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Spring Season: Weeks 33/34
Gonna have to be a quick one this week, since work has been (and continues to be) absolutely stupid. I should have seen it coming! This is how it always when the snow hits! Everybody panics and piles in to change their tires over all at once! But I was unprepared! I guess I thought the twelve-hour shifts would absorb a lot of the crunch? But instead there's just a lot more of it! I'm very sore and exhausted! I punched a wall on Wednesday when I ended up having to stay an extra ten minutes, it's real bad, so hopefully it's eased off some by the time I come back from my next week off!
It's also very cold, and very dark when I both leave and come home, which is... tiring. This never used to bother me so much! I'm not sure when that changed! Maybe when I got a bedroom with windows that actually look outside, thus gaining more of an appreciation for living my life in the glorious sunshine? That was right after my grandfather died, and three years sounds about right.
Looking for bright sides: getting to work an hour before sunup is kinda cool when you work in a giant glass-walled showroom. There are a whole lot of different colours out there, often all at once!
?????
OKAY, TO THE SPOILER ZONE. I've been watching a lot of short films lately, and having them in amongst the feature length movies has been feeling kinda weird, so in my continuing attempts to make this section less unwieldy, I'mma start splitting it into three, let's see how that goes!
Minor themes for the week include early Jackie Chan, the Quay Brothers, Eliza Hittman, three adaptations of the same damn story in one month, and the movie theater finally serving up some Halloween-y fare~
FILMS
Bless Their Little Hearts (1983): A low-key little downer of a film. Excellent, but also bleak enough that it's difficult to appreciate. One of those movies where the story feels beside the point, you're just invited to come sit inside this family's life for a little while, and it's kinda rough.
Chaos (2005): Way too much Ryan Phillippe, not nearly enough Wesley Snipes and WHATEVER the fuck he was doing.
The Deep (1977): Okay, this movie was kinda boring and way too long in spite of a few effective sequences, HOWEVER it was while watching it that I came to the stunning realization that Robert Shaw from Jaws and Robert Shaw from From Russia With Love are, in fact, the same man. I have seen both of those movies so many times, you guys. What the fuck.
Fearless Hyena (1979): A bare bones plot (he's basically Spider-Man) leaves plenty of room for absolutely killer fights. This thing is just stuffed full to bursting with ass kicking kung fu, with a little bit of drag for good measure. My only complaint is that I kinda wish the whole 'emotional fighting' angle was brought in earlier than the last act because it was so fucking cool, I wanted more of it.
Grand Hotel (1932): A lot of likable pieces, all wrapped up in a somewhat awkward package. Kinda stunned this hasn't been remade more?? It's tailor made to be repackaged with all the hot actors of any given moment.
It Felt Like Love (2013): Ahh, third wheeling and the uncomfortable, awkward sexuality of a girl in her early teens. BOY DO I NOT MISS ANY OF THIS. Really well done, but holy fuck could I not wait for it to be over.
In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale (2007): I don't think there's anything I could say here that the title doesn't already give you, except maybe "Directed by Uwe Boll".
The Killers (1964): A much more straightforward, inelegant version of the '46 movie, but what it loses in noir sophistication, it gains in just being fucking cool. There's no mystery to solve here, just some bastards blazing a trail. Firming up my opinion that I actually quite like Cassavetes as long as he's not the one behind the camera.
The Little Prince (1974): The book still feels like a pretty fundamentally unfilmable text to me, but this is such an absolutely buck wild attempt, I can't help but respect the hell out of it. GENE WILDER IS A FOX MAN, OKAY.
The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993): BACK TO THE 'RONA THEATRE WATCH #5! I snuck in a twelve-inch sub and it was literally the most perfect afternoon ever???
Once a Thief (1965): That awkward moment when the protagonist starts treating his wife horribly halfway through the movie and you instantly stop giving a shit about anything that happens to him. I only wish the fucking awful cops died in the end, too. The things I do for Alain Delon's face, man.
Pieces (1982): This is like... a twelve-year-old's concept of what college life is like, in the least convincing version of Boston I've ever seen. It's so bad. I love it.
Possessor (2020): BACK TO THE 'RONA THEATRE WATCH #3! Doing my patriotic duty by supporting Cronenbergs, hell yeah. The guy from that real pretentious 1009 short I watched a month ago turns out to be REAL fucking good??
Privilege (1990): This thing is just SO focused on being as intersectional in its feminism as possible, which should be a good thing, but kinda just made it feel like the point was constantly being wandered away from and lost, so much so that I'm not even sure what it was anymore?? This might be a 'me' problem, I don't know. Either way, Digna was the best part.
Real Life (1979): One of those rare movies whose central premises fundamentally don't work solely because of the intervening years since it came out? Albert Brooks just dreamed up reality television out of whole cloth and came to the conclusion that people would NEVER be able to deal with their lives being filmed all the damn time. We're so much more fucked up than we ever dreamed! This is still really goddamn funny, though. Every time Charles Grodin looks into the camera, it's like he's seeing into my soul.
Scream (1996): BACK TO THE 'RONA THEATRE WATCH #4! If The Nightmare Before Christmas was a perfect afternoon, this was an absolutely perfect evening, we went straight here from Possessor, stopping only to buy vodka coolers, it was amazing. skeet skeet motherfuckers
The Secret Garden (1949): I had a copy of this book when I was a kid, but I don't think I ever actually read past the first chapter of it, I just liked the look of the cover. So this was all new to me! Don't love the 'disabled child is actually fine once he gets out of bed' trope, but Margaret O'Brien and Dean Stockwell are legit two of the greatest child actors I have ever seen, I was SO charmed throughout. And the jump to colour near the end was some legit movie magic, I audibly gasped.
Spiritual Kung Fu (1978): Kind of meandering and uneven but WHO GIVES A SHIT IT'S ABOUT KUNG FU GHOSTS.
Stray Dogs (2013): Equal parts utterly gorgeous and fucking excruciating. I really hated it! Like, a lot! Pretty much every frame is a work of art and the cabbage scene is amazing, but not worth sitting through the TWO FUCKING HOURS of interminable shots of nothing that surround it. Just. No.
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974): I think my favourite thing about this movie is that just watching it makes me feel sticky. It's gross and weird and so very unapologetic about it.
The Young Master (1980): This movie is NUTS, it's written and paced like an old Hollywood musical, where the plot is just the flimsiest of excuses to get from one wildly unrelated musical number to the next, except instead of musical numbers, it's fight scenes. I lost count of how many times I shouted 'WHAT' over the course of it, though the definite highlights were the opening lion dance/fight, the skirt fight that isn't played for laughs at all, and Jackie Chan seemingly gaining superpowers from drinking bong water?? Amazing.
SHORTS
Anamorphosis (1991): Why can't all educational films be this fun? Cool to look at AND I learned things!
The Cabinet of Jan Švankmajer (1984): A delicately beautiful little bit of weirdness that would probably hit harder if I were more familiar with Švankmajer's work.
The Comb (1991): I don't think I had any real comprehension of what I was looking at for a single frame of this thing. Just a long string of vaguely creepy images, coming in through my eyes and ears and just sliding right off of my brain into the ether. I think I remember ladders?
The Discipline of D.E. (1982): You know something is good when it makes you want to completely change how you do everything in your life in only nine minutes. Fortunately, I quickly got over the impulse, but still! Do I need to read some Burroughs because maybe he is my shit? I guess I could just get into Taoism.
Dolfun (2016): Pretty sure this dude's droning nonsense monologue is literally impossible NOT to completely tune out, but dolphins are cool.
Forever's Gonna Start Tonight (2011): Oof, that ending tried real hard to sap all of the sympathy and kinship I'd built up with the lead character. Possibly it succeeded? Ugh, it's just a shitty situation all around.
Les héros sont immortels (1990): Far too talky, at least without subtitles; chunks of it went right over my head on a first viewing, and it wasn't really interesting enough for me to want to give it a second.
Les condiments irréguliers (2011): There's little reason for big sections of this to be nearly as creepy as they are?? Really well done, I loved this a lot.
The Killers (1956): The third version of this story I've watched this month, this one is... a Russian student film made by my boi Andrei Tarkovsky and his classmates! WHAT!! I am FASCINATED by this thing, oh my god. The man himself even shows up as Customer #2! He stiltingly delivers his one line and leaves as quickly as possible, it's amazing. Since it's just a short, it's obviously the most faithful adaptation of the Hemingway story of the three, but not just by virtue of not having to make up an extra hour of backstory and plot, it's faithful in a VERY 'what is adaptation?' student film kind of way that is both adorable and very cringey. Why did nobody tell these Russian children that they didn't HAVE to include a black person in their movie if they had no black people in their class to be in it?? It's because Hemingway uses the n-word a bunch so they thought it was plot relevant, isn't it. sIGH
Lick the Star (1998): It's got a lot of the nice, gauzy sensibilities that make me like The Virgin Suicides so much, but none of the layers to the subject matter, and the total dearth of decent actors just hurts it too much.
La petite sirène (2009): DELIGHTFULLY weird and creepy, and it's by the same guy who did Les condiments irréguliers and why hasn't he done anything else????
The Phantom Museum: Random Forays Into the Vaults of Sir Henry Wellcome’s Medical Collection (2003): Needed to be either longer and more in-depth, or more fantastical. Just kinda exists, as is.
Point and Line to Plane (2020): Beautiful and graceful, but strangely emotionless. I think I might like it all the more for that.
Protect You + Me (2008): This was Fine, but Brady Corbet was an actual child when he made it, which surely at least bumps it up to Good all on its own. DON'T WALK AWAY FROM ME.
Rehearsals for Extinct Anomalies (1987): Nope, don't like that one! Really unpleasantly tactile.
Second Cousins Once Removed (2010): Never really goes anywhere, but cousins really do be like that.
Street of Crocodiles (1986): Strange and unsettling and really weirdly compelling. I... think it might be a masterpiece???
Union County (2020): A little inscrutable in places, but not necessarily in a bad way. Sad but hopeful, makes its points and gets out of the way. Very nice.
TELEVISION
All Elite Wrestling (June 2 - July 22 2020): This shit remains my happy place at the moment, I'm kinda not sure what I'm gonna do with myself once I'm all caught up! Still a few weeks before I need to worry about that, though. I got through this year's Fyter Fest (it remains very funny to me that they're apparently making it a regular event when the thing it was parodying has long since ceased to be a relevant pop culture reference) and Fight for the Fallen (making it about COVID instead of gun violence this year was kind of a gimme), hoping to make it to All Out by the end of my next week off~ Current storylines I'm particularly invested in include Colt Cabana being wooed by the Dark Order (THEY'RE NOT YOUR FRIENDS, BOOM BOOM) and this random Joey Janela/Sonny Kiss team-up (I would watch a feature length version of this promo).
Star Trek: Discovery (3x01/3x02): I missed this show so much, you guys, and this season in particular is shaping up to be extremely my shit. It's going to be over before I know it, isn't it?
Okay, okay. Deep breaths. I can do this. Only two more days to go, plenty of podcasts to sustain me, wrestling and burritos waiting for me on the other side. Let's go.
It's also very cold, and very dark when I both leave and come home, which is... tiring. This never used to bother me so much! I'm not sure when that changed! Maybe when I got a bedroom with windows that actually look outside, thus gaining more of an appreciation for living my life in the glorious sunshine? That was right after my grandfather died, and three years sounds about right.
Looking for bright sides: getting to work an hour before sunup is kinda cool when you work in a giant glass-walled showroom. There are a whole lot of different colours out there, often all at once!
?????
OKAY, TO THE SPOILER ZONE. I've been watching a lot of short films lately, and having them in amongst the feature length movies has been feeling kinda weird, so in my continuing attempts to make this section less unwieldy, I'mma start splitting it into three, let's see how that goes!
Minor themes for the week include early Jackie Chan, the Quay Brothers, Eliza Hittman, three adaptations of the same damn story in one month, and the movie theater finally serving up some Halloween-y fare~
FILMS
Bless Their Little Hearts (1983): A low-key little downer of a film. Excellent, but also bleak enough that it's difficult to appreciate. One of those movies where the story feels beside the point, you're just invited to come sit inside this family's life for a little while, and it's kinda rough.
Chaos (2005): Way too much Ryan Phillippe, not nearly enough Wesley Snipes and WHATEVER the fuck he was doing.
The Deep (1977): Okay, this movie was kinda boring and way too long in spite of a few effective sequences, HOWEVER it was while watching it that I came to the stunning realization that Robert Shaw from Jaws and Robert Shaw from From Russia With Love are, in fact, the same man. I have seen both of those movies so many times, you guys. What the fuck.
Fearless Hyena (1979): A bare bones plot (he's basically Spider-Man) leaves plenty of room for absolutely killer fights. This thing is just stuffed full to bursting with ass kicking kung fu, with a little bit of drag for good measure. My only complaint is that I kinda wish the whole 'emotional fighting' angle was brought in earlier than the last act because it was so fucking cool, I wanted more of it.
Grand Hotel (1932): A lot of likable pieces, all wrapped up in a somewhat awkward package. Kinda stunned this hasn't been remade more?? It's tailor made to be repackaged with all the hot actors of any given moment.
It Felt Like Love (2013): Ahh, third wheeling and the uncomfortable, awkward sexuality of a girl in her early teens. BOY DO I NOT MISS ANY OF THIS. Really well done, but holy fuck could I not wait for it to be over.
In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale (2007): I don't think there's anything I could say here that the title doesn't already give you, except maybe "Directed by Uwe Boll".
The Killers (1964): A much more straightforward, inelegant version of the '46 movie, but what it loses in noir sophistication, it gains in just being fucking cool. There's no mystery to solve here, just some bastards blazing a trail. Firming up my opinion that I actually quite like Cassavetes as long as he's not the one behind the camera.
The Little Prince (1974): The book still feels like a pretty fundamentally unfilmable text to me, but this is such an absolutely buck wild attempt, I can't help but respect the hell out of it. GENE WILDER IS A FOX MAN, OKAY.
The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993): BACK TO THE 'RONA THEATRE WATCH #5! I snuck in a twelve-inch sub and it was literally the most perfect afternoon ever???
Once a Thief (1965): That awkward moment when the protagonist starts treating his wife horribly halfway through the movie and you instantly stop giving a shit about anything that happens to him. I only wish the fucking awful cops died in the end, too. The things I do for Alain Delon's face, man.
Pieces (1982): This is like... a twelve-year-old's concept of what college life is like, in the least convincing version of Boston I've ever seen. It's so bad. I love it.
Possessor (2020): BACK TO THE 'RONA THEATRE WATCH #3! Doing my patriotic duty by supporting Cronenbergs, hell yeah. The guy from that real pretentious 1009 short I watched a month ago turns out to be REAL fucking good??
Privilege (1990): This thing is just SO focused on being as intersectional in its feminism as possible, which should be a good thing, but kinda just made it feel like the point was constantly being wandered away from and lost, so much so that I'm not even sure what it was anymore?? This might be a 'me' problem, I don't know. Either way, Digna was the best part.
Real Life (1979): One of those rare movies whose central premises fundamentally don't work solely because of the intervening years since it came out? Albert Brooks just dreamed up reality television out of whole cloth and came to the conclusion that people would NEVER be able to deal with their lives being filmed all the damn time. We're so much more fucked up than we ever dreamed! This is still really goddamn funny, though. Every time Charles Grodin looks into the camera, it's like he's seeing into my soul.
Scream (1996): BACK TO THE 'RONA THEATRE WATCH #4! If The Nightmare Before Christmas was a perfect afternoon, this was an absolutely perfect evening, we went straight here from Possessor, stopping only to buy vodka coolers, it was amazing. skeet skeet motherfuckers
The Secret Garden (1949): I had a copy of this book when I was a kid, but I don't think I ever actually read past the first chapter of it, I just liked the look of the cover. So this was all new to me! Don't love the 'disabled child is actually fine once he gets out of bed' trope, but Margaret O'Brien and Dean Stockwell are legit two of the greatest child actors I have ever seen, I was SO charmed throughout. And the jump to colour near the end was some legit movie magic, I audibly gasped.
Spiritual Kung Fu (1978): Kind of meandering and uneven but WHO GIVES A SHIT IT'S ABOUT KUNG FU GHOSTS.
Stray Dogs (2013): Equal parts utterly gorgeous and fucking excruciating. I really hated it! Like, a lot! Pretty much every frame is a work of art and the cabbage scene is amazing, but not worth sitting through the TWO FUCKING HOURS of interminable shots of nothing that surround it. Just. No.
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974): I think my favourite thing about this movie is that just watching it makes me feel sticky. It's gross and weird and so very unapologetic about it.
The Young Master (1980): This movie is NUTS, it's written and paced like an old Hollywood musical, where the plot is just the flimsiest of excuses to get from one wildly unrelated musical number to the next, except instead of musical numbers, it's fight scenes. I lost count of how many times I shouted 'WHAT' over the course of it, though the definite highlights were the opening lion dance/fight, the skirt fight that isn't played for laughs at all, and Jackie Chan seemingly gaining superpowers from drinking bong water?? Amazing.
SHORTS
Anamorphosis (1991): Why can't all educational films be this fun? Cool to look at AND I learned things!
The Cabinet of Jan Švankmajer (1984): A delicately beautiful little bit of weirdness that would probably hit harder if I were more familiar with Švankmajer's work.
The Comb (1991): I don't think I had any real comprehension of what I was looking at for a single frame of this thing. Just a long string of vaguely creepy images, coming in through my eyes and ears and just sliding right off of my brain into the ether. I think I remember ladders?
The Discipline of D.E. (1982): You know something is good when it makes you want to completely change how you do everything in your life in only nine minutes. Fortunately, I quickly got over the impulse, but still! Do I need to read some Burroughs because maybe he is my shit? I guess I could just get into Taoism.
Dolfun (2016): Pretty sure this dude's droning nonsense monologue is literally impossible NOT to completely tune out, but dolphins are cool.
Forever's Gonna Start Tonight (2011): Oof, that ending tried real hard to sap all of the sympathy and kinship I'd built up with the lead character. Possibly it succeeded? Ugh, it's just a shitty situation all around.
Les héros sont immortels (1990): Far too talky, at least without subtitles; chunks of it went right over my head on a first viewing, and it wasn't really interesting enough for me to want to give it a second.
Les condiments irréguliers (2011): There's little reason for big sections of this to be nearly as creepy as they are?? Really well done, I loved this a lot.
The Killers (1956): The third version of this story I've watched this month, this one is... a Russian student film made by my boi Andrei Tarkovsky and his classmates! WHAT!! I am FASCINATED by this thing, oh my god. The man himself even shows up as Customer #2! He stiltingly delivers his one line and leaves as quickly as possible, it's amazing. Since it's just a short, it's obviously the most faithful adaptation of the Hemingway story of the three, but not just by virtue of not having to make up an extra hour of backstory and plot, it's faithful in a VERY 'what is adaptation?' student film kind of way that is both adorable and very cringey. Why did nobody tell these Russian children that they didn't HAVE to include a black person in their movie if they had no black people in their class to be in it?? It's because Hemingway uses the n-word a bunch so they thought it was plot relevant, isn't it. sIGH
Lick the Star (1998): It's got a lot of the nice, gauzy sensibilities that make me like The Virgin Suicides so much, but none of the layers to the subject matter, and the total dearth of decent actors just hurts it too much.
La petite sirène (2009): DELIGHTFULLY weird and creepy, and it's by the same guy who did Les condiments irréguliers and why hasn't he done anything else????
The Phantom Museum: Random Forays Into the Vaults of Sir Henry Wellcome’s Medical Collection (2003): Needed to be either longer and more in-depth, or more fantastical. Just kinda exists, as is.
Point and Line to Plane (2020): Beautiful and graceful, but strangely emotionless. I think I might like it all the more for that.
Protect You + Me (2008): This was Fine, but Brady Corbet was an actual child when he made it, which surely at least bumps it up to Good all on its own. DON'T WALK AWAY FROM ME.
Rehearsals for Extinct Anomalies (1987): Nope, don't like that one! Really unpleasantly tactile.
Second Cousins Once Removed (2010): Never really goes anywhere, but cousins really do be like that.
Street of Crocodiles (1986): Strange and unsettling and really weirdly compelling. I... think it might be a masterpiece???
Union County (2020): A little inscrutable in places, but not necessarily in a bad way. Sad but hopeful, makes its points and gets out of the way. Very nice.
TELEVISION
All Elite Wrestling (June 2 - July 22 2020): This shit remains my happy place at the moment, I'm kinda not sure what I'm gonna do with myself once I'm all caught up! Still a few weeks before I need to worry about that, though. I got through this year's Fyter Fest (it remains very funny to me that they're apparently making it a regular event when the thing it was parodying has long since ceased to be a relevant pop culture reference) and Fight for the Fallen (making it about COVID instead of gun violence this year was kind of a gimme), hoping to make it to All Out by the end of my next week off~ Current storylines I'm particularly invested in include Colt Cabana being wooed by the Dark Order (THEY'RE NOT YOUR FRIENDS, BOOM BOOM) and this random Joey Janela/Sonny Kiss team-up (I would watch a feature length version of this promo).
Star Trek: Discovery (3x01/3x02): I missed this show so much, you guys, and this season in particular is shaping up to be extremely my shit. It's going to be over before I know it, isn't it?
Okay, okay. Deep breaths. I can do this. Only two more days to go, plenty of podcasts to sustain me, wrestling and burritos waiting for me on the other side. Let's go.