What Show are you currently watching?

Travel Man with Richard Ayoade. I don't usually watch travel shows but this one is hilarious.

 

Like many folks, I watched Queens Gambit.

Enjoyable show with only one episode that I would say was kind of "what the heck was the point of that?" - which is pretty good.

I didn't care one way or the other for the story, and I felt that the story lacked in saying anything at all (which kind of is a bummer), but I greatly enjoyed there being another entry into the revival of the Wandering Watch style of filmmaking (the last being Maniac). I had written the artform entirely off as long-dead, but the limited series format seems like it might give the form a second life and I think that's very cool.

Maybe we could get a sort of Altered States style limited series?
Maybe? Please?

Moving on.
Let's see, I recently rewatched Lawrence of Arabia.


I love this film.
It's a terrible story, as in...it's meh for the story. It doesn't really say anything. It's more just "hey let's examine this one dude's change over time"!
But the film is just amazing. If you cut out all of the amazing cinematography and trimmed the film down to a two hour film that stuck to the narrative instead of waxing poetically about the desert visually a ton then you'd have a pretty crap movie. The story itself is horribly dull.

I said it on my profile, and I stick with it: this is an intoxicating film and to watch it is to bathe in cinema.

So while the story isn't that great, it's always a win to watch this just because the cinema of this film is just breathtakingly amazing.

Next up was a rewatch of Mutiny on the Bounty (1935).


What a mess of a film this is, really.
It's enjoyable in parts, and all, but man - it just doesn't know who to focus on or what to focus on.
There's a thing around our house we've come to refer to called, "Um...what's with the monkey?"
It's a quote from The Emperor's New Groove when the camera gets overly excited in its dramatic pull out and loses track of the point of the shot.


That's about the best summary of experiencing Mutiny. Just, "Um...what's with the monkey?"

The story is really centered around Christian and Bligh, but for a large chunk of the beginning of the film, you'd be hard pressed to know that, and they spend so much time with second and third string tangents that the Christian/Bligh tangent takes a hitting in effectiveness.

Once we get to the last third of the film things tighten up a bit better, and in the last 40 minutes or so, specifically, it really does.
However, it blows so much time up front aimlessly wandering around "the ship and crew" as a character rather than zeroing in on Christian and Bligh that they just start fast cutting at lightspeed (for the film's speed) to hurry up and wrap everything up - awkwardly rushing through Bligh's search for Christian, the trial (which should have been a rather big event that takes much longer than that), Christian's escape and founding of a new settlement, to name just a few things - let alone the pay off of Byam telling Christian's family what Christian asked him to. Further awkward is the ending tone of the film chimes away like "HEYO! EVERYTHING'S CHEERY!" as Byam sets off all dapper and praised by other officers upon a ship after recently being pardoned....but entirely skips right the heck over the deaths of the crew who in fact did not mutiny as charged - to include a young man who only got to see his baby, who was now two years old, for a single short visit (that we didn't even witness after it being a constant plot plug through the entire film) before being wrongly executed.

It's just an absolute mess of a film, really.

I think it's a great film to watch if you want to see how to make a complete whirlwind mess of story tangents and unsatisfying pay-off's.
So it's a great film to watch to learn from, but it mostly survives because of the idea of the air it evokes more than anything else (that and in 1935 the evil tyrant of a boss beating his men senseless was very much on par to social conversation since the worker's strikes were fresh in mind especially with the New Deal favoring Labor Union and Worker's Rights philosophies).

Moving on, let's see - oh, I rewatched The Searchers (hang on - this film ticked me off so there's a rant here).


You know...this film is just absolutely junk. The last time I saw this, I was very young - under 10 years of age. At that age, I'd watch pretty much anything if it came through the TV set.
So I rewatched it because everyone always references it and I really couldn't say one thing or the other about it from what I had in mind - as to be honest, a LOT of Wayne's films just blur together in my memory from that age.

I got so entirely bored watching it. The main character isn't likable, the supporting character (who takes forever to become the supporting character) is a whiney b**ch, there's no reason to give a d**n about the family at the beginning as they're just cardboard characters for Ethan to go ape-sh*t John Wick on the Natives over, and he does, but we have to have whiney Marty constantly there pulling him back...which in itself the idea of the two main protagonists being each other's antagonists isn't a bad idea.
That's actually about the only cool thing in the story.

Unfortunately, the story entirely lets the wind out of its sails for the monster that is Ethan at the end. They spend a ton of time building up his violence, hard-man ways, and crazed determination and in the end - the super scary thing of this racist mother f***er chasing down and killing his own niece as Marty chases after him to stop him from doing it was for.... BUM BUM BUUUUUM!!!!

....nothing.

He was only chasing after her with his gun and talking about her being dead to him since she's "gone Native" all this time because he wanted to scoop her up like he did when she was a little girl and carry her off into the sunset.

Um...what?

There's just lots of stuff like that in this film - set ups that go nowhere.
They spend most of the film hunting down "Scar" so Ethan can kill him and he doesn't...because Scar just happens to have been killed...somehow (we'll assume from a stray bullet in the raid?) in his sleep off camera and Ethan only gets to find him dead unceremoniously. We don't even stay with him to soak anything in - is Ethan ticked, joyed, what? No time to know - back to the raid. Hey look! Here comes Ethan with Scar's scalp! ...um...yay?

Then there's a court case, for some reason, that Ethan must attend for killing a guy along the way who double-crossed him and everyone makes a big deal about there being a bounty on Ethan's head for it, and so of course Ethan has to go down and recount his behavior and the State's Attorney points to Ethan's reckless pattern of behavior, his Confederate allegiance, murder of his own niece for being forced to live with Natives, his murder of Marty for trying to step in his way, murder of the post exchange (the man who attempted to doublecross him), and his attempted murder of the Reverend for trying to take him into justice as the examples of conduct indicating a man not fit for civil society and Ethan agrees that he is no man fit for the tame world of civlization and that perhaps the time for his kind is passing and it's best to execute him as one of the last of his kind because he won't be able to be different than his nature which god made him.

Right? That's how the story goes right?
No, wait. Nope. NONE of that happens. Instead, the court case is threatened and then just disappears from the story entirely because HEY! HEY! The cavalry came to town with news of where Scar is and they want to go get him too! HURRAY!

What the f**k is going on in this story? It's an absolute train wreck. We literally have a letter read to us smack in the middle for no real reason while we suddenly switch the story to being about Marty and his not-yet-but-maybe-one-day fiancé - which becomes an entirely separate plot line about him possibly losing her hand in marriage and it's a dilemma that goes....nowhere ... because all that happens is Marty fights with his "girl's" fiancé at her wedding and the suiter ends with saying that the wedding's off until things are sorted out....but nothing's ever sorted out - so....who the hell knows? I guess she must one day eventually pick Marty and the other guy doesn't try to kill him over it?

I swear to god the only reason this film is famous is the da*n door opening and closing scene at the beginning and ending of the film.
Yeah, and that's the only great cinematographic moment. Everything in between is dry, and at times just terrible - big moments of dramatic impact happen entirely off screen. One of the young men who was promised to marry the young woman who was killed in the raid at the beginning goes with Ethan and Marty and the reason that the show becomes the Ethan and Marty show is because he thinks his bride-to-be is alive and Ethan tells him she's dead and so this now ruined man goes insane and runs off into the Native's camp shooting his gun and dies ... OFF SCREEN!
We just sit there watching Ethan and Marty stare blankly stage right while we hear a few gunshots and then Ethan and Marty look bummed and all "well that's too bad" and that's our queue that this big pivotal moment happened.

Um...

Gah. Anyway, yeah, not really worth a lot in my book.


Cheers,
Jayson

 

Round 2:

Last set of reviews had a lot of negativity going on, and I don't like that.
So this time is more shows that I enjoyed that I've watched in the recent months.

Monsieur Verdoux


This film is just a wonderful little jewel of a film.
It's surprising in so many ways, and I don't think it exactly gets the recognition in pop-culture memory that it should.
Firstly, it's incredible to see how Charlie Chaplin goes about a story that's full of dialogue instead of a silent film (and if you didn't know, yes, he absolutely made films that had dialogue).

This was made in 1947, so by this point you're watching Chaplin as a refined filmmaker and story teller. The story idea came from Orson Wells in a sort of way like Lucas gave the story idea of Indiana Jones to Spielberg.

I think this is my favorite Chaplin film at this point. It's long because the 2 hour runtime moves at a slow pace, but it's never drab or dull.
It's an uncanny sort of film that almost feels a bit like a proto-Wes Anderson film in that everything moves somewhere in between a Film and a Play.
At times Chaplin falls back into his stage habits and performs in a very pantomimed manner akin to a stage play, and there are several scenes that "violate" the "rule" of "enter late/leave early" we are used to now in film language - instead playing out the entire entrance, action, dialogue, action, departure. However, this gives the film that proto-Anderson sense to it. That "you're being told a story" sense that Anderson's style leans into. A film which recognizes that it is a story in its telling of the story.

Yet there are dominantly more scenes which do not have this attribute and run more akin to standard film language.

The story is surprisingly dark in content for the era and if you told me that Chaplin had seen a Hitchcock film and decided to give that a go, I'd believe it.

Chaplin really makes this an amazing watch as he just immediately sucks you in with his charisma and you can't help but go along with him, and the story pays no mind to the fact that you might see the results of the set ups coming a mile away because it doesn't rush it. It almost treats it like Ridley Scott's approach of just that slow progress of suspense that banks on the knowledge that you will full well know what's coming, but like being tied to a rail way track watching the train coming from miles away, you won't be able to do anything about it, nor look away.

The ending is pretty par for the era, in being abrupt and leaving you with a sense of, "Oh - well, I guess that's all they had to say about that.", but it at least thematically has a nice wrap up to it even if it is brief.

Another interesting thing is watching Chaplin in this manner is very uncanny for my modern mind. It's like I'm watching Steve Martin and Mel Brooks constantly shape-shift back and forth from one to the other, and I don't think I realized just how big of an influence Chaplin had on some mainstays of my youth.

I mean, if this doesn't look like every other Mel Brooks performance...


I highly recommend getting this.
You can rent it on Amazon and Apple, but the only "free" streaming is on HBOMAX currently (and I don't expect it to go anywhere else)

Next up...

SPEEDY


God I love the heck out of Harold Lloyd, and this film is probably one of my all-time favorites of his.
Firstly, almost everyone knows - in one way or another - SAFETY LAST! which is the Harold Lloyd sort of Die Hard movie where he climbs a building as the film progresses and eventually ends up hanging from a clock tower.

Of course that film has all sorts of classic moments in it, and showcases Lloyd's craft of editorial pacing just as well, but SPEEDY just blows that pop-culture staple out of the water.

It does because it has a full and well rounded plot, unlike SAFETY LAST! which has a very simple plot of "climb building to get the girl, oh-no police"...more or less.
SPEEDY's interesting because it's right on the brink of being a dialogue film. It has all of the complex plot line tangents as a dialogue film, but just doesn't have the dialogue.

It also has more of a straight three act structure going on with proper interlinked narrative obstacles, rather than just a sequence of obstacles that aren't exactly narratively linked together.
The difference here is that a narratively linked obstacle would be like the Terrorist's plot in True Lies and Harry's plot to fool his wife into thinking she's doing some spy work causing her understanding of the situation to be confused, and one that Harry has to deal with as well as almost entirely his own fault to getting his wife caught up in this mess that he must now defuse with the complex obstacle of dealing with his wife learning his reality and being pissed at him, as well as not a trained and needing saving.

That's a richly layered narratively linked obstacle. A lot of old silent films just have obstacles. One thing after the other that gets in the protagonist's way - nothing that's exactly linked to anything else in the film. A horse that won't stop poking them with their muzzle, while they try to spy on a ballgame from outside of the stadium, or perhaps they're climbing a pole to watch and someone just finished polishing the pole (for some weird reason) before they showed up and now they struggle to get up the pole. A common one is usually something to do with the police.

Where Lloyd excels over Chaplin and Keaton is that he is a near master at weaving sequences of obstacles together so that they're relevant to each other and come back later in a poetic prose that compounds upon itself.
Even in SAFETY LAST!, Lloyd has just an amazing long-sighted view of the dizzying array of events, setting up a simple and harmless mistake of identity early on in the film to circle back around to become the paramount of frustration for the peril standing in the way of success at the end.

"And?", you say, but the thing is, unlike modern films where such things are normal, Lloyd's typically packing in some tangent of interconnected action at a rate of three to five things every minute of the film!
Simple things just slide right past your notice until they become involved. You see them get set up, but in Lloyd's films you don't overtly take note of them until they pop into his way, and some - like a Rube Goldberg machine - don't directly interact with him, but interact with a thing which interacts with a thing which.... then interacts with him.

Lloyd has a natural fascination with causal chain of reactions in like fashion to Jackie Chan, but without fighting. In many ways, Jackie Chan is very much the Harold Lloyd of Martial Arts.

But let's get back to SPEEDY.
Again, the reason this one is so fascinating is the scope of the world and the dynamics of the story.
It has our flawed protagonist who has ambitions that are misaligned with their needs, people our protagonist answers to and cares about, people they affiliate with in culture and world they know and live within, an upset of that world by an antagonist who threatens not simply our protagonist, but those he cares about, the representation of the world independent of our characters and having a motion to itself in its own cultural progress which is happening upon and through our characters, and a full on three act classic structure to a T.

It's almost exactly a Hero's Journey story, in fact.
A world of normality for our foolish dreamer that is ripped asunder by a cold and impersonal plot which threatens to destroy the world they know, and sets them off on a series of uncanny adventures in unusual circumstances which each push the foolish dreamer to grow a little bit until he is able to solve his core fault, rally the troops, and save the day!

Instead of it being fantasy, it's business tycoons, trollies, and a young man who can't keep a job because his head is in the clouds - but everyone likes him and he has a quick mind and charisma.

But really, the main reason that I just LOVE this film is that the main thing I love about Harold Lloyd is his editorial pacing.
It's FLAWLESS.
And seeing THIS film is amazing because he just so easily masters a FULL dramatic story with all of the elements in a three act play with the SAME level of editorial pacing mastery as he does in his other simpler shtick films.

It's jaw dropping. It really is. This man can get you ACTIVELY engaged into watching an hour and a half film without dialogue and not once will you take your eyes off of the screen because every moment is packed with something that means something to the plot and is entertaining.

I think if you tried to write his movies today, they'd be thrown out for the screenplay's being too long because you just wouldn't be able to fit a description of everything in his films in 120 pages - there's just far too much going on.

But really, SPEEDY is amazing and I highly recommend it. There's so much modernity in its editing, and the feel of the edit is just astounding! It's like a Michael Crichton book of film.

Freely streaming this one is hard (again, HBOMAX's classic movie section wins again), but renting it is easy.
It's on Google, Youtube, Vudu, and Apple.
If you're stuck, then...

But I don't recommend that approach as it's lower quality than you'd get renting it, and this film - while from 1928, deserves the better quality image.

Also, it's probably just me, but Harold Lloyd at times reminds me of Steven Colbert a bit. It's kind of weird.

NEXT!!

Cowboys & Aliens


Yes, a lot of shows I've been watching lately are from the long tunnel of yesteryear. That's mostly because I'm in that kind of mood, there's a ton of films in our cultural backcatalog, and not a lot of films/shows have come out recently that I've been all that jazzed about.

Something a bit more recent that I absolutely love is COWBOYS & ALIENS.

BUT, it has to be the UNRATED VERSION.

It's not a matter of violence or taboo content that makes the difference, nor even cut out scenes.
It's that the theatrical release is 2 hours, while the unrated version is 2 hours and 16 minutes.

What's the difference? EVERYTHING.
To save on distribution costs, the distributor did their own cut of the film and chopped almost every shot that had any downbeat left in it.
The result is that it comes off very rushed with one to five seconds being cut off of a ton of shots.

And this is Jon Favreau, so you KNOW how he likes to linger the downbeat on a Western (think Mando).

So DON'T WATCH this film if it's less than 2:16 for runtime.

I absolutely love this film.
It's such a great mashup and it's not even straight campy about it.
I love that it plays it as a Western and not as a Sci-Fi story. You could take out the Aliens and replace them with the 1950's "Indian Villains" tropes and it would effectively work much the same way with very few changes.

And I like that. That was incredibly smart, and I love the way they bury the lead - so to speak - of the Sci-Fi stuff and focus more on the Western tangents and the world of the West as the basis for everything - setting up classic rivalries and complications up front that just get straight up Deus Ex Machina'ed right out of existence when the Alien's enter into things.

And I think I love that the most. This film is a straight up "SCREW YOU" to anyone who hates Deus Ex Machina plots, and there's literally no getting around that it would be because COME ON! Aliens showing up in the Old West would absolutely screw up and rip apart ANY and ALL dilemmas anyone THOUGHT was important before.

I also just love the pacing of this film. It's just such a slick film. It moves like Indiana Jones met Independence Day, and I don't mean the story concepts or worlds - I mean the editorial pacing and shooting styles.

That mixture is just so da*n sexy to watch - I love it.

I think the only thing I was truly missing were just a few more massively wide shots and maybe a few more down beats....OK, I'm just a glutton for downbeats - especially in westerns, but at least a few more wide shots.
There are wide shots, but the memory of the film feels more confined than it is because there's so much darkness and tight spaces involved in critical moments that you kind of fog over the couple of wide shots that are in the film. I think it would have benefited from a handful more of them to really give it the air of its place in the West contextually.

At the moment, it's more a sort of we're here, now here-here-here-here-here type of impression and flow. Which is fine, lots of shows move that way, and this one benefits from the fast paced tempo that keeps up, which saves it from just dragging too long - which is super easy for a Western to do, but I think it just weighted itself slightly too much in that direction and lost a bit of the vastness sense that a nice good western can have.

Anyway, DEFINITELY worth the watch.
It's such a romp!
It's almost a sci-fi swashbuckling western.

And on that note, I'll end round 2!

Cheers,
Jayson

 

Community

 

the funny thing is that i just finished mad men, so alison brie just transitions into this goofy character from one in which one of her lines is "if you so much open your fly to urinate i will destroy you"

 

Watching season 2 of Dead to Me. Almost done. Very good!

 

I’m flipping between..

The discovery of Witches (loving it)

Brave new world (jury is out - it’s like a new take on Logan’s run. bit weird)

moonbase 8. it’s ok.. quite funny

 

Last night my gf and I bindged through The Good Lord Bird.


An absolutely fantastic show, jam-packed with hillariously insane character and award-deserving performances. A true gem of a series that I will probably watch again before too long (something which is very rare for a non-SW/non-True Detective TV series). Ethan Hawke is a one-man tour the force in this one, and The Good Lord Bird gets a 100% score from me

 

Three episodes into a show called "Imposters". It's made by Bravo and I think we're watching it on Amazon or Netflix. Really good!

 

Yeah he's pretty funny.

 

The Expanse, season 5, I watched the first 5 episodes and I can't wait for next Wednesday for 6, it's so good. Nice replacement for Mando I might pick up the books the show is based on.

 

Loved this show. Especially the 1st and 2nd season, the best ones.

 

I just saw an old episode of QI featuring Carrie Fisher as a panelist

 

queen's gambit. Much better than i thought it would be, and better than anything I've seen since game of thrones. The only thing that throws me off is how bad they are lol