Christmastime Is Here

I don’t watch TV very much and I don’t really celebrate Christmas except depending on who I’m dating at the time and if they celebrate. I do certainly admire the season though, especially if I’m spending it in an environment that’s nice and chilly and cold and bonus points if it’s snowing. It is certainly my favorite time of year. And regardless of if I’m attending a Christmas party that year or not, I’m gonna be spending more than a little bit of time watching certain favorites as a force of habit, namely holiday TV specials. Y’know, the kind that were animated and best made in the 1960s (though not by any “objective” standard. Even today, TV animation on a budget is pretty rough as is but Rankin/Bass’ stop-motion certainly tried to circumvent this). They’re short and sweet so I can watch enough to fill an hour before I sleep the night before Christmas and they’re a nice little amount of mood to continue on for the rest of the season. And I’ll especially give TV specials one thing over films:

If it weren’t for TV specials, I wouldn’t enter every winter season without the song “Christmastime Is Here” playing in my head. And I’m very happy to have that be the theme song of my winters, nice and falling singular piano notes apply a melody in my head to the imagery of snowflakes gently dropping to the ground. Just one piano tune over and over, something to cement early in my life the idea that jazz is always the best Christmas music, and Vince Guaraldi was the genius to make me think that.

Guaraldi’s soundtrack – which also includes “Linus and Lucy” another very close theme song to my childhood and a children’s choir performing the hymn “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” (there is also a children’s choir involved in “Christmastime Is Here” but my mind just goes to the piano underneath and its wonderful and evocative simplicity) – is not the only great thing that the 1965 TV special A Charlie Brown Christmas gave me, but it is the thing that sticks most to me. If it were not for the special, I don’t see myself being so enamored with jazz at such a young age that I would find it calming or atmospheric and all through the best kind of minimalism.

If it weren’t for A Charlie Brown Christmas, I also would probably be a lot more cynical about Christmas than I actually am as an adult who has no intentions of religious alignment in his life and is in many ways actively against religious institution. I’m sure one more cynical about religion than I am could probably be dissatisfied as the makers feared with the solution to the loveable child blockhead Charlie Brown’s usual depressive woes, this time centered around the Christmas season, as simple as (SPOILERS FOR A TELEVISION SPECIAL OLDER THAN MY DAD WHICH I DON’T THINK PEOPLE WATCH FOR THE PLOT ANYMORE) the blanket-dragging child Linus reciting from the Gospel According to Luke and poof! There’s Charlie Brown’s answer to the missing meaning of Christmas, but it IS true in a literal sense and it’s a spirited and confident reading from a child! A legit child actor, Chris Shea, was able to stand and deliver the Bible communicating the full and expressive meaning of the Shepherds’ Annunciation of the Nativity of Jesus and as somebody who grew up in Islamic Sunday School watching a lot of fellow kids trying to memorize Qur’an, I can’t imagine most of my teachers would have deigned for that sort of awareness of the material and declarative reading.

That’s kind of the miracle of A Charlie Brown Christmas that makes it so pleasant for me. The entire cast from Peter Robbins as Charlie on down to Sally Dryer in a one-scene part delivering a proud insistence she never sent Charlie a “Merry Christmas” are all young children around the 9-to-11-year-old range and they have these blocks of dialogue expressing existential crises and criticisms of capitalism and “commercialism” (I don’t think I knew the meaning of the word “commercialism” at their ages) that they have to deliver and they ace it with flying colors. Emphasis on the right elements while still sounding wholly like the stuff children would say with only the slightest hint of a hand tipped in maturity.

Credit it to director Bill Melendez for knowing how to direct voice acting, credit it to Charles M. Schulz – creator of the original Peanuts comic strips series that A Charlie Brown Christmas is a part of and writer of the special (the television special was made right at the height of the franchise’s popularity) – who would know these characters better than anybody else in the world and knows just the right amount of character and youth to imbue into the writing, credit it to whichever casting director was able to pull in this many intelligent young actors who could certainly know how to express thoughts like these, and of course credit it to these kids for pulling it off most of all and instantly sticking to our ideas of how these characters sound. The moroseness in Brown’s voice, the bold egotism in Lucy’s, these are just impossible to remove from the characters as I remember them, even when I’m just looking at the comic strip that reliably entertained me from my own childhood onward.

I am, truth be told, shocked that I’m nearing the end of my praise for my definitive work of Christmas-based pop culture and only now mentioned Melendez. Melendez’s animation work makes the best with what little they had, pushing the budget and month as far as he could, maintaining the flat 2-dimensional primitive stylizations of the hand-drawn comic strip so that it’s all in one plane, thereby establishing the style that every single Peanuts production since would have to live by lest they mess with tradition. And yet there’s still motion and spacing that Melendez is willing to play with, filling out an entire skating rink with individual (if still repeated motions) including a wonderful amount of liberty taken with Charlie’s beloved beagle Snoopy as he glides over the light blue ice (including a wonderful moment where he drags the other characters in a line all across the shimmering screen) or the memorable setpiece of everybody dancing to Linus, Pig Pen, and Snoopy playing “Linus and Lucy”. In fact, if it probably wasn’t for Melendez’s conservative usage of lines and colors in a manner that feels lovingly personal, it probably be able to sell the cuteness behind Charlie Brown’s choice of Christmas tree for the Christmas play, a lonely bent stick with barely peeking out of its branches. In a special that’s hardly the stuff of immaculate craft, this little tree that somehow means something to Charlie Brown doesn’t feel quite as bad and that means we sympathize with the care and adoration he wants his friends to give to the tree as well.

So, yeah, it’s not perfect. The audio feels like an unfinished element with missing sounds from what we’re viewing and very apparent seams where we hear what lines of dialogue are put together from separate takes (although there is a terrific gag of Snoopy giving his best impression of several different animals). And I’m sure some look for a more detailed design or fluid kind of animation from their animation, but I can’t see myself ever being dissatisfied with a Christmas night sitting down and playing this. A Charlie Brown Christmas is a television special that wants us to understand the meaning of Christmas and delivers it not just in substance but in the amount of soul that every single person involved in this special put into it. Melendez, Schulz, Guarini, and all their company gave us this one undiluted package of Christmas joy. I couldn’t feel any more merry after watching it if I tried.

Nothing’s Gonna Change My World

It is a relatively good thing, I think, that I saw Luc Besson’s summer space adventure Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets before I was able to start reading the original Franch comic series by Pierre Christin and Jean-Claude Mézières by the name of Valerian et Laureline*. It is a brilliant and wonderful work of pulp artistry and adventure storytelling that Valerian certainly lives up to in more than a few ways, but also stands as the kind of visual swashbuckler comic literature I wish I had access to as a child. That I read it after seeing the movie being a good thing is due to how little the characters within the comic series – dashing handsome and tall Valerian and red-haired ingénue from the Middle Ages Laureline – do not at all look similar to Besson’s leads, Dane DeHaan and Cara Delevingne. I like to hope that wouldn’t have bothered me, but just to be sure, the fact that I saw Valerian before reading them ensured that the only reason I’d fell the leads are miscast is because of their performance.

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is a damn great movie in my eyes, regardless of what the detractors of the movie think. It is more than a bit likely to show up on my top 20 of the year and it’s easily my favorite space opera of essentially the four major ones we’ve received this year (the others being Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, Thor: Ragnarok, and sadly Star Wars: The Last Jedi in that preferred order). And yet the one thing I can’t find myself to argue with detractors about (and indeed there are plenty) is that the leads don’t work. Less so Delevingne, who takes command of every moment like her character’s name wasn’t removed from the title with intelligence but would probably do much better with a co-star that she could actually have romantic chemistry with. It’s more DeHaan, not only being unable to pass for dashing anything but instead looking like the son of Peter Lorre in all those baggy eyes and delivering his macho lines like he’s barely out of breath. Lines that, mind you, are essentially a space soldier harassing his partner and only the best kind of screwball chemistry would make it feel less objectionable. DeHaan, an actor I overall love and want to see in more movies (who definitely helped with this year’s earlier A Cure for Wellness) is not that actor.

An out-of-place lead actor is certainly not something I could hold a moviegoer accountable for being unable to ignore, but in truth my love for Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is one that supersedes all of that just as much as my love of Star Wars does likewise. If I ever go to watch a space opera because I want compelling substance, please slap me in the face because something’s wrong with me. Valerian delivers an overwhelming amount of world-building in its gaudy biome designs of different regions in its titular International Space Station (we witness the growth of the original Space Station into this wondrous cornucopia of alien cultures and civilizations in an opening montage to David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” that even detractors find lovely, slowly having several of Besson’s usual collaborators like Louis Leterrier and Olivier Megaton welcome several disarming but lovely extra-terrestrials in the spirit of galactic brotherhood).

Hell, the moment that the trailer featured a long-shot sequence of Valerian crashing his way past walls separating several different environments and habitats, a variety of smooth surfaces, bold various colors, and dazzling lighting servicing several the kind of cartoonish but ambitious and engrossing CGI convinced me I was going to watch this movie in 3D and the second scene in the movie inviting us to explore a shiny shimmering beach planet where the very skin of its silver natives glows and pearls flow like water before showing off the depth of field by having a violent and explosive invasion occur is when I was certain I made the right decision.

See, I don’t really have a problem with Besson’s screenplay. It’s certainly slightly less stupid than Lucy (which I also stan for) and has a certain subplot that involves a detour introducing us to a wonderfully hammy turn by Ethan Hawke and a crazy fun outfit-switching dance performance by Rihanna (and whatever dance double they had)**, but its main purpose is to utilize the Ambassador of Shadows storyline into the making of a world-building adventure from setpiece to setpiece – here’s a trans-dimensional bazaar where Valerian has to interact with one dimension while inhabiting another to extract an item followed by a monster chase, here’s deep sea dive filled with imaginative sea life before Laureline has to wear some brainsucking jellyfish as a helmet, here’s a Gilliam-esque throne room for a couple of laughs while troll-esque aliens feed their picky king, and so forth. The context isn’t what has to make these experiences joyous to me, Hugues Tissandier’s construction of these sets and creatures does more than enough to do so and then Alexandre Desplat’s sparkling epic score lifts the film to ethereal heights (and it’s not even his best score of the year given The Shape of Water), the sort of spectacle driven cinema that gets butt in the movies to begin with.

Listen, if something as ridiculous looking and sounding as Valerian was not going to be your thing, that’s alright. I stan for the likes of Jupiter Ascending so it could hardly be unexpected that I walked out of it feeling my summer was made. It’s utterly shallow, but it’s also transfixingly vibrant. It doesn’t have as comforting an audience surrogate as Bruce Willis in Besson’s previous The Fifth Element, but if you’re willing to just go for the ride without anyone to relate to, you will still find yourself sucked in. You may or may not have to go into Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets with a very specific idea of what you look for in movies, but luckily it provides exactly what I look for: a brilliant living expansion of worlds and domains for which we can witness setpieces unlike anything we ever have seen before and possibly won’t see since.

*I will go on the record as to pointing out that I find removing Laureline from the title of the film to be a dirty fucking move, especially since I think the argument can be made that Laureline has more screentime overall.

**Between this, Girlhood, and American Honey, movies are really trying to make me overlook my dislike for Rihanna’s music and turn me into a fan of hers. It’s working.

Lucky as a Rabbit’s Foot

What do I get to say about Logan Lucky that wasn’t already said in one phrase before the movie was even over: “Ocean’s 7-Eleven”, a very knowing grace note of a background line by returning-after-a-4-year-hiatus director Steven Soderbergh (who had helmed the recent Ocean’s trilogy) and mysterious writer Rebecca Blunt (speculated by some to be a pseudonym for someone else, namely either Soderbergh or his wife Jules Asner).

It is impossible to conceive of a more accurate representation of what that movie is and presents about its characters and their lives, that it’s a heist movie from the exact opposite end of the economic background spectrum (Logan Lucky discusses this last element as a central motivation for the heist and certain actions after the heist, though Logan Lucky is not nearly as tenacious a commentary on finances the way Magic Mike is but it is a big one on class. More on that later.). Those characters being the Logan siblings – limping laid-off divorcée Jimmy (Channing Tatum), amputee veteran bartender Clyde (Adam Driver) who has a prosthetic left arm, and dry hairdresser Mellie (Riley Keough) who is apparently on the most stable footing out of the three of them.

They are frequently down-on-their-luck, due to a curse according to Clyde, Southern folk who are clever enough to attempt to turn that into the makings of a damned big heist of Charlotte Motor Speedway, THE Nascar home track, a heist that through that same hard luck ends up forced to occur on one of the busiest days of the speedway’s year – The Coca-Cola 600 Race.

Most of this sounds a lot more glamorous and epic than it actually is, especially naming Tatum and Keough among the cast, which I want to make clear isn’t the case. Soderbergh’s given us an very muted heist film, trying to feel casual and at-home within the humble settings between Virginia and North Carolina and pleasant about all of the culture of country life in all of its fairs and impromptu hang-outs in bars or mobile health clinics. Most of all there is nothing glamorous in how Jimmy, a recently laid-off divorceé, is faced with the possibility of not getting to see his daughter Sadie (Farrah Mackenzie) as his re-married ex-wife Bobbie Jo (Katie Holmes) has to move from North Carolina to Virginia, one of the things that spurs this heist’s necessity to him.

I don’t want to call it a shaggy film because the thoroughline with which it explores this community swiftly (not in-depth, but enough that we’re not wondering where we are) and the rush by which it gallops through the heist are all too tight to become anything we could call “shaggy”, but it’s a more relaxed movie than any heist movie has any right to be. We may as well speculate that Soderbergh is happy to be back in the south (having been born in Georgia) after spending time in the glitzy glamour of Hollywood and the world and that probably the chance to make Logan Lucky within his familiar home region might have coaxed him out of his retirement to make the film just as well as his proclaimed newfangled concept of film production and distribution. And that home feeling just radiates out of the film without any self-consciousness about it being rural and grainy south, especially when the movie uses John Denver as a wonderful emotional anchor (out of the multitudes of films released in the US in 2017 that famously utilized Denver’s music in its soundtrack, Logan Lucky has my favorite one by a landslide).

Tatum himself is also Southern (Alabama-born) and its no surprise he’s able to slip into the handy and gentlemanly but rugged state of mind and guide us through it like a second language to him, but it’s a surprise when most of the cast are able to follow up on him. And as this movie is not necessarily the Tatum show, it leaves Daniel Craig’s blonde manic Joe Bang and Keough’s Mellie with more than enough room to upstage the star in his own territory. Still all are pleasant and welcoming and interesting as the last, except for the deliberate point of Seth MacFarlane’s obnoxious British caricature who is meant to stick out like a sore thumb and be generally odious. For the first 2/3 of Logan Lucky, while it’s lightly aimed at the unfairness of the established economy on the little guy, MacFarlane and Dwight Yoakam’s bit turn as Warden Flop Sweat are the closest we have to present antagonists and Yoakam is too hilarious to be at all unlikable.

At the last third of the film is when Soderbergh and Blunt seem to lose track of what kind of movie they were making and suddenly shifting to an incongruent FBI detective film starring Hilary Swank in a performance where we can understand what she’s going for even while she falls flat on her face as Sarah Grayson, the investigator in the aftermath of the heist. And frankly, it outstays its welcome given how little we want to see the Logans get a comeuppance, the amount of nothing to come out of Grayson’s entry into the story (including a very misfire of an attempt to recreate the final note of the first Ocean’s Eleven), and the frank fact that the movie just stops being a hell of a lot of fun and clunks and drags on its way to the finish line.

It’s not enough to stop me from falling in love with Logan Lucky as a return for Soderbergh, probably because ironically the damage of the third act makes me appreciate what preceded it even more. You see, Logan Lucky is frankly safe as a movie for Soderbergh. It maps neatly onto most of the work he’s already done and it’s shot and set in an area of the world that he has a strong affinity for. It’s not necessarily a challenge for him nor does it provide something new for the viewer if they’re already fond of Soderbergh. But it’s fun and it has energy and it’s breezy and it’s hard to see myself not having a good time with it. So sometimes, taking the country roads home rather than speeding around in circles is the best sort of drive to take, especially if it’s your first time back on the wheel in a while.

Severance Package

The Belko Experiment is the sort of premise that, unless it has an immaculately talented director behind the wheel who could balance it all, could almost only go in one of two directions – it could either be a broad comedy doubling as light satire or it could be a cold harsh and cruel picture that’s a tense watch, though not a hard watch. I don’t think a movie with this many pieces that would make us go “but how the fuck does THAT work logistically?” could survive trying to play things too straight-faced and serious.

And so James Gunn’s screenplay for The Belko Experiment ends up a double-edged sword, in how it does have a broadness to it in the mystery behind its central location – an apparently outsourced office for Belko Industries all the way in Bogotà, Colombia that is outrageously guarded with military-grade weaponry and prison looking concrete gates on the outside, though still seeing the need for indoor security headed by the casual Evan (James Earl). The also ridiculous logic behind employees agreeing to painfully implanted trackers or the building of steel doors to cover up the entire building could like wise not be entirely taken straightfaced without being a total wink at how far people are willing to go to be offered any position, though that’s just too general here already. And especially when a voice on the loudspeaker (Gregg Henry) announces to its employees that they must kill each during an allotment of time or they will utilize the explosive trackers to kill many more. It’s not hyucks, but it’s got heightened distance. If anything, the only element of the film that doesn’t seem to have an actual business atmosphere analogue is how all of the management heads, including COO Barry (Tony Goldwyn), are former military with heavy combat experience, thus having a head up on the men and women beneath them that they can kill, but overall it’s an unsubtle portrayal of competitive work environments except with physical violence instead of the downsizing and staff cuts.

And so, Gunn’s script able to sell these with enough humor behind it desperately wants to be something of a comedy and satire. Indeed, the film even includes in its large ensemble many of Gunn’s regular actors, such as Henry, his brother Sean, and Michael Rooker (Gunn remains a producer on the film and I’m sure he was slated to direct at one point). There’s also one very recognizable comedic character actor in the form of John C. McGinley. So humor is in the idea of this movie to especially sell the commentary of cutthroat office atmospheres.

And unfortunately, director Greg McLean is just not funny.

Mind you, McLean is actually a wonderful idea for a movie about the brutality of others desperately shedding each others’ blood and as a result The Belko Experiment ends up working very capably as a thriller. It should be no surprise that the director of the nihilistic and overwhelming Wolf Creek is able to carry this movie’s stakes and horrors (though I’m not certain I’d call this a horror movie). Not enough to make this into a nailbiter, but given the amount of familiarity the premise of “put people into a room and make them slaughter each other in order to make a statement” at THIS point in the decade, it’s amazing to have any amount of tautness in the atmosphere at all.

And to be quite real, McLean certainly feigns in the direction of some amount of irony. It’s hard to deny that in how editor Julia Wong uses the occasional Spanish covers of classic rock tunes such as “California Dreamin'” into a rhythm for which our hearts jump on each shot and axe to the face (Wong, easily the movie’s best weapon, also has a way of utilizing cuts just at the moment of a body part giving way to the film’s not-quite-severe gore – enough to let us see the ugly viscerality of it and sell it before she cuts to the next element of the scene leaving it still fresh in our mind when we move on).

That honestly leaves the cast themselves to be guided by McLean to turn into sweaty and harried blood-covered beings who have two particular types – those who can’t grapple with this kill-or-be-killed environment or those who are eager to just step all over their peers – and the cast, mostly fronted by either John Gallagher Jr. or Melonie Diaz (as the unfortunate new recruit) all know how to turn their bodies into collapsing alarms of panic. And once again McLean, Gunn, and Wong structure all this material into several diverging storylines so that we can capture enough of the characters to make it hurt more when we see their grisly demise, the same sort of multi-narrative angle Battle Royale perfected with the premise beforehand.

Basically, it’s not reinventing the wheel and I can’t figure out anything within it that makes it a must-watch. But The Belko Experiment is not anything less than a decent bloodletting thriller as well, short enough not to outstay its welcome and shallow enough to prevent the nihilism within it from ruining our day.

PROFESSOR BIRDMAN’S WING-FLAPPING, PLUMAGE-FLAUNTING, BEAK-BUSTING THANKSGIVING WEEKEND MOVIE QUIZ

Obviously I’m late on this quiz, but Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule always seems to have the perfect ones just coming out at a point where I feel I need to recharge before getting back into gear with writing about movies. So here we goooooo!!!

1) Most obnoxious movie you’ve ever seen

Do I get to say Mike & Dave Need Wedding Dates, even though I couldn’t finish it (and I was like 5/6 of the way in) because it was so fucking shrill? If I don’t get to say that, then The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2. Fucking noise pollution that one is.

2) Favorite oddball pairing of actors.

Bruce Campbell and Ossie Davis Jr. in Bubba Ho-Tep and I sure am glad to have seen them together.

3) Which movie would you have paid to see remade by Ken Russell?

Fifty Shades of Grey. There’s gonna be some really occultist moods rising out of it with Ken Russell behind the camera, something that brings suddenly more camp value and artistic merit out of the material. And just imagine: Oliver Reed as Christian Grey.

4) Emma Stone or Margot Robbie?

I’m kind of mad that Margot Robbie isn’t already a HOUSEHOLD MOVIE STAR, even though she’s given performance after performance that steals scenes from movies that don’t deserve it (Focus, The Wolf of Wall Street, even fucking Suicide Squad). So no slight to the talented Stone, but Team Robbie until she gets her due.

Looking forward to I, Tonya on the praise of certain friends.

5) Which member of Monty Python are you?

Terry Gilliam. We like animation and visual art, we get into hissy fits over filmmaking, we’re petty over artists we don’t like (though I’d certainly battle him over his attitude towards Spielberg), and we’re both broke as fuck.

6) Which movie would you have paid to see remade by Vincent Minnelli?

High School Musical because if we’re gonna be inaccurate to my high school experiences, why not go for broke?

7) Franco Nero or Gian Maria Volonte?

Franco Nero because his charm is of the grizzled heroic sort, while Volonte is of the slimy villain sort. I wanna be one of the good guys, man.

8) Your favorite Japanese monster movie

It’s cheating to say Godzilla, even though it IS my answer. I guess Daimajin can take over, given how he don’t play no games.

9) Which movie would you have paid to see remade by Stanley Kubrick?

Forrest Gump. I don’t need to say why.

10) Hanna Schygulla or Barbara Sukowa?

Schygulla. The Marriage of Maria Braun, yo.

11) Name a critically admired movie that you hate.

There are so many, obviously. Bur I feel like nobody will try to stop me right now if I say American Beauty, a movie that already felt creepy and pretentious and misogynistic well before it turned out it was starring a creep.

12) Which movie would you have paid to see remade by Elia Kazan?

Glengarry Glen Ross. Character and tension driven drama, that’s right on his wavelength.

13) Better or worse: Disney comedies (1955-1975) or Elvis musicals?

Excuse me? Are we implying Elvis musicals are bad? Fuck outta here.

14) Which movie would you have paid to see remade by Alfred Hitchcock?

The Book of Henry, oh my fucking gawd.

15) Ryan Gosling or Channing Tatum?

Ryan Gosling has hella talent and often picks more interesting projects, but I’m sorry, my heart goes Channing Tatum who continuously charms the shit out of me and has moves like Jagger.

16) Bad performance in a movie you otherwise like/love.

Y’know, I just rewatched Blow Out and Nancy Allen’s performance has got some less than ideal connotations so I’m gonna go with that one. Still that shot of her screaming.

17) Which movie would you have paid to see remade by Howard Hawks?

The Last Man on Earth/The Omega Man/I Am Legend. Basically re-adapt Matheson’s book with less moving parts than Hawks is used too but probably more incisive to the lonely masculinity of the lead. If John Wayne stars, that’s a plus.

18) Tippi Hedren or Kim Novak?

Kim Novak. Doesn’t get enough credit for Vertigo.

19) Best crime movie remake.

John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon, but who the fuck even thinks about the original?

20) Which movie would you have paid to see remade by Preston Sturges?

Le Million. I mean, the movie’s already a perfect masterpiece, let’s be damned well honest and I don’t like international films being remade in America but I really would have loved to see a Preston Sturges musical and this premise is exactly the sort of heart he knows how to work with.

21) West Side Story (the movie), yes or no?

Eh. I don’t think it’s a bad movie but I’ve never been as in love with it as anyone else. I think the much better Robert Wise feature musical is 4 years later.

22) Which movie would you have paid to see remade by Luchino Visconti?

Le Samouraï. We already he has a love for Alain Delon based on how he used Delon in The Leopard. And man, the design would probably be less sleek but more lavish. But again we’d be remaking a perfect masterpiece.

23) What was the last movie you saw, theatrically and/or on DVD/Blu-ray/streaming?

Theatrically: The Disaster Artist

DVD: Kuroneko

Blu-Ray: Blow Out

Streaming: Riley the Cop

One of these things is not like the other. One of these movies sucks.

24) Brewster McCloud or O.C. and Stiggs?

I’ve only seen Brewster McCloud.

25) Which movie would you have paid to see remade by Luis Bunuel?

Olympia. I know it’s a documentary that’s unsubtly Nazi propaganda but YOLO, Buñuel would DESTROY that shit.

26) Best nature-in-revolt movie.

“Best” is a false term, but I get the most joy out of the idiocy of 2012.

27) Best Rene Auberjoinois performance (film or TV)

My man, that wonderful voice cameo in The Little Mermaid where he nearly murdered my dawg Sebastian to song. What a horrifying villain.

28) Which movie would you have paid to see remade by Ingmar Bergman?

3 Godfathers. I can’t imagine what Bergman would want to make this movie and I’d love to see him rip it apart.

29) Best movie with a bird or referencing a bird in its title?

The Bird with the Crystal Plummage. Only because it is the first movie that comes to my mind.

30) Burt Lancaster or Michael Keaton?

Burt Lancaster and you have no idea how hard this was.

31) In what way have the recent avalanche of allegations unearthed in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal changed the way you look at movies and the artists who make them?

It really took me aback to recognize the scale of sexual violence in the industry (especially with #MeToo) and insisted that sweeping things under the rug and “separating the art from the artist” is not good enough anymore. We can’t allow these sort of people to be put in a position of power and the complicity is with everyone – co-workers who work with the perpetrators, audiences who pay to see his work, everybody, man.

We gotta do better.

Also that it’s probably every industry, not just film, that has this abuse of power.

32) In 2017 which is “better,” TV or the movies?

Twin Peaks: The Return is easily the best audio-visual work I saw since Mad Max: Fury Road and I’m slightly considering putting it as number one on my end of the year list not in claim that it’s a movie (which no, it’s fucking not. It’s a TV series) but as declaration of how much I now fucking hate movies.

Sofia Coppola’s Tenchi Muyo

I don’t think I can blamed for feeling that sometimes feminine-focused storytelling is better understood by women. While of course Don Siegel and Clint Eastwood did fantastic work with their adaptation of Thomas P. Cullinan’s A Painted Devil back in 1971 under the title of The Beguiled, but Sofia Coppola’s remake of their film is a lot more relaxed and confident about the complexities of its characters in a way that Siegel and Eastwood couldn’t be. Indeed where Siegel had to grab every incident in the plot and squeeze out the most melodrama he could possibly stomp out of a story that feels alien compared to the rest of his work (save for possibly another Eastwood collaboration – Two Mules for Sister Sara, though I have not seen that one), Coppola’s treatment of this material is more chilly and sleepy. And that’s appropriate since she’s a lot more familiar about the malaise shuttered women feel in a singular location for an indefinite amount of time, surrounded by the harsh masculine violence (portrayed by a brilliant sound mix just distantly implying the battles occurring).

In Coppola’s The Beguiled, she explores that malaise through the tale of Martha Fansworth’s (Nicole Kidman) girls school in the middle of Civil War-torn Virginia as one day her young student Amy (Oona Laurence) brings the wounded Union Corporal John McBurney (Colin Farrell). Bringing a smoldering and helpless man into these four walls obviously sends a shockwave through Farnsworth, her teacher Edwina Morrow (Kirsten Dunst), and the five students, including and especially Alicia (Elle Fanning).

Young women locked in four walls and that empty time and space informing them. This is exactly the type of material she’s been working with for much of her career – her first three features The Virgin Suicides, Lost in Translation, and Marie Antoinette especially. And while probably more plot-driven than either of those three films, Coppola ends up finding a way to let The Beguiled simmer into just watching all these characters who don’t know how to respond to each other bounce off the walls emotionally. Gorgeous walls they are too, designed by Anne Ross in light pinks to feel like a pale ghost of a house trying to dress itself up for company but giving way to beiges failing to hide the school’s emptiness. And captured in lyrically soft lights by Phillipe Le Sourd that let those colors blanket the scenes in bored yet distinct ways. It’s a lovely film to look at and thereby a lovely one to live in despite the characters we’re living with, all vulnerable in some way, all trying to hold control over the situation so they’re not obliged to one another. So that I find Coppola’s Beguiled better, by a sly margin, than Siegel’s Beguiled should not be a surprise to anyone who knows me except for maybe those whose opinions usually align with mine and diverge at this point by disliking the movie.

Can’t bring myself to blame them. If there’s one place Coppola fails in Siegel’s stead, it’s that her Beguiled is so lax that it doesn’t bother to scrounge up any momentum as a thriller*. While that might add to a violent jar when the third act escalates, at no point in the movie – even at that first act – does it feel like it’s anymore than a really spiteful character drama without the slightest hint of danger. That’s probably not aided by fact that in an ensemble almost entirely personified by different levels of repressed female sexuality (this feels a lot sexually heightened than Siegel’s film, but it’s still there – especially in Farrell’s chemistry with Dunst) and varied in responses to that repression, the odd man out is Farrell. Maybe this is just as a unfortunate result of having seen the original first, but Farrell – extremely attractive as he is – does not have an ounce of the sexual charisma that Eastwood had as McBurney. Nor does his about-face around the second half of the film feel much dangerous as it is presented like a kneejerk response to misfortune. And that’s troubling, given Farrell has shown all throughout his career that he’s capable of both sex appeal and heightened antagony (I particularly think, funny enough, of another remake performance – Fright Night – combining both). In any other movie, Farrell’s muted performance would have been adequate. In the context of this heightened conflict of sexual wiles and manipulation, it’s an outright liability.

As for liabilities in the ensemble, the biggest one is not who is on-screen, but who isn’t. The black slave character of Hallie, previously a grounded presence that suspected McBurney early on, ends up removed on Coppola’s part (explained as her feeling unqualified to talk about slavery). Ignoring the evident collapse of the third act’s tension by taking away a character apprehensive to McBurney’s presence and thereby straining the already pretty languid pacing, I don’t really find much argument against the fact that deciding to make a Civil War film while consciously removing a pre-established black character is erasure (although Ira Madison III – among others – argues otherwise). In either case, the drama has to be entirely rearranged by Hallie’s presence and so Coppola as writer and director has more heavy-lifting to do.

I think she pulls it off and earns her Best Director Award from the film’s 2017 Cannes premiere, providing a film that balances the atmosphere in an uncanny way between the funereal and the flowery and brings a shudder to me while she also composes a forceful clash of charms from at least three different powerful personas on-screen (Seductive Fanning, Matriarchal Kidman, Erotic Farrell; on top of the brilliantly withdrawn Dunst and the impressive informal arc from innocence to complicit darkness in Laurence provides. I only regret that an actress as talented as Angourie Rice doesn’t get much to do). It’s not as overt as its predecessor, even in the carnality of certain relationships. I find that a boon, letting The Beguiled wrap around me into an ennui relatable to the characters on screen and nestling itself nicely into the output of a director I’m always ready to revisit.

*The guy I watched Coppola’s film with was actually surprised after-the-fact to find out that it was supposed to be considered a thriller. He hadn’t seen any advertising of course, which angled Coppola’s film as a horror film (I probably wouldn’t have convinced him to see The Beguiled with me if he saw those trailers).