cimorene

Two days ago I dreamed I was watching a late 1970s/early 1980s movie starring Angela Lansbury and Al Pacino about an organized-crime connected Showgirls-esque club.

The showgirls themselves were a mixture of women and drag queens, but they all had a shared dressing room with the top half of the walls covered in wig stands and the bottom half covered in shoe stands.

Al Pacino was running this club with another guy representative of various organized crime entities and they were hiring an emergency replacement for someone who had gone to jail, and Angela Lansbury was sent, looking very prim in a tweed suit, but backed by... some other organized crime interest I guess?

At first it looks like this isn't going to work, because how can someone so prim and proper (and wearing such a long skirt and such low heels) be - whatever job she's supposed to have, doorman? Hostess? Bartender? Idk - but Angela Lansbury was told to show up and she did and she is sure she can do whatever this job is, because she's nothing if not competent. Then there's a humorous scene with playful music where the girls transform Angela Lansbury into a sexier version of the secretary look she's got going on while they're also getting themselves dressed, putting on wigs and stockings and shoes (and drag queen padding and makeup for about half of them).

Then they have one night's business (and presumably some minor conflict with the Bad Organized Crime elements, elided) and after closing they're laughing and taking off makeup in the dressing room pointing around at the wig stands and talking about the ones on the wall and whose they are and what act they're for and then someone playfully asks Angela Lansbury to guess one, but they don't know that she realizes it's a challenge and does a masterful Sherlock Holmes style deduction that it's Al Pacino's. (Correctly.)

Tragically I woke up, but Angela Lansbury was obviously going to join them and help them kick out the other guy and the 'bad' organized crime connections, leaving, obviously, only the good organized crime, while having a playful sexual tension romance without the actual romance with Al Pacino.

Tragic that this isn't a real movie.

I watched a movie called Goodbye Charlie (1964) last night that was UNCANNILY similar to classic Popslash Explosion -era (ca. 1999-2001) Woke Up Magically with the Reproductive Physiology and Visible Secondary Characteristics Associated with Femininity fic (the fandom term for which used to be sex-or-gender swap-or-switch, and at some point progressed to genderfuck). This era in popslash was seminal to the development of modern media slash fandom and was probably the single strongest contributor to the next phase of development of this trope and its variants. (Citation needed, but source is that I was there reading in most of the major trending media slash fandoms of the time.)

SO ANYWAY this is the first movie I've found that is this close to the fandom template! A lot of people like to point to Star Trek's original series as the source of various tropes, but this is a exception. There is a classic episode of TOS where Kirk is trapped in a woman's body, but ( it doesn't fit ). I've always figured this one didn't have any real parallels in movie and tv! So I was pretty surprised to find even this much.

Here's a summary of Goodbye Charlie (1964, dir. Vincente Minnelli, starring Tony Curtis, Debbie Reynolds and Pat Boone), adapted from George Axelrod's 1959 play Goodbye, Charlie: ( Read more... )

But in spite of obvious differences, there are a lot of similarities to this particular early generation of gender-stuff fic:

The transformation serves the purpose of teaching a lesson related to gender (albeit not the same one as in fanfiction): check

Exploiting for humor scenes of the character in the "female" body participating at least briefly in objectification of other women: check

The affection and attraction between the transformed character and the BFF is addressed, resisted, and then develops past the resistance: check

The "female" body affects the transformed character by making them open to, curious about, and apparently happy to enjoy the actual transformation into a SUCCESSFUL feminine body inhabiter (ie recognized as a sexy woman by all who behold them, having mastered the art of... essentially... drag, ie the performance of glam hyper-femininity): check

A further transformation removes the inconveniences/impossibilities posed by romance with the transformed character: check (usually in slash this is a transformation back to their original body, but with a new awareness of gender and sexuality)

Modern trains are sadly disappointing in appearance when you're used to watching old movies at all - even worse if you're a fan of Agatha Christie adaptations.

But I've never been so disappointed in my life of train travel as when I started this movie - Do You Love Me? (1946), dir. Gregory Ratloff - a romantic comedy starring Maureen O'Hara.

She was reading a book standing in the corridor of a train when a guy popped out and said "We have plenty of room in our carriage, come on in!" and ushered her into a plush seat where she sat down and opened her book, only for all other 20-something dudes in the train to break out instruments and start playing a well-rehearsed big band style jazz number. (If I had to pick I wouldn't pick big band style, but at least it's jazz.)

Imagine the days when a big jazz band would just take an entire carriage and spend the trip playing! Imagine being invited in!!!

The joke is that it's 1946 and she's a classical snob, which you can tell because she's got glasses and a bun - totally She's All That pre-transformation - and is obviously going to become a glamorpuss while learning about jazz music. But who cares. Amazing!!! (As long as you brought your own earplugs.)

This is probably a well-known fact to many people - that Michael Redgrave is great, I mean - but I am not a huge tv and movie fan, and not British, and only 41 years old, which means his greatest movies were filmed before my parents were born. I recognize Vanessa Redgrave, who must be his daughter, but she's been already old my entire life, and I have only seen her in a few roles that I can recall (I guess because Helen Mirren and Judi Dench and Maggie Smith have accounted for all the roles for women in her age range and didn't leave any for anyone else).

Anyway, I've been watching old movies pretty much at random for a while - or at least starting them at random; I'm only finishing like one in eight or something - and I stumbled onto The Browning Version (1951), a classic film of a classic play by the celebrated playwright Terence Rattigan. (Beautifully shot and directed too, even though it was mostly filmed at a studio.)

I've been mulling over this film on and off for a few weeks, because I can't recommend it unstintingly - it has Gender Issues - but they are far from simple or one-sided gender issues. ( Read more... )

But anyway, in spite of having the Genders, this movie was very good, and I can't put that all onto Michael Redgrave in the lead - there are three other significant performances (Jean Kent, Nigel Patrick, and a child actor) and the writing of a celebrated playwright, who did the adaptation himself. But Redgrave's performance was really what got me excited about watching. It was just SO GOOD.

I tried to find some of his other work, but so far I haven't hit on one that I managed to stick out for more than twenty minutes or so. It's funny to think about what absolutely terrible nonsense I watched for the sake of actors' back catalogues 10-20 years ago (Willem Dafoe, Norman Reedus, Gary Oldman, Liev Schreiber). You'd think my attention span had changed, but it's rather that I have more of a sense that I have other, better things to do than watch something bad nowadays.

I keep having to quit watching midcentury comedies because you're being introduced in leisurely fashion to middle class characters you're supposed to find relatable and charming and they have multiple servants.

I just can't.

(The same thing doesn't apply to film noir and mysteries and thrillers and so on because these genres don't usually expect their characters to be charming and relatable to begin with. In fact, I often find these funnier than the comedies, albeit unintentionally.)

The edifice of midcentury white-collar jobs in the industrialized nations that created a huge balloon of suburban middle class with often multiple servants strikes me as in a way as peculiar, and as much a monument to the wealth extraction projects of colonialism, as those grotesque gilded neoclassical buildings that sprouted like mushrooms in the urban centers of the 19th century. That sort of lens is increasingly unavoidable whenever I watch or read anything, so it precludes even old texts being escapist in the sense of escaping association with unpleasant realities. But I find that genuinely old books and films are still able to offer an extra level of distraction because of their status as primary documents about the periods in which they're produced and the things you can learn about the past through them by observing. (The cars in old movies are great, and the architecture and interiors, especially little things like doorframes and light fixtures, are an unending source of delight.)

I was truly astounded to encounter a new-to-me form of the pretending to be married trope a couple of weeks ago.

The British film Young Wives' Tale (1951), a romantic comedy (misogyny warning), based on a 1949 play of the same name by Ronald Jeans.

Premise: due to the post-war housing shortage, a young married couple are renting out rooms in the house they own, one of them to another young married couple who have a toddler close in age to their daughter. Even though the renters are home all day (a writer and an actress who quit work to be a "homemaker"), they can't manage between them to watch their own toddler, and the homeowners' nanny quits in a huff over being asked to watch a second kid "as a favor". (I gather they don't bring up sharing the salary because the writer doesn't make enough money to afford it.) The house is thrown into disorder and homeowner Mary hits on the solution: pretend the toddlers are siblings so that the next nanny won't see anything wrong in watching them both. She gets an old-fashioned retired lady and due to Comedy Circumstances, the new nanny gets the idea that the two couples are married the other way around, and they have to continue to pretend after lying to her the first time to keep her from quitting. ( Read more... ) They SHOULD have switched. In fact, I think if a movie like this came out in the 1980s or later they probably would have.

Instead they end up apologizing to each other. The homeowner man who was making such a babyish fuss that his wife kept her job only needed to be told that she really does have emotions but she finds it hard to express them, and as soon as he sees her cry he is magically transformed. The Renter Guy has a fit of jealousy (not about the homeowner guy - there's an old boyfriend who remains her friend) and after he gets over it she's like "I really do TRY to cook and do housework" and he is suddenly like "Oh I know it's okay". Not a very good ending. The comedy pace only survives because of a couple of scenes where the nanny catches people kissing their spouses and declares it's a house of infamy and quits.

I'm still watching old movies mostly in order to do my knitting, at a rate of about one finished for each five or six started.

It's a lot easier for me to ignore a certain quantity of misogyny, racism, classism, etc in old movies, if it doesn't go much beyond the standard of the time, than it is in contemporary film. (The DNF rate shows that it only goes so far though.) In contemporary stuff, even nasty things that are completely genre standard will drive me away, like copaganda which has made me pretty much intolerant of any portrayals of them in contemporary tv, even from outside America where it's not quite as bad.

I'm finding it very refreshing seeing women with short hair absolutely everywhere in all these early-mid 20th c. films. Finland has the highest rate of short haired women out and about of any place I've ever encountered, but it's still much lower in my experience than the worlds of 1920s-60s film and tv. And I get a bit aggravated seeing the long hair everywhere on TV, where the Central Casting Style Nexus radiates stupidly identical, implausibly labor-intensive styling, right down to the same diameter of curling iron, out from shitty network tv into the rest of the film world, even affecting prestige tv and characters who textually can't be spending any time heat styling at all. (The long hair I see irl is not aggravating, because it's their own hair, but sometimes it is puzzling - Why? How? Do you think it's on purpose? - or mildly tragic - Oh no it needs moisture! Which is probably easier than they realize! Just switch shampoo and conditioner!)

Old films are generally worse than modern non-prestige film for makeup being worn all the time and by all women characters, but this is also easier for me to excuse. I always remember the picture size and quality they were designed for was generally so much lower that who knows what you'd've seen?

I've knitted the body of my new merino turtleneck and am working on the pocket linings (sleeves next, and the turtleneck last). This has meant finding things to put on to watch while I'm knitting.

Well, at first I was doing a lot of scrolling through the main pages of streaming services discontentedly, fuming because none of them have working genre categories anymore and there aren't even any search terms you can put into any of them to reliably pull up old movies or classic movies or even black and white movies.

But after I watched the newest videos from channels I follow on YouTube last week, the algorithm there unexpectedly suggested Laurence Olivier's Hamlet - and I watched it on a whim. ( Off Topic: review of Olivier's Hamlet ) Anyway, that was the most fun I'd had in a while, so I started typing "Shakespeare" into the search boxes of all our streaming services, not getting anything - of course you can subscribe to five streaming services and none of them has a single Shakespeare film, because enshittification! - , except that Netflix, bless its evil little algorithm, noticed what I was typing and suggested a whole list of "Did you mean?" with about fifteen options, and ten of them were things like "Shakespeare tragedies: Hamlet" and "Shakespeare tragedies: Macbeth"; and I clicked on each of them in turn, learning in turn that they didn't have this one or that one, being offered random shit instead, the way they do when they don't have anything featuring the same stars or director as the thing you searched for...

Except then I clicked on "Shakespeare comedies: the Tempest", and as usual Netflix didn't have it, but what it offered me instead was an entire screen full of 1930s-60s British (mostly) comedies that I'd never heard of. (I don't mean that they were obscure or anything - I have seen the original St Trinian's films, and that's about it.)

After all, why not?, I thought. These can't be as badly written as the last two episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation that I had to turn up to 1.5x speed in order to get through! (Rewatching all the Treks in order is a longterm background project.) (The offending episodes are ( 107 Justice - 108 The Battle ))

What was I saying? Right. So, midcentury British comedies (mostly)! I like British comedy a fair bit of the time, so it was worth a try. And everything is fairly sexist of course, just as in American films of the period, but I have managed to watch a few! Here's the score so far:

DNF/ sexism: Maytime in Mayfair (1949), The Big Job (1965), All the Way Up (1970)
DNF/ boredom: Treasure Hunt (1952), Sally in our Alley (1931)
DNF/ the premise was too stupid: No Kidding (1960), The Duke Wore Jeans (1958), Let's Be Happy (1957)
DNF/ Soviet Russia jokes: Friends and Neighbours (1959)
DNF/ the whole thing was a vehicle for one guy's extremely unfunny hapless idiot character: Keep Your Seats Please (1936)
DNF/ POV of an extremely stupid little boy who doesn't deserve what's happening to him, but it wouldn't've happened if he'd had two braincells to rub together to tell him to not play recklessly in half-demolished bombed-out shells of buildings: The Yellow Balloon (1953), The Weapon (1956) (If I had a nickel... etc... but it's funny that it happened twice) (Neither of these are comedies)

I had a great time and am kind of obsessed with this even though it is obviously still sexist and probably has at least one other glaring issue: An Inspector Calls (1954)(drama), Winslow Boy (1948)(drama biopic), The Extra Day (1956), The House Across the Lake (1954)(noir), Young Wives' Tale (1951), The Green Man (1956)

Really enjoyed, but it's still sexist and also the script could use a strong beta: The Iron Maiden (1963), Some Will, Some Won't (1970), The Key Man (1957), Raising the Wind (1961), Twice Round the Daffodils (1962)

Enjoyed in spite of all the sexism, but it was a bit stupid: Lady Godiva Rides Again (1951), Folly to be Wise (1952), Please Turn Over (1959)

Number of times that one of these movies mentions a strong risk of someone being sued for libel even if the thing they're publishing has changed all the names: two (so I guess it must be true??? But that's absolutely insane, and I knew British libel laws were insane, but - what do things even mean then???)

Number of films where American characters are played with a flawless accent but saying obviously British stuff that no American would say unless a British person wrote the script and was too dumb to hire an American picker: two

waxjism warned me off of the Carry On films, which I had never heard of before, but I read about them on Wikipedia and quite agree that they are not to my taste. It seems I may therefore have exhausted most of Netflix's supply of comedies, but part of the issue I'm having is just finding more of them. From watching them, it seems clear that Netflix have just bought an entire back catalog of some old distribution companies, but Netflix search does not recognize the names of distributors, film companies, producers, etc, so after getting through that first page I've found further results by searching for further work by the actors in the ones I've already seen.

Last week we watched the new Dungeons and Dragons movie, which was a pretty fun time although I wouldn't say I loved it, and I remembered that I saw people were writing fanfic for it, so I checked that out. There's not really all that much of it yet; it's not taking off with a bang the way summer movie fandoms sometimes do.

I realized through browsing this fic more, though, and mulling it over, that Regé-Jean Page's heroic paladin side character was the best character as well at the most funny and engaging part of the plot, and that his character's VERY SPECIFIC schtick is... kind of the same as Fraser's (due South): an impossibly, perfectly altruistic and impossibly, perfectly beautiful hero dedicated to helping any and everyone... who is also incredibly literal at all times.

This latter characteristic is a popular type of humor with robots, aliens, etc, eg Spock or Data, but I can't think of any previous examples besides Fraser where it was combined with the Too Perfect Handsome Hero type eg Steve Rogers or Clark Kent (another source of narrative tension and humor on its own, since you get a constant stream of 'Is this guy real?' reactions). Part of the deal with a perfect hero's comedy is that the narrative bends around them because they have sorta been parachuted in from another genre - like legend or folk tale - in which it's nearly impossible for them to lose. You get a lot of comedy mileage from this with the people around them, ie the Rays or the questing party in this new movie, but it does make the character kinda overpowered, from a Dungeon Master perspective. In other words, I conjecture that he couldn't be in more of the film because the writers wanted more uncertainty about the outcome.

The Green Knight looked beautiful in all the images and trailers, so we were pretty excited for it in advance, but typically enough, we then let a ton of time lapse before we got around to watching it like... two weeks ago. By then I knew, vaguely, that people who cared about Arthuriana and medieval literature were at least in part disappointed by it, but I didn't know any details.

The Green Knight still is really beautiful. Cinematographically speaking, everything is lovely.

On the evidence it would be totally reasonable to conclude that the director's main motivation was pictures of people touching Dev Patel's face.

The whole quest feels a great deal like katabasis (the journey to the underworld), or alternatively a bit like another spirit quest, but really more like katabasis, because besides everything feeling allegorical or symbolical, it's all primarily concerned with death in the movie.

I like Arthuriana but I have not actually read the poem, I just know about it second hand. This is my level of acquaintance with a lot of Arthuriana. I haven't read any genuine medieval romances longer than a couple of pages, or the Mabinogion, and I got Le Mort d'Arthur for a holiday when I was like... ten or eleven... because I was so into the stuff in theory (and at the level where it appears in more recent, like second-wave onward, fantasy literature), but I only managed a few chapters of endless battle descriptions before giving up in boredom. I have looked at it later to make sure my memory of the content was mainly accurate. I've read The Mists of Avalon but I haven't even read TH White. So, anyway, I don't have any expert opinions, or even like hobbyist/'that's my fandom' opinions. I'm more of a casual Matter of Britain enjoyer. That said...

There's an extent to which the movie's themes and ideas feel to me like they ARE about the things that the poem is about, even though not necessarily about the poem. The poem is about chivalric honor, specifically honor in sexual politics and the relations of an honorable knight with women, and the code of honor that has to do with battles, and conflicts between the obligations of honor to fellow knights and the obligations of honor and chivalry towards women (when the requirements of honor come in conflict with each other). Almost Talmudic, really. (I don't say this is ALL that the poem is about - this impression is just from Wikipedia/summaries/etc about it.) And also about death and facing the possibility of it bravely and, obviously, the lack of wisdom of youth. The poem is also about desire and homosexual desire though.

The movie, meanwhile, is more about... the creator's thoughts on (arguments with, philosophical critiques of?) the system of chivalry and the notion of honor and the contradictions therein. It's not just what honor demands and what is right and fair in sexual relations with women and random interactions with women, it's also the class system and the injustices to the women who weren't the objects of chivalry, and perhaps the way privilege shields knights and nobles from knowledge of the way the actions of those with power harm those without it unjustly. Chivalry in practice, and the rules of society around it, were codes for relations between members of the upper class, and for the most part, therefore, honor and justice and all that stuff was for the upper classes (goes the argument. It's one I've seen before, and it isn't without truth either, but perhaps not entirely that simple). Gawain in the film is an earnest protagonist who means no harm and starts by doing it out of cluelessness, strives to do his best for honor and all that stuff against his fear, but is trapped by convention and the apparent demands of honor and doing his best into a life that seems perhaps hollow.

It's PRETTY funny that a guy driven so hard by his obsession with Dev Patel's face and touching it significantly reduced the queer content of the poem though, isn't it? The tie between Lady Bertilak's seduction and Gawain's kisses with Bertilak is clearer when it appears in three separate scenes as in the poem. Reducing all that to a single kiss at the last moment before Gawain gets to the Green Chapel disconnects it from the central theme relevance of the sexual content between Gawain and Lady Bertilak, particularly when the movie casts the same actress for his lover in his previous life.

The end of the movie makes clear why Lowery wanted to elide the end of the Green Chapel encounter, but leaving the Green Knight NOT to turn back into Bertilak also makes the whole Castle Hautdesert episode, rather than tied into the central motive of the quest, into another episode along the dream quest. Also I guess the old lady is Morgana Le Fay if you know about it and otherwise you're maybe meant to just conclude that all the magic being done was done by Gawain's mother? I do see an implication that there was magic behind the quest, but with no particular implication that the Green Knight himself was enchanted, he seems more like an incarnation of Herne the Hunter or another forest god, presumably acting for his own reasons.

So in summary I guess it feels like the source material didn't interest Lowery that much and the main substance - apart from the main visual substance of Dev Patel's face being touched in various states of bewilderment and pain - is more a critique of the over-sanitised and -simplified pop culture notions of honor and chivalry than anything else. And as such is a bit, well, joyless and narrow, which is a very funny thing to be for the thematic ideas behind a story played out in a fantasy world that also includes multiple hallucinogenic drug trips.

Did I say it seems like he really wanted to make a music video? Much like the guy who made Legend with Tom Cruise, it seems like he really wanted to make a long music video and this work could've held up much better as a music video than as a movie.

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( Watched in 2022: )
Favorite TV watched:

1. Interview with the Vampire 2. Derry Girls (but that was the final season) 3. What We Do in the Shadows 4. Moon Knight 5. Our Flag Means Death

Favorite Film watched:

1. Glass Onion 2. Everything Everywhere All At Once (I didn't like any more enough to put on this list really, but The Lost City was fun)

( Read in 2022: )

Favorite Book:

( Knitting Year in Review: )

( Art review: )

Rian Johnson's Benoit Blanc movies are smarter, more deeply understanding adaptations of and conversations with Agatha Christie than any of the recent Agatha Christie adaptations released since the end of Agatha Christie's Poirot with David Suchet (The ABC Murders miniseries, the one that changed the ... everything about Poirot, 2018; Ordeal by Innocence miniseries, the one that changed the murderer and the motive, 2018; Murder on the Orient Express, 2017 movie by Kenneth Branagh; Crooked House, 2017 movie with Gillian Anderson, Christina Hendricks and Glenn Close; The Witness for the Prosecution, 2016 miniseries that I think also changed the end?). I said this when Knives Out came out and it's true again!

But I'm thinking about it now because I'm seeing a flood of reactions and content across social media related to Glass Onion and once again, I'm marveling that most of the reactions are evidently from people who don't know that Benoit Blanc is a Christie pastiche!

It's not a secret at all obviously, and Rian Johnson is quite open about it constantly, as is ... everyone else involved. But I keep seeing time and again all these statements that just... well, missing that these works are primarily Christie pastiche obviously leaves them perfectly possible to enjoy, but it leaves out an entire genre of context. There's so much "Obviously, yes, they're dealing with groups of rich assholes, because it's a Christie pastiche, and that's the format of all the most spectacular classic golden age detective stories, not just Christie's" and "Yeees of course he did, because it's a Christie pastiche" and "Oh my God, of course he's queer, he's Poirot!" It reminds me of all the mainstream readers who engaged with Harry Potter when it first came out without, like, asking a librarian or a bookstore clerk or checking Wikipedia and assumed she'd invented YA fantasy and all its tropes, the British boarding school novel, and/or the combination thereof.

It's not like Poirot is obscure. Not that I would call Enid Blyton or Diana Wynne Jones obscure, either, but the ITV Agatha Christie's Poirot is an extremely internationally successful show that ran for decades quite recently and still reruns! Generally, everyone usually seems familiar with it, but I suppose the issue is that they're not famiilar enough to necessarily recognize the bits. And even people who like Poirot haven't usually watched and rewatched and read it as much as I have (as previously mentioned on this journal, it's a longtime favorite show and I have a Tumblr sideblog called

maisouipoirot dedicated to screencaps of it... although I haven't updated it in... a few years? because the DRM on the discs makes my computer unable to read some of them).

I was very happy that they gave him Hugh Grant as his husband, because the casting so clearly underlines that he's Hastings (or the Hastings type) even with so little of him onscreen. He deserves it, was my feeling. And like Granada Holmes's choice to quietly eliminate Watson's marriage(s), it feels more in keeping with canon than the actual details of the books. Blanc isn't quite Poirot, of course - he's a more laidback version, with an infusion of the witticism of Peter Wimsey or Albert Campion (minus the British class overtones).

We watched another John Grisham film from the 1990s today. Sometime in 2021 we watched the one with Susan Sarandon and Tommy Lee Jones, which was also directed by Joel Schumacher, and today Wax said "He was making these around the same time he was making those Batman movies." Which is a funny observation.

It's a well-established truth that the Grisham movies in the 90s spawned a whole wave of Legal Thriller imitators, many of them actually bad although most of the Grisham films are good, in tv as well as movies I suppose. But movies more so. This genre has pretty much disappeared now.

Wax points out that they wouldn't exist now anyway, because of the oft-cited disappearance of the midbudget movie. They had been succeeded already by then with, I guess, espionage thrillers and terrorism thrillers. At least mostly. Thrillers tend to be streaming now, and rarely film length, although miniseries length would probably have been better for a lot of legal thrillers too, for that matter. But today's thriller miniseries seem to be espionage, terrorism, "politics", and of course, just plain crime and cops stuff but with ~suspense~ rather than the more classic piecing-together-clues formula common to early CSI and NCIS sort of cop shows. (Eugh.)

My dissatisfaction with contemporary mystery and crime genre offerings and ambivalence about law enforcement on film aside, though, I think this range of offerings is still a bit inferior. Partly this is because the espionage-suspense subgenre, in the intermediate (not-A-lister-like-Le-Carré) level, is plagued by mystery box writing, lazy stereotypes, loose ends and nonsense politics that don't match up, and usually also plagued by attempting not to have bad actors represent any actual ethnic groups, countries, or realistic terrorist interests. Except for muslims, of course, which are represented with shocking inaccuracy and racism in these genres (crime, espionage, "political"/"terrorism") and hardly anywhere else in media. I've talked about this issue in the context of the Mission Impossible movies before, which presumably got tired of bad actors within the US and UK intelligence services (the only remotely realistic premises they've ever used, tbh) and needed some more variety in villains but couldn't think of anything but implausible terrorists without coherent plans, ideologies, motivations, or goals, or even visible ethnicity. But that's a rant I've made before. Multiple times.

It is a great example of what Wax assures me is generally the case with Stephen King - and of course is fairly common in horror in general: that the stories are about real-life horrors. It is about bullying, and the little gang of teenagers is entirely made up of marginalized people. There's a fat kid, a black kid, a Jewish kid, an abused (female) kid, a hyper/annoying/ADHD kid (Richie), a small 'sickly' (overprotected by hypochondriac stifling mother) kid, and a kid with a stutter.

I was thinking about this recently watching some interviews with the cast of Stranger Things, which draws a large portion of its pastiche and references and genre from Stephen King, and an interviewer said something about how fun the sort of weirdly up-beat tone is when the kids are going into battle against eldritch horrors and diving into the hell dimension and shit. Maya Hawke said that she actually had thought about this a fair amount, because reading the script you'd think it looked scary as fuck and potentially hopeless and that ther character should be really terrified, but the writer/creator/director Duffer brothers always respond to her questions with something like "Nah, you're... you're pretty confident."

The one thing that Stranger Things is about more than anything else is trauma, but there's other stuff. Season 1: runaways, absent parents, bullies. Season 2: Specifically PTSD symptoms (apart from just trauma again); bad parenting; gaslighting/denial (or rather, not listening to children); institutional/government malfeasance; domestic abuse. Season 3: White supremacy and misogyny, fascism; cults; but also I think Russian espionage maybe... almost as itself: potentially both the Cold War and the contemporary issue of election interference. Season 4: Trauma and child abuse and bullying again, institutional incompetence and government corruption/coverups, Satanic Panic and witch hunts.

It's not as coherently or deliberately about things as Stephen King typically is, which is probably partly because it's got a lot more of its focus on producing nostalgia-pastiche. But it's also on the larger level about a generation of traumatized children who are growing up terrorized by certain knowledge that their world is on fire and many encounters with potentially apocalyptic danger and doom, while day-to-day life carries on with a nightmarish assumption of mundanity and often a complete lack of acknowledgement of their trauma or oftentimes the danger that they're in. And on that level, the existential threats to the American children of the 80s - nuclear war, the AIDs epidemic - pale in comparison to the existential threats facing the American children of today: climate change and its escalating natural disasters, white supremacist and christofascist takeover of the US being attempted, school shootings, and now (since the release of Stranger Things 3) the global pandemic and children being forced back to school in spite of it and without comprehensive air filtration and circulation or mask and vaccine mandates.

Last Night in Soho: I guess I read a lackluster review of this at some point? Or a lackluster headline maybe, because it was completely different from what I expected. Actually, I guess I would rate it pretty highly. It's not, uh, lighthearted like the Pegg-Frost Wright movies, really at all - classic horror and haunting, really, with a touch of that 'Is she really losing it or not?' kind of struggle. And I guess I was mostly okay with the ending, although I really wanted ( Read more... )

The Sandman (all except the new bonus episode): I was really happy to see this after being so excited to watch it, and I enjoyed myself and appreciated a lot of the performances and the set design that went into it. And especially the raven-training. However, relucantly, I have to agree more or less with Gavia Baker-Whitelaw's review, Netflix’s ‘Sandman’ struggles to recreate the creepy, immersive atmosphere of the comics. I ultimately felt kind of underwhelmed - it wasn't stylized enough. It didn't make use of the film medium in the way that the comic made use of its medium; it didn't achieve enough surrealism and hyperrealism and dreaminess and that kind of thing. I wanted to see more adventurous direction and photography, like... Hannibal, or the early Brian Fuller-related episodes of American Gods (visually, I mean, I'm not saying the script needed to depart more from the events of the comic), or something directed by Park Chan-Wook. Or even like, Stranger Things 4, which had killer editing and direction and camera angles and photography. I am glad that it was so faithful to the events of the comics and I think for the most part, the script is good; the cast all felt really good, some of them phenomenal, and at points the visual design was sublime; in fact there were some shots that really felt like they were what I kinda was hoping for, and then in between it sort of fell back into... Gavia compared it to The Umbrella Academy, and... yeah. So I'm still into it and I'm still awaiting the next seasons (it hasn't officially been renewed, but it probably will, since it did so well on release) with anticipation.

Underworld: Yeah, I'd never seen Underworld until yesterday, and it was hilarious. A fun time. Not nearly as cool or iconic as Blade; Underworld is trying extremely hard and is very clearly trying to imitate the coolness of other things, like Blade and the Matrix. The costumes are... well. Kate Beckinsale's iconic leather corset over a vinyl catsuit and tremendous Demonia platform boots would fit in perfectly at a goth club, but it's even less believable for its intended purpose (vampire parkouring around hunting werewolves) than the average superhero outfit. There's some really great locations and sets, though! The sets: not necessarily great in a BELIEVABLE way, or even a really great world-building way, but definitely looked cool on film. A lot of gray and blue filter on everything, which got rather oppressive. Young Michael Sheen is adorable and his forehead is hilarious. The plot is also hilarious. The voiceover is awful, but Wax says it was added because test audiences weren't following some of the transitions and implied backstories, so I guess needs must. The CGI werewolves were as awful and disturbing as I always find CGI werewolf concepts, but I've seen later ones that looked worse, so I guess they can have partial points for that. Oh! And this movie is a great example of the betrayal by a trusted mentor trope I posted about a few months ago. The twist wasn't exactly completely unpredictable to the audience, but at least the protagonist's surprise was convincing.

Day Shift: this is the new vampire movie on Netflix that people are talking about. Jamie Foxx is the protagonist, Snoop Dogg is his friend, and a younger Franco brother is the nerdy union rep who has to tag along on his vampire-hunting mission because he's on probation with the vampire-hunting union. This concept is, obviously, good enough to be funny without even writing the story. And the movie is a comedy, not like, just a pulpy B-movie like a lot of vampire stuff. There are a lot of typical comedy beats, not all vampire-related. But on the other hand, this movie has a huge structural problem, akin to building a house like... on mud without a foundation. The story doesn't know whether it thinks that vampires are inherently evil predators and enemies of humanity or not. This reminded me unavoidably of a recent conversation in princessofgeeks's journal about the racist problem of orcs and monster races in Tolkien (and subsequent fantasy). Inherently evil humanoid enemy species in fantasy/sf are generally considered problematic nowadays, for obvious reasons. But this isn't typically necessarily relevant to all classic horror humanoid monsters like vampires, werewolves, etc, which tend to be portrayed in classic horror as intelligent but consciously and explicitly predators who see humans as legitimate prey - in a sense, they dehumanize themselves (or you could say they dehumanize the rest of humanity). That's a whole different can of worms.

In the world of Day Shift, the fact that there's a union means that vampire hunting is legally sanctioned; being a vampire is a death sentence. We're shown both classic villain scenery-chewing from vampires and weird, apparently non-verbal monstrous vampires with tons of zombieriffic/goblinlike horror makeup, inhumanly screeching and growling and hissing instead of speaking... However, ( Read more... )

(Wax): Locke & Key: Wax watched the new season of this, even though the previous seasons were so unbearably bad. This show is based on comics written by Stephen King's son Joe Hill, like the earlier show Nos4a2, in which Zachary Quinto plays some kind of magical demon who steals the souls of children and locks them up in... his... magical Christmasland where no one ages? I think? Anyway, Locke & Key has been a mid-level production values, very low-level dialogue and spotty acting show from the beginning, kind of... not quite as mind-bendingly stupid as Nos4a2, but unfortunately it's got a huge ensemble cast of family characters who are all incredibly stupid, all the time, which is what drives the plot. It would only take a couple of them acting with average or better common sense to completely eliminate their problems, and as it is, their collective stupidity is more than enough to have killed all of them many times. There are a lot of fun concepts and settings and episodes in this world, but they're ruined by the fact that it's impossible to feel sympathy for any of the characters.

(Wax): Resident Evil (tv): Wax has just started this today. Uh, gotta love evil lesbians, I guess? I'm not really a fan of this genre and I can't say I'm enjoying it, but it doesn't seem to be unforgivably stupid or anything. And it's true, they DO have a very diverse cast.

... and Finn Wolfhard, and Paul Rudd.

I didn't want to watch it because I am miffed about it existing instead of a second movie about the all-female Ghostbusters (and also I wanted to read last night).

But the teenage protagonists are the grandchildren of Egon from the original Ghostbusters and my first reaction was "It's not old enough for their grandchildren to be that old", and it took me SUCH a long time to work out that they are.

Like Wax said "It was the 1980s!" and I know THAT, I loved Ghostbusters when I was a little kid, and I remember the Saturday morning cartoon as well! But that was just in my childhood, was my instinctive feeling, and now I'm an adult, which is ONE generation!

Eventually I realized that when I first saw it I was very small, which meant my parents were young adults around the age of the Ghostbuster characters, but I still didn't get as far as comparing myself to the Mom character..., who just seemed too... Mom-like.

Until I remembered that Wax's oldest niece is 18 I think, and my oldest cousin-once-removed-but-in-the-younger-direction is... probably 21? So, yeah, the mom is probably my age.

I was getting a little tired of those viral posts that say things like "When I say 2 years ago I mean 2010", but perhaps I have been too hasty...

In pursuit of time to darn socks and to finish knitting a hat for my dad and the ill-fated purple hoodie I first started in 2019:

Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998). 5/5. The concept is pretty similar to Snatch, though. It's just fitted together more neatly. Some great performances. Very funny. An almost total lack of female characters, but given how unbelievably stupid the criminals in question are, it doesn't seem implausible or unfortunate. Bonus for the ending.

Ma Rainey's Black Bottom. 5/5. I had heard that this movie was both award-winning and fantastic and also depressing, but I had NOT heard that it was based on an award-winning play written in 1982, so I was still surprised. It feels, from the start, like an original and incredibly good response to an exam question about the titular song, and as a fan of the period and early jazz who has a lot of accumulated trivia but not expert knowledge and not particular knowledge of Ma Rainey, I was excited by everything. But it doesn't do what I expected from the title. Knowing it's a play and that's when it's written, though, the title makes perfect sense. You would notice that it was a play, inevitably, before the end of it anyway; it's very theatrical. As for being depressing, the history of blues and jazz is inextricable from the history of Black people in America( Read more... )
. It's not a grueling portrayal of racist violence or anything like that: it's a long day of recording in a mostly-white city, backstories and social issues in dialogue, some white men who probably think that they aren't racist but whom you want to throw in the lake; and it's also an unflinching look at how the cruelty and tragedy of being Black in America penetrated every facet of their lives and what that looked like at this moment in time. It does have its own little dash of tragedy and one character death onscreen, but it succeeded in driving home the point that the little tragedy pales next to the bigger injustices.

...And also this is off topic, but I also can't fail to mention how incredibly good the hair, makeup, and wardrobe are. You may remember that these aspects in historicals are a bugbear of mine, and may know that the 1920s are my favorite historical era and perhaps the one I know the most about, so I was so over the moon about how incredibly fucking good it was that the plot got quite a bit less of my attention. Every single aspect of that issue that I could think of was perfect. I saw makeup on Viola Davis here that I've seen in vintage photos and paintings and never seen in a single after-the-fact reenactment before because it's been considered unflattering since. Even the hair, and it was BLACK hair, on multiple women and multiple men! Seriously, I know they actually won the Oscar for makeup, but it wasn't enough.

Pitch Perfect 2. 2/5, almost didn't finish. There were plenty of good jokes, but I don't really like pop mashups and medleys very much to begin with, a lot of the humor was very uncomfortable for me, and then there's the wealthy suburban white stereotypical college experience discourse as a genre and how it makes my blood boil. Not For Me.

Their Finest. 4.5/5. Gemma Arterton, Sam Claflin, Bill Nighy, Rachel Stirling. A woman hired to help add a woman's touch to the British propaganda films during the bombing of London helps make a successful movie. I like this period of film. The costumes were good - so many knits, so well chosen, an I wanted several of them! - and the visual design overall was better. I barely stopped yelling "LOOK AT THAT ADORABLE LIGHT FIXTURE" the entire time. Plot was engaging, London under bombing was very vivid, and Bill Nighy made me cry twice. Also the ending of this movie was SO WEIRD and took me completely by surprise, in that Whoa, thought I knew what I was watching!-way. Um, another character death warning, but you know, ww2 and all that.

Death in Paradise - the pilot. I've been meaning to give this a try for a while. It was a good time and I'll probably watch more later, but wasn't blown away. A lot of modern murder mysteries try to fake being in the classic Golden Age genre - a la Christie -, but it's just window dressing if you can't properly seed clues. If there's just a series of clues and then the detective pulls a genius solution out of his hat that the viewer never had the chance to suspect, it's not a classic mystery, it's more of just... a show about a detective. Not only are you the viewer (reader) not solving the mystery in this case, you're not even "solving the author" (which occurs when you can spot all the clues and you're just trying to guess if it's a red herring or a double or a triple bluff) - you're not solving anything, you're just watching a magic trick. But the lead is kind of a comedic character, and that's something. Plus the setting is, obviously, the big draw.

Never Have I Ever, Mindy Kaling's new teen sitcom. 5 or 6 episodes? It had a lot of good jokes, but when I stopped watching and took a step back I didn't have any desire to keep going. There was nothing to find out, no real plots or arcs, just... a long series of jokes. It was a likeable setup with lots of cute and interesting characters, but ultimately it was too much an American sitcom.

The Pelican Brief (1993). Working our way through Grisham movies. This one was unintentionally hilarious, because it's all about all these people killing everyone to avoid a breaking scandal that the president's primary donor owns a business that had a lawyer and two Supreme Court justices assassinated - but the closest link to the Republican president is that they've been photographed at a hunting lodge - no suggestion he knew anything! Nobody would even blink at that! Russian oligarchs are still financing most of the Democrats AND most of the Republicans after we all watched Russia literally illegally steal the '16 election and set an asset in the Oval Office! I mean now that scandal would MAYBE sink the business, but more likely some scapegoat would go to jail and the CEO would claim to have not known about it. The President asks the FBI chief to back off of the guy, which probably could lead to indictment, but is no more than any other Republican president in the last few decades would've done. And they're trying to sell the idea that the admin would all unanimously be like "we're never gonna be re-elected now, better not try"? Oh, sweet summer children.

The Trip to Spain. Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon. I've seen a lot of Rob Brydon on Would I Lie to You and a few other British panel shows, and actually was a little fuzzy on who Steve Coogan is, which I gather from this movie is unusual. But I see why they get along so well and am quite sure I wouldn't want to go on a road trip with either of them. It was fun to watch, but I'm totally bemused about a movie that is a fake documentary: they're playing themselves, without the names changed or anything, but all the other roles in their lives are played by actors. I can't think of another time I've seen that done.

Rewatching TNG for the first time in about 10 years - eps 2 & 3. 2 is the ripoff of TOS The Naked Time, which is funny and has some memorable bits but overall not as good. 3 is "Code of Honor", and it's got such a high level of Yikes that I could barely watch. I don't know how I had forgotten this! It's a thinly-veiled reference to Arab culture, and they're all literally dressed in shiny lamé turbans and harem pants, but the supposed-aliens are all played by Black people, like that is supposed to somehow counteract the stereotypes? The plot revolves around the chieftan of this "primitive culture" kidnapping Yar for a wife and then refusing to deal with the Federation for a life-saving vaccine if she won't fight a challenge to the death with his current #1 wife. REALLY? I'm just like... what did the non-white, non-male people around Roddenberry SAY about stuff like this?

In my new freedom from work practice - three former workdays of it so far - , I have kept up with the dishes and made a slight start on all the spring cleaning I want to get done (though I haven't made much of a dent yet). I've also slept a lot, obviously. It really is all a bit overwhelming, like those posts on Unfuck Your Habitat dealing with where to start. As a long-time UFYH follower, I know starting with repeated twenty-minute pomodoros is reasonable, but it's still depressing when you stand back and look at the situation as a whole.

We watched Snatch the other night because I'd never seen it. I see why it's seminal. An extremely well-done example of that style of heist film, rendered extra memorable by all the little moving parts and the way they intersect with each other, almost like a farce. It reminded me of a show I love, Hustle (2004-2012), a British series about a gang of con artists who collaborate to take revenge on rich people on behalf of their victims, like a precursor to Leverage. I like it better than Leverage for the style and the cons themselves, though. I'm extra fond of the style of narrative voice-over background explanations you get in this genre, which we saw in Snatch. Next on the list is Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, which I guess I'm not too young for, just too American to have heard of until after the fact.

I knitted for five hours or so the day before yesterday and made some progress on the hat I started January first (which was then on pause for over a month while I didn't watch anything). Very responsibly, then, I didn't knit a long time two days in a row, but spent yesterday evening darning some wool socks instead while watching the second half of James Acaster's Netflix stand-ups. Darning is so satisfying! And yet annoyingly takes longer than it feels like it should.

Wax is having a flare-up of her acid reflux and is tragically forced to cut her tea consumption, which is really extra bad because unlike me, she doesn't like any herbal tea at all. I think the only hot drink she can substitute is cocoa, which doesn't feel tea-like enough to have the proper psychologically soothing effect.

...pursuant to the last paragraph of my previous entry and the silly cover art for McKillip's Heir of Sea and Fire.

As usual, Karolina Żebrowska encapsulates my fury on this subject pretty well. Karolina Żebrowska on YouTube: How Hollywood thinks people react to historical costumes

Before today, my last rant on the subject concerned the new Wheel of Time show, although I hasten to add that wardrobe-wise this show has some decent design, it's just plagued with flaws in realism/styling, materials, and execution. (The shearling/fur-lined coats without button fastenings, for example. These are plausible garments that mirror historical styles used by real cultures. The problems are 1. the fake fur not looking good enough, 2. the sewing not succeeding in making the fake fur look right, and 3. the styling onscreen, ie the actors complaining extensively about being cold and not raising the collars/pulling down the cuffs/tying the fronts closed, which is what you do in that situation with that type of garment in reality. Direction, styling and filming in a temperature different from what they're pretending they're in were probably all at fault.) (And visible zippers and puckered seams and ill-fitting garments that in-verse had to have been tailored to the body are all execution problems.)

This was not a very eventful year, but losing a pet and gaining a pet are both major life milestones, so it's just as well to keep a record.

( Read more... )

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Cimorene

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Page Summary

Imaginary movies that should've been real
1964 'Woke Up Woman' trope/ proto-genderfuck movie
Train improvement: add the jazz band car halfway between the restaurant car and the dog car
Michael Redgrave is (was) a very good actor actually
I think the problem is that the text doesn't know the characters are rich people, but they are
Novel form of pretending to be married trope
women's short hair and other features of vintage film
Knitting and watching old British films
D&D:HAT & a character type that I absolutely love
Finally watched The Green Knight
2022 in Review
Glass Onion and Rian Johnson's Benoit Blanc as Agatha Christie pastiche
the golden era of grisham films
Stephen King, Stranger Things, and what the horror genre is really about
Watched recently
Wax watched the newest Ghostbusters movie, the sequel one with the female teen lead
Watching Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, Their Finest, Pelican Brief, Death in Paradise, TNG
Ritchie, stand-up comedy, fiber crafts, spring cleaning and low ph
historical costuming/hair and fantasy costuming/hair
2021 in our household, in review

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multi-fannish American queer cat & bunny owner in Finland

Entries tagged with movies

Imaginary movies that should've been real

1964 'Woke Up Woman' trope/ proto-genderfuck movie

Train improvement: add the jazz band car halfway between the restaurant car and the dog car

Michael Redgrave is (was) a very good actor actually

I think the problem is that the text doesn't know the characters are rich people, but they are

Novel form of pretending to be married trope

women's short hair and other features of vintage film

Knitting and watching old British films

D&D:HAT & a character type that I absolutely love

Finally watched The Green Knight

2022 in Review

Glass Onion and Rian Johnson's Benoit Blanc as Agatha Christie pastiche

the golden era of grisham films

Stephen King, Stranger Things, and what the horror genre is really about

Watched recently

Wax watched the newest Ghostbusters movie, the sequel one with the female teen lead

Watching Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, Their Finest, Pelican Brief, Death in Paradise, TNG

Ritchie, stand-up comedy, fiber crafts, spring cleaning and low ph

historical costuming/hair and fantasy costuming/hair

2021 in our household, in review