Category Archives: Movies

Super Bowls, Past and Present

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Sioux Headdress

Last night’s Super Bowl is now one for the record books. Overall, it was a good game. The Chiefs won. The first half was a bit of a sleeper and could have been skipped. I guess that is why they tacked on a third half at the end. The commercials were rather meh. Taylor did not get engaged. Beyoncé broke the internet, again. Did I miss anything? I guess that I was still keyed up over the close game, because afterwards, I watched a movie about football. American Underdog is the story of Kurt Warner and the role that he played in winning the Super Bowl here in Saint Louis. This biopic stars Zachary Levi as Warner. Levi is more famous for his more recent Shazam superhero movies. Costarring is Anna Paquin as Brenda Warner. The movie dwells on Warner’s football beginnings, with emphasis on his stint playing arena football. Eventually, he was noticed by the Rams. After a tryout, he was signed. When the Rams’ starting quarterback was injured, he stepped in and stepped up to lead the team to victory, as part of the so called “Greatest Show on Turf.”

Dumb Money

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GameStop

Netflix has just dropped Dumb Money. This movie tells the story of the 2021 fight over the video game company GameStop. This battle began when some Wall Street insiders tried to takeout GameStop by shorting its stock. They viewed GameStop as the next Blockbuster, a zombie company operating under an out-of-date business model. They were stopped by a rag-tag army of small investors, who drove up the company’s stock price. The insiders were betting that GameStop’s stock price would go down. However, the small investors were buying up GameStop’s stock, causing its price to rise, which caused the insiders to lose a lot of their own money when their margins were called. The film’s title comes from the derisive name that Wall Street insiders label these small investors with. They are looked down on and viewed as prey. This story plays out against the backdrop of the pandemic, so there are a lot of Zoom meetings. Dumb Money is similar to another movie about Wall Street, The Big Short. That movie was about the 2008 Great Recession. In that movie there were more losers than winners, but in this movie the good guys win.

The Portable Door

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Ivan Navarro, Untitled

You know those service agreements that no one ever reads, the ones where everyone scroll to the bottom and just clicks accept? The Portable Door is a cautionary tale about those agreements and the unread fine print that they may contain. What if some nefarious company has inserted into the standard legal boilerplate a promise for something important, like your soul? 

Synopsis:

Paul Carpenter (Patrick Gibson) and Sophie Pettingel (Sophie Wilde) are lowly, put-upon interns who begin working at the mysterious London firm J.W. Wells & Co. and become increasingly aware that their employers are anything but conventional. Charismatic villains Humphrey Wells (Christoph Waltz), the CEO of the company, and middle manager Dennis Tanner (Sam Neill) are disrupting the world of magic by bringing modern corporate strategy to ancient magical practices, and Paul and Sophie discover the vast corporation’s true agenda.

This Harry Potteresque bit of YA fiction is a pleasant treat on a cold winter’s night. This all-Australian production provides an inkling of what graduates of Hogwarts must likely contend with, when they have to live in the real world. The titular door is a magical device that can transport one anywhere that they wish. As an aside there is a nice montage that appears in the movie after Paul and Sophie have unlocked the doors secrets that could have doubled for the movie version of the New York Times travel section’s annual 52 Places article.

She Is Conann[e]

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Fierce!

Who’s this? You don’t know Conann[e]?

I want to live. To get revenge. [Look out!]

You will become the most barbaric of barbarians. [My barbarian queen!]

Hey, Conann[e]. Do you know who I am?

No. […and I’m not sure I want to.]

I’m you. I am you in ten years, Conann[e].

A different era. A different life. Killing one’s youth is the pinnacle of barbarism.

Apart my vengeance, I had no other perspectives. I would have done anything to go back in time and choose another path.

If love is brutal with you, be brutal in return. [Look out, Mark!]

Do you have regrets?  An ocean of regrets. [Ane one of them is you, Mark.]

“In a barbaric fantasy sci-fi trip through time, sword-and-sorcery mythology is bent, fractured, and gender-swapped by master visionary Bertrand Mandico in his third feature epic. Six lives, six eras, and six deaths mark Conann[e]’s poetic journey through different incarnations and lesbian loves,” the synopsis reads.

An experimental French filmmaker known for his provocative body of work, She is Conann[e] serves as Mandico’s third experimental film following the deeply bizarre The Wild Boys and the award-winning After Blue. Described as an “even greater handmade homage” to the auteur’s previous projects, She is Conann[e]’s influences include Tony Scott’s The Hunger, Federico Fellini’s Satyricon, and Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter. The film also drew inspiration from Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s entire works. In addition to Löwensohn as Rainer and Julia Riedler as Sanja, playing the many facets of Conann[e] are Claire Duburcq (After Blue), Christa Théret (Renoir), Sandra Parfait (Lupin), Nathalie Richard (After Love), and Françoise Brion (L’Immortelle). She is Conann[e]’s theatrical run will commence on February 2, 2024, premiering at select Alamo Drafthouse locations and at the Anthology Film Archive in New York City. Other screening locations include Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, Denver, and more.

In the Time of Plague

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Cate Blanchett in Manifesto

What is going around now? I do not know, but we got it. We are sick, again. Anne went to a concert Saturday night and awoke the next day feel ill. Yesterday, it was all-day couch-potato-land for her. Today, I have begun displaying some symptoms too. We must have a good marriage, because we share everything. Looking for a graphic to accompany this post, I delved into the archives. Searching for “plague”. I found this photo. It is from 2019, taken at the Hirshhorn and features the actress Cate Blanchett.

It is a screen grab of a segment of the 2017 movie Manifesto, in which she stared. A movie that I have not seen. In the museum, this movie was displayed as a video artwork. Blanchett is featured, in thirteen different guises, as thirteen separate films, which were running simultaneously on monitors strew around the gallery. The movie and this artwork explore how artists use manifestos to engage with the political and social issues of their time and how contemporary practices still employ art as a tool in the making of history. 

In this scene she is seen wearing a bunny suit and a pained expression. I do not know why I translated this image into being sick, except that I first used it during the pandemic. What little notes I have about this picture describe it as being a manifesto about Supernaturalism¹ and Constructivism², two -isms that I know nothing about. Rereading this post, I am amazed at the rabbit hole that I have traveled. There may be another couch, one with my name on it for today. 

  1. Supernaturalism holds that existence itself is miraculous, that life contains elements of wonder that cannot be defined or eradicated by science.
  2. Constructivism is the theory that says learners construct knowledge rather than just passively take in information. As people experience the world and reflect upon those experiences, they build their own representations and incorporate new information into their pre-existing knowledge (schemas).

Twelfth Night

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Viola & Orsino and Sebastian & Olivia and Toby & Maria

On Thursday night, we attended the Shakespeare Festival in Forest Park. This year’s production is Twelfth Night. Along with Joanie, we braved both bad air and unusually cold temperatures, because the show must go on. Twelfth Night is a comedy that supposedly got its name, because it was first performed for Elizabeth during Christmastime and no better title came to Shakespeare’s mind. This Shakespeare comedy includes romance, humor, masqueraded identities, gender switching roles and lots of partying. Naturally then, this production was moved from its traditional European locale to Miami. With its live band, the show is heavily laden with Latin music, giving it along with the play’s many colorful costumes a distinct South Beach vibe.

At intermission, when the audience turned their phones back on, we were greeted with the news of the new inditements. Later, I learned that the perp walk was scheduled to also occur in Miami. Finally, following his inditements, the perp-in-chief lashed out at the special prosecutor and his wife, Katy Chevigny, the later whom he termed his biggest hater of all. I do not understand how Ms. Chevigny has incurred so much of his ire, because she is best known as a producer of the Michelle Obama documentary, Becoming, a film biography of Ms. Obama’s book tour for her autobiography of the same name. This morning, I watched this film. It mentions the perp by name only once, while Michelle is recounting their last night in the Whitehouse. Her daughters plead with her for an impromptu sleepover that night. She eventually relents, but not before warning her girls that they would need to be ready to go in the morning, because the Trumps are coming.

In Twelfth Night, by the end of the fifth act the confusion that propelled the play’s plot has been cleared. All the couples have been paired and after the curtain call, the audience is sent on its way to the beat of one more Latin musical number. If only real life could be so well scripted. Chevigny’s documentary was a joy to watch too. It was nice to be reminded of all the hope and joy that accompanied the Obamas. Especially, after what followed it.