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Sun Oct 02 2022 21:04 September Film Roundup:
- Saving Face (2004): I keep forgetting to mention this film, which we saw months ago, and this is a good month to remember it. I don't remember much about it but it was a good watch, and as I recall the family dynamics were treated very realistically.
When I was thinking of this movie it really reminded me of Kal Ho Na Ho, but I think that's mostly because they were both set in Queens in the early 2000s. Saving Face was actually filmed in Flushing!
- Fire Island (2022): I'll be very disappointed if it turns out the working title of this movie was not Prejudice and Pride, and that it changed to its current, boring title by studio interference. I have not read the source material, and had a lot of fun during the movie listening to Sumana speculate about who was who.
I was intrigued by the scene where Bowen Yang's character cringes out at a party by narrating a 'gay Star Trek' SNL sketch starring Jason Bateman. I assumed this was a meta reference to an actual SNL sketch Bowen Yang was in, but it looks like it's referring to a sketch from 2005 that is not viewable online. This implies Howie saw that sketch on broadcast TV when he was, like, 15, and it was formative for him. It took some research to unravel this, but I can now say that was a good character beat and not just an in-joke.
PS: There is a Merry and Pippin in this movie.
- 10 Things I Hate About You (1999): The Taming of the Shrew is one of the trickier Shakespeare plays to adapt into a modern setting, and although I thought this movie as a whole was only so-so, I liked its approach to the central issue of shrews and their taming. The two main characters effectively 'tame' each other by adapting into more suitable partners for each other, and isn't that what happens in a lot of rom-coms, and real relationships?
The film ends with a helicopter shot of a band playing on the roof of a building, but it's not like the Beatles rooftop concert, they're way up there and there's no way anyone can hear them on the ground. And then the helicopter swoops towards the band in what IMDB trivia confirms was a terrifying experience for them. Where are they going to run? They're on a roof!
10 Things I Hate About You was turned into a TV show, but the only actor to reprise his movie role was Larry Miller, who plays the Baptista role. This seems to happen pretty often. I assume everyone gets right of first refusal, but the stars see it as an imposition on their time and only the character actors see it as a regular paycheck.
Finally, I want to note that during this film I came up with an all-time great riff: "I've found her celebrity crush list! Jack Nicholson, Mark Hamil... Cesar Romero?"
A quick Television Spotlight: we watched Only Murders in the Building, which I think gets much better in season 2 as they stop trying so hard to ape the form they're parodying (which resulted in lots of boring subplots) and lean in to wacky, nonsensical comedy (which resulted in me enjoying a Martin Short performance for the first time ever). I will say that season 1 was more effective at the Hitchcockian finger-wagging where they try to shame you for enjoying the thing they're showing you, but no one actually enjoys that—you're being shamed!
We also watched all of The Goes Wrong Show in the space of a coupel days, and see Sumana's review for that. Just really, really funny. I appreciate that the fictional actors all have consistent characters that lead to different styles of comedy as things Go Wrong.