hudebnik

... in a movie theater in the East Village. OMG.

For many years, it's been a challenge for computer graphics people to get water looking right. This movie is largely about water, and they did an amazing job of it, while staying clearly on the "animation" side of the uncanny valley. The animation, whether water, scenery, or living characters, is lush and gorgeous.

The characters are all non-human: a house cat, several domestic dogs of various breeds, a bunch of lemurs, a bunch of secretary-birds, a capybara, etc. There's no dialogue, beyond the sorts of noises you would expect those species to produce. They aren't overly anthropomorphized: they move and behave in ways you could believe that species moving and behaving, with the exception of a few who figure out how to use a boat's rudder. The individual personalities and inter-species relationships develop plausibly, if you've seen any of the YouTube videos about bonding between actual animals of different species.

The setting is intentionally ambiguous: the fauna are a mix of South American, European, and African, the flora seem to be subtropical, and the night skies have visible aurora, which makes it subpolar. Remnants of human civilization are everywhere -- some ruins thousands of years old, other human constructions that seem to have been abandoned only months ago, but no actual humans. There's no explanation of why the humans are gone, or where they went, and that's fine: the nonhuman characters don't care about those abstract questions, only "how do I survive in the world I'm in right now?" Likewise, the flood that motivates the whole movie happens for no particular reason: when you're a house cat, things like that just happen, you don't wonder why, you just deal with it.

And there's a lot of "it" to deal with: the characters face life-threatening peril every day, mixed with existential traumas like the loss of a toy overboard, and moral crises like whether to rescue other characters whom you don't particularly like. These crises are deeply involving and moving, and you'll find yourself wincing in sympathy. Highly recommended.

Next up: "The Wild Robot", also nominated for "best animated feature". Not showing in theaters any more, so we'll have to stream it.

Yesterday's mail brought a DVD of the recent movie "Mr Malcolm's List". We'd seen previews of it -- Regency-era Austen-style romance, with several PoC major characters -- but hadn't heard much buzz. So we watched it last night.

It's not "Belle", about a (historically documented) black heiress in early-19th-century England, in which her race is a major plot driver. In fact, race isn't mentioned at all: you could have changed the race of any or all characters, and except for one line it would have had no effect on the script or plot. This is a standard-issue Austen-style romance set in an alternate Regency England that's truly race-blind. (I gather that's also the theory behind "Bridgerton", which neither of us has seen.)

So, that romance plot... it has elements of "Midsummer Night's Dream", "Much Ado About Nothing", and "Emma". Comfortable-gentry Julia goes on an opera date with Mr Malcolm, the most eligible bachelor in London, there's no chemistry or shared interests, there's no second date, and the gossip mill prints -- and circulates widely -- a caricature showing him finding her inadequate and jilting her. She's publicly humiliated (on a sensitive subject, as she's already in her fourth season "out" without finding a husband, and verging on spinsterhood). Her cousin Cassidy is Mr Malcolm's best friend, so she asks him what went wrong, and he reports that Mr Malcolm has drawn up a list of qualifications for a prospective spouse, qualifications that Julia failed to meet. Julia is now even more angry and humiliated, and vows revenge by crafting a woman to exactly Malcolm's specifications, then having that woman reject him for failing to meet her list of qualifications. But she needs to find a woman Malcolm hasn't met who can play that role. Enter Julia's impoverished but sweet childhood friend Selene, who reluctantly goes along with the devious scheme. As anybody who's read Shakespeare, Austen, or commedia dell'arte could predict, Malcolm and Selene fall sincerely in love with one another; things go badly when Malcolm discovers the scheme; and everything is patched up in the end.

I noticed as the credits ran that the director, most of the producers, the scriptwriter, and the author of the book on which it's based were all women (in addition to the more-commonly-female movie-making jobs like casting, visual design, costume, etc.)

The acting is good throughout, by a cast most of whom I'd never heard of except the gorgeous Theo James, who played ambiguous love-interest Sidney in "Sanditon" and the Turkish diplomat who died seducing Lady Mary in the first season of "Downton Abbey". I guess my only complaint about the acting (and/or editing) is that Julia could have been a less transparent and more sympathetic malefactor, which would have made it more plausible when Theo James's character, Captain Ossory, falls in love with her. I don't know enough about Regency-era costume to comment on it. The dance scenes include the usual Regency-romance line-dances, as well as some anachronistic waltzing. OTOH, the opera appears to be "The Barber of Seville", written in 1816, so having it performed in London in 1818 is quite plausible.

Yesterday afternoon we bundled up against the cold and walked to the neighborhood movie theater, where we showed proof of vaccination, picked up our tickets, and saw Ken Branagh's "Belfast" in a screening room with maybe twenty other people, all seated some distance apart in assigned seats, but many not wearing masks.

The semi-autobiographical film follows 9-year-old Buddy growing up in 1969 in a close-knit neighborhood in Belfast where Catholics and Protestants live side by side. As sectarian violence grows, passing the barricades becomes a normal part of daily life, many of the Catholic families are terrorized into leaving, and his own Protestant family is pressured to join in the "cleansing" of Catholics ("you're either with us or you're against us"). Along the way you see a little boy's love for his neighborhood, his aging grandparents (played by Ciaran Hynes and Judi Dench), the movies (almost the only part of the film that's in color), and the (Catholic) girl who sits next to him in class. All but the movies are left behind when the family flees to England. Beautiful and moving.

Then we came home, had something to eat, and (staying in 1969) curled up on the couch, and fired up Disney+ to watch Part 1 of Peter Jackson's "Get Back", a documentary on the Beatles' Twyckenham sessions. In the first ten minutes Jackson summarizes the band's high school origins in 1957, its growth to world-celebrity status, and its retreat from live performance in 1967. By the end of 1968 they had dipped a toe back into the waters of live performance and decided they wanted to try it again, so they booked a rehearsal space for a few weeks in January 1969 to rebuild their relationships and put together a show. Working against a tight deadline (the space was needed for another production in February), they got together in a cavernous room and started brainstorming new songs, old songs, performance venues, sets, and what the show and the band were supposed to be about. The whole thing was filmed at the time, with the intention of producing a TV special along with the concert, and Jackson and his crew have gone through all the surviving 52-year-old footage to assemble something coherent. The result is a technical tour de force: everything looks and sounds as though it were shot yesterday, from picture quality to camera angles and cuts. If this doesn't win at least a "Best Editing" Oscar, there's no justice. And it's also a deeply revealing look at how four talented artists with strong personalities worked together -- occasionally arguing bitterly, but mostly bouncing musical ideas (and thoughts about the world outside) off one another as we watch the development of now-iconic songs from improvisations and a few scribbled lines of lyrics.

The 2021 movie "The Last Duel" is based on a non-fiction book about a judicial duel in 1386 Paris, at a time when judicial duels had fallen out of favor but weren't completely stricken from the law-books yet, to resolve the accusation by Sir Jean de Carrouges that a squire, Jacques Le Gris, had raped Carrouges's wife, Marguerite.

They say every man is the hero of his own story. The writers of "The Last Duel" took that literally, together with the principle that every court case has people with conflicting views of the same events. The movie is divided into three chapters: "the truth according to Jean de Carrouges", "the truth according to Jacques Le Gris", and "the truth according to Lady Marguerite", each presenting many of the same scenes from a different perspective. Naturally, Carrouges comes off as bold, brave, principled, decent, and wronged in his own account, less so in the other two accounts; Le Gris comes off as fun-loving, decent, and wronged in his own account, less so in the other two accounts; and Marguerite comes off as three-dimensional, decent, and wronged in her own account, and less so in the other two accounts. All this is interestingly done, and well-acted (by Matt Damon as Carrouges, Ben Driver as Le Gris, and Jodie Comer as Marguerite, as well as Ben Affleck as Count Pierre, to whom both Carrouges and Le Gris are in fealty, and Alex Lawther as the childish, 18-year-old King Charles VI). And one is intended to come away with the sense that Marguerite's account, the least supported by surviving court documents because they were written by men, is probably the most accurate. Also that men are pigs -- some actively malevolent, some clueless and sexist but not actively malevolent, some employing their monopoly on law and science to devalue and discredit women, etc. And that, then even more than now, a woman charging rape will be treated as a criminal herself, and she might be better off keeping silent about it. There's a line "better a mother who's alive than a mother who's right," or something like that.

As a period piece, it's a mixed bag. There are nice touches, like the doctor examining Marguerite's urine in a blown glass urinal, and the kirtle Marguerite wears in the rape scene (at her own home, not expecting guests, so it's an appropriate thing for her to be wearing) is a front-laced Gothic Fitted Dress (tm) with set-in sleeves. I'm no armor expert, but the armor looks to me only a few decades off (aside from the half-visored helmets, which are presumably inspired by jousting helmets that offered more protection on the left side than the right but which just look wacky). And heraldry experts I know say the heraldry is appropriately used, and quite close to the historical arms of Carrouges and Le Gris respectively. But as usual in movies set in the Middle Ages, the extras are better dressed than the named characters, who wear a variety of clothing ranging from the 13th century to the 16th. In one scene Marguerite wears a leather vest/bodice thing-like, and in another she goes to court wearing what might be described as a "frontless surcote", recalling perhaps a burlesque dancer. Most of the headgear dates from between 1420-1470, not 1386, and there are occasional excursions into Tudor. Indeed, Marguerite's forbiddingly old-fashioned and strait-laced mother-in-law (who lectures her about how when you get raped, you should pick yourself up and go on with life rather than whining like a baby) seems to be wearing an Elizabethan neck-ruff, at least 200 years fashion-forward.

Combat is depicted as horrible, brutal, and "by any means necessary" dirty. Again, I'm not an expert on this stuff, but there is lance-play, sword-play, axe-play, dagger-play, and unarmed wrestling, all of which are documented in combat manuals of the time; I think I even saw a moment of half-sword thrusting, although much of the armed combat is wild hacking and blocking.

shalmestere and I were both reminded of the 2018 movie "Ophelia", which likewise takes a story traditionally centered on its male characters (in that case "Hamlet") and re-tells it from the perspective of one of the women. Indeed, both movies have almost exactly the same closing scene, with the female protagonist playing with her toddler in a sunny field of flowers, so I have to suspect that it was an intentional quotation.

So see the movie as a sort of feminist manifesto, not as a period piece, and you'll enjoy it -- if you can stomach the rape and violence.

After a limited release last month, "Cruella" became available to non-premium streaming subscribers a few days ago, so we watched it last night. I think so did a lot of people: there were frequent "buffering..." freezes, adding a couple of minutes to the movie's 2:16 official length, and the first half dozen attempts to start streaming it failed completely, which makes me wonder if it lives on a single server that was getting overloaded with streaming requests. Which seems like a silly problem to have in 2021, when distributing copies of data to geographically-dispersed servers has Been A Thing for at least twenty years.

Anyway, we thoroughly enjoyed it. In a nutshell, imagine "The Devil Wears Prada" as a prequel to "101 Dalmatians". Indeed, according to IMDB, the screenwriter of "The Devil Wears Prada" wrote an early draft of this script and has a story credit.

Summary [mostly the first half; no spoilers thereafter]:
Estela, an intelligent little girl with an uncompromising eye for fashion, grows up in the early 1960's with congenitally half-black, half-white hair, which gets her teased in school, for which she fights back and gets in a lot of trouble. Her single mother nicknames her troublesome side "Cruella" and urges her to keep Cruella in check. It doesn't work: she leaves that school and travels with her mother and her puppy (a mutt she found in a dumpster) to London to start a new life. But in need of money for this new life, they stop at the home of the mother's wealthy ex-employer to ask a favor. There's an 18th-century-themed costume ball going on, the girl is mesmerized by the clothes, the puppy causes havoc at the ball, the employer's vicious Dalmatians are loosed to catch girl and puppy, and instead they knock the mother over a cliff to her death on the seaside rocks below. The suddenly-orphaned girl blames herself for her mother's death and flees, eventually reaching London and falling in with a couple of young pickpockets named Horace and Jasper (whom you'll remember as Cruella's bumbling sidekicks in the 1961 movie and the 1956 book). Estela grows up, combining her charm and knack for making clothes with the boys' skills at thievery, with the aid of their Chihuahua and her dumpster mutt, to make a decent if thoroughly-illegal living. But they can see that she wants more, so as a birthday gift they wangle her a job offer at a high-end clothing store, where she's surrounded by beautiful fabrics and clothes, but is only allowed to do janitorial work. Eventually she comes to the attention of The Baroness, the queen of the London fashion world, who has all the personal characteristics of the original Cruella DeVil, or for that matter Miranda Priestly from "The Devil Wears Prada", and who hires Estela away to work for the Baroness's own fashion label. Things get complicated as Estela discovers connections in her own past to the Baroness and revives her "Cruella" alter-ego, who becomes the Baroness's mysterious rival while Estela keeps working for her. Confrontations and reckonings ensue, with a happy ending.

Things are more politically correct than in 1956 or 1961, of course. Cruella doesn't smoke. Her school friend Anita is black, and one of her co-conspirators is a flaming queen, portrayed positively. Cruella doesn't actually make coats out of Dalmatians, although she does have Horace and Jasper kidnap a few of them, for reasons that make sense within the plot. And, with an eye to the flurry of short-lived adoptions that has followed every previous release of a major Disney dog movie, the credits say "If you are ready for the responsibility of pet ownership, please visit your local animal shelter...." It will perhaps help that most of the Dalmatians in this movie are not adorable, and the "nice" dogs in the movie are pound puppies.

The result isn't really a "prequel", because one can't imagine it subsequently leading to the events of "101 Dalmatians". Instead, if "Cruella" were the literal truth, "101 Dalmatians" would be a legend reconstructed by hearing second-hand of a few disconnected events from "Cruella" and stitching them together wrong, analogous to the misinterpretations by Brian's followers in "Life of Brian".

The writing is deft and funny, the visuals are gorgeous, including street scenes of 1970's London and a lot of over-the-top costumes, the cast and acting are superb (once you accept the premise of the over-the-top, scenery-chewing characters), and the sound track (made up largely of 1960's and 1970's pop songs) is excellent. Highly recommended.

The movie theater around the corner from our old apartment (and less than a mile's walk from our current home) is open for business, and showing three Oscar-nominated films that we haven't seen: "Minari", "Promising Young Woman", and "Nomadland". Also "Together Together" and "Limbo", both of which sound like the sort of film that could get Oscar nominations but didn't. Of these, "Nomadland" and "Promising Young Woman" are still showing next weekend. The theater is apparently only open Friday through Sunday so far, so I guess we need to see something today.

We were torn yesterday between re-watching "The Wicker Man" in honor of the solstice, and re-watching either "Fellowship of the Ring" or Branagh's "Henry V" in honor of the late Ian Holm. We ended up re-watching a fan cut of "The Hobbit" (both movies stuck together, minus most of the stuff that's unsupported by Tolkien, like Tauriel and the gold-melting gambit), which only had about twenty seconds of Ian Holm, but it was fun anyway.

So we saw Episode 9 last night. As always, the special effects are great. The characters of episodes 7-9 are more engaging and interesting than those of episodes 1-3. But NOTHING MAKES SENSE.

It has bothered me for a long time that single-seat fighter ships, both good-guy and bad-guy, are apparently capable of interstellar travel. In fact, in Episode 4 there was a line about "short-range tie fighters" that couldn't operate far from the support of a larger ship. And yet in Episode 9 you see a bunch of tie fighters follow the Millennium Falcon through a series of lightspeed jumps to several different planets. (Why all of these seemingly-random lightspeed jumps, with all the vacant space in the universe, happen to put the Falcon within a hundred yards of a planet's surface, surrounded by tall obstacles to dodge, is of course not explained.) And as far back as Episode 5, Luke flew an X-wing from planet to planet, with no suggestion that the planets in question were in the same star system. Rey does that again in Episode 9. So let's just swallow this: not only is there a lightspeed drive enabling interstellar travel, but it's cheap enough to include in an expendable single-seat ship (we certainly see enough of them get blown up!) whose primary goal is tactical combat. Which makes you wonder about the point of all those larger ships, but anyway....

In Episode 8, a fleet of rebel ships is outnumbered and outgunned by a fleet of Empire ships at fairly close range (say, millions of miles tops), and the good guys have a matter of hours to depolarize the framistans on the Empire ships so the rebel fleet can escape. So several of the main characters decide to go find and recruit the framistan expert on a planet in a different star system, making their way through the seedy underbelly and the glitzy gambling resorts of that planet -- all of which should take at least hours if not days by itself, not counting any time it takes to get to that planet. If it's that quick and easy to go to a different star system, why not just move the fleet? The same thing happens in Episode 9: with hours to go before the bad-guy fleet mobilizes to destroy a gazillion planets, the good guys visit a colorful folk festival on another planet in another star system, make friends with the natives, and leave the festival (pursued by storm troopers, of course) to find a wrecked space ship that might contain a clue telling them how to get to the planet (in yet another star system) where the bad-guy fleet is. A clue, BTW, that Luke had spent years looking for, and they're hoping to find and use it in hours. Then they need help from a particular expert in the seedy underbelly of a particular city on yet another planet in yet another star system, so of course they go there and do that, still within those few hours.

Then there's the light-saber duel on the platform in the middle of a raging ocean (you've seen it in the trailers, even if you haven't seen the movie). WHY are they having this fight, other than because it looks cool? What is either of them hoping to achieve by "winning" the fight (which determines what "winning" means)?

For the final multi-ship battle, one ship has been sent off to "the Core worlds" to beg for reinforcements from the dispirited but secretly rebellious people of those worlds. I imagine the response taking days or weeks to develop the political will, and days or weeks more to mobilize the forces; here it all happens within an hour or so. And when the motley reinforcements arrive, from dozens of worlds (reminiscent, as shalmestere points out, of the rescue scene at the end of "Pirate Radio"), they all arrive at once, in formation, despite having no apparent command structure.

In short, an awful lot of things seem to happen for no reason except that they look really cool on screen. And I think with a little more creativity, they could have made equally-cool-looking things happen AND MAKE SENSE.

Kvetch, kvetch, kvetch....

Saw "Late Night" yesterday, and enjoyed it quite a bit. It centers on the relationship between an aging and tyrannical "Tonight" show host (Emma Thompson) and her newest writer (Mindy Kaling, who wrote the script). Kaling's character Molly is explicitly and obviously a diversity hire (she's in mid-interview when the interviewer gets a phone call, on speaker, saying "Have you hired a woman yet? No? Well, get on with it!" whereupon he hangs up and says "You're hired!"), and the otherwise all-white-male writing staff openly refer to her that way. Her challenge is to make herself useful and necessary and shake things up. No earth-shaking messages, but fun.

On the way home from the movie, shalmestere and I discussed the "shoe" leitmotif that runs throughout the movie. If I were to watch the movie again, I think I would keep a list of every time a character specifically refers to shoes or the camera focuses on shoes or a character does something specifically involving shoes. I think they all mean something, but I'm not sure what.

Since shalmestere and I have both been sick for the past week (nothing life-threatening, just seasonal crud), we've watched a bunch of movies on DVD, mostly checked out from the library a few blocks away. I'm not coherent enough to write reviews right now, so I'll just list them for now:

• Dec. 30: Sorry to Bother You


• Dec. 31: Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far On Foot


• Jan. 1: The Time Traveller's Wife


• Jan. 1: Blackadder Back And Forth, in honor of the New Year


• Jan. 2: Philomena


• [ETA: Jan. 3: Pirate Radio, which we saw when it was in theaters]


• [ETA: Jan. 4: Persepolis, which we also saw when it was in theaters]