News You Can Bruise for 2024 November

Sat Nov 02 2024 22:02 November Film Roundup: Hey, how you doing? Me? Not so good. Lots of anxiety. But one of the things that keeps me going is the pleasure of films, and the rounding up thereof, so here we go:

• Ride Lonesome (1959): Perhaps the ultimate Western title. Sometimes a man's just gotta... ride lonesome. A decent story marred by the sort of lazy Native American stereotypes that most Westerns manage to avoid.
• TiMER (2009): Gonna bring up my groundbreaking Sleepless in Seattle review once again, because TiMER takes the core concept in an interesting direction. See, what we perceive as the rules of rom-coms appear to the inhabitans of rom-coms as laws of physics. They don't make sense, but quantum mechanics doesn't make sense either. We can build technology based on quantum mechanics, and the people in TiMER build technology based on rom-com physics.

  However, I have to say those fictional people in a fictional world don't go far enough. What we see in TiMER is not technically a rom-com (it's light on the -com, among other things) but pretty close. I think we should lean more into the sci-fi premise here, because scientists in a rom-com universe wouldn't stop at inventing the TiMER. That's because the TiMER creates a wide variety of natural experiments that anyone can conduct, though any given person can only conduct one.

  The TiMER reveals a universe in which people have free will most of the time, but lose a chunk of their free will starting at midnight on the day they're destined to find their One. (I'll ignore the time zone problem here, lest a Gremlin pop out of my computer and savage me.) What's more, you have to apply an opt-in prosthetic to have your free will suppressed! If you remove your TiMER on the day when you lose your free will, you and your true love both get your free will back! Amazing! It's spooky action at a distance, scaled up to a macroscopic level!

  When discussing the film afterwards Sumana and I proposed a subreddit where people post on the day their TiMER goes off, find their One online, and then hide in bed all day. Since the process is rom-com love-at-first-sight, it requires eye contact, just like in Sleepless in Seattle. What happens when people start doing this? Does the universe perform increasingly ridiculous feats of quantum teleportation to force the lovers together? Do you end up in a Groundhog Day situation, forced to relive the day over and over until you cooperate with physics?

  Uh, the movie's pretty fun. Lots of little variations on the theme. May I recommend Brendan's 2011 review if you want a review that covers, I dunno, the plot of the movie.

• Mothra vs. Godzilla (1964): Definitely one on the goofy side, with its villainous tycoons and egg-munching reporters and kid-friendly ecological message—but also has a couple scenes of human-on-human violence which are surprisingly shocking in a kaiju movie. The big G seems more clumsy than hostile in this outing, with his tail frequently getting stuck in things and generally proving a liability.

  In a possible first, I though the human characters were more interesting than the monsters here. I was prepared to dislike the fairy twins, but I found them charming when they weren't singing. The fight scenes aren't the best because Godzilla is never matched up against a kaiju with similar powers. Mothra just swoops around his head a lot.

  I will now never forget that "たまご" means "egg" because they say it so many times in this movie.