"Ennio," For My Mother

Hi, Mom. How are you?

I saw a movie this week that I thought you'd like.  I know you enjoy films about classical composers, and they just released a documentary on the work of Ennio Morricone, "Ennio: The Maestro," also called "The Glance of Music" in some places.  I know you're not much of a fan of modern composers - you've made your thoughts on Igor Stravinsky very clear - but I know that you've liked some of Morricone's music in the past.  More importantly, I think you'll appreciate that this documentary actually talks about the music and not just about the man.  It contains extensive interviews with Morricone himself, where he talks about his work, his influences, and his experiences composing.

I should warn you that "Ennio" is about two and a half hours long.  It's super comprehensive about Morricone's life and career, starting with his time as a child trumpet player, his musical education, and his earliest commercial work as an arranger.  The bulk of the attention is kept on Morricone's film music, and only briefly touches on his other work.  And that makes sense, since the film was put together by Giuseppi Tornatore, the director of "Cinema Paradiso" and "The Legend of 1900."  It doesn't individually discuss all of his film scores - which would be impossible since he's done hundreds - but it covers all the ones you probably know - "The Dollars Trilogy," "The Mission," "Cinema Paradiso," and "The Untouchables."  It's probably too long to watch in one sitting, but you can break it up into parts pretty easily.  Also, most of it is in Italian with subtitles.  That might make some of the more technical discussions harder to follow, but I thought Morricone was pretty good at getting his points across, even though I barely remember anything from music theory classes.

You know I'm a film nut, so I got a lot out of revisiting Italian cinema from Morricone's point of view.  He worked with everybody, including Gillo Pontecorvo, Bernardo Bertolucci, Dario Argento, Mario Bava, Liliana Cavani, Sergio Leone, and Pier Paolo Pasolini before Hollywood came calling.  So many films have Morricone scores that I didn't realize were Morricone.  The funniest realization was that he'd scored a Pasolini comedy, "Hawks and Sparrows," where the credits are set to music and sung by Domenico Modugno.  As always, I now have more movies I want to track down, including Cavani's "I Canibali," and "Sacco & Vanzetti."

You can tell how beloved Morricone is from the people who agreed to be interviewed for the film.  Clint Eastwood is here, of course.  Fellow composers like Hans Zimmer, Quincy Jones, and John Williams are here.  Bruce Springsteen shows up to gush about "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly."  Then there's Oliver Stone, Quentin Tarantino, Barry Levinson, and more directors than I can list.  The film also has some of the last interviews with departed filmmakers like Bernardo Bertolucci, Vittorio Taviani, and Lina Wermuller.  Bertolucci directed "The Last Emperor," which you told me you liked, though Morricone didn't do the music for that one.    

I think the best part of the film is the early stuff with Morricone as a struggling musician.  I'm surprised that there wasn't more attention on Morricone's personal life.  There's some material on his parents, but after he gets married, we don't get anything else about his family or relationships.  His wife and four children didn't participate in the film.  Most of his friends and contemporaries are gone.  Morricone himself, however, contributes plenty.  It's fascinating to hear him talk about his work and his collaborators, and the particular pieces that he remembers creating.  I'm sure that you're not going to like all of the music featured in the film, especially the more experimental work.    

However, I'm curious to know what you think about the more traditional scores.  I'll send you a link to where I got the film.  Let me know if you run into any technical issues.  Would Dad like this?  Well, they spend a lot of time on the "Dollars" movies individually, so Dad might like some of the earlier parts, but he'll probably get bored after that.  

I'll talk to you on Sunday.  Take care of yourself.  Okay.  Love you.  Byeeee.

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About That "The Batman" Movie

Minor spoilers ahead.

"The Batman," directed by Matt Reeves, is a lot.  It's three hours long, introduces a new version of Batman (Robert Pattinson) and Gotham City, and juggles a lot of secondary characters and villains.  I like that it treads some similar ground to "Batman Beyond," with an inexperienced Batman still in the early days of his career, but also has very specific ideas about the character that undermine parts of the superhero's familiar mythology.  Its influences are clear - David Fincher films like "Se7en" and "Zodiac," "The Long Halloween" Batman series, and '90s grunge music.  Pattinson's Batman feels more like The Crow at first, a tortured soul who spends a lot of time brooding over his personal traumas.  However, this is also a Batman who is still in flux, still building his persona and making a lot of youthful mistakes.

Gotham City is the most impressive part of "The Batman."  It looks absolutely terrible, a grim, decaying, urban nightmare, where crime has steadily been on the rise for years.  Reeves manages to make it feel both grounded in reality, using the imagery of serial killer media, and also very stylized.  Bruce Wayne lives in an ornate Gothic mansion.  Criminals in elaborate makeup run rampant.  The Riddler (Paul Dano), is a serial killer who appears in a bulky military cold weather mask, and uses some killing contraptions that wouldn't be out of place in the "Saw" franchise.  The whole aesthetic leans toward horror and psychological thriller territory, with very rough-hewn imagery.  There's a bat signal, but the image hardly looks anything like the Batman symbol.  At the same time, this is a film where Batman's reputation is so potent that criminals are spooked by shadows and the mere possibility of his appearance.

Viewer reactions will certainly vary, but I liked having such a long "Batman" movie because it gives Reeves the opportunity to tell a sprawling, complicated detective story from beginning to end, and give his Batman a full and satisfying character arc where he gets to change as a person and as a superhero.  I think this is a very good sign for any future sequels, because Reeves can tell a wide variety of Batman stories depending on how the Pattinson Batman develops along the way.  In this film, I think Pattinson is a decent Batman, but his Bruce Wayne is an almost comically angst-ridden shut-in.  It works for the purposes of "The Batman," but only just barely.  The characters around him are more successful - I really like Jeffrey Wright as Jim Gordon, the only cop in a corrupt department who Batman trusts.  They partner up to solve the Riddler case, with Gordon getting him access to crime scenes.  Zoe Kravitz plays a version of Catwoman who is mostly on the side of angels, waging a personal war against mobster Carmine Falcone (John Turturro) and his cronies, including the up-and-coming Penguin (Colin Farrell).  Wayne family caretaker Alfred (Andy Serkis) makes a few appearances, but they're pretty much limited to passing along information about Bruce's parents. 

All the familiar elements of a Batman story are here.  Action fans should be reassured that there are cool fight scenes, motorcycle chases and car chases with a new Batmobile, plenty of gadgets, and a big disaster sequence for the finale.  However, they take place in a Gotham where it's frequently raining, the cinematography is chronically dark and murky, and horrible, disturbing murders seem to happen every ten minutes.  There are plenty of one-liners, but the delivery is bone dry.  This is one of the least child-friendly pieces of "Batman" media that's been made yet, and I suspect that's a major reason why the movie hasn't done as well at the box office as some of the others.  Adult Batman fans are going to love this, but it's going to be challenging for more casual viewers and newcomers.  Then again, "Joker" made a billion dollars, so I understand why Warners was willing to take a chance with this approach.

Part of me is curious as to what the Ben Affleck version of this movie would have looked like, but I'm very happy with "The Batman."  There are things that didn't work, and aspects of this version of the character I wish had been explored more, but overall this is a very mature, very thorough and intelligent reworking of Batman that is perfectly suited for 2022.     

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Hollywoodle.ml, Framed.wtf, and Boxofficega.me

With the rise of Wordle, there has been a whole spate of new daily puzzle apps.  I've started casually playing a couple of the ones related to movies, and figured I'd pass along my recommendations. 

Hollywoodle.ml is for lovers of the old Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game.  Every new game asks you to connect a pair of actors, like Alec Baldwin and Andy Samberg, based on the movies they appeared in.  So, Alec Baldwin was in "Boss Baby" with Steve Buscemi," who was in "Hotel Transylvania" with Andy Samberg.  Or, Alec Baldwin was in "Men in Black 3" with Will Arnett, who was in "Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping" with Andy Samberg.  Being someone who watches too many movies, I can easily spend hours working out the connecting paths.  A recent development has been a new feature that shows the connecting paths with the fewest moves, and the most popular ones that people have played. The design is a little clunky, and it still feels like a beta version, but the idea is sound. I think there's plenty of opportunity for improvement.   

Now, Framed.wtf is even more minimalist, but it's already probably the best version of itself that it could be.  The gimmick is simple - you guess what a movie is based on a series of screenshots, starting with the most obscure.  So, for "Blade Runner 2049" the first screenshot is a character's shadow, the second is of an empty set, and the sixth is one of the more recognizable shots of Ana de Armas as the hologram Joi.  So far, the movies have all been very popular ones, and there hasn't been one yet where I haven't been able to figure out the answer within the first three screenshots.  However, it's much more approachable for the casual movie viewer whose only exposure to some of these films might be through advertisements or other cultural osmosis.  I've seen similar screenshot guessing games on many movie forums over the years, and I'm not surprised to finally see it in app form.    

Boxofficega.me needs the most explanation out of all of these games, and is probably the most niche.  The concept comes from the "Blank Check" movie podcast, where every episode ends with one of the hosts, Griffin Newman, guessing the five highest grossing films at the U.S. box office for the weekend when a featured movie premiered.  Thanksgiving weekend of 2008, for instance, saw "Four Christmases," "Bolt," "Twilight," "Quantum of Solace," and "Australia" top the box office, in that order.  Whenever Newman's impressive recall of box office statistics falters, a series of hints are deployed to steer him to the right answer, such as what genre the movie was, who starred in it, or who directed it.  The app version invites the player to do the same, starting with a list of financial stats, and distributors for the five movies you need to guess.  You start out with 1200 points, which are deducted when you make wrong guesses or have to use hints.  Most of my games end up with scores in the 600-800 range.    

  

Clearly, this game is aimed at the narrow group of movie nerds who keep up with the business side of the industry, and look at the weekend box office results every Monday morning.  This happens to include yours truly.  I'm nowhere near an expert, but I can usually figure out at least one movie without using any of the hints.  That said, the hint system is great.  You can pick and choose how much information you want to reveal.  I can usually figure out the answers based on some combination of tagline and first billed actor, but there are a lot of other stats to fall back on, including second and third billed actors, director, budget, and final gross.     

 

As with Wordle, a lot of the appeal of these games is being able to generate winning streaks, to look at your playing stats, and mark improvements.  Boxofficega.me is the only one with a paid version so far, asking for donations of any amount to access an archive of past games.

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Miss Media Junkie vs. Ryusuke Hamaguchi

Probably the most significant disappointment I've had with any film this year has been with "Drive My Car," the highly lauded Japanese film from director Ryusuke Hamaguchi, who had two films released in 2021.  The other is his anthology, "The Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy," which I also watched.  I've read multiple reviews and articles by Hamaguchi's admirers, detailing why they've connected to his work, but I remain unconvinced.  And I figured it was time to write about my stubborn resistance to this newly beloved auteur.

I did like one of the three stories in "The Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy," the finale segment titled "Once Again," where a case of mistaken identity causes two women to spend a pleasant afternoon together and form an unexpected connection.  It's intimate and touching, and nicely exemplifies the central theme of chance being a major force in life.  The other two stories also center around women.  In "Magic (Or Something Less Assuring)," a woman realizes that her best friend has fallen in love with her ex by chance, and wrestles with the possibility of ruining the new relationship out of jealousy and doubt.  In "Door Wide Open," a woman tries to seduce a professor as part of a revenge scheme that goes amusingly sideways.  In "Magic," the protagonist is frankly rather off-putting.  Her interactions with her ex suggest they had a troubled relationship - troubled due to her own manipulative behavior - which she's ultimately able to curb.  In "Door Wide Open," the pivotal scene involves the protagonist discussing an erotic passage of the professor's new book with him.  In both stories, it's suggested that the central male character is deeply repressed, and both come across as infuriatingly passive compared to the more sexually aggressive women.  Both of these stories contain extended scenes of awkward encounters that completely left me cold.  

"Drive My Car" was much less aggravating, but it features a similar dynamic.  The main character is Yusuke (Hidetoshi Nishijima), an actor and theater director, married to Oto (Reika Kirishima), a television writer.  Revelations about Oto send Yusuke on a voyage of discovery, trying to reconcile his image of his wife with the side of herself that she never shared with him.  Through interactions with her ex-lover Koshi (Masaki Okada), and his own driver, Misaki (Toko Miura), Yusuke is able to process his feelings in a positive way.  During the course of the film, he's also mounting a new multi-language production of Anton Chekov's "Uncle Vanya," and we spend a lot of time with Yusuke in casting and rehearsals.  "Drive My Car" is very deliberately paced and its three hour length never feels too slow.  But good grief, is it tedious.  From the behavior of his female characters, I can't help thinking that the director has major hang-ups about women and sex that he's been trying to address through his filmmaking.  All the major relationships in his films are pretty awful and suffocating and rub me the wrong way.      

It doesn't help that Yusuke is a pretentious theater director doing Chekhov.  I usually love watching artists at work in films, and their process of creating art, but Yusuke's efforts are so stultifying and unengaging.  Similar to the professor in "Door Wide Open," who remains stone faced while listening to his own salacious writing being read to him, Yusuke's distance from the material he's trying to engage with is used to show his own disordered mental state.  I get the point being made, but it just kills me that Hamaguchi has the audience marinate in that discomfort for such a prolonged amount of time.  It certainly didn't do anything for my appreciation of "Uncle Vanya."  The narrative does pay off eventually in "Drive My Car," but the process of getting to the resolution didn't endear me to Yusuke at all.  And this is  a film that clearly wanted me to sympathize and root for Yusuke.    

Now, I understand why "Drive My Car" worked for many critics.  It's unhurried and thoughtful.  John Cassavetes is cited as a major influence on Hamaguchi.  Claude Chabrol and Wong Kar-wai are brought up quite a bit too.  These are all directors that I admire and appreciate, but I don't love them.  The domestic subject matter and the challenging characters that they gravitate towards just don't interest me or work for me a lot of the time.  This year in particular has been difficult, with COVID restrictions limiting many filmmakers, and pushing everyone away from certain subjects.  I honestly wonder if I would have been more receptive to Hamaguchi's work in a different year, or if I was at a different place in my life.  For now, however, his movies just aren't for me.      

   

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The Movie List Nobody Watches

My recent focus on watching films from the 30s and 40s has helped me finish up various "best of lists."  I've noticed, however, that I've inadvertently also been making a lot of headway finishing a movie list that really nobody watches, because it's full of not-very-good films: the list of top grossing films by year.  You can use the worldwide or the domestic list, but they're largely the same and both are pretty awful.  Up until the end of the '90s I guess you could make an argument that they at least represented some of the best filmmaking talents of each era, but starting in 1999 it's just been an endless stream of gigantic franchise films.  Some of the recent box office winners are downright embarrassing in retrospect.  "Shrek 2" was the highest grossing film of 2004?  The live action "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" was the highest grossing film of 2000?  What were we thinking?

Sure, there are some very good films that became the highest box office performers of various years.  Nobody can challenge the bona fides of "The Bridge on the River Kwai," "The Sound of Music," or "Rocky."  However, the highest grossing film of any particular year was often the result of forces that went beyond whether or not a film was any good.  Hype was almost always a big factor.  Consider "Cleopatra," the box office winner of 1963, which was the most expensive film ever made up until that time.  It is a gargantuan, four hour spectacle that got mixed reviews at the time of release, and has not aged well.  That era also gave us 1966's highest grosser, "Hawaii," about a pair of humorless missionaries bringing Christianity to the islands, and 1958's "South Pacific," the garish adaptation of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical about forbidden love in the tropics.  

Then there are some downright weird outliers.  The highest grossing film of 1952 was "This is Cinerama," and the highest grossing film of 1955 was its sequel, "Cinerama Holiday."  Both were roadshow presentations designed to show off the widescreen Cinerama format, and consisted of first person POV shots of roller coasters and trips through foreign lands and natural scenery.  They were technical demonstrations more than narrative films, and are almost impossible to view today in their original intended format.  And I'll admit that this post was inspired in large part by my recent viewing of "Jolson Sings Again," the highest domestic grosser of 1949.  It is a sequel to the 1946 Al Jolson biopic "The Jolson Story."  It details Jolson's later years and comeback, stopping about every ten minutes for a pleasant song number.  It ends with the main characters attending a screening of "The Jolson Story," and a medley of songs reprised from that movie.  "Jolson Sings Again" often feels more like an Al Jolson tribute concert than a film proper, and offers nothing cinematically interesting whatsoever.          

  

One interesting recent development in the list of worldwide top grossers is that we're seeing a shift to non-American films thanks to the pandemic.  2020's highest worldwide grosser was the "Demon Hunter" anime movie, and it looks like 2021's winner will be China's "The Battle of Lake Changjin," the most expensive Chinese film ever made.  It's not clear if this trend will continue, as China continues to be jerks about keeping western films out of the lucrative Chinese market, but it's just another reason why nobody treats box office dominance as any measure of quality.  Some of these movies have become so obscure that I've had to go out of my way to track them down, and they haven't had the amount of cultural impact that you'd expect.  In 1951, the biblical epic "Quo Vadis" made more than twice as much as any other film, but isn't nearly as well remembered as other films from the same year, like "A Streetcar Named Desire," "An American in Paris," or Disney's "Alice in Wonderland."  And though "Quo Vadis" is not a bad movie, it's pretty clear why.     

  

As I continue on my merry way through the '30s and '40s, I'm watching the box office winners when I have the chance - a big part of this exercise is trying to get more historical context for the classics I've already seen, after all.  However, too often I've found that historical context is pretty much all that these films offer.  

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On Early Trips to the Movie Theater

I think you can tell a lot about a movie fan's relationship with films and filmgoing when you look at what they watched when they were kids.  So, as a thought exercise, I worked out the first twenty movies I remember seeing in theaters:

Oliver & Company (1988)

The Little Mermaid (1989)

The Rescuers Down Under (1990)

Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991)

Beauty and the Beast (1991)

Wayne's World (1992)

Newsies (1992)

Aladdin (1992)

Mrs. Doubtfire (1993)

The Lion King (1994)

Immortal Beloved (1995)

Batman Forever (1995)

Pocahontas (1995)

Muppet Treasure Island (1996)

Bed of Roses (1996)

James and the Giant Peach (1996)

The Stupids (1996)

Romeo + Juliet (1996)

Star Wars Trilogy: Special Editions (1997)

I think this list is probably missing a few things, because my memory isn't great.  For instance, I'm not sure whether I first saw "Jurassic Park" in a theater or on video.  These are just the titles I'm absolutely certain of.  However, you can see the patterns pretty clearly.  For my family, trips to the movie theater were a special occasion.  I mostly saw Disney musicals with my parents or on outings with relatives until I was a teenager.  Then I started going to movies with friends and picking more interesting titles.  Often what we watched wasn't as important as who we were going with - visiting cousins, school friends, or kids we were babysitting.  

So, I know the circumstances of every one of these theater trips.  "Wayne's World" is a special outlier, which I saw with my Girl Scout troop around the age of ten.  I had zero context for that film, having never seen "Saturday Night Live" at that point.   It was the most bizarre filmgoing experience of my young life.  The first movie I actually picked to see on my own was "Mrs. Doubtfire" for my birthday, and that was because I'd accidentally missed a showing of "Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit."  "Immortal Beloved" was a film my mother picked, a Beethoven biopic starring Gary Oldman.  One of her favorite films is "Amadeus," and she was expecting  "Immortal Beloved" to be something similar, but completely missed that it was R-rated for copious sex and nudity.  I don't think we went to a movie theater together again until "March of the Penguins" in 2005.

My parents weren't regular theatergoers, and mostly viewed theater trips as a convenient activity to get us out of their hair as we got older.  The only time I remember them going out to see a movie without us kids was "The Last Emperor" in 1987, and it was a big deal.  Keep in mind that we watched far more movies than this on video and through television broadcasts.  My family regularly started renting movies on VHS around 1992 - that was when and how I first saw "Star Wars."  My parents were happy to wait a few extra months to see new releases, even the highly anticipated ones.  I had already seen "Titanic" twice with different groups of friends before they finally rented it on VHS.

I always had a special love of the movie theater, though, because it made moviegoing an event.  I remember all of these trips with a rare kind of clarity.  "Oliver & Company," for instance, somehow had a trailer for the intense civil rights drama "Mississippi Burning" attached.  I thought I'd dreamed it until I found corroborating newspaper articles scolding the theater exhibitors for this decision years later.  Most of the earlier films were watched at my hometown's local two-screen theater, which has since been converted into a community theater space.  It was next to a drugstore, so we always snuck in our own snacks.  When I went with friends, it was usually to the theater attached to a nearby mall, and after 1996, a few towns over to a new 12-screen theater with stadium seating.  

Thanks to the pandemic, my theater trips have been severely limited over the last few years.  I've been antsy about being away from the big screen for so long, and its good to look back and remember why.  The movie theaters helped me to love the movies, but visiting them was never just about the movies.

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What's So Special About "Squid Game"

I avoided "Squid Game" for a long time, because I felt like I was already very familiar with what it was doing.  I've seen "Battle Royale" and "Gantz" and a couple of other ultraviolet Japanese IPs that serve as thinly veiled allegories for the brutal gamification of modern life.  I've also seen plenty of the Western equivalents, of course - "Running Man," "The Hunger Games," and a long list of gruesome horror movies.  I've enjoyed some of them, but this was never really my genre.  I watched some reviews and analysis videos with a lot of spoilers that reinforced that for me, "Squid Game" wasn't going to be anything new.

And then "Squid Game" started winning awards left and right, including a best ensemble award from SAG recently.  The cultural impact has continued to be huge, including the case of a Youtuber who paid several million dollars to recreate several of the show's featured death games in real life with real participants for a "parody."  The show's influence on Hollywood, especially as an example of western audiences' receptivity to foreign language content, is still being felt.  And the first season of "Squid Game"  is only nine episodes, so it only took me a few days during the post-Oscars content lull to get through the whole thing. 

Frankly, "Squid Game" is exactly what I thought it would be.  The characters are tropey and familiar, including the down-on-his luck loser hero Gi-hun (Lee Jung-Jae), and his more morally compromised old friend Sang-Woo (Park Hae-Soo), who become rivals in the games.  You can see all the twists and turns coming from a mile away.  However, the execution of the premise and the visual storytelling are excellent.  The show is wonderful to look at, with its bright colors and playground aesthetics.  All the elements are beautifully designed, from the contestants in their numbered jumpsuits, to the anonymous guards, to the deadly games based on children's activities.  The matter-of-fact portrayal of the violence is also crucial in helping "Squid Game" feel much more visceral and dangerous than similar western media.  

I also appreciate that "Squid Game" has more social commentary than most death game shows.  The "Squid Game" is an allegory for the rat race - a screwed up, often arbitrary system dispensing a twisted version of social equality.  Winning is often a matter of luck more than skill, but the people behind the scenes are fanatically devoted to enforcing its rules.  The contestants are all there by choice, even given multiple chances to walk away after learning the nature of the contest.  We see a few attempts to subvert or cheat the system, but the show is largely committed to actually following the characters as they play the game, and work through the moral choices they have to make in order to survive.  Sang-Woo is the most interesting character, because his moral failings start out fairly small - like withholding a key piece of information in an early game - but escalate quickly as the situation grows more dire.  

On the other hand, the commentary is fairly shallow.  The show's message never goes further than showing us that the game is fundamentally unfair, and arguing that a greedy, cynical view of human nature undermines our own survival.  The characters are compelling, but very broad, something that many American viewers don't seem to notice until a couple of English speaking villains show up in the seventh episode.  There's nothing wrong with this, but I do think that the show's maturity has been oversold.  The show's appeal is in engineering its exciting suspense and horror setpieces, not in being particularly insightful.

It's clear why "Squid Game" became an international hit.  There's a universality to the themes and the ideas that is very appealing, and the show offers some horrifying spectacle that you won't see anywhere else.  On the other hand, there's a good amount of the story that feels like filler - the whole subplot with the cop (Wi Ha-joon) and the Front Man (Lee Byung-hun) doesn't amount to much.  I also would have liked "Squid Game" much better if it had stayed a limited series instead of an ongoing one, which its success more or less requires.  

Will the creators be able to keep up the quality and fix the show's problems?   Honestly, I'm curious.  "Squid Game" is such an outlier in so many ways, I'm very interested to see if it'll turn out to be a trailblazer or a fluke.       

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