News You Can Bruise for 2018 October 1 (entry 0)

Mon Oct 01 2018 21:45 September Film Roundup:

• Four Bags Full (1956): A.k.a. "La traversée de Paris", a.k.a. "A Pig Across Paris". I've wanted to see this film for a while, tried to get an English DVD online, ended up with a French DVD with no subtitles. But on a trip to Portland, Brendan and I went to Movie Madness and they had an English DVD for rent! Go figure.

  Four Bags Full shows a snapshot of French film immediately before the New Wave, where the public was understanding if your film went to weird places, but it still had to have plot beats and action. It's really interesting, but not the amoral comedic heist I was hoping for. It was full of little glimpses of interesting characters such that I was often left wondering why they didn't do more with them. But people watching at the time probably thought "oh yeah, I remember THAT GUY from the occupation!", and a glimpse was plenty.

  BTW, Movie Madness is a great store with an incredible selection, highly recommended.

• Thor: Ragnarok (2017): Sumana and I have an occasional tradition where we'll watch an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation and then record a "podcast" called "Trek Talk". I put "podcast" in quotes because "Trek Talk" is not intended for public release. I put "Trek Talk" in quotes because it's the name of the podcast. We both watched TNG when we were kids and it's really close to our hearts, but we'd never actually watched together. Talking about it is really fun, gives us an appreciation of the actors and what it took to make the show, and lets us spin wild theories and tie together obscure worldbuilding threads that were never intended to mesh up. Like, what if scientific progress is so slow in the TNG timeframe because the Federation is terrible at putting on scientific conferences?

  I bring this up because after watching Thor: Ragnarok Sumana and I spent about 45 minutes recording a special episode of "Thor Thalk", and without spending that much time talking about it with Sumana I wouldn't have figured out how to turn this into a great movie. Let me back up: this movie isn't great. It's got a fun bit with Dr. Strange at the beginning, a nice Dirk Gently reference, and then it splits into two disjoint plots: "Gladiators of the garbage planet" and "Lord of the Rings on a discworld the size of Catalina". The garbage planet is really fun! It's got a lot of what I liked about the first Guardians movie. Jeff Goldblum is hilarious as always. But every scene on that damn discworld is dull, and there's a lot of 'em.

  How to fix it? Well, at the end a spaceship from the garbage planet makes its way to Asgard, and things pick up a little. So... what if that happened, like, at the beginning of act two? Just open up one of those big wormholes. Let the Grandmaster and all his crass, materialistic buddies run down the Rainbow Road and corrupt this medieval fiefdom with holographic jewelry and alien porn. There's your Ragnarok!

  I'm sure Goldblum's contract said "five scenes max, no stunts," so they couldn't have done it this way if they'd wanted to. The two halves of the movie stay separated, like an unloved McDLT. I'll just eat the half with the garbage planet, thanks.

• L'Atalante (1934): I kind of feel bad about not loving this movie. It's just one of those dreamy, super-melodramatic films. Reminded me a lot of Sunrise. I guess the appeal is that it combines the wonderful feelings around falling in love with the grimy everyday work of having to live together... on a boat? Maybe I'm annoyed because the couple's problems could have been largely avoided with better communication. This fact is of course something a couple needs to discover for themselves, but I don't think the characters actually discover it here.

  I will say that director Jean Vigo had an intuitive grasp of what cinemagoers want to see: cats doing silly or cute things. He delivered, as far as was possible given the constraints of the 1930s French film industry. Cat antics galore in this one.

It's busy times for the ol' Television Spotlight. We now follow a number of good shows, and a lot of them just came off their season break, but I already told you that The Good Place and Better Call Saul are fun, and who needs more of the same? So let me tell you about The Dragon Prince, a new Netflix animated series from the makers of Television Spotlight favorite The Legend of Korra. Sumana was not impressed by the ponderous, didactic opening, which I admit was a little bit like the boring half of Thor: Ragnarok. But that's like three minutes long, and the rest of the show is pretty fun, with the cute animals, elemental magic systems, and young people having dangerous adventures we've come to expect.