review

When Iron Man and Avengers came out, I wasn’t a comic book person. I liked Batman when Dawn of Justice came out, but that movie was super bad. This is the first movie in a long time that I’m “meant to” love. Stakes are high! And… they were fulfilled! I liked it a lot!

1. Plenty of reviews praise the film’s refusal to take itself too seriously, keeping its premise light while and its character arcs clean. Even reviewers completely unaffiliated with D&D liked it, which makes me really happy!
2. As someone very affiliated with D&D (hobbily, not professionally), that this movie honored the spirit of the game completely floored me. In sort of vapid ways — monsters we recognize, magic spells we recognize, situations we recognize — but in profound ways, too. If Honor Among Thieves has a core theme, it’s that failure is a part of progress. If it has a core loop, it’s the heroes formulating a ludicrous plan, that plan failing ludicrously, and the heroes riding that failure upward. Maybe, eventually, to success. This is the heart of D&D. Honor Among Thieves’ plans are more contrived and better produced, but their goofiness is instantly recognizable.
3. Corrollary to this, I love the idea that this movie could make new players into better Dungeon Masters. Failure moves the story forward rather than stalling it. Each action/reaction puts the characters in a new situation with new decisions to make. Now, this isn’t solely the claim of TTRPGs: Indiana Jones, really any great adventure story, does the same. But it’s cool to see an honest-to-goodness D&D adventuring party go through an honest-to-goodness adventure.
4. I absolutely did not show up to see a rules-accurate rendition. From what I’ve seen, no one else did either. Knowing the D&D community, that’s really refreshing! Something I thought was interesting, though, is that druids can’t turn into owlbears or wild shape more than twice at a time. The action economy makes one-versus-many brawls basically fruitless. Attunement is automatic. Spells, in general, don’t work that way. That the movie ignores these rules is fine — good, even — but it begs the question: if these rules are unintuitive, un-cinematic… then why are they written that way? I’ll probably introduce some house rules inspried by the movie.
5. The writing’s actually funny?? And like… kind of restrained? Characters recall previously spoken dialogue without needing a ghostly voice to echo it in their subconscious? That alone knocked me over.
6. I know I always save this bullet for last, but yay Chris Pine yay Sophia Lillis yay Justice Smith. Whatever your mileage on Hugh Grant, he’s very good at playing a sleazeball.
7. Oh, one last bullet actually. The names are so silly, in the legendary lineage of high fantasy silliness. I don’t know that I remembered even half of the cast. I know I didn’t know Chris Pines’ character’s — which is Edgin, by the way. Love “Forge” for a conman, though.

I watched this movie over two days and two monitors, so it’s not my most lucid or well-attended viewing experience. Good movie though!

1. You know, I say “good movie,” but not for someone who’s put off by some truly despicable language. Just a blanket content warning here.
2. I’ve never watched a movie exactly like this, in which narration from the book the movie’s adapted from intercedes between acts. Probably I would mind, except that the writing was rock solid. A great advertisement for said book. My favorite line: “He read auguries in the snarled intestines of chickens, or the blow of cat hair released to the wind. And the omens promised bad luck, which moated and dungeoned him.”
3. Speaking of lucidity, I wasn’t generally all there in 2007 on account of being like eight years old. The cast of this movie really surprised me! I don’t know if this was the it-crowd of 2000s mid-budget things, but it was a strong showing. I actually like Brad Pitt quite a lot, plus Sam Rockwell and Garret Dillahunt (who was very busy that year). Casey Affleck was a highlight, particularly as the character of Bob Ford. Paul Schneider was (intentionally?) creepy. Plus the Zooey Deschanel jump scare at the end rocked me, I had to triple check that it was actually her.
4. It lasted like 30 minutes too long. I mean, I suppose the film was bound by the real events it represented, but I think the story could’ve been a little less literal. It did such a good job of making me hate Bob Ford that I felt cheated when they tried to let him win me back.

One thing I would recommend about a daily blog: you get a much better sense of your creative life. I’ve sort of been running myself ragged these last couple of weeks, which I noticed because I haven’t added to my collection since the February 24. That means I’ve still been producing writing, but haven’t fed myself in any meaningful way, or doing the kinds of things that keep me grounded in reality. Which usually happens when I write for the future rather than for me right now.

Anyway, I’ve still found plenty of time for fun. Here’s what I’ve enjoyed this week:

1. There Will Be Blood. Chronologically I think it’s the first thing I watched this week, and I’ve been meaning to for a while. As for how much I enjoyed it… well I certainly respect and appreciate the movie a lot, but I found it extremely boring. Very high highs (“I drink your milkshake” and “I’m going to cut your throat”), but surprisingly little writing. I almost bailed waiting for the first line of dialogue. Stuck with it, enjoyed it, enjoy that it’s very much a slow descent. Were I a film scholar rather than primarily a writer, I think I’d be smitten. Daniel Day-Lewis was great, of course. Don’t think I’ll write more about it, though, which is why I’m writing about it here. (Oh, only one more thought — it’s a great story about gender!)
2. Psycho, in preparation for my upcoming Supernormal post. Found it a really interesting watch, and so I expect I’ll definitely write more soon.
3. Psych (no relation). Emma started watching it appropos of nothing, which tickled me to no end, because I used to watch ever episode of Psych many, many times over. Still holds up. Love a good detective thing.
4. Poker Face. Speaking of good detective things, we watched the first two episodes and I’m loving it so far! I went in expecting it to be nothing like Knives Out, which was the correct expectation. What struck me most so far is how it reflects waned attitudes towards the police, whereas most whodunnits are very cozy with police.
5. Geek Out, a very lightweight dorky trivia game. My favorite kind of party game is just good conversation. I also love watching people be good at things. Geek Out is fun because it switches between “who can name the most x” and “how many x can this one person name.”
6. Idk if it’s kitschy to mention my own stuff, but I had a lot of fun writing my blog post on whether movies will become games.
7. Learned my favorite coffee shop has decaf espresso, so I’ve enjoyed plenty of long(ish) walks with mochas.
8. Cooking: lemon chicken orzo, crab fried rice, and I messed around with North African flavor profiles for the first time to great effect.

I’m not usually this on top of trendy movies, and for that matter I don’t know if Cocaine Bear is actually trendy. Judging by the turnout at the theater (including one guy who showed up in a bear costume) and the memability of the movie’s premise, I’ll assume that it’s at least known about. No spoilers ahead.

1. At ~$30 million, Cocaine Bear sits in the mid-budget category — just above Everything Everywhere All at Once and just below Knives Out. There’s a really persuasive argument by REKRAP (and elsewhere) that the demise of mid-budget cinema is bad for movies as a whole. Mid-budget movies can’t afford top-of-the-line spectacle, but good ones make up for it by getting very creative with the resources at their disposal. $30 million is still a ton of movie. We’re not talking about short films here. But in filmmaking, it’s at the sweet spot of affording great talent (but not idols) and creating great effects (without an overwhelm of CGI). Some examples without adjusting for inflation: No Country for Old Men, Blade Runner, Hero.
2. It’s a lot of fun. Like, you’d have to be Grape Nuts level boring to make this movie and make it boring. Cocaine Bear does a lot of “goofy suffering” humor, and it’s not for squeamish moviegoers. I probably would have switched it off if I was watching it at home. But my friends and I ate a bunch of barbecue, then saw it in theaters with popcorn and beer. Made for a solid night.
3. What Cocaine Bear doesn’t do as well, in my opinion, is capture the magic of goofy horror movies. Slashers — and not to sound like a broken record with my No Country take, but I think Cocaine Bear is uncontroversially a slasher, or at least a splatter thing — succeed when they marry the over-the-top and the self-serious. Scream works as parody because of the year it came out (at the end of the Golden Age of slashers), but also because it’s just good horror. Plus it does something new by adding a whodunnit element. I can’t explain exactly what I mean, but Cocaine Bear feels like a two hour punchline. It’s a fun watch, but I’m not sure it has many opinions about what a horror movie should be.
4. One stance the movie does take, which is very refreshing, is that it’s not fun to gut characters in the middle of their plotlines. For the kind of movie it is, it uses death pretty judiciously. Ditto, the bear is treated more like an animal than like Jason Voorhees, which I love.

Quick aside, but there’s a language for animals in movies that I think is developing, to the benefit of cinema as a whole. I’m thinking of The Banshees of Inishiren, which prominently features a dog, but finds many ways to tell you that the dog will be okay. That said, if you’re considering watching the movie and are sensitive to animal plotlines, still check Does the Dog Die.

Hero is the first wuxia movie I’ve watched, though I definitely am going to watch more. I’m not especially canny in Chinese history and culture, and I’ll read lots more if I decide to write anything at length about the genre (which I definitely will). Still, here’s my impressions:

1. Holy crap, what a pretty movie! The fight between Snow and Moon was especially gorgeous, as the leaves changed from yellow to bloodred over the course of the fight. Every action scene prioritized spectacle, which I like, especiallly since the spectacle in question was grace and motion rather than wanton gore. (Not that gore can’t also be fun, but I don’t think that would have flown in this particular movie.)
2. Not knowing how a Chinese audience would approach this movie, I pretty much assumed that the king would be a vicious monster whose death could be portrayed as ultimately good. Only about halfway through did I realize that this wasn’t a story about facing off against Sauron, but one about facing off with George Washington.
3. The use of color in the Rashomon-inspired narrative “versions” tickled my brain. There’s the red version of the story, the blue version, the white version, the green version. How these blended with the natural landscapes was super chef’s kiss.
4. My biggest takeaway: nothing in this movie tries to be realistic. There’s a whole swordfight that takes place across the surface of a lake. “Wire fu” describes the use of ceiling wires to let actors fly across the battlefield — and I am taking a leap of faith it’s is a harmless portmanteau and not a harmful foreignism, pls let me know if I’m wrong. In any case, people perform completely unapproachable feats. What struck me was the lack of explanation needed beyond “they’re very good at martial arts.” Qinggong and neili are the terms of art I’m seeing used to describe this assumption that, if an action hero trains long enough, they can basically fly around and slash gazillions of arrows out of the sky. Western tastes also include the unrealistic, but usually it’s in the form of a) technology (the “cheerfully amoral celebration of Western military hardware“) and b) extreme pain tolerance. Genius fills the role that qi fills in a wuxia flick. Though cowboy movies display some pretty remarkable aim, too.
5. “A warrior’s ultimate act is to lay down his sword.” Great line.

Unlike the movies I’ve talked about in the past, I’ve seen Blade Runner before. Actually, I studied it pretty extensively for a college essay.

But a) it’s been a while and b) this time I enjoyed what I’d consider the ideal Blade Runner viewing experience, which is to say that I had it on in the backround while attending to other things.

1. I’m actually not kidding. Someone described Blade Runner as the ultimate “vibe movie,” and I agree. The movie rewards careful viewing by showing its age. Roger Ebert described The Searchers as a film within a film: a stern, moving character study framed around a frivolous damsel-in-distress thing. I sort of feel the same way about Blade Runner. And just to be really clear what I mean, Deckard forcing himself on Rachel wigs me out. How you want to interpret that scene depends a lot how much credit you give the emotional complexity of the movie. And anyway, I won’t pretend to be the critic you need to hear about all this from. (Here’s a more thorough read on the topic, if you’re interested. And another.) This is all to say, Blade Runner doesn’t always align with modern sensibilities. Its aesthetic appeal, though, is flawless. Just glancing at the screen now and again, there’s hardly a shot that doesn’t evoke the feeling of the movie as a whole.
2. One scene I did fully steep in: the “tears in rain” monologue, obviously. On the screen, it scans perfectly. But it’s also fractal, it rewards you the deeper you look into it. It has its own Wikipedia page, this monologue. Writer David Peoples — and I think this is true of Ridley Scott as well — had some trouble killing his darlings. The original monologue waxed Victorian. “I’ve been Offworld and back… frontiers!” “I’ve seen it, felt it…!” Rutger Hauer called it “opera talk.” So, he went rogue. His rewrite brought the film crew to tears.
3. For this and for every other reason, Rutger Hauer is the best part of this movie. He does a sort of… gazelle run thing during the chase scene at the movie’s climax? Rules.
4. Oh, except the dove thing is silly.
5. Gaff is such a weirdo! Deckard does up his boots one lace at a time, he grumbles, he tries to get out of the rain. Gaff is like pop punk Willy Wonka. If you told me Jared Leto had only seen one movie, I’d guess Blade Runner, and I’d guess he only saw the parts where Gaff was on the screen. (“It’s too bad she won’t live. But then again who does?” To his credit, that’s actually a raw line.)