'Which dream is this?'

Twelve hours after the film.

And more. Always more. The movie in question: Paterson. But, there are always more movies. Today there was also 13th. Yesterday: 20th Century Women and Hidden Figures. Nothing the day before.

Insert a sad emoji here.

Sing and Assassin's Creed the day before that, Fences the day before that. And, the day before that was Christmas with Gremlins and A Christmas Story to celebrate. And the list goes on. On the one hand, it is December, awards season, and a whole lot of good films show up at once. On the other hand, I am on winter break from teaching and I have extra time to see those movies. On a third hand, 2016 has been depressing, 2017 probably will not be better, may even be worse, so I want to enjoy what I can enjoy while I can enjoy it.

But, I want to talk about Paterson. I want to talk about the poetry of everyday life. I want to talk about how I have not seen nearly enough Jim Jarmusch movies. Seriously, I realized today that Broken Flowers--sixteen years after the film--may be the only other Jarmusch film I have seen start to finish. And, while I only vaguely remember liking Broken Flowers, I loved Paterson. I loved the way Jarmusch plays with audience expectations, offering up a...

Assume SPOILERS, when I can actually bother to be specific about the film.

Also, assume that I will probably ramble about other things because that is what I do, that is how I live, writing like I am running out of time, a la Hamilton, but too much of what I write is in one-hundred-forty-character snippets, Facebook comments, D&D notes. Offer me the space of a thing like a blog and I will use it. With my Groundhog Day Project, I aimed for a thousand words a day and regularly exceeded it. If I remember correctly from the data I put together for my Master's Thesis, the average length of entries was somewhere around sixteen hundred words.

(I did a cursory check of my data and found only where I cited the average as "over a thousand words each." I think the specific number is on a post-it amidst all my thesis notes and I am not going there right now.)

That is my thing. I write. Excessively. I say with many words what I could easily say with few. When I aim for poetry, sometimes I can be succinct. But, it is rare.

But, that does not mean that I do not recognize the poetry of every day, that I do not enjoy the sound of the rain out the window as I fell asleep last night, that I do not enjoy the cute usher at the movie theater saying, "See you later, alligator" as I leave the theater today, that I not appreciate the people around me (the good, the bad, and the ugly), the things around me, the places, the sights.

Like tonight, the fog and rain as my daughter and I left my sister's house to drive home.

Like a well-drawn map.

A well-constructed LEGO project.

A blog entry or a story that still holds up long after I have written it.

A marriage left behind.

Chapters of my life finished.

Pages turned.

Bridges burned.

Or maybe just the overt use of black and white in Paterson to distract from the play of blue, or the sudden appearance of red at a climactic moment.

Or how Jarmusch uses a setup that implies a protagonist trying to escape the doldrums of his everyday life only for us to gradually realize that his poetry is already doing that, that his girlfriend's penchant for acting on her whims is played as flighty except she is doing what the film seems to expect us to want him to do. She has a dream. She tells him about it. She acts on it (when applicable).

Or how the mundane is poetic and poetry is mundane.

Or how film can suck me in and let me live in it, in my version of it, in my version of my life around it, in a world where it exists and I exist and we get twisted together into something anew.

Or just how one of our cats just glanced at me as he walked past and I imagined him casually saying "hey" because sometimes cats talk and they talk casually and life keeps going on anyway. Regardless of who might be president. Regardless of what direction the world might be going. Regardless of violence and rhetoric and everything else under the sun.

Pages turned.

Bridges burned.

With Ohio Blue Tip Matches.

And the people who get that.

 

 

 

 

 

And, I realize that the phrasing of that last line implies that I will be using people as kindling to go with those matches. While that is not what I meant, the poetry of it still works for me so I will leave it as is.

This Is Not about 20th Century Women or Hidden Figures

A handful of hours after the film. And a slightly larger handful of hours after the film.

The films in question: 20th Century Women and Hidden Figures.

My problem is this: I watched these two films about women today, one certainly my kind of film, a whole lot of talk and very little plot but stuck a little in its white privilege; the other a fairly (white) audience-friendly, straightforward, historical piece about three women of colour who could use more notice. And, it seems like I should be writing today about gender and feminism and racism, or at least talking about how Michelle Williams little bit of over emotional screentime in Manchester by the Sea--thirty-four days after that film*--is getting notice and Greta Gerwig is not...

(*For the record, I rather liked Manchester by the Sea, but after early trailers were touting Williams' role as being Oscar-worthy, I expected more.)

...except I do not usually talk about awards that way, the snubs and whatnot. Instead of the obvious topic, though, I find myself stuck on a line from 20th Century Women--I am pretty sure it is in the trailer--Annette Bening's Dorothea saying to Gerwig's Abbie regarding her (Dorothea's) son: "You get to see him out in the world, as a person. I never will."

Because, as a parent that rings very true to me, especially of late. I have three kids and they are all old enough to have lives of their own. I see them when they are home, I interact with them when they deign to interact with me.

They do not even see movies with me much anymore.

I know!

The horror.

Similarly, I see my students just when they are in the classroom or bother to come to my office hours, or maybe passing in the hall. I see my siblings and parents only occasionally. I see my grad school friends rarely but for Facebook. Their lives when they are away from my sight might as well be foreign constructs, like films I will never see but only hear about third hand. Their loves, their hates, their habits and behaviors--these are things that only exist in temporary windows.

Like film characters. Like TV characters. Novel characters (though my own creations remain in my head long after I finish or abandon a bit of fiction). Even D&D characters (though my own current character is in my head quite often). A particular character, the things they do, the things they say... The things the writer and director have them do, the things the writer and director have them say... Hell, the things the actor has them do, the things the actor has them say--all of these things are all the evidence I have for who and what these characters are. I know only of their dreams inasmuch as they reference them in the short time I am with them. I know only of their love lives if their love lives are part of the plot of the film in question, or if they bother to mention it. A lazy screenwriter or director, or a bad actor might make these choices poorly and ruin my experience of the character...

But then, I must consider the fact that your experience of a particular character is not the same as mine. Your experience of a particular plot is not the same as mine. Your 20th Century Women is not my 20th Century Women. Your Hidden Figures is not my Hidden Figures. Your Manchester by the Sea is not my Manchester by the Sea. Etcetera. Etcetera. Etcetera. And, so forth.

(Sorry, I saw a production of The King and I this past week and I could not help it.)

I return to Benesh...

(Readers of that other blog of mine may remember my systematic deconstruction of and debate with Mary Ellen Benesh's dissertation regarding Groundhog Day--coming up on twenty-three years after that film, also close to nine months after that film, and many, many numbers in between.)

In particular, I return to a notion of hers that I adopted somewhere along the way. How she puts it:

...for viewers... an imprint remains as during the film the audience members "introject" or take in its psychic content including symbols, images, and narrative, as well as projecting individual personal concerns. After the film, if it is particularly "resonant," the process continues as the film "plays on" in the viewer's mind. A personal "edition" of the film is thus created and assimilated into the psyche of the viewer. (Benesh, 2011, p. 8)

She references (and I often have cited) Izod (2000) and the comparison of the experience in the movie theater, watching the film...experiencing the film, to the process of dreaming. What a film is as you watch it depends on so many outside factors. How your day is going, who is sitting nearby, what other films you have seen, what you want out of life, what you believe about the life you have, what you believe about life in general... etcetera. The black mother with her three daughters sitting to my left during Hidden Figures today, for example, saw a different film than I did. The old gay couple sitting to my right during 20th Century Women saw a different film than I did. A devout Trump supporter probably saw Rogue One--fourteen days and eight days after the film--differently than I did. A very conservative person, a parent perhaps, would have seen Mustang--just over a year after the film--very differently than I did...

Facebook recently showed me my link to my blog entry about that film as a "memory" worth sharing again. That entry is not particularly brilliant. I was in a bad mood, angry at the situation in the film, and my sinuses were bugging me a great deal. It is only three paragraphs. What really struck me reading it recently was that third paragraph:

Maybe it's because my sinuses have been angry at me all day but I don't feel like lingering and/or sugar coating. I'm tired of there being standards and traditions about actions that don't hurt anyone. You know, the whole requirement that women be pure for their husbands is just one. Gay marriage is another big one lately. I'm tired of it. If what someone else is doing offends you because of some made-up standard in your head, keep it to yourself... Better yet, get the fuck over it.

Now, in being brief, I was also just vague enough as to be proving my own standards just as worthy of being dismissed as the bullshit conservative ideals on display in Mustang, but my point here is that surely there were people who saw that film who felt no ire at all, who understood and related to the conservative parents and their efforts to rein in their daughters. Recently, I told my own daughter to not bother dating anyone then later told her not to listen to my patriarchal bullshit. You know, it is her life. I am here to make it better. And, coming back to my earlier point, it is a life to which most of the time I will not bear witness.

 

 

 

 

 

I suppose my point is simple. Every film is a window into a different world, into a life not my own. And, every film is also a window into my world, into my life. Life happens in these discrete little units. Seconds. Minutes. Moments. We share the ones we can. We are far from the ones we cannot.

 

 

 

 

 

And, sometimes, some people are just assholes who are not worthy of sharing.

Just saying.

Hollywood and the White Male Problem

Six days after the film. Eleven (and sixteen) days after the film. Also, most of my life after the film. The films in question: Passengers, La La Land (twice), and the original Star Wars more times than I have ever bothered to keep count*.

(*still far fewer times than I have seen that film which shall not be named here)

I intended to write this week about La La Land, and compare it to Sing Street--we're nine days after that film--deal in modern movie musicals and why Moana--twenty-three days and eighteen days after that film--is a better musical than either of those two, though I loved La La Land and thought Sing Street was amazing. For the record, I wanted to really use La La Land to write about what some reviewers are calling the "whitesplaining" of Jazz. A nice big racial discussion, room for political tangents and big, opinionated commentary on the state of (white) film today, and maybe some open wondering on how +OscarsSoWhite was going to be this year.

(If you are somehow reading this and have never read any of the entries in my previous film blog, you should know that I tend to get rather obsessive about the Oscars every year, making an effort to see all the nominees, and in recent years having seen most of the nominees (except of course the short films, the documentaries, and the foreign-language films) by the time their nominations are announced, and last year in my other blog, I wrote for days about #OscarsSoWhite.)

(Also, you should know that my sentences sometimes get convoluted. I had toyed with deliberately limiting entries in this blog to only 500 words. I rejected that limitation almost immediately.)

I intended to write about Passengers and the misogynist notions at the core of its plot.

I was going to twist the discussion of La La Land into the discussion of Passengers (or vice versa) to talk about what I was going to call the "white male problem" in Hollywood.

And, to be fair, Hollywood absolutely has a white male problem.

But, then Carrie Fisher died, and though I did not have a particularly emotional reaction to her death, I did get to thinking about Princess Leia and about Star Wars and how bound up in my entire life that series is. I mean, I was barely more than a year old when the original was in theaters. I do not know exactly when I first saw that one but I knew it well enough when The Empire Strikes Back came out. I cannot, of course, remember just how I understood that film at the time, what the experience of seeing it for the first time was like. I have seen the original Star Wars trilogy so many times--watching the three of them together when I was home sick from grade school more than a few times--that each viewing affects the memories of the ones before. Those films (and many others) are part and parcel of my being. Not just inasmuch as they influence the way I look at movies but also the way I look at life. Princess Leia was probably my earliest crush. I was one of many young boys (and, I assume, girls) moved, as it were, by the sight of her in that outfit Jabba made her wear, but I think there's something much more important than a preadolescent crush there. It occurs to me (now, if not previously) that the conservative notion that Leia needed rescuing got twisted up in the progressive notion that she was quite capable in her own right, and probably shaped a lot of what I thought in the intervening years about cinematic and real-world women.

And, I am rambling a bit.

And maybe grasping at straws.

Or maybe quite accurately measuring my past self and his growth into who I am today.

I really do not know.

Plus, I find myself pulled in too many directions in what I should be writing here. So much so that I regret (and may very soon change) my plan to write here only once a week. I do not think I would try to force myself into the corner of having to watch a film every day again (not that I do not regularly make an effort to see nearly that many anyway), and certainly not the same film every day again, but I think I would like to write every day again. There are several throughlines to my life at present; I am a father, I am a teacher, I watch a lot of television and what some people call too many films, and I play Dungeons & Dragons (and other tabletop games), and I'm into politics. The thing is, I have proven many a time in my old blog that I can use films and the discussion thereof to talk about pretty much anything. Anything and everything. And, maybe it is the order that it provided my life for a few years, or maybe it is that I need a regular outlet beyond 140 characters to...

What is it that I want to do?

(I ask that rhetorically, so that I can immediately offer up an answer, but I also ask that of myself here, now, as I write.)

I want to write about film again. I want to write about life again. I want to take my experience with something like 5000 films seen in 40 years of life and use it to comment on... well, anything and everything.

You can never watch too many films. You can never have too many opinions.

Though, for the record, some films are not good. And some opinions are awful.

And, elephant in the room, yes, I know this blog has a white male problem, too. But, unlike Passengers, trying to have its misogynist cake and eat it with a deus ex machina Laurence Fishburne and the sudden ability to not only save a woman's life but also offer her up some interstellar hibernation, and unlike La La Land which, well, actually doesn't really make any effort to solve its white-guy-saves-jazz problem, I tend to be up front about my biases. Like, sure, Leia in that slave outfit was hot (or, to my seven-year-old self, probably just "pretty") but hey, her turning the Sail Barge's cannon on its own deck was pretty hot, too (or, to my seven-year-old self, probably just "cool"). And, Carrie Fisher was always far more than Princess Leia anyway. She was also a brilliant writer and a hilariously honest memoirist and interviewee. She was someone who acknowledged her flaws and moved on past them as best she could. Like we all should.

Says the white cis-gender heterosexual male.

Forgive me.

Rogue One and how Star Wars still has a Rhyming Problem

Six days after (and eight hours after) the film.

(It would also be some 238 days after the last entry in that other blog of mine. This is not that blog. But, like that blog, this is not a place for movies reviews as such.)

The film in question: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.

I'll keep my 'review' simple--I liked the film a lot. There are not a lot of Star Wars films, of course, but this is one of the best of them, for sure. The performances are as good as one might expect from a fantasy franchise like Star Wars, good actors playing just above the level of the material but never quite achieving greatness. The plot is simple enough, and as far as prequels go, Rogue One is obviously the best Star Wars one and a good example of what can really be done with a prequel... But I will get to that below the spoiler tag.

SPOILERS. Really, if you read on, many things will be SPOILED for you.

The ending of this film with all of our major characters dying to get those Death Star plans adds a better sense of gravitas to the proceedings in A New Hope. Nevermind the debate over the use of a CGI Peter Cushing, Rogue One adds a little depth to the character of Tarkin, seemingly taking it upon himself to destroy an Imperial base to protect their new superweapon and squeezing Krennic out of his job. Plus, if you watch A New Hope right after watching the end of this film, I imagine Darth Vader might be even scarier than I remember him being when I was a kid.

So, yeah, I enjoyed the film. But, I also was making a list of complaints in my head as I watched it (the first time) because that is just what I do. I have no particular problem with the use of CGI for Tarkin or Leia. Ethically, I mean. I do wish that Tarkin had played a little less like a video game cut scene, or they had at least kept him turn away from the camera more or something. Leia works better because her appearance is so brief. (And, because, really, Leia in A New Hope did have a bit of a too-made up vibe going.) I liked the bit with Pando Baba and Doctor Evazan. I liked the brief appearance of C-3PO and R2-D2. I liked the non-CGI inclusion of old footage of rebel pilots in the final battle.

But.

And, I am surprised I have not seen more reviews complaining about this but.

I do not think there needed to be or should have been a space battle at the end of this film that was supposed to stand apart from the main series. I mean, sure, George Lucas made a point about the series rhyming but a) Lucas is not calling the shots anymore and b) Rogue One is not part of the series. My high school English teacher made a point about how he did not like Emily Dickinson's poetry because all of her poems--and I never confirmed this to actually be entirely accurate--could be read to the tune of "The Yellow Rose of Texas." If every Star Wars film is going to play to the same tune, I wonder how long it can sustain itself. This after nearly four decades of Star Wars, of course, but we left Star Wars behind in the late 80s, we can do so again. Like the Marvel Cinematic Universe films or the less successfully realized DC version, at a certain point the concept will wear too thin. Rogue One should have been a better injection of... Not originality, exactly, but something to energize the "series" away from all of that rhyming.

Instead, Rogue One rhymes too. A quick rundown:

Jedha stands in for Tatooine at the start of both A New Hope and Return of the Jedi. Our main characters lookout over Jedha City like Obi-Wan and Luke once looked out over Mos Eisley. While Cassian and K-2SO feel like stand-ins for Han and Chewie in the rhyming structure, we head into Jedha City to find another set of Han and Chewie stand-ins in Chirrut and Baze.

(If they had been a little more coded-gay, maybe they would have served a better structural purpose in the story of the film. And, for the record, I loved these two and the way they played off one another and how Chirrut was a replacement for a Jedi rather than a stand-in for one. But, in terms of the structure of this story, they are there simply to pad out the cannon fodder checklist for the third act. If there had been no commandos later, maybe Chirrut and Baze would have had a greater import (if not a greater presence) in the plot.)

They get to Saw Gerrera, a sort of stand-in for Obi-Wan but not physically fit enough to have so much screentime. And, like Jabba the Hutt, ruling his criminal empire from a B'Omarr monk temple on Tatooine, Saw rules over his insurgency (and the film could have really taken more time to explain why Saw's men bombing an Imperial tank was going too far for the Rebel Alliance but Cassian murdering his own informant was not) from a tomb. Rescuing Bodhi from Saw is something like rescuing Han from Jabba but not quite.

Similarly, failing to rescue Galen from Eado is something like rescuing Leia from the Death Star but, again, not quite. The stories rhyme. They echo. They do not quite mirror. Jyn gets two father figures dying right in a row instead of a few years between as it was with Luke. (As it presumably will be with Rey.)

Finally, the assault on Scarif plays just like the assault on Endor, even cutting between three parts of the fight--the space battle, the ground combat, and the efforts inside the citadel. And, judging by footage in early trailers, this was part of the reshoots. No longer does Jyn march toward a TIE Fighter on that high platform. Nor does Krennic march through the water with stormtroopers. Instead--and I do commend this choice--the film attempts to make it more personal by putting Krennic there in the tower with Jyn. This is problematic in a couple ways, though. 1) Jyn does not save herself from Krennic; rather Cassian shows up to save her. Not the best move for a franchise that seems to actively be trying to be progressive. 2) Though Krennic was apparently her father's friend once upon a time, and he was the officer who took her father away, he was neither the one who pulled the trigger on her mother (exactly) or on her father. In fact, Galen Erso died because of rebel fire. The film could have benefitted from changing the way it plays the Empire--make it much more personal or make it much more monolithic. Meaning, give us real interaction between our heroes and Krennic, maybe make them have to actually pose as Imperials to to get the Death Star plans rather than simply dress as them. Or, never take us inside the Imperial ships, never take us inside the Death Star or the citadel on Scarif unless or until our heroes sneak inside it. The real power in the original trilogy is that the conflict is personal. The prequels took that away in order to build up that same very personal struggle to come. The Force Awakens already played one familial hand to make the conflict personal, and I expect the new trilogy will play another. Rogue One, on the other hand, has a very personal hand to play but never quite plays it. Saw dies arbitrarily. He does not protect Jyn. He is not even that important in helping out the fight she is about to join. Bodhi could just as easily have been picked up by Cassian and the rest of the plot would have worked the same. Galen dies not by the quite direct hand, or orders, of Krennic but by passing rebel fire unintended for him. The film tries to amp up... something in Jyn's attack on Cassian in the shuttle afterward, and her line, "You can't talk your way out of this" lands well, but Cassian's response, "I don't have to" is so on-the-nose as to weaken the delve into darkness this film wants to be. He refused to kill one guy, so nevermind that we saw him murder a guy who was on his side earlier, Cassian is a great guy.

(To be fair, refusing to kill someone is more than Han got after murdering Greedo.)

Rogue One wants to be a darker, grittier war film, but it also insists on being a fun Star Wars romp. Imagine if this were more about the violent insurgency or about spies deep undercover in Imperial territory, or an entire film like that ground combat in act three (i.e. an actual war film). I mean, taking one step away from the feel of the franchise is great, laudable, but why not two? Why not three? At this rate, the Young Han Solo film can never be a serious exploration of him being a scoundrel, a portrait of a scruffy-looking gambler and smuggler. It can only be the story of how he defected from being an Imperial and saved Chewbacca from slavery, established backstory with room for Han to team up with his own Jedi stand-in, his own Han and Chewie stand-ins, a droid nearby for comic relief.

Star Wars, as a brand, is increasingly self-limiting. If they really want to make standalone films, they should probably take more risks, bigger risks than casting a female lead and actors that are not all white.