The Kissing Booth (Vince Marcello, 2018) — D
Titicut Follies (Frederick Wiseman, 1967) — A
My Cousin Vinny (Jonathan Lynn, 1992) — A
Tag (Jeff Tomsic, 2018) — C+
Ocean’s 8 (Gary Ross, 2018) — B-
Airplane! (David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, Jerry Zucker, 1980) — A+
Edge of Tomorrow (Doug Liman, 2014) — B
Red Sparrow (Francis Lawrence, 2018) — C-
The Devil Wears Prada (David Frankel, 2006) — A-
mother! (Darren Aronofsky, 2017) — B+
Where’s Poppa? (Carl Reiner, 1970) — B+
Bewitched (Nora Ephron, 2005) — C
Hala (Minhal Baig, 2019) — A-
Aladdin and the King of Thieves (Tad Stones, 1996) — C
Barking Dogs Never Bite (플란다스의 개) (Bong Joon-ho, 2000) — B+
There was a homeless man who used to hang around a pizzeria I worked in and would come in asking for food a lot. There were actually a couple of different guys I would give slices to, but there was one in particular who was rather aggressive and rude when he would come in. He would come in when it was really busy and I would ask him to come back a little later, or tell him a specific time that would be best because of when we’d be throwing out old pizzas. His response would usually be to make a scene. I certainly understood his position during these tantrums—I have no idea how I would behave if I was starving and there was food all around me that I just couldn’t access. But I was also a minimum wage employee who already frequently broke the rules, so I tried to keep it on the down-low when I did.
Sometimes he would go into the ice cream place next door when there was a young woman working alone and steal her tips from the jar. Sometimes he would say that he was a vegetarian, sometimes he wasn’t. Sometimes he would say that cheese gave him heartburn, which of course could very well be true but we only served pizza. Just like all the other guys in the neighborhood, I usually gave him what I could, but unlike anyone else it was always an affair.
One day, I don’t know how, someone had found out that he had been incarcerated for sexual assault. It was a little bit jarring just to know that this man who I see and feed at least a few times a week had also done monstrous things—based on our country’s incredible low rate of actual sexual assaults being reported and an even more incredibly low rate for the ones that are reported leading to incarceration, and knowing personally that this man was somewhat of an aggressor, I feel comfortable saying that he was most likely guilty. But when it came down to it, he had served his time and was now living on the street begging for food. He had to eat somewhere so it might as well have been me. I’m not going to be the one to treat anyone as less than human — as deserving of starving to death—no matter who they are. It was a truly strange conflicting feeling, but I’m not in a position to serve as somebody’s judge, and I’m certainly not in a position to serve as somebody’s executioner.
That same exact strange conflicting feeling creeps up inside me again watching Titicut Follies, the very first film from legendary documentarian Frederick Wiseman. The movie documents the lives of the patients/inmates of the Bridgewater State Hospital, a correctional institution for the criminally insane, in Bridgewater, Massachusetts in 1966. One of the opening scenes of the movie features a man describing the acts of pedophilia that landed him there, as well as ones that were never uncovered. It’s a bold decision by the filmmaker to begin his slice-of-life portrait with one of his subject’s casually admitting and describing the worst thing he’s ever done. It’s not cold or unfeeling, but it is very conversational—he’s speaking to a doctor, one who is just as disgusted by the man’s homosexuality as he is his pedophilia, in a remorseful but not evasive tone. His confession is a statement of fact. He is neither proud nor shying away from what he has done. “I didn’t feel good about it,” he says, his eyes to the ground.
Wiseman’s style, as established with this debut, is a very day-in-the-life, bare bones style of documentary movies: there are no voice overs, no text on screen, no explanations, no talking heads. There are no interviews, there is simply life and the ways in which the camera captures it. For Titicut Follies, this means that there is a lot of rambling, a lot of non sequiturs, a lot of yelling, and a lot of inhumane treatment.
It’s this style that helps elicit that conflicted empathy deep in the viewer’s gut. Wiseman makes me feel exactly how I should feel without ever telling me outright. In a few minutes, he has taught me that watching Titicut Follies is going to feel a lot like real life—a lot like watching a rapist starve to death and feeling compelled to hand him food. Nobody will be holding my hand or whispering in my ear telling me what to do. I’m going to have to figure it out on my own.
It’s easy for us to judge people in the abstract. Justice demands that a violent sexual criminal be removed from society—whether to be punished, made remorseful, to protect others, or some combination of the three. In the wake of the Jacob Blake shooting in Kenosha, Wisconsin at the hands of the police last week, many took to internet comment sections and Twitter to point out that Blake was an alleged rapist*. They felt it didn’t matter what was done to him based on what he did to others. Titicut Follies forces us to confront our own personal notions of justice in the same way that learning of Jacob Blake’s past did. Viewers are forced to empathize and then forced to consider that reaction. Anyone watching can tell that the inmates at Bridgewater do not deserve to be treated the way they are, on camera no less.
Wiseman’s work so often takes aim at large American institutions and the ways in which they are corrupt, and there was no shortage of the unjust to be uncovered at Bridgewater State Hospital—which we are to understand is likely no different from other institutions of its kind across the country, at least at the time. The doctors do not listen to the patients. The guards abuse and toy with them. These men, most of them guilty of committing crimes, are very clearly mentally ill and are being treated as less than human, right there in front of the camera. The viewer can only imagine what went on when there was no film crew around documenting everything.
Which is seemingly one of Wiseman’s other great tricks. His second film, High School, takes place in a Philadelphia high school in the ’60s, where the teachers and administrators are regularly blatantly unfair and uncaring in their relationships with students, yet by all reports the teachers were fine with the crew filming them, and even fine with the finished product when they saw it. It wasn’t until reviews and public reaction to the film came in that they began to realize that they were the bad guys. The story of the release Titicut Follies—named, by the way, after a stage show the inmates put on—is much more complicated. The state seemingly knew right away that the facility didn’t come out looking very good, and tried to block its release, citing concerns over the patients’ privacy and dignity. Of course, if they cared for their dignity, they would have not allowed a facility to continue to operate that took their dignity away from them in the first place.
It was originally shown at a film festival in 1967, but was recalled in 1968. Wiseman appealed the next year and as a result the film was allowed to be shown to doctors, lawyers, judges, social workers, and other health-care professionals. Because it went virtually unseen, the film’s impact on the institution it was documenting is unknowable. In 1987, family members of inmates who died while under the care of Bridgewater sued the hospital. In the case, the lawyers cited the censorship of Titicut Follies, drawing a direct connection between the decision to ban the film and the continued inhumane treatment of the inmates. The movie was finally released to the public via PBS in 1992 after a Massachusetts Superior Court judge ruled it appropriate, and was finally made available for home video in 2007.
The movie is brutal and often hard to watch, but ultimately, I think, worth watching. In fact, a movie like Titicut Follies almost demands to be watched, if only to examine how far we are willing to extend our empathy—something that I hope we all do as far as we possibly can.
Titicut Follies is available on DVD from Zipporah Films or streaming on Kanopy.
*The notion that Blake’s alleged assault was on a minor arose due to some confusion, intentional or not, with the way Wisconsin classifies sexual assault. He was accused of raping his girlfriend and had not yet entered a plea at the time of his shooting.
- The Kissing Booth is most definitely not a soapy, cheap, goofy teen rom-com. That’s what I thought it might be based on other Netflix originals in the same vein and the trailers that auto-play while I’m scrolling. It’s pretty damn sexist — although it’s got sexist portrayals of both girls and boys, so there’s at least that — and it seems to have no regard for the way that much of high school or even real life works. We watched it with plans to watch the newly released sequel, although having now seen it and the sequel’s runtime (131 minutes!!) that feels like a mistake. I mean, I’ll probably watch it eventually, but now I’m dreading it.
- Is there any better on-screen pairing than Joe Pesci and Marisa Tomei in My Cousin Vinny? Is there anyone that’s ever been more attractive than Marisa Tomei in My Cousin Vinny? Has there ever been a courtroom comedy that works equally as well at the courtroom stuff as it does at the comedy to the extent that My Cousin Vinny does?* We watched this because I’m constantly saying “two youths” the way Pesci does and my wife didn’t understand why. Anyway, it’s pretty tightly scripted, it’s very funny, and the performances are great. Tomei won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for this role, even though she’s kind of the lead actress and should have won for that category. (*My deepest, most sincere apologies to Legally Blonde.)
- Did you know Tag — a movie about grown men ensconced in a multi-decade game of tag — was based on a true story? It seems like that’s all the movie’s marketing was when it came out, but thankfully the script uses it more as a jumping off point than as material for an adaptation. The movie finding more and more ludicrous ways for Jeremy Renner to avoid getting tagged is fun, and the attempts at emotion feel genuine even if they’re a little canned.
- Ocean’s 8 is a great, straight-ahead caper film, which is sometimes just exactly what you need. There’s no upending the formula, no hard turns on the established format even as the plot itself twists and turns. And the assembly of talent in front of the camera is great and does good work with at-times sparkling chemistry. I’d say it’s on par with Ocean’s Thirteen and probably better than Ocean’s Twelve.
- By accidentally watching Red Sparrow this week as well (it was on FX), I now get to have an opinion on that argument setting the film world on fire: “which Hunger Games franchise director has had a better non-Hunger Games release in 2018? Gary Ross made the franchise’s first movie and Francis Lawrence made the next three. I think Ross’ Ocean’s 8 is both a better made movie and more of a representation of its author’s voice, as he also has a story credit and a screenplay credit. Meanwhile, Red Sparrow feels more like a Jennifer Lawrence project, even though he technically brought it to her. It’s got a ton of sexuality in it, it’s occasionally very brutal, and Jennifer Lawrence is great as usual as a Russian double-agent, but ultimately it commits a sin that is unforgivable for this kind of espionage thriller: it’s rather boring.
- Because she’s done so little work since the burnout became public on her persona following her huge six(ish)-year breakout, I realized I could pretty easily fill the gaps in my own viewing history of Jennifer Lawrence’s movies. Following her break-out in 2010’s Winter’s Bone, it was basically five years of Hunger Games movies, X-Men movies, David O. Russell Oscar plays, and long-delayed movies that were released to jump on her newfound popularity. In the five years since, she’s had two more supporting-role X-Men, Passengers, Red Sparrow, and Darren Aronofsky’s mother! This movie is one of only 21 in history to receive an F grade on CinemaScore — which polls audiences as they leave the theatre. Add on that I’ve never seen a single Aronofsky film, and I had no idea what to expect going in. I wonder what I would have thought of the film not having heard that it was a “biblical allegory” beforehand, because with that in mind, it’s kind of a beautiful piece of art. I can kind of understand why audiences may have turned on it, as it’s both poetically nonsensical at times and actively distressing at others, but I don’t think it is deserving of an F grade.
- I’d only ever seen The Devil Wears Prada in pieces on television before this, and having know watched the entire thing all at once, I can say I do genuinely love the movie. Even though there’s a little bit of a disconnect between the ways that Anne Hathaway’s character’s friends outside the job are treating her and the way we are seeing her act, there’s something about the movie that just absolutely works. It just hums. The biggest macro conflict of the whole thing is “will Andy become somebody who she is not” and it never really feels like there’s any chance that the answer will be “yes,” as much as her shitty boyfriend and friends want us to think it will be. Other than that, every performance — Hathaway; Meryl Streep as the steely, mock-Anna Wintour; Emily Blunt in a breakthrough role as the ambitious first assistant; and Stanley Tucci’s hard-ass of a mentor — is perfect. Somebody go back to 2007 and give Blunt a Best Supporting Actress nomination and while you’re at it add one for Clare-Hope Ashitey for Children of Men that same year.
- I love Airplane! We used to watch it all the time in my house growing up — to the point where I even know the origin/reference point for jokes that I, as someone not alive when the movie came out in 1980, would not understand, because my parents have explained them to me multiple times. This was a Zoom watch party, because funny movies are always funnier when you can laugh along with someone.
- Edge of Tomorrow is a futuristic action take on the Groundhog Day time-loop phenomenon, with a fairly ingenious yet easy-to-follow explanation for both the inciting of the loop and the path out of it. There is a bunch of fun action and the movie uses the “knowledge of what will happen on this day” gained by living the day thousands of times to great effect, as Tom Cruise goes from a relatively un-Cruise-ian character — cowardly, out-of-shape, no fight instincts — and builds him into what we expect from a Cruise character. This means there are perfectly choreographed action scenes that Cruise floats through in the same way that Bill Murray might casually slice his way through his own day with words and jokes. Oh, and Emily Blunt kicks ass.
- Following his recent passing, TMC ran a mini-marathon of Carl Reiner movies this week, which I recorded and plan to watch through, starting with Where’s Poppa? Reiner was a comedy legend known as an actor and TV writer, though his film directing career never quite reached the heights or cultural staying power of his best friend, Mel Brooks, or his son, Rob. I’m hoping that running through some of his directorial work can uncover the man a little bit more for me, and having now seen Where’s Poppa? I feel like it’s a pretty good place to start (other than The Jerk, of course, but I’ve seen The Jerk plenty of times). Starring George Segal as a grown man who feels that taking care of his senile mother, played by Ruth Gordon, is killing his social life, Where’s Poppa? has a very subdued comedic tone, even when it’s going for something outlandish. Reiner really lets the scenes stew in their absurdity — like the opening where Segal tries to scare his mother to death wearing a gorilla costume — which makes them feel much more surreal and to-the-bone than just some written scene with jokes in them. There’s also a bold and bizarre attempt at a prolonged rape joke that probably doesn’t land now the same as it may have when the film premiered in 1970 — so bold and bizarre, in fact, that you almost have to give it credit for trying even though it only raised eyebrows instead of laughs from me.
- For most of Bewitched, I was thinking that the movie’s critical reputation may be unfair — it’s possibly even the best of Nora Ephron’s four critically maligned films? But honestly, the whole thing really starts falling apart in the back half of the movie. Here’s the set-up: Nicole Kidman plays a witch who wants to leave her magic life behind and start living like a normal mortal human and then gets cast as the lead in a reboot of the television show Bewitched. It’s a fairly inventive take on the whole thing, and Kidman is fine in the role, even when the movie is unclear on what her cultural and societal knowledge truly is. Will Ferrell isn’t quite playing a wacky character schtick — the thing that has worked best for him in his broad comedies in the past — but that doesn’t necessarily mean it can’t work for him, as we’ve seen with things like Stranger Than Fiction (which I like), Everything Must Go, and Melinda and Melinda. But it doesn’t really work here. And then all of a sudden the rules of this meta-textual take on the Bewitched universe become so muddled and confusing that I literally was Googling answers on my phone with less than ten minutes left in the movie. That’s not a good sign!
- Also, now that we’ve finished our Nora Ephron watch-through, here are my official rankings of her directorial features, presented without comment:
- Sleepless in Seattle
- This Is My Life
- You’ve Got Mail
- Julie & Julia
- Mixed Nuts
- Bewitched
- Lucky Numbers
- Michael
- It’s hard to say, because most of her movies so far haven’t had much of a cultural footprint — or at least it hasn’t been discernible yet due to how recent they’ve been — but I feel like Geraldine Viswanathan can become a movie star, or at least should. So far I’ve seen her in Blockers, an underrated teenage sex-comedy where she steals scenes as part of the teenage ensemble; The Package, a mediocre teen movie that she’s easily the best part of; Bad Education, where she plays third lead to Hugh Jackman and Allison Janney and totally holds her own; and now Hala, which displays another side of her completely. The movie, a poignant coming-of-age movie about the family dynamics, school life, and teenage romance of a high school-age daughter of Pakistani immigrants, is built around her performance completely and is all the better for it. Even as the American immigrant story is becoming a more and more told one, Hala finds plenty of new and fresh places to go.
- The third Aladdin! Aladdin and Jasmine are getting married! And now Aladdin wishes he had a dad? And it turns out his dad is hot? I kinda think this one’s better than the second one — the songs are a little more memorable, Jerry fucking Orbach is an albino villain, and Robin Williams is back, baby! Speaking of, it kind of feels like they told Robin if he came back he could do and say whatever he wanted, because his whole meta/pop culture referential humor is dialed all the way up to 11. It still looks pretty cheap, is barely 75 minutes long, and is totally disposable, but also, I’m like 90% sure Jasmine’s boobs are drawn bigger in this movie? So there’s that.
- Bong Joon-ho’s directorial debut, Barking Dogs Never Bite almost feels like the Korean version of a Coen brothers dark comedy. There is an ensemble of strange, almost sad-sack characters, some comedic violence, hilarious chase scenes, and bizarre side tangents. The movie takes place almost entirely within a large city apartment complex and concerns almost entirely the people who live there, but it still feels like it has something to say about the world at large — about class and empathy and community and little yapping dogs.