News You Can Bruise for 2020 September

Sat Sep 05 2020 08:56 "August" Film Roundup: Kind of a weird Roundup this month, made up of movies I forgot to review in earlier months and stuff we actually saw in September. That's because the "July" Roundup had a lot of overlap with August, and then instead of movies we spent the rest of August watching Avatar: The Last Airbender (2005-2008), a really nice kids' show that paved the way for more sophisticated shows like Steven Universe, not to mention its own sequel, The Legend of Korra, which we saw in 2015 and are now rewatching. Time has lost its meaning and there might not be much to show next month, is what I'm saying.

• The Old Guard (2020): Nothing fancy, but a enjoyable action concept leads to a lot of scenes in the Deadpool mold where the heroes can soak up incredible amounts of damage and keep fighting. A conceit similar to the heavy use of tasers in PG-13 movies (and Korra) in that it lets you have more brutality than an audience would otherwise be comfortable with.
• The Rise and Fall of Nokia (2017): Smana wanted to watch this documentary because she was involved in Nokia's mobile-Linux projects of the early 2010s. I enjoyed the parts of the documentary that dealt with the invention of cell phones but I thought it presented the introduction of the iPhone as a fait accompli rather than going into why Nokia's (kinda disorganized) response was inadequate. Not the tone you want to take in a film made to celebrate the centenary of Finland's independence, I suppose.
• Nixon in China (2011): We streamed the Metropolitan Opera's performance for free when they put it up. I really love the libretto but neither of us were wild about the music. We don't really watch opera, so we don't have the reading conventions down. After an Act I which was pretty naturalistic and easy to read, we were totally befuddled by the weird fourth wall breaking in Act II. Act III was not naturalistic at all, but typical of what I think of as opera: people singing out their emotions, you know, like a Broadway musical.

  But I keep going back to Act II, which features the Nixons watching another opera (The Red Detachment of Women). Their reactions to the plot lead them to interfere with the performance, but the opera-within-an-opera seems designed to accommodate and work with such audience interference, because of course it's all part of one big opera and the "audience" is just as much performers as the people they're interfering with. That was really interesting but I imagine that's a feature of Act II of Nixon in China and not something special you get from the art form of opera.