I’m putting the blog on ice for a bit while I do not cook a turkey for Christmas dinner, and desperately try to get closer to meeting my Goodreads challenge for the year than my current abysmal standing.
Talking Movies proper will return in January with a Top 10 Films of 2021, and previews of 2022′s best and worst films.
The blog has been far more sporadic this year than previously, for various reasons, not least of which was the continuing nightmare for morale of COVID-19. I don’t make any promises that things will improve on the writing front next year, but I do have some hope that normality will ebb back into our lives, and for that reason let us revisit Sorkin Christmas: Part Two.
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! Roll on Omicron and endemicity.
A strange thought came to mind the other week as I was listening to the eerie and thrilling noise of the wind whistling thru tall trees, a favourite sound of David Lynch. Is Lynch, like 1990s Tarantino, a dead-end? Or, more accurately, such a singular creative explosion that, while he at first might appear liberating and invite people to join him in his explorations, he actually leaves a Tunguska-like blast radius around him which nobody else can ever enter. Can you make a film that has surreal elements and escape being called Lynchian? Can you use dream logic and corny dialogue mixed in with extreme violence and weird sexuality and not have everyone start writing up their Lynchian comparisons? What if you merely used strangely inappropriate soundscapes? Can David Lynch even escape his own shadow at this point? Or can he have a more subtle type of influence? I’m not about to compare The Nice Guys to the work of David Lynch, but there is something to be said for its relation to Lynch’s description of how to write a screenplay. Hoard ideas like a squirrel collecting acorns, and when you have gathered forty conceits that’s the guts of an eighty minute movie – this is Lynch’s unusual advice. (There will be no cats saved here!) And it seems to be oddly applicable to Shane Black’s screenplay, where there are many memorable single moments; like discreetly dumping a dead body over a fence only for it to land on an alfresco dinner party in a lower level mansion; that seem like just such conceits. Strung together they make for a very lively movie, if a very un-Lynchian one. Although there is a giant talking bumblebee at one point. Hmm…
You’re on the list, Mr Garrison, that much is certain.
Watch these 60 films for a 90s mood
The Hunt for Red October // Die Hard 2 // Goodfellas // Arachnophobia // Mermaids // Misery // The Silence of the Lambs // Point Break // JFK // My Own Private Idaho // Terminator 2 // Sleepwalkers // Unforgiven // A Few Good Men // Glengarry Glen Ross // Reservoir Dogs // Wayne’s World // The Player // The Age of Innocence // In the Line of Fire // Jurassic Park // The Remains of the Day // Falling Down // The Fugitive // Little Women // Speed // Pulp Fiction // Dumb and Dumber // Leon // Shallow Grave // The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert // Interview with the Vampire // The Client // Die Hard with a Vengeance // The Usual Suspects // Seven // The American President // Heat // Babe // Scream // Independence Day // Hamlet // A Summer’s Tale // Trainspotting // The Game // Austin Powers // The Lost World // LA Confidential // Saving Private Ryan // The Truman Show // There’s Something About Mary // Out of Sight // Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas // The Matrix // Three Kings // The Sixth Sense // Fight Club // Notting Hill // Austin Powers 2 // Beau Travail
The Bond, James Bond Cinematic Universe
Well, this is a new low. The adulation masquerading as arts journalism that the MCU receives from click-hungry American film websites has now spilled over to not only deriding the failure of DC movies to be the MCU, but also criticising the failure of the Daniel Craig Bond movies to successfully be a B,JBCU. (If you will) One of the many faults of Spectre was in fact just such a contrived attempt. Painting Blofeld, in his own words, as the author of all 007’s pain, and the unseen puppet-master behind everything was just dumb. Bond films don’t actually need to be in total continuity building to a ‘huge’ conclusion. Once upon a halcyon time, their opening sequences didn’t even have any connection to the film that followed. They are meant to be films. Films. Not episodes. The MCU seems to have scrambled critical faculties to the degree that this needs to be stated repeatedly, loudly, and in public. TV and 1930s matinee serials have episodes. Films are, with exceptions, their own standalone statements. The same way that Chekhov didn’t write Three Sisters: Episodes One to Seven, then on his deathbed hand writing duties over to Gorky for the next seven episodes. It would have been far more exciting, on finally regaining the rights to use Blofeld and SPECTRE, to have pulled an audacious stunt like Blindspot did with its final season villain and have Quantum attacked and absorbed by the new international crime syndicate; led in this case by a diabolical mastermind with a penchant for Persian cats. (And for God’s sake Eon, not necessarily a facial scar)
Ladies and gentlemen, to whom it may concern, it’s the Tonight Show
I was recently reading Woody Allen’s Apropos of Nothing and was surprised to find he wrote for Herb Shriner’s TV show. Which I know about purely from a DVD extra showing an episode Orson Welles appeared on that, apart from Welles, had some serious Conan O’Brien vibes – as if America nailed the format in the 1950s and never changed. This started me wondering why nobody ever really attempted that kind of late night comedy talk show here. (Let us not mention Craig Doyle) I mean, besides the obvious – we would run out of guests needed to populate a show every night. Or would we? Suppose you broke apart the Late Late Show, that unwieldy illogical near three hour behemoth, into three shows a week. Put in an opening monologue making fun of the news a la Johnny Carson every night, and then have a guest and a musical slot, maybe some recurring bits, and two long ad breaks. Couldn’t that work in a 50 minute slot?
Some Bank Holiday proposals
We do not have enough Bank Holidays in this country. This chatter about a one-off Bank Holiday as a thank you to frontline workers for getting thru Covid does not cut it. If it happens, it should be permanent. As always our politicians benchmark us against Europe only when it’s convenient, and devoutly avert their eyes when it is not. We are out of step with the rest of Europe by not having Good Friday as a proper ‘everything is officially closed’ Bank Holiday. And we need a Bank Holiday in July for crying out loud! What is generally the best month of the summer and there is no Bank Holiday to exult in the weather and all schools being out. These are the most obvious places to put two more Bank Holidays. There is a case to be made for putting a Bank Holiday on the 8th of December to regularise an old rural tradition of going to the big shmoke to buy presents for Christmas. Even as the practice dies out. And we could use another Bank Holiday to properly celebrate 1916, though getting our politicians to give us two (or three) more days is quite enough of a Herculean task without adding the impossibility of getting them to be proud of having thrown off the shackles of the British Empire. These are the same people who proposed reflecting and remembering 1916 in 2016, but shied away from the notion of actually celebrating it.
Wait, that’s who? And they’re meant to be who?!
American Crime Story: Impeachment has surely achieved some sort of Platonic ideal. Clive Owen is made up to look like Bill Clinton. But he does not look like Bill Clinton. Neither does he look like Clive Owen. The uncanny valley effect has been achieved in a human. To paraphrase Hunter S Thompson: once you get locked into a serious prosthetics collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can. Edie Falco also looks nothing like Hillary Clinton, so the outrage of Linda Tripp at encountering her in the bathroom was only explicable by her complaining to another character about it. When you are dealing with some of the most visible public figures of the 1990s, what is the point of going to such lengths to achieve such inept results? And why bury Sarah Paulson under Linda Tripp FX to the point where it’s easy to forget who’s underneath all the materiel until you hear a familiar cadence to her voice poking thru.
Talking Movies 