Jay’s Take: Mulan 2020

A spoiler-heavy movie review.

mulan

In Disney’s ongoing venture to remake every property they’ve ever produced so as to hold the new generation upside-down by their ankles and shake all the money out of their pockets, here we have “Mulan”. You know already whether this is something you are going to watch, whether that be for the THIRTY DOLLARS Disney is asking its Plus subscribers right now to pay for the privilege (which was my burden to carry, thank my wife and pandemic-fatigue), or waiting until December when it will be available to anyone who uses the service and still gives a shit. Let’s get this out of the way right now: the $30 price-tag is obviously an experiment with no reasonable grounding in reality. When was the last time you paid $30 to see a movie in theatres? Even in my neck-of-the-woods, Cineplex’s shaky-seat D-BOX format is only $25, and you get a two-hour massage out of it too. Yes, I understand it could be worth it if you held a twenty-person viewing party (and so everyone is only retroactively-paying $1.50), but then your bigmouth neighbors would call bylaw enforcement and you would have a social gathering fine to worry about (which we were told could be in the thousands, but obviously depends on where you live and who you know). If Disney is successful in getting enough of their subscribers to pay, then it will be a dark day for movies-on-film champions like Chris Nolan: you could be looking at a multi-billion-dollar enterprise cutting out struggling theatre chains with a pricier alternative. Know what else isn’t grounded in reality? Mulan 2020.

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yuanda

A poem.

like waters before us,
I pictured a wall
that would separate us from them.

at first I thought my force of will had faded
until
a barricade, a band-aid
contrived by those we stood-fast to reject.

and while their wall was never meant for us,
but them, to keep us outsiders at bay,
I claim it, in Our name.

now they can never take it away.

//jf 9.9.2020

 

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Jay’s Take: Tenet

A spoiler-heavy movie review.

tenet_new

Happy 100th Cumulative Post!

I have created a monster. I knew that my wife loved movies before we got serious, but all my talk of the Hollywood machine has permanently-ruined the conversations we have about what we watch together. Take, for instance, Christopher Nolan’s latest: “Tenet”. For a director who shies-away from the immediate-aftermath of violence, I was pretty surprised with how much violence against women was in the film: specifically against its leading lady Katherine, played by Elizabeth Debicki (who – ironically – praised the ground Nolan walks on in the theatre pre-show). Her character is married to the Big Baddie of the piece: a Russian arms dealer named Andrei, played by the superlative Kenneth Branagh; and her release from her husband’s abusive bondage plays prominently in the choices our unnamed lead (Denzel Washington’s son John David) makes in the film. I told my wife that the scenes of domestic abuse were unnecessary: I figured Nolan had done enough to show how ruthless and evil Andrei was without giving our otherwise-unfeeling hero the personal attachment in saving the battered wife. My wife, on the other hand, suggested that the extra-violence was because some European (and even Russian) audiences expect that gratuitousness as it fits in with their cinematic culture: she even cited the rape scenes from the Swedish version of “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo”, and how they were toned-down for the American remake. I said that Nolan probably has Final Cut now (after how much money he’s made Warner in the last 15-years), and the studio would be contractually-obligated to leave him alone and let him put whatever he wants in his movies without interference, even if that meant deliberately changing certain things for a foreign audience.

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let it go

A short story.

“A widower takes audacious measures to overcome his personal guilt over his partner’s death.”

“Did she make you cry
Make you break down
And shatter your illusions of love?
And is it over now?
Do you know how?
Pick up the pieces and go home.”

– “Gold Dust Woman” by Stevie Nicks

*

That night, Trevor watched The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and the next morning he called-in sick to work. Rachel Brosnahan. She looked just like her, only without the blond hair. He had watched the season from the beginning, and it was funny and painful in equal measure. And then there was the flashback, to when Midge did have blond hair, and it was like he was instantly-transported to his past. He couldn’t even pay attention to the show: he was so transfixed by this celebrity, this actress, out of his reach; a candle to his former flame. An imitation. As the show played, he reclined further in to the couch with his bottle of Wiser’s. He couldn’t remember the last time he touched his glass but he knew he was too-far-gone to reach for it now. From bottle to glass. He took a swig and let the TV carry on while his eyes darted around his living room of their own accord, looking for anything to rest on that wasn’t her. Why was he still watching? Because it was like a photograph he never took. A post he never saved. She was an idea, and then Rachel made her real again. It was coming up on ten years since Liz had died and try as he may there wasn’t any way to get around it. To relax. To take his mind off of her. Elizabeth Greer. Every show he turned to seemed to be a love story. His coffee table was strewn with artifacts from a life he knew before: trinkets from other girls that stood testament to missed opportunities; books he had stopped reading who knows how long ago, when his memory began its deadly choke-hold. That was the only way he was able to remember her now; her face, her manner: through the eyes of people paid to mock him and his affliction, as far as he was concerned. Rachel was beautiful in her own way but paled in comparison to Liz.

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Jay’s Take: Unhinged

A spoiler-heavy movie review.

unhinged

The biggest piece of criticism I can level at “Unhinged” – the Russell Crowe-vehicle that has the dissimilitude of being one of the first major releases after the Coronavirus lockdown – was that there simply was not enough screaming from its cast. Or yelling. Or raised voices at all, really. When I was still in my early-1s (10 or 11), I would lay prone at the top of the stairs that separated the second-and-third floors of our family’s home and listen to the movies that my parents would be watching downstairs while I was supposed to be in-bed sleeping. If you went by my word then, I would have thought all they ever watched were horror movies, because all I heard from my perch was 90% screaming. I don’t even know why I bothered: the volume was never loud enough to actually discern any dialogue, so I would literally only ever be hearing swelling music cues, gunshots, and screaming. I’m blown away just thinking about how many nights I would be there, through how many movies, fascinated by the idea of what they could be watching. And screaming always sounds more painful when it’s out-of-context.

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