Serious cold

This is the PROPER Winter weather: single digit (Fahrenheit) temps and bright sunshine. Time for a quick jaunt round Grand Blanc Commons.

Hogbacks

Finally snow!

It has been a ridiculously warm January. No lakes have frozen over - if ice fishing is your hobby, it's a bad year for you. And if this is the New Normal, find a new hobby. Anyway, at last it snowed, for the first time in January. As usual, all the schools panicked yesterday and canceled my 7:40 class Wednesday before the snow had even started. But then they felt ashamed at jumping the gun ("in retrospect, I shouldn't've eaten the other elevator passenger, as we were only stuck for ten minutes") and didn't cancel today's class, which means now my Monday/Wednesday class is out of sync with my Tuesday/Thursday class. Phooey. Anyway, here's yesterday (at Seven Lakes) and today (at Metamora-Hadley).

Film review: The Menu (2022)

 

Maybe we were spoiled by the wild ride that was Barbarian, but I this film left me a bit unsatisfied.  Now, as it's about a super-fancy restaurant that serves artsy-fartsy food, you might say that it would be genius if that was intentional.  But somehow I don't think it is, and as an honest-to-goodness cheeseburger plays a key role at the end, and that's one of the parts that annoyed me the most, that sort of undercuts that notion.  Mind you, it would have had to do a lot to make the premise, which in these days of White Lotus and Glass Onion, is getting a little hackneyed (rich people go off to island for fancy rich-person getaway/treat, things go awry), for it to succeed, and it just didn't have the ideas in the tank.  It certainly starts fairly promisingly, and maintains tension in the slow build-up to the inevitable first spilling of blood, and Ralph Fiennes is his usual great self as the head chef/unhinged psychopath in charge, 

and there were some blackly comic moments (although nothing to match Justin Long's basement-measuring antics in the afore-mentioned Barbarian) - my favorite being when a minor character who certainly doesn't seem to have done enough wrong to deserve death points that out, and Fienne's character asks: "Where did you go to college?" "Brown" "Student loans?" "...no..." "You're dying".  But that is indeed a problem: we don't really know whether to root against the chef, whose final menu is to end with everyone (staff included) dying, or for him, because we're supposed to hate the customers.  But not all of them are all that hateable, and, conversely, Anya Taylor-Joy's "Margot," our putative protagonist, isn't all that lovable (perhaps because "relatable" is not really in that actor's wheelhouse, what with her rather alien appearance and affect).  Meanwhile, hardly any of the staff deserve their fate, not even the slavishly devoted (and unfortunately coiffed) Elsa (Hong Chau), who actually gets some of the best lines and is the most entertaining character.  

(Nicholas Hoult's sycophantic foodie character could have taken that spot, but I don't think he's a particularly strong actor either, even though he had me laughing as often as anyone.) Of course, you could say I'm being naive in wanting black-and-white characters or a clear message, but several of the guests were such cardboard cutouts that the only way to defend the movie is as an allegory.  And it seems to want to be that, what with the class warfare allusions, but then it ends up being just a bit too muddled.  And the cheeseburger incident seems to be a mockery of the exquisite food up to that point, and that's a little cheap, too, particularly given the fact that the creator of that food dragged himself to the pinnacle of his profession from humble beginnings.  Anyway, a missed opportunity: good buildup, but ran out of ideas, and failed to come up with clever enough backstories for the characters.  (And what was the business with the allusions to Feinnes's chef's sexual harassment of a character who, despite ritualistically stabbing him with a fork as part of his penance, is nonetheless on board with his Jonestown-esque master plan?  And the business of having the men run for it but not the women?  Not to flog the culinary cliches too much, but half-baked.) I must say a lot made sense when I saw Adam McKay's name in the closing credits.  Since the Big Short and continuing with Don't Look Up, he is not known for his subtle nuance.  Still, another critic who didn't like the film compared it unfavorably with Godard's Weekend, and I hated that film a lot more.  At least this film was never boring, and only the food was pretentious.

Film review: RRR (2022)

This film is EXHAUSTING.  Yes, it's over three hours long (so we had to watch it in two halves), but it's also just one action scene after another (with a few epic song-and-dance numbers thrown into the mix). For most filmmakers, this would be all of their filmography put into a blender, with all of the slow bits taken out.  Apparently it's the most expensive Indian film ever made, at about $72M, and I'm only surprised that it isn't much more than that, because every dollar is up there on the screen.  Not just in the effects (which are, let's be honest, a bit cartoonish, with rather ropey CGI), but in the casts of thousands getting thrown every which way, and the giant sets, many of which get blown into bits.

Technically, I suppose, it is loosely based in reality, but rather in the way a WWII film like The Dirty Dozen or Inglorious Basterds (or however it's spelled) is, with the British (played by a motley crew of, while they are indeed actual British actors, one of whom I realize I've heard of before, but they honestly could be a lot better at being evil - where's Alan Rickman when you need him) playing the role of the Nazis, which, of course, they pretty much did.  Essentially the film is an epic bromance between the hairier very country-hick Bheem, and the also-country-but-a-lot-more-hardened Ram.  

Just like in The Departed, however, Ram is actually a British cop who's been charged with catching Bheem, but when they meet cute while rescuing a boy (who is in a boat, threatened by a train that's fallen off a bridge - it's even more ridiculous than it sounds, especially in the way they end up rescuing him) neither realizes that the other is his foe.  Bheem's mission is actually to rescue a little girl who was taken from his village when a horrible English Lady liked the henna art she drew on her hand and wanted to keep her, little realizing that that particular tribe had an ethos of all-for-one, so that they will never allow a lamb to stray from the flock.  We first meet Bheem capturing wolves and a tiger 

for purposes that only become clear halfway through the film in perhaps the absolute acme of the stupidly amazing action sequences.  I have to say that a lot of people die just to recapture one, let's be honest, rather whiny little girl, and one wonders if it ends up being worth it.  Meanwhile [spoiler] it is revealed about 2 hours in that Ram is not really the super-keen British cop he has been pretending to be, but has a tragic past where he had to blow up his father (who'd already had a finger shot off - long story) to take out some dastardly British, and his promise to his pre-exploded father (who had just witnessed Ram's brother and mother die) was to get a gun for every member of his village, to fight the British.  So his many exploits of beating up fellow Indians as a supercop for the British are just a ruse, to gain their confidence enough to be put in charge of a lorry load of guns, which he will then steal.  But (many dance numbers later) his plans are derailed because he has to rescue Bheem, after having caught him in the first place.

Would I recommend it?  Well, I think everyone should see it.  And the non-stop action and dancing and singing is never less than amazing and entertaining.  But it's an odd melange.  You'd think it would be ideal for kids, except there's quite a lot of genuinely upsetting (for kids) violence - fingers shot off, people shot dead, necks snapped, that sort of thing.  And, as I also found with the works of John "Hard Boiled" Woo, the apparently quite sincere but ridiculously over-the-top saccharine sentimentality is almost impossible for this cynical Westerner to take.  But our heroes are very appealing (and Ram, in particular, is impossibly gorgeous, first with a luscious mustache, and then, after apparently being in prison for a couple of weeks, long rock-star locks and a full beard) 

and the dance numbers are like nothing I, a non Bollywood-aficionado have ever seen.  I can't imagine what the director will do for an encore, though.  Here's hoping he tries his hand at science fiction!

Film review: Barbarian (2022)

This is a twisty one. First thing to know is that it's a horror film, so don't watch it if you're of faint of heart (or stomach). The second thing to know is that its chief virtue is that it keeps surprising you, so I won't say too much. It starts with a woman showing up at night to an Air BnB in a part of Detroit (that you can't see because it's dark) only to find that it's been double-booked, and a slightly sinister-looking man (like her, he appears to be in his late 20s) is already there. Everything is overlaid with tension, and it seems very likely that this man, who is desperately trying to convince her that he's harmless, is actually lying about everything and planning to do something terrible to her. However (very implausibly) it turns out that every hotel she calls up has no vacancies and he says it's because there's a big convention in town. And the man, whose name is Keith (hers is Jess) does a good enough job of convincing her that when she takes the bedroom and he takes the couch, she doesn't lock the door. And then, cut to the middle of the night, and her door is open, and she thinks she hears someone whispering. Was it Keith? No, he's making whimpering noises on the couch, apparently having night terrors, and is very disorientated and annoyed when she shakes him awake. Next morning she wakes up late and finds him gone for the day having left a note saying he'll see her again tonight. She then sets off for the interview that was the reason for her booking the Air BnB in the first place, and at that point she discovers how truly scary and derelict the neighborhood is (it is Brightmoor, so this is realistic).  Well, the interview (with a documentary-maker - of whom Keith had heard, part of what warmed Jess to him) goes well, and she returns to the Air BnB.  But as she's walking from her car to the door, a very scary homeless-looking man comes running towards her, yelling.  She darts inside and is very rattled.  It doesn't help that there's no toilet paper on the roll.  As she waits for Keith to make it safe for her to go back to her car, she decides to look for toilet paper in the basement.  While down there, she finds a strange rope coming out of the wall.  She gives it a tug and... the movie takes the first of its turns.  So, the film starts out looking like it's going to turn into something like Room, and I'm not saying that there aren't elements of that, but by the end you will have witnessed things that wouldn't be out of place in a Sam Raimi film (before he went mainstream).  And you're not introduced to one of the main characters in the movie until a good 40 minutes in.  Can I recommend it?  Well, for a certain kind of viewer, certainly.  If you are not upset by horror movies and you like being surprised, well, this is certainly for you.  If you're tired of tropes and always being able to tell where a film is going, well, you won't with this one!  And while it's definitely intense, and has some dark themes, by the last 15 minutes it's doing such preposterous things that you can't be too upset.  It's well-acted and there are absolute (intentional) laugh-out-loud moments mixed in with some real "Jesus Christ!" moments. And, like all good fiction, the bad end unhappily, and while I wouldn't say the good end happily, the one person you want to survive does just make it.

Fantasy art exhibition

This has been on at the FIA since late September, and it closes tomorrow, so, since my former art teacher strongly recommended it, I finally made time to check it out. Gustave Doré! Arthur Rackham! Brian "Faeries" Froud! Mike "Hellboy" Mignola! Norman Rockwell (including the last one here, which is certainly atypical)! And a fair amount of dreck, but overall, thanks for the recommendation, Alla!