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Film: Emilia Perez

Imagine if Michael Mann directed a musical with a Mrs. Doubtfire plotline but told through the POV of a female Michael Clayton. It makes zero sense. Does it work? Not entirely, if you take these things seriously. But 10-12 great scenes and set pieces. Gotta be one of the most absurd ideas for recent films, which is exactly why it should be watched and appreciated. The film has nothing to do with transgenderism, drugs, or Mexico, the superficial subjects. The true subject of the film are the ironies and absurdities of our current world which is why all the right people will hate it.

CA Democrats

Newsom busy doing the only thing he knows - banning all the things. This guy is trying to turn CA into the EU. If it weren't for inertia and bribery, we'd be in real trouble.

Not that I'm in favor of ultra-processed foods but this shows how Democrats literally can't run anything. Anyone know about school lunch? The easiest way for government to get healthy eating to have a real impact - but what happens? Democrats offer school lunch to the entire state. For like $2.50 per meal. Guess what the kids get for $2.50 a meal? Ultra-processed shit. What happens? Unhealthy eating and a whole lot of waste because even kids aren't stupid when it comes to crummy good. And guess what else? California now in an 80 bil dollar budget deficit. So what are they cutting? K-12 school budgets. Everywhere. 

So let me get this all straight - Newsom expands shitty school lunch causing budget deficits and an incredible amount of waste and ultra-processed shit to go into the bellies of our children. Now he needs to cut education stuff like teachers and staff. Then he bans ultra-processed foods. Huh? What a clueless rube.

Adaptation Syllabi

The Insider

Dogman

Bug 

Fat City

Brokeback Mountain

The Wild Robot

With excerpts from Game of Thrones, House of the Dragon, and 21 Jump Street

General Theme: Young men in crisis (except in the case of the Insider - middle aged men)

Logging

Film: Road House remake

Loved the take. Great setting. Gyllenhaal in top form. A number of terrific scenes, especially towards the beginning of the film. Generally great side casting all around. Billy Magnussen one of my favorite random actors. Connor McGregor was absolutely ridiculous and terrible, but in a way that makes sense for the film. I'm a fan of the way they redid this movie. Kept key elements from the first film, but really went on a riff. Terrible how Amazon treated the film. Really coming around to the view that the streamers are enemies to cinema. They are an inhuman machine meant to devour anything that gets in the way of churning algorithmic profit. Does anyone believe differently? Do the people who work at these places like what they're doing? I imagine all of them are just counting the paychecks until their balances reach a point where they can be set for life.  

Who is happy with this new arrangement of things?

I just checked rotten tomatoes. 52% audience. How is this possible? You can't tell me Deadpool vs. Wolverine is better than this film. Similar audiences. But Deadpool is 94%. Have people lost their minds?

The 1000 Foot View

Of our current politics...feels fairly obvious...there's a feeling the status quo isn't working for most Americans. Why? Not sure...but you can see this in many measures - the so called deaths of despair, the rising anxiety in teens, the lower birthrates, the lowering of life expectancy, job security/under employment, etc.

The Democrats are the party of the status quo. Their MO - don't believe your lying eyes. Things are actually GREAAAT!

The Republicans are the party of change. Their MO - everything sucks and we need to throw new ideas against the wall to get America working again.

And you wonder why one holds the political power.

Thinking...

Movies will not survive as digital creations - they will be replaced by entirely new dramatic forms. Why should they? They are not meant to be watched on a computer. I'd rather read twitter than watch a movie on my computer. But I'd never go to a theater to read twitter.

Long But Good

A devastating critique of Netflix. This sums it all up:

Thierry Frémaux, head of the Cannes Film Festival and a vocal critic of streamers, understood this well when he presented the dilemma at a Cannes press conference in 2021. “What directors have been discovered by [streaming] platforms?” he asked. It wasn’t a rhetorical question. Frémaux began calling on journalists to name an auteur whose career had been launched by a streamer. By this point, Netflix had released more than seven hundred films in the US alone, with hundreds of directors attached. Yet as the Guardian later reported of the scene, “nobody could name any at all, in fact.”

Logging

Film: Midnight Cowboy

A film that captures the era moreso than a timeless classic. Maybe I'm just a yuppie kid of the 80s but I definitely had the thought - if these guys just got jobs they'd solve a lot of their problems. 

Book: Fat City

There are a number of wonderful paragraphs that at some point I'll cut and paste to recall. Why I do I like stories about losers so much?

Film: Reservoir Dogs

The first half of the film is more or less perfect. The way the story unfolds, each new character and situation complicating and building upon the last. The flashback stuff is the least exciting, but understandable and needed given the conceit of the story. Is Tim Roth overacting? I read an interview with Leonard Gardner who commented about the film version of his novel. He discussed Susan Tyrrell, the actress who played Oma overacting or perhaps "playing it too big" for him when he was on set. Huston agreed and Gardner spoke to her about it. She said something along the lines of - that's who I am - I play it big. And ignored his notes. And now, he rewatches the film and understands and loves her performance. How much of life is like this?