The New Normal?

Film: Birdman, or the Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance
Format: DVD from NetFlix on Sue’s Mother’s Day present.

I’m currently reading the book “Blink” by Malcolm Gladwell. The book is about rapid cognition—about how we often get a very deep feeling of something from a very short glimpse, what Gladwell calls “thin slicing.” In the chapter I just finished, he talks about the show All in the Family and about how it tested poorly with audiences initially with the pilot, but was put on air anyway because its network could afford to take a chance on it. The show, of course, was a huge hit. The main reason it tested poorly was that it was simply too new. Audiences didn’t know how to come at it; they couldn’t put it into a specific category. I think the same thing is true for me of Birdman, or the Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance.

I honestly don’t know how to come at this film. There were times while watching where I felt as if I was under assault by the film. Long stretches are a constant barrage of noise and movement, chatter, swearing, fantasy mixed with reality. It feels like there is so much to concentrate on and so few guidelines to tell what is real from what is false. The film plays merry hob with time, moving seamlessly during a single pan from early in the day to later in the same day without a single transition. It all does fit together, but so much is simply assumed of the audience to make sense of it without much in the way of help.

Try Lunesta

Film: Sleepless in Seattle
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on The Nook.

Off the top of my head, I can think of three movies that Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan made together: the terrible Joe Vs. the Volcano, the derivative You’ve Got Mail, and today’s viewing, Sleepless in Seattle. It wouldn’t be saying much to say that this is the best of the three. Sleepless in Seattle follows a lot of the romantic movie conventions as well as makes a good deal of hay with referencing An Affair to Remember. But it was also co-written by Nora Ephron and directed by her as well, which gives it immediate credibility.

It’s also a hard movie to classify. IMDB calls this a “comedy, drama, romance” and I agree only with two of those labels. Certainly there are comedy moments here, but this is not a film I would specifically label as a comedy. It’s heavy on the drama, heavy on the romance, and as with a lot of Ephron’s best work, the comedy comes naturally from the situations and from the characters, and never feels forced.

On the Road Again

Film: Road to Morocco
Format: Streaming video from Hoopla Digital on The Nook.

A film like Road to Morocco is difficult to deal with from a modern perspective. It is at once both fun and frustrating, both funny and infuriating. All of the Bing and Bob road movies are entertaining and this one has the added bonus of being entirely self-aware. But they’re also racist to a certain extent and flush with the sort of whitewashing frequent of the era. What else can you call it when a movie has both Dorothy Lamour and Anthony Quinn playing Arabs?

Like all of the road movies, we get our heroes abandoned, shipwrecked, or otherwise tossed out into the wilderness. In this case, Jeff Peters (Bing Crosby) and Orville “Turkey” Jackson (Bob Hope) are tossed off a ship and after a little panic, wash up in Morocco. The boys are hungry and broke, but soon discover that the mentally afflicted are treated as holy they try to work up a mentally damaged act that backfires. Later, the two sit in a restaurant and gorge themselves with plans to run out on the check. Instead, Jeff is approached by a large man and arranges to sell Orville into slavery for $200 with plans to make enough money to eventually buy him back.

This Might Leave a Czar

Film: Anastasia
Format: DVD from NetFlix on laptop.

A while ago, I commented on just how good 1935 was for Charles Laughton; the man was in three movies nominated for Best Picture, one of which won. That’s a hell of a good year. Yul Brynner had a good year in 1956. He walked away with an Oscar for The King and I and acted across from Ingrid Bergman in her Oscar-winning performance in Anastasia. Okay, I’ll admit that I’m prone to like Yul Brynner in general. I’m not sure if it’s the bald head, the piercing stare, or the Mongolian-tinged accent, but I’ll watch him in just about anything.

Anastasia is epic in everything but length in the sense that this is massive, sweeping story about history and romance with any number of plot twists. And like many an epic, this is a story deeply involved in Russian history. It seems impossible to touch on any aspect of Russian history without the story becoming something massive, at least in tone and scope. Anastasia tells one of the great myths of Russian history post-revolution. It’s well known that the family of Tsar Nicholas II was killed by the Bolsheviks, but there was also the story that the tsar’s daughter Anastasia somehow survived the slaughter. What then would happen if Anastasia Nicolaevna had survived?

Hail to the Chief

Film: Primary Colors
Format: Streaming video from Hoopla Digital on The Nook.

There are a good number of political dramas on the various Oscars lists that I’m watching. I don’t generally seek them out, but Primary Colors is one that I actually saw in the theater. I remember it; my wife was about five months pregnant with our first daughter and I was pretty much willing to do anything to keep her happy. This is the first I’ve seen it in 17 years, and yet I remember specific things about the film. That bodes either good or ill, depending.

Fortunately, it bodes pretty well. I remembered Primary Colors favorably, and I liked it on this watch, too. This is more or less the story of the governor of an unnamed small Southern state running for president in the 1990s. The governor, Jack Stanton (John Travolta) seems to connect well with the general population. His wife Susan (Emma Thompson) is emotionally damaged but tough. He appears honest, caring, and forthright. He’s also an inveterate womanizer with scandals bubbling up, allegations of drug use, and was a draft dodger during the Vietnam War. In other words, this is more or less the story of the first Clinton campaign without it being specifically called that overtly.

Dog Days

Film: Bolt
Format: DVD from DeKalb Public Library on laptop.

I went into Bolt specifically with the thought that I probably wouldn’t like it a ton. This was a film that had to win me over. While there are certainly exceptions, Disney animation went through a dark period, and some of those movies (see Brother Bear, for instance) were, well, pretty awful. Even a lot of good non-Pixar Disney films suffer from being flatly predictable throughout. So Bolt very much started out as “I need to check off this box” instead of a film I was looking forward to seeing.

After an initial problem with the DVD, I settled in and ironed a bunch of shirts while I watched. Bolt follows the tried and true “plenty of make believe, but be true to yourself” Disney fable, in this case pretty literally—more literally than usual, in fact. We start with an introduction to Penny (Miley Cyrus before she went all “former Disney star” crazy), who gets a new dot from a pet shelter. We learn that this dog, Bolt (voiced by John Travolta during scenes without humans), has been given a variety of super powers by Penny’s father to protect her against his nemesis, Dr. Calico (Malcolm McDowell). There’s a solid action sequence of Bolt and Penny avoiding Calico’s many minions and a quick primer on Bolt’s powers.

Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Picture 1995

The Contenders:

Apollo 13
Babe
Braveheart (winner)
Il Postino
Sense and Sensibility