Oooh, I look forward to watching it! I think I’ve just got Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness to go before I get to it, after…
I watched Spider-Man: No Way Home at the weekend, which I found very enjoyable. It was probably the only way they could do a (spoiler for the villain(s)) Sinister Six-style storyline any time soon. It certainly sits near the top of my MCU rankings.
Out of the blue last night, I watched Barbarian based on the recommendation from Red Letter Media and wanted to watch it before I watched their review. It was one of those movies where I just started watching it while my wife was beside me playing on her iPad and she soon got really into it.* I enjoyed it and appreciated the review/critique/analysis the RLM guys gave about it.
(* The same thing happened with Cabinet of Curiosities, Kevin Can F–k Himself, and a few other streaming shows.)
Watched Mitchells vs. the Machines at last (it took a long time to convince the family after hearing really good reviews) and loved it. The girls really liked it too, specially the music and general goofiness of it.
I loved Mitchells vs the Machines, although I admit a rare thing: I had to watch it twice to “get” it. The first watch was too… surface? The second watch I could settle in and kind of let it wash over me. It was solid.
Just finished watching Enola Holmes 2, and I admit to loving it aside from a few niggling complaints. Minor, though. And Cavill… what can you say about Cavill. Man is a genius. Thoroughly enjoyed. Hope they make more!
There is a rumor on imdb about a remake about a popular 80s movie which they never made any sequels of (that I would watch) with Cavill possibly cast as the lead. Just saying. I would fully endorse that remake. Love the original. But rumors are just that.
Fortunately the only bit worth watching is on youtube.
Just saw some very short test footage I had no idea existed. It looks very cabinet of curiosities like MoM Test footage
The television series was pretty good. Had it’s hits and misses, and the last season was crap, but overall worth a watch.
Watched cult indie time-travel film Primer (2004).
That’s one complicated plot, and I’ll happily admit that I’m saying this because afterwards I chose to look online so that someone else could unravel it all for me.
I find the biggest problem with films which are incredibly hard to grok on first-viewing is that I often have no desire to watch them again. Primer is very very clever, but it’s a (very) low-budget 16mm film with below-average (for entirely fair reasons) film-making and performances; and even though it’s short, I simply didn’t want to re-watch it (most likely repeatedly) to try to figure it out. I probably should have at least re-watched it once from where the main plot kicks in, but… oh well. Tenet was another, rather different example – that one from an experienced director with all the film-making chops in the world, and a huge budget to work with, but I had even less desire to sit through that one a second time.
Give me a David Lynch film any day – it might be just as baffling to me on the first viewing, but the critical difference is that he makes me want to see the film again…
I do like that Primer exists; I just wish they could go back and do it all again, but better.
@Lordof1 and I have talked about this at greater length on Ribbon of Memes, but we ended up feeling that e.g. Mulholland Drive didn’t really have any bones under all the fancy presentation, whereas Primer does offer genuine answers - even if the answers are “causality has broken down and the universe is irretrievably in trouble”.
I think time travel movies (and books) are a bit like deduction games. The whole point of watching them (I joke, I joke) is to guess the story before it is told. Obviously, good movies will give you enough clues to do that.
When we watch such movies (also crime movies) we are having fun guessing and it would probably annoy other people. But I have had such good guesses for some story twists and turns that we just have to keep it going. Like with Paint the Roses you need to deduce why the writer/director put that scene just so—why can‘t you see the face of that person in that scene? Here is one of my guesses for Tenet: Well because you would recognize it. So it is someone you know. How many characters are there that could be in that place? Ah, the trope says it is probably the other person in the scene—the protagonist—that would make it cool because apparently now they have switched sides… (I was right).
If you’re talking about being able to have any certainty that an interpretation is the correct one, then I agree to a significant extent. I think the basic story of Mulholland Drive can be established, but many of the details seem wide-open to interpretation, and I think Lynch likes it that way. If he himself didn’t have specific story-based reasons for some of the weirdness, I wouldn’t be especially surprised; but even if he did explain exactly what each thing was intended to represent, I can’t imagine thinking “Oh, of course!”. But that also means those things can mean what I want them to mean, and I’m ok with that idea. I might find it frustrating if I needed to know for certain what everything meant, but I seem to have made peace with that not happening – and it keeps things interesting on repeat viewings as well, which is relevant.
I think both approaches are completely fine, though – I just know that my own preferences are leaning more in one direction than the other.
When I’m reading mysteries I call this “solving the puzzle by non-diegetic means”, i.e. something that the investigator in the story doesn’t or can’t know. (E.g. the detective goes over why each of the five suspects couldn’t have done it, and I say “weren’t there six suspects a couple of chapters ago?”.)
Yes, I did try to watch it just for enjoyment rather than to work out the truth of events, but if there is no truth I find myself frustrated. Did the use of that phrase in that scene mean anything? No, because nothing means anything.
But as you suggest this is very much my own reaction and I won’t say anyone is doing film wrong for feeling differently.
For me, it’s similar to the difference between solving a puzzle and interpreting a dream. Both can have a solution, but the dream is inevitably going to be a more nebulous thing to latch onto; and while asking “why” of the puzzle may be answered with “because it had to be that way”, for the dream the answer may simply be “why not?”.
I do like doing this with how generic American crime shows can be. eq “ is the murderer because the actor also played the murderer in [y]” or “ is the murderer because they haven’t given any other significant reason for why they introduced that character at the start”
Or “because they’re the most famous of the guest stars in this episode”.
Damn that’s a good phrase for that. Totally stealing it.
I usually explain that most mystery shows can be solved by understanding the formula (as @bruitist points out, they won’t introduce a character that isn’t significant to the story because they don’t have time to waste on unimportant characters… if somebody seemingly unimportant is given a line of dialog in the first ten minutes and they aren’t mentioned for the next ten minutes, they’re the murderer).
That would make them “Chekov’s Characters”, I guess?
It’s also a pet-peeve of mine any time a detective solves a case with information that is impossible for the audience to know (I usually refer to it as the “Igniting the Plasma” problem… an episode of ST:TNG has Picard solving a mystery and at a crucial moment Geordi says “That’s weird… these shuttles have their engine manifolds open. There’s no reason for them to do that, because it would ignite the plasma…” and Picard stares into the camera and says “That’s exactly what they were trying to do… ignite the plasma!” and then the show fades to commercial with the obvious implication being that Picard has solved the mystery… but “ignite the plasma” doesn’t mean anything until the next scene where he explains it to Wesley). Ye Olde Sherlock books were awful for this, specifically for Sherlock’s ability to identify cigar and cigarette ash at a glance. “I saw the cigarette came from a rare Indian brand unavailable in London, and therefore the murderer must be somebody recently returned from India… just like YOU, Mr. Yadoneit!”
The newer series still fall into this trap (“Language of Flowers” and “Language of Dance” indeed), but they tend to be better. Basically Doyle, for all his cleverness, simply wasn’t as smart as Sherlock and so had to come up with solutions for mysteries too hard for himself, and so uses book-logic to solve them.
Anyway. Non-diegetic solutions. I love it.
This is one of the great things about the country house murder formula: you’re a long way from anywhere, and if an outsider had come in, killed Rich Old Uncle Thing, and gone away again, there’s a fair chance somebody would have seen them. So it’s not a stretch to say “it was almost certainly one of us here” and have a small number of suspects who can each get a decent share of the narrative. When you move into an urban setting, there’s the extra possibility that it might just have been a random mugging gone wrong, or someone we haven’t met, and even if that’s not part of the story the police ought to have a reason for dismissing it.
(I am told that “diegetic” in the sense of “in the world of the story” is a slight abuse of the term, and even film critics use it mostly in relation to music (e.g. “is this song playing so that the characters can hear it or is it just for the benefit of the audience”), but I find it a thoroughly useful distinction.)
I tend to feel that there’s a tension between the “game” part of the murder mystery, the bit where I learn what the detective learns and the challenge is to beat them to the correct solution, and the “story” part. Someone like John Dickson Carr is writing nearly pure game: he plays fair, but his characterisation is nearly non-existent. Some writers want to tell a story about people, whether that’s soap-operatic or gloomy literary-novel, and the crime-solving part can become nearly an afterthought – P D James, for example.
This is why Columbo is the greatest detective show ever.