What I Talk About When I Talk About Movies

I’m going to be honest, I’m not entirely sure what caused this, but I’m trying to think about how I’ve been evaluating the movies I’ve been seeing. When I started being a “movie person” (as a coworker of mine calls it), a lot of my opinions were based on other critical opinions. Whether that was just out of fear that my own opinions weren’t worth much at all or because I was putting way too much weight on what others say or even a mix of both, whichever it is, I realized it was a problem. And in an effort to fix that problem, I wanted to, well, I guess not exactly write down “how I’ll aim to in the future” but reflect on what I do like.

I’ve said stuff like this before, but I look for creative flourishes. To steal a quote from The Beginner’s Guide, “It reminds you this was made by a real person.” And yeah, that does get really close to auteur theory, which a lot of people consider an outdated model of thinking, but it’s not like I’m looking for touches by one single person. Anyone involved can make a film enjoyable. For example, the film The Man Who Killed Hitler And Then The Bigfoot is, mostly, kind of mediocre, but there’s one camera move when Sam Elliot says “...and this knife” that I thought was really really good. Again, the film isn’t that great, but if it had more things like that, I think it would be.

I’ve also found I have a weakness for neo-noir crime films. Destroyer is a good film, but I enjoyed it much more than I think the movie deserved. Does that make sense? Or Goldstone, which did something similar. And honestly, because the releases for these movies aren’t as big as the really big ones, it’s possible that there’s a little bit of “you haven’t seen this and I have” to it as well, but if it’s there, I think it’s minimal.

But those two paragraphs are at odds with each other, I think. The first one looks for technical performance, whether that be mastery of the film’s style (one of the reasons I liked Phantom Thread and some people didn’t), while the second one is emotion based. I don’t mean that they have to be at odds, but that’s often how it feels. The phrase, “I really liked that movie, but…” or something similar comes up a lot in my discussions, and there has to be a better way to say that because the “but” in that sentence feels like it dismisses the first half way too much.

I’m still learning. I tried earlier in the year to have a full review blog, and that fell through because of other commitments, but I still do talk about movies with friends and family. And like every other skill, it can only get better over time.

-F

Daylight Savings

This isn’t going to be one of those posts that slags off Daylight Savings Time, although I do think it’s only kept around for tradition’s sake at this point (and you know what they say about traditions: they’re old people’s way of peer pressuring you). Instead, let’s talk about how a seemingly irrelevant change severely alters the work environment of a place you might not normally expect: the food service industry.

First off is the obvious: windows. At my workplace, we have just about an entire wall of windows facing west. For about an hour a day, the sun shines right into the cashiers’ eyes. This hasn’t been too much of a problem -- not too many people come in at that time of day -- but once the hour shift happens, those two times merge into one unfortunate block of time. I guess that’s why they have us all wear hats.

But there’s also what I’m starting to call the “sundown rush.” Because no matter what time it is on the clock, the evening’s busiest time is around sundown. Right now, that’s about 7:30 PM, which on paper shouldn’t be a problem. We’re open for an hour and a half after that, so we should be able to get everything we need to get done done, right?

Well, the way that our saute cooks start to close down is basically going to half-capacity while three of the burners get cleaned, before switching burners to clean those. This is one of the first steps in their cleaning procedure, which means it happens… right around 7:30.

Eventually, as the sun sets later and later, these problems will cease to coincide with each other. All spread out, there manageable enough, and the sun setting later and later will certainly cause these phenomena to drift apart. But until then, we all just have to power through it.

-F

Raindrops on Roses (Part Sixteen): Searching

(I had trouble getting blogspot to cooperate this week so no images for right now)

(trailer)

It’s been three weeks since I last talked about screen-only media, and in that three weeks, I had a revelation that some might say is obvious but, I mean, I’m the one writing this blog so I’m still going to share it. Fundamentally, it’s the same lesson one learns when writing to anyone, through any medium, be that Internet Relay Chat, text messaging, or even handwriting letters: It’s difficult to identify the emotions in text like it is in sound.

Here’s a fun fact about the internet: The solution to this problem, universally, is appending a “/s” to any text that’s meant to be sarcastic. And when the original writer thinks it’s obvious they’re meant to be read as sarcastic, there’s inevitably still someone replying with something like, “Can’t tell if /s or not.”

Searching and Secret Little Haven both have similar themes in this regard. Both of their plots involve a father failing to understand his daughter and almost losing them. The question remains, though. How do you convey a character’s emotion through a screen? And that’s where these two pieces of media diverge.

Let’s focus on Searching for now. Between it and Secret Little Haven, Searching is much more sympathetic to the father, if only because it’s shot almost entirely from his perspective. The audience gets to see all the messages John Cho’s character, David, doesn’t send. We get to see his mouse move across the screen, click between tabs or windows, and can therefore get a sense of what’s inside his head. There are also a number of instances of webcams set up to allow for, you know, the actual acting.

In fact, the film makes a point to introduce all the necessary characters by video call or similar means before dropping into the text messages. This idea works not only because the audience gets to see these character’s faces match them to text, but also because we get to see how David reacts to them. How does he react to his brother having weed just in shot, for example.

In fact, the film tries to avoid the problem for as long as possible. Video, whether for chatting or otherwise, is used at every opportunity, sometimes in some admittedly contrived ways. But the film is also good at setting up these opportunities. A few times late in the film are of note here, though to speak more about them would be to spoil them.

This is a film built on its twists and turns. It is a thriller, after all. And it’s got a pretty tight script to help it, too. That was one of the problems of Unfriended and its sequel: those films were built upon their gimmick and had little else to offer. Searching, on the other hand, is tied to its gimmick to the point that it becomes a necessary part of the film.

Again, I’m not going to spoil it because I do want people to experience this movie as blind as possible, but we’re introduced to a phrase pretty early on in the film that keeps coming up in the back of David’s mind. At the end of the film, when it finally comes out, the way it’s presented makes it all the more rewarding.

-F

Mr. Bird

I’ve been focusing on other projects recently, so this is another “week off” sort of post. Many of the people who read this blog on the regular have probably seen this one already, but it’s also one of the ones I’ve been consistently happy with, so hopefully that balances out.

It also means I finally have to pick a title for it, so here you go: Mr. Bird

Ruminations on Oscar Gold (Part Two)

I was going to talk about the Oscars again, but then I remembered that, well, I’d already done that. I thought that, well, maybe my opinions had changed or improved in the year since I’d last written about it, but it turns out that actually, well, they really hadn’t. My previous post even contains some of the same buzzwords that I’ve used to describe my opinions this year (“Cultural touchstone” stands out, for example).

But I still want to talk about it, I think. Like, I’m not going to directly comment on any of the results, largely because, not having seen either Bohemian Rhapsody or Green Book -- the two major pushbacks focus on the Best Editing and Best Picture awards to these two movies respectively -- I can only comment on the metatext of these two films. To put it another way, being blissfully ignorant of these two films means I can only talk about what people are saying about them, and there are dozens of takes now that the awards are over about how these were bad choices, enough that that’s not something that really interests me.

I do enjoy some of the trivia, though, like how this is the second time a Spike Lee joint has lost to a “solving deep south racism through the medium of cars” film (Driving Miss Daisy won in 1990, while Do The Right Thing was snubbed), or how Best Actor winner said the ghost of Freddie Mercury protected him from director Bryan Singer, who has had multiple sexual assault allegations pointed at him.

In fact, it’s really easy to get caught up in the bread and circuses of it all. I was working during the ceremony itself and I was still checking, poking around to see which film won what and the associated reactions therein. And that’s kind of how I put it last year. The reactions are more important to me, I think, than the awards themselves. So while I’m disappointed that some of my picks didn’t get chosen, I’m glad the discourse around those picks is there.

-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

"May-Mays"

I’ve been listening to a lot of what people would call “meme music” lately. Stuff like Never Gonna Give You Up (yes that link leads exactly where you think it leads), or What’s Up? or songs similar, if that makes sense. Stuff that, for some reason, the internet has latched onto as “the paragon of funny things.” Gangnam Style is another one.

I don’t know why specifically I’ve been listening to these songs, nor do I have the best reason for why these songs became popular in the first place. The closest I can come up with is that they’re all kind of unaware of their own charm? Like that paradoxical One Direction lyric, they don’t know how charming they are.

That sort of thinking, of course, extends to other mediums as well. Tommy Wiseau, for example, managed to make The Room, but everything else he’s made has been with that paratext in mind. “From the guy that made that disaster-of-a-movie The Room” all the promotional material seems to say. This can also be exemplified in music. People don’t remember Saturday at all, even if it’s technically a better song (or so I’m told. I’m not a music critic). Did you know that Rick Astley’s still making music?

But turning to more strict definitions of the word “meme,” I’ve also been listening to what people would call “memetic genres.” Entire types of music that get relegated to the “it’s just memes” category of listening. And to be fair, some of that derision is probably well deserved. The premier Vaporwave song is called “リサフランク420 / 現代のコンピュー” (Lisa Frank 420 / Modern Computing), for example, and other songs in the genre only get more esoteric. And I like to think Eurobeat (that’s “Techno Bluegrass” for those that remember that) would be a lot better received if it didn’t have Running in the 90s as its headlining song.

But both of those genres have a sort of cheesiness to them as well. Vaporwave’s major aesthetic is in reimagining 80s pop songs, and Eurobeat lyrics are frequently so obsessed with sex and cars and sex in cars that anything else is just an outlier.

So is “cheesy charm” what makes a song a meme? I mean, maybe. There are definitely outliers out there, of course. For example, Hurt as performed by Johnny Cash is not particularly cheesy at all (okay, maybe the shot of Cash pouring wine over everything is kind of funny). But it’s definitely a common factor for a lot of songs.

-F