News You Can Bruise for 2016 February 7

How you doin'? I'm bringing the beginning of February into this post just so there's more than two things in this list. I was pretty busy all month and we spent a lot of evenings watching this month's Television Spotlight. Missed the whole Coen brothers retrospective at Film Forum, oh well.

• Office (2015): a.k.a. "Hua li shang ban zu". A gorgeous musical with a lot of great songs and a really dull, standard issue plot. So, effectively an American musical from the 1950s. I was hoping it would turn into the Chinese version of The Apartment, but it didn't get much past The Pajama Game. However, unlike other movies with dull plots, this movie is always fun to look at, and most of the songs are really fun. So, semi-recommended.
• McFarland, USA (2015): You know my feelings about sports movies, and this was sports movie all the way, but I was really interested in this one. I'd been wanting to watch it for a while, and finally saw it with my sister Rachel when she was in town. Why? Because this movie actually happened to us.

  In 1989, our dad abruptly moved us to the San Joaquin Valley where he became a cross-country coach at the local high school. (For all I know he got the idea watching the 1988 Griffith Park race that's recreated at the climax of McFarland USA.) Dad saw talent in kids that didn't have a lot of options, and helped them develop that talent. I remember him talking about the McFarland team and I probably got dragged to McFarland for meets. So this wasn't just a movie for us. As soon as the immortal line "We can't afford to live in Bakersfield!" dropped, Rachel and I knew that what we were seeing was raw and real.

  How can a by-the-numbers sports movie also be raw and real? It's simple: selection bias. My dad's story was very similar to Jim White's, but there's no movie about Dad, because his abrupt move to Arvin wasn't an exile in which he would forge a sporting dynasty. It was the rash decision of a dying man. For me, hanging over every scene of McFarland USA is the awareness that a feel-good sports movie can abruptly turn into a depressing indie film about a shattered family.

  Some nitpicks: In the early meets, the McFarland team is running against schools like Palo Alto (240 miles away from McFarland), not schools like Wasco (12 miles away). I guess kids from Bakersfield and Fresno don't make good sports-movie snobs. We were also certain there would be a plot point about running in tennis shoes without breaking them in, and got kind of annoyed when it didn't happen.

• Sabrina (1954): Billy Wilder is nearly able to make a romance between 55-year-old Humphrey Bogart and 25-year-old Audrey Hepburn not seem creepy. It's a really fun movie, with great performances, assured female sexuality, Wilder's trademark respect for office work, and humor that ranges from sophisticated observation to jokes about butts. Good stuff.

And now, the Television Spotlight, focusing on a show that we started in January and finished in February:

• Twin Peaks (1990-1991): Seen many years after Beth gave us the Season 1 DVDs, but not quite late enough that we can immediately switch over to the new season premièring in 2017. This was really solid, really fresh compared to other shows of the time. Over the years I'd picked up the impression that the characters in Twin Peaks were completely illegible, like aliens, and I wanted to see how they pulled that off, but the truth is they didn't try. The inhabitants of Twin Peaks are... quirky. Slightly weirder than most sitcom characters. Disappointing in theory, but I didn't mind because for the most part the characters are very well-realized and likeable. And there are a couple characters who are more on the "alien" side, though I don't think it advances past the level of a Star Trek episode.

  The second season was still fun but not as strong. I got the sense that the showrunners were winging it and maybe fighting a bit. Characters came close to explicitly saying "Terrible David Lynch things keep happening to me, so I'm going to go find another TV show to be in." or "Remember me? I'm the interesting villain! This other villain is a dime-store piker compared to me!"

  We also rewatched the Psych parody/homage episode "Dual Spires", which was baffling when we first watched it in 2010 but is now revealed as a solid mass of references. Well, I guess that was pretty clear the first time we watched it, but now we get all the references. Not a great Psych episode, but worth it just as a game of "spot the in-jokes".