{"id":3252,"date":"2020-09-02T08:39:54","date_gmt":"2020-09-02T16:39:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/?p=3252"},"modified":"2020-09-02T11:25:52","modified_gmt":"2020-09-02T19:25:52","slug":"its-still-june-somewhere-part-deux","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/2020\/09\/02\/its-still-june-somewhere-part-deux\/","title":{"rendered":"It&#8217;s Still June Somewhere, Part Deux"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>\n<li><i>A Secret Love<\/i> (2020): An intimate family documentary about the challenges of aging and care for aging people, packaged in a story about a romance between two women that spanned much of the twentieth century, and the baseball history best known from <i>A League of Their Own<\/i> (1992). I found it beautiful and affecting, and it hit very close to home. I would have said that this was the best Netflix original I\u2019d seen yet, but of course it\u2019s not a Netflix original! It\u2019s a Blumhouse production with Netflix distribution. So instead I\u2019ll say that the promotion of small, cheap indie films like this is the best case Netflix makes, to me personally, for its own value in a post-streaming-fragmentation world.<\/li>\n<li><i>Modern Times<\/i> (1936): I haven\u2019t studied Charlie Chaplin; this might be the first of his films I\u2019ve ever seen, and for sure the first of his features. The set design and prop work hold up really well four-score-and-four years later! And it\u2019s interesting to see this as a last gasp for silent films\u2014it was both the final Tramp movie and the first one where he has a voice. I can see why the Tramp series was so popular, but I&#8217;m not especially driven to watch more of them, in part because\u2026<\/li>\n<li><i>Steamboat Bill, Jr.<\/i> (1928): &#8230; of this movie, which I&#8217;m juxtaposing with the previous entry even though we watched that in May and this in July. This was the first Buster Keaton feature I\u2019ve seen, and it too came at the end of an era, as the last movie he got to make with his own team and creative control. Functionally it has a number of similarities to <i>Modern Times<\/i>: hapless man does his best to deal with circumstances of industrialization while pursuing romance with a spirited young woman; set pieces and physical comedy ensue. Keaton\u2019s mournful deadpan is itself a clear contrast to Chaplin\u2019s mugging, and is more in my preferred flavor of comedy. But I think the reasons I preferred this movie go beyond that (and also beyond certain <a href=\"https:\/\/vimeo.com\/146442912\" title='No longer available on youtube, probably because it samples \"Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard.\" THANKS A LOT, PAUL SIMON.'>formative influences<\/a>).<\/li>\n<p>The Tramp is a figure of audience empathy contending with superiors and forces beyond his control, but because he\u2019s a clown persona, he\u2019s also the butt of the joke. He dodges both the crackdown of the factory boss and the backlash of the union, and once he\u2019s thrown in prison, he\u2019s happy to indulge in contraband and latch onto the privilege granted by turning snitch. He can be a trickster figure, poking authority in the eye, but it rarely comes across to me as getting one back for the underclass: the motivation is that the eye-poke is a reliable gag for clowns.<\/p>\n<p>Keaton\u2019s eponymous Bill Junior is sympathetic, but he plays that sympathy against his own privilege\u2014he\u2019s been spoiled, he\u2019s a dandy, he\u2019s ineffectual and he can\u2019t seem to stand up for himself until\u2026 well, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=9NapyrF31DI\" title=\"Wikipedia says this gag appears in a number of Keaton films, but this seems to have been the biggest one.\">you know<\/a>. He\u2019s a kicked dog, but one who\u2019s only just been dislodged from the lap. So when <em>he<\/em> makes his character the butt of the joke, it comes across to me as punching up. When Chaplin\u2014who, by 1936, was an international icon at his peak, granted ready audience with world leaders\u2014draws a greasepaint grin on the face of the Great Depression, it seems to me like punching down.<\/p>\n<p>I mean, obviously the people actually living through the Depression did not agree with me here; <i>Modern Times<\/i> was a hit and <i>Steamboat Bill, Jr.<\/i> was such a flop that it cost Keaton his artistic autonomy. I think both are worth watching. The latter is <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=n9QPfiLuQ9c\" title=\"This is actually a better transfer than the DVD we watched from DVD dot com.\">in the public domain<\/a> and not terribly long. If you don\u2019t already know about it, please indulge me: during the final act, try to figure out how they pulled off its special effects before you check Wikipedia. I couldn&#8217;t! It is rare that I get to feel that kind of sustained astonishment. This wasn\u2019t just pre-CGI, this was two decades before the invention of the <em>transistor<\/em>. Buster Keaton was a goddamn magician.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li><i>Moonstruck<\/i> (1987): This movie has an opera performance at its center, and I don\u2019t think that is just because it\u2019s about Italian people. It functions like a romantic comedy, but there aren\u2019t many outright jokes, and the cast plays it various degrees of straight. The exception is Nicolas Cage, whose performance is high Nicolas Cage with extra Nicolas Cage on top. My hypothesis: this movie was not written as a romantic comedy; it is itself a light opera. Cage is the one who saw that and decided to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=diQhM7HLNG8\" title=\"I would have boned him after this too.\">just fucking go for it<\/a>. It\u2019s fun!<\/li>\n<li><i>Scott Pilgrim vs. the World<\/i> (2010): Rewatch, of course. A decade has been pretty kind to this movie! There is a random unprompted r-word (from Kim Pine, of all characters) right before the first party scene, which jarred me, and which I am glad to report did not reappear in the recent and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=DKqKLnsmoK4\" title=\"Ellen Wong punches the highlights out of her own hair!\">delightful benefit table read<\/a>. I am less glad to report that neither did my <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=bDhRBkGesLQ\" title='\"He seems like the kind of guy,\" said Bryan Lee O\u2019Malley in the commentary track, \"who would subscribe to a joke-a-day texting service.\"'>favorite throwaway bit maybe ever<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li><i>Furie<\/i> (2019): This was another 36 Cinema livestream, with commentary from Lady Sensei (founder of the Women\u2019s Martial Arts Network) and Warrington Hudlin, a longtime film professional now working at the Museum of the Moving Image. They\u2019re both a bit older than the commentators from previous showings, and in a very charming way, both clearly got caught up watching the movie and forgot to talk about it for long stretches. That\u2019s understandable! It\u2019s a gripping movie! It looks like it should have cost about ten times its actual budget, and its producer-star Veronica Ngo is magnetic and makes the hits feel very legitimate. In writing this, I learned that she subsequently appeared in <i>The Old Guard<\/i> (2020), which increments my interest in seeing that too.<\/li>\n<li><i>Palm Springs<\/i> (2020): Emotionally intelligent and fun! If you\u2019d like to see it and are one of the four remaining inhabitants of Earth who do not have my Hulu password, let me know.<\/li>\n<li>\n<p><i>Hamilton<\/i> (2020): I know I\u2019m linking to a lot of videos in this post, but I do think <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=1xDnEqMLGZo\" title=\"Also a LITTLE notable for Mackie straight-out saying that the Disney production system is racist.\">this talk between Daveed Diggs and Anthony Mackie<\/a> is worth watching as a complement to this adaptation. Diggs is quite clear that the frame of reference for, as he says, \u201ccentering brown people at the birth of our economy\u201d is very different now than it was in 2015, even if the underlying nature of our world is not so different at all. <a href=\"https:\/\/youtu.be\/1xDnEqMLGZo?t=1297\" title=\"Nobody seems to have a real transcript, only screenshots of someone else's transcript, so YOU'RE WELCOME for the time signature links.\">One quote<\/a> that I\u2019m still thinking about:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\u201cEvery piece of art is viewed through the lens of the time that you are looking at it in. \u2026 There is such a hopefulness in [<i>Hamilton<\/i>] that, in this particular moment, reads even more&#8211;maybe revolutionary, or maybe fictional.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI don\u2019t think it\u2019s wrong in any era, it\u2019s just that the lens keeps changing. You hope that you are part of something that can continue to be in conversation with the era that it\u2019s viewed in. That\u2019s how timeless things work.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The lens of the present moment is of course a moving river, but I think Diggs&#8217;s concept there is a lens that bears repeated use. Sometimes you watch a movie from 2010 that has a slur in it, and it hurts to hear, but the principles behind the work can still stand up: an argument with flaws on the surface. Sometimes you watch a movie from last year where the language is fine but the takeaway isn\u2019t: an argument with flaws at its core. With consciousness of my privilege, I am much more willing to hear out the former, in most conversations.<\/p>\n<p>Diggs also throws in <a href=\"https:\/\/youtu.be\/1xDnEqMLGZo?t=693\" title=\"Anthony Mackie's connection is pretty spotty during parts of this call, so it's fun to guess whether he's frowning because he's thoughtful or because he can't hear.\">an aside<\/a> about how, despite his increasing celebrity, he has tried to maintain a normal profile in his day to day life: \u201cpeople don\u2019t expect you to be walking to the store, so I walk to the store, and nobody really bothers me.\u201d Four and a half years ago, waiting outside the stage doors with Sumana and Kat and Rachel and Claire and Julia and a lot of euphoria, Diggs was the one cast member who popped out to kindly give my playbill an autograph. That kind of continued and thoughtful integrity is something I admire very much.<\/p>\n<p>All that said, the work of adaptation here is very skillful. Agile camera work, dynamic shot length, and an intimate knowledge of what angle to use when, as you might expect from Tommy Kail. He also directed the <i>Fosse&#47;Verdon<\/i> miniseries, which I haven&#8217;t seen, but it seems clear that his practice making that (and <i>Grease Live!<\/i> (2016)) made for an adept transition from theatrical to film direction. IMDB tells me that he worked on the former with editor Jonah Moran, who then edited <i>Hamilton<\/i>, and the result of that collaboration is excellent. They combined multiple live performances, some with an audience and some without, into a seamless whole with solid continuity that knows just when to include laughter or applause and when to sit with silence.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A Secret Love (2020): An intimate family documentary about the challenges of aging and care for aging people, packaged in a story about a romance between two women that spanned much of the twentieth century, and the baseball history best known from A League of Their Own (1992). I found it beautiful and affecting, and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23,140],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3252","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movies","category-roundups"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3252","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=3252"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3252\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3263,"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3252\/revisions\/3263"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3252"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3252"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3252"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}