Juror #2

I had heard good things about this film and watched it last night with a friend. It is a jury movie, except transposed in a way that 12 Angry Men has an additional complication. While in "12 Angry Men," it works as a closed room session which could be staged as a play production set, "Juror #2" needed to have the benefit of being a film.

The movie starts with Justin, a young guy with an expectant wife in her third trimester. The couple had experienced a miscarriage before this pregnancy and are still skittish about whether this time will go to term. Justin is summoned to Jury duty for a case in which a boyfriend and a girlfriend were arguing at a bar on a night with heavy rain. She walked off and was found in a ditch the following morning. The boyfriend is accused of being vindictive. But Justin in hearing the case is suddenly seized by a sinking feeling - he was at the bar that night.

It was the anniversary of the miscarriage and he was not wanting to bring that distress home. But he is also in AA recovery and is at risk of a relapse. On his way home from the bar, he hit something in the rain, but when he got out to check, it was too dark and rainy to see what it was.

And this is a high profile case, with the prosecutor wanting a conviction, as she is currently running for District Attorney and this would be a headline example.

So Justin is stuck by this unwelcome epiphany that he probably was the cause of this case, but is not sweating in the witness box facing a future of incarceration. Drama ensues.

This is a Clint Eastwood film, and so I was wondering how he wanted to resolve this story. He made his bones in western films, where there was justice and frontier justice. And you are following around this expectant father who finds himself responsible for an accident as a result of being in the wrong place at a bad time. Justin transgressed one of my mother's favorite parenting maxims of "Nothing good ever happens from being out late at night."

Does the film want to let our protagonist off the hook for his potential role? What is his responsibility to try to give this boyfriend a consideration of innocence? What about Justin's wife who would find herself effectively a single parent to an infant? What message or time does Clint want to leave with his audience as a guy who seems to want his films to carry hard truths?

 

No good path forward

Guilt carries weight of waiting 

How to save a life 

Holy Trinity (2019)

When I saw this feature pop up for a one night showing at a local independent theatre, the one line description of "A dominatrix gains the ability to communicate with the dead after huffing a mysterious aerosol can" got my attention for 'Why would you start with that premise and what are you wanting to explore with that?'

And the film appears to have spent the majority of its small budget on sets, props, and wardrobes, all of which had extreme contrast in aesthetic colors. But even as the editing style occasionally decided to go for a trippy and disorienting strobe effect, the film feels like it fits its intended purposes for its niche and target audience. It was interesting to see this film in a room of other people who felt seen and understood by the intentional visual cues and jokes through recognition and appreciation. For a stylistic choice, most of the brands throughout the movie are shown in pastel with words describing their contents. Some set pieces look uniquely distressed or modified, like a CRT TV set covered in a mane of white around the screen with shaving cream or flattened cotton balls. Or a store with the corporate tag of "Glamhag" which is also the name of the film's production company.

The cast and crew of this film looked like they were having a blast making it, as they delivered dialogue to one another in familiar tones and affects, like a group of friends deciding to amplify their mutual theatrical amusements with drama and posing. And the film's premise is absurd and plays in a heightened alternate world and setting apart from what feels connected to daily reality. But this filter on reality within the film underscores the tone of feeling like an alien having to process what normal would look like, with hypermundane branding of everyday items, and extravagant costuming. There are musical and dance performances being part of the fabric of what the film wants to display. There are extended set pieces and tangents which show flashback scenes and backstory of what drew the characters in the film to seek solace in deep and old wounds, roleplaying the scenarios to process, console, and control what had affected them.

At times the film feels extremely raw and intimate, like it is too much to display in terms of emotional and personal traumas being aired out like sticky clothing on a humid day. It is imperfect and fantastical in its dreams and yet leans into these areas even when difficult conversations must be had to resolve the characters' conflicting desires, and needing to reach out to others from humility for guidance.

Will I watch this again? Probably not, but it shows a world and perspective with an open hand and heart, one which asks some questions of joy, acceptance, and resistance against convenient conventions. The characters are messy, but delighted to participate in community with each other. It feels like a movie you would make with your talented friends and a ridiculous idea which made you laugh together and try to chase and tease out what it could do and where it could go. Speaking to the dead doesn't really go anywhere, but the experience and environment make a haunted impression of annoyed dynamically static landscape.

 

A canned response heard

An unusual echoed hum

When struck and blown out 

I saw the TV Glow (2024)

When I first saw press for this film, I was fascinated and intrigued. The dayglo visuals, the warped logic of a movie about an obsession with an in-world 90's TV show, the short window it was available in theaters and the gates to stream it.

My local library finally got a copy and I watched it tonight. I was not disappointed by the experience. It has elements of mystery, metaphor, and a pervasive surreality to it. The world feels like an alternate history with a in world show having the tropes of a 90s show in title font, blocking, camera, and dialogue. 

It reminds me of the Grindhouse project that Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarentino released in the mid 2000s as a love letter double feature to a time where that mystery b-movie night would be playing as standard fare in a secondhand movie theatre. 

This generation has the epherema with the fleeting nature of 90s tv shows which were greenlit with a gold rush of prime time tv and novelty. Some of which were able to be recorded by VHS.

The main characters of this film are Owen and Maddy the former being a seventh grader with overprotective parents who gave him a bedtime, and the latter being a cool teen girl who is standoffish, neglected by her parents and is quietly dogmatic about a show on the YOUNG ADULT NETWORK called "The Pink Opaque."

The show is about two teen girls who met in the pilot episode at a sleep away camp and became psychically linked to battle the monsters of the week, sent by a power rangers type big bad who is named "Mr Melancholy" and is a giant face in the moon.

Owen is attracted by the siren call of forbidden fruit of teen culture, as it airs at a late hour beyond his curfewed bedtime. Maddy quietly tapes the episodes on VHS and drops them off for him to watch and appreciate at school.

The film is full of Owen's asides to the audience about the timeliness of events in his life as he is narrating the constancy of "The Pink Opaque" as his favorite show from nostalgia and having his egg cracked into the world of media and storytelling. The show becomes a larger gravity as the film goes on, making the real world's allure to pale in comparison to the organized clarity and rhythm of the show and it's cliffhanger finale episode.

My experience of the film is the attention to detail and atmosphere in the setting and set pieces of the film. There is room to breathe and slowly be immersed in the lived in reality of the film and the show within. The performances of the actors is excellent for the unsettling familiarity of awkward nostalgia and desperate mania of being a teenager. I really enjoyed the quiet horror of waking up to a life that the media didn't cover. The quiet despair of settling out of fear of the unknown possibility of greater responsibility and accountability. It is a dangerous business waking out your front door. And a dangerous business to dream of a greater world, but refuse to step through the closet doors catching a glimpse of that opportunity to adventure within the dream world.

What is illusion?

Alluding to the true sight

Of false visions shown

The Banshees of Inisherin/Kneecap

Irish movies have been breaking my heart and making me ponder the arcs of a life.

I watched Banshees last night and it woke me up at this early hour to puzzle through my strong feelings about it. I heard about the film and how it was up for awards, and knew the base plot from that. It made me wonder how it explained itself. A friend recently brought it up in conversation and said that the movie did explain itself. About a year or so ago, my mother told me she watched it and didn't like it. Conflicting reviews like this convinced me I should settle the matter myself.

I like Colin Farrell, I found him especially charming and hapless when he was alongside Brendan Gleesan in "In Bruges", which also remains stuck in my mental craw for how tight that movie's plot and script is. "In Bruges" feels inevitable given its players, I follow the logic even as matters spiral into the absurd and ridiculous.

And in "The Banshees of Inisherin", Colin and Brendan appear alongside one another once again in a beautiful location, trapped in a uniquely personal drama where Colin looks to Brendan for guidance when his world spirals. In "In Bruges", Brendan is sympathetic to the younger man's cause and believes Colin has the potential to change his stars. In "Banshees", Brendan's character starts the movie's plot by losing faith that Colin is capable of change and decides to change his own life while he has a life to enjoy.

Colin plays "Padraic", a dairy farmer in 1923 Ireland who has a simple life of contentment on an island as a civil war drama plays out on the mainland. Most of Padraic's life is centered around his miniature donkey (Jenny), his pony, and most of all, going to the pub each day at 2pm to have a pint with his best friend. But on this afternoon, Brendan's character, "Colm", is unresponsive. And this breaks up Padraic's routine. He goes to the pub alone and wonders what he did to offend his friend. And everyone on the island knows that Padraic and Colm are best friends, so it is an object of conversation and minor drama on an island where nothing much happens. Colm eventually comes, but will not sit or talk to Padraic, raising the eyebrows of others.

Padraic is abashed in the eyes of his peers and tries to reconcile with his friend, finally learning that Colm woke up this morning and realized that he had had enough of Padraic. Colm is older and finds that he is tired of Padraic's dull company and conversations about his livestock, and instead Colm wants to focus on composing music for his fiddle. While Colm has time left in his life, he would prefer to spend it doing things he finds meaningful, enriching, and maybe outlive him. Padraic is shocked to learn of his best friend's evaluation, and turns to others for a second opinion. There is some shuffling of feet, as others in the pub are also forced to consider divorcing the two on their own merits. Colm is undeniably the more interesting one, as he plays his fiddle in the bar most nights. Padraic, well, Padraic is a cheerful if uninspiring fellow who is very nice, but has no great learning or skills. That would be his sister, Siobhan, with whom he shares their childhood home. 

Siobhan is a reader, and finds herself having to question her life as well when her brother mopes about his identity crisis about "being a good buddy" in jeopardy without Colm's support. Siobhan tries to find out from Colm why he decided to break off a lifetime of friendship with her brother so suddenly. Colm states Padraic is dull, and Siobhan counters that this is not a revelation and it is therefore a poor reason to justify this cold shoulder. Padraic is the same fellow he has always been since childhood, and Colm agrees, but he wants to do something for himself and Padraic may have been an anchor to Colm's life in the past, and Colm wants to drop him as dead weight.

Padraic's new branding as "dull" also forces him to reevaluate whether others think of him in relation to the town idiot. However, that position is currently held by Dominic, the local policeman's son who is in his early twenties. Dominic likes Padraic, and even more, fancies the sister, Siobhan. Siobhan tolerates Dominic's puppy dog flirting with polite, but firm rejection. Dominic always speaks his mind, but he doesn't have a wise mind and therefore speaks without a filter and tends to turn people off as annoying and vulgar. It also doesn't help that Dominic's dad is a domestic abuser of his son, and being the policeman, there is no recourse for Dominic to appeal to for justice.

Padraic is finding his social stock to be closer to Dominic's level than he hoped. So in trying to make amends to Colm, Colm expresses that he wants to be left alone, that he is cutting Padraic off cold turkey because nothing else has worked so far to hint to Padraic that discussing donkey dung for 2 hours is a good use of time. Colm says that unless Padraic takes the hint and stops trying to waste Colm's time, Colm will make him understand how serious he is. Colm vows to cut off his own fingers and send them to Padraic, one at a time for each time Padraic tries to talk to him. And the pub members look at Padraic with guilty muttering and pleas to not drive Colm to this desperation, to take the hint and figure his own life out. They don't want to lose their fiddler. Padraic does not know what else to do though, as his life doesn't have a greater purpose than being Colm's friend.

The movie's pivotal point comes during a late night at the pub where Padraic and Colm speak past each other on legacy and what people will remember about you when you are dead and gone. Colm states that art and music is a legacy that can preserve your memory in the hearts and minds of others long after you lived. Padraic protests that he doesn't know Mozart, but he comes from a line of people who were nice and decent. Padraic's mother was nice, his father was nice, his sister Siobhan is lovely and kind and beautiful and so nice. Padraic painfully does not care about the future without his friend, his sister, and his donkey - he does not have any grand skill other than being a decent guy. And if that is not enough right now in the present? He cannot understand why Colm has thrown him to the town's scorn with this desertion - it is cruel to put him in this position.

And this movie breaks my heart at this point. Because there is merit in using the talents you are given to build your life and craft your purpose. I understand and have lived just long enough to be both men in viewing the future trajectory of my life. Sometimes people are tiresome and dull, and I am in no gracious mood to treat them kindly or charitably, for I am exhausted and poor company. But as a family friend once said, "relationships are so stinkin' mutual." You both need to be invested in some way of maintaining lines of common communication. There are friends who I once had, but we went in different directions and pursued different interests. But that does not mean I do not mourn the loss of who we were to each other. I have been so so loyal to some friends, trying to grasp straws that we still have in common and keep alive the kindling of relationship. 

The movie ends around a fire, a talk, a letter, and then just music. Because sometimes music says what dialogue and discussion cannot.

And so I get to the short review of "Kneecap", a movie about young delinquents in present day Ireland who gain local and national notoriety as a Gaelic rap group. The native tongue is a means of preserving identity and culture, to communicate is a fundamental need for being recognized and understood. And England's treatment of the Irish's land and tongue has caused generational trauma. "Kneecap" is the name of the group in the film, and is composed of two drug dealing youths and a middle aged music teacher who find a common purpose in composing raps in Gaelic, which is a pretty open field to explore and exploit in reclamation.

The film is extremely creative in storytelling and minor details in visuals. It is so sincere in communicating the need for the language to be heard. The language is so pleasant to my ears, even when rapped over an 808 in songs about "sex, drugs, and cessation of English occupation." The characters in this film are genuinely heartfelt in their rawness and affection for one another, even in strong disagreement and limitations. In conflict and contrariness, it makes a good argument for free speech. That it encompasses not only for the beautiful and lovely parts which are marketable, but also for fools and the young who may be unfiltered and therefore crass, vulgar, and rude. But we all have something to say, and while we may not be heard and acknowledged as right, it is cowardly to try to silence people from protesting at all.

 

Still don't understand 

Gaelic or the Irish bands

Lovely though they are

Boy Kills World (2024)

Bill Skarsgard gives an expressive physical performance. His character in the film was formed with two core memories, he wants revenge for his loss of his family at the hands of a paranoid lady dictator and he is particularly haunted by the memory of his fearless younger sister.

Also, his character can neither speak nor hear, so Boy relies on reading lips and his internal monologue is narrated by a arcade fighting game announcer. He constantly trains in the jungle with a lean Asian guy in his 50's called "Shaman," who alternately spars with Boy and blows smoke in his face while laughing. Boy's world is small and limited in the forest, and he hallucinates his younger sister as a child who talks to him and gives commentary on his life and circumstances.

The circumstances could be bleak, but the film's two commentaries of internal announcer narration and sweet childish defiance provide lightness in contrast.

On a trip to the dictators' city, the annual Culling event's preparations are happening, where the streets are raided by the dictatress's foot soldiers to find pockets of unrest and keep the family in power. The dictatress's family is also going slightly insane in their own ways as there has not been serious opposition in years. Hilda is the dictatress matriarch of the family, but her paranoia has caused her to be a hermit in a bunker within her compound, so she is an unstable figurehead. Hilda's younger sister, Melanie, is a marketing obsessive who is having to spin the family's continued justification narrative to the masses and engage in brand partnerships to the Culling, a gladiatorial exhibition televised like a Hunger Games media capital event. Melanie married a photogenic pretty man, Glen, to mold into the face of her marketing announcements to the masses. Hilda & Melanie's brother, Gideon, is a man built like a boxer, but with the soul of a thespian, and Melanie tries to humor his aspirations to keep him in line for his enforcer and interrogation duties for the family. Also, there is a younger woman who is an elite soldier for the family, who wears a daft punk helmet and is dispatched to forcefully pacify of larger groups of unrest.

Boy decides that today he is ready to have his revenge and sneaks into the family compound in the trunk of Glen and Gideon's car after they fumble the public square announcement for why they are taking 12 people from the streets for "crimes against the peace" and therefore deserve to be executed on television.

The action in the movie's fight sequences is fluid and outrageous in its overkill, with many looking like elaborate Mortal Kombat fatality sequences. Boy's fighting skills are tempered by his general anxiety and hyperawareness of having to navigate a hostile environment of his own aggression while deaf. Also, having insane hallucinations of his eight year old sister who is fearless and appears to wander through this environment with fearless abandon like a giant adventure.

I rather enjoyed this movie for leaning into its instability and leaving the audience off balance as to how Boy's simple quest for revenge will be resolved. I especially liked the reminders that he is relying on his vision for his awareness. There are scenes in which he cannot successfully read another character's lips and is "hearing" all kinds of gibberish and imagining what a "guitar robot time dance with a hill farmer" means in an elaborate infiltration plan.

It was goofy, it was gory, it was tragic, it was heartfelt. Bill Skarsgard does an excellent job of portraying naive, traumatized, and determined. He is trapped in being a boy, with idealistic dreams of absolutes and simple love of family being everything. Anything in his way is an obstacle which must be overcome.

Don't say much do ya?

Body communicates pain

From Boy to his world.

Challengers (2024)

Very short review as I just finished watching this in the theater on a discounted ticket promotion. It was very funny to see this movie in a nearly empty theater. When I stood up to leave, I learned that the only two other people were a couple in the top row, the woman of which noticed the other two audience members other than me ditch the movie before the end. The guy and I were too focused on the screen to see that exodus and we both had the same reaction to the film's effective point.

I had a great time watching a tennis version of "ball is life, life is ball." And how, at a level of competition, the participators in the sport see it as duel and dance, transcendent in the flow and the externalities become interwoven into the thread of the moment as fuel.

The framing of the film was other than I expected from the marketing, but it was effective in showing off the style and flair of the subject. The soundtrack and cinematography really sell the substance and excitement of the film's pacing and stakes.

Break point setting up

The advantage of seeing Love

All passion and pride

The Beast (2023)

This movie haunted me.

Yesterday I learned a friend was interested in seeing this French film at a local independent theater. It was a nice day outside, so I took a walk through the neighboring area. Outside the theater there was a local culinary street fare with small plates. I went to a local bakery instead and bought two croissants, a cinnamon roll one for myself and a chocolate one for my friend when he arrived.

I knew very little about the film itself, but my friend is extremely good company to watch a film. He is very excited about details, themes, motifs and even the legacy for how a director tends to execute his or her vision.

I didn't even remember from the trailer that the movie was French. The logline about a woman in the future cleansing her DNA of trauma didn't clarify either

The movie begins with a woman set in a green screen to the left, being given directions for how to block her steps for the later post production. The camera follows as she centers in the space, then gradually focuses on her face, getting intimately close to it, but the score is not alarmed, so the audience is not signaled to find this uncomfortable. But the direction off screen tells her that eventually she will notice a Beast to her right and to react to it when she realizes it has been there, waiting.

The scene switches to a different setting. The actress is wearing fancy clothes from a much older period where etiquette was armor. This shot tracks her through a cocktail party, looking for her husband and instead finding a stranger she met once while abroad, in whom she confided. This confidence was with the freedom of believing that she would likely never meet him again, and her secret would be like telling the wind. There are times where it is easier to tell a stranger something than a friend, for the stranger is a blank slate upon which you can plead your case for human sanity and they do not have a vested long term interest to hold you accountable to it later. Except this stranger has reencountered her and has follow up questions as to why she felt trapped since childhood with a sense of impending doom and desolation not only for herself, but for all whom she loves. How it will come in one fell swooping stroke and only then will her fears become realized into reality.

The rest of the film proceeds in much the same manner, as details of the woman's life and motifs are told over time and space. The audience too is waiting to see if her fears will be proven true. And the film's score heightens the anticipation. You wonder if you can truly trust it to signal you for the event or leave you to figure it out yourself visually without accompaniment.

Eventually, the logline of the movie comes into play. There is a technology to cleanse people's DNA of generational trauma. The process gradually neutralizes triggering effects of irrational and unstable emotional twitch instincts. Maybe this will be the answer to our heroine's dilemma. Whether it will vaccinate her from living with the burden of dread or even allow her to react more decisively when the key moment comes rather than be frozen and helpless in the face of fate.

The movie being primarily in French made me reflect on a passage in the science fiction Culture novel "Master of Games" by Iain M. Banks. How language makes certain frameworks of understanding and thought processes. It is not only an organizational method of concepts, but influences how to think about things. Our relationships to objects and emotions can be nuanced by what paths we know for how to think about them and how much they are given consideration in the language for variations on the theme. And from the French movies I have seen, the translation is not only of the language, but the concepts underlying and overlaying it. I think Iain's series is well named, because his books often wrestle with the inevitable clash of philosophies and cultural traditions which are rigid and flexible in incongruous ways. And how one of them will find others to be intolerable and feel the need to fix the other by diplomacy or force, because if that other school of thought is allowed to survive, it is a danger to the continuance of their tradition.

This film made me confront the question in my mind. What if my anxieties could be cured? Would I be willing to pay the cost? Even if it advantaged me to be divorced from my worries and stress, would I feel the loss of those traits like the removal of my wisdom teeth? Or would it be a deeper ache like I have lost my soul and the ability to truly enjoy the success, like Captain Barbossa with his apples in "Curse of the Black Pearl"?

And what if I seek the wisdom of the scientists and mystics, and their best efforts are not enough to correct what is within me? Is it better to live in the dread of the unknown, or be trapped in the confirmation that there is no salvation on earth for that which ails me?

Paralysis weight

An anticipation waits

Music of Tom Waits