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Media week in review + Wally
Jan. 27th, 2024 09:24 am1) Saw the first Paul Thomas Anderson movie Hard Eight, the latest in the neo-noir series. It kicked ass. Philip Baker Hall was reliably a blend of fatherly gentleness and hard-case intimidating, and it was cool to see what I thought of as signature camera moves or framing from Boogie Nights or Magnolia in this teeny, stripped-down movie. Also cool: a brief appearance by a young Philip Seymour Hoffman. It was the Philip Seymour Hoffman of Twister more than it was the Flawless/Happiness/Capote era, all wild comedic energy, a little grating (which worked here for the dangerous unpredictable vibe Hard Eight was going for, as opposed to...whatever mess (I say that with nostalgic love) was happening in Twister).
There's an upcoming Albert Brooks double-header and a Harvey Keitel retrospective at this theater, so forewarned is forearmed.
2) Watched Love Birds because someone Tumbld about it and someone else had watched it at some point and was surprised I hadn't. I have to say: Rhys wasn't the one I was following around at the start of Our Flag Means Death. Certainly, once I started watching it, I went back and watched Flight of the Conchords, which I clearly had not watched beginning to end. I feel like maybe I said this one other place but: I primarily knew Rhys as the NPC in the Dwayne/Kevin Hart Jumanji movies. I very much enjoyed what Jesse Thorn once described as "doing his Rhys Darby thing" in that movie.
Blah blah blah, Love Birds was charming if a little sloppy/inexplicably loaded with multiple story threads--I never did manage to figure out why we had to have a rich friend who bonked Doug's girlfriend who was also losing his financial shirt?--and for how generally handsome Rhys Darby is in that Southern Hemisphere white guy way (see also: Russell Crowe), he was, like, PEAK handsome in this. Maybe it was just the construction guy wardrobe.
3) Tried to do what the OFMD renew crew kids are telling me to do and choosing the first thing Netflix recommends when you type in Our Flag Means Death... which is The Sandman. Uh, so I'm, like 12 minutes into the first ep of The Sandman. We'll see how this goes.
4) Ann, if you can see this after LAZERS: Julie and I are back at watching The Great. 3 eps in and we both have agreed Mariel is the one person we're pulling for. It's quite the tour de force for Nicholas Hoult, who never wants the viewer to be charmed by Peter but definitely doesn't mind if you laugh at what a dickhead he is. And Elle Fanning is wonderful, of course. Those Fanning ladies... it made me a little nostalgic, in a roundabout way, for The Alienist, where Dakota reigned supreme. I'd like a costume drama like The Alienist again.
Coming up soon: a 1960s Japanese neo-noir about the Yakuza (?), American Fiction, seeing Michael Shannon play the REM Murmur album, maybe starting Stranger Things S4 (this is my new Succession... I'll keep saying it FOR YEARS AND YEARS; then one day it'll just happen and shock everyone, especially me), maybe read a fucking book, for God's sake.
And WALLY: Mr. High Pockets, who is sitting next to me on the couch right now, bit my feet this morning. He was playing. God, I wish he wouldn't. Anyway, I kept thinking to myself that Wally's 1 year anniversary of living here with the rest of us was coming up. I could've sworn I got him from the shelter in February. But on a recent Instagram scroll, I discovered it was late March. Just as a pandemic will compress time on you, so does grief. Boy, that two months was a sleepwalking stretch for sure. Anyway happy nearly 1 year to Wally High Pockets, a buff-colored gentleman who bites feet, has a tail like a caveman club, and is happy to be with all the other cats. He's a nice dude. Except for the feet biting.
There's an upcoming Albert Brooks double-header and a Harvey Keitel retrospective at this theater, so forewarned is forearmed.
2) Watched Love Birds because someone Tumbld about it and someone else had watched it at some point and was surprised I hadn't. I have to say: Rhys wasn't the one I was following around at the start of Our Flag Means Death. Certainly, once I started watching it, I went back and watched Flight of the Conchords, which I clearly had not watched beginning to end. I feel like maybe I said this one other place but: I primarily knew Rhys as the NPC in the Dwayne/Kevin Hart Jumanji movies. I very much enjoyed what Jesse Thorn once described as "doing his Rhys Darby thing" in that movie.
Blah blah blah, Love Birds was charming if a little sloppy/inexplicably loaded with multiple story threads--I never did manage to figure out why we had to have a rich friend who bonked Doug's girlfriend who was also losing his financial shirt?--and for how generally handsome Rhys Darby is in that Southern Hemisphere white guy way (see also: Russell Crowe), he was, like, PEAK handsome in this. Maybe it was just the construction guy wardrobe.
3) Tried to do what the OFMD renew crew kids are telling me to do and choosing the first thing Netflix recommends when you type in Our Flag Means Death... which is The Sandman. Uh, so I'm, like 12 minutes into the first ep of The Sandman. We'll see how this goes.
4) Ann, if you can see this after LAZERS: Julie and I are back at watching The Great. 3 eps in and we both have agreed Mariel is the one person we're pulling for. It's quite the tour de force for Nicholas Hoult, who never wants the viewer to be charmed by Peter but definitely doesn't mind if you laugh at what a dickhead he is. And Elle Fanning is wonderful, of course. Those Fanning ladies... it made me a little nostalgic, in a roundabout way, for The Alienist, where Dakota reigned supreme. I'd like a costume drama like The Alienist again.
Coming up soon: a 1960s Japanese neo-noir about the Yakuza (?), American Fiction, seeing Michael Shannon play the REM Murmur album, maybe starting Stranger Things S4 (this is my new Succession... I'll keep saying it FOR YEARS AND YEARS; then one day it'll just happen and shock everyone, especially me), maybe read a fucking book, for God's sake.
And WALLY: Mr. High Pockets, who is sitting next to me on the couch right now, bit my feet this morning. He was playing. God, I wish he wouldn't. Anyway, I kept thinking to myself that Wally's 1 year anniversary of living here with the rest of us was coming up. I could've sworn I got him from the shelter in February. But on a recent Instagram scroll, I discovered it was late March. Just as a pandemic will compress time on you, so does grief. Boy, that two months was a sleepwalking stretch for sure. Anyway happy nearly 1 year to Wally High Pockets, a buff-colored gentleman who bites feet, has a tail like a caveman club, and is happy to be with all the other cats. He's a nice dude. Except for the feet biting.