cimorene

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?