April showers

 

Finally glimpses of green

 

Eclipse!

Unfortunately we were just slightly too far North to get the full eclipse (if only we'd stayed in Arkansas...) but it got noticeably (and eerily) darker and cooler. I watched it from the roof of UM-Flint's parking structure, on my way in to work for a Zoom meeting.

James Taggart (1996-2024)

Jimmy died this past week.  It was sudden, and to us, unexpected, as we'd heard that he'd got his life settled after a tumultuous period.  It turns out that the truth was more complicated: he had apparently got himself clean (although it was drugs that caused his death) but his work life had been a bit more unsettled than we'd been led to believe.  However, unexpected as his death was, Jimmy was never likely to live to a ripe old age.  He was dealt a poor hand.  However, he was very sweet at heart, had his own quirky sense of humor (and thanks to him I will always think of "hope springs eternal" as "hope springs a turtle") and he and Thomas had some good times when they were both little.  Just one more reminder that the world can be incredibly shitty.

Film review: The Nice Guys (2016)

Shane Black, who wrote and directed this very entertaining buddy-sort-of-cop movie, is the definition of hit-and-miss.  He burst on to the scene as the writer of Lethal Weapon in 1987, which reinvigorated the buddy cop film at the time, took time out to act (if you can call it that) in the Schwarzenegger classic Predator) and went on to write and direct Iron Man 3, which earned half-a-billion.  But he is probably best known recently for writing excellent buddy cop films that flop.  Besides this one, there's also the last movie Val Kilmer was good in, alongside Robert Downey Jr., in his pre-Iron Man doldrum years, Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang (2005).  Both are excellent, notable for their hilarious banter and combination of high production values with unexpectedly subversive elements (perhaps the reason both flopped).  Anyway, this one is set in a day-glo version of the seventies (in contrast with all the color-bleached versions of the seventies we see nowadays, like Joker) and combines Ryan Gosling (showing his pre-Barbie comedic chops - notably a great ability to shriek like a girl and do straining-to-speak-gurning that would be the envy of Lou Costello) with Russell Crowe, sporting the ample gut that is evidence of his lack-of-commitment to the film star body-maintenance diet, and probably part of the reason he hasn't been in anything of note for years.  Crowe is the recovering alcoholic heavy Jackson Healy and Gosling is the sad-sack current alcoholic sleazy detective Holland March, unable to forgive himself for the house fire that killed his wife and left him single-parenting the precocious Holly (the now ubiquitous Angourie Rice, very impressive).  

They meet because the former has been hired by "Amelia" to scare off people following her, while the latter has been hired to find her (or more accurately, hired by the aunt of recently-demised porn star Misty Mountains (whose vehicular death opens the movie) because she thought she saw her alive after the funeral and Holland works out it was Amelia she saw).  Healy actually breaks Holland's arm but turns around and hires him after he (Healy) has encountered two hit men also on Amelia's tail and starts to worry about her.  Turns out Amelia is on the lam after having appeared (with Misty Mountains) in a sort-of-porn film called "How do you like my car, Big Boy?" which is just a means to deliver an environmental message.  

People associated with this film keep dying because it would damage the Detroit Big Three - will Amelia be one of them?  This film, which has the great Keith David and the largely-retired Kim Basinger show up in small roles, is surprisingly brutal (thanks in part to a psychopathic killer called "John Boy" who is on Amelia's tail, 

and thanks in part to Healy), and veers from said brutality to witty quips (and surreal moments, like the Nixon story) with head-snapping abruptness.  But it's non-stop entertainment, and the leads are all excellent. The ending sets up the possibility of sequels that never came, sadly, but still should. 

It was just what we needed after a shitty week.  If you want to watch it, it's on Netflix, but only for a couple more days! 

Michigan weather in a nutshell

 Consecutive days this week:

Film review: Timecrimes (2007)

Now this is how you do low-budget (only 4 actors required, and about 3 locations, one of which is in a generic wood) time travel science fiction right.  Although it has to be said that this movie caused a massive argument between me and Jami, so perhaps "right" is inapt.  But anyway, this passes the David Lewis (famous 20th century philosopher who wrote on Time Travel among other things) smell test.  It's also, unlike Primer, genuinely disturbing, both in content and implications.  Here is a synopsis (with spoilers, so skip if you're planning to watch it, and I do recommend it).  A middle-aged Spanish couple, a skinny, short-haired (this is very important) wife (Clara) and a dumpy, balding, hairy husband (Héctor, our "protagonist") are just moving in to a half-finished house in the country (polythene on the windows, unfurnished rooms).  She seems to be doing all the work while he, first, tries to nap, (while a radio plays loudly, including "Picture This" by Blondie), then gets a strange call consisting of heavy breathing, tries to call back only to get an answering machine that says it's a restricted number, then (after briefly making out with Clara) he sits outside in a deck chair (while she works on assembling a table) scanning the countryside with his binoculars.  

While so doing he spots something pink, then when he looks closer he sees a young woman with her face hidden by long hair who, as he watches, takes off her t-shirt (an unnecessary touch by the filmmakers, which definitely adds to the quease-factor later on - she is also young and gorgeous which actually works against a later plot point).  Having lost a bet that she will be able to get the assembled table into their bedroom upstairs (that table doesn't survive the movie intact), Clara goes off on some errand (that Héctor would have had to do had she succeeded) in her boxy little blue car.  Héctor, meanwhile, decides to investigate, whether for prurient reasons or just because it's weird is not clear, but the former certainly makes sense.  He comes across a discarded bicycle next to a knocked-over recycling bin in a country lane, next to a path leading up into the woods, which he takes.  Not far in, he comes across the young woman, now completely naked and apparently dead.  He approaches cautiously and sees she is breathing (and that her clothes are scattered in front of her) when suddenly he gets stabbed in the arm with a pair of scissors.  Shrieking in pain and terror, he runs off as fast as his beer gut will let him.  Looking back he sees that his assailant must have been the pink he saw earlier, because he is a man in a trenchcoat with pink bandages completely swathing his head, like a messier version of the Invisible Man.  He hides and keeps peeking at the strange figure, who terrifies him by jerking round and looking at him miming binoculars.  With another squeal he lumbers off again.  He encounters a fence with barbed wire on top, which he half-climbs, half knocks over and continues running until he comes to a house.  Nobody answers, so he breaks a window to enter.  He sees nothing of note except a calendar on the wall on which somebody has scrawled an S-shape with two xs in the open parts of the S.  

Exploring further, he finds first a first-aid kit that enables him to bandage the nasty stab wound, and then a lab in the basement.  There is a walkie-talkie on the table and he manages to contact a man and he tells him he is being chased (as they talk, a clap of thunder is heard).  After a pause in which he blocks the door to the lab, the man asks if the man chasing him has a bandaged head, and tells him that (a) he (the man) is in a turret-shaped building up the hill from the house, and (b) that he can see the bandaged man approaching on video monitors.  He advises Héctor to come to him where it is safe, as the bandaged man will find him in the house.  Héctor runs frantically up to the turret (up a lighted pathway - it is now night) where he finds that the man is young and bearded, and the turret appears to be a lab with a large circular piece of equipment with a lowerable dome above it at the center.  

A car (small and boxy) pulls up and suddenly the face of the bandaged man is at the window.  The young man tells Héctor that the only way to escape is to hide in the circular equipment, which is full of a milky liquid.  He will join Héctor but he has to control the dome.  Héctor reluctantly gets in and then is alarmed because the man shows no intention of joining him.  He tries to get out, but it is too late.  He is drowning in the liquid... 

and then the dome is immediately lifted... and it's daylight.  And the young man acts very surprised to see him.  Yes, you've guessed it, he has time-traveled, back to earlier in the day, just before the moments of the beginning of the film.  One thing the young man (who is played by the writer-director, what is it about time travel films that inspires megalomania?) tells him, once Héctor sees himself in his own garden through binoculars, is that he must not mess things up.  Of course, he immediately calls his own number, and we get to hear the other side of the original phone call, and when the earlier Héctor calls back, the young scientist is alerted and tears Héctor off a strip.  So, of course, Héctor immediately steals a car and drives off.  Driving down the hill from the compound, he passes a very familiar young woman riding a bicycle uphill.  He stops just after she has passed out of sight, and is clearly thinking of turning round when out of nowhere a big red truck rams him off the road.  The (little, boxy, white) car is wrapped around a tree and Héctor acquires a nasty gash on his forehead.  Woozily, he unwraps the bandage from his arm, which is still soaked in the milky-white liquid from the time machine, so that mixed with his blood it goes pink, and starts bandaging his head.  A thought seems to strike him about not being seen when there are two of him, and he bandages his entire head.  Yes, of course, he is the man who was chasing him earlier.  And suddenly, the young woman has appeared, full of concern, ready to help him.  

She even has a pair of scissors ("from cutting my neighbor's hair earlier" - they will be used again for hair-cutting later) that she uses to tidy up his bandages, and that he surreptitiously pockets.  There then follows the most unpleasant part of the movie, where "Héctor 2", now apparently (a bit late!) taking seriously the scientist's admonition not to disrupt anything, recreates everything he saw (which, of course, entails making the poor young woman strip at knifepoint, and eventually stripping her entirely after she has tripped and knocked herself out).  He even stabs himself with scissors and has to try three times before he can get his earlier self to see him turn round suddenly and mime binoculars.  Then, once his earlier self has fled, he collapses for a rest.  But then he hears the woman scream and races into the woods to find her gone.  Things are a bit fuzzy after that (for me) but he arrives at his own home just as night falls and realizes that she is inside.  He tries to track her down to explain but (naturally) she first throws a table downstairs at him and then hides in the bedroom.  He breaks down the door and chases her onto the roof (he can't really see her because it's dark) at which point she falls off the roof!  And he looks down - and it's Clara!  It must be Clara, she's got short hair.  Horrified, he slumps down in a fugue state... until a crack of thunder brings him to and he realizes he's got the walkie talkie in his pocket and can listen in on the conversation between Héctor 1 and the scientist, and can even tell the scientist to lure Héctor 1 to the turret when Héctor 1 is barring the basement door.  Suddenly, he is resolved, having just tried desparately to keep the past the same as it was, to change it, and save Clara!  And so he races up to the turret (in Clara's little blue car - another clue that the corpse is Clara) and startles Héctor 1 into the machine.  And now things start to get really interesting...  Will he be able to save Clara?  Can the past be changed?  Well, what would David Lewis say?

(If you never intend to watch the film you can get the whole story explained here.)

Film review: Primer (2004)

 

This is reputed to be a fiendishly complicated time-travel film.  "How complicated can it be?" we thought.  Well, too fucking complicated, that's how.  To the extent that we had to watch a 20+ minute YouTube explanation (Thanks, LondonCityGirl!) to have some semblance of an understanding of what we'd just seen.  The more I think about this movie (which, to be clear, is an amazing achievement given that it cost $7,000 to make) the more peevish I get.  It's a classic example of someone using superficial clever-cleverness to hide fundamental flaws (reminds me of several people I knew in grad school).  Here's the outline of the plot: two engineers accidentally invent a time machine (first peeve: the first evidence they have that they've invented a time machine is that a fungus called "aspergillus ticor" to be found inside secretes a protein at a massively faster rate (in hours what it should take months to do).  This does NOT prove that they can travel back in time, which is what they then proceed to do.  Anyway, the machine works like this: you turn it on at the time you want to return to.  Then, having turned it on, you go and hide away in a hotel room, because once you use it, another version of you will be popping out of there (in fact, that's another problem: as they turn it on, a version of them should pop out right in front of them).  But then, weirdly, you leave the hotel room and go to a library to see what stocks have massively improved over the course of the day.  Armed with this knowledge (and some canisters of oxygen, because apparently it's pretty nasty inside that very cramped time machine) you go back to the machine in the evening of the day you turned it on, and get in it.  It then takes exactly the time inside the machine to return to the point you turned it on (so it's best to take something so you sleep - also it's pretty uncomfortable, and it appears to have unpleasant side-effects, including making your handwriting look appalling), at which point you pop out and immediately go buy stocks.  So, if you think about it, there are three of you for the six hours between the 9 AM you turn it on and the 3 PM you enter it: the original hotel-room-then-library version, the version who has traveled back with the stock knowledge, and the version traveling backwards inside the machine.  But really (and this is something the movie gets completely wrong) there is only one of you, with a loop-the-loop personal timeline.  Later, when (inevitably) different "versions" of each of our protagonists (fair-haired Abe and dark-haired Aaron (who is also the writer, director and composer, and all-around megalomaniac, Shane Carruth) 

run into each other, it is actually different stages of the same person. Anyway, the enrichment plan works fine for a couple of days until things are complicated by a party in which a girl called Rachel (whom Abe has been wooing, largely because her father is a rich venture capitalist) is attacked by a shotgun-wielding ex, whom Aaron invited to the party, and Aaron intervenes.  But did he do enough?  Later on, while pursuing another plot point - punching a former boss who got rich off their ideas in the nose, the two encounter Rachel's father who has apparently managed to time-travel, presumably because Rachel's boyfriend comes back and finishes the job.  This prompts Abe to want to use his failsafe device, which he turned on 4 hours before the first turning-on of the original time machine, which means he can use it to return before the whole mess gets started and stop himself ever time traveling.  (But of course, really, we know he must fail, because when he set up the failsafe device, a version of him did NOT immediately pop out and stop him. (Another complaint: Aaron finds out about Abe's failsafe device and travels back to it and constructs another failsafe device at the same time.  But how?  Did he put another time machine inside the time machine?  Because he couldn't construct a new one instantaneously, which is what would be required to have a duplicate failsafe device that also turns on at 5 AM.  Also, given that Aaron used the original failsafe device, isn't he already in it when Abe comes to use it?)  But Abe and Aaron have already discovered (because of a cell phone plot point) that the past can be changed, so...)  Anyway, our two friends have a falling out, Abe is determined to do all he can to block any time travel, while Aaron (at least one version of him) travels off to some distant country where they speak French and is seen having a giant version of the time machine built...

Overall, a fun, if impossible (see also Looper and Back to the Future) conceit, that deserves a much higher budget remake so that we could actually see duplicates interact, and we might actually understand what the fuck is happening.  As it is, the film is like caviar or oysters - expensive and disgusting food that people convince themselves must be good because it's so hard to get.  (And why's it called "Primer"?  Your guess is as good as mine.)  I've got to stop thinking about it, because every time I do I think of a new problem.  I mean, don't get me started on the whole thing of the wife thinking there are rats in the attic when really it's her husband's double, who apparently can't make more noise than a rat, even though he's wrongfully imprisoned.  This movie is a first draft of a first draft.  It should have been the movie that you make for $7000 as a proof of concept so that a studio funds the big budget proper version.  That doesn't co-star the writer/director (although Abe can stay - he's pretty good).