Although I've got to confess: I did not diligently take notes on the miscellaneous films I watched this month, so it's mostly bullet-ish points to go along with the usual GIFs.
Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves | A Thousand and One | Suzume | Air | Renfield | The Super Mario Bros. Movie | Chevalier | L'Avventura | Star Wars: Episode VI--Return of the Jedi | Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret.
I said I would see it again AND I DID. I'm pleased at how much of this holds up on a rewatch--it's just so FUN, y'all.
I did not talk a bunch about Daisy Head's performance as Sofina last time, so I must give kudos to her! Sofina the Secret Red Wizard is great: She and the other Red Wizards exist on another plane of existence from the rest of the characters, wherein everything is horror and madness and smiles are not a thing anybody is capable of doing. Like, I keep going back to the moment when she just, like, sticks her icy evil fingertip into Hugh Grant's teacup and makes no expression. Are ALL the bloopers from this movie going to be her absolutely breaking in the background of every scene she does with this cast of total goofballs?
I love love love that Holga and Edgin are never a romantic thing, because PLATONIC FRIENDSHIPS FTW. (Can I tell you how much of my life has been me having strong friendship bonds with dudes and then everybody being like, Oh, does he liiiiiiike you, like, good lord, people, keep your heteronormativity OVER THERE away from me.) Also, Holga kicks so much ass and Edgin kicks zero ass and everybody is very clear about this division of labor.
I like that everybody concedes the best action scenes are just Michelle Rodriguez punching stuff. (See also: Every trailer for Fast X that ends with Michelle Rodriguez and Charlize Theron fighting.)
I love Simon. There's something particularly and weirdly endearing about "sorcerer limited only by his own insecurities," and his arc here is a particularly satisfying one. He thinks he sucks, so he sucks, and then Edgin points out he ALWAYS succeeds when needs must, and then needs must! And even if we wanted to continue to doubt his innate talent, he also has a good grasp of arcane objects--when presented with a seemingly impossible obstacle, he knows the exact MacGuffin they need to get past it. He just so happens to have a token spell that lets them speak to the dead! He recognizes a frickin'
I would see it again in the theatres, but three times seems a bit much when there are so many other films coming up. But...I am still tempted.
A Thousand and One, 08 April 2023, Century Olympia
#AThousandAndOne is such an incredibly good, heartbreaking film. It is about a woman who grew up in foster care and who, upon finishing a brief stint in prison, discovers her son is being neglected in foster care, too. So she takes him.
The title of the film could be a reference to the number of their apartment for most of the movie (10-01, though the hyphen has fallen off the door when they move in and never gets replaced), but walking out of it, I was put more in mind of Scherezade's One Thousand and One Nights, wherein--not that you need me to remind you, but--a woman makes a life for herself in the shadow of a cliffhanger, one morning to the next, storytelling because it's the only way through.
While there is, OBVIOUSLY, the central ethical issue that, yeah, Inez kidnaps Terry from his foster home, I think it's also important to contextualize things. First, having grown up in the system herself, Inez is primed to recognize how it fails the children housed within it. Second, when Inez takes Terry, he's actually languishing in the hospital because he sustained a head injury while running away from his current foster parent. And third and most importantly, nobody comes looking for Terry. Like, there's an APB out and she gets his fake papers, but she doesn't even leave the city. It would not have been hard to find them, and yet nobody does.
The other thing about the film is that, in addition to an exploration of Black families and the foster system--Inez's on-again, off-again partner Lucky is a surrogate father to Terry even during off-again times--it's what I assume is a really interesting portrayal of New York City from the nineties to the present. We start off in Mayor Giuliani times (I think) but skip over years to key points in Terry's life, and at one point he and a friend are subjected to stop-and-frisk in an incident that is equally mundane and chilling. By the end of the movie, their neighborhood is being gentrified and Inez is being not-so-subtly forced out of her decent apartment.
There's a bit of a twist at the end--we're supposed to gasp and people in my theatre did, in fact, gasp--but after about ten minutes of dwelling in that discomfort, the narrative sort of settles into an, "why of course this is the case" sort of feel. It both feels like a cheap shock and also not at all like one. It's hard to explain, but it actually made the story click into place much more solidly than not.
Gorgeous. Sad. Heartfelt.
Suzume, 15 April 2023, Century Olympia
#Suzume is about a teenager who follows a mysterious hot guy to a town's ruins, accidentally opens a door to discover she has the ability to see otherworldly monsters, and has to take a road trip to close mystic portals to save Japan from ruination. GO SEE IT.
Seriously. I saw this in Japanese with English subtitles, I did not actually know what to expect--I have once again reached the mode where I will go see any movie that isn't a horror flick--and twenty minutes in I was ready to pledge my undying loyalty to this narrative.
There is a requisite Hot Anime Guy who Suzume bikes past on her way to classes. He asks her where to find some ruins and she tells him before continuing on to school, but when she can't stop thinking about him, she turns right around and heads over to the ruins herself. "Am I totally stalking this guy?" she asks herself and I LOLed so hard.
She finds a door not-at-all suspiciously standing in a pool of water. She trips over a little stone cat fixture and she pulls it out. She opens the door and finds it leads to a vast, sparkly other world that she cannot enter. And there's no sign of Hot Anime Guy around, either.
So she goes to school, because why not, right?
Well, later an earthquake alert sounds and Suzume sees a gigantic smoky dragon thing rising from the hills--originating from where that door in the ruins must be. But nobody else can see it! She bikes back up and finds Hot Anime Guy, whose name is Souta, trying to close the door again. There's some chanting and a magical key, but they manage to close the door before the smoke monster thing falls and causes a Very Big Earthquake.
She takes Souta back to her house to bandage some Door-Closing-related wounds. Then a cat, Daijin, appears on her balcony, takes a look at Souta, states clearly, "You're in the way," and then Souta's mind is transported into a broken child-sized chair.
YOU READ THAT RIGHT. For the majority of this film, the designated love interest is an animated piece of tiny furniture.
Suzume and Chair!Souta realize that Daijin is a harbinger of the giant worm emerging from doorways in abandoned places. (The film's creator, Makoto Shinkai, focuses a ton on how Japan's 2011 earthquake and tsunami impacted the people and the land.) They have to get to those doorways in order to close them before the giant worm falls to earth--otherwise, another disaster might ensue.
ROAD TRIP. Suzume empties out her bank account and skips out on school--to her aunt's absolute consternation--to travel northward by boat, train, car, bus, and bike to close doorways. We also dig into a bit of mythology as well, particularly why Suzume's able to see the giant worm monster thing when most people can't.
I loooooooved this movie. It's an epic supernatural saga, a episodic road trip, a weird romance, and a lovely/sad family tale. I cannot wait to watch it again--it was only in theatres for a couple of weeks here, so I'm now impatiently waiting for it to come to streaming/Blu-ray.
Air, 16 April 2023, Century Olympia
There's a bit of a cheat in this movie, which is about how Nike signed Michael Jordan to rise to athletic shoe dominance, because it starts us off with Nike as the underdog and Air Jordans as a shaky bet on an unproven rookie. There is no suspense in this story, but boy howdy, do they try to make us feel it as such.
This cast is STACKED, as we all know. There's something that feels a little weird about an almost all-white cast trying to corner the basketball shoe market by courting a Black family, but that's historically accurate, I guess? There's also a nice little bit where Chris Tucker's character is a key factor in the discussion--Nike's rivals, Adidas and Converse, don't have a Black executive on hand--and he makes the most of it, even if the script underplays the significance.
There's also a lovely bit where the shoe imagineer (I DON'T KNOW) talks about the Air Jordan's design, and how it should be "like water," as if it always existed, and they only happened to capture it as it should be. I like that. It's rhetorical and UX-centered in a lot of ways. I dig it.
This is a well-made movie! Why does it exist? I don't know! Why not, I guess?
Renfield, 22 April 2023, Century Olympia
Listen, am I inordinately predisposed to like #Renfield because Nicholas Hoult gets hotter with every extremely weird career choice he makes? YES. YES I AM.
BUT IT WAS FUN. If you're not familiar with the concept, Renfield has been Dracula's familiar for centuries now. Familiar, in this case, meaning a servant of Dracula who receives a level of super-poweredness when he eats bugs. (It's a whole thing about consuming the life force of beings.) In exchange for being granted this gross but handy power, Renfield's job is to bring Dracula victims while his master recuperates from previous attacks.
Thing is, Renfield accidentally started attending a support group for people in toxic co-dependent relationships and he's beginning to realize maybe he's not living his best life.
There's a neat bit at the beginning where they very, very faithfully (I think) echo previous Dracula movies. Not that I have watched any of those, but it looks quite convincing!
Awkwafina plays Rebecca, the only non-corrupt cop in New Orleans! Their paths cross kind of accidentally: She's tracking down some missing persons (Renfield makes a habit of abducting dirtbags to feed Dracula, but a murder's a murder), and in the course of almost finding Renfield, she gets attacked by a spoiled mob kid. When she refuses to grovel to the mob, Renfield gets all heart-eyes at her. (There's a whole little bit where he brings her flowers and it's supposedly romantic, but it feels less like a romantic/sexual interest and more like Renfield's got a serious case of "do I want her or do I want to be her" happening.)
Shoreh Agdashloo is the head of the meanest mob, and guys, she and Nic Cage's Dracula had waaaay more sparky chemistry, let's see what that horrifically campy, gory movie would be like, why don't we?
Nicholas Hoult is so goddamn good at this whole "acting" thing, y'all, now I have to binge watch The Great.
The Super Mario Bros. Movie, 23 April 2023, Century Olympia
#TheSuperMarioBrosMovie is very much like if you ported Narnia's Pevensies into a magical version of Mad Max: Fury Road, incels included.
It is entirely possible to leave this movie as a full-blown Peach/Toad shipper. Am I? MAYBE.
Is this a good movie? I don't know. "Good" is a qualifier with no fixed meaning. Is it a movie good at doing what it means to do? YES INDEED.
Chevalier, 23, April 2023, Century Olympia
Three things #ChevalierMovie does extremely well:
- Shares music by a Black composer who has historically been ignored, and through the journey, unpacks what it means to be privileged but also a person of color in that era, and also what it means to pass, and also how soul-crushing "twice as good for half as much" actually is.
- Makes you wonder why there was NOT ONE scene of Chevalier and Mozart angrily making out backstage.
- Establishes Marie Antoinette as history's first Karen.
L'Avventura, 27 April 2023, Blu-ray
So I joined up with a group of faculty showing films on campus this quarter. The current theme is "art house," and the first showing was Antonioni's L'Avventura. GUYS, as much as I watch films nowadays, I'm the farthest thing from the traditional film buff. Like, the only thing I knew about Antonioni is that he got name-checked in Rent's "La Vie Boheme." So, point to ME for getting closer to fully understanding all those references!
L'Avventura is OSTENSIBLY about a disaffected young woman who disappears while hanging out on a island with a bunch of rich people, and how her best friend and former fiance fall in love (or something) while they search for her. Or, as a couple of us declared after the movie was over, "I thought this was going to be a surprise lesbian Gone Girl!" (So far as the narrative deigns to tell us, it is NOT.)
Hilariously, a couple of folks were like, "Why were there dudes in town squares constantly leering at these poor young women," and those of us who have been to Italy were like, "Oh, no, that seems accurate to life."
Generally, this seems very much like a story about how women are either objectified or forgotten, and how that script can be writ upon the lost and lonely places of Italy, as well. But maybe not? It's possible I'm imposing a narrative on a film that's supposed to be more abstract than that.
But it's gorgeous, I'll give it that.
Star Wars: Episode VI--Return of the Jedi, 29 April 2023, Century Olympia
It's the 40th anniversary of ROTJ, so it came to the theatre this past weekend! I have briefly written about this movie in my Star Wars movie post, if you're curious.
I am generally ambivalent about Lucas's weird additions to the original films in the "Special Edition" versions. In ROTJ, most of the add-ins weren't toooooo intrusive--just little bits of CGI for background work, but OH MY GOD, the added song in Jabba's palace made up for that in metric tons of craposity. WHY. WHY DID THEY. WHY.
Otherwise, I quite liked the whole opening act. Watching this without doing any prep work before (that is, prefacing this watch with Episodes IV and V) meant the in media resness of the Han rescue was really emphasized. I liked it! It was disorienting! Jabba's palace is filled with ugly decadence!
Han and Leia are so obviously an established couple--they sure do declare their love for each other a lot--that it's kind of weird how quickly Han tries to be a Good Guy and offers to "back off" about the whole Luke situation? Then again, Luke and Leia lock into being a Force dyad pretty dang quickly, too, so maybe Han's just a victim of pervasive heteronormativity across the galaxy, given that he doesn't yet know about the sibling thing when he makes the offer.
David Prowse does some excellent helmet acting as Vader in this movie! It's a shame he's, like, third-billed as Vader, because honestly, some of those head tilts are doing some heavy emotional conveyance.
Honestly, I don't even mind Anakin replacing Sebastian Shaw (Vader #2 AKA helmet scab-face guy) in the Force ghost scene--it's just a little jarring since we've got Alec Guinness instead of Ewan MacGregor as Obi-Wan. (Yes, we can make the argument about when Anakin became Vader or whatever, but still.) Good for you, Hayden Christensen! Make that money!
Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret, 30 April 2023, Century Olympia
#AreYouThereGodItsMeMargaret manages to increase my deep and abiding love for Rachel McAdams by about 450%, which is a feat, let me tell you.
It's a very cute movie and also, MY GOD, I am glad I am no longer that age.
I only read the novel a few years ago, so I have no enduring childhood attachment to it, but this feels like a fairly excellent adaptation! It captures the specificity and universality of Margaret's puberty-and-also-interfaith-conflict journey in multiple ways that I dig.
The additional focus on Barbara's own struggles is a welcome one, though obvs I am biased about McAdams. Like, when she volunteers for THREE PTA committees in a row, I was like, Girrrrrl, and it was perfect.
And there's a quick, quiet scene in the middle where she sees a bird through the front window and sort of becomes fully enraptured with it, carefully scrambling to start painting it, and I have never been so in love as I was with Rachel McAdams's face in that moment, I swear to you.
What a lovely month of movies it has been!
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