"But I'm a Cheerleader" is Just What I Wanted

One of my favorite movie discoveries this year is "But I'm a Cheerleader," a satirical LGBT romantic comedy that has developed a significant cult following over the years.  It's about a high school cheerleader named Megan (Natasha Lyonne), who is suspected of lesbianism and shipped off to a conversion therapy program, True Directions, by her frightened parents (Bud Cort, Mink Stole).  True Directions is run by the villainous Mary Brown (Cathy Moriarty) and her henchman Mike (RuPaul in one of his only roles out of drag).  Fellow campers include Hilary (Melanie Lynskey), Dolph (Dante Basco), and a sarcastic rebel named Graham (Clea DuVall).  Megan doesn't believe that she's a lesbian, but her time at True Directions makes her question herself, and she develops a connection with Graham.  

Critics at the time of the film's release complained that the film's lampooning of anti-LGBT panic and homophobic cultural norms were too broad and tended to be preaching to the choir.  Its embrace of campy visuals and references to counterculture greats like John Waters was appreciated, but at the same time some felt that the comedy was too gentle, and the skewering wasn't nearly as strong as it could have been.  However, remembering where the culture was in 1999, two years after Ellen Degeneres coming out, with broad swathes of the United States still wildly misinformed about anything having to do with the LGBT community, "But I'm a Cheerleader" doesn't seem miscalibrated to me at all.  In fact, I think it's held up very well, and its humor and messaging are more timely than ever.    

I love the film's utterly unsubte art direction.  True Directions exists in this totally artificial world of constructed gender norms, where Megan and her fellow happy campers are pushed to conform themselves to aggressively color coded stereotypes of outdated heterosexuality.  The girls are put in pink uniforms, get makeovers, and perform housework with pastel cleaning implements.  The boys are put in blue, and obliged to build up their masculinity through sports and manual labor.  The sets are painted to resemble dollhouse aesthetics, filling the frame with big blocks of oppressive color.  Outside the confines of True Directions, the world is also heightened to some degree, and there's some brief goosing of LGBT culture, but the main event is really the nightmarishly reductive vision of heteronormativity that is being imposed on Megan.

"Cheerleader" features a great collection of talent and some memorable performances.  Natasha Lyonne and Clea DuVall are very winning as our two confused teenaged heroines, who eventually figure out their priorities and their feelings for each other.  I like Lyonne especially, for keeping Megan three-dimensional and complicated in the face of so much absurdity.  She's very honest in her doubts about being a lesbian, and it's easy to relate to her growing pains.  However, Cathy Moriarty steals the movie.  She makes for such a hysterical villain here, hellbent on stamping out any whiff of non-conformity while made up like a demented Martha Stewart.  I haven't seen her in anything significant in such a long time, and I'd forgotten how amazing she is in roles like this.    

I suspect that this would have been one of my favorite films if I'd seen it as a teenager.  It fits right into that vein of goofy, off-kilter comedies about outsiders, and it has the outlandish visuals I love, like "Edward Scissorhands" and "The Addams Family" movies.  I'm a little sad that director Jamie Babbitt doesn't seem to have attempted something this visually ambitious since.  Sure, it's messaging is too blunt, and its style is sometimes garish, but "Cheerleader" does such a good job of capturing that feeling of adolescent alienation and awkwardness, and handles its characters with a deftness that I admire.  Also, I'm a sucker for an unrealistically happy ending.

I understand why this movie didn't connect with everyone, but it managed to hit the bullseye dead center for me.

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The Dream World of "The Green Knight"

I sometimes hold back from reviewing certain films because I'm not sure that I can give them a fair shake.  One of these is David Lowery's "A Ghost Story," from 2017.  It's a slow-paced, existential art film about a ghost watching life go by from his perspective.  It feels like a film that achieved what it wanted to, and created some beautiful images along the way, but is also way too indulgent for me to get behind.  Since I felt so many of my reservations ultimately came down to my own personal taste, I thought it was unfair to take any kind of position in writing, and let "A Ghost Story" go by largely unremarked upon.

I've had some of those same feelings again about Lowery's latest, a mostly faithful retelling of the Arthurian legend of Sir Gawain, titled "The Green Knight."  It is easily the most beautiful fantasy film I've seen in years, a magical realist vision of the Arthurian age, full of supernatural forces and  natural beauty.  The closest antecedent I can think of is "Pan's Labyrinth," due to its fantastical creatures and melding of harsh environments with sublime fairy tale visuals.  "The Green Knight," however, is much more narratively obfuscated and difficult to parse.  The mood is often dreamlike, and Lowery delights in blurring the lines between fantasy and reality with visions and illusions.  

The broader story is fairly straightforward.  Gawain (Dev Patel), nephew of the King (Sean Harris) and son of a sorceress (Sarita Choudhury), is a young nobleman who hasn't yet proven his worth to become a knight.  He's in attendance at court when the Green Knight (Ralph Ineson), a supernatural creature of unknown origin, arrives with a challenge - land a blow on his person and win his green axe, but any blow given must be received in kind one year later, at the Green Chapel.  Gawain agrees and chops off the Green Knight's head, but the Green Knight lives in spite of this.  A year later, Gawain must set out on a quest to find the Green Chapel and allow the Green Knight to behead him.  

Once Gawain actually sets out on his journey, the film becomes a series of encounters with various characters, some interesting, some tedious, and some inexplicable.  There's the young scavenger (Barry Keoghan) he meets on a battlefield.  There's the mysterious young woman, identified as Saint Winifred (Erin Kellyman).  There is a fox, who befriends him along the way.  There's the Lord (Joel Edgerton) and the Lady (Alicia Vikander), who invite Gawain into their home, which seems to exist in another time period.  Vikander also plays Gawain's lover Essel, a prostitute, who seems destined to bear the brunt of Gawain's thoughtlessness and carelessness.

"The Green Knight" is an oddity in this day and age because its aims and its themes are so classical.  Gawain is continually tested for his purity, for his bravery, and for his integrity through various trials, following a moral code that often seems impenetrable but is sternly absolute.  Not remembering the original Gawain story very well, I found the narrative difficult to follow, sometimes deliberately so.  Giants show up for a scene for no apparent reason.  It's hinted that there are connections between certain characters, and certain objects, and having some prior knowledge of the Arthur legends is necessary to make any attempt at interpreting the film.

So thank goodness for Dev Patel.  He is such a fascinating presence as Gawain, this storybook figure with great capacity for both nobility and depravity.  He's essentially embodying the trope of the hapless pilgrim on a spiritual quest, even though the film's iconography often elevates him to a loftier status that he has yet to earn.  Patel keeps him very human, portraying his struggles against cowardice and selfishness with very little dialogue.  Gawain fails constantly, and reeks of insecurity.   So much of Patel's performance is just in his body language and his eyes, relaying so much confusion, guilt, and fear.  

I don't know if "The Green Knight" is a good film, but like "A Ghost Story" it's not one that's much to my tastes.  It looks gorgeous and I enjoyed certain scenes - particularly the ending - but too much of it is all about maintaining this trance-like mood and leaden pacing that left me downright bored.  I'm glad David Lowery gets to make films like this, but I do wish I could figure out how to appreciate them more.  

             

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My Favorite Preston Sturges Film

I've done my write-up for Frank Capra, so I feel obligated to have an entry for the director I always mixed him up with, Preston Sturges.  Sturges was a master of the screwball comedy and a connoisseur of human foibles and eccentricities.  He came to Hollywood as a screenwriter, and only got his shot as a director after a decade in the studio system - and how he broke through to become the first real Hollywood writer/director with significant creative control is the stuff of legend.  He was widely admired and envied during his own lifetime for his artistic independence, though this proved to be short-lived after several contentious battles with the studios.  

Once Sturges got his shot, it resulted in a spectacular run of comedy films in the 1940s, including "The Lady Eve," "The Miracle of Morgan's Creek," "The Palm Beach Story," and my favorite, "Sullivan's Travels."  Because his earlier projects were based on older scripts, "Sullivan's Travels" can be counted as the first movie Sturges really put together as an auteur.  It starts as a show business satire that quickly morphs into a cross-country journey of discovery and comedic farce, featuring mistaken identities, screwball romance, and some pointed social commentary.  Joel McCrea plays Sullivan, a hotshot young comedy director who decides that he wants to make serious, important films, and travels America as an anonymous tramp in order to get in touch with the plight of the downtrodden.  Of course, he gets more than he bargained for.

Sturges has claimed that he wrote the film as a response to the self-serious messages that he saw creeping into comedies, and wanted "Sullivan" to make a stand for the value of a good honest laugh.  In order to do this, he essentially did what his protagonist wants to do - he made a socially conscious film about the plight of the downtrodden.  In fact, the scenes of poverty and miserable prison life were considered so objectionable, that censors refused to allow the film to be exported overseas.  However, the film is also a delightful comedy that punctures the highfalutin' pretensions of Sullivan at every turn, mixing sobering realism with goofy slapstick, acknowledging the harshness of the social divide while simultaneously featuring an effervescent romance that plays out exactly how every other silver screen romance plays out.  Somehow, Sturges has his cake and eats it too.       

I think the secret to the film is that it's never cynical.  It's not a black comedy in any sense, because Sturges is totally earnest in whatever he's showing us from scene to scene - the sobering lives of the poor during the Great Depression, the meet cute between Sullivan and the girl, and Sullivan finally learning the value of a good laugh.  Sullivan's crime isn't hypocrisy or narrow-mindedness, but naivete.  He honestly doesn't understand or appreciate what his audience needs until he walks a literal mile in their shoes, and the fact that he's so eager to walk that mile makes him terribly likeable.  This is also one of Veronica Lake's best roles, making great use of her considerable screen charisma, while also giving her the chance to really play a well-rounded character with some principles and pride and great one liners.     

"Sullivan's Travels" is also one of the first films about Hollywood that feels properly grounded in something like the real world.  The would-be starlet wants to meet Ernst Lubitsch.  Sullivan essentially wants to be Frank Capra at the beginning of the film.  His struggle with creative burnout feels completely genuine, and so too does his tone-deaf indulgence of his own ego.  The big epiphany takes place during a screening of a Pluto cartoon - a piece of real media that we see being enjoyed by a mixed-race audience.  The sequence has become iconic, a beautiful encapsulation of how the audience's relationship to media is often completely different from the filmmakers' or the critics.'

The film decries the socially significant "message film," but its own message remains painfully resonant today - the downtrodden don't need to be told they're downtrodden.  They're usually better served by a little escapism and a good laugh.  And as someone who frequently gets too wrapped up in artsy, hoity-toity cinema, that's a good lesson to always keep in mind. 

What I've Seen - Preston Sturges The Great McGinty (1940) Christmas in July (1940) The Lady Eve (1941) Sullivan's Travels (1941) The Palm Beach Story (1942) The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1944) Hail the Conquering Hero (1944) Unfaithfully Yours (1948)

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What Went Wrong With "In the Heights"?

 

I knew very little about "In the Heights" before I watched it, just that it was an adaptation of the musical that Lin Manuel Miranda created before "Hamilton."  I didn't know any of the music or songs.  I didn't know the story, though I suspected it was a modern update on "West Side Story" due to the New York setting.  And I didn't know the main actors, aside from Anthony Ramos as the lead, and only because he'd been in "Hamilton." Lin Manuel Miranda, Jimmy Smits, Stephanie Beatriz, Christopher Jackson and Dascha Polanco appear in smaller parts - really nothing significant enough to write home about.  So, with no big stars, no memorable songs, no interesting story, and a long running time, is it any wonder that not many are showing up to see "In the Heights"?

The musical is built around two eventful summer days in the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York City.  Usnavi de la Vega (Ramos) is our narrator and guide, a young bodega owner looking to get out of the Heights, maybe to the Dominican Republic where his parents were from.  His love interest is Vanessa (Melissa Barrera), a hairdresser who wants to be a fashion designer, but is thwarted in her attempts to move up in the world.  We also follow a second couple, cab dispatcher Benny (Corey Hawkins), and his boss's daughter Nina (Leslie Grace), who has just returned to the Heights after a discouraging first year at Stanford University.  Nina's father Kevin (Smits) has given up a lot to send her to school, but Nina is buckling under the pressure.  As the day rolls along, someone wins the lottery, someone dies, there's a blackout, and we have many, many rousing song and dance numbers.

Washington Heights is largely populated by Dominican, Mexican, Puerto Rican, and Cuban immigrants.  There are frequent lines of dialogue and lyrics in untranslated Spanish.  The show also finds ways to feature different cultural standards like food, clothing, and of course the music.  While on the one hand this is wonderful to see, and the efforts toward more diversity are appreciated (as imperfect as the Twitterati have made clear that it is), on the other hand this is also another hurdle for general audiences to clear.  I was surprised at the lack of hand-holding, and the multiple ways in which the adaptation makes it difficult for audiences to engage with the material.  Director John Chu organizes spectacle that is very rousing, but unmoving.  I suspect it's because the main characters often feel like they're getting crowded out of the frame, and it's only very late in the film that we get a number with really novel staging.  If the point was to make the viewer feel like they were hanging out in Washington Heights for a few hours, they succeeded, but the immersiveness sometimes feels counterproductive to the dramatic thrust of the film.     

After the big opening title number, "In the Heights," there is a surprising lack of momentum and conflict in the story.  Usnavi, Vanessa, Nina, and Benny all have problems that are very internal, and none of the performances are particularly noteworthy.  We watch them go about their lives, chasing their dreams and circling each other romantically.  Mostly what comes across, however, is that they're all unhappy and never shut up about it.  Everyone also constantly feels like they're getting short shrift, maybe because the film is trying to do too much.  Gentrification, social justice, and poverty issues are all dutifully namechecked, but the show doesn't actually deal with any of this in a meaningful way.  It's more successful at getting across the experience of being a first or second generation immigrant, which is great, but which I've also seen done better in other musicals.    

If there's one thing that I feel like "In the Heights" is missing, it's a sense of fun.  The best scenes in the movie are of Lin Manuel Miranda's shaved ice piragua seller waging war against a Mr. Softee truck, because there's some real humor and targeted tension there.  The rest of the movie feels like homework.  I didn't come out humming any of the songs.  None of the characters left much of an impression.  I didn't care if the couples got together, and if Usnavi ever went back to the Dominican Republic.  I don't go to musicals for escapism, but I do expect to be entertained.  And "In the Heights" is a lot less entertaining than I hoped it would be.    

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A Quick "Rick and Morty" Update

I caught up on the latest batch of "Rick and Morty" episodes recently, which were a noticeable step down from previous seasons.  I figured that this was a good time to put down some thoughts on how the series has been doing.  I haven't written anything directly about the show in a few years, since the episodes have been released in small batches and the show doesn't really have any longer storylines or much character progression.  Sure, Beth and Jerry separated for a bit, and there's a Beth clone running around in space, and Morty's love life isn't quite as dead as it used to be, and a ton of backstory has been revealed, but the most nihilistically snarky show on television has found a status quo and is sticking to it.  And as a result, "Ricky and Morty" has plateaued hard.

Part of the issue is clearly the show's own success.  In 2018, Adult Swim ordered a whopping 70 episodes of the series, and at its current pace of ten episodes a year, this thing is going to run until 2026 at least.  You can't burn through material at the rate that the first few seasons did when you have 70 episodes to fill.  So now, the series feels like it's pacing itself.  While the Smith family is having insane adventures every week, the family unit is staying more or less intact.  The show is also doggedly trying to improve Rick and Morty's mental health, while only very superficially dealing with their endless emotional baggage.  While the show does confront Rick's megalomaniacal self-destructive tendencies and existential malaise, it also tends to find handy shortcuts for processing them.  It doesn't help that there are so many formulaic episodes this year, where Rick is essentially a wacky grandpa being chased around by old enemies or getting into hijinks - very disturbing hijinks, but nothing we haven't seen before.  

And that's another problem.  The shock value of Rick's behavior has steadily declined over time, because we've been exposed to it so often.  After fifty episodes, watching Morty accidentally destroy a civilization, or seeing the Smiths murder endless variations of themselves isn't novel anymore.  The show isn't treating these events as particularly weighty either, the way that it used to in the earliest episodes.  Instead, the Smiths maintain this remarkably blase attitude toward the worst of their depravities.  Morty and Summer accidentally create a giant incest baby?  Well, that's annoying, but nothing to get upset about.  With no real consequences in play anymore, there are no stakes to any of the adventures, and episodes rarely leave much of an impact.  The absurdity is still fun to watch, and I frequently find myself appreciating the writers' ingenuity and sick sense of humor, but it's just not the same.

This is not to say that I don't think "Rick and Morty" still has a lot of mileage left in it, or that the creators can't get themselves out of this rut.  What was so fascinating about this series from the start was the psychological complexity of the major characters, and even though the Smiths are currently in a comfortable holding pattern, they don't have to stay there.  In fact, I'm surprised we haven't seen bigger changes already.  The show potentially has a decent roster of recurring characters who are only very slowly being sketched in - Jessica, the President, Birdperson and Tammy, and of course the barely glimpsed ex-Mrs. Sanchez, Diane.  There's also a lot of perilous emotional terrain left to explore.  If the show simply let the kids get older and start forming real relationships outside of the family, it would open up so many more avenues for insanity - and provide Rick with more victims.      

  

The fandom has long wanted more of the slowly percolating Evil Morty storyline, and while I'm glad that the writers finally gave in and pursued this in the finale, I'm also not sure where we go from here.   Part of me hopes that since Evil Morty sort of won and got what he wanted, this will be the last we see of him, and the show can move on to other things.  

Oh, and the Christopher Lloyd and Jaeden Martell teaser was adorbs.

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"A Quiet Place Part II" and "The Tomorrow War"

John Krasinski continues to impress with "A Quiet Place Part II," which picks up just after the original concluded.  The surviving members of the Abbott family are forced to flee their homestead and find a new place to hide from the invading aliens.  Evelyn (Emily Blunt), Regan (Millicent Simmond), Marcus (Noah Jupe), and the new baby make their way to an abandoned foundry, occupied by Emmett (Cillian Murphy), an old friend who has become embittered by isolation.

I think the film actually peaks with its opening sequence, where we watch the initial arrival of the aliens play out while the Abbotts, including father Lee (Krasinski), are having a typical family outing.  Watching how everyone reacts, and figures out how to escape and survive is thrilling, and it's a smart way to get the audience firmly back into this world, and reminded of the rules in play.  The storyline of the rest of the film is much more loosely structured.  Evelyn, Regan, and Marcus are eventually split up and each is forced to face the aliens alone.  Marcus and Regan are pushed more to the forefront, taking up bigger hero roles, which lets the young actors stretch a bit more.  We also get to see other corners of the world post-invasion, including the ways that surviving humans have learned to cope - or failed to.  

The strength of the sequel is the same as its predecessor - the commitment to a unique premise that gives many opportunities for nervy action and suspense sequences.  The use of quiet and stillness isn't as pronounced this time out, but it's still very effectively deployed.  My only real issue with the film is that it is clearly  a connector piece to another inevitable sequel.  The plot and characters see some decent progression, and I appreciate that the scope of the adventure is kept pretty small, but this still feels more like the latest episode of a "Quiet Place" serial than a proper movie.  So far it's a very good serial, though, so I'm not inclined to complain too much.    

Now on to "The Tomorrow War," which is frankly not nearly as pulpy as the premise would suggest.  It stars Chris Pratt as Dan Forester, a veteran and teacher who is drafted into a war that is taking place decades in the future.  The human race is losing against an invading force of aliens, and as a desperate measure are taking people from the past to shore up their dwindling resistance.  Dan leaves behind a wife, Emmy (Betty Gilpin) and daughter Muri (Ryan Kiera Armstrong), to travel to the future war, alongside average people like Charlie (Sam Richardson), a talkative scientist.  Other major characters include Dan's estranged father played by JK Simmons, and a colonel played by Yvonne Strahovski who Dan meets in the future. 

When I first heard about "Tomorrow War," I assumed the time travel was going to play a bigger role in the film, and we'd have a much sillier, "Bill and Ted" style treatment of the war against the aliens.  Instead, the tone is initially very grim.  The aliens, called the White Spikes, are terrifying Xenomorph-like critters capable of causing massive amounts of destruction.  The warfare sequences are more horrific than exciting, and a lot of people get killed off in a very short amount of time.  The concepts and the scenarios are still fairly ridiculous, but I respect that everyone does their best to play it straight, and that the script manages to come up with some pretty solid stakes for Dan in the future war.  The trouble is, the third act takes a turn for the sillier and tropey-er, which undercuts a lot of these earlier efforts.  

 

The resulting film is wildly uneven, but acceptable for gee-whiz summer blockbuster fodder.  I mean, I can't be too upset with a film where the vicious aliens are a very unsubtle metaphor for climate change, or where J.K. Simmons gets to be a snarky badass.  I regret that this was an Amazon Prime premiere, and I didn't get the chance to see the carnage on a much bigger screen.  Also, it's a terrible shame that Betty Gilpin wasn't allowed to get in on the action, and is stuck in the suburban mom role the whole time.  Then again, Chris Pratt is barely allowed to crack a smile for the duration, which is a terrible waste of his talents as well.  "Tomorrow War" is fine for what it is, but it's not showcasing what anybody involved is capable of.        

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The Bo Burnham Hyperfixation

I watched Bo Burnham's "Inside" special on Netflix a few weeks ago, not really knowing who he was, and got knocked for a loop by it.  I previously posted a full review, but long story short it's one of the most intense, beautifully executed pieces of media I've seen all year.  Subsequently, I decided to look into some of Burnham's past work.  This sent me down the digital rabbit hole, catching up on over a decade of his specials, videos, interviews, and appearances.  I haven't had my attention so totally hijacked by a single performer this way in ages, but Burnham's career is fascinating stuff.  He started out as a teenage Youtuber posting silly songs from his bedroom, then became a well-regarded stand-up comedian, actor, writer, and director over the next fifteen years.   "Inside" has far more impact in the context of Burnham's unusual career, and seeing him develop his voice and style and the major themes that he revisits over and over again.

Bo Burnham is far from my first media infatuation (see my previous posts on my most embarrassing parasocial relationships).  However, this one feels very different.  It used to be that I had fairly limited access to any performer's past work, and it could be a lengthy process to track stuff down.  In the early aughts, I used to buy obscure films off of Ebay to scope out a couple minutes of Leo DiCaprio or Jonathan Rhys Meyers in early roles.   And now here I am, watching baby-faced Bo Burnham in that one episode of "Parks and Recreation" where he plays a country singer, and that "College Humor" sketch where he's smothered by groupies, and the episode of "Green Room" where appears alongside Gary Shandling, Ray Romano, and Marc Maron - all in the same afternoon.  It is way easier to do this kind of deep dive than ever, with hours and hours of his content available online, and dedicated fans helpfully compiling links to everything and everywhere he's ever popped up.   You can literally watch him grow up and mature through the videos posted on his Youtube page, like a musical version of "Boyhood."  I'm churning through years of his work in days, something I never could have dreamed possible when I was stanning Johnny Depp as a teenager based on "21 Jump Street" reruns and a VHS copy of "Edward Scissorhands."

It's overwhelming essentially experiencing every stage of Burnham's career all at the same time, whiplashing from his bedroom ditties about high school parties, to the "Eighth Grade" press tour, to the music videos for his first comedy album, to the analysis and reaction videos for "Inside."  On the one hand this is good - the best way I've found to get myself out of these infatuations with performers is to essentially flood myself with their relevant content for a week or two until I'm sick of them.  On the other hand, the access has clearly contributed to me getting myself in this deep to begin with.  My binge is nearing its end, fortunately, and I'm reaching the point where I'm getting to the more mediocre and unsuccessful projects that tend to temper my enthusiasm.  I don't think I have the patience for the MTV series Burnham created and starred in, "Zach Stone is Gonna Be Famous," and very little interest in his tiny parts in a string of recent comedies.  His best work is really as a musical satirist, and even then there's an awful lot of sophomoric material from his earlier shows that hasn't aged well.

In the end I keep coming back to "Inside," where this whole thing started.  I've only watched it twice so far in its entirety, but I've seen many of its individual segments dozens of times, and listened to the songs even more than that.  I'm still in the process of parsing and digesting the special, trying to get my head around what its doing formally and thematically, trying to work out why it's had such an impact.  My deep dive has been very helpful for this, giving me antecedents to help contextualize things like Burnham's relationship with the internet, his fans, and his self-image.  He's given many good interviews about all these thing, including a fantastic podcast interview he did with Douglas Rushkoff, who made the vital "Merchants of Cool" documentary twenty years ago, that feels like the blueprint for much of the media commentary.  

I think what impresses me the most is the degree to which I've realized Burnham actively comments on and subverts his earlier work.  And that early work is way more interesting when you realize how much of it is building up to "Inside."  And then there's his history of mental health issues, growing pains as a comedian, and prior attempts to leave the stand-up sphere permanently. And I could write multiple additional posts about how he engages with and criticizes various forms of social media, and the ongoing metanarrative of his disillusionment with the internet.

This part of my fixation is going to take a while longer for me to work through.  Stay tuned, kids. 

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The Fascinating World of "Psycho Pass"

The anime franchise "Psycho Pass" is the brainchild of director Naoyoshi Shiotani and writer Gen Urobuchi, a cyberpunk thriller set in a dystopian future Japan.  It's a Production I.G. title, and shares many visual similarities with the studio's flagship franchise, "Ghost in the Shell."  However, "Psycho Pass" is a little more down-to-earth and less cerebral, specifically citing the work of Philip K. Dick as an influence.  Like Dick's "Minority Report," "Psycho Pass" takes place in an authoritarian society where nearly all crime has been eliminated, because criminal behavior is predicted by the sinister Sibyl System that is constantly scanning and rating people's psychological profiles - their "psycho passes."  If someone's psycho-pass becomes "clouded" beyond a certain threshold, they're declared a "latent criminal" and shipped off to mandatory therapy, prison, or in extreme cases shot on sight.

In place of the police, we have the Ministry of Welfare's Public Safety Bureau, where potential criminals are tracked and pursued by Inspectors and Enforcers.  The Inspectors are essentially police detectives, and the Enforcers are latent criminals who do the more dangerous work under them with significant restrictions.  Being an Enforcer is the only legitimate job that a latent criminal can hold, and there's a disturbing trend of Inspectors being exposed to so much psychic damage on the job that they eventually become latent criminals and Enforcers.  Our central heroine is a rookie Inspector, Akane Tsunemori (Kana Hanazawa), who joins the Bureau and is put in charge of several Enforcers, including Shinya Kogami (Tomokazu Seki), an ex-Inspector who is still obsessed with a particular unsolved case.  Other characters include Tsunemori's fellow Inspector, Ginoza (Kenji Nojima), middle aged Enforcer Masaoka (Kinryu Arimoto), and the female Chief of the Bureau, Kasei (Yoshiko Sakakibara).    

"Psycho Pass" is the anime that comes closest to following the usual template of an American crime procedural.  There are some ostentatious character design flourishes, but the style is more subdued than the majority of action anime.  The show also originally aired as part of the Noitamina programming block, and is aimed at adults, so there's little of the zany humor or fanservice that tends to take me out of similar shows.  Each episode brings a new case and a new criminal to pursue, with some thornier season-long mysteries involving serial killers Shogo Makushima (Takahiro Sakurai) and Rikako Oryo (Maaya Sakamoto) playing out more incrementally.  More importantly, there's a big focus on the protagonists' personal relationships, and the show pulls off some decent dramatic twists.  "Psycho Pass" is also a much easier watch than something like "Ghost in the Shell."  It has its share of dense intellectual rambling, and high tech eye-candy, but more human characters and an emphasis on action scenes.  The big showstopper visuals often involve the Bureau's special Dominator firearm, which essentially blows up anything it targets.    

I watched the 22 episode first season of the show, which is  self-contained, and the first theatrical film featuring most of the same characters exploring a different corner of their dystopia. The level of the production isn't as high as some of Production I.G.'s other titles, but "Psycho Pass" comes off as a perfectly serviceable action thriller.  I especially appreciate Tsunemori as a rare young female heroine who stands her ground and gets to be a big part of the action with relatively little male gaze-y material.   She fits into the older mode of sharp-minded "action girl" heroine like Noa from "Patlabor" or Deunan from "Appleseed" that I've missed in recent years.  The rest of the characters are fairly generic types, but the show uses them well, and avoids many of the usual melodramatic pitfalls.  

I'm a little surprised that the remake rights for "Psycho Pass" haven't been snapped up in the U.S., because the premise is such a strong one, featuring a host of interesting science-fiction concepts and themes to explore.  On the other hand, FOX already made a "Minority Report" series a few years ago that didn't do well.  Also, I stopped watching where I did because the show's format reportedly changes significantly from season to season, swapping out various characters.  By all accounts the first season is far and away the best one.  I might come back to the "Psycho Pass" universe eventually, but the original 22 episodes wrapped up so nicely, it feels like the best place to leave it.      

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"Black Widow" and "Gunpowder Milkshake"

While I'm happy that Scarlett Johanssen's Natasha Romanov, aka Black Widow, finally has her own movie, it couldn't be plainer that this is an afterthought, a retroactive attempt to beef up a character that the MCU is pretty much done with, and to use the audience's affection for her to introduce and propel several other characters forward.  For one thing, I'm pretty sure that "Black Widow" is the MCU's first prequel - or maybe midquel.  It takes place just after "Age of Ultron," when Natasha is on the run.  She reunites with Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), a fellow victim of the evil Dreykov (Ray Winstone) and his Red Room that trained them to be super spies.  Natasha and Yelena discover a chance to take down Dreykov for good, which means reuniting with their old surrogate parents - Alexei Shostakov, the Red Guardian (David Harbour) and Melina Vostokoff (Rachel Weisz).

"Black Widow" has a very dark and creepy title sequence that looks like something that "Se7en" era David Fincher might come up with, alluding to crimes and abuses in Natasha's past that are definitely not in PG-13 territory.  However, this is as dark as "Black Widow" ever gets.  The movie deliberately sidesteps the more serious material, even making light of some of Natasha and Yelena's past trauma.  "Black Widow" is an action thriller, but also has the surprising conceit of being something of a dysfunctional family sitcom at its core.  As we learn in the opening scenes, Natasha, Yelena, Alexei, and Melina were Russian sleeper agents that were placed together as a fake family unit in the United States in the 90s.  It was the closest thing to a real family that Natasha and Yelena ever had, so most of the movie is about reestablishing these old family bonds - this time by choice.

   

The spy thriller maneuverings of the plot are fairly predictable, and it was never more obvious that director Cate Shortland and the people in charge of all the action scenes had very little to do with each other, but the movie is slick and entertaining, and it mostly leaves a good impression.  The new characters are very engaging, especially Yelena and Alexei.  The humor is brisk and sarcastic.  The one issue I have, which is actually very common for MCU films, is that the hero with her name on the movie is one of the least interesting things about it.  Natasha gets to show off her moves, take care of unfinished business, and have her big showdowns, but she's so dry and stoic that it's hard to do much more than admire her from a distance.  "Black Widow" is actually better as a Yelena movie, and I don't think it's a coincidence that Florence Pugh is already set to reprise her role in other Marvel projects.

Now, "Gunpowder Milkshake" is a piece of disposable action fluff that is mercifully self-contained, and manages a few moments of genuine fun amidst two hours of deeply mediocre schtick.  It stars Karen Gillan as Sam, an assassin who exists in a cartoonish universe adjacent to the "John Wick" and "Kingsmen" universes.  One day she kills the wrong man, and then finds herself in the position of being the only person who can rescue an eight-year-old girl named Emily (Chloe Coleman) from terrible harm.  She ends up having to call on the assistance of her estranged mother Scarlet (Lena Headey), and her mother's friends - a group of female assassins who operate out of a library: Anna May (Angela Bassett), Florence (Michelle Yeoh), and Madeleine (Carla Gugino).    

This is a European production, helmed by non-Americans earnestly trying to evoke American cultural signifiers like diners and bowling alleys in very hyper stylized terms.  So, everything feels very plasticine, very belabored, and not remotely genuine.  The execution is so heavy handed that it ruins some of the cuter conceits like the library safehouse hiding weapons and supplies in various ironically titled books.  The characters are flat and the dialogue is uniformly terrible.  The film is an absolute slog for the first act, really until Sam and Emily finally have to face off against a group of goons sent by Emily's employers.  It's the action scenes where "Gunpowder Milkshake" finally finds its footing.  There's a great fight sequence where Sam's arms have been temporarily paralyzed, and the goons are heavily injured and high on laughing gas.  Then there's a car chase sequence in a parking structure where Emily is obliged to drive the car, sitting in Sam's lap.      

So, if all you really want is a flashy shoot-em-up where a bunch of talented actresses get to posture and look cool, you could do worse.  The Zach Snyder style slow motion indulgences, and Paul Giamatti in sleazeball villain mode are what they are, and it feels petty to call them out for being exactly what they've been advertised to be.  To its credit, "Gunpowder Milkshake" isn't exploitative or sleazy,  and avoids some of the worst tropes of this particular subgenre.  I came away feeling pretty good about it, moderately entertained and open to more.

 

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"Riders of Justice" and "No Sudden Move"

I've known for a while that I need to check out the work of Danish director Anders Thomas Jensen, and wound up starting with his latest, "Riders of Justice."  It's a mixture of action, comedy, and drama, starring Mads Mikkelsen as a soldier, Markus, who is having trouble connecting to his daughter Mathilde (Andrea Heick Gadeberg), after the death of his wife.  One day a trio of nerdy statisticians, Lennart (Lars Brygmann), Otto (Nikolaj Lie Kaas), and Emmenthaler (Nicholas Bro), approach him with evidence that the train accident that killed his wife may have been a planned attack by a criminal gang, the Riders of Justice.  This sends Markus on a quest for vengeance that takes many unexpected twists and turns.

The fun of "Riders of Justice" is trying to figure out what it is, and where it's going.  The movie starts out as a series of different scenes that seem to have no connection to each other, illustrating the central theme of the piece - the universe is random, and causality is unknowable.  We can't ever really know the reason things happen, so we just have to accept them as they are.  The story is full of chance encounters and coincidences, many of them very funny.  The ensemble is great, and most of the humor comes out of the character interactions - Markus teaching the statisticians how to use firearms, the statisticians pretending to be crisis counselors around Mathilde, and all the encounters with Mathilde's obnoxious boyfriend Sirius (Albert Rudbeck Lindhardt).  What surprised me was how well the drama played out, with Markus having to learn to be a better father, and really grappling with his inner demons.  There's action and violence and badassery, but the film is as much about awkwardly trying to connect to other people, and learning the value of supportive family and friends.  

I appreciate how low key the film is, just following this group of oddballs as they try and track down their targets, and keep having to deal with various tangents.  Reality is heightened, but not as much as you'd think for an action comedy, and the characters are all psychologically pretty down to earth.  Markus may be a professional soldier and killing machine, but his most impressive moment is when he finally has an emotional breakthrough and processes some of his grief.  The film knowingly punctures some of the common action film tropes, like the impressive computer setups that don't actually do anything useful, or the smug teenage boyfriend who actually turns out to be a good influence.  My favorite character is Bodashka (Gustav Lindh), a hapless victim of the Riders who is rescued and recruited by our heroes about halfway through the movie.  There's a very winning humaneness to the whole feature that makes it a very satisfying watch.

"No Sudden Move" is Stephen Soderbergh's latest, a period crime film set in 1954.  It's the classic simple job that goes off the rails, revealing a much bigger series of crimes and conspiracies in the process.  There's an all star cast, a solid script from Ed Solomon, and a ton of atmosphere.  I love the opening, where we watch Don Cheadle's world-weary Curt trudge his way home through a Detroit neighborhood, accompanied by the vintage-style credits.  Curt is on the outs with a local gangster, Watkins (Bill Duke), and accepts a job from Doug Jones (Brendan Fraser) to help menace an accountant, Matt Wertz (David Harbour) into stealing a certain set of documents.  Along with Ronald (Benicio Del Toro) and Charley (Kieran Culkin), Curt holds the Wertz family hostage to get Matt to cooperate.  And then things get complicated.  

Amy Seimetz, Julia Fox, Ray Liotta, Jon Hamm, and Matt Damon all show up in roles I don't want to spoil, but if you're at all familiar with Stephen Soderbergh, you know how this works.  Every character gets their moment to shine, and every performance offers some new delight.  The caper hijinks are perfectly executed, the stylized dialogue is endlessly cool, and the momentum never flags even as the plot becomes more and more densely tangled with competing parties and their interests.    It's hard to pick out an MVP, because there are so many great moments and unexpected little digressions.  The whole initial break-in scene at the Wertz house is great, as each member of the family discovers what's going on.  Then there's the surreal turn where the auto industry comes into play.  And everything that comes out of Bill Duke's mouth is a treasure.

I don't think "No Sudden Move" is one of Soderbergh's better crime films, because nobody is onscreen long enough to be a truly great character, and the plot is perhaps a little too convoluted.  It functions something like a collage of all these different character moments, and all these ideas that never quite reach their full potential.  The bigger picture stuff works, and I'm fine with how the movie concludes, but I also can't help feeling that it comes off as slighter than it should.  The film ran into production troubles because of the pandemic, and several members of the cast had to be swapped out, so I can't help wondering what the film would have looked like as originally intended.  Still, "No Sudden Move" is a fun, easy watch, and well worth checking out.      

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"Cruella" is So Much Fun

You've probably heard "Cruella" compared to "The Devil Wears Prada," because it's about duelling fashion designer divas, or "Joker," because the title character has been reworked to be a stylish anti-hero.  However, I feel it's important to establish up front that the most important antecedents to "Cruella" are "Wicked" and "Maleficent."  This is not a prequel to the beloved "101 Dalmatians," or any kind of remake.  This is a full reimagining of the Cruella DeVil character, that paints her as the misunderstood outsider who was the victim of bad press.  Did she kill dalmatians and make a coat out of them?  Just a nasty rumor, darling.  

In fact, Cruella (Emma Stone) turns out to be a dog lover.  She starts out as a little girl named Estella, with a darker troublemaker side that her patient mother (Emily Beecham) dubs "Cruella."  Alas, misfortune leaves her an orphan in London, where she and her pup Buddy form a gang of thieves with fellow vagabonds, Jasper (Joel Fry) and Horace (Paul Walter Hauser).  Despite this checkered history, Estella wants to go straight and become a fashion designer, eventually securing a position at the fashion house of The Baroness (Emma Thompson), the most successful and demanding designer in London.  The Baroness becomes her mentor, but the relationship soon turns sour, provoking Cruella into making her return to the spotlight.

There is a lot of story stuffed into "Cruella," and the film is way too long.  It keeps morphing into different films - "The Devil Wears Prada" for a good chunk of the running time, then a heist movie, a campy revenge movie, and of course the action-heavy Disney live-action spectacle with a lot of bad CGI.  It takes a considerable amount of patience to get through the early scenes of Estella/Cruella's childhood, and some seriously iffy story choices.  The big one is giving a reason for Cruella to hate dalmatians, which is totally ludicrous any way you look at it, and turns out to be a red herring anyway.  The best thing I can say about these parts of the film is that director Craig Gillespie keeps them moving along briskly, with a lot of slick editing and catchy needle drops.

Because once Emma Thompson hits the screen as the impossibly demanding Baroness, and Emma Stone transforms into her rival, the film finds its groove.  It is so much fun watching two over-the-top divas go at each other, upstaging each other, catfighting for status, and using haute couture to do it.  "Cruella" is set in the late 1960s and 1970s, which puts a lot of classic British rock and pop music on the soundtrack, and plenty of vintage fashion on display.  Cruella's style is built around the idea that she invents punk rock about a decade early, and pulls a series of PR stunts worthy of Lady Gaga and Banksy to show herself off.  Cruella plays up her bad-girl persona on purpose, until it's no longer an act.              

It helps that this is one of the best looking live-action Disney features.  There's still way too much CGI, and some of the cutesy nods to "101 Dalmatians" are too much, but there's also some gorgeous production design, and tons of lavish costumes, designed by Jenny Beavan.  The dresses, particularly Cruella's big showpieces, are absolute knockouts, and provide the film's biggest wow moments.  And the film knows it.  There are the requisite chase sequences and farcical bumbling, but everyone involved with the production understands that we're there to see Emma and Emma look fabulous and menacing. 

Thompson is the one likely to get awards attention for her wonderfully disdainful grand dame, but I want to give Stone full marks for putting her own spin on Cruella DeVil.  She's able to be theatrical and showy and an absolute monster when she needs to be, but also human enough to be sympathetic and vulnerable too.  The connections to the previous versions of Cruella are only surface level, and this really is an entirely new creation -  a maniacal artistic genius and outcast who it's fun to see clawing her way to the top.  She won me over, and that was an uphill battle considering how little interest I had in seeing this film.

There have been the usual complaints circulating about why this movie was made, and "Cruella" gives a very good answer: when you look at Disney's IP, the classic villainesses were always far more interesting and fun to watch than the boring old princesses.  And this is a case where Disney really let the filmmakers go wild, and turn "Cruella" into something different and fabulous.  It's not a great film by any measure, but this one turned out so much better than I ever thought possible, and it's got all the earmarks of a future cult classic.

I'm all for Disney remixing and reimagining whatever they want if it means more films like this one. 

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My Top Ten Episodes of "Parks & Recreation"

It's nice to be writing a top ten list again with a wealth of options to choose from.  "Parks & Recreation" is a great show, and I really had trouble narrowing this down.  Hence, the healthy list of honorable mentions.  The first season was not up to snuff, but I seem to like the later seasons more than most.  Also, I will totally cheat and count two-parters as single episodes. 

The picks below are unranked and ordered by airdate.  All the spoilers ahead.

"Ron and Tammy" - This is the episode that really kicked off "Parks" for me.  The explosive introduction of the evil Tammy Two, played by Megan Mullaly, shook up our understanding of Ron Swanson and introduced a new level of absurdity to Pawnee.  I don't think any of the subsequent Tammy installments ever lived up to this one, because the initial shock is just deployed so perfectly.  

"Summer Catalog" - It was a close race between including this or "Jerry's Painting," but "Summer Catalog" is so strong all around, and I enjoy it as one of the more grounded and realistic stories that the show has presented.  Leslie becoming bitter as she actually meets all the former heads of the Park Department is a lot of fun, and Andy and April's romance playing out is terribly sweet. 

  

"Andy and April's Fancy Party" - Regular sitcoms love to drag out romantic relationships, so I can sympathize with Leslie when the wedding is sprung on us out of nowhere.  This goes against all the norms of network television!  But Andy and April, despite not knowing how to adult, turn out to be completely right about getting married.  Also Donna and Ann in the B-plot are super cute.  

"Citizen Knope" - I'm a sucker for episodes where everyone rallies together, and "Citizen Knope" gives us the show's best version of this.  This is the episode that really gets into Leslie being the world's best gift giver, community do-gooder, and really the ultimate friend.  It's not just that everyone is willing to make a big sacrifice to help Leslie run for City Council, but that Leslie shows she deserves it.  

"The Debate" - This is the episode where I felt that Leslie Knope won her election, and it was kind of a shame that it took two more episodes for everyone else to catch up.  The swings in this one are just wild, from Leslie coming in expecting to cream Bobby Newport, to the endless dirty tactics, to the idiot also-ran candidates.  The B-plot with Ron and Andy's hijinks at the viewing party is also a blast.

"Emergency Response" - It's another big crisis that everyone manages to turn into a triumph, thanks to Leslie using all her powers of organization and preparedness for evil.  This one gets a big boost from the ensemble - Ron taking over "Pawnee Today," Andy at his exam, and Chris being dead.  And the ending, of course, is irresistable.  I found the surprise wedding announcement better than the ceremony itself. 

"Ron and Diane" - Too much Tammy Two can be detrimental to the show, and I think this episode got it just right, not only using her reappearance to explore Ron's steadily advancing relationship with Diane, but Ron's relationship with Leslie.  We also get to explore a new corner of the Pawnee universe, and one of my favorite B-plots: Tom, April, Donna, and Andy discovering Jerry's charmed home life. 

"Recall Vote" - Weirdly, this is my favorite Ben and Leslie episode.  I left most of their more romantic episodes off the list, but this is the one that stuck.  After Leslie's recall defeat, the pair get hilariously drunk and loopy together, to the point where Ann has to intervene.  And they're dressed as Buttercup and Westley the entire time for Halloween, and never mention it.  How could I resist?  

"Leslie and Ron" - It's the "Parks" version of "Mad Men" two-hander "The Suitcase," where we finally just get Leslie and Ron locked in the old department together to hash out their grievances.  The gags are great and the performances are silly, but there's just enough genuine drama and heartache to make the reconciliation feel real.  The episode also pays off some long-running Ron jokes to perfection. 

"One Last Ride" - I watched the producer's cut of the finale, and got to see all the extra scenes of what happened to characters like Jamm and Shauna, which was great.  I wasn't totally sold on some characters' fates - surely Andy and April had more in store for them - but the ones that they got right were so perfect.  Of course Jerry is mayor forever, Ron finds his place in nature (and federal government), and Leslie and Ben attain higher office.  It's seeing everyone together, though, that made me happiest. 

Honorable mentions: "Practice Date," "94 Meetings," "Telethon," "Flu Season," "Media Blitz," "Harvest Festival," "Jerry's Painting," "Camping," "The Trial of Leslie Knope," "Campaign Shake Up," "Win, Lose, or Draw," "Halloween Surprise," "Two Parties," "Leslie and Ben," "Are You Better Off," "London," "Fillibuster," "Fluoride," "Moving Up," "2017," "Ron and Jammy," "Pie-Mary," and "Two Funerals"

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"Clash of the Titans" '81 and '10

The 1981 "Clash of the Titans" is one of those beloved fantasy adventure films that I vaguely remember watching as a child, but don't have much of an attachment to.  Though I remember specific scenes from it, I could never be quite sure I'd properly seen the whole thing.  So, I thought it was time to finally fill in a blank spot.  The film was a hit when it was released, and considered something of a nostalgic throwback.  All of its mythological monsters and creatures were brought to life with stop-motion animation by Ray Harryhausen, best known for his monster films of the '50s and '60s.  "Clash of the Titans" was treated as the grand finale of his career, and each of his creations is prominently credited right after the main cast.  

 

And this all seems perfectly sensible to me, because when you get away from Bubo the mechanical owl, the Medusa, the Pegasus, and the Kraken, the film is a very earnest, very basic Greek mythology pastiche.  The star studded cast, which includes the likes of Laurence Olivier as Zeus, Maggie Smith as Thetis, Sian Phillips as Cassiopeia, and Burgess Meredith as Ammon, do what they can.  However, we spend the bulk of our time with Harry Hamlin's Perseus and Judi Bowker's Andromeda, who are there to look pretty, and not much else.  I appreciate that the script, by Beverley Cross, sticks pretty close to the original mythology, and the portrayal of the gods as mercurial assholes.  The adventures are rousing and fun, but follow fairy tale logic, with no attempts made to assert any larger themes.  Everyone seemed perfectly happy with "Clash of the Titans" being simple, uncomplicated B-movie fun.  Alas, I am far too old and grown-up to enjoy the film at face value, though I admire all the artistry that went into it.  Maybe if I had watched it more often when I was younger, I'd have some nostalgia for it.  

I managed to completely ignore the 2010 remake of "Clash of the Titans," and its sequel "Wrath of the Titans," when they came out.  Like the original, they were sold primarily as spectacle, riding the new wave of 3D films in the wake of James Cameron's "Avatar."  They also share a leading man, of course, the remarkably uncharismatic Sam Worthington.  He plays Perseus like he's played every other role I've seen him take on - utterly generically.  I found the rest of the cast more promising.  Liam Neeson and Ralph Fiennes play Zeus and Hades, the most prominent god characters, and fine purveyors of hammy lines like "Release the kraken!"  Among the humans, Pete Postlethwaite, Mads Mikkelson, Liam Cunningham, and Nicholas Hoult show up as Perseus's allies, though none of them get much of a chance to do anything interesting.  The best new character is Io, played by Gemma Arterton, who is set up as a sort of guardian angel figure for Perseus, and mostly replaces the princess, Andromeda, who has a much smaller role.       

The point of the movie is the creatures and action scenes, of course, and "Clash of the Titans" is a very good example of all the trends of blockbuster filmmaking of 2010.  There's the bleak, gritty creature design that paints the once white pegasus black, and turns the kraken into a grey morass of tentacles with a giant maw.  There's the cinematography that does a fairly good job of making the action more expansive and visceral.  The battle and flying sequences look great.  Alas, there's also the middling CGI that takes a few too many shortcuts.  The Medusa sequence is especially disappointing, too murky, too dark, and clearly trying to hide the fact that the CGI Medusa had nothing on the Harryhausen version.  I can't speak to the 3D post-conversion that kicked up such a ruckus, but I understand why they did it.  This was a movie intended to be seen on the largest screen possible, with a rowdy crowd. 

I'm glad that Bubo only shows up as a cameo, because the tone of the reboot is so much more dour and serious.  It's still pretty kid-friendly, but this was not a film made for kids or fantasy fans.  For that reason, I prefer the original version, even though I know it's not for me.  The original had some real magic in it, campy and dated as it is, that proved difficult to replicate.    

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My 2021 Youtube Playlist

My yearly Youtube playlist is mostly made up of media ephemera that's difficult to categorize, and the only thing they really have in common is utilizing a strong musical element. Still, I think that they're worth recommending and writing about. This batch includes more advertisements, tie-in music videos, late show hijinks, and oddball musical numbers you probably forgot about.

Don't Forget to Watch the Movie - Loews Movie Theaters ran these pre-show PSAs starting in 1996. I never knew they existed before I stumbled across them online, and now I'm a little mad that I didn't get to actually see them when they were shown in theaters. It's so wonderfully nostalgic to see so many of the Sesame Street gang again in their prime, singing a song composed by Tony Geiss. Two years later, Loews would commission another Sesame Street pre show short, "A Brief History of Motion Pictures."

Lady Marmalade - Since we're firmly in the era of millennial nostalgia, it's time to revisit that moment in history when Patti LaBelle's "Lady Marmalade" was covered by Christina Aguilera, Lil' Kim, Mýa, and Pink as a tie-in single for Baz Luhrmann's "Moulin Rouge!" The media blitz around this thing in 2001 was insane. Everyone watched the music video, directed by Paul Hunter, with a special appearance by Missy Elliott, on repeat. The glitzy cabaret outfits, the trippy anachronistic visuals, and the masses of camp value are so much fun. I've searched in vain for the drag queen spoof version of this I remember floating around a few years later.

Jackie Chan Sings "A Whole New World" - If you haven't heard by now, Jackie Chan is something of a recording star in China. Here is his cover of "A Whole New World" from "Aladdin" with Nana Ou-Yang, for Ou-Yang's "Cello Loves Disney" album. The pair also played a father and daughter in the 2017 sci-fi thriller "Bleeding Steel."

Jimmy Fallon Recreates "You Spin Me Round" - One of the most delightfully nerdy things I keep going back to is Jimmy Fallon and Paul Rudd's recreation of Dead or Alive's bonkers music video for "You Spin Me Round (Like a Record). The original video is a priceless artifact of the 80s, with Pete Burns with the giant hair and eyepatch, the disco ball, the color guard, and the fashion choices. The fact that Fallon and company went shot for shot, and got so close to the original just makes it funnier. This was one of several music video recreations done for "The Tonight Show," but "You Spin Me Round" is far and away the best.

Ping Pong the Animation - Here's the title sequence of "Ping Pong the Animation," set to Tada Hitori by Johnny Bakudan. I enjoy it because it is such a departure from the standard, formulaic anime OP, showing off the visual style of director Masaaki Yuasa, easily its biggest asset.

Liza With a Z - After successfully collaborating on "Cabaret," Bob Fosse, producer Fred Ebb, and Liza Minelli put together this concert film, "Liza With a Z," described as "the first filmed concert on television." Fosse won Emmys for direction and choreography, part of his legendary 1972 streak that included "Cabaret," "Pippin" and "Chicago." "Liza With a Z" was thought lost for decades, before being dug out of the NBC vaults and remastered in 2006. The clip here is of Minelli singing "Son of a Preacher Man."

BBC 2008 Olympics spot - Legitimately, one of my favorite things to come from the 2008 Olympics was this BBC ad, created by Jamie Hewlett and Damon Albarn, better known for their collaboration on "Gorillaz." The beautifully animated little spot depicts characters from "Journey to the West" heading to the games, and demonstrating various athletic feats along the way. The Chinese vocals from Jia Ruhan as Guanyin, sending Monkey off on his journey, are especially poignant.

Everybody's Coming to My House on Colbert - I considered including a segment of the recent David Byrne musical film, "American Utopia," on this list, because it's amazing. And then I found this clip from 2018, when he appeared on Stephen Colbert's show to promote the musical, and decided that it belonged here instead. I just love the way that it's staged, the way that it incorporates Colbert and the audience, and the energy that it brings. "American Utopia" will be around for a long time, I'm sure, but this particular performance truly feels like ephemera.

Corky and the Juice Pigs "Dolphin Boy" - And on that note, it took me way too long to find this clip of Canadian comedy musical group, Corky and the Juice Pigs, performing "Dolphin Boy" on "MadTV" in 1996. The appearances of Corky and the Juice Pigs are pretty much all I ever liked about MadTV.

"The Forty Year Old Virgin" End Titles - And finally, boy there were a lot of familiar faces in "The Forty Year-Old Virgin," weren't there?


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My Top Ten Films of 1953

This is part of my continuing series looking back on films from the years before I began this blog. The ten films below are unranked and listed in no particular order. Enjoy.

The Band Wagon - For years I thought that the title of the film was "That's Entertainment!" because this was where the song made its debut.  Fred Astaire stars, but this is the film that I remember best as the one that made Cyd Charisse a real headliner at last.  The plot is standard show business stuff, with the requisite romantic farce, but the song and dance sequences are some of the best to be found in any of the MGM musicals.  The highlight is clearly the "Girl Hunt Ballet," which puts Astaire and Charisse in '20s mobster threads and lets them set the screen on fire.

Stalag 17 - Billy Wilder's comedy/drama set in a WWII German POW camp nicely balances the humor with the thrills and pathos.  The film successfully mashes up several plots - the prison camp escape, a mole hunt, and military hijinks - to very good effect.  The ensemble is the film's biggest asset, lead by William Holden and an array of great character actors.  As much as I enjoy Otto Preminger's work as a director, I wish he'd acted more, because his smug bastard Colonel von Scherbach is my favorite character in the film, and a big reason why it works as well as it does.   

Do Bigha Zamin (Two Acres of Land) - Directly inspired by "Bicycle Thieves," this is considered India's first real foray into Neorealism.  Following the struggles of a poor family to save their home from a rich developer, the story is full of big emotions and pointed social commentary.  The melodrama can be a little much at times, but it manages to be very engaging and powerful.  The film is at its most effective when it's following the young son, Kanhaiya, who experiences the most dramatic changes in his worldview, and faces the most important moral tests.        

Little Fugitive - A little independent picture that tells a small, but very memorable story seen from the point of view of a seven year-old boy who runs away to visit Coney Island.  Filmed using a newly invented hand-held 35 mm camera, and greatly influenced by the French New Wave, "Little Fugitive" beautifully captures a child's-eye-view of the world.  Long stretches of the film have little dialogue, and the actors were non-professionals.  Full of little moments of joyous kid mischief and loving shots of Coney Island, it's a perfect snapshot of childhood in New York in the 1950s.   

Roman Holiday - Audrey Hepburn's arrival in Hollywood was such a fairy tale, it seems perfectly appropriate that her big screen debut should be playing a modern day princess.  "Roman Holiday" is a breezy romp through a picture-perfect European city, full of romance and fun and excitement.  It's the perfect romantic comedy and hugely influential on so many imitators.  Can it be possible to have a love story set in Rome anymore without a breathless scooter ride?  I also appreciate "Roman Holiday" for giving Peck and Hepburn a chance to be really, really funny.

Summer With Monika - Considered shocking at the time of its release due to the nude scenes, "Summer With Monika" was treated almost as an exploitation film by many exhibitors.  In hindsight, however, Ingmar Bergman's film is a pretty stark, intense story of a summer love affair between two difficult people that eventually - perhaps inevitably - turns sour.  The sensuality is certainly present, but treated maturely and serves the story.  The psychological states of the main characters turn out to be far more interesting that their carnality, and are well served by Bergman's efforts.  

Tokyo Story - This is one of Yasujiro Ozu's best loved masterpieces, a film about an old couple slowly coming to terms with the fact that their children's lives have moved on without them.  As the film examines the  various relationships between parents and children, it reveals the awkwardness of the generational divide.  However, the power of the film comes from its acceptance of this situation as a bittersweet inevitability.  Setsuko Hara has one of her most lovable roles here as the sweet daughter-in-law who is the most considerate of the younger characters.      

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes - This is one of my favorite Marilyn Monroe films, and one of my favorite musicals period.  Structurally, it's a buddy movie, but with showgirls instead of cowboys or sailors.  The musical numbers are iconic and sometimes surprisingly subversive.  Witness the use of the female gaze in Jane Russell's "Ain't Anyone Here for Love?" number with the male Olympians.  However, what we all remember the film for is Monroe's iconic Lorelei, the perfect encapsulation of her innocent bombshell screen persona.  As the ill-fated sequel would discover, there was no replacing her.      

Ugetsu - Kenji Mizoguchi's period ghost story is one of the most beautiful films he ever made, full of fantastical events and dreamy imagery.  War and strife drive two different sets of characters apart, and they have to undergo harrowing journeys  and transformations to reunite, both physically and spiritually.  Ghosts and spirits frequently appear as living beings, and trick foolish victims with lies and illusions.  Mizoguchi took inspiration from Chinese scroll paintings to showcase the beauty of the natural world, contrasting with the war torn lives inhabited by his tragic characters.    

The Wages of Fear - My favorite Henri-Georges Clouzot film is one of the most nail-biting action thrillers ever made.  A group of men are hired to transport nitroglycerine over rough terrain, a dangerous job that gets more and more dangerous as the film goes on.  The scenes of tension are often unbearable, and the ironic ending is one of the most fitting of all time.  There's a simplicity and a brutality to the filmmaking that is riveting.  While I like William Friedkin's 1977 remake, Sorcerer, it doesn't have quite the rawness and the biting satirical verve of the French original. 

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