WHAT ARE YOU WATCHING ON TV? - OCTOBER 2022

Tell what's on your TV?

Everything Everywhere All At Once. (2022) 2 hr 19 cm. English, Mandarin, Cantonese. Directors & screenplay: Daniel Kwan & Daniel Scheinert. Cinematography, Larkin Seiple. Film editing, Paul Rodgers. Art Direction, Amelia Brooke. Set decoration, Kelsi Ephraim. Costume design, Shirley Kurata. Rented this one via Amazon Prime; might try to catch this if it’s still showing in New Haven. Recommended; seen it twice. Kind of a Thornton Wilder, Skin of Our Teeth vibe, through the prism of Asian American stereotypes (laundromat, Kung Fu fighting). Listed set, costume, art direction – high quality noticed during second viewing. Special effects apparently learned from YouTube tutorials (not a criticism). Michelle Yeoh’s character is Emily Wang, harried laundromat manager in tax difficulties; married to clueless but kind hearted Waymond (played by Ke Huy Quan, who played Short Round in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom as a child); Emily’s daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu) is also agent of universal chaos Jobu Tupaki. James Hong, in one of his last roles, plays Emily’s continuously disapproving & disappointed Confucian father(s), Jenny Slate has a minor role as a laundromat patron, but Jamie Lee Curtis has a very full supporting role as Deirdre, IRS agent & Frankenstein monster minion of Jobu Tupaki & hot dog fingered lover of Emily in an alternate universe. Basic trope: multiple universes created at every decision point; Emily is one of a multitude, in continuing conflict with Jobu Tupaki/Joy, negative creator of a bagel/torus/black hole intended to draw all the multiverses into chaotic nothingness. (That the dialog is constantly switching from English to Cantonese to Mandarin is probably another way of expressing the alternate universe concept, as well as the switching from Confucian to 50’s to Gen Z family values) Laundromat Emily is the chosen one because (unlike Keanu Reeves) she isn’t good at anything, so she becomes a template for limitless potential, the opponent of Jobu, avatar of meaninglessness. In Heidegger’s world view humans differ from stones because da Daseins are always conscious of their inherent eventual non-being, but in the Daniels’s worldview even in an alternate universe where life never evolves mother & daughter stones have google eyes and continue to quarrel. Go for the laughs or the nihilism, whichever you prefer.

Via TCM. Obsession (1976). 1 hr 38 min. Director Brian De Palma. Screenplay: Paul Schrader. Cinematography: Vilmos Zsigmond. Film editor Paul Hirsh. Score: Bernard Herrmann. De Palma is well known as a Hitchcock acolyte, so the Hermann score actually has a major role in the film, with its echoes of Vertigo. Michael Courtland (Cliff Robertson) is a New Orleans real estate business partner with Robert Lasalle (John Lithgow) whose wife & daughter are kidnapped on the eve of a big real estate deal. The wife & daughter are killed in a botched attempt to catch the kidnappers. Years later, Michael is in Florence, revisiting the city where he first met his wife, and falls in love with “Sandra Portinari” (Genevieve Bujold) who is a double for his dead wife Elizabeth. Like Scotty in Vertigo he courts Sandra & remakes her in his late wife’s image, and Sandra goes along with it. The twist is even creepier than the Hitchcock film. Daddy issues indeed! No surprise that Lithgow is up to no good. The success of the film may be whether you think Robertson pulls off the Scotty role – Bujold claimed there was no chemistry between them. Also Schrader was ticked off because De Palma did not choose to incorporate the final section of Schrader’s screenplay in the film. I was half expecting Michael to use the automatic on Sandra/Bujold at some point in the 360 concluding shot/scene. I don’t think Schrader had any such intention, to be fair, but I don’t have access to the script.

While my DVD player is dead, I’m going to try to catch up on Showtime movies I’ve been meaning to get around to; hopefully something to report before the end of the month. In Amazon Prime news finished the last episode of Season 1 of Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power. Still confused on who the bad guys are. Arguably the whole first season is exposition, so clearly patience is demanded. Still worth a run through. Finding Galadriel to be more sympathetic toward the end. There were times I was wondering whether she would be the reincarnation of Sauron if she didn’t keep her genocidal tendencies in check. Britbox is doling out Shetland season 7 episodes week by week though I’m feeling like I’m being strung along. Also discovered I’d only seen 2 episodes of Vera season 11 (?) so I was able to binge the rest. Blythen’s Vera mannerisms starting to wear thin.

On the peacock streaming service, watched the first 3 episodes of Murder She Wrote. Never followed the series before. Though the pilot was interminable – stretched out to 2 episodes -- Angela Lansbury was fine, though she could use a foil like Vera’s Aiden to bring out the vinegar. Probably better off when she stays in Cabot Cove, Maine, where she meets victim Howard Duff, briefly in episode 3. Do all her potential boyfriends get killed off? Problem I’m having with the recent Vera & the 80’s Jessica Fletcher is that in the 90 min or 45 min timespan the killer can be rather arbitrary, since time spent sketching suspects reduces time to explore character. In the Howard Duff episode didn't really get a good idea of the actual relationship between Duff & daughters.

>2 featherbear: "Everything Everywhere All At Once"

We watched this one last weekend and it is glorious. So many laugh-out-loud moments. The underlying plot is fairly standard but the frenetic and humorous action sequences*, the acting talent, and the cinematography elevate this into the category of films that I will watch multiple times.

* The parts that are most likely to offend prudish minds were the funniest to me.

>5 ScoLgo: Hi There! It's been a while since we've heard from you. Hope everything is good for you and yours. Happy to see that you are not a prude:)

>6 Carol420: Hi Carol! I lurk all the time but don't post very often. I am pretty much the opposite of a prude. Live & let live is my personal slogan.

Have you seen the movie, Carol?

I have just finished watching a repeat series of Luther, the final in the series was a real cliff hanger.

>7 ScoLgo: I haven't, but my library has it and it looks like it would be a good one. I'll pick it up tomorrow and thanks for the recommendation. Glad to know that you're still "lurking":) I like your personal slogan and totally agree with you.

Showtime has many indie films distributed by A24, so I’m catching up on some of these. Two movies that generated a lot of hate on IMDB & elsewhere. I liked them both, but keep that in mind.

Mother! (2017) ca. 2 hr. Director & screenplay, Darren Aronofsky. Cinematography Matthew Libatique. Film editor, Andrew Weisblum. I clicked on IMDB’s awards link, only to learn that the star Jennifer Lawrence was nominated for “Actress Most in Need of a New Agent,” while director Aronofsky was nominated, along w/everyone else associated with the movie, to “The Hall of Shame,” as well as to JLaw & Javier Barden for “Most Egregious Age Difference Between the Leading Man & the Love Interest.” The epithet most associated with the negative viewer reviews was “pretentious.” Probably Aronofsky was mistaken in assigning abstract names to the cast since this might result in such a reaction: Lawrence (Mother) – Barden (Him) – Ed Harris (Man) – Michelle Pfeiffer (Woman) – Domhnall Gleeson (oldest son) – Brian Gleeson (younger brother) – Kristen Wiig (Herald) – there’s a large cast, all with functional/action descriptive names: Aesthete, Abettor, Cupbearer, Damsel, etc.

I have a problem with “pretentious” which would apply I believe to a film with a banal moral or concept unworthy of the creator’s aesthetic effort. But the intent of the film seems pretty open ended to me. The arc of the film starts off in what appears to be grounded in recognizable domestic tension. Lawrence is a young wife married to older poet (the always hypermasculine Barden). It should be noted that the pov is entirely focused through her. She herself is focused on renovating their house, while he tries to cope with writer’s block. Things start to go haywire when an unexpected visitor (Ed Harris) turns up, and the poet is a little too hospitable, with the visitor, & later the visitor’s wife (Pfeiffer), & even later the visitor’s sons (the Gleeson brothers) turn up as well. Pfeiffer in particular becomes an obnoxious house guest, and Lawrence’s passivity in the face of the invasion of her personal space & her husband’s overgenerosity moves things in a disturbing direction. The disruption created by the visitors culminates when the fandom of the visitors destroys a precious relic of the poet, the only survivor of a devastating loss, and the dysfunctional family self-destructs in murder. Through the disruption, we learn that the underlying tension (amplified by Pfeiffer’s unhelpful advice) is the childlessness of the Lawrence/Barden couple, but the death of the visitors’ son (which leads to even more invasive guests encouraged by the poet) culminates in Lawrence’s pregnancy & the unblocking of the poet’s creativity resulting in a work of art, which in turn devours the wife’s organic offspring & amplifies the husband’s selfishness (if that’s possible!), all leading to a Walpurgisnight where Lawrence’s heart becomes the relic & the cycle repeats. Make of it what you will indeed.

The merger of HBO with Discovery has led to a downsizing of HBO’s ambitions, replaced by numerous house renovation reality shows that appear to have been the backbone of Discovery’s content, suggesting that home renovations seem to have become the metaphor of our frustrated times. This appears to be the theme of The Humans (2021), bumped from HBO to Showtime. Director & screenplay, Stephen Karam. Originally a stage play (won a Tony), with a family thanksgiving taking place in a decaying 2 story New York apartment kitty corner from the former Twin Towers site. Here the frustration of IMDB viewers might have been due to the trailer, which suggested a horror movie; for me this was more of a polished version of the student playwright family dramas one used to see at the Yale Rep, or, on Broadway, the August Osage County play, also later a movie. Whole lotta family microaggression & pathos, with sad revelation culminating and concluding the play/movie, proof that we’re all a bunch of electrons lying & bumping into each other in the empty spaces. Kept my attention because the family electrons were uncomfortably recognizable & the dialog was funny enough at times to elicit embarrassing chortles from me. Principals are: Richard Jenkins (father Erik) & Jayne Houdyshell (mother Deirdre), daughters Brigid (Beanie Feldstein) & Aimee (Amy Schumer) & Brigid’s husband (?) Richard (Steven Yuen), and mostly trundled around dementia addled Momo/grandma (Jane Squibb). The apartment is 2 stories connected by a spiral staircase, with mysterious bulges, plus unexpected noises from the tenant above. The apartment type, recognizable from my New York days, is another character in the drama – hardly an exaggerated venue as some viewers seemed to think. Acting was fine (Jenkins & Houdyshell from the original theater piece), including Schumer (who was lit with some unfair criticism for some reason) & I enjoyed the Feldstein (she's new to me) performance – a piece of work as her daddy described her. Yuen perhaps reminded me a bit too much of his role as Speckle in the cartoon series Tuca and Bertie (Netflix, Cartoon Network, & HBOMax) which I continue to recommend.

Shin Godzilla (2016) 2 h. Japanese, English, w/English subtitles. Directors, Hideaki Anno & Shinji Higuchi. Screenplay, H. Anno. Cinematography, Kosuke Yamada. Film editing, H. Anno & Atsuki Sato. (Auteur monster movie? I need to take a look at some of the Evangelion animes he directed if they’re still available) First DVD rental (via Netflix DVD service) since my broken player was replaced. I guess monster movies qualify as Halloween appropriate! With the elections approaching I’ve been finding TV hard to watch due to some of the attack commercials – especially following the Pelosi assassination attempt – turned off the World Series after a particularly nasty one – so this was a relief, a return to less polarizing times. Some good & interesting points that make this Godzilla stand out. Unlike the recent American movies (which tend to focus on individuals & family), this one focuses on the (Japanese) government trying to cope with something completely unexpected -- with buck passing, lack of willingness to commit the military, what to give away at the press conferences, inability to think outside the box, decisions based on political ambition, uncomfortable relationship with the U.S. The government is satirized as dim but not satanic. The U.S. is surprisingly cooperative, with the liaison a Japanese-American daughter of a U.S. senator with ambitions to become the first woman president. (But played by a Japanese TV actress; the whole foreign policy & U.S. domestic policy scenario now seems naïve given post 2016 xenophobia; incidentally, while Satomi Ishikawa, the U.S. liaison, has TV good looks, the cast playing government, professors, & military is surprisingly average-looking; refreshing to see a good range of different Asian faces) The fundamental trope is unchanged: creature from the deep mutates after feeding on illegally dumped radioactive waste (no mention of the Fukushima 2011 disaster, but probably pretty obvious to Japanese viewers). The destruction of much of Tokyo struck me as good CGI, easily comparable to the later Hollywood Godzillas. (My most enjoyable Godzilla destruction fest was of Waikiki in the 2014 American movie; watching your hometown smashed by monsters is always The Best) Not so the monster, whose first appearance or version – it mutates throughout the movie – rather resembles a sock puppet salamander. Further mutation allows the creature (Gojira seems to have some etymology referring to an Angry God) to resemble the traditional spiny biped. Also interesting is the number of different weapons deployed on the creature; clearly the military never takes seriously the oft-repeated Nietzsche-attributed maxim that What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Stronger. By the time the U.S. smart bombs have succeeded in transforming the G.’s dorsal spines into radioactive lasers and weaponized its bad breath – U.S. is always happy to cooperate when it gets a chance to try out its advanced weaponry -- you might think the final solution of nuking the monster might be the quintessential Bad Idea. But the intrepid Japanese scientists manage to figure out the clues left by a missing scientist using … origami -- & come up with a scheme not to heat up The Angry God but to cool him/her off. For a while, anyway. Definitely worth a watch, and not at all gory, if that’s a concern. Probably rentable via Amazon Prime?

PS. After I saw & loved The Cave of the Yellow Dog (2005) on TCM I checked on Amazon to see if it was available to rent or own to stream or to own as a DVD, but it was not, nor was it available to rent as a DVD on Netflix DVD, but it recently became available on bluray so I just got a disc from Amazon; you get 2 discs, one bluray & one dvd, so I’ll be trying them out on my new player. Apparently some streaming services only have a dubbed version, which is an abomination, when you consider the sweet voices of the children in the original Mongolian. Can’t help but feel pessimistic for this way of life 17 years on under Chinese control. (Another dubbing abomination I’ve discovered is that the HBOMax Studio Ghibli version of Spirited Away is only available as dubbed. Fortunately own a multilingual DVD, but I don’t possess the full range of Miyazawa’s oeuvre.)

Finished Shetland Season 7 on Britbox via Amazon Prime streaming. So has the series come to an end? Perez resigns from policing, making possible a romantic relationship -- no Tom Brady he; Tosh will apparently take his place, where she would be balancing raising her baby girl with the help of a most accommodating husband & the usual gruesome police work. The season ended without explaining how she escaped from the trailer/caravan when she tripped the timer of a bomb. Will Season 8 reveal she has superpowers? Or did I just miss an episode. Resuming The Expanse on Amazon Prime. Caught the first 2 seasons on cable but Amazon apparently went into its deep pockets &, well, expanded it a season or so. I'm somewhere re-watching Season 1 again. Also on Prime, finished The Northman. I started it on the Peacock streaming channel, but it got bumped to Prime (along with Ambulance) & I finished it there. Now interested in seeing the director's (Robert Eggers) other 2 recent films, The Witch and The Lighthouse, both on my Showtime to-be-viewed list. Maybe November, yeah?

Just got a subscription to the Criterion Channel! (My new Samsung now accommodates the app!) Jules et Jim has never looked better!