Old DVDs (media notes)
I’m sitting here, trying to work, but getting distracted by an impending snowstorm.
I’m stocked up on food and coffee (very important that latter part), put out some more bird feed so the little critters can do some last minute tanking up, and am absolutely no longer in the mood to work today.
So, in lieu of something genuinely productive, here are a few notes on recent media I’ve been enjoying.
Movies #
I’m the last among my immediate relatives, at least on my father’s side, to have a disc player, having recently upgraded to a fancy Blu-Ray player a while back. Everybody else got rid of their players years ago.
This means I’ve been getting their DVDs.
The other day, one of my aunts mentioned that the family summer cabin that everybody shares has a couple of hundred DVDs in boxes that nobody can watch any more, and that if I emptied a few of the boxes that would free up storage space in the cabin.
So, I raided the cabin, taking about half of the DVDs there, mainly leaving behind the children’s movies, Danish language fair (my uncle and his family used to live in Denmark), and all too many Woody Allen movies (not watching any of those ever again.)
I watched the first batch of these over the past couple of weeks.
Some of these I’d seen before. Some I’d missed at the time.
First off, an absolute classic.
The Big Sleep #
I’ve seen this classic with Bogart and Bacall several times over, but it’s been over a decade since the last time.
Bogart and Bacall have a screen presence that is unparalleled and a charm that’s hard to define.
The dialogue is amazing.
The movie manages to preserve most of the book’s plot despite having to condense the narrative down to a 110 minutes and having to work within the limitations of the Hays Code.
Still one of the best movies ever made.
Hero #
This would be the 2002 movie directed by Zhang Yimou. The version I got from the cabin box was a mediocre pan-and-scan version, but it was sort of watchable.
I had missed this one when it first came out. I missed a lot of movies from 2002-2005, when I was busy working on my PhD.
The cast in this one is amazing. Jet Li. Tony Leung. Maggie Cheung. Zhang Ziyi. Donnie Yen.
Pretty close to being a list of the best of the best of Hong Kong cinema at the time.
It’s clever, with a number of grand set pieces, and great performances from some of the most consistently reliable actors in Chinese cinema.
But it fell a little bit flat in that it was so obviously pro-China propaganda. It had twists and turns and Rashomon style retellings, but in the end the message you take from the movie is that conquest is good when China does it because that way they could impose peace.
Even if you make allowances for a poor translation in the Icelandic subtitles, the structure of the narrative still converges on the point that the emperor, a warmonger whose hands are soaked with blood, is spared because the peace after conquest is assumed to be worth it.
California Suite #
A 1978 movie based on a Neil Simon play, adapted into a screenplay by Neil Simon himself.
It’s a set of four stories that take place in the same hotel but are otherwise unrelated. (The original play has the four stories all take place in the same hotel suite, hence the name, a structure that Neil Simon had used before, but that conceit was abandoned for the adaptation.)
This one’s a mixed bag.
The Alan Alda and Jane Fonda story is great, carried almost entirely by their performances.
The Michael Caine and Maggie Smith story is also quite solid, although it still feels quite unresolved at the end.
The Walther Matthau story is humorous but ultimately empty fluff. Whatever it was trying to do wasn’t accomplished.
The biggest dud of the four was the Richard Pryor and… well, Bill Cosby one.
Leaving aside the obvious discomfort that comes with watching anything featuring Bill Cosby, the story itself just didn’t work. The conflict felt unearned, the characters were assholes, and they didn’t learn anything from the experience.
Worth watching, in my opinion, for the Jane Fonda and Alan Alda story, but you could probably just stop watching once that arc is resolved, none of the other characters actually learn anything or change.
Casino #
I hadn’t watched this one since I originally saw it in the cinema and my opinion of it hasn’t changed in thirty years:
Competent and charming, but instantly overrated, and criminally under-uses Sharon Stone. The story of two self-destructive assholes self-destroying in incredibly predictable ways simply doesn’t have the same compelling narrative drive as Goodfellas. Sharon Stone’s character was an opportunity to break up that dynamic, had she been developed into a full third lead with more nuance, but Scorsese, for all his talent as a filmmaker, has never been particularly adept at female characters.
It’s a fun movie, but also a missed opportunity. A Scorsese movie with Sharon Stone in her prime as a lead should have been epic, but what we got was lazy characterisation.
Three Amigos #
The 1986 vehicle featuring Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Chevy Chase.
This one didn’t age as badly as I expected, but that’s probably because my expectations were quite low.
It has a number of solid comedic scenes and gags and the fact that most of the humour is self-mockery – the leads being goofs – gives it marginally greater longevity than many other eighties comedies.
But it is also thematically confused. It starts off presenting us with a real-world/movie-world dichotomy, where we’re placed firmly in a context that is “realistic” compared to what the character see and portray on the screen in-movie. The world that the leads come from, Hollywood, is clearly portrayed as artificial and simplified.
This is a solid setup for the jokes of the first half of the movie, until the movie abruptly shifts gears to include fantastical elements that are even less realistic than the Hollywood unrealism that they mocked at the beginning. This tonal confusion undermines its own comedy because it doesn’t continue into the final act, which switches back into drawing humour from the real-world/movie-world contrast.
My best guess is they ran out of material for the middle part and so filled it with random sketches they could massage into the setting.
Not the best. Had a few laughs.
Blame it on the Bellboy #
1992 movie. Genuinely bad. Attempts to be a funny confused-identity farce, but is overall just largely mean-spirited and humourless, which isn’t what you want from a farce. The one funny joke – assassin accidentally kills animals instead of the mark – was basically lifted wholesale from A Fish Called Wanda with worse execution.
K-19: The Widowmaker #
I’d missed this 2002 movie originally so was watching it for the first time. Featuring Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson, it’s basically a submarine movie with Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson.
Ostensibly based on true events with the Soviet Union’s first nuclear submarine, but really it’s a Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson submarine movie. You already know, just from that, whether you’re going to enjoy the movie or not. It has claustrophobia, underwater disasters, “oh no, the pressure!” moments, and all the rest you want from a submarine movie, with a selection of solid submarine captain brooding by both Ford and Neeson.
It is what it is and if there’s one thing that Kathryn Bigelow knows how to do is a solidly executed genre movie that does what it says on the tin.
Not art, but not everything has to be.
Marathon Man #
This, however, is art. I hadn’t seen this in at least twenty years and it was much better than I remembered.
Great performances. Solid plot. Nicely directed scenes that builds up the paranoia as the Nazi worries about being recognised.
So good.
Series #
The only new English-language series I’ve been keeping up with lately is Only Murders in the Building because it’s a fairly reliable piece of entertainment.
The other English-language series I’ve been watching religiously is Taskmaster. It’s great.
Other than that:
Not me #
Finished rewatching this and it’s quite possibly the best Thai BL series available. It has a solid plot with a few genuinely affecting moments, the scene where the crowd saves the protagonists in the final episode is even better than I remembered, and is only let down a bit in places by the business need of giving every major couple (or “ship”) some airtime.
(Thai series make a lot of their money on fan events with the performers. For some companies, the series exist mostly to create “shipping” moments.)
You can watch the series in its entirety on YouTube.
Love Design #
The other surprise of late has been the WeTV exclusive, Love Design. Turns out that when you hire experienced actors – as opposed to less specialised “performers” that model, sing, and act – spend some time on the screenplay, and employ an experienced production team, you generally end up with a better series.
This one is turning into a fan favourite, not just because of the performances of the leads, but because of the writing. The third and fourth episodes, no matter how the second half of the series pans out, are already candidates for a couple of the best-written BL or GL single episodes in recent history.
Most of it is delivering on beats that were set up in the first couple of episodes, so they don’t exactly come as a surprise, but they are well-executed in a way that’s genuinely charming.