Tag: Movies

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Quentin Tarantino bad mouthing Paul Dano bothered me for some reason. Tarantino has every right to criticize someone’s work. It is part of the risk artist takes. Critical feedback is a gauge of how effective the artist is so I am not opposed to criticism per se. Tarantino’s criticism, however, was unnecessarily mean spirited. He sounded like he wanted to hurt Dano more than let a colleague know how to improve his work.

More worrisome is this has become the environment we live in. I disagree with you has become more than a difference in opinion or taste. If I didn’t like your performance, you didn’t get it wrong, you are a bad actor. Or a stupid person. Or an evil person. The press eggs this on because it loves a disagreement and have a gleeful willingness to spread the absolute worst thoughts that people have to their readers and viewers. So if a famous person burns another famous person, you can bet your house that there will be a reporter sticking a microphone into the burn victim’s face asking for his response. Retaliation is inevitable.

I wish I was above it all but, I have to confess, I am right in there slinging mud with the best of them. I try to be conscious about it but I fail. Almost all of the time, I fail. A simple a thing as a Trump supporter with a misspelled protest sign is enough for me to forward to Facebook and Instagram so everyone can see how Trump supporter’s are so dumb. I am laughing at one person’s mistake and implying that all Trump supporters are the same which means they all potentially are bad spellers. Uneducated and stupid, right?

The problem is that in a few minutes, I will receive a post from a someone showing a misspelled sign from a left winger. Am I supposed to make the same sweeping assumption about all left wingers based on the one left winger who can’t spell? Of course not. It is just one person’s mistake. The question, for me, then what was I hoping people would think when I sent the post about the bad spelling Trump supporters? It was unfair of me to provide this false depiction of Trump supporters.

Making fun of people is all a lot of fun when you are speaking with people who agree with you but, in the social media world we live in, we no longer have this luxury. Everyone, including the people we are making fun of, can read your thoughts and know what you really think of them. People rarely change their minds if you are calling them stupid. Yet we keep calling each other stupid. Quite loudly at that. How then can we expect people to listen?

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Benedict Cumberbatch and Olivia Coleman have a new movie out called the Roses. In the movie, there is a scene where Cumberbatch’s character gives Coleman’s character a food she is allergic to and then refuses to give her her epipen when she reacts until she signs their divorce papers. Apparently the Natasha Allergy Research Foundation is upset because depriving someone of their epipen while having an allergic reaction just isn’t funny. This seems like another mountain out of a mole hill situation. The movie is a satire on how divorce proceedings get out of hand and the terrible things that people might do to gain an advantage.

The movie wasn’t endorsing murder by epipen as much as pointing out the potentially horrible things a desperate person might do who finds themselves in a messy divorce. Withholding an epipen to someone who needs it to fits nicely into one of those potential horrible things. There are thousands of ways this might be done. Would it be any funnier if he was holding a gun to her head?

And I am pretty sure I have seen it before in movies and in television without comment. It is in fact an ingenious way to murder someone. Why then has the Natasha Allergy Foundation got their panties in a twist over this is a bit of mystery until I read that the movie had lukewarm reviews and weak box office.

Then the light bulb went off over my head, this is just a PR trick to get the movie into the headlines. Nobody is really mad at all. Now I have no proof whatsoever regarding my speculation but it is the only thing that makes sense. It is a movie after all, a movie where people do outrageous things, depriving a person having an allergic reaction of their epipen is outrageous and wrong but it also fits right into the movie being made.

I am betting there is no there there but kudos to the movie’s marketing department for keeping it in the headlines.

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The Night of the Iguana is a movie I have been wanting to see for sometime. It’s based on a Tennessee Williams’ play though John Huston and Anthony Veiller wrote the screenplay. Williams usually plumbs the depths of the human race’s deep dark secrets and, lately I have to be in the right mood for these descents. But this movie has so many talented people involved, the big names alone are an impressive list of Hollywood heavyweights — John Huston, Richard Burton, Ava Gardner, and Deborah Kerr — I knew that I would eventually breakdown and see the movie.

I was pleasantly surprised. First the story isn’t so dark as Williams usually portrays the world, There is an underlying positive feel that is missing from most Williams plays. The characters go through some challenging experiences but they aren’t destroyed by what happens to them. They pick up the pieces and carry on with their lives It may not be where they intended to go but at least they aren’t being carted off to the insane asylum like Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire. They survive the storm.

For a movie that is over 60 years old, it aged well. It feels very much like a movie that was made in 2023 about life in the 1960’s. Richard Burton, who sometimes comes off like a stiff Shakespearean actor to me, particularly when in a Shakespeare play, is natural as the rascally defrocked minister who is reduced into being a tour guide in Mexico for good Christian women. Ava Gardner is a good time woman running a tourist hotel. She lives her life very much on her terms, even to the point of having two young men as lovers while her husband was still alive. Deborah Kerr is an unmarried artist struggling with poverty and caring for her aging grandfather. All these characters could easily be turned into caricatures but the actors give these characters a different look aided enormously by a script which surprises us with their actions while still being wholly believable.

The story takes surprising and interesting turns, the pace is crisp and unforced. and the acting is impressive. If you are looking for a good old movie, see this one.

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I want to recommend a movie called Under the Silver Lake without steering you wrong. First, it isn’t Citizen Kane. There are some real problems with the movie particularly the bone headed treatment of woman — almost all the women are good looking eye candy scantily clad, topless or nude. They are primarily there to please the male gaze. The plot is convoluted, possibly non-existent which is weird because there seems to be a plot that is always moving but not necessarily forward and perhaps not side to side or backwards either. It is way too long. The movie is clearly aimed at young men with thwarted artistic ambitions — a very limited audience indeed. The lead character, played by Andrew Garfield, is kind of creepy even though he is, for lack of a better word, the hero of the movie.

Despite all of this, I did enjoy the movie and am thinking about days after seeing it. So there is something there. I am just not sure how to describe in such a way that anybody would understand. The movie is definitely not for everyone but I, for one, kept thinking this is an interesting enough ride for me to stay on board. There is no need for spoiler alerts because there is too much going on for anyone to connect the dots to a cohesive plot even if you have seen the movie.

It comes as close as I have ever seen of capturing the offbeat weirdness that is LA. A weirdness that is both sinister and oddly cheerful. Everyone is a performance artist and a member of a secret conspiracy whether they want to be or not. David Robert Mitchell, the director, is fan of Alfred Hitchcock and this movie is definitely a homage to him. There are hints of other old movies throughout the film.

The plot sort of is this: the hero is completely distracted from the very real possibility of being evicted from his apartment to investigate instead the disappearance of a woman he met just once. Because no one can explain where she is, he becomes enmeshed in probably unrelated conspiracies from a nut who seems completely rational at times but has an answer for the hero’s every question which makes him sound believable even though you know he is crazy. There are adolescent hooligans keying cars, gurus, nuclear fallout shelters, comic book shops, parties that absolutely anybody can walk into if they have the right cookie, secret codes that lead to maps found on the back of cereal boxes, blind folded journeys through Griffin Park lead by a homeless man wearing a paper crown, and a naked women wearing an owl mask who could be a notorious murderer. Do you get it?

It’s funny, sad and frequently unbelievably artificial while also being genuinely LA.