Old Christmas TV

 The Rankin-Bass Christmas specials are kind of bad, aren’t they? Now, I’m going to be upfront and say that that opening sentence is definitely misleading for the final product of this post, but at the same time, I do think that has to be said. They’re the adorable sort of bad, but I don’t think they’d air as frequently as they do if they were made today. I also should say I understand that one of the reasons they do still air is because they’re old. Old content draws eyeballs for a minimum amount of work (the games industry is actually undergoing this revelation as well for certain rereleases of games, but that’s another blog post).

What I want to talk about is how I think these draw eyeballs because they’re old as well. They’re similar to A Christmas Story in that way, how being played over and over for free programming at Christmas makes them more associated with holiday traditions every year. Because they’re traditions, then, they become associated with the past.

A Christmas Story is kind of about this already, being made in the eighties about some mythical American forties, though it never really interrogates its own nostalgia (there’s a whole Dan Olsen video about this so I won’t dig into it too hard). But the Rankin-Bass specials, accompanied by A Charlie Brown Christmas don’t even have that excuse. They just got bought up at the right time by the right company.

I think the biggest indicator that this is what’s going on is every time they try and introduce a new Christmas special. I remember this big marketing push for something called Arthur Christmas, and after that, it was something I can’t even remember the title for about Elf on the Shelf toys. Both of these fell flat. They haven’t melted into the popular discussion in the same way, and I think they’re doomed to stay down there, at least for a few decades.

-F

Raindrops on Roses (Part Twenty-Six): The Lighthouse

(trailer)

If you remember, this is something I wanted to do a year ago, alternating between comparing both the old and new Suspiria movies and comparing Robert Eggers’ previous work, The Witch (or The VVitch) with his then-upcoming film The Lighthouse. I managed those first three, but my schedule didn’t line up for the last, most recent movie and I defaulted to another horror film. But it’s been a year now, and I’ve seen the light… house and now is the time to talk about it.

What a strange movie.

I don’t mean like “strange” in a bad way, of course. If I did, I’d have attached it to a different blog series. Plus, most of the choices it makes are conventional. It’s filmed in black-and-white and with a 1.19:1 aspect ratio, which is outdated but not unheard of in modern times. It has a minimalist cast of three but one can easily conceive of that working. What I find most interesting, though, is how it deals with building up and releasing tension.

If you’ve seen The VVitch (or most any horror movie; I’m using this one to compare the same director) this might be something you already understand on an intuitive level. This movie works towards increasing the audience’s awareness that something scary might happen before giving them the catharsis of actually being scary, whether that’s a brief moment of action a la a jump scare or delivering on narrative payoffs. One can find a similar structure in comedy movies, which is why horror-comedies like Shaun of the Dead can exist and be popular.

This is not true of all movies in either of these genres. For example, It Comes At Night barely releases any tension for most of the movie, which is probably why it is so divisive. And the reason I want to talk about The Lighthouse is because it does the same thing horror-comedies do, building up scary tension to a comedic release. But I wouldn’t call it a horror-comedy. Now, to be fair, the line is blurry, but also the comedic aspects of The Lighthouse are more used to draw even more tension for the scarier moments.

A lot of this is in the framing. The movie is about two lighthouse keepers who, isolated from the rest of the world for months on end, go insane, and it’s this insanity that leads to the funny moments. But that means that each comedy beat in the movie only serves to amplify further tense moments. Sure, the moment was dissolved now, but what does that mean about the next moment? Or the next after that?

Is it better than The VVitch? That’s a difficult question. They’re so different from each other, only really connected by having a small cast, an isolated situation, and a folk tale atmosphere. It isn’t like the two Suspiria movies where, you know, one’s technically a remake of the other (and even then I think I declined to answer). I will say, though, I am excited to see whatever movie comes next.

-F

 

See You At The Movies(?)

I wrote a little bit about this a month ago, about how, yeah, I missed movies and going to the theatre to see them and all that, but also, like, I understood why places were closed and I was content with being patient, with even perhaps a bit of moralizing judgment towards people who wanted them open. Circumstances have changed now, and I’d like to revise my stance a little bit.

The biggest change was my preferred theatre reopening. It’s a lot easier to make decisions when the riskiest option is inherently off the table, after all. I can understand the impetus to reopen, by the way. I’m not blaming anyone involved in that particular decision-making process. It’s near a pretty big college campus, one that’s welcoming back students right now, so of course they would want to be there for that. And the precautions look reasonable in terms of trying to keep people safe.

So I should want to go now that it’s open? Well, I guess I’m still hesitant about going out into the world for anything I would deem unnecessary. Things like groceries are fine, maybe even going to a cousin’s first communion, but movies? I won’t say every outing I’ve done has been strictly necessary, but it still feels like a wide gap. But at the same time, the fact that the option is there feels like a temptation. It means I can sympathize more with people who do feel like they have to do these things, at the very least. A casual want (“I can’t wait until I can go see a movie.”) has become an active consideration (“I can’t wait until I’m comfortable seeing a movie.”)

It’s weird, that’s all. Like a lot of these blog posts, I don’t have a solution or anything. Maybe I will slip a mask on and sit two rows away from anyone else. It’s a closer possibility than I realized, but it still feels like so many things are holding me back.

-F

The Tenets of 2020 Movie Releases

So Tenet, Christopher Nolan’s upcoming movie, got delayed indefinitely. Finally, if you ask me. There was a good long while where it looked like marketing (people assumed Nolan himself but I haven’t looked into things enough to confirm this) wanted this to be the “movie that saves theatres this summer,” whatever that means, and while it was pushed back a few times before this, there was always the impression that yes, whatever happens, this movie is going to be played in theatres this summer. And then, of course, the world continues to have ended, so somebody finally pulled the trigger and put it on hold.

I admit I wasn’t really excited either way? I didn’t see the marathon of a trailer that showed in front of The Rise of Skywalker and the one spot I did see didn’t look all that exciting. In general, I like Christopher Nolan as a writer/director, but not amazingly so? I don’t know where that puts me on the “filmbro” scale, like, whether I’m elitist or hipster or both. I’ll still probably see Tenet if I have an opportunity.

But that’s the thing. Cinemas are closed right now and for good reason. I only really watch movies in theatres. So I’m stuck between really missing this thing that I really enjoy and knowing that not only that I can’t indulge, but that I shouldn’t want to indulge right now anyway. It’s something I think about from time to time, and that event has only brought it to the forefront.

-F

More Thoughts About Spoilers

I don’t know how I got into this mindset, but whenever someone tells me something they might consider a spoiler, if I ever read or watch or play that thing they’re talking about, I assume they were lying? The first example that comes to mind is a narrative game called Firewatch, which has a twist that can come out of left field if you’re not prepared for it. And even then, after watching a video where someone mentioned it, I had a hard time piecing together just how it had happened while playing. Like, I knew, but I hadn’t accepted it yet.

Maybe it’s that I just don’t care? That seems like an elitist way to phrase it, though. “Oh, you shouldn’t care what other people say happens to these people” seems awfully mean to the people who do really care, and have good reasons for caring. That’s one of the points of media, after all, to provoke empathy. And it’s not like I made a conscious decision to ignore knowing the ending, it just sort of happened, if that makes sense.

In a way, I might compare this to what I talked about when I complained about biopics because those are kind of spoiled by default. People know what happens to Freddie Mercury, for example, just like how pop culture has made the initial genre shift of Psycho less effective. But both of these can be made up for with good elements elsewhere, compare Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and Gus Van Sant’s near-shot-for-shot remake and you’ll see what I mean.

This also ties in with a recent trend of creators feeling like they need to be smarter than the people they’re catering to. Westworld ran into this most directly -- series head Jonathan Nolan mentioned changing the twist of an episode because people on Reddit had already guessed the twist they’d been going for. And that seems like a weird way to be making something to me, just shoveling in twist after twist without a thought to cohesion.

The twist in Firewatch, upon reflection, is actually thematically cohesive with the rest of the work. I won’t talk about it here, but it does tie in with the game’s themes of coping with loneliness and dealing with familial issues. So maybe that’s why I didn’t mind knowing about it ahead of time. It seems difficult, to me, for something with a twist for a twist’s sake to have a similar effect, but those media will likely be hamstrung by the passage of time anyway. Once everyone knows what’s up, it’ll fade from the zeitgeist, never to be meaningfully talked about again.

-F

Ranking My Thoughts

I’ve been thinking a bit about Top X Lists. These are not to be confused with the “X things that will make you go, ‘whoa!’ Number Y will make you go, ‘gee whizz!’” lists that people associate with clickbait. That’s not to say that ranking things can’t be turned into clickbait -- there’s something authoritative about them that makes people crave either validation or something to be mad about -- but it seems like declaring something “best” or even “tenth best” has qualities to it even people who “take themselves seriously” seem to gravitate towards.

But at the same time, these people who take themselves seriously also, I think, find it the hardest to put together a self-respecting list? Like, I take movies seriously (though I wouldn’t call myself a critic or anything like that) and I still find it difficult to rank movies. I have to add some category on top of it, like “Top movies of 2019” or “Top 9 Best Picture nominees.” And yes, I understand there can be some methodology to these lists. Some places will poll multiple people in order to make a list in aggregate as if that’s any better than asking everyone in China how long the emperor’s nose is.

For the three lists I’ve made on this blog so far, I have to admit a little bit of not only recency bias but also interest in making a compelling list to read. I want there to be a decent mix of things people have heard of in case they haven’t seen them yet and also some unknowns. And when it comes to the unknowns, I mostly do it because I want to share these movies (this is the reason I tell people), but there’s also a bit of superiority in it. Like an “I’ve seen this thing and you haven’t” sort of feeling. I try to downplay it, but I can’t say it’s not there.

This sort of methodology does mean that a lesser-known movie is more likely to sneak onto a Top X list. That means it’s not really a Top X list at all, though. Because again, they present themselves as authoritative. These are meant to be “the best,” no matter if they are popular or not. But then I’m left with questioning why someone would even write such a thing. An objective piece (no critical analysis is objective but as something that wants to be speaking from a position of authority, Top X lists sure try to be) would mean a lack of need for anyone else to write one. We’d just consult the algorithm of rankings and that would be that. X is better than Y.

So maybe it is all just clickbait dressed all fancy and done by someone important. That seems like the far other end of the spectrum, though. Dismissing opinions on the internet that are written out like this simply for being opinions, or with a disingenuous word like “clickbait” seems a bit dangerous too. You can and should dismiss them for other reasons (being bad opinions is certainly at the top of the list there) but not that one.

-F

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

Ruminations on Oscar Gold (Part Three)

I’m a little early this year, but then again, I managed to catch all the Best Picture nominees pretty early. And hey, people like numbered lists, so instead of wandering my way through the same points as the last few years with only a little bit of added discourse -- my ideal Best Actress category would have gone a lot differently, for example -- I figured I could rank them all and give some general thoughts.

9) Joker
I like Joaquin Phoenix and I think he does a good job in this movie, but I also wish he had a better movie to work in. This is not a hot take, but it feels like the filmmakers tried to jam an 80’s Martin Scorsese plot into an origin story, and both of them end up wanting. Any moment Bruce Wayne shows up on camera was a moment I was left wondering why they were there besides justifying the title.

All this is also ignoring the paratext of the movie, how director Todd Phillips made this because, to paraphrase, he couldn’t make a Hangover Part Four, and it’s like, I’m sorry you can’t make the movie you wanted but that doesn’t mean you had to make a whole movie complaining about it. In retrospect, it was probably a mistake finding that out before seeing it, but I couldn’t help watching Joker through that lens and the movie was worse for it.

8) Ford Versus Ferrari
This is one of those movies that I call “aggressively average”. Its story is alright, the acting’s alright, its message is a little muddled but one can draw some conclusions from it even if they’re occasionally messy, and that just leads to a film without much that can be said about it. It’s fine.

7) Once Upon A Time In Hollywood
This was another film I knew a bit about before going into it. I knew that Quentin Tarantino’s next film was supposedly about the Charlie Manson killings, and even though the trailers seemed to be leaning away from that (though Manson obviously still makes an appearance), it was something on my mind as I went through the first two acts of the movie. And I really enjoyed the first two acts! It felt a little overindulgent at times, but so did Hateful Eight before it, and I still liked that a lot. But the last act, as flashy as it is (I know a lot of people who will only talk about the flamethrower, for example), felt so disjointed to me that I just have to wonder why the other acts didn’t just get tightened up and end the movie there. Maybe it’d end up too similar to Barton Fink or Hail Caesar! (both by the Coen Brothers) then, but I don’t think that’s bad company to be in.

6) Jojo Rabbit
We’re moving into the “films I liked” portion of the list. And there’s a lot to like. Most of the performances, for example, including Taika Waititi’s portrayal of Hitler that is both necessarily scary while still remaining as goofy as can be expected of the imagination of the ten-year-old main character. It’s a little paint-by-numbers in terms of plot, but still charming in its own way.

5) 1917
I so want to like this movie more. I feel like it hits a lot of my more pretentious buttons, and while it’s those buttons that push it higher than Jojo Rabbit, I also can’t really justify putting it any higher than this. This was the last movie I saw on this list, so I’m still shaking out my feelings as to why, but here’s an honest attempt:

So for those who don’t know, the movie’s shot a lot like Birdman was. That is to say, it uses multiple long takes and stitches them together to create two scenes seemingly happening in real-time. The immediate problem is that, well, I really liked Birdman. I did a whole post about it. And while 1917 is shot the same, it isn’t quite paced the same. A lot of the scenes are stretched out for characters to move around as they talk to each other, and the camera’s slow, methodical approach to following the characters around means this walking and talking has to do a lot of the heavy lifting, and it doesn’t quite get there. Compare this to Birdman, which I thought had snappier dialog and a camera that was a bit livelier.

I still recommend it, though. I’m sure it’s going to be somebody’s favorite movie on this list. Just not mine.

4) The Irishman
Okay, so first thing’s first: It’s really hard already to get people to watch this movie given its two-hundred-plus minute runtime. Like, you can like a movie as much as you want, but getting people to spend three and a half hours of their time is a big ask. In some ways, this movie is almost a mirror to Joker. Both that and this film really want to be an eighties Scorcese film, though, of course, this one actually managed to get the director.

I suppose I misspoke a little. The Irishman doesn’t just want to be an eighties Scorcese film, it wants to be the eighties Scorcese film. It wants to use all the elements that made its other films what they were, and there’s a lot of audience superstition in that sort of storytelling. What I find interesting, though, is how it seems to also kill off the same tropes it brings up. It’s based on a true story, but all the surviving characters in that story are either dead or dying. The movie wants us to think it’s the end of an age, and that, I think, is an interesting enough reason to check it out.

3) Little Women
I haven’t read the Louisa May Alcott book, nor have I ever consumed any of its various adaptations, but this still seems like a pretty good one. Sure, there’s a lot of snark I could give it (Timothee Chalamet and Saoirse Ronan keep friendzoning each other in Greta Gerwig movies, Laura Dern is 5’10” and that’s hardly little at all) but it succeeds very well in what it sets out to do, which seems to be revitalizing the characters many other adaptations lacked. Because it’s not just Jo’s story, and it’s not just Amy’s story, it’s all of their stories.

2) Parasite
Boong Joon-Ho is kind of a cult favorite and has been for a while. Snowpiercer is his biggest hit for understandable reasons (*cough* Chris Evans *cough*), but all his movies vary in style and genre. Theme, though, is another story. I don’t want to spoil too much about this movie -- if there’s one thing that people seem to agree on it’s that it’s best if you don’t know what’s coming -- but I can’t recommend it enough. As long as subtitles don’t ruin your experience, check this one out while you can.

1) Marriage Story
This one is probably a little obvious given how highly it ranked on my own personal list a couple weeks ago, but yeah. It’s just a really good movie. I don’t know if it’ll win Best Picture -- Hollywood is incredibly fickle (Green Book? Really?) -- but it’s something I can watch again and again.

-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!

Fragments

When picking topics to write about on this blog, I find myself tending towards already having an expanded enough take to get at least the first few paragraphs down. Unfortunately, this leaves some topics doomed to fall through the cracks. What I thought I’d do this week is just throw out three of these not-completely-formed ideas just to give an idea of what I tend to think about. And who knows? Maybe I’ll come back to one of these in the future.

There’s a lot of online discourse about how some adaptations and remakes shouldn’t be made. For the former, there’s generally some sort of “unmakeable” label attached, like Watchmen (until 2009) or the philosophy of Alan Watts (until the video game Everything), and for the latter, people tend to ask, well, what’s wrong with the original? But in both cases, like the parentheticals already implied, aren’t there enough counterexamples to shut down these arguments? I even wrote about the two Suspiria movies on this very blog and talked at length about how they could be considered companions to each other.

After years in the foodservice industry, I came to the realization that restaurants very rarely operate at one hundred percent of their capability. Especially the chains and fast-food places. It’s a meme, for example, that the McDonald’s ice cream machine is always broken. It’s the same where I work. Sometimes the problems are more hidden, like, nobody needs to know that the ice machine gets in moods where it just won’t make ice, but sometimes you just need to tell customers, “There were actual bones in the meatballs so you can’t have any. No, I don’t know when we’re getting more” (for the record, that particular problem has since been resolved).

I just talked to someone who didn’t have a snow brush for their car. Who doesn’t have a snow brush? I wondered how they were going to get home in the blizzard that was going on at the time if I hadn’t been there with mine. But their car was newer, so maybe they just hadn’t gotten one yet?

-F

An Open Letter

In the parlance of our times, this is a “callout post”, and while I know people spend a lot of time trying to avoid that particular label, but it’s probably best if I just say what it is at the start and let the rest of the world think about its contents.

To whom it may concern:

You know that screen right before the movie starts that’s all like, “Hey, silence your cell phone and don’t use it during the movie, it’s super annoying”? Did you think that it was just talking about everybody else? I’m trying to not start out super mad here. I mean, there are stricter theaters than the ones we’ve been in, where you can get escorted out for the sort of stunts you’ve all pulled. But seriously, I like to think of myself as a pretty tolerant theatre-movie-watcher and I’ve never been as close to kicking someone’s seat as I have after you decided that the middle of the movie was the best time to check your emails.

You know what I’m more forgiving of, actually? A cell phone ringing, or vibrating, or otherwise making noise. Maybe that’s because I’m self-conscious of my own watch beeping in the middle of intimate scenes or I’ve been to movies with people on-call with a hospital and so, of course, have to have their phone on vibrate. And even without those caveats, I can forgive that sort of thing as an honest mistake. Those people didn’t mean to break my immersion, they just did accidentally. To err is human, and all that.

But pulling out your phone, that’s a deliberate action. And seriously, just leave the movie, eh? If you don’t like it, that’s also fine. I’ve not liked movies too. I haven’t walked out of movies before, but that’s certainly an option. Like, if you don’t like a movie, I won’t think less of you if you stop putting yourself through it. Leave! Just leave. Your phone will be right there in your bag or purse or pocket. So don’t! Just don’t. You’re older than me, generally. You should know better.

I hope the next movie you see is as enjoyable as you hoped it would be, and I hope your phone stays perfectly in your pocket.

All the best,
-F

Raindrops on Roses (Part Twenty-Five): Tigers Are Not Afraid

(trailer)

Like I said last week, this was supposed to be where I talked about Robert Eggers’ new movie, The Lighthouse, but I messed up the dates -- it comes out this weekend -- so instead let’s take a look at a different movie that came out this year (in English-speaking countries, at least), Tigers Are Not Afraid, or Vuelven, directed by Issa Lopez. And while we’re still on the theme of “reflections,” we may as well start drawing comparisons to a similar magical realism movie with horror elements, Guillermo Del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth.

To be fair, the movie kind of invited the comparisons itself by having a quote from Del Toro in its trailer. Besides, if you were going to invite comparisons, you could do worse than a movie like Pan’s Labyrinth. But let’s start with the differences, first.

Tigers sets itself in the modern day, with its magical elements coming from the three pieces of chalk the main character, Estrella, comes into possession of. Each piece of chalk represents a wish that she can make, but she quickly learns that what she says and what she wishes to happen are never quite the same thing.

Also different are the child characters aside from the protagonist. Pan’s Labyrinth intentionally only had one child character (the baby doesn’t count), portraying its Spanish Civil War setting through the eyes of a child who could not be more isolated. Tigers Are Not Afraid, meanwhile, has four other children supporting Estrella as she tries to cope with the world around her. It’s a different dynamic; it promotes a sense of group unity that Labyrinth lacked.

What Tigers Are Not Afraid keeps, though, are a lot of the things that made Pan’s Labyrinth so strong of a movie. Magical realism stories like these are traditionally Hispanic/Latin American, and without meaning to say the originals do it better, these movies replicate those same sorts of feelings. The way the movie plays out, it’s plausible that the chalk simply had no effect at all, and that Estrella’s experiences with the supernatural were simply hallucinations, possibly as a result of trauma.

On top of this, Tigers also has to keep one final story plate spinning: its own nested story about a prince and a tiger, using it as an allegory for everything that’s happening. And again, it’s rather effective, and the two combine at the end for a final sequence.

The only reason this movie might be a difficult recommend (provided you’re not a heathen and deathly opposed to reading subtitles) is that it’s currently only on a fairly niche streaming service, the horror-focused Shudder. But if you do already have it or you otherwise have access to it, this should be on your list.

-F

Next time: Something different…

Raindrops on Roses (Part Twenty-Four): Suspiria (2018)

(trailer)

How do you look at a movie like Suspiria (1977) and think “You know what this needs? Less color and a more intimate soundtrack. And also it needs to be at least an hour longer”? Because that’s what this is. Just after the trailers play and the logos announce who made the movie, a title card appears: Six acts and an epilogue, it says. This movie has no shame.

One of the most prominent pieces of marketing material I saw for this movie was this quote by the director, Luca Guadigno. He says that this is not an attempt to remake the 1978 Giallo film, but to recreate the feelings he had when he first saw that movie. And look, I don’t want to read too much into that -- like, drawing one-to-one comparisons between the two films gets pretty difficult pretty quickly -- but it does open up the possibility of a new label for this sort of movie: the “spiritual companion piece”.

Still, though, an hour longer? Before I’d seen both movies, I had to wonder, what got added in that extra hour that justifies itself in some way. The answer, I think, lies in the extension of some of the original movie’s themes. For example, Suspiria (1977) goes out of its way to mention that Helena Markos was a Greek Immigrant to Germany, and was shunned by the locals for fear that she was a witch. The 2018 film expands this to set the film specifically in West Germany post-World War II and introduces a subplot involving a character looking for their partner after the war separated them.

A lot of the movie, then, goes out of its way to present itself as the more mature option, from its own “kills”, to its muted aesthetic, to how it’s mentally aged up its characters. But at the same time, changing the plot like this reinvigorates the mystery to those who have seen the previous movie.

Susie, Sarah, Olga, Markos, these characters are all here. But they’re in a whole different movie, and I noticed as I watched these films back-to-back, they complement each other really well. Whether you want a sometimes-too-long dirge about the holocaust or a bright and colorful mystery slasher, Suspiria is there for you.

-F

Next time: This is a little awkward. The intention was to talk about Robert Eggers’ new movie, The Lighthouse as a comparison to The Witch (hence the “reflections” theme) but it looks like I miscalculated. I’ll still talk about a horror movie next week, but now I need to figure out what.

Raindrops on Roses (Part Twenty-Three): The Witch

(trailer)

This is, like, the horror movie that got me into horror movies, if that makes sense. I hope it does, because, while The Witch (stylized at The VVitch for reasons we’ll get into) does do a lot of things right in terms of horror -- especially in creating and maintaining dread -- a sizeable chunk of its audience did not take well to it. It has the same problems, I think, that It Comes At Night -- a movie I talked about last year -- had. It was marketed in a way that lead people to believe it was something it wasn’t.

So what is The Witch not? Well, it’s not over-the-top, for one thing. It’s a very subdued sort of horror, the kind that you have to make when you’re working on a rather small budget and with uncooperative animals. The fact that it looks as great as it does is definitely a testament to how well they used the money the filmmaker’s had.

But when I say subdued, I also mean in how it presents itself. The titular witch, for example, doesn’t really show herself for much of the movie. I mean, she’s there pretty early on and the camera is never demonstrated to be unreliable so the audience knows she’s there throughout the movie, but the way the movie plays out, much of our protagonists’ misfortune could easily be attributed to mundane problems.

This is something that I think is actually to the movie’s detriment. It’s not decisive. It can’t seem to decide whether the events are all because of some hallucinogenic corn rot or because the devil himself is destroying a puritan family, and that threatens to tear the movie apart.

I criticize The Witch a lot, but that’s only because the rest of it is so great. Like Suspiria and other well-made movies before it, it has a very specific aesthetic in mind and uses that to carry most of the mood. This isn’t just in the muted tones or the dress or the cinematography, but also in the characters. How they talk, what they talk about, everything that could be done to transport the audience back to the seventeenth century, this movie tries to do, even extending to the marketing materials. People thought The VVitch really was how you spelled the title, because that's how people did back then.

“A New England Folktale” is the movie’s tagline, and it plays out like one. I don’t want to spoil more than I already have, but when watching (or rewatching, if you’re good and watching these movies before I write about them), look at each character’s most obvious wants. William wants to experience mortal grief to further his eternal reward. Caleb is going through puberty and the sexual ideas that go with it. Thomasin longs for the pleasures of England. Each of them (and the other characters) receives these things, but in a “be careful what you wish for” sort of way.

Plus, there are only, like, three jump scares. If that, like me, was your barrier from seeing more horror, this is certainly a good place to start getting past that to the good stuff in the middle.

-F

Next time: Suspiria (2018), directed by Luca Guadigno

Raindrops on Roses (Part Twenty-Two): Suspiria (1977)

(trailer)

Let’s start with this: “The only thing scarier than the last twelve minutes are the first ninety-two” is one hell of a tagline, even if it’s not strictly speaking true. From just looking at the plot summary, Dario Argento’s Suspiria, not to be confused with the 2018 version directed by Luca Guadagnino, takes the form of a pretty by-the-numbers slasher film, though that itself requires some moving around of the timeline a bit. It’s about seventeen years after Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho started codifying the genre, but calling Suspiria a “by-the-numbers” slasher movie ignores the timeline, where the glut of that genre that started after Halloween’s release a year later.

Mentioning Alfred Hitchcock is actually rather important, though. The genre of cinema Argento’s work falls under, “Giallo”, professes that it owes quite a lot to Hitchcock’s style of filmmaking. Giallo is a pulp-y style -- it’s Italian for “yellow”, as in, the color of pulp novella pages -- and strives to match Hitchcock’s methods of doling out information and creating suspense. And this is something that Suspiria does quite well. If there’s any reason to watch Suspiria, it’s for the atmosphere.

If you haven’t actually seen this movie yet (i.e., if you didn’t watch it in the week between when I said I was going to talk about it and now), at least take a look at this still frame:

It’s almost overwhelming to look at, and that’s the point. Almost the whole movie, especially during the movie’s more violent moments, looks like that. And when it’s not the environment, it’s the lighting, and even when it’s neither of those, the soundtrack provides an additional layer of tension. There’s a specific eighteen or nineteen note melody that is set to trigger an almost pavlovian response in its audience.

If there’s one thing that Suspiria (1977) does poorly, it’s in the other half of the Hitchcock method I mentioned earlier: the doling out of information. It’s a slasher movie, but it also wants to be a mystery movie, it wants to invest its audience in who is killing these people and how. Putting aside the forty-plus years of pop-culture osmosis that this movie has been through, there’s also the fact that the same theme, that same overarching nineteen note melody also contains hints of a rather spoilery word. I won’t repeat it here, just in case, but seriously, it’s right there in the theme. You’ll know what’s going on before the opening credits are over if you’re paying attention.

But that still sells the movie short, I think. Because it is an exercise in atmosphere more than anything else, and some might argue that knowing the answer to the movie’s mystery only makes it all the more intriguing of a film. There’s a reason it’s survived as long as it has. It’s still a pleasure to watch, and I’d recommend it to just about anyone who is interested in its sort of horror.

-F

Next time: The VVitch, directed by Robert Eggers

Every Movie In The Entire World, Ranked (Part One)

I’m kidding, of course.

Here’s an anecdote to start us off. I listen to a weekly music stream. Think of it like a radio show, I guess would be the best way to describe it, where the host spends the first half of the show playing what she found interesting out of the week’s new releases, and the second half taking requests from the audience. Occasionally, something rather well-known will come through the filter of suggestions (I remember Yes’ Roundabout coming on the first time I tuned in), and she’ll always say the same thing whenever it comes up:

“Just think of all the songs that have ever been written, ever, and now remember that there is so much more music coming out every single day,” she says. “Nobody can listen to all that music. There are probably a bunch of songs someone thinks are must-listens that you’ve never heard of.”

I think the same can be said for every artistic medium, from food to theatre to paintings to, yes, films as well. Movies have a much larger buy-in, too, especially for the more niche or independent ones. You have to sit in a dark room for two hours, more or less, and just take in what’s being presented to you. A song is what, three or four minutes?

And yet, I’ve also noticed people get a lot more vocal about “the classic” movies. “You haven’t seen X? And you call yourself a cinema snob?” And my general response has been, well, first of all, a label like “cinema snob” comes with a lot of baggage that I’m not particularly interested in being associated with (nor is it something I’m willing to go over here), nor have I ever called myself that (I fashioned myself a critic once -- that didn’t go over well), and second, I guess see the above quote?

I just figure I’ll pick up the older movies by osmosis, really. The worst someone can really do in this situation would be to march me to a TV, sit me down and put the movie on, right? Done, watched the movie, you never have to bother me about it again. And hey, I’ll probably like it, too.

In the meantime, there are so many movies I’ll never get to see coming out every day. I can try and stem the flow somewhat, but it’s an impossible task. I just have to hope I catch some good ones along the way.

-F

Raindrops on Roses (Part Nineteen): Frances Ha

(trailer)

The coming-of-age genre has always felt to me like it’s deliberately tearing itself apart towards two extremes. At its core, it breaks down childlike wonderment, presenting a cynical view of reality with a very firm “This is the way the world is” message. But it also -- more often than not, it seems -- comes with a happy ending attached. The “comer-of-age” grows up and adapts to the world, finding things to replace the ideals they left behind.

By those metrics, Frances Ha would be a relatively standard coming-of-age film. But there is a key difference here. The protagonist of these sorts of stories is normally a teenager, matching their mental turn towards adulthood with their physical one. The titular Frances is twenty-seven. This may not seem like much, but it means Frances has wildly different issues she has to overcome. Compare this film, for example, to writer and star Greta Gerwig’s 2017 film, Lady Bird. While Saoirse Ronan’s character is dealing with the trials and tribulations of her final year of high school, from friendship drama to relationships to her equally strong-willed mother, Frances finds that all of her friends are moving away while she’s trapped in a career she no longer finds satisfying.

One might note, though, that the basic structure remains the same. Despite her age, Frances Halladay still has a lot of ideals that just don’t work in a cynical world. Some might read that as a failure on the part of the writing, creating a woman-child who might as well be just out of college if she’s going to act like she does. But that’s part of the point, I feel. One of the major lessons that Frances needs to learn is that life is perfectly fine moving on without her.

There’s also a charm that goes into the various episodes of Frances’ life, another thing that extends to many coming-of-age stories. There isn’t really an antagonist. There are low points, yes, and characters fight, but everything is mended by the end with that same resolution I mentioned at the beginning: Frances grows up. And yes, there’s some melancholy attached to that. But there’s a hopefulness to it as well. She’ll figure it out.

-F

One And Done

This is going to be another one of those “I think it’s interesting that this phenomenon exists but I don’t have too much more to comment about it other than saying, ‘Look at this cool thing.’” But its neatness is also why I’m talking about it. So temper your expectations, I guess, but not too much.

I think it’s weird how often I go one-and-done with movies. Like, I go to a cinema, stare at a screen for two hours -- maybe more, maybe less -- reflect on my experience a bit, and that’s it. That’s the entirety of my experience with a movie. Sometimes I’ll talk about it later, generally in a, “Oh, have you seen this,” sort of way, but once I’ve left the theater, it’s very likely I’m not going to see that movie again.

Take Madeline’s Madeline from that top five/six I did last year. Or even The Proposal, which I just wrote about. I found both of those movies to be very affecting and occasionally technically impressive. Both of them are also ninety minutes I’ll never experience again unless I get exceedingly lucky and come across them by chance. It won’t be by myself, either; I’ll be forcing these movies on a friend or family member.

I bring these instances up in comparison to a similar phenomenon: the idea of “wanting to unwatch something so as to experience it for the first time again.” How I understand this concept (to be really clinical about it) is people yearn for their stronger positive reactions to things, given that they’re impossible to recreate even on a second viewing. Their glee at a season or series finale, for example, or their shock at a particular twist.

This isn’t something I’ve experienced myself. Not because I’m not really into certain pieces of media, just because, well, I don’t know. Maybe because of how seldomly I rewatch things? But even in terms of music, songs that I listen to over and over, I don’t think I have thought of any of that. As rad as the intro to Justice’s Genesis is, I don’t ever think I’d wished it was the first time I’d heard it.

I also don’t think I don’t have very strong reactions to things. I mean, I spent almost an entire blog post selling The Proposal to anybody who would listen. Every post on my now-defunct review blog was about a film that I enjoyed. What I like, I really like. The only other cause I can think of, though, is just because of the number of movies I’ve seen over the course of, say, a month has only increased. The idea there being that each viewing of a new movie is a new chance for those highest of high moments.

But that seems a little elitist when read like that. It reads like, “Oh, you people just need to watch more movies/read more books/listen to more music.” And I don’t think that was my intention at all. If anything, I’m all for that feeling. The way I experience these movies, I wonder if there’s a hint of “art is disposable” mixed in there in a way that I don’t think was intended by the artists. Not everything has to be a complex sandcastle just waiting to be washed away by the waves, right?

Like I said at the beginning, I don’t know what any of this really means. I just think it’s a neat dichotomy of ideas. It’s always useful, I think (and if you excuse the pretentious phrasing), to consider just how one goes about consuming media.

Come back next week to, ironically, read about a film I have watched a couple times.

-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

Trailers (Not The Park Kind)

If you want you can think of this as a follow-up/rehash of that spoilers post I did a few weeks back. Not that it covers the same material per se, but it covers similar internet reactions to similar portions of media. Instead of talking about the merits of not giving away the final moments of certain stories, let’s talk about the opposite: the parts they show before the movie or game or show is even out.

In fact, spoilers and trailers are more related than one might realize. There are numerous people on the internet that swear by not watching trailers, believing that they’re either deceptive marketing out to trick you or give away way too much of any given movie. There are people say that theaters play too many and people that say they have to see all of them.

There’s definitely an art to a good trailer. The one for Suspiria (2018), for example, seems like one you’d get tired of seeing after a certain point, but I never seemed to. Madeline’s Madeline (2018)’s trailer, too. What makes both of these work, I think, is how instead of describing the plot, they’re big on conveying the emotion of the film. For Suspiria, that was dread. For Madeline’s Madeline, that was its dream logic.

We’ve certainly moved on since “In a world…” (not the 2013 movie (obligatory trailer link)).

There are other, similar promotional materials as well. Blade Runner 2049 (2017) had a few prequel (interquel?) short films before its release, as did Alien: Covenant (2017). These tend to be the more nostalgia-driven films, I’ve noticed, but it’s something I’ve noticed as far back as Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope (1948), which had an additional scene with a character who otherwise starts the movie very much dead. There’s not much to say about these because they’re exactly what they are: superfluous to the main story, which is why they aren’t in the film.

But that brings up an interesting idea. Trailers don’t have to show what’s in the movie. Like I mentioned, this can cause some consternation among audiences who feel lied to. It seems like every horror movie A24 produces falls victim to this, including It Comes At Night (2017), which I’ve talked about before. To elaborate, it seems like they prefer slower-burn horror, but they always want to market it as more standard fare to attract an audience. The most recent example of this was High Life (2019), which has a trailer promising space-horror, but it’s written and directed by Claire Denis, a French arthouse filmmaker. Now, I understand being frustrated, but one does have to remember that they’re being sold something.

I’ve been trying to talk about the better side of trailers because I’m firmly in the “I enjoy them,” camp. Really, the only trend I’ve found annoying about trailers is how they tend to announce themselves online. As advertisements, I mean, there’s been a huge push to have the first five seconds be an ad in itself so that people don’t skip past them on Youtube (for an example, see that Blade Runner 2049 trailer). It’s like how jpeg compression can slowly ruin images, combining bits together saves data but it means it ends up as a flash of incomprehensible images and sound. I imagine some poor editor, having made what they think is a pretty good trailer, being forced to hack away at it until only the explosions and thrills remain.

But there are also the bad ones. The ones people can only wonder how bad the movie’s going to be if it’s going to sell itself like this. Sonic the Hedgehog (which I’m not going to link here) had a trailer so bad it’s causing artists to probably go into a crunch period to fix some of its more out-there aspects, and even without those its best selling point is probably hoping that people see it to laugh at it (or Jim Carrey, I guess). Because again, it’s an artform. It’s meant to be judged.

Again, these things are trying to sell something. I don’t want to downplay that. When I say I like watching trailers, I’m still participating as a consumer, not so much as a critic. So that’s at least one reason to be wholly against them. But at the same time, I wouldn’t have seen some of the smaller movies I’ve seen without some of these trailers, so the idea of completely ignoring them just seems completely foreign to me.

-F