Eurydice

If you’re unfamiliar with the evolution of vocabulary used by “the youths” (scare quotes mandatory), you might not know what a “hot take” is. It’s not an especially difficult phrase to parse once you break it down -- a “take” is an opinion on something (e.g. “What’s your take?”) and the adjective “hot”, well, that has a couple synonyms ranging from “controversial” to “brand new” or even “poorly thought out”, decided through context clues, but no matter how it modifies the take, it’s always something that will bring energy to a given conversation. The opposite would be a “cold take,” one that people have heard before and/or just doesn’t get the blood boiling anymore.

Anyway, here’s a hot take: Eurydice, feminist icon?

I mean, obviously not according to the text itself. The surviving versions of the Orpheus myth paint his wife as not much more than an object for Orpheus to desire. She dies on her wedding day, having been bitten by a rattlesnake, and a major plot point in the myth is that Orpheus isn’t even allowed to look at her as he rescues her from the underworld. That’s Greco-Roman mythology for you. But as time has marched on, I’ve noticed both a resurgence in tellings of this myth in general and interpretations of Eurydice specifically.

To preface all this, I wouldn’t call myself either a classics expert or a feminism expert. I didn’t even know it was pronounced “you-rid-i-see” until earlier this year. But when you experience two pieces of media like this in relatively quick succession, you kind of have to make note of it.

The first is Hadestown, this year’s Best Musical according to the Tony Awards. On its surface, it’s a retelling of the Orpheus myth replacing ancient Greece for depression-era America, creating a narrative distance between Ovid et al. to justify a couple things: its folk-opera aesthetic, and the ability to reinterpret the characters as it pleases. Hades, for example, is depicted as an oligarch who signs people into his employ permanently in exchange for a pittance while the Fates and Hermes are made into dueling narrators, each trying to influence the story in their own way.

But let’s focus on Eurydice. With the major story beats of the myth still there, it’s not like she’s a main character, but she does get, you know, an actual character. The Hadestown version of Eurydice is a realist who is attracted to Orpheus’ optimism, and instead of being killed unceremoniously, Hades attracts her to his underworld by promising her steady work and food to eat. She’s seduced into it, but it’s still a bit more agency than Eurydice has in the individual myths.

These choices are made at the beginning of the story, though, and from Eurydice’s perspective, the story plays out largely the same way once she arrives in Hadestown. To contrast, let’s look at this other piece of media, a film this time: Portrait of a Lady on Fire (trailer).

Portrait isn’t a myth by any stretch of the imagination -- it’s a romance drama between two women and set in the eighteenth century -- but it does spend a lot of time commenting on the myth. The introductory scene to this theme features its main characters sitting around a table with one of them reading aloud. The question arises: why did Orpheus turn around? To paraphrase using some modern (and not French) parlance, “If it were me, I would just not turn around.” The answer the characters come up with is, “Eurydice told Orpheus to turn around. She wanted him to remember her as she was.”

Already, too, the film has emphasized the two romantic leads’ looks at each other. “How you see me” is a recurring phrase throughout the film, as well as several shots of following someone close behind, so this scene, in essence, serves as the thesis of the film. But an idea like “Eurydice said something to Orpheus” isn’t exactly supported by the text of the myth, so the film then serves to demonstrate its reasoning by itself. There are several more callbacks to the myth, but I’ll skip ahead to its conclusion.

The final scene of Portrait is of its two leads, Marianne and Héloïse, having in the meantime been forced apart, attending the same musical performance by chance. Marianne sees Héloïse, but, as the camera lingers, it becomes apparent that it’s a look they won’t share. Héloïse is distracted by the music. Now it is the audience’s turn to ask for a look.

As a reminder, the film is set in the eighteenth century. The relationship between these two women was doomed from the start. And yet, all we want is a turn of the head and a look of recognition in Héloïse’s eyes. Héloïse chooses otherwise, though. She stays with the memory of Marianne as she was.

The symbology is reversed, but the message is still the same. Portrait of a Lady on Fire presents Eurydice as a woman who recognizes that her relationship with Orpheus will fail -- on a meta level, it almost presents her as someone who realizes she is but an object of inspiration to him -- and chooses to live in Hades with the happy memories of their courtship than to have them ruined by the passage of time.

Bookending Hadestown is a line sung by Hermes: “It’s a sad song, but we’re going to sing it anyway.” This is one of the major themes of the musical: its own commentary on using old stories to make commentary on modern issues (a joke title of Hadestown that gets passed around is “Orpheus Starts a Union”). And I thought that was worth talking about in regards to one figure that these two wildly different pieces of media share.

-F

Another Countdown

Surprise! I can make another post.

Last year’s “Best Films I Watched” list went over pretty well, I think. I mean, “That I Watched” is a pretty big qualifier, especially when I, either by accident or deliberately, missed out on some pretty big-name affairs. Big names from the summer like Avengers: Endgame or even the December darlings like Uncut Gems or Greta Gerwig’s new adaptation of Little Women are getting left by the wayside here, though I have no doubt I’m going to try to seek those movies out once I find the time.

Disclaimers out of the way, let’s get it started!

A Bit Of A Shill

This seems like something at least some people who read this would enjoy: I’ve recently been following a miniseries done by Canadian sketch comedy troupe LoadingReadyRun called Road Quest. What it is is basically having six of their members going on a road trip across British Columbia together in a style reminiscent of Top Gear and though of course it was scaled down to a more reasonable budget, there’s clearly a lot of heart that’s been put into it.

What I especially like is that it’s clear all the participants are actually friends with each other, like, when Top Gear’s hosts sniped at each other over walkie-talkies, you could occasionally sense some actual malice behind it (to my ears, at least). And maybe it’s my own projections onto the lives of each on-screen personality, but that’s not really there in Road Quest. Sure, there are moments of unfamiliarity -- a few of the duos admit that they never truly interacted with each other before the trip -- but that adds its own layer of charm to the proceedings as we, the viewers, watch that relationship grow over the course of ten days.

I don’t want to leave out the cinematography, either. There are several beautiful drone shots throughout the series that really emphasize the landscapes that these teams come across. But those you’ll have to see for yourself.

I’ve put a link to the first episode below. There are twelve planned episodes -- they’re up to Episode Seven now -- with a new one posted every Monday. I really hope you all enjoy it as much as I have; I wouldn’t share it if I didn’t love it.

-F

Spooks

Next week is going to be the first day of October, which, despite what some corporations will tell you, means it will be officially spooks season (this is shade at big-name haunted house companies that open for business in late September) (this is a joke). Now, last year I made a pretty big deal out of it. I made a bunch of Raindrops on Roses posts and I told a spooky story in the same vein as many others on the internet.

This year will be mostly the same, though I’d like to note the differences now. A lot of it comes from the fact that I get the extra Tuesday to play around with. The first difference, hopefully to the relief of some of my readers, is me talking about it upfront like this. A warning that something will be coming on that last week.

The second difference is in how I’ll be doing Raindrops on Roses posts. I’ve mentioned before how I’ve enjoyed splitting each trio up into a theme of film, movie, and book. With four weeks instead of three, though, and my history of talking about movies (rest in peace, other blog), I thought it would be fun to talk about some horror movies -- some old, some new -- with its own subtheme. Call it “reflections” or something like that. And maybe that won’t make sense until week four when I explain myself, but it’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while now and I’d like to get it all written down.

You can watch along if you like. The first movie is going to be Suspiria (1977), directed by Dario Argento and written by Argento and Daria Nicolodi. There are a couple films with this name, actually, so make sure it’s this one.

I’ll see you there!

-F

Miscellaneous Smiles

I’ve started taking Tuesday shifts at work, during what would normally be peak blog-post-writing time for me. I don’t anticipate having too many issues getting posts out in a timely fashion, but if there are any, that’s why.

In the meantime, I’ve been feeling a little overwhelmed with negative news, some of which I may comment on here if things blow over (I’ll be fine, I more meant the state of the internet), so in an attempt to balance that out a little bit, here are a few positive things from my personal life in no particular order.

I’ve recently discovered the joy of listening to a Neil Cicierega album. If you don’t know who that is, he is one of the creative forces behind the Potter Puppet Pals series and is all-around a pretty funny internet person. He has a band, Lemon Demon, who are most famous for their song The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny, but what I’m talking about are the “Mouth” albums created under his own name, Mouth Sounds, Mouth Silence, and Mouth Moods. All three are basically one long mashup, borrowing from dozens of artists to create a fifty-minute-and-change musical stream of consciousness, and they’re all great.

Speaking of music, I’m going to a Welcome to Nightvale show soon, which I’m very excited for. If you can imagine a weird town with, say, a dog park only hooded figures are allowed into, an endless expanse of desert, and a miniature town underneath a bowling alley, all described through the medium of radio, that’s just some of the weirdness to be experienced in Nightvale. The live show promises to be more of that, but bigger and for an audience.

I’ve been integrating into my class pretty well. I sometimes have difficulty offering criticism in a group setting (which is difficult given that that’s basically the entire class), so the fact that I haven’t had that much trouble here is a good feeling overall.

So yeah, that’s three things. Again, I’ll be fine, but like I wrote a few weeks ago, sometimes I need to balance out all the down with some up.

-F

Sick Music

I don’t know if I’m sick or under the weather or just not feeling it and suffering from some writer’s block, but I’m not in the greatest of writing moods. I did promise something positive for this week, though, so let’s talk about music for a bit. Just some quick paragraphs about songs and artists I like and maybe you readers can find something you enjoy as well?

I’ve been on a pretty big electronic kick lately, actually. It started with Justice (example song: Audio, Video, Disco) which I’ve blogged about here before, which extended into synthwave and darkwave (I think those are the genre names? Genres are confusing, but that's a topic for another blog post) with artists like Carpenter Brut (ex: Le Perv) and Perturbator (ex: Birth of the New Model). About the same time this happened, too, someone recommended The Prodigy (ex: Memphis Bells) to me, and while that’s not really any of the genres of the first three artists I mentioned, it’s still within my personal wheelhouse of “things I like”.

That doesn’t mean I don’t listen to acoustic music anymore. I’m very much on the Black Midi (ex: Talking Heads) train, and I still go back to artists like Barns Courtney (ex: Rather Die) and Poe (ex: Haunted). It’s actually a nice feeling, going back to songs you haven’t heard in a while and realizing you still know all the lyrics, or well enough that you can sing along to the chorus at least.

What else? Well, there’s The Budos Band (ex: Old Engine Oil) if you’re looking for something jazzy. Or Katzenjammer (ex: Tea With Cinnamon) if you’re looking for something a bit more indescribable (Wikipedia says Country/Balkan? I guess that works. Again, genres are hard). Or there’s-

Look, the point of this exercise was to get something on paper for this week, and I think that part worked out.I’m not saying I could throw out recommendations until the end of time, but I am still, well, I am still not feeling the greatest. I do hope you enjoy what I picked out for you all, though. I tried to stay away from a given artist’s biggest hits in an effort to try and attract you to more of their music if you like what you hear. So give them a listen!

-F

Champion Of The New

I don’t really think of myself as a film critic. I watch a lot of movies, yes, which I think inevitably means that opinions are going to change and develop as I express them, and there was that one time I tried to have a weekly review blog that we don’t really talk about anymore, but, I don’t know, I guess the label just never really stuck.

But one thing I have realized I enjoy doing from that whole process is telling people about movies they otherwise wouldn’t have heard of. Not in an “If you haven’t watched this movie you haven’t lived” sort of way (see below), it’s more of an “I don’t think this movie gets the respect it deserves” idea.

I think that’s why critics like to do Top X pieces. There are other reasons, sure (lists are both easy to make and easy to consume, search engine optimization and clicks are the driving moneymakers in the gig economy, etcetera), but at least ideally, there’s also the drive to promote. To take from Anton Ego at the end of Ratatouille, “The new needs friends.”

So with all that said, let’s talk about something new.

The Proposal (2018) is a documentary about an art installation, the installation itself about an artist and their relationship with their own artwork after their death. That’s its primary question, one that features prominently in its trailer: “What happens after the death of the author?” But that message has two meanings. The first is the obvious: An artist’s work is their legacy, but art can be a commodity. So what happens to that legacy when someone just… buys all of the art? And doesn’t let anyone see it?

The second, question, though, is a bit more physical: Does their body reach similar sacred heights? Filmmaker and visual artist Jill Magid has an answer to both questions already in mind. Her goal is, by taking you through the same steps she did, by showing you the same pieces of architecture that she has seen, she wants to guide you to that same conclusion. Or, at the very least, think harder about why your answer might differ.

But presenting a perspective and defending it is an obvious selling point for documentaries. What makes The Proposal stand out is just how pretty everything looks. Luis Barragán’s work is treated with the reverence it deserves, with special lingering looks at his Satelite Towers and his El Bebedero fountain, and they emphasize certain voiceover moments as perfect moving images.

One thing I want to point out specifically is how Jill Magid seems to take special pains to try and always film herself from behind. By doing so she becomes an observer, just like her audience, even if she herself admits that by even presenting this story she is forever changing its history and future. She also makes an aside towards the more controversial aspects of her project (“I know my offer is unorthodox” she says in the opening narration). I mention these because, again, depending on how you view the questions the movie poses, you might find yourself hesitant to view further after a little research.

I don’t know how easy or hard this movie will be to find after its limited theatrical run. The way I figure, you’ll probably forget this post by the time this movie re-enters your consciousness. But if you haven’t forgotten it, I hope that this sways you to watch it.

Really, that’s all I can do.

-F

Raindrops on Roses (Part Eighteen): The Hypothetical Screen-Novel

To reiterate what I said in my introduction post (see Raindrops on Roses part Fifteen-and-a-Half), I wanted to talk about adaptations of computer screens, but I couldn’t think of a good book that did something similar to match the film/game/book sets I had been doing. So instead I plan to describe how the aspects that make Searching and Secret Little Haven work might translate over to a less visual medium.

Some books aren’t entirely without visuals, of course. The graphic novel medium could potentially use the computer screen quite well. It presents a similar limitation to Richard McGuire’s Here, where instead of a single place presented over multiple time periods, the novel could depict a single screen, following the cursor around just like a film might. Individual windows could be treated like different panels and such, for example.

This does run into the problem of separating itself wholly from its filmic inspirations. At best, what I’ve just done is describe a storyboard for something like Searching. And, I mean, it works. I could see something done like this, but that’s not what I was going into this piece trying to explore.

We learned from Searching that introducing characters before reducing them to IRC messages helps the audience, largely by letting them get to know that character in a different context first. And we learned from Secret Little Haven that a sort of melodramatic earnestness goes a long way. If all your characters have their emotions written on their sleeve, interpreting their messages as anything other than the obvious becomes difficult, if not impossible.

Both of these lessons operate under the assumption that the aesthetic problem gets solved, i.e., how do you make a book look like a computer screen? The closest I can think of is the “documentary novel” Nothing But The Truth by Avi. It’s written in a semi-script format, which serves to hide both critical details about the truth behind certain events but also many of its characters’ motivations. So even that example is not perfect. It runs counter to the emotional honesty that the previous two examples provided, obfuscating rather than illuminating.

What we’re looking for, therefore, is a novel that eschews traditional formatting in favor of (probably) text messages, IRC chat, or some other format that reduces description. It preferably needs to have earnest characters, each of whom get little introduction scenes before being pulled into the larger narrative.

I don’t know if that book exists yet. If it does, I haven’t read it yet. It might be a bit of a mess, to be honest, though I also think a lot of books sound like a bit of a mess when you boil them down to a paragraph of description. But it would be neat to see if it matches the same mood that those other examples do.

-F

Screentime (Raindrops on Roses Part Fifteen-And-A-Half)

This was going to be a whole Raindrops on Roses series but I couldn’t remember a book to match the theme. But it’s still something I wanted to write about, so here it is anyway.

There have been enough pieces of media focused entirely on the computer screen that I, someone who is definitely not an art critic, would call it its own genre. In a way, this sort of creativity, almost unbounded in variation up to this point. I first heard about it in an Every Frame a Painting video called “A Brief Look At Texting And Internet In Film,” which in turn lead me to the three short films, Noah (2013), a relationship drama/coming of age story; Internet Story (2010), a docu-thriller(?); and Transformers: the Premake (2014), a documentary. And since that video has come out, there have been three pretty prominent feature-length examples as well. Unfriended (2014) and Unfriended: Dark Web (2018), both horror films; and Searching (2018), a mystery/thriller.

Stylistically, it makes sense. By cropping the film’s screen down to only parts of the computer’s, it’s easy to direct the audience’s attention to where it might be important. Noah has a whole gag centered around this idea, for example. It also allows for an easily-explainable diegetic soundtrack, which further increases immersion. Plus, because webcams have basically become default parts of the computer experience for most people, actor performance isn’t diminished at all.

What I’ve noticed, though, is that these screen-as-film ideas are one of the first ideas to become outdated. It really isn’t their fault; it’s just how the evolution of the internet works. Operating systems and the design of websites and applications continues to iterate upon itself, while these movies are stuck in their own era. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing -- we don’t hate older movies for not having cell-phones, for example -- but it is a noticeable one, made all the more prominent by the medium through which the film is conveyed.

What’s interesting, then, is video game’s attempts at the same presentation. Instead of film’s looks towards modernity and capturing the present, video games instead seem to be looking at certain aesthetics that only existed decades in the past.

I first noticed this in the visual novel Emily Is Away, which revolves around being in an IRC with an old high-school friend. It has a sequel, entitled Emily Is Away Too, which is more of a reimagining of the original’s scenario and has the same visual themes as its predecessor.

But there are other, more stylized games out there as well. Arc Symphony, for example, revolves around a message board back when message boards were tied directly to email accounts, and is played with a CRT-screen effect to further immerse the player in that era. It shares themes (fandom, discovery of identity) with another game called Secret Little Haven, which, as far as I’ve encountered, seems to take the best lessons from all the previous examples and wrap it into a single package.

The two examples I would have chosen for the Raindrops on Roses series would have been Searching and Secret Little Haven. And, to be honest, I still kind of want to. So here’s what I’ll do. These two works will be the next two posts for that series, and the third in the theme will be imagining what a book with the same visual aesthetic might look like.

See you then!

-F

"The Biopic Problem"

I’ve been trying to avoid complaining about so-called “predictability” in films. I’ve found that that sort of thinking is generally reductive. Like, when someone asked Roger Ebert what film had the least cliches, he responded with My Dinner With Andre, a film that consists entirely of Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory having a dinner conversation, and even that has a TV Tropes page. But at the same time, I’ve started to have a negative view of what are commonly called “biopics,” and the simplest reason I can give when pressed on this is, to put it simply, that they’re too “predictable.” I promised over on NSS Reviews that I was going to try and resolve this little hypocrisy, so here I am.

In a typical three-act structure, there’s generally some sort of climax in the second act with the intention to meet two quick goals. The first is, loosely, to let the characters demonstrate how they’ve changed since the beginning of the story, and the second is, on a meta-level, to keep the audience from getting bored. Apollo 13, for example, has the “square peg in a round hole” sequence, while another space biopic, Hidden Figures, features the main characters slowly breaking down the institutional racism that surrounds them.

There’s a little trap there, however. The second act climax isn't the only climax in the film. To paraphrase the fictional Robert Mckee from Adaptation., the last act is going to be fresh in people's minds, and can even get people to forgive earlier mistakes, so make sure it's a good one. So if the movie's climax isn't as good as the second act's, it just comes across as poor pacing. Wonder Woman (which isn't a biopic but I've found superhero films can fall for similar traps, probably due to their mythological inspirations inspiring more stock story structure), for example, has a rather intense sequence where Diana leads a trench run on the way to taking back a French town, while the final act has a three-part battle to raid a German stronghold. On the surface, this seems like a fine escalation, but when the film throws a misguided twist at the viewer, followed by lasers that weren't especially well set up, it runs the risk of breaking the audience's immersion.

(In regards to “the misguided twist”, I don't want to spoil too much, but I'm of the opinion the film had one villain too many)

How does this relate to biopics specifically? Well, accuse me of judging films by their trailers if you must, but I've found biopics are more likely than not to be “safer” experiences, which means they are much more likely to fall into this kind of trap. But there's another reason as well. A reason related to the whole selling point to biopics in the first place.

“Based on a true story” is one of those phrases that can get people rolling their eyes. It's frequently meaningless, relying on names that might be recognized even if the true stories aren't. The Wind Rises, for example, takes very large liberties with its main character, Jiro Horikoshi that it's easier to read that particular film more about the nature of art and those who make it than a serious look at an engineer's life as war approaches (it also does the thing people decried Patch Adams for, introducing a fictional love interest and then killing her off, though Patch Adams had other problems as well). These “true stories” are naturally placed at the climax of the movie; people don't want to see Apollo 13 land back on Earth and then NASA faffing about for another forty-five minutes, they want to know if they landed in the first place. But with enough public knowledge, the tension of these movies is killed in the scripting process. People know how the story ends, so when movies like First Man ask, “Does Neil Armstrong land on the moon?” the audience knows they're in for a waste of time.

The solution, therefore, is to move the goalposts a bit. Again with First Man, the goal of the third act is to provide closure for Neil Armstrong's two major relationship conflicts: he and his wife and he and his daughter. It doesn't particularly work, as the daughter subplot is more or less dropped for over an hour until the final scenes make it relevant again, but it's a good try. Movies like Hidden Figures miss this, so when John Glenn finally goes up, the movie wastes ten minutes pretending he might not come down.

Look, I get it. I get why people like these movies. They can be really sweet stories and my heart's not entirely black just yet. Heck, I enjoyed a lot of these movies I mentioned here, even some of the ones I disparaged. But to get fully into a picture, I want to see some spark of creativity shining through, and it's very easy for biopics to not, so I tend to avoid them.

-F

A Premature Countdown But A Countdown Nonetheless

It feels weird making a “Top Five” list before the year is quite over yet. Like, as I’m writing this, movies like The House That Jack Built, Roma, The Favourite (yes, with the “u”), or If Beale Street Could Talk haven’t quite come out yet, which means that some of these could easily get bumped off or shifted around if I get around to seeing them. But this list has been on my mind since somebody asked about it at work, and I’m not sure where else this would fit into the schedule, so I thought I’d give at least a go at explaining myself here as well.

So without further ado, here are my five favorite films from 2018:

5) Thunder Road / Eighth Grade
(Thunder Road trailer) (Eighth Grade trailer)

Okay, I lied, it’s six films. But I liked these two for similar enough reasons that I couldn’t bear cutting one and not the other. It’s true that neither of these films is especially well shot (though Thunder Road does start with a reprise of the short film it is based on (which you can find here) which is a particularly impressive ten-minute long one take), but the writing very much makes up for it.

It’s actually interesting how these two films complement each other. Eighth Grade is about a girl’s final days in Junior High, dealing with the classic struggles of adolescence like not relating at all to her father or wondering why she’s not popular, but with a little bit of writer/director Bo Burnham’s wit mixed in there. On the other side of the coin, Thunder Road is about a father separated from his wife, sharing custody of a daughter the father has trouble relating to. But then he realizes he didn’t really know his mom that well either, and a large portion of the movie is him reconciling all that.

Anyway, they’re both really good with especially strong lead performances, so check them out if you can.

4) Thoroughbreds
(trailer)

It’s really easy to not care about what happens in Thoroughbreds, and I say that even as I put it on this list. There are simply no likable characters in the film, with even the two closest to sympathetic being a drug dealer and a literal sociopath. But the film (written and directed by Cory Finley), understands this and is shot in such a way to always keep the audience at a distance. The experience turns into a kind of helplessness, as you watch a series of events that was doomed to happen from the start.

And again, some people won’t like that. To those people, Thoroughbreds is a bunch of Rich, White People Problems with spoiled brats for characters, and that really is an acceptable reaction to this film. But once you get past that, the film just pulls you the rest of the way in.

3) Les Garçons Sauvages (The Wild Boys)
(trailer)

Oh, you thought the characters in Thoroughbreds were unlikeable, rich brats? Well, I’m one of two minds recommending this movie then. On one, some of the things not shown, only implied, in Thoroughbreds take center stage here, which means that the first third of this movie is just showing five terrible, terrible people doing horrible, uncomfortable to watch things. Thoroughbreds would just be a boring film without its audience’s engagement. The Wild Boys would have those same people leaving in disgust.

It also doesn’t do as much to draw people in, though that’s perhaps to be expected of a literal French art-house movie. It’s going to be pretentious and if you’re not into that, this probably won’t be an enjoyable watch. What the film does offer, though, is striking imagery and a Lord of the Flies-like energy that will leave those still in the theater with a peculiar sense of awe.

2) The Other Side of the Wind
(trailer)

I actually wrote a lot about this one already in my Blue Curtains post, but to summarize here, it’s fascinating how this film was made, it’s fascinating how it finally got all put together, and there’s enough of Orson Welles’ spirit to shine through, even if all the jokes and references land forty years too late.

Shot in a documentary style (almost ten years before Cannibal Holocaust and This is Spinal Tap popularized the mockumentary genre), The Other Side of the Wind describes to us the character of Jake Hannaford, a once-big-time film director who may be desperately clawing at relevance? It’s all unclear, of course, as Jake won’t let anybody into his private life without a fight, but on his seventieth birthday, there are cameras everywhere. I think some of the pieces are out of place, sure (the opening monolog practically begs to be respected for even releasing the film at all), but as I said in that post, I still can’t get this film out of my head.

1) Madeline’s Madeline
(trailer)

It was the trailer that first attracted me to this film, its cutout montage and constant “Hey Na Na” evoking that perfect sense of weirdness that I just had to see play out. And in that regard, I got what I was expecting. But what I wasn’t expecting was, to put it bluntly, the entire rest of it? Everyone’s performance is great, especially Helena Howard’s; it looks great, with a special commendation to make the images actually more focused as the film hits its weirdness stride; and its story slowly evolves in a sort of stream-of-consciousness way that perfectly models the perspective of its main character (and, if you watch a couple of interviews, also the creation of itself).

It’s weird. I mean, I knew I was pretentious (or at least enjoyed art people tend to call pretentious), but having it listed out like this made me realize it just a bit more. Like, the most accessible films are at the lower end of this list. Not that they’re bad, mind you, just that they’re listed lower than the more experimental fare. But at the same time, I do want most people to see most of these movies (The Wild Boys being the exception, again, you really do need to know what you’re getting into with that one), if only to help them find something new to enjoy.

-F

Blue Curtains

There’s a movie I can’t get out of my head. Not because I think it’s a great movie (though it very well may be (I’d have to get back to you on that)); it’s more like when you’ve got a song in your head and all you can remember is the chorus and maybe a riff or two, and if you don’t sing about it (or, in this case, talk kind of adjacent to it), it’s just going to get worse.

The movie in question is The Other Side of the Wind, the last film by Orson Welles (now available on Neflix!). It’s a frenetic piece; its conceit is that it’s footage from a bunch of cameras all trying to get a hot new scoop on a Hollywood director on the night of his seventy-fifth birthday. What I can’t get over is how prescient it is for being shot in the 1970s.

But let’s take a step back for a moment. The title of this post is based off a tired joke that goes a little something like this:

An author, in a fit of self-indulgence, decides to sit in on a class teaching his own work. The professor goes into a long, impassioned speech about the curtains in a scene. “The author made the curtains blue here,” the professor says, “because it symbolizes the purity of the scene, while also foreshadowing the tragedy to come.”

Upon hearing this, the author shouts “The curtains are blue because I like the color blue!”

This was also at the heart of The Beginner’s Guide, the subject of a Raindrops on Roses post I made a few months back. In that game, Davey, for as much as he tried to demonstrate his understanding of Coda’s games, didn’t know Coda as well as he thought he did and so ruined their friendship because of it.

But there’s something wrong with both of those conclusions, right? The term “Death of the Author” still has meaning, right? Like, I remember discussing the briefcase in Pulp Fiction with a friend. We were both talking about what we thought was in it and I said, “Well, Quentin Tarantino says…”

He interrupted me with “I really don’t care what Quentin Tarantino says.”

I feel much the same way about The Other Side of the Wind. Taking it as a 2018 movie about 1970’s Hollywood makes it very much a period piece in the same way that Barton Fink (directed by Joel and Ethan Coen) is. It certainly helps that many of the characters are played by their inspirations up to and including John Huston in the lead role.

What makes it prescient, though, is how little some things have changed in the intervening years between filming and release. For example, sex and sexuality is one of the themes that permeates throughout the movie; one of the things all the cameras are trying to figure out is the relationship the main character has with the women in his life. But as the movie goes on, it’s revealed that not only is that kind of a touchy subject, but shades of modern-day’s difficulties with sexual assault begin to crop up as well.

Another example would be the opening monolog, especially as this one was added near the end of the arduous editing process and by making mention of otherwise anachronistic items like cell phones, it only adds to this bridge between the old and the modern.

But, again, these interpretations on certain contexts were certainly not Orson Welles’ intention. Sometimes the curtains are just a nice shade of blue. But I never really liked how that joke villainized the professor. They’ve presumably developed their own context for the piece after years of study, and suddenly someone shouts back a retort with nothing but some perceived authority. And in most cases, I find it actually weakens the piece. The Other Side of the Wind goes from a period piece spanning multiple periods to its own inside joke that the audience can never be a part of.

-F

Adjectives That Describe Your Bones Sometimes

I hinted in my last Raindrops and Roses post that I wanted to cover something related to skeletons and the spookiness and/or scariness that occasionally describes them. So of course October would be the perfect month to talk about the theme for this month: horror.

I used to hate horror media. Even dystopian fiction -- a genre generally associated with horror even if it isn’t quite -- weirded me out. If I could remember my dreams, 1984 probably would have given thirteen-year-old me nightmares. I don’t think I got the same catharsis horror aficionados say they experience coming out of a horror movie, or if I did, I was more fixated on the “being in danger” part of being scared. When I was even younger, a particularly zealous performance in a for-kids production of Beauty and the Beast drove me to tears.

I can’t say exactly when the change happened, when I started being interested in being scared. I think I realized just how large a swath of media I was just dismissing off-hand, and wanted to at least take a second look at these films and games and stories before relegating the genre to “things I just didn’t ‘get’”.

I also understand that a large portion of my readers have already had their one or two experiences with horror, and didn’t like it that much. It’s probably going to be difficult to convince you to watch or play or read any of these in that case, but to help try and convince you, I wanted to talk about which specific horror I’ve found myself enjoying before we get into the specifics:

In regards to more visual media, let’s talk about jump-scares. They’re fine in small doses, but constructing a horror movie or game out of them just gets repetitive. They also have to represent the end of a particular scene. It’s the payoff, as it were. Cutting down on their frequency also reduces how predictable they are. One of the reasons I didn’t enjoy A Quiet Place, for example, is because every “jump scare scene” ratcheted the sound effects up and the ambient noise down, meaning you already knew the scare was coming.

The characterization has to be strong. This seems like an obvious point for any story, not just horror, but horror tends to lend itself to stupid decisions more often (“Let’s split up. We’ll cover more ground that way.”), and those have to be justified. Uncharacteristically poor decision-making isn’t a deal-breaker, but again, most stories have characters, so most stories should have good ones.

Lastly, I’ve found with horror movies that I’ve enjoyed them more before they introduce the supernatural aspects into them. For example, The Witch (stylized as The VVitch if you’re pretentious (which I am)), loses something when you realize the existence (or, at least, the confirmed existence) of the titular character could be cut entirely and the movie would be just as compelling, if not more so.

Again, these are just opinions. I’m certainly not going to say that any of these are the best things ever (or, in one instance, even strictly-speaking good), but they are things I want to share and talk about.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy these next few posts, and if not, well, some stores already have Christmas decorations up, so you’ve got that to look forward to.

-F

Weird Nostalgia

This was going to be a Raindrops on Roses post, but I decided against that for a couple reasons. First, I knew what theme I wanted for my movie/game/book set to be, and I knew that what I wanted to talk about here didn’t mesh with that at all. And second, I’m not actually sure I remember a lot of what I want to talk about at all. Which is kind of fitting, given that what I want to talk about is Neal Shusterman’s The Schwa was Here.

Like, I remember these moments, the set pieces as it were. There’s a kid who is functionally invisible, you see. Your brain can see and hear him, it just tends not to. And I remember the montage of moments as the people who do start noticing him test the limits of his power (for example, he gets through 2006-era airport security until he also tries taking a metal bar with him). But I don’t remember the actual characters at all. The summaries I could find online say this kid’s friends start taking advantage of him, and I have no idea how true that is.

But I also remember liking it despite knowing nothing about the plot. I remember really appreciating the third act especially as everyone learns valuable life lessons and our main characters find friends they never thought they would (if you’re offended at spoilers for a twelve-year-old book feel free to not write anything in the comments). So I’m in this weird position of having fond memories of no memories at all.

I had a similar reaction recently to the movie Annihilation (2018). I mentioned being a little low on the movie, but when asked why, I struggled to remember my initial reaction. When I did respond, it was mostly remembering what I had said before than actually remembering examples from the movie.

The common thread between these two examples, I think, is frequency and distance in time. I’ve only ever read The Schwa was Here once about eleven years ago. I only saw Annihilation once back in February. By comparison, I remember a lot about Madeline’s Madeline or The War of the Worlds because of how recently I’ve seen them, and I remember a lot about Upstream Color or The Phantom Tollbooth because of how often I rewatched or reread them. Which I imagine is not a new development in terms of understanding how memory works, but it seemed interesting in this context with how much media I consume.

-F