Many Rooms Occupied by Different Concepts

Sometimes life is a string of chaotic perversity with little sense of direction or purpose. 1984's The Hotel New Hampshire is one of several Tony Richardson movies that give this impression. But while his British New Wave movies, for all their idiosyncrasies, felt like they had real insight into normal life for young people in Britain in the '50s and '60s, The Hotel New Hampshire feels altogether surreal and disconnected from reality. Not in a bad way, though it does seem less remarkable than A Taste of Honey or The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner.

Beau Bridges plays a hotel owner and father of the large family that staffs it, including incestuous siblings Rob Lowe and Jodie Foster.

There are a lot of big names in this movie. Wallace Shawn invites them to leave their American hotel to run one in Germany where they meet Nastassja Kinski who always wears a bear costume because she's uncomfortable facing her humanity. However, in Germany they also meet Matthew Modine, a Communist revolutionary who happens to look exactly like the boy who instigated a gang rape of Foster's character, and is just as despicable. But she's attracted to both of them anyway.

The family has a dog named Sorrow who constantly farts. His name is used in dialogue throughout the film to give double meaning to lines; after she's raped, Foster's character says she wants to sleep with Sorrow. She doesn't know yet that her younger brother, played by Seth Green in his first role, has had the euthanised Sorrow stuffed. Which symbolises . . . I sure don't know what.

The movie moves along quickly and mostly the family is shown laughing and bickering through tragedy and good fortune and various bizarre incidents. Overall, I was struck by a kind of tenacious flippancy. I guess that's one way to get through life.

The Hotel New Hampshire is available on Amazon Prime.

But One Specific Feeling

Jennifer Lawrence is back and naked in the 2023 legitimate comedy No Hard Feelings. Although I suspect this movie was produced primarily as an excuse for Lawrence to be naked on film, consensually this time, it also has some genuinely funny moments.

I'm not turning my nose up at Lawrence. I watched it to see her naked. I was one of the prudes who respected her privacy when nude photos of her leaked to the internet and I avoided looking at them. Perhaps afraid of seeming a blushing innocent, she plays an earthy, hard drinking woman who likes having frequent one night stands.

The film opens with her ex-boyfriend, a tow-truck driver, repossessing her car. She tries to convince him she really loves him but is thwarted when a burly Italian steps out of her front door in his underwear. So much for that.

But look who it is playing her ex-boyfriend!

Yes, it's Ebon Moss-Bachrach, from The Punisher season one and from that episode of Fringe I talked about last week. The guy is stalking my retinas. He doesn't have a big role.

Lawrence's love interest is a blushing, innocent lad, Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman), whose wealthy helicopter parents hire her to break his cherry before he goes to Princeton. His comical innocence allows Lawrence to come off as even more rough-edged. At least she's a little better at it than Mary Elizabeth Winstead.

This leads to her dragging the reluctant Percy to the beach one night for some skinny dipping. Three hooligans try to steal their clothes but Lawrence marches out of the sea and beats them all up. This is the only nude scene she does, I suppose because it was felt that she comes off as more empowered in a fight scene than she would in a lovemaking scene.

It's not a particularly funny scene. Nothing feels authentic about the setup. The three hooligans feel like characters from a porn parody. But Lawrence looked fantastic and that was the point. It reminded me of Sex and Furty (不良姐御伝 猪の鹿お蝶), the 1973 Pinky Violence film. In that movie, the veneer of an action film was the pretext for gratuitous nudity. In No Hard Feelings, it's the veneer of comedy. Well, Sex and Fury is an interesting film for other reasons and there were other interesting things about No Hard Feelings.

Lawrence's character took this job because she was promised a free Buick as payment, which she needs for her job as an Uber driver. She's also a bartender and she needs to work multiple jobs because gentrification in Montauk has driven prices way up. I could certainly relate as my hometown, San Diego, has recently become the most expensive town in the United States for basically the same reason. But as the film progresses, it became clear the filmmakers had little real understanding or appreciation for the issue as Lawrence's financial problems turn out to be merely a dreamed up excuse for her repressed psychological issues from an absent father in her childhood. It's the old lazy excuse rich people tell themselves, "Oh, the poor could be happy if they just made the effort." Yeah, that's why the rent in my studio apartment became 90% of the income from the three jobs I was working.

There are a few funny moments in the film. I liked the scene where Lawrence manufactured a meetcute at Percy's workplace, an animal shelter. There was a funny moment where she moves the office couch to be nearer his desk. Mostly, though, there's just one reason to watch this movie and, as the Fool in King Lear said, it's a pretty reason.

No Hard Feelings is available on Netflix in some countries.

Post-Thanksgiving Entanglements

Hope Davis wants to go on a simple quest to find out whether husband has been cheating on her but finds the matter complicated when her parents, sister, and sister's boyfriend all decide to tag along in 1996's The Daytrippers. The ensuing story is a pleasant, mild, holiday diversion.

After Thanksgiving, Eliza (Davis) goes home with her husband Louis (Stanley Tucci) and the two make love.

And I thought, wow, ain't Stanley Tucci a lucky son of a gun. The balding man with average looks somehow got this knockout. But, of course, this was the era when the cheating fictional husband typically wore his inner corruption on the outside.

Meanwhile, Eliza's little sister, Jo (Parker Posey), is with her boyfriend, Carl (Liev Schreiber), staying at their parents' house. When Eliza brings them the clue she found, a love letter quoting Andrew Marvell, Rita (Anne Meara), Eliza and Jo's mother, decides they should all pile into the car and head into the city and find out just what Louis is up to.

Rita is a spectator who is unconcerned with her lack of more than superficial understanding of any of the various people and situations they encounter in the city. Carl, who's in the process of finishing his first novel, frequently pontificates with shallow opinions, at one point mentioning how the middle class is anaesthetised by tabloid media. Oh, for the days when America had a sizable middle class. You don't know how good you have it, Carl. Anyway, the shoe seems to fit Rita in this case.

But although she leads the charge, she's not the focus of the film which persistently maintains a light touch, never allowing any of the little plot threads to get a firm grip, quite intentionally. Life is too messy for any drama to take up the space it might want to. Rita faints in the street and Carl prevails upon a young man to let them into his apartment so she can rest. They discover a little drama involving the man's father who's kind of a prick, but then also kind of a nice guy, at first demanding to know why strangers are in his home and then offering them all lunch and wine. This little episode is followed by a party where Jo finds herself tempted to cheat with a less obnoxious author.

Carl keeps talking about Andrew Marvell as an "Elizabethan poet" and "predecessor of Shakespeare" though Marvell was in fact born years after Shakespeare and Elizabeth I were already dead. I'm not sure if this was Carl's mistake or the filmmakers'. I'm tempted to think it's the latter since what would be the point of introducing a mistake that only the random 17th literary nerd like me would catch? My point is, she should be dating me.

The writing is mainly strong, though, with its deliberately light but canny touch and its credible characters in mildly incredible situations. Hope Davis and Parker Posey are both gorgeous and captivating.

The Daytrippers is available on The Criterion Channel this month as part of a Parker Posey collection.

Dreams After Bikes

Last night brought another strange dream. This time, I was in a neighbourhood near my old neighbourhood from when I was in elementary and junior high school. It was night and pitch black. Above, I could dimly see orange enemy zeppelins slowly patrolling. I knew they were occasionally dropping demons totally concealed in black clothing. Their mission was to savagely murder everyone they met so I built a lookout platform on top of one house. I sat in there with some people and we got to talking about how phony the Oscars are and we all took turns mocking acceptance speeches.

I also watched Pee-Wee's Big Adventure last night. That's one of those movies I used to watch constantly when I was a kid. So much so that, even though I don't think I'd watched it in thirty years, it felt overly familiar. Maybe my last impression of it was that I needed to give it a rest, I don't know. It's still a remarkable film. Roger Ebert put it very well when he said the film created a complete fantasy world "like Alice in Wonderland or Lord of the Rings." There's a fundamental logic in the film that doesn't exist in reality or in any other film and the character of Pee-Wee is at the center of this strange universe. When he tells Dottie he's a "loner, a rebel", in any realistic context you'd say, yeah, that's true. He's a complete eccentric and his home, with his complicated decorations and gadgets, only leaves room for one. But then he giggles to himself after he leaves Dottie. It was all a joke, he had no insight into his own character. Or maybe he just doesn't think it's true. He is remarkably good at making friends, after all.

Twitter Sonnet #1794

Corrective pads can square a shoulder shot.
Beyond the frame, an actor tries to cut.
A million mice can take a single cot.
The hare was trim from ankle down to butt.
Along the road to loafers, wheels were shod.
Returning palettes crack beneath a load.
No items now can sell before the pod.
The moisture glutton soon became a toad.
A mountain den provides the shelter place.
With good in cans, the goods were waiting late.
A finished deck expelled the wasted ace.
In secret fish the praise was saved for bait.
As ev'ry pretty thing'll start as sad.
The planet's noisy moon'll start as bad.

Or a Couple Days

A couple of robbers and killers are on the loose with a pretty hostage and for some reason Nick Nolte's solution is to spring their old pal Eddie Murphy from prison. But 1982's 48 Hrs. is so good you don't much care that the premise doesn't make a lick of sense.

Nolte plays Jack, a tenacious movie cop and a bit of a racist, or anyway a guy comfortable slinging epithets at Murphy just to keep him in line. Murphy plays Reggie, a cool head in a crisis who wants to use this opportunity to get laid.

Director Walter Hill constructs some great action sequences. I particularly like a stand off early on featuring a young Jonathan Banks.

The cast also features two Twin Peaks stars in supporting roles, David Patrick Kelly and Chris Mulkey. Ric Waite's nighttime neons cinematography is great though it pairs a little oddly with James Horner's score. The songs by the BusBoys are a dated delight. What genre would you call them? Ragtime rock?

They also recorded "Cleanin' Up the Town" for the Ghostbusters soundtrack.

48 Hrs. is available on Paramount+.

A "Fetch" is a Mirror Demon

I watched 2004's Mean Girls last night, the first time in fifteen or so years. Looks like it'll be twenty next year. Who'd have thought it would have had such a long life? Wikipedia has a list of ways it's influenced culture, including this surprising tidbit:

In June 2018, the official Twitter account of the Israeli Embassy in the U.S. made headlines when it responded to a tweet by Iranian leader Ali Khamenei, calling Israel "a malignant cancerous tumor", with an animated GIF of the "Why are you so obsessed with me?" quote from Mean Girls.

It's not like it's the first movie to show teens being catty or people being vain or manipulative. But it is very rare for a film to acknowledge this stuff as a normal part of high school life. Or adult life. I especially like the part where Cady, Lohan's character, talked about how she was desperate to please Regina (Rachel McAdams) at the same time she was bitterly focused on destroying her. The movie does a really good job showing a cycle of resentment coexistent with genuine human affection.

Even more than backstabbing behaviour, the peculiar mixture of love and hate is rarely portrayed in fiction these days. The greatest flaw in Mean Girls is that it has a happy ending, where it's suggested Cady somehow solves the whole psychological problem for the entire school. The movie would've been just about perfect if it ended with things still festering, the girls being driven further apart even as they learned to smile more easily as they kill. And maybe, in one tiny positive note, Cady would have matured enough to know just to opt out of it as long as she could. God knows people are forced to play these games in the workplace. This is why I recommend watching movies.

Mean Girls is available on Netflix in Japan.

Rooms and Legs

I'm starting to think Selena Gomez requested a sexier look for this season of Only Murders in the Building. Last night's new episode featured her in a short skirt, showing off her legs again after her performance in Oliver's dream, and a form fitting cardigan. Another character even makes a joke about her typically big, shapeless sweaters.

Whatever the reason, it's an improvement.

Last night's episode was called "The White Room", referring to a gag where Charles, so bad at delivering his song for the show, finds himself mentally transported to a legendary actors' "white room". The other actors describe it as a sort of psychotic break and hallucinatory haze from which the actor emerges finding evidence that they've done something unspeakably grotesque.

I felt like the shots of Charles in the white room could have been funnier but I really enjoyed the awkward reactions of the other characters when Charles emerged from the zone.

I think I'm enjoying this season more than either of the previous two.

Only Murders in the Building is available on Hulu in the US and on Disney+ in other countries.

A Clone's Message

The title of 2023's They Cloned Tyrone may prompt you to ask, "Why? Why did they clone Tyrone?" That's a question the film never answers, though perhaps it thinks it does. Somewhere in this muddled, racist mess, the filmmakers may well believe they conveyed any number of things.

Jon Boyega stars as drug dealer Fontaine, a taciturn young man who's shot to death, only to wake up the next morning as though nothing happened. But his death was witnessed by a Pimp called Slick (Jamie Foxx).

The two men are joined by one of Slick's prostitutes called Yo-Yo (Teyonah Parris) as they embark on an adventure to uncover a vast conspiracy.

The Wikipedia synopsis calls the film "retrofuturistic" which is I guess a reference to the fact that Fontaine has an old car. I don't know. Characters mention Sponge Bob and 50 Cent. There are surprisingly few references to gangsta rappers compared to the number of references to Spider-Man, Nancy Drew, and Star Wars.

Supposedly part of the insidious secret plot is to turn black people into white people, or at least, that's what we get from the infodump that serves as a climax. But it's not the movies and books starring white people, nor is it the Scottish and French alcohol the characters drink. No, it's--and I kid you not--the fried chicken, the grape juice, the hair products, and the gospel church. Yes, the evil scientists are trying to turn black people into white people with stereotypically black things. I guess the hair products that straighten women's hair kind of fits but it's certainly suspicious that a women's product that screenwriters Tony Rettenmaier and Juel Taylor (both men, one white) would have no interest in would be one of the Devil's instruments.

Incidentally, no parallels are drawn between the government hypnotising the populace and the pimp keeping a psychological hold on the women selling their bodies so he can buy expensive clothes and alcohol. Nor is a connexion made between the drugs Fontaine pushes, or his strong arm tactics, and the machinations of the conspirators.

The film is kind of cute in the few moments it gets away from its drunken conception of political messaging. I liked how Fontaine, Slick, and Yo-Yo became a team without really seeming to think about it, just out of an instinctual camaraderie. Though their infiltration of the enemy base requires some vigorous suspension of disbelief.

They Cloned Tyrone is available on Netflix.

X Sonnet #1727

A pleasure spurned was really spite for veal.
With leg o'mutton sleeves she served the scotch.
But patrons broke a plate before the seal.
And all the local cats could do was watch.
As galloped ghosts were polled we scattered tips.
However blank the page, we warrant knights.
Behold a cleaning label noting pips.
The captain's heart adorns a sleeve by rights.
Remembered noses notched above the bridge.
The reasons stated lopped around a hole.
A dozen questions lay below the fridge.
And only frozen chickens took the poll.
Enduring splashes soak the busy rail.
An idle dolphin stretched the iron pail.

Go Go Gadget Lecture

What if AI takes the form of a doll with a massive chip on its shoulder? 2023's M3GAN runs with this premise into a depressingly lame movie. I say depressingly because this movie was extremely popular.

People call it a horror comedy. Not much of the comedy seems intentional. I laughed when M3GAN turned out to be super strong with no explanation. But it sure seemed more like lazy writing than comedic writing. Growling sound effects for when M3GAN is watching from the shadows don't make any sense, either, and seem like hackneyed cues put in so that people know it's a horror movie, like applause cues on a sitcom.

The production design is really bland, as usual for anything produced by James Wan. Lots of large rooms with blank walls and department store showroom furniture.

The film was written by Akela Cooper, whose writing for Luke Cage I don't remember being this bad. I guess at the beginning of the film there's some depth to control freak Gemma (Allison Williams), who's compelled to adopt her niece after her parents die in a car crash.

That car crash scene features the girl's mother sensibly pointing out a series of mistakes made by the father who becomes moronically defensive each time. "Why didn't you put chains on the tires?" "Hey, neither of us knew that was a thing until like ten minutes ago." This as they're driving up a mountain in a snowstorm. I guess that's kind of funny.

But the meat of the movie is insubstantial. M3GAN, created by Gemma for her niece to play with, is supposed to be the perfect toy and the little girl's supposed to be obsessively attached to her. But all the doll does most of the time is scold and lecture the girl, telling her to use a coaster or giving her a lecture on how condensation works. The big moment when M3GAN is supposed to show herself as uncannily perceptive and sensitive shows her recording the little girl recalling a memory of her mother. And then M3GAN sings a cheesy song. As far as I can see, she doesn't have much on Teddy Ruxpin. I guess maybe we're supposed to find this funny but I really think it was meant to be scary.

One critic on Wikipedia is quoted as calling her a "gay icon" because she's "gorgeous and loyal but messy and insolent." If by "messy and insolent" you mean neat-freak who tries to take control of the household by murdering people. I feel like it's slightly homophobic to call every feminine psychopath that comes along a "gay icon".

M3GAN goes after one boy who tries to bully the little girl. She plays dead when he thinks she's just a doll at which point he takes off her shoe and hits her in the face before she comes alive and tears off his ear with the super strength she has for no apparent reason. It's weirder that he hit her in the face. When he took off the shoe, I thought he was going to molest her, which would have make more sense for the kind of boy he appeared to be. But I sense we can't even show a doll being assaulted now. We're a long way from I Spit On Your Grave. Too many scenes feel less like the writer intelligently imagining would happen and instead plugging in stock scenes, attuned for genre expectations and prescribed morals.

M3GAN is available on Amazon Prime.

What Doesn't Change You Confirms You

Natasha Lyonne wonders how she could possibly be gay in 1999's But I'm a Cheerleader. Coming from a time when homosexuality was still a somewhat, kind of taboo topic, the film feels very softball to-day. Most of the jokes don't really land but the romance between Lyonne and Clea DuVall's character is really sweet.

With all the deliberately artificial sets and costumes, the film feels more like an idle fantasy between two girlfriends getting high together, giggling as they discuss what it would've been like if they'd met in conversion therapy.

Cathy Moriarty plays the strict headmistress, let's call her, of the conversion camp--camp being the key word here. Step one is getting inmates to admit they're gay, then conversion can begin. So Lyonne's character, Megan, is forced to reflect on the pinups of women she keeps in her locker at school and on how she dislikes kissing her boyfriend. Clea DuVall's character, Graham, is the bad seed who likes to sneak out and go to gay bars at night. Maybe the best way to tell you what kind of humour this movie has is to say that RuPaul plays one of the conversion therapists.

The film was directed by Jamie Babbit who's gone on to have a long and very solid career directing television. She's directed episodes of Gilmore Girls, The Orville, Only Murders in the Building, and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, among many others. It's kind of funny seeing Lyonne playing someone who's supposed to be a stereotypical cheerleader when nowadays she's basically become Columbo. She's good and her innocent Megan with hard boiled Graham is a very sweet combo.

But I'm a Cheerleader is available on The Criterion Channel.

The Pool Widens

I finally got around to watching 2018's Deadpool 2 last night. It was a breath of fresh air, at least the first half hour or so. But the last part of the film wasn't bad at all, in fact it was much better than the first film. Director David Leitch of John Wick fame delivers several genuinely good action sequences.

Deadpool continues to be the one and only context in which I enjoy Ryan Reynolds. His smarmy, ironic humour is allowed to be genuinely abusive and he's truly, decadently ultraviolent. The film allows him to be repulsive which makes him much more interesting than the standard blockbuster superhero.

I was surprised how much I liked Zazie Beetz as Domino and it's a shame she's not coming back for the sequel. Leitch mines the great potential in her power, which is described in the film simply as being "lucky". This leads to complicated action sequences with small details miraculously coming to her aid.

Josh Brolin also makes for an effective Cable.

Deadpool 2 is available on Disney+.

Twitter Sonnet #1715

The fallen line engulfed the spongy brain.
Organic butter killed the newest watch.
Superbly spread, the certain cream was lain.
So Odin's spear retains another notch.
Forsaken cannons break the rotten beam.
Invited frogs will surely cut the toads.
For skipping howls, the dog was docked a dream.
A burning pan has scribbled forty roads.
Her beans were numbered long before the grind.
The dribbled wax confessed the letter sent.
A cheesy paper ports the cruel to kind.
No steel so hard could never soon be bent.
Created hair divides in section names.
Accepted shows include embittered dames.

Death Rides a Clown Car

Those who narrowly escape death may find it is only to suffer a sillier fate down the line. So it is for the doomed souls of 2000's Final Destination. I'd heard how goofy this film is but I guess fate finally tapped me to watch it. It is fun, in an unintentionally whimsical way. Young Ali Larter is pretty cute.

A young man boards a flight to Paris with his 39 classmates. Dozing off, he has a vision of the plane exploding. He makes a scene and is escorted off the plane along with his teacher and a handful of other classmates. Then the plane really does explode.

It seems the boy and his friends are granted a reprieve. Little do they know the ghost of Loony Tunes lurks in the shadows. One kid is strangled by a lively shower cord than the phone cord in Detour. The teacher is caught in a deadly cycle of bloody slapstick in her kitchen to rival the opening cartoon from Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

My favourite, though, is when the boy gets pinned under a tree, his face somehow forced down into a puddle. We're meant to believe that the tree is so heavy that he can't even turn his head but he's somehow able to escape from it without any apparent injury. I guess Toons are governed only by the laws of comedy.

Final Destination is available on Netflix.

Lifelong Party Girl

It seems I wasn't the only one who preferred to see more of Sophie Marceau because 1982's La Boum 2 focuses almost entirely on her character, Vic. Without the weird need to prop up Claude Brasseur (who's still in the film in a reduced role) the story becomes mostly an easy-going treat.

Vic is now looking very much like a young woman as her mother observes when watching her in a dance studio. She imagines Vic as Debbie Reynolds in Singin' in the Rain and then as Cyd Charisse and we can see the skinny girl from La Boum is, in La Boum 2, able to match Charisse toe to tip.

The film becomes a sequence of mildly amusing episodes in which Vic agonises about parties and the boys she has to choose from to break her cherry. Only one scene really recalls the tedium of the first film, when Vic loses a bet at a party and has to dress as a streetwalker and stand on the curb for three minutes. Of course, her father immediately just happens to find her.

But mostly this is a sweet showcase for Marceau who was fortunate to grow up beautifully.

Love Among the Canal Kittens

On a barge in France, crowded with cats, a marriage is in jeopardy. 1934's L'Atalante may be the most adorable movie ever made.

We meet the crew of L'Atalante, an old man named Pere Jules (Michel Simon) and a boy (Louis Lefebvre), as they prepare for the return of their captain, Jean (Jean Daste) and his new bride, Juliette (Dita Parlo). Cleaning up the deck, Pere finds some of the omnipresent cats and kittens. He absently puts a kitten on his shoulder where it remains throughout the ensuing scenes.

Michel Simon's performance is nothing short of astounding. I was convinced he was a real old man whom director Jean Vigo found lounging on a wharf one day. It turns out he was only 39, four years younger than I am, and is the same actor I remember fondly from Boudu Saved from Drowning.

A scene where he shows Juliette his esoteric collection of knickknacks, tattoos, and porn from his world travels is absolutely captivating. From the shaggy marionette to the naked woman scrawled on his back, each item is captivating in its own way.

So often in films set aboard ships, the cabins are improbably large in order to accommodate filming. Here's one film that keeps in mind just how cramped it is. Vigo must have made sets that disassembled easily in order to accomodate a variety of angles with his bulky 1930s camera and equipment.

It pays off and there are fresh inventions in virtually every shot.

As Juliette, Dita Parlo is adorable as any of the kittens. Most people watching the movie probably root for her to leave Jean for Pere but the film blessedly presents a more complex, and simpler, situation. I loved this movie.

L'Atalante is available on The Criterion Channel.