Spoiler Alerts if you haven’t seen Lost in Translation.

Lost in Translation is almost a good film but it’s just not good. Sometimes a film boils down to one plot point that can decide where you stand on it forever. For me, Lost in Translation had to make a decision. Was it: a), a film about a platonic relationship between two people at different points in their lives who had something to learn from one another, or b), a shitty film about a romance. And in reality, the closer it strayed towards option b without crossing the line into romance the more interesting it could have been. It was a high risk game and it fucking botched it at the last minute.  The end result is weird.

I really don’t want to devote too much time or though to this so I’m just going to bullet point some thoughts.

• The kiss ruins the film. At best it takes away from the mystery of the romance and at worst it’s a plot line cop out that takes the rug out from underneath an interesting look at friendship. Debatable but stupid.
• I’ll never understand Bill Murray as some kind of alternative romantic lead.
• Scarlett Johansson was pretty good.
• There are some weird racist moments.
• I like Giovanni Ribisi. It felt like there was a lot there that could have been explored but not going into it was good for the context of his relationship with Scarlett Johansson’s character and the uncertainty she feels about him.

That’s it for this one. Didn’t like it so not going to get to into it. I’m going to do a second post today about music.

An after note: I wrote this on the day of the title’s date. I’m not sure why it didn’t post originally, but since I’m not at a point where I feel like sharing these things yet, a lack of feedback for this post didn’t seem out of place. It was only when I came back to post today that anything seemed out of place. So here it is…

Sometimes it’s tough to have a whinge about something in writing. If I was complaining in conversation, I would happily name and shame people all over the place, but I think writing something critical about people you don’t know can be a shitty thing to do if they aren’t hurting anyone.

But then sometimes I just want to complain about things.

I was reading about a song that I like and I came across an interview where the artist spoke about the meaning of the song. The song was based on their reaction to reading an article by someone I had never heard of. The article was about the role of men in teaching younger men. It’s an idea I find interesting because I think the only way to deal with toxic masculinity is by engaging with and looking at male role models. The author turned out to be a famous and critically acclaimed guy who deals with these kind of themes. The thing about it is the original interview never said what the name of the article was. And that’s fine,  but what’s not fine is that the same exact thing is said in loads of interviews with the artist without anyone ever finding out the name of the article. I think what I find so crappy about it is the lack of curiosity and research and I think it really gives you a look behind the curtain of interviewing. The writers have to say shit is interesting and cool but it’s obviously just information they got from a press release or that they stole from another interview. Fuck that, man. It’s either laziness or falseness and both are bullshit.

It feels unfair to segue into talking about Mute now, but at the same time it makes sense. Mute has good characters, a good cast, a good universe, a good idea and then just a weak story. I think sometimes films are written like that and they put all their attention into those first parts and then forget a story.  Mute should be really cool, but it’s not  doing the hard work. The characters are deadly. Leo, played by Alexander Skarsgård, is the mute of the title and he’s a classic sci fi/ comic book cool protagonist. The fact that he can’t talk is bad ass. It always is in these type of stories. Cactus, played by Paul Rudd, is great and the way he develops is fun and uses Paul Rudd’s likeability and charisma really well. Justin Theroux is in there as a weirdo too and I generally think he’s great. Robert Sheehan and Dominic Monaghan are floating around in the kind of way that really shows you that Duncan Jones can get people to do weird little roles. The universe is cool. It’s a futuristic Berlin. There’s Cold War tones and American military in there. It looks great.

But then the story is only ok. It’s there, but it’s nothing incredible. In truth, it almost wants to be Guy Ritchie caper. Leo is following clues and then there’s a twist that’s been hiding right in front of the viewer the whole time. It’s just not as smart as it thinks it is. The film is actually saved by the fact that reviews for it are terrible, because it’s not as bad as the critics say. It’s just not great and kinda lacking in substance.

Well it’s been a long gap since I last wrote. Last week was a one of those weeks where you fight just to get to the end. You can’t do anything other than the unavoidable. So in my case, I worked, I ran and I played Call of Duty online with my friends. To be fair, that’s pretty good going – work, exercise and social interaction (as far as anyone can socialize). It has meant that my productive plans took a back seat, but hey, you gotta stay alive. On the film side of things I have a bit of a build up of things to write about so I think this will be a long entry with my general thoughts on life and the first film and then there will probably be a couple of short entries over the next few days to catch up.

I’ve been trying hard to be productive so I don’t lose my mind. Over the weekend I cleaned out the garden shed with my mom. It wasn’t a massive job but we really sorted it out and once it was done I really felt like I’d earned my time sitting around. When I can’t go anywhere I really get cabin fever from just sitting around so getting things done prevents that. I’m also trying to mix up my relaxing time. I’ve been trying to watch more films instead of playing FIFA. FIFA is a real crutch for me because it’s so mindless but I always feel like it’s such a waste because there is no substance to it. I’ll always prefer a narrative to FIFA but FIFA is always the easiest thing to go to. I’m trying to break it up by playing more guitar and I am getting back into the swing of that. I’m focusing on songs I can sing along to because I’m a shitty guitar player and I love a sing song. I’m saving up some musical thoughts for a later post so I’ll park that there.

One of the best things I’ve done with my time lately was watching Manchester by the Sea. It is the saddest thing I’ve ever seen. I was recommending it to someone and they asked what it was about and my explanation was a sad thing happens to a man who gets sad and then another sad thing happens to him forcing him to deal with his original sadness and more new sadness. It’s the bleakest thing I’ve seen in a long time but it’s incredible. Casey Affleck is great. He plays a man, Lee Chandler, whose brother dies and he has to come back to his hometown to look after his nephew. His performance is really understated and he really suits the role. I think part of what I like is that things aren’t over explained. People’s emotions are conveyed by actions and they don’t have to tell you what they feel or think. The scene where Lee arrives at the hospital when his brother has died is great. The doctor is telling Lee about what happened and he interrupts him and just says “fuck this”. I think it feels like a real reaction. Casey Affleck really makes Lee seem like a man who is really trying to hold his shit together and is struggling. There is a scene at the end that feels like the conclusion to the story that is really powerful. I’m not going to get into it because it needs to be seen. If anyone ever reads this and has seen the film reach out to talk about it because it’s incredible and I could talk about it for ages but I really don’t want to ruin it.

Thinking of some little notes that I liked, the setting is New England again. Afflecks and New England is no surprise I suppose. We’re outside Boston this time. It’s a city by the sea and it’s funny, it’s so picturesque and dramatic that it reminded me of a Wes Anderson film. Obviously it’s the tonal opposite though.

The kid is great too. He’s played by Lucas Hedges. He works very well with Casey Affleck and there’s times when he’s a little bollocks and times where you really get him. His band are terrible.

Michelle Williams has a great scene later in the film that really changes the course of the story. Again, she’s very understated and she’s exactly what the role needed.

I really liked it. It’s not an easy watch but it’s 100% worth it.

This was the week that I lost it. I’m having a lot of trouble with the lack of control I have over my own life. It’s something I’ve always struggled with I think. When I was younger and I felt I had to deal with things that I didn’t want to deal with, I used to do mad things like cut my own hair or shave off beards. As I’ve grown older and it’s become less socially acceptable to make manic changes to one’s appearance, I’ve moved on to spending money that I shouldn’t or just being a bastard when I’m stressed out by things I’m supposed to do but don’t want to. Being a contrary prick isn’t really a sustainable lifestyle, so as I’ve become more aware of the signs that that’s where I’m heading I’ve tried to make changes.

Considering I’ve been in lockdown for three weeks, I’m doing alright. The middle of this week was tough though. I’ve been working on the same thing in work for a long time and it had been acting as a constant for me in these weird times. It was like the world was upside down but at least work was staying the same. This week I had to move on to something new and urgent so I really felt under pressure for a few days. I ended up in terrible form from Wednesday to Friday morning. I’m not sure what changed for me to go back to normal, but I’m feeling fine again. When I was in shitty form, all my plans went out the window. I’ve been making lists everyday of what I need to do and of what I did the day before so I’ve really felt like I’m getting things done but that all stopped.

That’s why I’m writing this now. I watched Nightcrawler on Monday. I tried to watch it once before a few years ago but I found it too uncomfortable so I gave up. It was worth persevering with. It’s creepy and gross and Jake Gyllenhaal’s character, Lou, is repulsive. He’s a bizarre creation, made of a combination of unreasonable confidence and determination, naivety and insanity. He reminds me of lots of people I’ve encountered who seem smart but turn out to just have read things online. Basically, what you see as he becomes successful is that the only thing holding these people back is the authority they act with. There’s a line where shamelessly faking it til you make it just becomes doing it. He’s a mad character when you think about it. He has no back story and that’s intentional on the part of the film makers and it does make him more mysterious. He has no conscience and pushes for his goals no matter what. He has the capacity for violence but he’s invested in getting into a legal career.

My favourite scene is where Lou is offered the job running his rival’s second van. It’s a weird scene, Jake Gyllenhaal doesn’t do a whole lot of talking. Watching it back as I write, I like Lou’s clothes throughout the film. He has a very consistent style, preppy but cool. Bill Paxton is great. I like that he keeps calling Lou “Brah”. The scene shows the change in Lou. He would have killed for the offer at the beginning of the film but by this point he has outgrown it.

I liked Nightcrawler a lot. I have a lot of time for Jake Gyllenhaal and I always wanted to come back and watch it. I guess all it took was a pandemic.

I’m getting a bit restless in lockdown. I’ve had two bad facial hair experiments so far. I’m  resisting the urge to try to cut my hair. My sleep pattern has slipped this weekend so my routine is messed up. It’s tough to focus on work when working from home but at least it gives a bit of routine. I feel for anyone who doesn’t have an enforced structure on their days in this crazy time. I know there’s people dealing with emergency services and things who have it worse, but there’s a real danger of losing your grip in this weird lockdown world. The kids who live next door to me have been pretty inspiring. I’m pretty sure they’ve just bounced on their trampoline and laughed for the last four weeks and that’s some good work when you’re a kid who can’t go outside.

I watched Argo on Saturday night. More Ben Affleck. It’s good. Not as good as The Town but it’s good. Ben Affleck had very bad hair and I found that distracting. I think part of the problem is the tidied true story. It’s based on real events but things are tidied up to make it something else. It’s like on the sound engineer’s board of levels they crank up the dials marked “Angry Iranians” and “Heroic Americans” and turn down “Help from other countries” and “Ben Affleck isn’t Hispanic”. It’s funny that something based on a true story can seem not real. I think it suffers by comparison to The Town and maybe having seen the two so close together took something away from Argo.

It is good though. Ben Affleck is great except for his hair. The rest of the cast are good. John Goodman and Alan Arkin are entertaining. The excellently named Scoot McNairy is good as the complainy hostage. To give the film credit, the final third is a rolling series of very good and tense scenes cutting across all the various characters playing their parts in the caper which works very well.

I think my next project for this blog will be to put together a rankings list to compare the films I’ve written about. I need to do some thinking into how that will work. There’s some ambitious options but there’s always the danger I’ll give up and just use a spread sheet. So far everything I’ve written about in this incarnation of the blog has been something I hadn’t seen before so I don’t have to worry about rewatch value and value of surprise in my ratings but that’ll be something to consider as well. We’ll see how it goes.

In the meantime, I will continue to write about any films I watch and the ideas I have about them and I might have some thoughts on music in the next few days.

 

Netflix is a load of shit really isn’t it? I’m looking for things to watch and it’s all multi episode documentaries and shitty Netflix originals films. It’s just aimed at the lowest common denominator, nothing anyone ever wanted but things that can go on in the background.

I tried to watch “The Irishman” and I lasted 18 minutes. It’s just some jobs for the lads shite . It’s like “Ocean’s Eleven”, the only people who wanted that film were the people in it and people who are obsessed with liking the correct films. If your favourite film is a Scorsese then you need to go do a gap year and grow a personality. “The Irishman” is too fucking long. It’s arrogant to think you deserve people’s attention for that long in one setting. The opening 20 minutes is Old Man Robert De Niro, telling a story about Not As Old Robert De Niro, remembering a story about Younger Robert De Niro. At that point, I don’t care. And it just looks like “Arctic Express” with Tom Hanks.

So somehow after all that I ended up watching “You Were Never Really Here” with Joaquin Phoenix. I liked it, but there’s a lot to think about from it. It’s short, which you might have noticed is a positive quality to me right now. It’s less than 90 minutes and it’s almost exclusively Joaquin Phoenix. I think I like him as an actor. He’s generally pretty solid in things, but, between this and “Joker”, I wouldn’t bet against “Taxi Driver” being the only film he’s ever seen.

The mad thing to me was that as I was watching the film my opinion changed. Up until about half way through I thought it was a bit of a lazy idea. It had a 90s comic book vibe of these cool anti hero cliches with a bit of John Wick noble gruesome violence on top. But then it snapped back to reality. I don’t want to ruin anything but I also don’t feel like it’s a real twisty kind of film. To keep it vague, it involves underage sex trafficking by influential white guys in America. The response of the “bad guys” seems overly powerful and very black and white evil. But then I remembered Jeffrey Epstein and suddenly it became much more real.  I feel like if I’d watched this pre-2019 it wouldn’t have had the same impact on me at all.

Two scenes I liked:

When Joe fights the police officer in the hotel room with the mirror on the ceiling. Visually nice while also very brutal.

When the man dies in Joe’s kitchen. Intense.

That’s it. I’m feeling cabin fever-y. I’m trying to eat well and exercise while working from home and it’s all getting on top of me. I’m going to go play a board game.

I’ve reached the second Saturday of the COVID19 lockdown and I haven’t lost my mind. I am running a lot but that was a strangely timed coincidence because I’d been running for a few weeks before any of this started. I like to think I’m not the butt of the jokes about people who’ve started running all the time during the lockdown but I definitely am.

Up until now, I’ve been happy enough to just drift along and do whatever I want with my free time. I’m still working but I’m not commuting so there’s extra time there and I’m obviously not socialising outside of my home so there’s a lot of time there. So I’ve been running and playing guitar and doing the group Skype calls and playing games over discord.

Now, I’ve reached the point where I need a bit of order and structure to avoid getting restless and grumpy. So I’ve thought about what I always say I don’t have time to do. This blog is one of those things. I like writing about music and film but once my routine for writing breaks I always feel like I need to tidy the blog up before I go back to it. Part of that has always been trying to find gimmicks or niches and writing for themes. The plan now is just writing about thoughts and ideas on things.

Things in this case is “The Town”. I’m linking to Wikipedia for details because I love Wikipedia.

A couple of things came together for me to watch this on the second Saturday of lockdown.

Ben Affleck is an intriguing guy. He has the vibe of classic leading man but he has the ability to do gritty and interesting things and he has a real knack for fucking his own life up. He’s been in the back of my mind for a while. It all goes back to watching “Triple Frontier”. At the beginning, he’s a sad, washed up real estate agent going through some kind of divorce or separation and it really doesn’t seem like acting. He really was a sad man who couldn’t stop fucking up at that time.

I also went to Boston for the first time this year and my brother isliving there. America is so weird. It really is too big to be one country. The different states should be their own countries. I don’t really understand how places that are all so different can consider themselves one country. Makes no sense. Boston is fun. It was freezing cold and it snowed. We ate great food and we had a great time. It hadn’t been on my radar before but I think about Boston a lot more now.

“The Town” is very solid in my opinion. It’s not flashy and nobody seems like a hero. I think you can believe it as a film. Affleck is good and there’s a pretty decent cast. Blake Lively is good at being trashy. Jeremy Renner is good as a bastard. My conscious memory of him is Marvel based so he has always seemed really lame to me. It was fun to see him in this.

And there are nice details to it. I enjoyed the clothes and I liked the context of Boston – Townies, Toonies, Southies. I liked the robbery scenes. I loved the “We’re gonna hurt some people” scene. It’s so mechanical and they both know exactly what to do and how. It’s a good bit of character building.

I liked the whole thing. It’s not the best film I’ve ever seen and I’m not going to watch it over again but it’s solid and respectable and it’s good fun and that’s what I needed today.