{"id":3165,"date":"2020-01-27T09:36:12","date_gmt":"2020-01-27T17:36:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/?p=3165"},"modified":"2020-01-27T09:55:15","modified_gmt":"2020-01-27T17:55:15","slug":"december-donesies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/2020\/01\/27\/december-donesies\/","title":{"rendered":"December Donesies"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>\n<li><i>Fantasia<\/i> (1940): Rewatch with chemical enhancement, but instead of having some sort of transcendent trip, I ended up really focusing and finding wonder in the interstitial animations. I knew the Nine Old Men (despite the obstacle of the sexism embedded in that nickname) did untouchable work on the fantasy sequences, but I can basically understand how you model, storyboard, keyframe and tween those drawings. I have <i>no idea<\/i> how they created a character out of a sound wave and drew it, with the technology available to them in the late 1930s. Maybe they rotoscoped an oscilloscope? Did they even have oscilloscopes in 1938?! I\u2019m writing this on an airplane, so I can\u2019t look it up now, and therefore will never know!<\/li>\n<li><i>High School Musical<\/i> (2006): The second film in the Zac Efron Basketball Typecasting Saga. Kat, one of its proponents, could not explain to my satisfaction why\u2014in a movie about hesitating to sing or disagreeing with an individual\u2019s choice to sing\u2014all humans expressed their emotions and plans by singing. There\u2019s a heightened reality to teen movies as a genre, and there\u2019s a heightened reality to musicals, and when they overlap\u2026 hmm, as I type this I remember that Kat also loves <i>Josie and the Pussycats<\/i> (2001), <i>School of Rock<\/i> (2003), <i>Reefer Madness<\/i> (2005), and the song and dance sequence in <i>Love, Simon<\/i> (2018). The puzzle begins to piece itself together\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/li>\n<li><i>Blindspotting<\/i> (2018): Now, see, this I was not expecting to be a musical. But I think it is! Specifically, a <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Clipping_(band)\" title=\"CLPPNG??\">clipping.<\/a> musical. From the trailer and reviews, I thought I was in for a street-level psychological thriller about the personal effects of police violence; that\u2019s in here, but it\u2019s also a meditation about masculinity\u2014both fragile and loving\u2014and race and community and women\u2019s ambitions and the aftermath of incarceration and a deep love mixed with sorrow for a gentrifying Oakland. And when its principals\u2019 feelings build up too much, they burst out into rap, which sounds like Hamilton but is not at all like Hamilton, despite starring Daveed Diggs. Hip-hop contains multitudes, and the songs here are not excursions into heightened reality: they\u2019re reflections of how the constraints of men\u2019s roles and their role models carve narrow channels through which they can express things to each other. This wasn\u2019t always an easy movie to watch, but I loved it.\n<\/li>\n<li><i>Candyman<\/i> (1992): It\u2019s been years since I read the stunning <a href=\"https:\/\/www.chicagoreader.com\/chicago\/they-came-in-through-the-bathroom-mirror\/Content?oid=871084\" title=\"This is incidentally yet another movie which entices graffiti dorks.\">Chicago Reader story<\/a> that unpacked the origins of this movie, and now I live here, in the birthplace of the Chicago Reader! So I was glad Kat\u2019s roommate Lauren let me join their movie night and watch this. I enjoyed it and also did not think it lived up to its origin. Virginia Madsen and Tony Todd give it their all, though. Interesting trivia: this movie features prominent 90s singer-actor Vanessa Williams, who is not prominent 90s singer-actor Vanessa Williams.\n<\/li>\n<li><i>War Walk: The Star of Sky Riser<\/i> (2019): You can say this shit, JJ, but you sure can\u2019t write it. I tried to go into this with low expectations, and that might have worked if this hadn\u2019t chosen the working title of Takesy-Backsies: The Motion Picture. There is evidence in this very blog of my strident defense of the quite-bad prequels, but this is the one that broke me. I was a Star Wars fan for twenty-five years. I guess now I\u2019m free!<\/li>\n<li>\n<p><i>Do The Right Thing<\/i> (1989): I started this movie, then watched the above movie, then finished this one; I\u2019m deciding to count this one as \u201clast\u201d so I get to be glad I didn\u2019t end the year on a disappointed note. I\u2019d never seen a Spike Lee joint before! I am aware of criticism of his treatment of women on screen, and it wasn\u2019t hard to see the evidence here: this is a story that ends up saying as much about the hazards of masculinity as it does about race, and I don\u2019t know if that was intentional. But it\u2019s richly photographed and full of great performances. I didn\u2019t know it was Rosie Perez\u2019s first movie! Her work in the opening sequence alone\u2014set to \u201cFight the Power,\u201d which I also didn\u2019t know was written for this movie\u2014is something that could have fed a full story. But she didn\u2019t get even a slight story of her own here.<\/p>\n<p>After we finished it, Kat pulled up Copland\u2019s \u201cFanfare for the Common Man\u201d and said \u201csee?!\u201d She was right to recognize it as an influence, and I wonder if it might have been used as a temp track. But the score of the movie (composed by Lee\u2019s father!) is one of its best and strongest choices, lending an old-fashioned expansive feel to a story that takes place in one block on one day.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>So the end count for 2019 was something in the hundred and teens; discounting rewatches, I hit exactly 101, which seems appropriate. I don\u2019t think I\u2019ll watch as many movies this year, in part because I want to replace that time with reading a freaking book or two. But I do plan to keep writing little things about the ones I watch, here or on my Letterboxd account. Thanks for reading, and I\u2019ll see <i>you\u2026<\/i> at the <i>mailbox<\/i> where I get <i>Netflix DVDs mailed to me now because I gave up on their streaming offerings entirely!<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Fantasia (1940): Rewatch with chemical enhancement, but instead of having some sort of transcendent trip, I ended up really focusing and finding wonder in the interstitial animations. I knew the Nine Old Men (despite the obstacle of the sexism embedded in that nickname) did untouchable work on the fantasy sequences, but I can basically understand [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[141,31,23,140],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3165","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-kat","category-landmarks","category-movies","category-roundups"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3165","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3165"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3165\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3167,"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3165\/revisions\/3167"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3165"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3165"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3165"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}