This is one of those movies that I really can’t say anything about without ruining everything. All I can say is that Elisabeth Moss and Mark Duplass were both great, I loved the concept, and the execution was fantastic! The metaphors at play remind me of an excerpt I heard once from Dan Savage at a lecture where he was answering questions from the audience about relationships, but I can’t say which one or it could spoil stuff.
This is worth checking out, available streaming on Netflix.
First, a big thanks to the stupendous Wes for getting Roused the paid version of this theme. It’s finally mobile-ready, baby!
Second, I’m writing a bit now for a fun writing community called Sidelines. My first post went up the other day, and since I had more to say than would fit in a Sidelines post I decided to share the extra part here with a link to the rest of the story on Sidelines. It’s about the rise, temporary or long-term, of shared movie universes. And away we go!
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Tentpole films are a necessary part of the current film economy. Expensive movies that potentially deliver huge returns while also increasing the status of your brand is huge. The newest strategy for delivering some of those tentpoles is the shared movie universe,which offers a variety of unique perks and perfectly suited to our current multi-platform media world.
I’d argue the current trend actually started with Pixar, even though it wasn’t necessarily a shared universe. Like Disney once did decades earlier, Pixar built a model in which a carefully crafted storytelling voice carried across multiple films, each featuring remarkably high quality. The execution of this strategy played a large part in making each year’s newest Pixar installment one of the most anticipated movies of the year. Sadly, they are far less consistent than they once were. Thanks to this approach to unified storytelling collaboration, with centralized oversight, we knew what it meant when someone said “Pixar movie” far beyond merely understanding it was going to be computer animated. We knew we’d laugh, and cry, and smile, and that the storytelling would be rich, fresh, and satisfying. It resulted in a brand loyalty to a particular studio that is nearly impossible to come by, with perhaps Pixar’s parent company being the only other company to share that sort of reflexive loyalty.
Marvel Studios did something bold by taking that model and going even farther. They took Pixar’s lead in creating a central storytelling tone, maintained throughout the entire studio output and overseen by a central content-runner, but took that to a new level by actually having the events of their stories impact each other. This culminated in the massive success of The Avengers. It was so natural, because the comic source material had been doing that all along. It was also risky, and required the creation of multiple films with quality content that audiences responded to.
See more here at Sidelines, as I ponder which new shared universes spawned in response to Marvel’s success might fail or succeed.
Quirky, super low budget winner about Future Folk, the Brooklyn-based folk outfit comprised of two aliens from the planet Hondo.
They’re like Flight of the Conchords, but they exclusively play folk and are from much, much farther away than New Zealand.
The History of Future Folk catalogues their origin story, as they come earth to wipe out humanity in order to save their own planet, but fall in love with earth music and realize they need to find a way to save both worlds.
This movie is as sweet as it is unique, and as full of heart as it is unselfconscious. As the trailer says, this is the greatest alien folk-due, sci-fi, action, romance, comedy movie ever made.
This one looks like it could be pretty special, and like it will definitely be really difficult. Irish cinema is offering some pretty great fare the last few years!
The story of the crane wife is a Japanese folk tale, “Tsuru Nyōbō,” a variant of Tsuru no Ongaeshi (Crane’s return of a favor). I learned it because of The Decemberists album
Patrick Ness has written a beautiful novel rooted in that story. He transcends the potentially dangerous gender lines of the folk tale by instead revealing the fear, courage, cruelty, and kindness in all of us. Writing a story about how much we need other people, even if only two or three. Barebones summary: The story begins as a man hears a keening outside his London window in the small hours of the morning. He goes outside to find a crane with an arrow in its wing. He helps the crane, and the next day a mysterious woman comes into his print shop and everything changes.
My first experience with Ness was with his Chaos Walking series, which is great, and I was excited to read something so different from him. With The Crane Wife he tells a story that is simple and grounded, which is impressive since the story is rooted in myth and magic. He always presents that myth and magic in ordinary ways, simply allowing his metaphors to take flesh within the pages.
Ness delivers a moving illustration of the way each of us is afraid, each of us capable of destruction and creation, and each of us needs someone to see us for who we really are and offer us forgiveness for all those small and large things we are secretly ashamed of.
It is also a story about story. My favorite passage to that end feels like it is lifted right out of my master’s thesis: “No, a story is not an explanation, it is a net, a net through which the truth flows. The net catches some of the truth, but not all, never all, only enough so that we can live with the extraordinary without it killing us … as it surely, surely would.”
You should think about spending some time with this lovely little book
Pretty much entirely new footage, and, our best look at The Vision so far. For the embed to work correctly it seems you need to use fullscreen mode, which is better anyway.
I made it, 28 posts in 28 days. Well, actually, 27 posts with one being twice as long to make up for the missing day. Still, this challenge with Wes did exactly what it was intended to do, getting me to post with renewed consistency and momentum and reminding me that most days when I feel like I can’t write I actually can. In a time where I was soul searching a bit concerning writing, this gave me the context to see how I actually felt when I was writing with consistency. It didn’t give me any big picture answers, but it reminded me that I really do love writing, even in the times I’m not amazing at it. Hopefully, now that I won’t need to post something every single day here the quality will rise a bit in the future, what with me being able to spend a few days writing some posts instead of having no choice but to throw it up half-cocked. My hope is to post something more in the realm of three or four times a week, although probably less some times when my energy is being directed toward fiction writing.
So, here’s to the future. To baby steps and discipline, to doing the work every single day, because when you do mediocre and shitty work every day, that’s when moments of inspiration and quality can break through. Here’s to letting go of excuses because I see now that they are normally bullshit.
I’m tired of letting the fact that I’m usually afraid and down on myself to ruin any chance I have of being something more than I am now. And so, it’s time to risk failure because at least part of my brain can believe that failure isn’t as final as it feels, but is merely part of what it means to try again after every defeat. Learning something, growing, and putting in the work again is really hard, but it’s also the only way I’m ever going to get anything I want out of life, and while I would never throw my lot in with those fucking YOLO idiots, they are right that I only get to live one time, ever. Time to carpe some diems.
I really liked Frank, the story of an Irish kid who meets an American indie band led by a man who never takes off a giant fake head. The film is also on a long list of movies that I really appreciated, but would normally be hesitant to recommend to anyone. I hate endorsing movies to friends when there is a solid chance people won’t like it, mostly because such a vast majority of people hate what they hate with much more passion and intensity than they love anything they love. I initially wrote much more about that fact as I was composing this, but then decided it was best left for a different post altogether. Suffice it to say that I have trouble separating my own feelings from the art I love, and most people are assholes when they don’t like something. Thus, even my best friends don’t normally get recommendations from me unless they read this blog, wherein I get to share stuff in a bit of a vacuum.
Anyway, the trailers for Frank make it seem like the film is about a lovable Irish kid who finds a genius songwriter who is a diamond in the rough, and a bit nuts, and nudges him toward a wider audience. In reality, the film is much better, and at times much much more uncomfortable than that. There were scenes later in the film where I literally had to pace my living room because I was so uncomfortable about what was taking place and how casually terrible people can be.
Frank is about genius, and mental illness, and being talentless (but too talentless to know it), and it is about that age-old conversation about the relationship between creative genius and mental illness. It’s about community, finding those people who see you and understand you and accept you for who and what you are, and make you better. The film is small and intelligent, and it is one of the few movies about brilliant and weird music that actually includes brilliant and weird music. Most of the time they just keep telling us it is weird and brilliant and we are supposed to go along with it. Everybody in it is great, which is what sells the uncomfortable moments so well, but also what makes the heart and beauty land perfectly.
I absolutely loved the closing moments of the film, for reasons that are best explained in a long conversation with someone who gives a shit about my two cents, instead of in a hastily written blog post. I’m sharing that scene so people who have seen the film can enjoy it again, but I would recommend skipping it if you haven’t watched Frank. Both because of spoilers, and because you won’t know what the fuck is going on. I just needed a scene about a man who can often only express himself indirectly and through an artistic medium included on RtM.