The Best Classic Films I Watched in 2021

In an effort to highlight older films, here are the best films I watched this year that were not released in 2021 or 2020.  I've also disqualified films from the 1950s, because I'm going to write up several of them for my Top Ten lists in the next few months.  I've also already written a full post for "But I'm a Cheerleader."  Entries are unranked and listed below by release date.

La Ceremonie (1995) - A fantastic crime drama that sees Sandrine Bonnaire and Isabelle Huppert as a maid and a postal worker who become friends and do terrible things together.  It's a film that is largely about the uneasiness of the class and cultural divides, and how shame and resentment can turn toxic.  The performances in this are fabulous, and Claude Chabrol is as sharp as he ever was in constructing the nail-biting narrative - all the way through to the explosive finale.       

Polyester (1981) - I've had a mixed track record with John Waters films.  Frankly, his films are often a little too subversive for me to really enjoy.  However, "Polyester" somehow hit a sweet spot, because I am madly in love with it.  I adore Divine as Francine Fishpaw.  I wish Cuddles were my friend.  Oddly, the only part of the film I don't much care for is the gimmick it's best remembered for - the Odorama.  Frankly, it just distracts from all the other delightful campiness happening onscreen.  

Mur Murs (1981) - I don't know why it took me so long to watch this Agnes Varda documentary, which is all about the mural art of Los Angeles, much of it done by local artists and amateurs.  It provides a fascinating sort of bookend to one of Varda's last documentaries, "Faces Places," and serves as a beautiful time capsule of the way Los Angeles was in the '80s, the way I remember it.  I find it comforting that there's some record of so much art and artistic verve that is now largely gone.  

Monterey Pop (1968) - You can keep your "Woodstock," your "The Last Waltz," and even your "Stop Making Sense."  My absolute favorite concert film is D.A. Pennebaker's "Monterey Pop."  It's the lineup more than anything else - I grew up on The Mamas & the Papas, The Who, Jefferson Airplane, Otis Redding, and Jimi Hendrix.  And the fact that it opens with "San Francisco," one of my favorite songs of all time, just seals it.  This isn't the film nerd in me talking.  It's the music nerd I forgot was there. 

National Velvet (1944) - It might be terribly sentimental and unrealistic, but seeing little Elizabeth Taylor riding her beloved Pie to victory in the Grand National Steeplechase is one of the sweetest things I've ever seen on film.  Taylor and Mickey Rooney absolutely carry the film, in spite of their young ages, with stellar support from seasoned actors like Donald Crisp and Anne Revere.  It's no wonder the film is so fondly remembered, and why they're still making "girl and her horse" family films to this day.   

The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) - The first of two Charles Laughton films on this list, and the first of two William Dieterle films too.  It's wild how well Quasimodo still comes off to this day.  The makeup effects are remarkable, and Laughton's performance really is iconic.  I also find it very telling that most of the updates to Hugo's novel that the '96 Disney adaptation was excoriated for came from this version.  It's clearly the reason "Hunchback" is still remembered as an action adventure story.

The Life of Emile Zola (1937) - I'm sorry to say that I wasn't very familiar with beloved French writer Emile Zola or his involvement with the famous Dreyfus affair before this.  Directed by William Dieterle, this is a typical biopic of the era, which uplifts its subject to hero status through a lot of shameless melodramatic devices.  However, Paul Muni is so good as the lead, and the "man against the system" plot is executed so well that I found it all tremendously moving and inspiring.

Captain Blood (1935) - I've written a lot about "Captain Blood" this year in various posts, but I just can't get over what a touchstone this film is for so many other subsequent adventure films.  Errol Flynn and Olivia de Haviland are sparkling, and the filmmaking is still wonderfully dynamic.  I think what really gets me is that the epic adventure is actually properly grounded in historical fiction, giving it a sense of time and place that most contemporary films of this type are sorely lacking.

Lady for a Day (1933) - I watched so many good classic dramedies this year, including "Pygmalion," and the version of "Pride and Prejudice" with Lawrence Olivier and Greer Garson.  But how could I resist Frank Capra?  I'd previously seen the '60s remake of "Lady for a Day," "Pocketful of Miracles," and loved it, but the original is more straightforward, unfussy, and totally delightful.  It's a Cinderella story starring a 70 year old woman, one that thinks the best of humanity.  It's irresistible. 

 

The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933) - I was anticipating Charles Laughton's famous performance at Henry VIII, but somehow I completely missed that this movie is a comedy.  Alexander Korda is someone that I usually associate with producing spectacles.  There's certainly spectacle to enjoy here, but also a lot of laughs and a lot of fun as Henry VIII's personal life spins out of control.  After Laughton, Elsa Lanchester has my vote for the best scene-stealer, as the hysterical Anne of Cleves.

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Rank 'Em: "Star Wars: Visions"

This is the third one of these anime shorts anthologies based around a Western property I've seen, after "The Animatrix" and "Batman: Gotham Knight."  I'm a little out of date when it comes to anime creators, but I still recognized several of the participating directors and studios.  I think the best way to talk about this project is to talk about each of the shorts individually.  And the best way to do that is with a "Rank 'Em" post.  So, here we go, from best to worst, by rankings of the "Star Wars: Visions" shorts.

Oh, and I watched the English language versions, because I figured listening to the Japanese voice actors try to wrangle "Star Wars" terminology was going to be awfully distracting.  

1. T0-B1 - This short is drop dead gorgeous.  It's a melding of "Star Wars" and "Astro Boy" tropes, featuring a robot boy who wants to be a Jedi.  The animation is on an entirely different level.  I love the storybook quality of the visuals, and the way that the short incorporates so many little nods to its progenitors.  Out of all the "Visions" shorts, this is the one that I want to see a full series for.    

2. The Duel - One of the clear influences on the original "Star Wars" is the work of Akira Kurosawa, so it's terribly fitting to see this short recreate the look of a Kurosawa samurai epic with "Star Wars" elements incorporated into the works.  The mostly black and white world, with its scratched up frames, and bursts of color provided by lightsabers and droids, is distinctive and eye catching, and executed beautifully.

3. The Ninth Jedi - No surprise that one of the most polished shorts would come from Kenji Kamiyama and Production I.G., home of the "Ghost in the Shell" franchise.  This short tells the most complete story, set in a far future corner of the "Star Wars" universe, and does a good job of fleshing out its handful of characters in a short amount of time.  The multiple plot twists and the concept of lightsabers that adapt to their user's needs are a lot of fun.  

4. Akakiri - The shorts in this collection are all kid-friendly, which makes sense given the intended audience.  This is the one that feels the most adult, with its dark ending and creepier concepts.  Eunyoung Choi's  Superflat style suits the Kurosawa pastiche well, and I especially like the villain, Masago, voiced by an excellent Lorraine Toussant.  Along with Henry Golding and Jamie Chung, this one easily has the best vocal performances.

5. Lop and Ocho - I find the story a little half-baked, but there's no denying how fantastic this short looks.  The animation is fluid, detailed, vibrant, and looks amazing on every level.  The characters, however, aren't as fully fleshed out as they need to be to pull off what the story wants to be.  It feels like the first half of one introductory episode mashed to the back half of a concluding one, and we lost the rest of the series.  

6. The Twins - I went into "Visions" looking forward to this short the most, because it's Hiroyuki Imaishi and Studio Trigger.  And while it's wildly over the top, and crazy kinetic, and breathless and does some neat things with "Star Wars" iconography, I also found it a little disappointing.  There's way too much winking at the audience, too many callbacks, and the dialogue is so stylized and hammy, it feels like a parody at times.  

7. The Village Bride - No major complaints with this one, but it's a really generic anime adventure that has little to do with "Star Wars."  This is the longest short, and takes advantage of that by doing a little more world-building and setting up its characters a little better.  However, everything here from the visuals to the action to the story come across as pretty bland and forgettable.         

8. Tatooine Rhapsody - It's different from all the other "Visions" shorts, I'll give it that.  The premise is fine, the music is pretty fun, and the chibi style character designs are great.  However, conceptually it just doesn't come together.  There's not enough to the characters, and something about the humor doesn't translate right.  Some good pieces in the mix, but better luck next time.    

9. The Elder - Well, Studio Trigger clearly put their B team on this entry.  The animation is disappointingly static, the character designs are very derivative, and I can't get over how flat everything looks.  The big fight scene at the end is decent, but really nothing special.  Still, it's always nice to hear from James Hong, who voices the title character.    

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Count In "The Card Counter"

If you're familiar with the work of Paul Schrader, you may already know what to expect from "The Card Counter."  There is an alienated male protagonist who suffers in isolation, weighing past his transgressions and future opportunities.  He is part of the seedy underbelly of America, and gets involved in a criminal enterprise that inevitably goes wrong.  Violence is perhaps an inevitability.  It's almost surprising that Schrader hasn't made a film about the gambling world before now, because it's an environment well suited to exploring his favorite themes and subject matter.  

Like all of Schrader's recent films, the production here feels a little oddly cobbled together.  Oscar Isaac plays the title character, William Tell, to perfection.  Tell is a coolly anonymous professional gambler who travels from casino to casino across the country, stays under the radar, and lives out of cheap motel rooms by choice.  Isaac's co-stars, however, are considerably less impressive.  I appreciate that Tiffany Haddish is being given a chance to stretch a little playing La Linda, a woman who stakes and manages gamblers, and becomes Tell's love interest.  However, she's noticeably green at playing a dramatic part like this, and the film might have suffered considerably if Isaacs and Schrader weren't able to pick up the slack.  Similarly, Tye Sheridan feels a little oddly placed as Cirk (pronounced Kirk), a young drifter who turns out to have some interesting personal connections to Tell, and ends up traveling with him.  There is also a villain, John Gordo, played by Willem Dafoe, who has very little screen time and mostly functions as a looming, sinister presence.  

When "The Card Counter" is being a moody portrait of a damaged man living a lonely existence, it's fantastic.  Oscar Isaac's detached, nuanced performance immediately draws comparisons to similar characters played by Robert DeNiro and Alain Delon.  Tell is a much sadder, more resigned character than Schrader's usual protagonists.  His guilt is more palpable, and his capacity for violence less so.  Schrader does a good job of coming up with these little conceits to help fill in Tell's backstory, like his habit of wrapping all the items in his hotel room in white sheets, or all the flashbacks to his time as a soldier being shot with warped fisheye lenses.  In the present, he seems to occupy an endless series of bars, hotel rooms, and casinos, all totally stripped of any glamour or glitz.  There's some thoughtful use of internal monologue, and the depictions of Tell's skill at the gambling are excellent.  Everyone involved clearly did their homework.         

Schrader is less successful when it comes to maneuvering Tell into re-engaging with the world outside his self-imposed bubble.  I wouldn't be surprised if budget and Covid challenges impacted the production, because the film often feels like a scaled down version of something bigger.  While I can certainly see what he was going for, and I admire his ambitions, the execution falls short in several places.  Tell's relationships with La Linda and Cirk aren't established well enough to provide  adequate emotional stakes to the action.  I like the way that the script leaves red herrings everywhere for those of us who know the usual tropes of gambling movies - addiction, debts, rivalries, and mentor/protege relationships.  Once the actual conflict and moral dilemma are made clear, however, I couldn't help feeling frustrated with how much energy had been expended on the misdirections.    

I think it comes down to "The Card Counter" feeling a little too sparsely populated and unbalanced.  Isaacs is so good, and Schrader has devoted so much effort to highlighting the performance that there's precious little room for anything else.  All the other characters in the film are distressingly flat in comparison, partly due to the actors, partly because they aren't fleshed out well enough.  Attempts to immerse us in the culture of the gambling world end up feeling half-hearted, because none of the other gamblers are really characters, and there's little sense of urgency in the tournaments.  I've seen "The Card Counter" billed as a thriller or neo-noir, but it's not a good fit for either genre.   

I wonder if I might just have a problem with Paul Schrader's films in general.  I wasn't much of a fan of "First Reformed," though I've grown to appreciate it more over time.  I appreciate his work from the 70s, but don't really enjoy it.  "The Card Counter," in spite of its flaws, is easily my favorite Paul Schrader work to date.  Make of that what you will.  

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Eating Up "The White Lotus"

This series was such a relief to watch after Hulu's "Nine Perfect Strangers," a show that spends eight hours saying as little as possible.  HBO's six episode "The White Lotus," on the other hand, has a lot to say, and does so with great skill and efficiency.  I know it's not fair to compare the two shows - one is a melodrama and one is a black comedy -  but both revolve around a bunch of spoiled rich people in paradise, being forced to confront their various failings, so there's some inevitable thematic overlap.

The most important thing about "White Lotus," which features beautiful, white, rich tourists behaving poorly, the way they do in so many other shows, is that it shows them in context.  We often see the action from the POVs of the staff of the White Lotus resort in Hawaii, and have an up close, uncomfortable view of all the entitled, privileged, insensitive behavior that the service workers bear the brunt of.  The most obvious asshole on the show is Shane Patton (Jake Lacy), newly married to the lovely Rachel (Alexandra Daddario), who discovers that he's been booked in the wrong room and takes it personally.  He gets into a battle of wills with the White Lotus's manager, Armond (Murray Bartlett), a grinning control freak who quickly reaches the end of his patience.  Then you have the troubled, needy Tanya (Jennifer Coolidge), who is looking for a shoulder to cry on, and finds it in spa worker Belinda (Natasha Rothwell), who she plies with money and empty promises.  Belinda knows better, but still lets Tanya get her hopes up.    

Writer and director Mike White is not afraid to be topical and not afraid to point out all the awkward, unspoken biases and hypocrisies that allow the rich characters to act the way they do, and the systemic oppression that force the poor characters to take it.  The final set of guests is the Mossbacher family - mother Nicole (Connie Britton), father Mark (Steve Zahn), college-aged daughter Olivia (Sydney Sweeney), and teenage son Quinn (Fred Hechinger).  Olivia has also brought her non-white friend Paula (Brittany O'Grady), who backs her up in bullying Quinn and manipulating her parents.  And it takes a while to realize that Paula is actually the key character in this group, who is made keenly aware of where she  is in the hierarchy of characters, subordinate to some but also in a position of power over others - and just as capable of causing harm.  Eventually you stop looking for people to root for, and just embrace that everyone is terrible in their own special way.        

I love the writing here, which constantly touches on a wide range of different class, race, identity, and social issues, while following all of these different characters through their various journeys of self-discovery.  There's a great scene involving the Mossbachers, where they're discussing inequality, and the adults offer self-serving pragmatism, Olivia and Paula can only be cynical, and Quinn is fully nihilistic.  There's the way that Armond is able to passive-aggressively finagle his way out of trouble by using hospitality tricks against the guests, but only up to a point.  And there's the way that Rachel keeps trying to find a way out of her new marriage before she consciously realizes that's what she's trying to do.     

And what really impresses me about "White Lotus" is how entertaining this all is.  I put off watching this miniseries for months, because I wasn't too keen on watching a show that seemed to be all about the discomfort of class consciousness.  But while the commentary isn't subtle at all, the show is also frequently hilarious, infuriating, thrilling, and a lot of fun.  The actors are having a ball, and I'm impressed as hell by Alexandra Daddario, Natasha Rothwell, and especially Murray Bartlett achieving a spectacular career high.  The production values are great, with special kudos to the music, which uses traditional Hawaiian instruments to create these moments of unease, suspense, and high energy.      

This was a great surprise, and I'm sad there isn't more.  Maybe I'll check out "Succession" - HBO's current show about more terrible rich people - after all.

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"Ted Lasso," Year Two

Minor spoilers ahead.

Sophomore seasons are full of pitfalls, especially when they follow beloved first seasons.  And there haven't been many shows with first seasons as intensely beloved as "Ted Lasso."  The show does some of the sneaky, contrived things I expected it to do, like wrangling certain characters back into Ted's orbit who have no good reason to be there, and unlikely love matches that we all know are doomed from the outset.  However it also does a good job of building on the momentum of year one, and setting up for year three, while being very entertaining for at least eleven of its twelve episodes.

This season is more comfortable with following individual members of the ensemble on their own storylines.  Keeley and Roy are often off on their own, Rebecca's love troubles take center stage a few times, and Nathan has a huge subplot that is one of the best things the show has done to date.  We get one new major player, Dr. Sharon Fieldstone (Sarah Niles), a sports psychologist who is hired to work with the team after a crisis in the premiere, and proves totally immune to Ted's usual charms.  Nigerian player Sam Obisanya (Toheeb Jimoh) is also promoted to main character status, and the show does some fun stuff with him.  However, a few characters inevitably get the short end of the stick.  Coach Beard gets an entire episode to himself, a sort of surrealist, "After Hours" digression that I don't think really works.  This is one of the two extra episodes that was added to the season order in light of the show's success, and it feels like padding because it is.     

As for Ted Lasso himself, his mental health struggles really come to the forefront this year, and he's not nearly as much fun as he was last season.  While Ted still has his moments of charm and insight, and Sudeikis is still delivering a fantastic performance, he's deep in personal crisis over multiple episodes, and a good amount of the narrative hinges on how this negatively affects his role as a coach and as a mentor.  He's mostly back on track by the end of the season, but it still feels like Ted is MIA for a long stretch.  I found my attention shifting more toward Keeley and Roy this year, as it's more fun to watch the two of them grow and mature as people.  They currently have my favorite romantic relationship in any form of ongoing media.  And on the flip side, watching Nathan's ambition and inferiority complex turn him into a monumental asshole is absolutely infuriating.  I know Nick Mohammed is doing a great job based on how much I wanted to strangle him by the end of the season.

Individual episodes focus on different characters from week to week, and are best consumed a little at a time instead of all at once.  "Ted Lasso" has been steadily becoming a hangout show for me, where I check in with my favorite characters every week to see how they're doing.  My favorite installment this year is the Christmas special (the other extra episode), where nothing related to the larger story arcs happens, but we just get the various characters celebrating the season, and Hannah Waddingham gets to belt at the end.  The ins and outs of the football season are still present, and we get to look in on different corners of the UK sports industry and culture, but it's not as central to the show as it was previously.  The big game still happens at the end of the season, but it's not nearly as important to the show as the decisions made by various characters about their futures in the closing scenes.

The production looks great.  The show's success means that the "Ted Lasso" crew now have access to more locations, like Wembley Stadium, and more real football figures making cameos.  And as much as I may have my quibbles with particular choices made for particular characters, on the whole the writing and the acting are consistently strong.  "Ted Lasso" could easily keep going like this for another decade, and I'd be happy to watch.  Alas, all signs point to only one season left, and I'm already impatient to see it.      

         

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The Posts I Didn't Write Today, 2021 Edition

This is a feature I've been toying with making more permanent for a while, discussing some of the ideas for posts that never quite panned out.  This year I had a couple that got as far as me actually writing the full posts before I realized that I had to abandon them.  But waste not, want not, so at least I'm going to use them for a little self-analysis in this post.

Wolfwalkers and Physical Media - One of my favorite films of 2020 was Cartoon Saloon's gorgeous "Wolfwalkers," which was acquired by Apple TV+ and has been an exclusive on that service for over a year now.  It had a tiny theatrical release - and in COVID times that means next to none at all, and more alarmingly it wasn't released on any kind of physical media until only a few weeks ago, as part of a Cartoon Saloon boxset.  Since other films with Apple TV+ distribution like "Cherry" and "CODA" have also been missing physical releases, I wanted to dig into the potential implications of these movies skipping over so many of the traditional windows of distribution - VOD, DVD/Blu-ray releases, cable and network television broadcasts, and so on.  "Wolfwalkers" feels like a film that should have had a much bigger cultural impact than it did, and I'm worried that the Apple TV+ exclusivity is severely limiting its potential audience.  

And this ties into the wider issues of media siloing and paywalls that have been cropping up recently.  The trouble here is that all I have is a lot of conjecture and my own experiences with finding media as a kid - which seem wholly out of date.  Do kids still consume movies the way I did, stumbling over them at the library, or broadcast as filler television programming on the weekends anymore?  Do more households have Apple TV+ than I think they do?  I've also already touched on most of these issues before with my post about Apple TV+ and the "Peanuts" holiday specials last year.  This is a topic I'm still keeping a wary eye on, but don't feel comfortable writing anything more about yet.

The John Mulaney Situation - I try to avoid the celebrity gossip ecosystem as much as possible but John Mulaney's wild ups and downs over the last eighteen months have been hard to ignore.  The comedian's recent substance abuse and relationship troubles read like a stack of tabloid headlines.  A good chunk of Mulaney's fanbase turned on him because he wrecked the nice-guy persona he'd built up over the years.  So, this looked like a good opportunity for me to talk about parasocial relationships and the pitfalls of modern celebrity and internet fame again, and I could be mostly objective because I've somehow managed to completely avoid John Mulaney's work until now - I literally only watched two of his specials in order to write the post.     

However, the more I tried to justify what I was doing, the more I wound up in the same trap of essentially rubbernecking the car crash.  By trying to analyze Mulaney's actions, and his fans' responses, I found I was getting sucked into their drama and potentially contributing to the media scrum.  I also quashed a post about a much more obscure, down-on-their-luck former internet celebrity and their morbid fan base for similar reasons.  However, I was so fixated on the idea of the Mulaney post, I had to research and write the whole thing before I could get it through my head what a bad idea it was.    

Rank 'Em: The Early James Bond - Finally, I was planning this set of posts for a while, to go with the "Rank 'Em" post I'd already written about the modern James Bond movies (1995-2015).  I managed to finally finish all the Bond films, and was revved up to rank the first sixteen films, from 1962 to 1989.  However, I kept putting it off and putting it off, and eventually I had to face the fact that I'm not especially interested in spending time trying to write about these films.  I like some of the early Bond films, but others were a real slog, and many of the earliest installments have aged poorly.  

I'm never particularly objective when I'm ranking movies, but in this case I found myself wondering if I could get away with ranking the wildly campy "A View to  Kill" and "Moonraker" higher on the list because they were childhood favorites.  And that was when I decided that I should leave ranking old James Bond movies to the actual fans of old James Bond movies.   

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"Love Hard" and "Red Notice"

I was all set to write this post about Rebecca Hall's lovely new film, "Passing," but I don't feel like I have the background to say anything meaningful about it. Meanwhile, Netflix recently released the Christmas rom-com "Love Hard," which is a vastly less accomplished movie, but I do have some strong opinions about it. Nina Dobrev stars as Natalie, a girl from California who is so unlucky in love that she writes a column detailing her exploits on endless bad dates. One day, she finally thinks she's met her potential perfect match online, Josh (Jimmy O. Yang), and decides to surprise him in person for Christmas, flying all the way out to his home in Lake Placid, New York. Alas, Natalie has been catfished. Josh used the photos of a better looking friend, Tag (Darren Barnet), for his profile. Now she and Josh have to keep up the ruse that they're dating for the benefit of Josh's parents (James Saito, Rebecca Staab), and older brother Owen (Harry Shum Jr.), while Natalie pursues Tag.


"Love Hard" is an often painfully by-the-numbers romantic comedy, and exactly the sort of thing you'd expect to find in Netflix's Christmas line-up. The jokes about online dating, dick pics, and whether or not "Die Hard" counts as a Christmas movie are a little outdated. And sure, it's cute that the movie pays homage to "Love, Actually" to the extent that it builds the whole finale around recreating the climax, but it's dangerous to be invoking the charms of better movies when yours is so blatantly derivative. However, "Love Hard" does get some extra points for its casting. Nearly all the male characters in the film have Asian ancestry, while the film itself is never explicitly about the Asian-American experience. In fact, considering how little anybody's ethnicity comes up in conversation, this might be a case of actual colorblind casting. And it works very well, because the instant you see Jimmy O. Yang and Natalie's reaction to him, suddenly the sympathetic catfishing premise becomes a lot more plausible.

Netflix may be getting a lot of criticism lately about the quality of their offerings, but they've been very good about diversity in their projects and taking chances on projects with Asian leads like "Cowboy Bebop," "To All the Boys I've Loved Before," "The Half of It," the the upcoming "Last Airbender" reboot, and, of course, "Squid Game."


And on that note, I am unable to resist putting down a few words about "Red Notice," Netflix's latest attempt at blockbuster filmmaking. They spent at least $200 million on an action comedy starring Dwayne Johnson, Ryan Reynolds, and Gal Godot as rival international thieves and law enforcement, bent on stealing three priceless Macguffins, double crossing and one-upping each other along the way. Considering some of the reviews and feedback I'd seen, I was expecting this to be much worse than it was. Yes, the three leads are playing themselves, to the extent where I'm not even going to bother referring to them by their character names. Yes, the direction and script by Rawson Thurber are derivative in the extreme. Yes, the product placement is super obvious. However, for this kind of movie, "Red Notice" is perfectly decent at delivering what it promises - noise, action, and the occasional decent one-liner. If you liked the "Hitman's Bodyguard" movies, or the "National Treasure" movies, or anything involving Dwayne Johnson in a jungle punching things, you'll probably like this one too.


It's actually kind of fascinating to see a star vehicle like this being made in 2021, and to realize that it's become kind of a throwback. Most films this size are built around existing IP now, and action spectaculars based on star power are often the realm of B-movies and direct-to-DVD dreck. Reynolds, Johnson, and Godot aren't bad at all in the film, but you can also clearly see the limitations of their talents because they're given so little to work with. The supporting cast is remarkably sparse, with no real villain to root against. The plot is a straightforward Macguffin hunt with a twist so feebly deployed, you wonder why they bothered. Still, there's plenty of money onscreen, the pace is quick, and the leads are charming. I personally wouldn't have spent $200 million on this, but "Red Notice" is not the end of cinema or the end of Netflix. It's a perfectly mediocre movie, and that's okay.



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"The Great," Year Two

Spoilers for the first season ahead.

I was worried at the end of the first season of "The Great" that it wouldn't be able to keep the momentum up for any future seasons.  After all, the coup that put Catherine the Great in power had happened, and we were set to lose several important members of the show, right?  Well, the show is subtitled "An Occasionally True Story," and they meant it.

So, we're back in Russia with the newly elevated Empress Catherine II, who opts not to kill the captured Peter, but to place him under house arrest in a room of the palace while she tries to drag her country into the modern era.  She also doesn't kill Marial, who betrayed her last season, or Archie, who was not on her side.  I was worried that this would lead to stagnation of the various ongoing storylines, but the show is pretty good about maintaining momentum and juggling a lot of little fun subplots.  Catherine is heavily pregnant for most of the season, and Peter, now madly in love with her, is trying to be a better husband and father.  Also, there are some new players in the mix, including Catherin's doctor, Vinodel (Julian Barratt), scheming courtiers Arkady (Bayo Gbadamosi) and Tatyana (Florence Keith-Roach) and guest appearances by Catherine's mother Johanna (Gillian Anderson), and Peter's dead father, Peter the Great (Jason Isaacs). 

I'm glad that they didn't kill off Peter, because the show's backbone remains the ongoing battle of wills between Catherine and Peter as both characters struggle to adjust to the new status quo.  This time around, Peter's major weapon is love.  While his friends plot against his wife, he plots to win her heart.  And because Catherine's reign is constantly in turmoil, her idealism is forever being tested, and pregnancy hormones have her eating dirt and really horny, Peter gets a lot farther than you'd think.  In fact, this is a much hornier season of "The Great" than last year, with nearly everyone enjoying a healthy sex life and being wonderfully frank about it.  The highly vulgar dialogue is as good as ever, and the level of absurdity remains at a delightful high.  Of course there are all these insane Russian ideas about pregnancy, and the father-to-be is supposed to spend the birth digging graves in case things go badly.  Of course Peter's highest priority when fleeing the palace is securing his gourmet chef for the trip.    

At the same time, events also take a more sentimental turn as the season goes on.  There's less emphasis on how backward the Russians are, and more on getting to know the various characters better as their circumstances change.  Grigory is a lot more sympathetic when we get to see the extent of his loyalties to Peter, and he shacks up with a much nicer partner.  Velementov is still very one-dimensional, but he has an awful lot of history with the royals that comes in handy.  Then there's Elizabeth, who comes out as one of Catherine's strongest supporters, even if she's still trying to get her and Peter back together.  Catherine herself often proves to be her own worst enemy, refusing to compromise and showing poor judgement at some critical junctures.  She's a lot more human this year, and it's good to see.  All this character building allows the show to occasionally have little serious moments, and display some genuine emotion.

"The Great" remains one of the best looking shows currently in production.  Even though it's wildly anachronistic, Catherine's court looks fabulous.  Catherine has the most spectacular maternity wear I've ever seen in any medium, and Elle Fanning always looks amazing, even when she's enormous.  Johanna, a deliciously manipulative snob, is put in comically wide dresses that require her to turn sideways to maneuver around obstacles.  The palace is practically a character itself, its grandeur and stateliness always providing the perfect amount of contrast to the chaos unfolding within.                  

Considering how far the show has diverged from actual history, there's clearly no reason why "The Great" shouldn't go on for as long as it wants.  My only reservation is that Fanning and Hoult are so good, it seems a shame not to see them move on to bigger and better projects.  Then again, how often do roles this good come along?

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"Candyman" Returns

I know I watched, but don't quite remember the original "Candyman" from 1992.  Mostly, it remains in my head as a few potent images, along with Tony Todd's sonorous voice.  Going back to the film now, I realize that what faded from my memory - and what gives the film so much power - is its context.  "Candyman" is set in the notorious, poverty-stricken Chicago housing development of Cabrini Green, and its monster, Candyman, the lone African-American slasher icon of his era, is the product of all the psychic pain and racial injustice that the place represented.

Thirty years later, Cabrini Green has been gentrified and we have a new "Candyman" movie.  The lead characters, an artist named Anthony McCoy (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) and his girlfriend, gallery director Brianna (Teyonah Parris), live in Chicago and are part of the local art scene.  Anthony, who has been in a creative rut, learns about the urban legend of Candyman - and eventually the events of the original film.  It turns out that the 2021 "Candyman" is a direct sequel, one that is not only keen to explore the undercurrents of racial tension that informed the original film, but to update it.  Gentrification is brought up constantly, but the film also tackles cultural appropriation, African-American identity, and generational trauma.

It makes a big difference that the leads in the new "Candyman" are African-American, because their journey in discovering Candyman stands in for uncovering their own history and puncturing the comfortable middle-class black mindset that they enjoy at the beginning of the film.  There are some interesting moments where you can feel the black creators of the film - which include Nia Da Costa and Jordan Peele - examining their own privilege and their own potential complicity as successful African-American artists engaging with this material.  There are some not-so-subtle punches aimed at the art world, at real estate developers, and at anyone - black or white - who profits from gentrification. 

Is it scary, though?  While the new "Candyman" follows all the rules of a typical slasher, and there's lots of blood, I think it's more of a slow burn psychological thriller and body horror picture than anything else.  Aside from two major sequences, the bulk of the violence is either offscreen or happens at a distance.  We see the Candyman, now played by Michael Hargrove, fairly early on.  His kills are brutal and wonderfully executed, but not especially frightening.  The slow deterioration of Anthony McCoy and the occasional appearance of racially motivated violence are more genuinely upsetting to watch.  

However, it is an absolutely gorgeous film, filled with Grand Guignol horror imagery, beautifully  orchestrated by director Nia DaCosta.  When people tell stories about the Candyman legend in the film, the accompanying visuals are shadow puppet animation sequences.  There are mirror shots everywhere, both of literal mirrors and reversed images - even the opening credits!  Candyman himself, when we finally see him in his full glory, has never looked better or worse.  Likewise, Chicago is a major part of "Candyman," and Da Costa takes pains to showcase both its shiny new growth and its neglected slums.      

I think the new "Candyman" is a decent enough horror film, and a decent enough piece of social commentary, but it's far from great.  The writing, which has a lot of interesting, promising concepts, never fully fleshes out the characters and the plotting is very messy.  There are ellipses all over the place, unexplained motivations, and pieces that don't seem to fit together quite right.  The actors are talented and are able to patch many of the gaps, but only up to a point.  The ending is worth the slow buildup, but then it's over far too quickly.  It's a film that is frequently trying to do too much.

But, especially in this day and age, better too much than too little.  I appreciate the new "Candyman" for a lot of things - for giving its talents a chance to do some interesting work, even if it's flawed work, for bringing attention back to a forgotten franchise, and for a final shot that made me unexpectedly very happy.  It might not make you scream, but the new "Candyman" will surely leave a lasting impression.

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"Only Murders" is a Lot of Fun

 "Only Murders in the Building" brings back nice memories for me of watching endless reruns of "Columbo," "Murder She Wrote," and "Diagnosis Murder" in the '90s.  It always struck me as a sort of character actor retirement genre, so It's a little wistful to discover that Steve Martin and Martin Short have reached this stage of their careers, but on the other hand I'm delighted that these two have found a project that is so well suited to their talents.  Martin co-created the series, a comedic mystery featuring Martin, Short, and Selena Gomez as amateur detectives.  The first season consists of ten half-hour episodes.  

Part of the fun of "Only Murders" is that it's got a nice self-awareness to it.  Our trio is composed of Charles (Martin), an actor famous for playing a TV detective, Oliver (Short), a Broadway director who hasn't had a hit in years, and Mabel (Gomez), a mysterious twenty-something.  They all live at the Arconia apartment building in Manhattan, where an unfortunate young man named Tim Kono (Julian Cihi) is murdered.  Oliver, Charles, and Mabel all meet by chance, and discover that they're all fans of true crime podcasts.  They decide to seize the opportunity to produce their own podcast and investigate the murder themselves.  Suspects include recently released convict Oscar (Aaron Dominguez), Howard (Michael Cyril Creighton), whose cat was at the scene of the crime, and music superstar Sting, who happens to live in the building.  There are several other celebrities with supporting and minor roles, including Tina Fey, Nathan Lane, Jane Lynch, Jimmy Fallon, Da'Vine Joy Randolph, and Amy Ryan.

The episodes are short and the tone is light, so this is very easy watching.  The dialogue is full of banter, with Short and Martin getting plenty of opportunity to play off each other, and Gomez's Mabel slowly seeing her unflappable cool girl persona dismantled bit by bit.  The dynamic these characters have is great, as all three characters have their own little subplots to work on, but they keep getting drawn back to the bigger mystery.  The pacing is very good, as the status quo keeps being unended from week to week.  Mabel's got a secret past!  Oliver has money troubles and unscrupulous motives!  It helps that the show also keeps finding interesting ways to shake up the formula.  One episode is told from the perspective of the detective assigned to the case.  Another is told from the perspective of a deaf resident of the Arconia.  And then the podcast's groupies get involved.

The show looks fantastic, and is full of little visual touches.  There's the animated opening and ending credits sequences that look like New Yorker cover art.  There are the occasional, quick fantasy sequences and cut-aways, culminating in a fantastic fake-out gag in the finale.  The episode with the deaf character is almost totally spoken dialogue free.  Martin and Short are still spry enough to do a fair amount of physical comedy and running around, which keeps the proceedings lively.  The two comics are great, playing versions of their usual screen personals, especially Martin Short in full show business diva mode.  The member of the cast I'm the most impressed with is Selena Gomez, who I haven't seen in anything in ages, and who I'm happy to report has become a lovely and appealing actress while I wasn't paying attention.  While the generational divide is occasionally played for laughs, Mabel is always on equal footing with Charles and Oliver narratively, and I don't think "Only Murders" would work so well without her.      

There's a bland network sitcom or network procedural version of this show that might have been made in another universe, something with a smaller budget and not nearly the amount of idiosyncratic dark humor and foul language.  Whatever you want to say about the streaming wars, it's been great for content like this - a silly, satirical mystery show for a more niche audience, but one that lets its talent shine.  I truly can't remember the last time I liked Steve Martin and Martin Short so much in anything, and I'm already looking forward to the next season.

  

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Fun and Games With "Free Guy"

There are high concept movies, and there are high concept movies that you need the resources of a major movie studio to really pull off.  "Free Guy" is such a project, a rare original property, even though it is heavily based on and draws from the gaming world.  I don't think this movie would work if it didn't have copious amounts of expensive CGI to create its fantasy universe, or an A-lister like Ryan Reynolds playing the lead, a video game character named Guy.   

More than any other recent film set in a video game world, like "Ready Player One" or the recent "Jumanji" movies, "Free Guy" feels closer to the actual culture of gaming and game creation as it exists now, even though the featured game, "Free City," is fictional.  It's totally comfortable with using the visual language and narrative conventions of games like "Grand Theft Auto" and "Fortnite," and assumes the audience is familiar with them too.  The action takes place not only in "Free City,"but also in the real world, at the gaming company, Soonami, that created and maintains the game.

There are two parallel narratives going on for most of the film.  First, you have Guy, living out his repetitive, super-limited existence as an NPC, or background non-player character in "Free City," where the players go on crazy missions that involve a lot of wanton violence and destruction.  Guy works at a bank that regularly gets robbed multiple times a day, and his best friend is a totally ineffectual NPC security guard, Buddy (Lil Rel Howery).  One day, Guy sees and becomes infatuated with a player named Molotov Girl (Jodie Comer), which leads to him breaking out of his pre-programmed loop and becoming a player in the game himself.  Meanwhile, in the real world, Molotov Girl is really a woman named Millie, who is trying to find proof in "Free City" that Soonami head honcho Antwan (Taika Waititi) took the game that she and her partner Keys (Joe Keery) created, and used its code in "Free City." 

Director Shawn Levy, and writers Matt Lieberman and Zak Penn, wring a lot of comedy from both parts of the film.  "Free City" is one, big send-up of gaming conventions - everything from ridiculous player skins to lazy character creation to anarchic player behavior - treated as perfectly understandable because most of the players are revealed to be children.  Ryan Reynolds is great as Guy, this super earnest, super wholesome n00b who becomes the hero of "Free City."  His character is ridiculous in construction, but Reynolds is at his most loveable, and he makes it work.  And yes, this movie is something of a stealth rom-com.  Meanwhile, Millie and Keys are dealing with deadlines at Soonami and the sinister designs of Antwan, the kind of nightmare Silicon Valley CEO that has become a new stock villain in recent media.  This is the weaker side of the film, and you can sense good actors like Waititi flailing around a bit as they attempt to lampoon game company culture.

"Free Guy"is straightforward enough that anyone can have fun with it, but it really is a love letter to gaming.  There are the expected easter eggs and references everywhere, but also cameos from prominent Twitch streamers, and the worldwide popularity of gaming actually serves as a plot point a few times, with Guy achieving international fame due to his online antics.  A lot of work went into making "Free City" feel like a real open-world game, and the movie does an especially good job at contrasting what the game looks like to the players, and what the game looks like to Guy and the other NPCs.  There's still some obvious hand-holding, and the basement-dwelling gamer nerd stereotype still rears its head occasionally, but I'm counting this as a win for better representation of the gaming community.  

As summer blockbusters go, this is very solid.  The plotting is messy, but the cast is good,and the execution is often very good.  I can forgive some stupid contrivances when it's in the name of an original property getting the chance to go this hard in the name of nerdy comedy.  And I do hope Disney will let Reynolds and Levy and friends make a few more in this vein.   

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Getting "Old"

Moderate spoilers ahead.

After the exasperating experience I had watching "Glass," I was a little wary of M. Night Shyamalan's latest.  I admit that I knew almost everything that was going to happen in the film before I watched it, because I've read the French/Swiss graphic novel it was based on, "Sandcastles."  And because I liked "Sandcastles" so much, and was curious as to how the material would translate to the screen, I decided to give "Old" a shot.  I'm glad I did.  

"Old" is the weirdest, wildest, movie I've seen this year, something that probably only M. Night Shyamalan could have gotten made with this level of talent and budget.  If you've seen any of the press, you know the film is about a group of people trapped on a beach where everyone finds themselves aging at a rapid pace.  Children become teenagers in a few hours, and then adults.  Adults grow old and succumb to the inevitable.  Diseases that should take years to progress quickly become unmanageable.  Most of the action centers around the Kappa family - father Guy (Gael Garcia Bernal), mother Prisca (Vicky Krieps), and six year-old Trent (Nolan Rivers) and eleven year-old Maddox (Alexa Swinton).  Trent and Maddox are also played by a succession of other actors, including Alex Wolff and Thomasin McKenzie.  Others on the beach include a paranoid surgeon, Charles (Rufus Sewell), his wife Chrystal (Abbey Lee) and daughter Kara (Eliza Scanlen), a psychologist Patricia (Nikki Amuka-Bird), a nurse Jarin (Ken Leung), and a rapper, Brendan (Aaron Pierre).  

Like "Glass," "Old" has some of the most eye-rolling, on-the-nose, unsubtle, unrealistic dialogue I have ever heard.  The paper-thin characters are constantly spouting introductions and exposition, the plotting is often clumsy, and dialogue is awfully stilted.  One of the kids literally goes around asking for the names and occupations of every adult he meets.  However, the film is so allegorical, and is constantly barrelling through insane, high concept situations at such a fast pace, the broad behavior of the characters and the artificiality of their speech often work to the film's advantage.  There's an oddly straightforward, "Twilight Zone" quality to the supernatural setups and payoffs that is fascinating, and the tone is often juggling horror, tragedy, and humor all at the same time in a way that is sometimes maddening, but also very entertaining.  Whatever else you want to say about "Old," it is never boring.         

I feel that I should point out that there's very little gore in the film, though there's heaps of body horror.  Shyamalan is very good about suggesting more than he ever actually shows.  One of his devices I particularly enjoy is how he'll occasionally have a series of events play out over the course of one shot.  The camera travels up the beach following one character during a tense moment, and by the time it returns to the starting point, the situation has completely changed due to how fast the characters are aging.  We often see the reactions to what's happening a few seconds before the actual reveal, and only glimpses of the really wild stuff, letting the audience's mind fill in the horror.  Though the film looks expensive, with its tropical locale and constantly changing status quo, it's the filmmaking, rather than the effects, that do the heavy lifting.   

It helps that the cast is all-around fantastic, threading the needle between too outrageous and not outrageous enough in light of the impossible circumstances.  The younger actors like McKenzie and Wolff are especially good, playing young children in older bodies who have to step up more and more as the adults start losing control.  There are some truly touching moments between Krieps and Garcia-Bernal, and Sewell manages to save some of the really ridiculous developments just by managing to somehow keep a straight face. 

I really don't know if "Old"is a good movie or not - I'm leaning toward not - but I enjoyed it.  I thought it was daring and weird and tried things that nobody else in their right mind would put on screen.  And even if it was nuts, I had a lot of fun.  I even like the totally unnecessary ending that offers a totally unnecessary explanation - not a twist - but an explanation.  Shyamalan seems to have found a new groove, and I'm happy for him.  

But dear god, this man needs a co-writer in the worst way. 

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Nine Perfectly Mediocre "Strangers"

I feel a little bamboozled after watching all eight episodes of "Nine Perfect Strangers."  This was billed as a prestige project, created by David E. Kelley, based on a novel from "Big Little Lies" author Liane Moriarty.  The cast is stuffed with good actors, including Nicole Kidman, Melissa McCarthy, Regina Hall, Luke Evans, and Michael Shannon.  The premise sounded very promising - a group of strangers go to a ritzy health retreat called Tranquilum, run by a mysterious Russian guru figure, Masha, played by Kidman.  It sounds like the perfect jumping off point for a thriller or a mystery or some kind of juicy melodrama, right?  Right?!

Well, the nine guests who show up for the retreat aren't "nine perfect strangers" to begin with.  There's a family unit of three, the Marconis, and another couple, the Chandlers.  One character turns out to have a connection to Masha.  The vast majority of the show is taken up by the characters introducing themselves, slowly revealing the traumas that are making them unhappy, and undergoing various treatments and therapies to try and find them a shortcut to healing from their various mental and emotional hangups.  Every trick used by Masha and her minions is either based on bunk science, or implemented in its showiest form with no safeguards whatsoever.  It becomes clear pretty quick that Masha is up to no good.

The series is mostly interested in trauma and people's attempts to heal from it.  So, the action revolves around the characters trying to overcome tragedy or betrayal or guilt.  The Marconis, Napoleon (Michael Shannon), Heather (Asher Keddie), and their 20 year-old daughter Zoe (Grace Van Patten), are trying to work through the grief of losing Zoe's twin brother to suicide.  Frances (Melissa McCarthy), recently catfished by a con-artist, and Carmel (Regina Hall), deserted for a younger woman, are getting over broken hearts.  Frances quickly connects with Tony (Bobby Cannavale), a former football star and drug addict.  And finally, Masha herself, who turns out to have the most checkered past out of any of them, proves deadly earnest in helping them all.  

Because the actors are so talented, and the production values are pretty good, I got most of the way through the series before realizing that the show was going nowhere, and then I figured I might as well finish it.  "Nine Perfect Strangers" pulls off the trick of making it seem like there's more substance under the surface than there actually is.  However, none of the characters display much depth or get much of an interesting arc, despite so much time devoted to setting them up for big confrontations and revelations.  Absolutely nothing is done with the Chandlers - a young couple (Melvin Gregg, Samara Weaving), who are having relationship troubles.  Mysterious asshole Lars (Luke Evans) fares only a little better.  There's plenty of drama going on between Masha and her employees, Yao (Manny Jacinto) and Delilah (Tiffany Boone), but we never learn enough about the latter pair to care.

The trouble boils down to a very weak, meandering narrative.  McCarthy and Cannavale have some real chemistry, and Regina Hall has some great scenes, but the story doesn't live up to their talents.  Dramatizing people's mental health struggles isn't easy, but the show's tactics veer on the distasteful too often.  Masha's treatments range from the silly to the wildly dangerous, but the show insists on treating her as sympathetic - and takes the disturbing stance that she might be right in the end.  There's plenty of fertile ground for social commentary and satire here - and this is teased occasionally - but the show doesn't seem interested in pursuing any of it.  Instead, the melodrama is played totally straight, and comes across as weirdly tone-deaf.     

There's an excellent opening sequence featuring psychedelic visuals, which is my favorite part of the show.  It's a pleasant acid trip that is echoed by various visuals in the show itself, but sadly not capitalized on as much as it could be.  The best episodes are indeed the ones featuring copious abuse of drugs, setting up a grand finale of madness that seems beyond the ability of the show's architects to properly deliver.  I see so many interesting pieces of what could have been a much better show here, but instead the result is just a colossal waste of time.      

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My Favorite Sergio Leone Film

I put off writing a post for Sergio Leone for years, because I never wanted to deal with the fact that I'm not really a fan of his movies.  This is unfortunate, because he's without question one of the most influential action filmmakers who ever worked, and almost single-handedly changed the western genre as we know it.  However, there was always something about Leone that kept me at a distance.  Maybe it was his extensive use of dubbing.  Maybe it was the oddity of Caucasian actors regularly playing Latino characters.  Maybe it was just that the existential bleakness of Leone's vision of the American West fundamentally didn't appeal to me.

I can admire Leone's filmmaking from a technical standpoint, especially the editing, the cinematography, and the use of music.  I like his sense of humor and his use of space.  However, when it comes to his characters, I have significant difficulty connecting to the macho, hardened gunslingers and bandits trying to eke out their survival in the sun-baked wasteland.  I understand their motives, but those motives also tend to keep me at a distance.  In "A Fistful of Dollars" and "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly," the primary motive is greed, which I respect, but don't really respond to.  Revenge and regret, however, are things I can get behind, which is why my favorite Leone character is Colonel Douglas Mortimer played by Lee Van Cleef, from "For a Few Dollars More."   

I'll admit that I frequently get the "Dollars" movies mixed up, and misremember which scenes happened in which movies. However, every time I revisit them, "For a Few Dollars More" always leaves me more satisfied than the others.  It's the film that made me a fan of Lee Van Cleef, an actor primarily known for playing villains, perhaps most famously as Angel Eyes in "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly."  "For a Few Dollars More" is considered his breakthrough film, where he plays a rival bounty hunter to Clint Eastwood's Man With No Name.  We don't understand his motives until nearly the end of the film, which are revealed to be heroic.  Up to that point, Colonel Mortimer is just another ruthless gunslinger, playing out the film's familiar western cat-and-mouse games with both the primary protagonist, the Man With No Name, and Gian Maria Volonte's evil El Indio.  The film excels at its scenes of action and intrigue, ramping up the tension and thrills from what we saw in "A Fistful of Dollars."  

What sets "For a Few Dollars More" apart for me is how it uses these tantalizing hints of deeper emotions and past history throughout, which are eventually paid off, and add an entirely new context to the events we've seen take place.  Leone's later films would often go back to these themes and this storytelling device, using flashbacks to fill in character details and motivations.  However, I don't think it was ever executed better than in "For A Few Dollars More," where the throughline is so clear, and the story is so simple and heartbreaking.  I enjoy many elements of the "Once Upon a Time" trilogy, where this device comes into play constantly, but those films are often very rambling and indulgent.  The length of Leone films is another reason why I find much of his work difficult to embrace.  Amazingly, "For a Few Dollars More" is one of his shortest films at 132 minutes.      

It doesn't hurt that "For A Few Dollars More" has one of my favorite Ennio Morricone scores, and certain music cues are actually integral to the plot.  Also, this is the one where Klaus Kinski shows up as a hunchback reprobate, and is somehow not the most interesting person onscreen most of the time.  "For a Few Dollars More" was specifically created to be a sequel to "A Fistful of Dollar," and Leone went to great lengths to get Clint Eastwood to star, but ultimately it's Lee Van Cleef's movie.  I suspect that's a big reason why it tends to be overlooked when people talk about the "Dollars" trilogy - it's not about the Man With No Name.  But good grief, it's hard to think of what the rest of Leone's filmography, and spaghetti westerns in general, would have looked like without its influence.   

What I've Seen - Sergio Leone

A Fistful of Dollars (1964)

For a Few Dollars More (1965)

The Good the Bad and the Ugly (1966)

Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)

Duck, You Sucker (1971)

Once Upon a Time in America (1984)

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My 2021 Holiday Wishlist

Well, this has been a disappointing couple of months, to say the least.  Nearly all sectors of the entertainment industry have been going through interesting times, some more interesting than others.  As we slowly, slowly try to get back to normal, I'm trying to approach things with greater patience.  And this year for Christmas I want…

For the theaters to recover as much as they can, especially the independent venues.  I live in an area that used to have a fairly healthy indie and arthouse theater community.  Now, nearly every single arthouse theater is gone, and I have to drive at least an hour to the nearest theater that screens any indie films at all.  Online screening options have mostly picked up the slack over the last year, but once the pandemic is over, I'm very concerned that the smaller theaters will be gone for good.  And I know this is my fault as much as anyone's because I still haven't been in a physical theater since February of 2020.

For the studios to recover as much as they can.  Paramount has pushed back several release dates again, because they can't afford to have their major films bomb, even though I suspect they're only delaying the inevitable.  Tom Cruise's expiration date as a leading man looms large.  Universal and Disney seem to be doing okay with reduced expectations, but Warners' day and date experiment has delivered mixed results at best.  I'm very worried that several of their better films from this last year didn't make enough revenue to justify already planned sequels.  It looks like the 45 day window is here to stay, but the situation is still changing so fast from month to month.  Here's to finding a happy medium that everyone can live with.       

For the streamers to continue to improve in all areas.  Prime needs to do something about their interface, because navigating it is getting ridiculous.  I only still have Apple because I'm not being billed for it for another six months.  HBO Max has very good things to offer, but their pricing makes a long term commitment unlikely.  Netflix and Disney's decisions drive me up the wall sometimes, but I feel like I'm getting my money's worth most of the time.  I feel like I'm waiting for Paramount+ and Peacock to be merged into bigger players.  However, the bundling trend worries me.  Speaking of Netflix…

For Netflix to try a little harder when it comes to their offerings.  This might be a cyclical thing, or maybe I've just been having bad luck lately, but I've been striking out an awful lot with Netflix programming this year.  It feels like a fluke whenever they do manage to create something great.  Next year they have "Stranger Things 4" and "The Sandman" coming up, along with the return of a couple of continuing series I have some investment in, but I might start putting Netflix into my intermittent subscription rotation with Paramount+ and HBO Max if things don't improve.   

For social media to step up their self-regulation.  We've seen some gains this year as services like Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit have combated COVID misinformation, but they could be doing much more on a variety of topics.  Over on Youtube, there's still too much automation and not enough curation when it comes to kids' content, and the copyright strike system remains a terror.  I think the past year has made it clear that self-regulation is impossible, and it's high time for the FCC or another governmental body to get involved.

And finally, for all the new films and television shows coming out next year to exceed my expectations, and for those that didn't to improve. 

Happy holidays!

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I is for "In & of Itself"

I went out of my way to watch the Hulu special titled "Derek DelGaudio's In & of Itself," because Frank Oz directed it, and it's rare that Frank Oz directs anything these days.  Immediately, I found myself on guard when the film began with a request to the audience to turn off phones and devices to pay full attention to the film.  I braced myself for an oncoming torrent of deception - though that's not really what the show is. "In & of Itself," which bills itself as an exploration of identity, is a combination of magic show, one-man stage play, and motivational speaker presentation.  The film is taken from several performances of DelGaudio's stage show as it was performed in New York and Los Angeles, together with brief animated segments to help illustrate some of his stories.

Derek DelGaudio is a friendly, unassuming looking man.  His delivery is very pleasant and self-effacing, and he regularly breaks the tension with humor and asides.  He wants to tell us about how people perceive each other, and how our identities are constructed.  To that end, he tells us stories, the first a terrifically entertaining one about a man called the Rouletista, a legendary player of Russian Roulette.  We're also treated to tales of his tough childhood, his journey toward becoming a magician, and a twist on the old fable of the six blind men and the elephant.  He also keeps performing magic tricks and illusions, manipulating a pack of cards, making objects disappear, and pulling off several impressive feats of audience participation.    

The entire time I was watching the performance, I maintained my resistance to it.  I couldn't help feeling, after years of watching other, less benign performers - religious firebrands, snake oil salesmen, and so on - use the same tricks and tactics for their own purposes, that I needed to be wary of a con in the works.  DelGaudio tells his audience himself at one point that it is very easy to lie on stage, and easier still to lie on film.  Orson Welles demonstrated that to us beautifully in his 1973 film, "F is for Fake," where Welles uses all the practiced, perfected storytelling methods at his disposal to spin a fabulous story about art forgery - only to reveal that the critical part of the tale was an elaborate lie.  The fact that DelGaudio is self-aware and comments on the nature of using illusions to create an air of mystique, doesn't change the fact that he's also using trickery to make his message more compelling.  

On the other hand, I can't be too upset when the message DelGaudio is trying to convey is simple self-introspection.  He's not trying to take advantage of people, and he's not trying to sell or promote anything except empathy.  Also, as with any magic act, even if you know it's a trick, you can still appreciate the skill and the craft of the magician.  Some of the show's conceits are a lot of fun.  My favorite is the book that is given to one audience member in every show, who is then kicked out and told to write down what they predict the ending will be, and invited back to share their predictions at the next performance.  The result is a volume bursting with creativity - with illustrations, post-it notes, collage works, and pages and pages of writing.  And there's the astonishing moment when DelGaudio seems to magically conjure a letter from a loved one for a different, unsuspecting audience member.  The letter recipient might be an actor, or the situation might actually be socially engineered, but the audience's delight at the surprise, and their feeling of connection to the letter recipient is genuine.      

So, in spite of my heap of reservations about the tactics employed in a show like this, I think it is worth seeing and enjoying.  Derek DelGaudio is a hell of a storyteller and watching him reenact his journey of self-discovery for us is a lovely experience.  I wouldn't buy a bridge in Brooklyn from the man, but I'll be happy to watch more of his stage and screen work any time.

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