Last night I watched Prey, the latest entry in the Predator series of films.  I thoroughly enjoyed it.  It might even be better than the first one (though it's sense of mystery and dread before the big reveal of the alien is hard to repeat).  

This one is also beautifully shot.  Some incredible cinematography, and not just because of the marvelous landscapes.  Even animals and humans are captured beautifully.

It's wonderful to have a major motion picture centering a Native American story and actors.  The idea of going back and placing the story on the Plains in the early 18th century was an excellent idea.

A few weeks ago Michael and I got the rare chance to go to a movie.  Rare, since we are parents of a young child.  Rare because we don't usually use babysitting money for a movie, since we hopefully will be able to stream it sometime in the future.

We went to see The Shape of Water.  And in the various reviews I've read of the film, none have commented on what to me seemed to be the primary theme--toxic masculinity.

Our current social moment is shaping how I interpret many things, so it clearly shaped watching this film (as it did the Opera earlier this year).  

The male characters in the film demonstrate multiple types of men, with implied questions--Who are the real men? Who is the best man?

Of course the best man isn't human, which subversively makes  a point, right?

The man who, like President Trump, thinks he is the best man, is the worst man, the one possessed by a toxic masculinity.  The film does a nice job of giving you a few glimpses into his life that cause you pity instead of overwhelming dread he normally compels.

The females are, of course, the central, vital characters, but you see how they must navigate all these male types in their effort to get along.  Fortunately, the women are the agents of the film and drive the action, which the good men embrace and the toxic ones  seem at first incapable of comprehending and later react violently toward.

I highly recommend the film, which is far more layered than its whimsical fairy tale reputation might suggest.

Recently the BBC declared Some Like It Hot the greatest film comedy of all time.  Here's the essay.  An excerpt about how the film plays with identity:

Look again at the beach scene with Joe and Sugar. It was written by two men who were once called Samuel Wilder and Itec Domnici, and acted by a man and a woman who were once called Bernie Schwartz and Norma Jeane Mortenson. Schwartz, who renamed himself Tony Curtis, is playing Joe, who is pretending to be Junior, using the mid-Atlantic vowels of Cary Grant, who was once called Archibald Leach. Mortenson, who renamed herself Marilyn Monroe, is playing Sugar Kowalczyk, who renamed herself Sugar Kane, and who is using lines which Joe used when he was pretending to be Josephine. Not even Twelfth Night or The Importance of Being Earnest had such elaborate fun with its characters’ identities. Names, genders, social standings ... they can all change in Some Like It Hot. It’s the American way.

Trailer: An American Conscience: The Reinhold Niebuhr Story from Jen Quintana on Vimeo.

Maybe the greatest cinematography since Lawrence of Arabia.  

That's the only good thing I can say about this movie, though even it has a problem I will get to.  ***Beware of spoilers--though a reasonably aware person should know what to expect from this film plotwise just watching the trailers.***

Artists tell stories.  And great stories are told and retold many times and can and should be adapted in the telling.  Yet, any change should serve some purpose to the story or to a larger theme the story is drawing our attention to. 

Hugh Glass and his story are an authentic part of the American West, though quickly turned into folk tale and legend.  Jim Bridger became one of the great mountain men, explorers, and entrepreneurs in his own right.  I encountered Hugh Glass' story in the masterful A Cycle of the West by Nebraska poet laureate John G. Neihardt, a volume that should be in the canon of American literature read by every well-educated person.

The real Hugh Glass story is one of forgiveness overcoming violence and revenge.  The genuine story is both an unconventional Western and true, which is one reason the story is so subversive of our romanticized notions of the West.  

Inarritu has chosen to tell a different story--a very conventional revenge narrative.  In fact, so conventional, that I quickly became bored by the film and wondered why I needed to wait hours more for a bloody death scene (I actually was checking the time to see how much longer I had to endure).  This film ratchets up our romanticized notions of the West and employs every stereotype and trope.  Whereas the real story reminds us that our romanticized notions are inauthentic.  This strange choice of a conventional plot also led to thematic decision I greatly disliked.

I was, in fact, disgusted by the film.  Not its violence, but the filmmakers' decision to create a hypermasculine story.  

First, they manufactured a half-Pawnee son.  Why?  They seem to have chosen to do so in order to make the revenge all that more potent and guarantee a violent conclusion.  

They've also chosen to set the film in mountainous winter landscapes instead of on the Great Plains where the events occurred (Glass encountered Fitzgerald north of Omaha at Fort Atkinson).  This choice, which leads to the stunningly beautiful cinematography, also seems to be about ratcheting up the hyper-masculinity.  Crawling across the rolling hills and grassy meadows of the Plains would seem to be not effort enough for these filmmakers.  They need to manufacture sturm und drang.

Then they add repeated and unnecessary sequences of sadistic tortures of Hugh Glass.  Was the story of bear mauling, betrayal, and survival by crawling not powerful enough?

As told by John Neihardt, the story is rooted in the friendship between Glass and Bridger, a friendship completely lacking in the film (because of the manufactured son?).  Glass feels betrayed by a friend and the anger and bitterness motivates his crawl, but evaporates when he finally meets up with Bridger again.

Also, the Neihardt version reveals a homoerotic possibility to the relationship between Glass and Bridger.  We know from the historical record that the men who blazed trails in the West often engaged in same-sex relations, though the films and television shows often unqueer these stories.  

Which they've done again.  This time in service to a hypermasculinity that can't tell a story of friendship, same-sex love, or forgiveness.  That would be a good story.  An unconventional Western film with unexpected plot developments.  And, very likely, also a true story.

So, if this film wins the Academy Award for Best Picture, then I will be even more angry for Brokeback Mountain lost.  Clearly the lesson for filmmakers is that they should purge the queer elements of the great stories.

Read more about the Neihardt story here.

And an article that also disliked the film for its refusal to tell the genuine story.

The Neverending Story by Michael Ende
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I have loved the film The Neverending Story since I first saw it in fourth grade (I believe that's when) back in the mid 1980's. Shockingly, as a lover of the film and a kid buried in books who constantly browsed library and bookstores, I didn't realize there was an actual book until a month ago when I encountered a copy laying the choir room at church; this copy belonged to the music director's teen daughter. "May I borrow this?"

Okay, I was glad to have some more details and enjoyed some of the material in the early part of the book which was lacking in the film (for example the way Atreyu and Falkor meet is much better in the book and inexplicable deus ex machina in the film), but there were some of the film choices that I did prefer. And I most definitely preferred ending the film where they did, as the rest of the book, about two thirds of the story, I really didn't care for at all.

The main difference is that Bastian is a rather unpleasant character in the book, from beginning to almost the very end. Which makes the story less engaging, I think.

View all my reviews

Michael and I took advantage of our first post-Sebastian's birth date night to go see a children's movie.  We wanted to see Inside Out because of all the good buzz it has received, and not just film-related buzz, but broader discussions of how the movie could impact the way children talk about their feelings.

We were deeply moved by the film (it is about emotions after all), both of us crying a number of times.  The movie also provoked a great deal of conversation afterwards, with us raising all sorts of interesting questions about the choices the filmmakers made and the meanings one could interpret from them (like Riley's emotions being both male and female unlike every other character).  

I had two intellectual reactions to the film.  I do think the movie will help children to talk about their feelings.  I can imagine conversations about the importance of what we normally think of as negative emotions--sadness, fear, anger.  I liked how sadness was the empathetic character.  I know I'll make use of the film's metaphors in the future.

But I also reacted as a philosopher of mind (my dissertation topic).  The reviews and articles I had read ahead of viewing the film worried me, and the actual film supported that worry.  The premise of the film promotes one of the worst mistakes in Western philosophy--the Cartesian theatre.  Alva Noe has written a very good critique on this very point.  We philosophers have been working hard to debunk folk understandings of the mind and our work will be even more difficult if a group of young people grow up imagining the human self functioning as the film presented.

So, effective metaphors if one can teach kids (and adults) that they are only metaphors and not good representations of how the mind functions.

My closest friend who is a veteran of Iraq & Afghanistan and I have been e-mailing about the reactions to American Sniper.  I have not yet seen the film, so I cannot react to it, but the reactions themselves are interesting.  Clint Eastwood, in an interview last week, reminded people that he has always been anti-war and believes he made an anti-war movie.  Clearly not all the people who've seen the film got that.

My veteran friend wrote the other day that one should avoid stating any critical opinion of the movie in public.

Today he forwarded me this article, by another veteran, reflecting on the film and the reactions to it.  The title of the essay is "There are no war heroes." A procative enough title.  An excerpt:

I'm a U.S. infantry combat veteran of Afghanistan, and I witnessed this phenomenon firsthand. Personally, though, I found the movie to be factually probable, visually and emotionally stimulating, but curiously aimless: like walking in a shallow pool looking for a place to dive and swim, expecting depth and finding none. I found the audience's reaction both inspiring and depressing. On the one hand, Thank god people are finally responding to the horror of war. On the other hand, This is not quite true.

Have you seen the film?  What do you think?