Sat Mar 05 2016 18:22 February Film Roundup:
This month quite a few non-feature-films make it into Film Roundup. Could this be becoming... a blog?
- Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992): Really unpleasant, reminds me why I put off Twin Peaks for so long: I was afraid it was all gonna be like this. David Lynch gets a lot of credit for putting women actors through harrowing emotional experiences and filming it, and that's sort of the core of what I don't like about highbrow film. I don't know whether this opinion will prove popular or un- but I think the constraints of working with a 1990s television network and Mark Frost, Hill Street Blues writer, made Twin Peaks a LOT better than the corresponding David Lynch Movie (i.e. this movie) would have been.
- Hail, Caesar! (2016): Fun in a way that seems light and fluffy until you look beyond the boundaries of the silver screen and give a moment's thought to what's going to happen after the movie, at which point you know true terror. "Terror" may be a little strong. My point is this, like the movies it depicts, is a fun movie that carefully keeps all the ugliness out of the frame. There's a metafictional cleverness here that is unique even among Coen movies and subtle enough to miss. Recommended.
- Hamilton: An American Musical (2015): Live theater makes its first appearance here at Film Roundup. After months of living with all my friends and loved ones being obsessed with the Hamilton cast recording, our tickets, purchased in the mists of time, finally came due, and Sumana and I saw Broadway's hottest musical with Brendan, his friend, Rachel Chalmers, and her kids. It was good! The subject matter and the high information density of hip-hop brought me in, and the solid performances kept me interested. I've lived in New York City ten years and I think this is my first Broadway musical, so you can tell this isn't really my thing, but Hamilton is a genuine crossover hit.
- Man With a Movie Camera (1929): Another "believe the hype" selection, though after 85 years the hype on this drop has settled down to a dull roar. This docudrama about filmmaking has aged incredibly well. You get the thrill of the avant-garde with the comfort that comes from the avant-garde having been proven right and adopted by the mainstream. The cinema verite style may have seemed weird to moviegoers at the time, but it's not verite anymore--it's a glimpse of life in a long-away place. The rhetoric of editing has become standard, and for good reason--this is great stuff.
You can watch this film online. As with most works from 1929, the copyright status is unclear, but it tends to stay up longer on Youtube than most feature films.
- Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (2006): A goofy comedy with no villain, just stupid people sabotaging their own lives. I think Sumana is a bigger Will Farrell fan than I am, but he's fun. Gary Cole is great as always. Some might say this is the dreaded 'sports movie', and it certainly has the sports movie plotline, but to my way of thinking, in a 'sports movie' about NASCAR racing, the characters would be the cars themselves. Ever give any thought to why Cars (also 2006) is terrible? Here's your answer!
- Executive Suite (1954): A fun, realistic story of corporate intrigue. Barbara Stanwyck doesn't get much to do, but it has a nice bit of nerd wish-fulfillment as the industrial designer fights his way to the top.
- Mermaid (2016): a.k.a. "Mei ren yu". The non-filler parts of this movie are hilarious verbal comedy, pretty decent slapstick, and horrifying violence against marine life. Why do I keep walking into this trap? I'm just gonna lay it out here, spoilers be damned: this movie has a scene where trapped mermaids are massacred with automatic weapons. Also a scene right out of the Iron Chef octopus episode that made me stop watching Iron Chef. Does the whale die? Some do, some don't! Spin the wheel! Not recommended. Just find the police station scene online and watch it, 'cause that scene's a riot.
- I went to IFC and saw the Oscar nominations for Best Animated Short. The best one was World of Tomorrow, already reviewed in Film Roundup past, but the eventual winner (Bear Story) was also good. I also enjoyed Sanjay's Super Team, and was a little disappointed in We Can't Live Without Cosmos. The non-nominees inserted into the program were not great, and mainly served to illustrate an odd trend in which French animators specialize in animating realistic fur and link to their Linkedin accounts in the credits.
- Ran (1985): Some movies I watch because I think they'll be great, or at least interesting. Some movies I watch even though I'm not super excited about them, because other people think they're great and I want to understand why. It's not as clear as you'd think that the "I'll like this" movies have a better success rate than the "other people like this" movies, but Ran is in the latter category and did little for me. It looks nice, I liked a couple scenes, but eh.
Here's a hypothesis I'll be testing: I like Kurosawa's modern movies a lot better than his old-timey movies. Ikiru stays with me, probably will stay with me for the rest of my life, and historicals like The Hidden Fortress and Ran just feel like dudes hitting each other. Not as much depth, you know?
In lieu of Television Roundup this month I'd like to put in a good word for a company I don't like very much: Amazon. Specifically, Amazon Instant Video. If you spend $8 a month on Netflix you can stream the output of their recommendation engine all day long, but if you want to watch something in particular, you're likely to be disappointed, because Netflix's selection is terrible. That's why they put so much work into the recommendation engine! From one who knows.
By contrast, Amazon Instant Video has an excellent selection of classic, arthouse, and just plain old films. I generally want to watch specific titles, and about 90% of the things I put on my wish list are available on Amazon for the price of a video rental. Remember that? Back when there were video rental stores, you could borrow some Criterion DVDs and the works of big-name arthouse directors, but could you get an obscure noir, a 1950s office comedy, or an undistinguished war movie that you only want to watch because there's a character with your name in the movie? The answer was no. Same with the public library (still a good place to borrow seasons of television though).
So we frequently purchase the time-limited right to stream a movie from Amazon. It ends up a bit more expensive than Netflix, and if we watched a movie every single night it would get pricey real fast, but it's a lot more satisfying for casual use.
We do sometimes have Netflix-style nights where we just want to watch something that's free on Amazon Prime, and unfortunately we recently encountered the worst documentary I've ever seen, a thirty-minute piece on Queen that's part of a series of terrible music documentaries. They're all rush jobs cobbled together from still photos cadged from Geocities fan pages, old television footage, and interviews from other peoples' unfinished documentaries.
There's no Queen music in the Queen documentary. The interview subjects tell rambling stories laced with vague, inaccurate recollections. It's like Drunk History, except nobody's drunk, just frequently wrong. I know people get things wrong in interviews, but it's the filmmaker's job to fact-check and find some way of conveying the correct information, and that didn't happen here. We peeked at a couple other docs in the series and although they're all awful, only the Queen documentary was hilariously awful.
