptonite. Those pesky guys steal focus, get in the way of the real task at hand, which is punishing those baseballs. Only Welington Castillo lately seems immune from the dastardly effects of baserunners on the pure artistry of the dong.

At the end it even sorta looked like the Twins were offering up the game to us on a silver platter. Every reliever they had warming for a while there had ERA'a in the 6+ fun zone, and I think they even left one lefty guy in there to face a couple more righty hitters than they could have. I guess they knew that Adam Jones (who I'll never ever be as angered by as anyone else because I love him so) and Manny Machado weren't gonna do anything, or were willing to take the consequences if they were.

But alas, 'twas not to be. And that brings us full circle to the penultimate (I know, not really, but the 9th went so quickly who even noticed it?) nail in the coffin on this day, the latest Davis backwards K. A 6-pitch AB during which the bat never once left his dreamily muscular shoulder. Maybe a Davis punching bag could be a popular giveaway item! I'd have injured myself for sure.

As for the game experience? It was weird in some ways. Field Trip Day, where they bus in thousands of middle school kids and force-feed 'em weather factoids from the mouths and brains of people like Bob Turk and Marty Bass, then get 'em doing things like the wave, repeatedly, and "The Chicken Dance", and "YMCA", and the Oriole cheer (Tim Williams did NOT leave out the second O, twice, this year!), etc. This passes for education in some small way I guess. I wanna know where these kids get all the cash for the food. Man did they gobble up some sugar and grease...

The timing of the game pissed me off. Rush hour traffic both arriving and departing made for some extra fun. And I missed Baseball Bugs. The whole day seemed disjointed. I recall in past years happily standing around for a good long while before they unleashed those kids upon us in the upper deck. Today? By the time we got settled they were already pouring in.

Food? Did the full greasy today, with the jumbo dog lunch, cheeseburger dinner, root beer as the beverage of the day. Arby's on the way home. You don't mess with a successful formula like that.

Not much else to say here. The kids weren't too annoying I guess, though there was the usual array of delinquents who think it's fun to spit or drop things on folks from great heights. Maybe I'm just more aware of these picayune types of issues than I once was. Egads! I'm beginning to care about something beyond watching the games! Yeah... this is what losing a lot can do to a guy...

-------------------------------- Link to past posts, faster than the top-right icon thingie: https://disqus.com/home/forum/claudecatsplace/recent/ --------------------------------