I was listening to a podcast review of one of my airplane movies (now purchased and rewatched [0]), A Complete Unknown. The reviewers’ comment was that they got tired of the music biopic trope of others looking at the rising star with adoring eyes, and it’s true, ACU does that a lot.
I noticed it too – it’s really obvious. It could be them fully leaning into the trope, because tropes are tropes because they work, but I think it’s meant to be a subversion of the trope.
Watch Timothee Chalamet in those scenes, and Dylan in Don’t Look Back, and see how that adoration reflects in his/their face, and consider what it must have been like for Dylan then, and for Chalamet in real life now, with the fame [1] descending upon someone self-aware and bright who can see what’s coming, and what that might do, given their naturally cynical bent. Then think about the other movie Chalamet has starred in, and his role in that, and a scene explicitly calling out [2] the moment a friend becomes a disciple.
There, I made a connection between Dune and Bob Dylan. Both of whom arrived at roughly the same time.
It’s definitely a trope, probably for a reason, and well mocked in the music mockumentary genre. I think the director and the star both knew that, and considered the well-deserved skewering these kind of movies have gotten, but this isn’t La Bamba, and it’s not about the adoration, it’s about watching Dylan/Chalamet and seeing that funhouse mirror reflection of what just happened, and what’s about to happen, in their faces, and how it got to Johnny Cash just a moment before.
I don’t think I’ve seen that in a movie before, and that was really well done.
[0] I wish I had made time to watch it in an IMAX theatre. It was pretty good on my home setup, way better with good sound than on the airplane.
[1] it’s even called out in the letters to Johnny Cash in the movie, how obvious do they have to make it?
[1] in the movie and the book
Well, the pope apparently read my screed about not believing that an American could ever be elected, and decided to prove me wrong by stacking the cardinals with his own peeps.
I had a bunch of new movies favorited for this trip (“The Room Next Door“, “Presence“, “Sing Sing“, “Nosferatu“, etc.) but only got around to a few. Maybe “Sinners” will be on the next flight. I also got sidetracked by watching old eps of Archer (from when it was funny) and 30 Rock (it was always funny). It’s been a tough few months.
[1] My info comes from here. Dylan has apparently long insisted on preserving the privacy of his former lovers and wives. Hint: reader mode
[2] Also some of his albums sound great. I struggle to find new music that doesn’t suffer from the loudness wars. I don’t want to be an old fogie, but when I want that hit of good sound through a good stereo system, most new records don’t got it, so I have to resort to old stuff. [3]
[3] And fuck you I’ve had my hearing checked a number of times. I struggle with voices in a crowded room, but both my audiologist and the Apple hearing test tell me that I’ve still got really good ears even at high frequencies. Despite years of power tools, concerts (fan and musician), gunfire, and assholes.
There must be something in the air, and I think I know what it is…
I just saw a video of Benedict Cumberbatch reading something first written in 2011, but my experience with this has been post-pandemic, where it seems like all manners and rules are completely gone, everywhere [1]. Apparently this was a thing ten years earlier, though I was blessedly unaware. And then there was this blog at one of the better websites…
My thought since the eternal March 20, 2020 has been that I am never going to the gym again without a mask because every day, there’s someone who thinks that the appropriate function for the hand drier is to dry their balls [2]. Pandemic or no, not ever going into the gym again without a mask.
[1] don’t get me started on people who just drive with their brights on all the time, and get angry when you give them a courtesy blink. They know they are blinding people, and they mean to do it, and they don’t care that it makes everyone else a more dangerous driver. For example.
[2] and then there are the people who never wash their hands, or wipe a bench.
I’ve been flying quite a bit, but haven’t been finding too many airplane movies. If you remember the definition: something that’s maybe worth watching, but not worth saving to watch on a bigger screen.
In the theatre, I’ve seen Black Bag and 2001: A Space Odyssey in IMAX (also saw this at the Hollywood Bowl with the LA Phil and Gay Men’s Chorus), and that’s about it. I think Dune 2 was last year. I’ve been kind of busy.
Here’s what I’ve got so far:
For Gene Hackman, I watched some mid-tier things that I had missed before, like Runaway Jury. Fine, but I always go back to Heist. A whole movie of Hackman saying things like:
”He isn’t gonna shoot me? Then he hadn’t oughta point a gun at me. It’s insincere.”
“Don’t you want to hear my last words?” “I just did.”
“I’m not that smart. I try to imagine a fella smarter than myself, then I ask myself, what would he do?”
The little smile at the end is perfect.
For Val Kilmer, of course there is Tombstone, and Top Gun, and Real Genius. Salton Sea, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, and a bunch of forgettable stuff, but Spartan is the one I watch over and over.
“In the city, a reflection. In the forest, a sound.”
“What about the desert?”
“You don’t want to go to the desert.”
Ebert liked them both, 3.5 and 4 stars respectively.
Tagged movie reviews
Climate change will manifest as a series of disasters viewed through phones with footage that gets closer and closer to where you live until you’re the one filming it.
–(now-deleted) post by @PerthshireMags
I was looking for where I hid my license the other morning, because I was about to head out on a bike ride. Why do you bring your license, you ask? Riding a bike requires no license. California doesn’t require you to carry ID. I have an ID bracelet in case of emergency, and devices that set off alarms if I crash. These work. Ask me how I know.
Unless…
You are stopped by LEO for something. You don’t have to carry ID unless an officer says that you committed some infraction, in which case you have to show ID. Even if you didn’t commit an infraction, and can show the officer video proving it, not having ID in that case is an infraction. For which you will be written up.
So you don’t need an ID unless you do, in which case not having it is a ticketable infraction.
Ask me how I know…
Fast-fish
I just watched the 50th anniversary showing of Jaws in IMAX at the Chinese in Hollywood, which was great. Spielberg before he completely gave into the saccharine emotional button-pushing of his later films.
I only just twigged to the Moby-Dick allegory on this viewing, for one specific reason; enlightenment hit me upside the head with a marlinspike. In defense of my ignorance, I saw Jaws when it came out, and possibly again at the 25th anniversary. Long before I started reading Moby-Dick at least once a year for the past two decades. I was a teenager the first time, and a newly minted experimental physicist with my mind on other things the second time.
Maybe I had read M-D once when I saw Jaws, as an adolescent, and like most great books I read dutifully then, most of the joy and meaning only came later.
The marlinspike-to-the-head came late in the movie, when the crew of the Orca have managed to attach two buoys to Bruce the shark, and are running full-steam ahead with the wind (the smoke is blowing forward faster than the boat is moving) behind the sounding shark.
Hooper mutters “fast-fish” to himself with bared-teeth, and it all fell into to place.
“Fast-fish”
My mind leapt. The movie reframed itself in an instant. My head swum.
I am sure that I did not catch that in any previous viewing, and I can’t find any reference to it in any of the articles comparing Jaws to Moby-Dick [1]. Plenty of analysis, meta-analysis, deconstruction, close-reading, and navel gazing, but no one calls out that Hooper, a rich, well-educated kid, is explicitly referencing a chapter in Moby-Dick. Spielberg and Gilbert (and Bentley, and one of the numerous other screenwriters) all certainly knew what they were doing.
I’m guessing that the entire audience, in 2025, when they chuckled at that line, were thinking that he was just saying that the shark was fast. Which is what the movie had been building up to, for one of the turning points where
AhabQuint is harpooning thewhaleshark, and it looks like thePequodOrca might succeed.Maybe everyone else knows this. But I’ve never seen it written down before. Let me display my ignorance; worth it for a small ration of enlightenment.
Tagged Moby-Dick[1] Of course, search sucks now, so this is probably just another AI slop failure rather than the collective minds of the whole universe not having read Moby-Dick and understanding what ‘fast-fish’ was referencing at any time in the last fifty years. This is about me finally getting it.
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