{"id":3169,"date":"2020-02-13T09:24:08","date_gmt":"2020-02-13T17:24:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/?p=3169"},"modified":"2020-03-23T08:12:05","modified_gmt":"2020-03-23T16:12:05","slug":"here-are-some-movies-i-watched-in-january","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/2020\/02\/13\/here-are-some-movies-i-watched-in-january\/","title":{"rendered":"Here Are Some Movies I Watched In January"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>\n<li><i>Like A Boss<\/i> (2020): At a contractual-requirement-fulfilling 83 minutes, this film appears to take place inside a Good Place-style neighborhood, where all events and personas revolve around a critical test of the protagonists\u2019 moral character, which I believe they failed.<\/li>\n<li>\n<p><i>Little Women<\/i> (2019): I have no history at all with the story. This took two acts before it got me, but it got me! I think there\u2019s an interesting comparison to make here against <a href=\"\/nfd\/2019\/10\/22\/september-cinema-soundoff\/\"><i>Burning<\/i> (2018)<\/a>, another adaptation with glorious set dressing and costuming that takes a solid 80 minutes to pick up. I got antsy in the first part of this movie and not in that one, and I think it comes down to the fact that <i>Burning<\/i> gives you so much time to look at things in quiet, and LW has almost every minute heavily scored. Trust your actors\u2019 faces a little more, composer Alexandre Desplat!<\/p>\n<p>That said, the movie does trust its cast in general to convey time jumps and ages without much assistance from CGI or even makeup. I found that interesting, but I admit it got a lot easier to parse the different periods once Saoirse Ronan got her hair cut. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.directors.uk.com\/news\/little-women-q-a-with-greta-gerwig-and-mike-leigh-live-tweets\">Gerwig, at a director Q&#038;A with Mike Leigh,<\/a> mentioned that they wanted to make the past a little glowy without going all the way into color-coded grading. And if the choices were <a href=\"https:\/\/news.avclub.com\/here-s-why-virtually-every-movie-is-now-orange-and-teal-1798276248\">teal and orange<\/a> vs creepy de-aging CGI vs \u201cah fuck it,\u201d then I will take option three.<\/p>\n<p>I found that Q&#038;A by way of a path that started with Kat sending me <a href=\"https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/culture\/on-and-off-the-avenue\/how-jacqueline-durran-the-little-women-costume-designer-remixes-styles-and-eras\">this New Yorker article about the costuming<\/a> in the film, which would, not long after that piece was published, win the movie\u2019s sole Oscar. Learning that Gerwig is a huge Mike Leigh fan puts a pretty interesting lens on both <i>Lady Bird<\/i> (2017) and <i>Frances Ha<\/i> (2012).<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li><i>Carol<\/i> (2015): I\u2019m going to write steampunk fanfic about this movie. I loved that it put its characters through hard things without sadism, and though the color and grain were pretty consciously presentational at times, finding out afterward about their roots in <a href=\"https:\/\/www.artsy.net\/article\/artsy-editorial-artist-dreamy-colorful-street-photography-secret-decades\">Saul Leiter\u2019s photography<\/a> made me feel very fond of it. I don\u2019t know if Sofia Coppola was influenced by Leiter\u2019s work for <i>Lost in Translation<\/i> (2003), my second-most-problematic fave, but they evoke the same feelings in me.\n<\/li>\n<li><i>High School Musical 2<\/i> (2007): I\u2019m told this is the best one.\n<\/li>\n<li>Special mention: <i>The Good Place<\/i> (2016-2020): Hey Leonard and Sumana, do you want to have another phone call about this? I am very interested to discuss how your season-two predictions shook out.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Like A Boss (2020): At a contractual-requirement-fulfilling 83 minutes, this film appears to take place inside a Good Place-style neighborhood, where all events and personas revolve around a critical test of the protagonists\u2019 moral character, which I believe they failed. Little Women (2019): I have no history at all with the story. This took two [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[141,27,23,140,28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3169","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-kat","category-leonard-richardson","category-movies","category-roundups","category-sumana-harihareswara"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3169","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=3169"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3169\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3185,"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3169\/revisions\/3185"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3169"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3169"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3169"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}