News You Can Bruise for 2024 July 10

A little late this month since everything sucks and Sumana and I have been watching a lot of TV shows instead of movies. But that just means you'll get a big Television Spotlight at the end of this post.

• The Big Lebowski (1998): Possibly the first time I've ever seen a movie in a theater where everyone in the theater had seen the movie before. Since this was my seventh viewing of The Big Lebowski, I decided to do something different by sitting way up in front and focusing on small background details. Here's what I noticed that I hadn't noticed before:
  • The last thing Jeffrey Lebowski does in the movie is hit a dog.
  • On the porch of the unit opposite the Dude's apartment there's a huge pile of shoes. Shoe-free household, I guess. Was it set up as part of set dressing or is that just the situation of whoever actually lived there?
  • The Dude's landlord seems like a Prop 13 guy who inherited the apartment complex and is able to live his LA artist lifestyle on the irregular proceeds of the rent.
  • In the scene on the beach near the end, you can see someone just walking around on the cliff up above, unaware that they've become an extra in Leonard's favorite movie of all time.
• The Long Goodbye (1973): Why not, while Lebowski is fresh in my mind? This started out as a lot of fun but made the mistake of really caring about the plot and the mystery. I loved the early adventure to find cat food, Marlowe giving a pep talk to the hood assigned to trail him, but lost interest when he started taking his job seriously. Not bad for my first Robert Altman film, though.
• The War Between Men and Women (1974): Jack Lemmon plays James Thurber, if Thurber was Lemmon's age in 1974. (He was actually 80 and had been dead for 13 years.) Thurber's brand of quippy sexism is on its way out in 1974, but it still kinda works. The animated scenes distinguish this a bit from the average Women's Lib-era sex comedy, but otherwise I wasn't enthralled.
• Streets of Fire (1984): A goofy, over the top attempt to create a big movie musical that the kids will like, but it was made by baby boomers whose idea of cool is stuck in the James Dean era. There's just not enough punk rock in this; in particular it's much less cool than The Warriors, directed by the same director (Walter Hill) four years earlier. However, Streets of Fire is so wacky and off the wall that Sumana and I had a great time watching it. It's a classic good bad movie: a bizarre idea competently made and greenlight because hey, who knows what will be a hit?

  I think you could have made a big movie musical enjoyed by kids in 1984, but the kids in question would have been theater kids, right? Not the punks. This movie and Pennies From Heaven (1981) are off the mark with their fixation on recreating a time in the past when musicals had mass appeal. You need modern sleaze and transgression, a la Rocky Horror Picture Show.

  I made a bet that at some point in the movie a street would be literally lit on fire. Reader, I won that bet. There's also a classic "make this character a woman but change nothing else about the screenplay" character here, a la Ellen Ripley, which creates a sadly compelling female character by 1984 movie standards.

• Bullet for a Badman (1964): I don't have much to say about this generic 60s western. I remember that the location sites are beautiful, and the horses do a lot of good stunt work, falling over when their riders are shot and whatnot. I mean, I hope that's stunt work.

And here is the promised Television Spotlight:

• Franklin (2024): I think me and Sumana might be the only people who have ever watched this. It seems like an Apple TV honeypot designed solely to collect award nominations. I do recommend it if you're a major Franklinhead, as it's full of snappy quips. Probably way too slow and ponderous for the general public. We both thought Thibault de Montalembert was outstanding as the Comte de Vergennes.
• Star Trek: Discovery (2017-2024): Time to bid adieu to the weird eldest child of the rapidly-closing Stream Trek era. Unlike Star Trek: Picard, Discovery had tons of great episodes and a really good season. Unfortunately, it was season 3, four years ago. Season 5 was all right, so I'm not super disappointed, but only because my expectations have been well lowered by this point.

  I haven't looked into this in detail, but I have to assume there was major turmoil behind the scenes at Discovery, since the showrunner kept changing early on and the show kept lurching in different creative directions, occasionally doing things like casually spinning off a much better Star Trek series. But Discovery never lost sight of its pole star: the belief that Michael Burnham is the most important person in history and has to save the universe all by herself once a year. Honorable mention to the way Star Trek's traditional countdown-to-everything-blowing-up timers would inexplicably pause for minutes at a time so that everyone could have their character beat, though they did tone that down in the final season.

  My biggest Discovery regret is that Michelle Yeoh and Jason Isaacs spent so much time playing contemptible Mirror Universe characters that we barely or never got to see their (presumably) heroic, Star Trek-y Prime Universe equivalents. Doing a show that doesn't focus on the captain was a bold experiment but it left a void at the core of the show that took a really long time for Michael and Saru to grow to fill... by becoming captains.

  Oh yeah, Saru! One of my favorite Trek characters, period. Especially in the early seasons, he was a believable and sensitive portrayal of a sentient prey animal. And... yeah, I like most of the other characters (not you, Burnham's various love interests) but Saru is the standout here. The secondary cast was neglected from the start and it feels like they never recovered. I love the eventual Chekhov-Sulu bromance between Owosekun and Detmer but it was such a long road, getting from there to here.

• The Prisoner (1967): I believe "hot mess" would be an appropriate term. This is so stylish and has tons of good ideas, many of which remain quotable 55 years later, but the impetus for the series in the first place—Patrick McGoohan's weariness of being typecast in spy shit—also drives it over the cliff at the end, with the last few episodes willing to put complete nonsense onscreen as long as the cliches of the spy genre are averted or mocked. We enjoyed seeing the titular Prisoner become more and more adept at using his environment, manipulating the Village and its government to his advantage. Definitely worth a watch.

  I've mentioned before Dave Hutchinson's "Fractured Europe" series of books and how they have a MEGA TWIST which, now that I think on it, seems strongly inspired by the setting of The Prisoner. This makes me feel a little better about my inevitable theft and adaptation of Hutchinson's twist.