Ran

Last month, I watched William Friedkin's Sorcerer for the first time, and thought it was pretty incredible. By some happenstance, an acquaintance mentioned he was going to rewatch To Live and Die in L.A., a 1985 neo-noir from Friedkin that a lot of people say was influenced aesthetically by Miami Vice. Regardless, I decided to check it out as well, never having seen it before... and man, it's actually pretty incredible. The script is a little so-so on the dialog level, but the sheer cynicism of it, especially in the final minutes, is breathtaking. Also, a phenomenal car chase sequence, which I had to look up and has apparently been listed on a lot of "best car chase" lists over the years alongside Friedkin's own The French Connection. William Petersen plays a Secret Service agent by the name of Richard Chance, an amoral man with a deathwish who'll do anything to get his target, including stepping on the wrong side of the law. He's after Rick Masters, played by Willem Dafoe in one of his biggest roles to date, a con turned noteworthy artist... who also dabbles in counterfeiting US currency. There's lots of violence, there's sex, there's unlike partnerships, moral dilemmas, and more. Stylish as hell, too, of course. I'm not sure if Miami Vice was really an influence or if it was just the mid-80s and Friedkin was adapting to the styles and forms. If you have not seen it, do not read the spoilers:

What do users care about the ownership of the company? What special love are they supposed to have for ByteDance? I would suggest they have none. I would also suggest that the idea that the algorithm weights towards CCP talking points (as Yglesias anecdotally shows when he searched "Ugyhur") is concerning. Now, if the idea is that rather than sell TikTok will simply leave the US market... well, I think Yglesias is right, people will bitch and then they'll move on to the TikTok-alikes from Meta or whoever. Moreover, I would say that the refusal to divest and choice to leave the US market kind of proves the point that China sees a big propaganda upside on Chinese ownership of the company and would rather leave the market than let go of its control. And to be clear, if they leave the US market rather than sell, the EU is almost certainly going to make similar demands, and presumably ByteDance will then leave the EU market as well. The US would not allow Meta to become majoirty-owned by China or Russia. It wouldn't allow X to be.

Yeah, they're not trying to shut down TikTok, they're just trying to mandate that it no longer be owned by a Chinese company. I liked Matthew Yglesias's analogy in a recent post at Slow Boring: Also, worth noting that TikTok is banned in China. So they can't say they're not going to let it out of Chinese hands because then the US will use it to aim propaganda at and gather data on Chinese users.

Baffling. Anyone else?

You shouldn't have her leaping off of great heights or scaling walls, repeatedly doing things that have sharp stops and turns, sure, but long walks at her own pace are absolutely fine. We've taken to running Lancelot (the most energetic boxer we've ever ownedf) on a treadmill for half an hour at a steady pace pretty much daily on top of walks, training, his play with Winter, etc., and it really helps at times to take the edge off. Training for obedience and doing exercises as well that make her use her brain can also be very tiring for a dog -- scent work especially, making her really use her nose. It's hard to do every day, for sure, but it might be worth looking into some of those dog puzzles that offer treats and such, something for her to work on, as a way of passively getting her some added stimulation. She will no doubt have a great desire to chew on things still . We recently bought some Nylabone toys and Lancelot, who has a very strong drive to chew on stuff, will often settle for that until he's tired of it, and he's less destructive than he was (have some rather chewed up plastic storage boxes from earlier on). And while crating is not something I've ever done and don't think is necessary... blocking the dog off into a less sensitive part of the house might be good. Do you have any sense of what the other dogs are doing when she decides to do this? Is she trying to play with them and when they refuse she turns to making her own fun? Or is she perhaps acting out in part out of anxiety? Does she show much distress when you leave, as compared to the other dogs?

I don't think he's volunteering for that job again any time soon.

It starts well, has some good skewerings of the publishing world throughout, but it also leans a lot on family drama which is well-written but nothing you haven't seen before. It's elevated by the performances. ETA: Also, last night Netflix released To Kill a Tiger, one of the Oscar-nominated documentaries. It covers the events following the gang-rape of a 13-year-old girl in a rural rice farming community in Jharkhand, a state in eastern India. Her father and mother determine to take it to the police, with the support of a women's organization named the Srijan Foundation that advocates the law being used to deal with these cases. The problem is that in these rural communities, the usual preference is to handle it internally, and of course the natural suggestion is that the girl is then married to one of her rapists. The family's refusal leads to incredible pressure, and it highlights the fact that their life is lived communally, and being shut out of the social life of the village also means losing out on the communal aid, which can make things incredibly difficult. We follow the case all the way to a conclusion, and I have to admire the young girl for her bravery (she personally reviewed the documentary and agreed to let them release it) and that of her family. The coda at the end shows that their determination seems to have had an effect in their native state, as more women and girls became willing to come forward cases to the courts.

Ah, so they have the rumpnissar! Smart to leave them right to the end. Linda said there'd be riots in the streets if they left them out of this. Some of this was filmed like 10 minutes away at Bohus Fortress.

Still haven't gotten to the second half of Sandman, myself. I think I felt some trepidation about how The Doll's House was going to be adapted, but we'll get around to it eventually.

Oppenheimer has very well secured its place as one of the greatest biopics ever made, and will be remembered as such. I think Zone of Interest is another A+ film that will stand the test of time. Barbie is not going to be soon forgotten, either, and will be one of those films that mothers will be showing to their daughters years down the line. I'd say Poor Things will be remembered as Yorgos Lanthimos's best film (unless and until he ends up making something better, I suppose). Those are the four unequivocal A films for me. Past Lives I've a special place for, but it's a first for Song and I suspect she'll be making even better movies down the road. ETA: Now, to put it another way, which of these films will eventually end up in the Sight and Sound 250 greatest films? Zone of Interest seems a given to me and I'll be shocked if it's not there a decade from now. Oppenheimer, maybe, but it may take a couple of decades of distance. Ditto Poor Things, and that depending on Lanthimos's further career. But I suppose I can't imagine Barbie or Past Lives will.

I'm a little sad that we haven't glimpsed a Me 262 so far. This show definitely has the same problem of The Pacific, in that the story is so split-up, so it's not just following one group of guys through the whole of the war. But it's very competently done, and some of the air battle sequences have been pretty bracing.

I assumed it was some sort of Norman French name, but no, it's rooted in Old English but perhaps with Norman French orthography. maybe in how it ended up trying to fit the original Anglo-Saxon, Ceolmundleah, which meant "Ceolmund's clearing", Ceolmund being a personal name. Also, discovered that Cholmondeley is pronunced... as Chumley? Those always fascinate me.

Finished Kore-Eda's film Monster. Spectacular film, and part way through I was just amazed at how good Sakura Ando is (she was spectacular in Kore-Eda's Shoplifters) was and then as the story shifted perspective (there is a Rashomon-like aspect to the film, in which we gain new understanding and insights to the same events by revisiting them within different contexts, although it's not like Rashomon where the shift in context directly relates to how someone describe things) she fades into the background and I lamented it... except then it got better and better as it went. The story starts in a very basic way, a single mother (Ando) has a young 5th-grader son who she fears is being bullied and abused by a teacher at the school. She enters a Kafkaesque nightmare of conflict-avoidant school bureaucracy, really powerfully portrayed on Ando's part, and things escalate until the teacher is fired.... And then we go back, and we see some of the real story, as understood by the teacher. Except... then we see more of the real story, and we realize that not everything was as it seems. In the end, the film hinges on how well Kore-eda directs this thing, and in particular his direction of the young boys, the son played by Soya Kurokawa and another boy in his class whose relation to Kurokawa's character is ambiguous at first, played by Hinata Hiiragi. Also, should note this was the final film in which Ryuichi Sakamoto contributed original score. He was too ill to do a full score, but he provided two original piano pieces which are quite lovely, as well as some other work he had done previously. The film is dedicated to him, as he died before its release. ETA: Just saw that Kore-eda won Best Director at the 17th Asian Film Awards for his work on this film, following his win last year for Broker (which I really want to see).

I think Oppenheimer is the best directed and edited film of the year, a lean, tight 3 hours that never outstays it's welcome (which is an amazing feat in and of itself), and really have no problem considering it the best film of the year when looked together as a whole, across all the aspects of things that went into making it. So these results don't bug me whatsoever, personally.

Who won last year, I wonder? Nothing Christ-like about it. To win, you need to carry your movie, and when you are in less than a third of a film, much of it as a passive figure, you've got a big obstacle to arguing that you are carrying the movie. Who were the undisputed leads of these films: Black Swan? The Iron Lady? Blue Jasmine? Still Alice? Three Billboards? Judy? Nomadland? The Eyes of Tammy Faye? Everything Everywhere All At Once? Poor Things? The women, often the titular characters, were the leads. Silver Linings Playbook, Jennifer Lawrence was undoubtedly equal to Bradley Cooper -- but was Gladstone equal to DiCaprio? Nope. And she was barely ahead of De Niro in screentime! Above and beyond that, as you allude, Scorsese is repeatedly overlooked -- the Academy takes him for granted. Being the best actress in a Scorsese film is basically already entering with a strong handicap, not counting everything else against you. And then there's the argument from some that there was some category fraud, that she should have gone for Supporting Actress instead... though frankly Da'vine Joy Randolph simply had a meatier role and a better performance, so I wouldn't have expected Gladstone to win there, either.

BEELLLLAAAA!!! *rips out tuft of hair*

Yeah. We proposed at some point for TWoIaF a section on the organization of the crown and royal household, but as I recall George didn't think anyone would find it interesting. I mean, he wasn't wrong, stuff that hints as stories and narratives are far more interesting, but... there would be some people who would be interested!

Yep, he's pretty talented. His work on the Attila docu-drama he did blew me away when I first came across it, and I wrote a whole long essay about how D&D should hire him to oversee VFX. We would have had the Battle of the Green Fork if they had. But he went on to directing, which was of course much better, and deserved. And Monsters is pretty damned good when you hear him talk about how it was all pretty much improvised with just loose story beats planned out that Scoot McNairy and Whitney Able then fleshed out. The awesome thing about The Creator is that a number of VFX artists who worked on it have remarked on Reddit and elsewhere that it was one of the best gigs they ever had, that the VFX supervisor (Jay Cooper) and Edwards were in complete accord and knew where to focus energy and budget, and that they never felt like they were overworked or forced to work more hours than they wanted. Directors who come out of the VFX world just have a huge leg up. I know the Godzilla Minus One director acted as VFX supervisor as well, which was one way they really made things more efficient... but you know that 30 person team worked 80, 90, 100 hours a week at points to get it done. Very curious to see Edwards' Jurassic World film. Worried a bit that it appears to have a locked-in release date, so he's got a deadline breathing down his neck, but if anyone can swing it, he can, especially working from a David Koepp script (scripting is his downfall).

Oh, as to Best Visual Effects, hats off to the Godzilla Minus One team managing what they did, but I still think The Creator is a much better exemplar of how Western studios can make visually-impressive films on more limited budgets. A big part of the reason Godzilla-1 managed to do what it did on a $15 million budget is the fact that the workers are paid much less on average (per Glass Door, the average VFX animator earns $82,600 in the US... and just $23,700 in Japan) while working more hours. I imagine some VFX artists out there are probably seeing the Godzilla win rather sourly, showing that as far as the industry is concerned the already-cheap-for-its-amazing-visuals The Creator was still "too expensive" because Western VFX artists expect too much money.

Sir Ben Kingsley is 80 and did perfectly well. Pacino did the same thing at the Game Awards in 2022, he just doesn't rehearse and doesn't care, and age has made it worse.

Have to say I am very pleased I missed on Best Animated, as The Boy and the Heron was my preferred choice. I liked American Fiction well enough as a film, especially the performances, but I felt it got kind of muddled after the first half hour. Really pleased for Stone, and looking at clips she seemed quite shocked. But this (and the Boy and the Heron win, plus Poor Things in Makeup) tells me that people need to bump up the weight of the international section of the Academy when prognosticating.

Watched After Yang, a 2021 SF drama starring Colin Farrell. It's a sort of Black Mirrorish film, using its SFnal premise/setting (a utopic-seeming future after the end of a 60 year war with China, in which androids are used to act as siblings for newly-adopted children from China who can then teach them something of their Chinese culture and heritage) to tell a quiet story about memory, loss, and death. Yang is the titular android, played by Justin H. Min, and his sudden malfunction one day leads to his family wrestling with what to do to fix him, which ultimately leads to discoveries about the secrets he had and about his past which reflected on those secrets. It was a pleasant, thoughtful film, with some really lovely production design imagining this post-war future where peace seems to have led to adopting Asian fashions, architectural styles, and cuisine. The theme for the film was composed by the late Ryuichi Sakamoto, who won the best score Academy Award for The Last Emperor... and who coincidentally scored a Black Mirror episode (or maybe not coincidentally?). His last score was for Kore-eda's Monster which, funnily enough, I just started watching today. Then I watched Charlie Kaufman's post-modern masterpiece, Synecdoche, New York, starring the late, great Philip Seymour Hoffman. Never seen the film before, but it's a very Kaufman film, reminding me of his later films Anomalisa and I'm Thinking of Ending Things. Hoffman plays Caden Cotard, a theater director in a somewhat estranged marriage who ends getting a MacArthur Fellowship to create a great play... which ends up becoming the play-within-the-play, blurring reality as he stages, essentially, a grand examination of his life, and then the life of everyone he had contact with, until it's this all-consuming behemoth with an enormous cast playing all these people he knows (including, ultimately, actors playing himself, and actors playing actors playing himself). Hits all the Kaufman themes. Hoffman's performance is exceptional. Then for a change of pace, I watched Road House, which I haven't seen in a couple of decades. Man, what a crazy film. Apparently, Keith David had way more to do in the film, but the first cut was 3.5 hours long (per the director, Rowdy Herrington) and David's bits were among those cut. It's a luridly, pure 80's film, and it's hard in some ways to really quantify why it's so mesmerizing. So, as usual, I'll link to Sean T. Collins' 365 short essays (one for every day of the year) on the film. Of course, Jake Gyllenhaal will play the part of Dalton in Doug Liman's remake of the film, with Connor McGregor, no less, playing the part of the bad guy's toughest hombre. Reviews are mixed, I've seen, and I suspect it will on the one hand make serious improvements on the fight choreography and cinematography of the original, but will lose some of the ineffable charm and sheer outrageousness of the original.

Rather baffled by obvious science fiction novels (Catspaw, Shards of Honor / Cordelia's Honor) on a list allegedly about fantasy novels. Absolutely yes to Tanith Lee and Ellen Kushner, Zelazny and McKillip. Moorcock obviously (but is Elric really "forgotten"? Well, maybe these days). McCaffrey as "forgotten" too? Well, again, maybe I suppose. And yes, technically that's a science fiction setting, but it's not really clear in the first novel and hews close enough to fantasy so I'll allow it. De Lint, sure, important figure. Judith Tarr's The Hound and the Falcon or Avaryan Rising would be one I'd slot in there. Robin McKinley's The Blue Sword and The Hero and the Crown. Or as recently discussed, Lloyd Alexander's Prydain series starting with The Book of Three. Alan Garner's The Owl Service and its ending still haunts me today. Jack Vance... is he forgotten? I'll wager most readers under 30 don't know who he is, so The Dying Earth or Lyonesse. And if we want something that would make an amazing adaptation... John M. Ford's The Dragon Waiting would be fantastic. If he had been a British author, it would have been adapted in some form in the UK long ago, but alas, he was American.

Just some of the most absurd nonsense. Variety should feel ashamed of itself for basically acting as stenographer for this guy and his lawyers.

Kind of now makes me wonder which ending @Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II got...