Sumana

The 1980s action movie Streets of Fire is, in the US, up on YouTube in its entirety to watch free-with-ads right now. Saw it last night.

A few thoughts:

It's infernokrusher. It's pretty. It kind of reminds us of Dark City, Batman: The Animated Series, and Brazil in how it synthesizes a stylized 20th century urban aesthetic that sort of is unmoored in time. And it's a MOVIE, visual and sonic spectacle. According to the English Wikipedia article, one co-screenwriter said that the director/co-writer wanted a comic book movie but wasn't satisfied with any existing comic book to base the film on, so it's like a comic book movie, and the director said:


What more do you need in a trailer? Although the trailer itself is also fun, and perhaps helps illustrate my belief that Streets of Fire could fit somewhere in the Mad Max franchise without a ton of changes.

Spouse and I, fairly early in the runtime, started suspecting that the character of McCoy had originally been written as a man, then genderswapped -- so much so that, at one point, Leonard forgot the character's name and called her Starbuck. We were right. According to IMDb trivia, originally the filmmakers had Edward James Olmos in mind!

What a treat to see Rick Moranis playing someone so loathsome, given how I grew up on his Honey, I Shrunk The Kids character. (Also, that's a marvelous title.) Also, funny how Willem Defoe's Raven is the actual threat and does dangerous and reprehensible things, but we have way more screentime of Billy (Moranis's character) just being incredibly irritating.

More elevated municipal rail than I had expected -- not just as stanchions that serve as obstacles during car chases, but also as a relevant mode of transport.

Spoiler for the ending: I ( spoiler )

Thank you Jim Steinman for those opening and closing songs - in his obituary I read the deathless quote  "If you don't go over the top, you can't see what's on the other side," which is the essence of infernokrusher.

A fun ride.

I saw Fire Island and enjoyed it -- it's been a while since I watched a Pride and Prejudice adaptation and this one was charming and cutting. Leonard has never seen nor read P&P, so I got to spot parallels and pause to tell him about them. Leonard once wrote of It Happened One Night that


and there's a similar balancing act to the role of Darcy, or the Darcy-alike in any P&P adaptation.

My household has now watched seasons 1 and 2 of Only Murders in the Building. A fun show! We are Steve Martin fans here and enjoy Columbo and Murder, She Wrote for popcorn-type everyday viewing, and the performances, characters, jokes, and twists keep us engaged. A big Manhattan apartment building sure gives you a lot of opportunities to bring in new characters whenever you like and tangle up the neighbor-web further. This is one of the few shows we like where Leonard is willing to watch, like, 3 episodes in a row instead of stopping after two, so I think it finds a rare mix of humor, suspense, and (usually) manageable intensity/violence.

I'm now caught up on Welcome to Wrexham, perhaps otherwise known as the "waiting for the next season of Ted Lasso" placeholder. I wrote a bit about my mixed reaction on MetaFilter's FanFare, about how I sort of wish it were more of a Ken Burns-style or Jon Bois-style documentary instead of the specific kind of sports documentary/reality TV it is. One thing I didn't mention there but will add here: would the supporters' trust have been nearly as welcoming to these complete outsiders if they had the exact same plans yet were not white? Probably not. (I'm guessing this from the reactions I think I've heard about when rich Chinese or Middle Eastern people buy interests in European sports concerns. But maybe I'm wrong.)

Last year, with a friend, I saw the first few episodes of the old BBC TV version of Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. This past weekend I finished that up. I think when I was a kid, reading the books, I found the idea of the restaurant at the end of the universe elegant and silly, but -- as an adult, and watching the TV version -- I grasp better the emotional tone, the desire for a really decadent oblivion. The emcee looks like he's taking a break from Cabaret.

I tried the 2016 Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency adaptation but stopped halfway through the first episode. Gently is so obnoxious and boundary-trampling, and I just have such a low tolerance for bullying that the narrative seems to be fine with. He's way more out-of-line in the show than I remember him being in the book (at least the first time/s we meet him). However, there is a cop played by Richard Schiff (Toby Ziegler from The West Wing) -- he and his partner are fun to watch.

I've also now seen the first episode of Avenue Q, Armando Iannucci's space fiasco comedy. I liked The Thick of It and The Death of Stalin and I think Avenue Q is along the same lines plus gets us new worldbuilding (e.g., the moon is now a giant jail??) so I'm curious to watch more.

Got yesterday's Framed on the first try, having never seen the film in question.

Today: Read a YouTube comment in Russian and translated it into English without needing to look anything up.

Attention cuddyclothes! The makers of Swiss Army Man have a new movie coming out next year, a scifi action movie starring Michelle Yeoh and entitled Everything Everywhere All At Once. Here's the trailer which I stopped watching partway through because I decided I wanted to see the film and didn't want any more spoilers.

My spouse and I are doing a little project this month where we watch 10 famous movies from the 1990s that we hadn't seen before. Feel free to join in and do the same if this piques your interest!

Today I saw Knives Out, the latest Rian Johnson film, and loved it! Stylish, funny, kept me on my toes, incisive, some very very cool performances. There is at least one special treat in there for Hamilton fans. Happy to talk more in the comments of this reaction post by giandujakiss!

Saw Captain Marvel. I enjoyed approximately all the same things that, for instance, yasaman did, but ... the moments of enjoyment did not add up to me being glad about the time and money I'd spent. I decided on the way home that I'm stepping off the MCU treadmill. I am aiming to not see Avengers: Endgame in theaters, and am noting this here as a bit of pre-commitment.

The MCU has structural problems that are just not going to go away. In particular, writers and directors have to connect up what's happening in a single movie with innumerable other future projects. And it also has structural constraints that stop it from being what I'm looking for in my entertainment right now. It's meant for children to watch and thus the movies never get as complex or experimental as movies for adults do; the movies are "action" movies full of unrealistic violence; practically every movie is about superheroes rather than thinkers, families, systems, etc.

About four years ago I was so intrigued by "Hey Ho" by thuviaptarth that I dove into the fandom and watched the extant MCU movies. And I got a bunch out of that! But it feels like the marginal returns are diminishing, and I'm going to cut my losses.

I saw the Sandra Bullock thriller The Net at some point not long after its initial release. Yesterday I rewatched it with my spouse (who'd never seen it) and realized I remembered nearly none of it. It's trying to say something kind of interesting, and the giant technical inaccuracies and TV movie-level plotting/characterization/cinematography aside, there's still something there worth watching.

(This is a kind of successor post to my review of Antitrust, another Internet-centric thriller from a few years later.)

Angela Bennett (Sandra Bullock) is a schlubby, isolated beta tester who lives in Los Angeles, works remotely for a San Francisco software firm, and is about to go on her first vacation in six years when her colleague tells her about a weird new virus-or-something. She forgets about it until she starts to get hunted -- the dude she meets on vacation tries to kill her, all records of her existence seem to be scrambled or lost, etc. All that you can probably get from the trailer.

Some disjointed responses follow.

( spoilers )

(Capsule review by my spouse at his blog.)

I saw ads for this on Indian TV around Republic Day and thought, cool, sort of Wonder Woman action vibes plus a martial-arts-dance sequence plus anticolonialism! It's a big enough blockbuster that it's showing in some NYC theaters, so I took my spouse plus a couple friends to it the other night.

The friends in question are white, and one of them likes big action movies (we see the MCU together) but is pretty ignorant of history, especially world history. So I prepped them, double-checking that they did know that the British occupied India for basically most of the 19th century, and that we weren't too keen on that. I didn't want to spoil them for the film but I wasn't sure of exactly what events would be covered in the film. So I told them: I'm pretty sure that this film assumes you know that, in 1857, there was a rebellion against British rule. From the fact that India got its independence in 1947, you may infer that this rebellion didn't work out for us. So, British rule depended on a middle management layer of locals, including Indian clerks and Indian soldiers called sepoys.... And I explained the bit about the cartridges.

And we wondered what exposition would happen -- would there be a Star Wars-style info crawl at the start explaining who/what/when/where? Nope! More like, halfway through the movie, you see some soldiers and an onscreen caption reading "Cartridges were sent...." and then, mutiny montage. So I unknowingly guessed THE EXACT RIGHT chunk of history to preload into my friends' heads so they weren't COMPLETELY at sea.

But of course I could see/hear some other messages that they couldn't. Like how Manikarnika was being positioned as a kind of figurative avatar of Kali or Durga. Or the chanting of "Har Har Mahadev" (anodyne English subtitle: "Victory is ours"; actually an invocation to Lord Shiva so specifically Hindu that Hindus yell it during anti-Muslim pogroms and chanted it during Partition violence, and it's super noteworthy when Muslims say it as part of a "communal harmony" initiative). The anti-casteism message (the scene where the villager serves Laximbai milk) is tiny, and the "hey Muslims were a huge part of the mutiny!" message feels practically nonexistent. And yeah that closing where there's an Aum symbol written in fire on the ground (also sort of end-of-Ramayana Sita imagery, as I read it). And the pointed scene where the Queen of Jhansi rescues a calf from being slaughtered (read: only awful barbarians might want to kill and eat cattle!). And all the treason and betrayal by other Indians, and all the "motherland" and "we try peace but we'll fight to defend ourselves" and "honor" and "so awesome to have a chance to be a martyr!" talk. This is a disturbing movie. It has fun bits in it, it has moving bits in it, but I came away distressed.

See, I haven't seen Lagaan* in a while, but in Lagaan, all the Indians work together. All castes, Muslims and Hindus together, women and men together, a guy with a disability turns out to be an amazing pitcher, and so on. Aamir Khan's character shows some leadership and you get a lot of training montages and it's about beating violent coercion with excellence and discipline and cleverness. Manikarnika is not like that. Manikarnika is about the joy of killing British soldiers, about the indivisible pride of the motherland and the people on/from it, and about a vision of Hindu nationalism that has no room for Ambedkar or Gandhi. And this is a huge blockbuster hit in a country that means a lot to me.

I need to read Harleen Singh's The Rani of Jhansi: Gender, History and Fable in India (Cambridge University Press, 2014) or a similar work before I say: this movie is historically inaccurate. And it weirds me out that it's hard for me to find reviews where people talk in depth about what's going on in this movie, politically. Is it all happening in Hindi, which I don't know and can't read? Am I completely misreading it? Is it not even worth explicating because it's so obvious to every Indian sourcelander watching it? (Indian news sources do point out that this seems almost part of a BJP pre-election campaign push.)

I'm worried, you know? Maybe one reason I'm not seeing people talk about this online is because they're afraid of retribution.

* I could swear that one of the British officers in Manikarnika is played by the same guy who played the main villain in Lagaan. IMDb seems to disagree. Maybe it's just similar facial hair.