News You Can Bruise for 2024 August

Sun Aug 11 2024 15:56 July Film Roundup: Pressed for time this month so I'm just gonna write some quick reviews and head off to resume my apparently busy life.

• Seven Samurai (1954): I know I said no more Kurosawa films that take place before the Meiji Restoration, but I really needed to get out of the house for a day, so I saw this at Film Forum. It's good. I'm always apprehensive about sitting down for a three-hour movie, but due to selection bias they have a pretty good track record. The only super-long movie I've actually bailed out on was Reds (1981).

  Reading IMDB trivia about the different drafts this screenplay went through was comforting to me, as I go through my own creative struggles. Adding the wacky peasant-pretending-to-be-a-samurai was a good decision.

• Slacker (1990): A hell of a movie. Really impressive how it's able to keep its conceit going the whole time. Sumana proposed this one and I was skeptical, mainly because of the title, but it turns out the movie originally had a super-pretentious title and the studio made Richard Linklater change it. Speaking of which, that guy really loves his walk-and-talks, huh? Great dialogue, stylized but still seeming naturalistic.

  Now that I think of it, you could film an X-Files episode entirely running in the background of this movie. Many of the characters have a "wacky but sinister X-Files side character" feel. I guess that really was the vibe of the 90s.

  Since Slacker and X-Files now have me in the conspiracy mindset, time for me to share one of my patented cinematic conspiracy theories with you. I believe Richard Linklater has been secretly working on a film since 1990, with the cast and crew sworn to secrecy, to be released only after he dies.

• Noises Off (1992) - A fun farce with a tacked-on framing device we moviegoers probably didn't need. While planning this Film Roundup I kept thinking Steve Martin was in this, that's how fun it is. I don't even know what role I was mentally casting Steve Martin in. Maybe Christopher Reeve?

  Anyway, fun movie, especially if you like the Goes Wrong Show type of chaos. Probably not as fun as the original play, but the great thing about movies is you can now watch them anytime, without spending thousands of dollars to stage a new production.

• Inside Out 2 (2024) - I dunno. I read an article that framed this movie as specifically being about anxiety, and I guess through that lens it's a good guide for teens and their parents to get real about important topics. But I watched the whole movie, not just the anxiety part, and there's a lot that didn't work for me.

  Rather than harp on this, I want to present another crackpot cinematic theory, this time about an earlier draft of the Inside Out 2 screenplay. I believe that the new emotions introduced by Riley's puberty were originally intended as warped versions of the original five Inside Out emotions, rather than brand new characters. Disgust→Envy, Fear→Embarrassment, Sadness→Ennui, Anger→Anxiety. This plan fell apart when it became clear that the warped version of Joy could only be Horniness, and nobody wants that.

• It Happened To Jane (1959): One of the most generic movie titles ever, just below It Happened One Night and It. What happened to Jane, you ask? Fortunately, there's a song at the beginning of the movie that... no, the song explains nothing! Jane falls in love, okay? With young puppy-dog lawyer Jack Lemmon, no less. What a catch!

  I don't have a way to quantify this, but my gut says that older comedies like this have more stuff than modern ones. This movie has detailed technical subplots about running a mail-order business, the legal system, small town democracy, and railroad freight logistics; on top of the usual rom-com antics about mercenary journalists and sex segregation of lobsters. Also a song about the Cub Scouts, which has lyrics written by the director and which I must assume was included as some sort of residuals scam. I wouldn't say all of this comes together in a cohesive whole, but it definitely all happened to Jane.

• Supermarket Woman (1996) - We loved this story of user research and continuous incremental improvement. The best film of the month, I think. Showing recurring interactions with the same customers over time was a neat trick to kind of create recurring guest stars in a movie. Also did a great job showing the clash between craftspeople, who want to do the best job possible, and people trying to run a damn store, who need to give the people what they want at the cheapest price.

  Japanese question: the owner of the rival supermarket Discount Demon is referred to by the feudal title "daimyo". I am pretty sure this is a joke, but what kind of joke is it? Is Discount Demon doing a kind of Medieval Times thing, what with the old-timey demon mascot and the military-style discipline? Is this guy just really egotistical?

  PS: I think the supermarket shootout in Hot Fuzz was inspired by the chase scene in Supermarket Woman.

• A Taxing Woman (1987) - She's back! This is the point where we realized that Juzo Itami and Nobuko Miyamoto have a Joel Coen/Frances McDormand type of relationship. Not as joyous as Supermarket Woman but a fun crime drama, sort of a tax fraud Columbo. We do plan to see all of Itami's films eventually, or at least I do.

  Old video game watch: there's some classic (I must assume) MSX non-game software on display in the love hotel, but the real prize is the scene where Itakura sees the villain's son playing Super Mario Bros. on the family Famicom computer. There's no generic Atari beeps or disinclination to show anything but the back of the TV, the way there would be in an American movie of the period. It's shot very naturally, and when Itakura takes over, she's realistically good at the game!

  Capcom released a visual novel of A Taxing Woman for Famicom, making this the only movie I'm aware of that had a video game adaptation published on a game system also seen in use in the movie. This probably happens all the time now, but the closest I can come to another example is the Wii adaptation of Iron Man (2008). Tony Stark has a Wii in his modernist house, but you don't ever see him flinging around the Wiimote playing Twilight Princess.

• My Cousin Vinny (1992): This film is often praised by those in the legal profession. I guess that makes sense because there's no villain, the things happening in the courtroom are all things that happen in real courtrooms, and it flatters the legal mind by depicting the justice system as actually seeking justice. Unfortunately, as a non-lawyer, I must say there is a huge problem with this movie, and it's the titular Vinny.

  I mean, do you want this guy as your lawyer? I seriously thought the second-act twist was that oops, Vinny actually isn't a lawyer. He failed the bar again, he's been lying to his family for months, and now he's in over his head. There's a recurring cycle early in the movie where Vinny gets humiliated in court, over and over again, seemingly learning nothing. Not only does it feel like he didn't go to law school, it feels like he's never seen a courtroom drama. If you cut all but one of these cycles, and skipped quickly to the part where he starts interviewing witnesses, I'd be a lot more sympathetic to the movie.

• The Art of War (2000): Sumana saw this in the theater, way back when, and remembered it as being full of bad computer stuff. But like with Antitrust (2001), the perspective of years shows that the computer stuff, though hardly prophetic, isn't that bad. When it is bad, it's because the filmmakers came up with a bunch of roundabout hacker/spy crap instead of, I dunno, figuring out how to dramatize the use of PGP. It's pretty simple, guys: just show a "Decrypting..." status bar.

  The Wesley Snipes action is fun, and this film has the same outsized impression of the UN's influence that you find in much earlier films like A Global Affair (1964). I don't think I recommend this, exactly, but you could do worse.

  One of the first films that needs to manufacture a cell phone malfunction for the plot to work out.