Over the Garden Wall (2014) - If dreams can't come true, then why not pretend?

Made For Halloween Marathon 2019!

Full offense meant towards every other special we watched for this marathon, but Over the Garden Wall captures the spirit of Halloween far better than any of them.  There's a tendency to look on the holiday as merely its surface-level elements, with the candy and the dressing up and the pumpkins and the gentle attempts at spookery.  In fairness to them and many other Halloween specials, there's nothing inherently wrong with celebrating Halloween as a time of haunts and creeps at play and little else - it's wonderful we still reserve any amount of time for reveling in mischief and fear, and some truly great art has come from fully embracing the modern aesthetic, like The Nightmare Before Christmas.  Halloween isn't just the modern practices and signifiers, though.  There's a salient connection to an older way of life, an older system of beliefs, a link to times when it was believed certain nights blurred the line between this world and the other.  Viewed through a modern context, you've not only a blurring between reality and supernatural, but also modern customs and bygone means of celebration.  We've gone through quite a few iterations of how to observe Halloween and the sense of controlled fear in general, and this holiday marks a good time to revive them more than most.

Amongst its multitude of virtues, Over the Garden Wall's greatest strength as a piece of Halloween media rests on just how many autumnal and horror-adjacent ideas it evokes to pitched-perfection across a mere ten quarter-hour installments.  Episodes can vary in focus from exploring the confines of a seemingly infinite manor seeking out a ghost in the spirit of old dark house movies, gentle schoolhouse dramas mixed with Scooby-Doo and Benny Hill sensibilities, harvest festivals directly informed by the aesthetic of gay nineties fall-themed postcards, or 80s teen dramedies.  Quite a few episodes even make room for direct homages to Fleischer's creepier Betty Boop/Cab Calloway cartoons  There's dozens of artistic influences on display throughout the series, all unified by a gentle modernized take on the classic fairy tale set-up of children wandering the woods seeking a way home.  As all-encompassing revelry in imagery and tropes of Halloweens and harvests past as you could want, it ensures there's a special, particularly resonant moment for all audiences without sacrificing its own particular feel.  Chasing a predesignated, boxed-in style to slap over everything simply can't achieve the same warm, cozy effect of merging multiple sources to create a vibe all your own.

It's good the series' artistic style is so dedicated to forging its own path whilst wearing its influences on its sleeve, for doing so is ideally reflective of the show's overall storytelling goals.  I don't speak casually when I call this a modernized fairy tale; it's way more than just the sense of light whimsy meant by that evocation.  The Unknown as a setting is reflective of both Wirt's self-serious teenaged poetic mythologizing and Greg's younger freeform train of thought approach to the world, a dark, never-ending wood where practically anything can and will happen, and children must watch where they step at every turn lest they stumble into a strange inhabitant.  It's every bit the perfect stretch of land in which to abandon a Hansel and Gretel or Little Red Riding Hood, and leave them to learn a harsh lesson about never straying from the path, or always listening to their elders, or never trusting strangers.  Over the Garden Wall avoids such overt moralizing - while dangers do lurk betwixt the edelwoods and deceptive forces do crouch in the dark, the vast majority of residents and travelers are merely people living their lives, and trusting supposedly obvious warning signs based on initial appearances often leads to more trouble than being kind and adaptive would otherwise.  There's little need for Wirt and Greg to listen to a powerful authority figure or suffer greatly for their transgressions to learn their lessons.  What they bring into the woods is enough to see them through, if they know how to use it.

A firm rejection of regressive, conservative views on childrearing will always earn applause from me, but what makes this show so special is how beautifully structured it is towards the goal of communicating that idea.  How it will dedicate entire episodes to the old "you meet in an inn" set-up to explore the pros and cons of identifying oneself by a societal role, or sly repeat concepts from previous episodes in a new context to throw the viewer off-guard and foreshadow the characters' descent into despair when the same outcome produces vastly different results.  How dedicated it is to finding a minute or two for development and honest conversation amidst whatever ten-minute slice of fun we're currently engaged in, often with direct relation to the game's unfolding.  How gentle and consistent it is in revealing non-hostility of frightening entities in order to reinforce the sense of confidently conducting yourself and looking beyond first impressions for kindness rather than deception.  How when it does reveal the genuine, immediate danger in the forest, it takes the form of unilateral, unflexible thinking patterns, mixes that with the original conception of a fairy for a fresh take on Der Erlkönig, and then simultaneously freshens it further and ties it closer to healthier old sensibilities by making the secret to victory acceptance of a different, adaptable worldview.  On all levels I can conceive, Over the Garden Wall tries and succeeds at evoking the old to create and enliven the new, and it does all this with the added benefit of gorgeous art, charming characters, and alternately humorous and genuinely frightening moments.

This is what the children need.  Fairy tales for the new age.  Decidedly modern sensibilities used to explore and understand and grow beyond past attitudes.  Something crafted with the total spirit of Halloween in mind, something that can understand the original impulses behind its celebration and find ways of thematically educating them about its nature and assuaging their own self-doubts, and finding room for new forms of surface-level fun besides.  Over the Garden Wall is the kind of program which can play with a cat in a great big jack-o-lantern themed maypole raising the dead to new life in pumpkin costumes for a grand harvest dance amidst pastoral New English fields of wheat, and still make time for incorporating candy and costumes into its aesthetic.  It's the complete package for Halloween viewing, and a lovely watch with friends.  Odds are you've already seen it and don't need my glowing praise atop the thousands of other write-ups online, but I'm still thankful for the chance to watch it as the capper to this series.

Hey, thanks!  It works for the November holiday too!

5/5

Van Gogh (1991) - He was my friend.

Letterboxd Season Challenge 2019-2020!  Theme three, part three - a film chosen by Cahiers du Cinéma as one of the 100 essential to an ideal library!

(Chosen by John!)

A part of me is screaming there's no way I can do this film justice.  It's a biopic about Vincent Van Gogh, one of the great European masters, a figure whose work and legacy are a tangled intersection of mental illness, impressionism, romanticism, and the nature of art itself.  It's a film by Maurice Pialat, one of France's most challenging directors, a man whose preference for simplicity and a sense of the real betrays an eye for complex beauty, inner turmoil, and a kind of fantastical attitude towards reality.  It has been hailed as a masterwork both in the context of art about Van Gogh (of which I have seen very little), and Pialat's filmography (of which I have seen none.)  "You've been fraying with all these reviews you've been writing lately," I say to myself.  "You've taken on far too much to do even a simple film justice, much less something with mountains of required reading attached like this picture.  You should just shut up and admit you won't get anything good out of this, because anything you say will be shallow and ill-informed and of no use to anyone who wants to read about Van Gogh."

Perhaps.  I confess to struggling with sitting still during the two hour, forty minute runtime of Van Gogh, and to great difficulty focusing when trying to read up on relevant materials to spruce my knowledgebase and say something a little more interesting.  I certainly won't match the insight in a Sense of Cinema article with this write-up.  However, if ever there were a film where my lack of insight seemed a good match to its contents, it would be Van Gogh.  Even with as little as I know, I can tell at a glance how Pialat chose a fundamentally different approach to Van Gogh from the popular conception, and how this approach is one friendly to simpler perspectives, much as it also invites deeper digging.

You and I know the image of Vincent Van Gogh.  Lust for Life draws on the popular conception of a mad artist wracked by fits of insanity amidst landscapes inspired by his vibrant paintings.  Don McLean eulogized him as a misunderstood lover who saw beauty where others found none.  Doctor Who posited there was something inherently different and special about the way he saw the world, which drove both his unique painterly style and the mental problems that led to his early suicide.  Most recently, Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman spent nine years painstakingly replicating Van Gogh's brushstrokes to animate a biopic about his life in the direct form of his paintings in Loving Vincent.  In a generalized sense, he's shorthand for a misunderstood genius, someone given to wild displays of poor physical and mental health, a longer never recognized until after he was gone too soon, a man completely defined by his highest highs and lowest lows.  Art seriously reckoning with his life and legacy will speculate, venerate, celebrate, agitate, and overall canonize the image of Vincent Van Gogh, Special Artist Who Saw The World Differently.  It seems to be practically the only way most folks know to discuss his life.

Pialat takes a different tact with Van Gogh.  Following Jacquest Dutronc as the artist during his final two months in Auvers-sur-Oise under the dubious care of Doctor Gachet, Van Gogh has gained note for how it eschews the paintings and the madness almost entirely.  Vincent paints plenty throughout the film, and his difficulties with gaining notice under his younger brother and only dealer Theo, but the works are always framed as the products of labor, afforded little more prominence in the frame or note as something special than anything else in his life.  Several of Vincent's most famous works are entirely absent, and others are glimpsed in the corner of but one single shot.  As to his struggles with mental illness, we see more than our share as the film pushes through its second and third acts, yet any impression that Vincent has severe troubles of the mind is confined to discussions of vague past difficulties and a repeating headache throughout the first.  Otherwise, he seems a personable enough man, one who has a tough time connecting with women and seems moodier than those around him, but hardly a tortured artist whose experiences here are ultimately prelude to a suicide in sixty days' time.  Some brief fiddling with a gun while discussing the topic and a reassurance to his brother that he's not suicidal are about all we get, and those two events are separated by a solid hour.

The most prominent facts about Vincent Van Gogh thus relegated to the margins, the central narrative and visual focus of Van Gogh thus becomes what other works might consider the margins.  Vincent taking idle walks amidst fields of wheat and olive trees, Vincent struggling with how sincere his brother and doctor are about their relationships, Vincent trying to romance Gachet's young daughter or else conversing with prostitutes, Vincent acting lively as can be at an outdoors party.  Whether any of this is remarkable on its own or not, I couldn't tell you - the images are certainly beautiful, the performances certainly painful, the conversations certainly intriguing, but we are talking about work in an anti-melodramatic mode, which I typically blanch at and find incredibly difficult to read.  The structure is admirable for the way it gradually introduces more of Van Gogh's unhealthy behavior until Dutronc is an emotionally unstable mess, hopping from peak to valley in the middle of otherwise ordinary conversation.  The imagery is all beautiful, drawing on motifs from Van Gogh's work without tackily trying to duplicate his famous paintings.  The silence between moments of revelry or conversation rings with power, and the tendency to compress important events to their beginning and ending with a quick cut tells us everything we need to know about how present the man himself is despite our own lengthy time at his side.

But again, I have little proper frame of reference for Pialat or Van Gogh's respective catalogs, and do not think myself capable of fully communicating this film's import or quality.  What I DO possess, is a long-running streak of adoring works of art that emphasize the simple fact of our existence, and while for most of Van Gogh I find its commitment to the margins of Vincent's life an intriguing if difficult to sit through experience in my current headspace, its conclusion and method of presenting his suicide grabs me most of all.  The way Pialat avoids implying any of the negative, draining events from the previous hour are THE central influence on Vincent's decision to shoot himself is a lovely touch on its own - there's a montage of people around town preparing for their day like nothing's wrong, Vincent included, which gets across how there's no poetry or grandiosity to a suicide, just a spur of the moment decision we don't get to see - but the drag through his prolonged death really makes it.  As was the case for much of the film, Vincent isn't on-camera for long stretches of his own dying, the camera instead following supporting cast and background characters as they concern themselves with the preparations and busywork of housing a dying man.  His actual passing takes place behind a cut, and we're afforded a single shot of people mourning before the film transitions to an extended sequence of life returning to normal.  The proprietor's wife gets more cameratime after busting her foot on an opening door than Vincent does as he slips away from a self-inflicted bullet wound.

This may seem cruel, and I could see how it could become undoubtedly so with a shorter, less personal film behind it.  With so much of Van Gogh focused on the living of daily life in an unremarkable way, though, I find this approach entirely appropriate.  In the grand scheme of things, there was nothing remarkable or important about Vincent Van Gogh if you follow him as a man like any other.  He rose, he worked, he spoke, he ate somewhat less than he should have, he fought, he loved, he dreamed, he died.  Never minding all the sensational, myth-ready forms his illness manifested and the incredible, universally-valued paintings, we find over this lengthy picture a man whose most vital, important facet was that he lived at all.  When he passes, others live on, touched by his presence depending on how close they were to him in life, but not defined by it as if they knew some great, immortal artist was gone too soon.  It seems small, and yet it is two-and-a-half hours plus of simply observing he was here, same as you or I.  There's kindness and empathy in not treating him as a great or a master or an all-time tragedy - his death as lowkey and personal as his life, and then the lives of others take over and the world moves on, as it would and will for all others.

I find it good and right to do this.  To afford the simplicity of following the day to day free from the constraints of legacy until their presence and influence over Van Gogh's life are impossible to ignore, and even then only affording them as much importance as necessary to communicate the idea before returning to form.  One becomes so concerned with understanding and communicating the grandiosity of what The Great Vincent Van Gogh or The Great Maurice Pialat DID, what they MEANT, what they LEFT US TO AGONIZE OVER LEST WE MISS SOME COSMIC MEANING, that one risks missing how they were just people in the end.  And in the beginning, and the middle, and all the parts in between.  The small stuff matters, even if so much of the small stuff over so much movie is difficult to watch through if you're not in the right mind for it, and while I know there's so much more complex analysis to perform with respect to Van Gogh and all it embodies, much as I wish I could engage in it right off the top of my head amidst this overstuffed schedule in a stressful time in my life, I think it satisfactory enough to note all this.  To say Van Gogh is a beautiful film about the need to appreciate the greats as average, unremarkable people under the right circumstances, how there's nothing wrong with understanding a life through its most ordinary moments, leaves me feeling fulfilled by the watching.

For the time, others can write nuanced essays about Van Gogh and Pialat.  I'm happy to say what I've said, think what I've thought, and put a pin here to return when I have better resources and a clearer head to do more.  If I never return, what I've mined from this source is still good enough for my money.

4/5

Halloweentown (1998) - See you in the afterlife!

Made For Halloween Marathon 2019!

Depending on how you contextualize the matter, the Disney Channel film Halloweentown is either a standard tween drama about asserting your independence with a thin layer of watered-down spooky imagery slathered on top, or a standard kitchen sink fantasy family romp with a thin layer of watered-down tween drama sprinkled about.  Neither characterization does the production any favors, implying nothing particularly special about the base story while making the flavoring sound unappealing and insufficient.  Although you'd have to press me fairly hard to get me confessing I feel any different than this, I think it about as fair to have a go at Halloweentown for what it is as I do for all the films highlighted in this marathon - which is to say, not fair in the slightest.  Why take the movie to task for trying to give kids a safe, enjoyable entrypoint into spoopy material and SLIGHTLY more complicated family dynamics than they'd be otherwise used to when its legacy as a nostalgic classic indicates it landed just right with its target audience?  There's more than plenty failures inherent to the film's construction to use as fuel for a nice coal-raking beyond its conception, after all!

I more than understand the limitations imposed on a project of this nature.  Child labor laws dictate children can't work outside certain hours, so location shoots need to take place during the day and night scenes can't take advantage of natural dark.  Filming permits are expensive, as are props and costumes, and the challenges of set dressing grow exponentially when trying to transform a real location.  Interiors, though less logistically challenging, still constitute a real expense, and the overall company bottom line will come out healthier if old sets are recycled with minimal changes.  Costumes and special effects eat into a budget like nobody's business; cheaper alternatives to the cutting edge and a lack of make-up or prosthetics on the leads make an acceptable cost cutting measure.  And we mustn't forget how all of this is done on a TV budget, with a TV production cycle, and a particular target date to hit due to the holiday theming of the picture.  Movies are stupid hard to make, and the people behind them deserve no grief for the multiple reasonable compromises necessary to turn in a project on time and in budget.

From an end-viewer's experience, though, it's still hard to lose the feeling of Halloweentown as a disappointing setting.  A magical world full of all the monsters and creatures and beings you associate with All Hallow's Eve, realized as a tiny town square with minimal set dressing beyond the big stone jack-o-lantern prop.  The interiors we visit could readily double for homes and ice cream parlors and saunas (???) in any Disney Channel production save the inhabitants, who wander about in costuming ranging from passable to obviously inflexible latex.  Exterior shots not only rarely leave the tight confines of the town square, they rarely leave one side of the street.  Everything about this wondrous fantasy land wherein main character Marnie Cromwell's dreams of becoming a witch feels tiny, dingy, and uninspired, hardly what you want from a children's film trying to sell the magic of a town where it's Halloween every day.  I put no blame on the crew or schedule masters for doing their best under doubtlessly cramped, underfunded circumstances, but I do put blame on director Duwayne Dunham for not allocating screen resources better.  When compared against the potential of the setting to capture the eye through the whole runtime, I hardly think the puppetry needed to animate a skeleton taxi driver for a handful of scenes a worthwhile choice.

Mark you, for much Halloweentown, I can only tell what the town looks like by squinting at the frame's margins.  For reasons I cannot comprehend, practically every dialogue sequence is shot in extreme close-up, with characters' faces completely dominating the picture.  Not a medium or wide in sight any time people are talking, regardless of whether the location or action around them would benefit from a slightly pulled-back lens.  It's as if the whole movie was shot with the camera parked inches from the actors' faces, which makes for quite the miracle when considering how even the youngest child actor only occasionally acknowledges its presence.  Staying so needlessly, uncomfortably close makes the already fairly charmless town feel even more drab and uninviting, because the unexciting image of not-so-great child actors badly emoting as they half-scream through their lines lingers in the brain far more readily than that of a supposedly wondrous setting.  At the very least, it's preferable to be pressed up against the kid characters' faces, seeing as they're not half so creepy as Robing Thomas' damn-near pedophilic Kalabar getting up in our business.  He's thankfully not in this much, though his scenery chewing delivery towards the end is also afforded no flattery by the overly close camera.

With regards to those kids, I could certainly do with less of them.  Not regarding the snarky, self-satisfied dialogue, something endemic to practically all family friendly children's media in the 90s.  Not regarding Kimberly J Brown's Marnie, who's only bland and uninteresting in the mold of pretty much all protagonists of this nature.  Certainly not with regards to Emily Roeske's Sophie, an actually endearing presence in the film and one I wish had more to do than repeat the same three lines of dialogue over and over again when the scene's not totally focused on her, even if it's just doing some more unique cute things.  With regards to Joey Zimmerman as Dylan, the smug, brainy, "rational" brat brother of the bunch.  Him being eight years my senior and fully grown nowadays, I feel no qualms in stating I absolutely cannot stand the kid - not the way he's written, not the way he's dressed, not the way he delivers his lines, not the immaturity he inspires in anyone who responds to him, not the basic conception of his character as a skeptic who has to actively call out everything around him as fake before adopting a forced cheery "everything's obviously a dream so I'll roll with it, you freak dream people" attitude, none of it.  He's a prominent presence throughout the whole film, getting at least one grating line per scene, and the screenplay's idea of allowing him development is to grant him magic powers and then immediately slide back into the same viewpoint as always.  The whole "believe in yourself and love your family and you can do anything" message is fair and fine for a film of this nature, but it stands on shaky ground when the person two inches to the left of the main character going through all this self-improvement journey stuff is talking smack at it every step of the way and seemingly learns nothing by the time the last frame fades.  He's awful, and I actively wish he wasn't in the movie, particularly because he reminds me of myself at his age, and I don't think any child needs exposure to that blither.

Halloweentown probably ain't worth all this, as I mentioned up top, much as it's plainly a cheapie attempt to cash in on Tim Burton providing Disney a marketable name and concept in The Nightmare Before Christmas.  It's a Disney Channel movie from two decades ago, fer chrissake.  All the stuff I've mentioned is bad, but not "all those paragraphs what I wrote up there" bad, and on the whole it's an inoffensive runaround without anything special to its name.  Fact of the matter is, there's Homestuck nonsense going today, I get nice and riled up by the thought of Andre Hustle continuing to desecrate the corpse of something that WAS special and meaningful to me, I need a punching bag which doesn't come with painful memories of past fights and undue emotional turmoil, and Halloweentown makes the perfect target.  So take that, you nothing of a Disney Channel movie.  Bear the brunt of my negative energy, so I might feel better while watching and analyzing Van Gogh tonight.

There are multiple elements at play here to indicate the separate dimension Halloweentown exists within is actually hell, and I don't feel kind enough to the film to think of alternate interpretations for any of them.  Benny the skeleton cab driver is slowly roasting for the sins he committed in life, and he probably deserves it.

2.5/5

The Worst Witch (1986) - HAS ANYBODY SEEN MY TAMBOURINE?

Made For Halloween Marathon 2019!

(Warning: I have never read any of The Worst Witch books.  Everything I claim about them comes from a two-hour dive across wikis, fan communities, and Goodreads reviews after watching last night.  Please excuse any inaccuracies.)

I shan't categorically claim a book so simple and episodic as The Worst Witch has natural difficulties making the jump from page to screen - to my understanding, both later TV series based on the series have found greater success, which indicates Jill Murphy's tale of Mildred Hubble struggling through her first term at Miss Cackle's Academy for Young Witches has greater potential for live-action translation.  It is probably more accurate to claim a mixture of hewing so closely to the structure of a book with perhaps half-a-dozen major incidents and bringing the same to life on a fairly low budget does nobody any favors.  1986's The Worst Witch has to fill a scant seventy minutes (less counting opening and closing credits) with an even scanter handful of notable events, and call it a day.  You can handily do this in the pages of a book with barely 100 pages, large-print, and multiple full-page illustrations aimed for the sensibilities of first or second graders.  Imagination and empathy for the main character takes over quickly to fill in any gaps, and a "and then this happened, and then this, and then this, and then that," structure fits either the child who only reads one chapter at a time or the child who tears through the whole book in a single sitting.  A low-stakes, high-fun spin through the life of a girl who can't do anything right in a fantastical setting is a great idea for a young reader's book.

For a film... well, you can see the director and crew straining for ways to make it all work.  Some choices meet their mark by inventing clever little new incidents to serve as glue between the major incidents, such as the game of Terror Tag or a brief bit of comedy with the Headmistress' (I assume) Chicago-dwelling niece.  Nice, kid-friendly expansions on what you'd expect from the setting and story, as are the moments of conversation between the children during lull-periods.  At other, more crucial turns, though, the film opts to take major incidents like Mildred accidentally turning her rival into a pig, and draws them out with guff-laden dialogue for quite a long while, longer than I could imagine myself standing at an age more appropriate for relating to this story.  Elsewhere, attempts to appeal to an older audience fall completely flat, whether they be the multiple segments showing the evil witches plotting their dastardly scheme to little more effect than their sudden appearance towards the book's end, or recasting the stuffy, elderly Chief Magician as a vamping Tim Curry, whom literally every other member of the cast is in love with for some reason.  Anything with these two threads is padding of the highest order - and speaking of their padding...

At least one of the songs is tolerable.  I think it's more a problem with delivery on Growing Up Isn't Easy and Agatha's Song, as the singers are pretty shrill and off-pitch, and I could see myself going with their bouncy rhythm if they featured a better performer.  They still irritate the ears a touch, unfortunately.  As to Tim Curry, his song features some awful non-sequitur lines even for something aiming at silly, very basic rhymes, an awkward halting rhythm backed by badly tuned synths, and Tim Curry wavering back and forth with no indication he knows what he's doing.  And it is probably the best part of the special thanks to how hard Tim Curry goes for it on the vocals, coupled with Craig Price's off-the-wall editing and effects.  If there were an award for Most Editing, Price deserves it for his work on Anything Can Happen On Halloween every year all years.  It's a neck and neck battle between Tim Curry and Charlotte Rae for whose musical number is the most transparent time waster, but much as I love Tim Curry's and have the entire thing imprinted on my brain after discovering it on YouTube years ago, I have to hand him the title.  His goes on way longer and completely warps the film's tone to cram itself in there.

Much as decisions to expand the story with wheel-spinning and weird underaged Tim Curry-crushes and long musical numbers harm The Worst Witch's potential, I think the biggest problem introduced in bringing it from page to screen involves the tone of how Mildred is treated.  Watching this without the implicit understanding that as a young reader invited to think of myself in Mildred's place thanks to the degree of non-specificity the written word affords, working through all the times when Mildred is called out, teased, put upon, straight-up bullied, and badgered by her fellow students and teachers alike for what look like terribly minor infractions just makes one feel bad.  The adults in her life engage in the exact same name-calling and positive punishment as the other children, to the point where the one adult in the school who's supposed to be on her side, the headmistress, out and out calls her the worst witch to her face multiple times.  It's a miserable thing to see, compounded by hints that this magical society otherwise operates on "Do things how you please just so long as you're witchy about it!" I GET Mildred being punished for messing up a potion, but let her ride her broom and carry her kitten however she damn well pleases, you monsters.  Carrying a cat in a satchel is just as witchy as having it sit on the tail.  With how pointed and direct these baseless attacks on her  person play, and how little the excessive lengthening and padding blunt the effect, the story still feels more joyless than I suspect it should, even for one about a little girl who feels like she can't do anything right.  I more want to hug Mildred and tell her it'll be OK than watch her continue on through this battery.

So, important thing to note again as we finish up: While I can't sit down and point to my own experiences with Murphy's books as a means of illustrating my points, I am somewhat inclined to treat the series with a softer hand.  This film reportedly disappointed Murphy on release, and while I could handily join thousands of others in digging through the Harry Potter similarities, I also understand how, with eyes clear from the nostalgia in my own, the first film in that franchise suffers from much the same issues as I identify here, just with a stronger throughline and a FAR higher budget.  If I can apply "this thing works far better on ink and paper, where a child reader can engage in self-protagonist-replacement easier" in a film I identify as a childhood favorite, I can say this weaker effort shouldn't cast any bad light on its source material.  Besides, in much the same way I adore Sorcerer's Stone in spite of the problems, I know there's plenty people who love this special for the same reason I love the first filmic entry in MY magical school series - they saw it as kids, have strong memories associated with its iconography, and no real reason to be bothered by the padding or strange means of depicting conflict as a result.  I wouldn't want them to besmirch my love for the film, so I won't besmirch anyone else's here.  There's issues issues aplenty, but I can understand why others like it, and don't think it much right to call this bad beyond its failure to engage me as an adult.

Besides.  Just... lookit this.  It's incredible.

3/5

The Story of a Cheat (1936) - At ten, I was saved by stealing money. Later, I was punished for failing at stealing. Finally, after stealing a great deal of money, I turned honest, and went completely broke.

Letterboxd Season Challenge 2019-2020!  Theme three, part two - a film chosen by Cahiers du Cinéma as one of the 100 essential to an ideal library!

(Chosen by Jackie!)

Sacha Guitry did not initially care for film.  After directing a short patriotic piece celebrating France's great celebrities and intellectuals of the day, the famous French wit swore off the medium as too restrictive, and focused instead on writing, directing, and starring in the over one-hundred plays he'd produce between 1902 and 1936.  To his mind, Guitry's greatest assets were his wordsmithery and his voice, neither of which could translate well to the silent medium.  This changed in the mid-30s, when his third wife of five, Jacqueline Delubac, convinced her new husband to give film another try, now that it possessed the technology to distribute his words loud and clear.  Guitry threw himself into his new medium with characteristic aplomb, wearing multiple hats in numerous films per year to the decade's end, and continuing his cinematic career regularly throughout the late 1950s, even through his disillusionment with French patriotism after his countrymen accused him of collaborating with the Nazis during German occupation on false pretense.  Quite a good thing he listened to her advise given today's film, although the whole "five wives" thing does give one a moment's pause when reflecting on his character.

It's interesting coming to Guitry after Murnau in this challenge's previous entry.  Murnau fared ill amidst the rise of talkies, and produced his (unfortunately) final film in defiant silence to great effect; Guitry evaded the movie houses for years due to their silence, and when he finally got in on the game, he was all talk talk talk.  I'd call The Story of a Cheat one hell of a chatty movie, except a chat usually involves two or more participants - the titular Cheat regales the story of his life to the audience in total isolation, narrating  an extended monologue over practically every second of the film.  The line between the Cheat and Guitry is blurred from the opening moments, where the picture foregoes the usual textual credits in favor of Guitry's voice introducing us to each player and major member of  the crew in a humorous behind the scene's tour, which sets the stage for how the rest of our time here shall play.  His voice dictates everything we see onscreen, and not just in the usual narrative sense of a voice-over's words providing additional context to the action.  Every camera movement, every choice in framing, many musical cues, acting decisions, practically every last cut happens because the Cheat has thrown in a little non-verbal reaction, or paused for effect, or gone on a tangent that requires a complimentary montage.  Rarely have I seen a film so dependent on a near-omnipresent monologue since Blue, and Jarman's solid-color experiment had other speakers every so often.

The effect could land as hopelessly, odiously egotistical lot of nonsense, a bastard so wrapped up in himself he forgets to keep the audience engaged.  Make no mistake, this is, at the surface level, IMMENSELY egotistical, what with how all other characters speak in the Cheat's voice, and how the moving image is in absolute subservience to a singular, directorial voice.  Knowing Guitry adapted this from his lone novel, Les Mémoires d'un tricheur, the film strikes me as more direct reading from a literary source with a film playing in reaction to the reader's inflection than a film version of said story.  To this end, it is still an exercise in ego, but it is a delightful, involving exercise in ego.  The filmic medium is already commanded by a single, commanding voice despite its collaborative nature, just rarely in ways we can perceive so directly.  Adopting the form of a literary work and making the film move in time with a speaker explicitly rather than implicitly creates the effect of being in on the joke at every turn, especially with how self-aware Guitry's words and the reactions from on-screen characters get at times.  A wink for each verbal nudge, a self-conscious cough for every awkward moment, a reward for paying attention to the particulars of rhythm. As an audience member, you are treated as an old friend who gets all the in-jokes and appreciates the Cheat's peculiarities to the fullest, in a way one rarely gets from more conventional filmmaking.

This remarkably successful fusion of literary and cinematic conventions is helped along further by several of the Cheat's endearing character traits.  He is simultaneously the luckiest man in the world and the one to catch the hardest breaks, with any curveball life throws him containing both opportunity for fabulous wealth and the set-up for inevitable failure.  Attempts at honesty lead him down paths towards crime, caves into underhanded dealing see him taking the straight and narrow route to great personal loss, and all with the Cheat's visible person and detatched narration indicating he's merely a helpless toy of chance and fate with wry amusement.  The ways in which his dominance over the narrative breaks also contribute to a positive impression, for the Cheat not only loses his cool around pretty ladies and falls for fate's traps in the course of the narrative, he simply cannot maintain his control over the camera and narrative when an old flame arrives to interrupt his flow.  He's a simple buffoon at heart despite all the well-mannered class and posh speaking style.  The kind've guy you admire for persevering through a sea of nonsense, despise for his self-satisfaction, and yet admire again for how well he takes the breaks and how knowingly he tweaks his nose at misfortune disguised as fortune disguised as misfortune.

Cleverness coupled with technical proficiency will get you quite far, and it is thanks to The Story of a Cheat's cinematic style that I think it a practically  perfect film.  In the past, I've praised The Maltese Falcon for possessing such on-cue sound design as to function equally well as a radio program as a moving picture.  With this film, I not only think you could snip out Guitry's monologue and have a satisfying experience with very little lost, I also believe you could play the film in total silence and still understand the entire thing.  The need to compliment and play along with narration I suspect was written and recorded well before filming started gives the film a highly meticulous yet freeflowing feel, the sort you get when needing to respond to spontaneity with mechanical grace.  Its performers approach pantomime whilst maintaining an easy, casual affect; its camera introduces characters and tells stories all on its own due to the need for a complimentary image to each word; its stagy vibes are frequently broken by montage or odd yet fitting cuts in a way that get a laugh with or without the narration.  Either half of the film, the singular narration or the collective effort to follow along visually, would make a highly satisfying experience; you mash the two together as they are here, allow them to talk and inform one another's choices in real time, and you've something you just can't get outside the realm of pictures flickering at twenty-four frames per second.  S'just... such deeply involving FUN to follow through.

What a film to have prompted my caving and buying a Criterion subscription!  The Story of a Cheat is unique in its literary qualities without sacrificing or downplaying the necessary collaborative effort behind its creation.  It is self-involved and egotistical in ways that invite the audience to laugh along as an old friend.  Self-aware and witty as to offset any and all potentially damaging effects of sinking so far into the mire of this man's life.  And it's got some good suggestions about how to improve a capitalist socioeconomic system if we're stuck with it for the foreseeable future to boot!  I love love love this film as a successful example of merging mediums, as a comedic thrill ride which achieved the rare feat of keeping me from looking at the clock once throughout the runtime, and as demonstration of how the singular and collaborative and cooperate without sacrificing their respective energies to create that is, I must say again with emphasis, downright delightful.  It is more than worth the fifty dollars for Criterion's four-film Sacha Guitry box set, or the 100 dollars necessary to access it on Criterion Channel.  Hell, for those looking to go a little cheaper, a single month's subscription (or even just a free trial) is worth it for this film alone.

5/5

A Disney Halloween (1983) - *Horrifying Michael Eisner noises*

Made For Halloween Marathon 2019!

My original intention for this introduction went something to the effect of, "You see what I mean? The third film in the Made For Halloween marathon is just a collection of clips from old Disney shorts and features, something I slotted in as a fun extra entry alongside Over the Garden Wall. There's really no way I can get a coherent review out of THIS!" Work an exasperated tone for mild humor, get into a quick little bullet-pointed summary of anything I found notable, call it a day on the shortest write-up in the series. Simple enough. Unfortunately, two factors got in the way of my plans. Firstly, I could not for the life of me find the originally planned special, Disney's Halloween Treat from 1982, anywhere online. The closest approximation, a fan-made reedit, is a janky, ill-flowing mess that fails to feel like anything beyond its station. So, we went with 1983's A Disney Halloween instead, which uses reordered segments from Halloween Treat, follows them with footage from 1977's Disney's Greatest Villains special, then finishes off with two mostly intact cartoons more directly related to Halloween-y topics.

Second, and far bigger a problem, comes from my browsing the Letterboxd review pages for these specials. What should I find there, but a review by user No-Personality that matches my usual standards for length and personal depth, for a program I honestly thought couldn't sustain any extended discussion. Not only for A Disney Halloween, but for Halloween Treat and the later DTV Monster Hits, with comparative notes across all three. Clearly, the bar on how much I have to try in reviewing these clip shows has been raised! Ergo, while I won't make an effort at totally matching what they've got beyond the link there (my own history with these specials begins and ends with "I think I may've seen one on TV when I was six or seven, even though I know they stopped airing with any regularity before I was born," and I'm not nearly big enough a Disney fan to provide meaningful or interesting commentary on anything here), I can at least expand my bullet-pointing idea out to discussing the special's whole structure, rather than just what jumps out at me most immediately. I care bout you folks, all six of you who regularly click on this space through twitter and facebook.
So!

• Goofy has slain Michael Eisner's alternate universe double, and fashioned his corpse into a meat suit. This is the second most horrifying thing in the entire special, right behind having to look at Michael Eisner.
• I'm fairly convinced Ted Turner's colorization process was such a big deal during the 1980s not due to fears he'd irrecoverably damage classic black-and-white films with his insistence on needless/gainless modernization, but rather because efforts to colorize old movies before turner looked like Cozilla or the attempts at adding splashes of color to The Skeleton Dance here. It's weak, weak stuff, to the point the colors only stay inside the decades-old celluloid lines on the very last shot before we cut to more montage footage of the shorts within. Nobody needed this. 
• Starting with the Night on Bald Mountain sequence from Fantasia makes for a stronger opening than Halloween Treat's Mad Madam Mim wizard's duel, I should think. Can't exactly speak to this with any certainty, as we didn't watch Treat, though I can say the summoning of ghastly spirits by the hand of a great demonic figure is a better tone-setter than Fun With TF Fetish. At the very least, if Mim has to stay towards the special's front despite Hans Conrad having a full ranting speech dedicated to her from a few years back, it makes more sense for her to follow Chernabog rather than the other way's round.
• I wouldn't say The Old Mill makes a PERFECT Halloween-specific short for showcase when Disney made so many other more overtly spooky tales (no Mad Doctor, huh?). It's still an absolute 5/5 short, remarkably complex and artistic for the first film to feature Disney's multipane camera, and much of its charm and thrills pull through even the fuzzy resolution of the archive copy we watched. Glad to have it here, regardless of the expense to Pluto's Sweater and Mickey's Parrot. 
• Donald Duck how many floors do you have in your home. 
• Pink Elephants on Parade is a better song than Hephalumps and Woozles, and boasts stronger, more creative animation. Not the fairest comparative in the world, given the drastically different economic situations at Disney both on the macro scale of the studio operating at full strength before WWII really cut into their pocket books vs something originally intended as a stand-alone short during the relatively fallow 60s, and the micro scale of Winnie the Pooh stuff aiming for a gentler tone than anything in Dumbo. I can't help but think it disappointing they went with what I'd think of the lesser of two similar options, particularly since they kept the naked dancing fire spirits from the Fantasia sequence. 
• OK, in this A Disney Halloween rendition of the special, I can understand cutting Pluto's Judgement Day in with a few other Pluto shorts to create a little thing about Pluto being tormented by cat devils in hell for chasing and bothering cats all day long. They've added in a segment from one of their 1950s TV shows about the history of cats and witchcraft, and moved up the Siamese cats segment from Lady and the Tramp to create an extended block of cat-related content. Makes sense, cats are a big part of Halloween iconography, and the whole "people used to be superstitious about black cats so ooooh, spooky!" thing makes a better bridge into Racism than slotting Si and Am in with Cruella de Ville and the Evil Queen like Treat did. However, Treat is the one that cobbled these Pluto cartoons together, and I can't figure out why no matter how hard I try. Pluto's Judgement is already structured around Pluto tormenting a bunch of cats and then getting his comeuppance in a dream - did we need to showcase Figarro so much that we slotted one of his Pluto shorts in here? I can just see some station manager storming around the office bellowing, "MORE CATS! GOTTA HAVE MORE CATS! CATS PLUS CATS EQUALS HALLOWEEN!" as the editing team scrambles through the archives and pulls out Puss Cafe of all things for their Halloween special. 
• I love Hans Conried, as should we all. Terrific self-satisfied sneer of a voice, incredible screen-presence, one of the many reasons everyone should give The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T a watch sometimes, all-round great gentleman of stage and airwaves. Much a hassle as it was arranging to watch the longer special in spite of multiple sleep schedules, listening to him bemoan the lack of respect afforded to villains as the Magic Mirror is a total delight, and the biggest reason to watch this special. And of course he chooses the bad guy with whom he shares a voice for the first in his highlight reel, just an extra little touch to really sell it. 
• Limited though they were by the restraints of what the '77 special contained, and much as Edgar is one of the elements in The Aristocats I wholeheartedly love, I'm sad we don't get any Cruella de Ville in here. There's nothing much Halloween-y about her (or many of the villains, come to think of it, beyond convincing children they make fantastic costumes for the following night), but they had a full segment for her in the original, and the already brief montage of Lady Tremaine, herself, and the Queen of Hearts was cut down to five-second flashes. I'm sure there was something they could've done with Hal Douglas to keep her in, if only for her song. 
• The Maleficent segment was mostly an occasion for complaining about how dumb 2014's Maleficent was, and how badly it treated the fairies. 
• I get finishing on Lonesome Ghosts and Trick or Treat. They're explicitly Halloween-focused shorts, they featured Huey, Dewey, and Louie in the opening song without giving them any real time in treat, and these two are practically the only shorts in the whole thing to run for close their originally intended length... but Treat ended with the Headless Horseman song and chase from Ichabod and Mr. Toad, and I can't help but bemoan its loss alongside everyone else who's done any kind of in-depth discussion of these specials. Go trick 'r' treating all you like, just don't deny me Bing Crosby singing the best song in any Disney animated film. Yes, I know I can just look it up on YouTube after. Yes, I absolutely did so, both before we watched, after we watched, and again a few times at work today. No, I shan't stop complaining, nor can you make me stop. 

No rating this time, as there's nothing much TO rate. Some stuff's from shorts/films I consider brilliant, others are from films I don't care for but feel somewhat warm towards due to the highlighted elements, others I'd never seen before tonight and found fine, and some are Racism. Call it a 4/5 if you like, though it's just not anything I'd think ratable in any event. Fortunately, the back half of this little marathon boasts films with no such problem across the board, so we can get back to non-bullet-pointed business as usual in short order.

The Addams Family (2019) - You rang?

Conceptually, the new Addams Family is a touch confused.  Per the lengthy pre-credits introduction sequence, this latest take on Charles Addams' classic characters are a bunch who very much mind the fact that polite "normal" society views and persecutes them as freaks, and are ecstatic to discover a creepy old manor in perfect line with their sensibilities.  Quite a lot of one major subplot involves Morticia and Gomez agonizing over keeping Wednesday safe from the outside world, and the climax turns on first a need for one family member to shield the rest from an angry mob, then on the whole clan learning the meaning of tolerance.  I'd feel somewhat hesitant to decry this as a betrayal of the franchise's core appeal - this being how for as creepy, kooky, mysterious, and spooky the Addams' are otherwise, they're far better at maintaining the wholesome, healthy ideal of a nuclear family than the more conventionally regular people around them - except for the way the film frequently demonstrates an understanding of this same appeal.  Depending on the scene, the Addams Family are wracked with the same inability to functionally communicate with and love one another as the rest of the world and fear discovery/destruction, or act exactly like their traditional selves, blithely unaware of how or why others would ever view them as different, exactly in tune with one another.  It's definitely odd to go from Morticia failing to deal with Wednesday's emergent rebellious attitudes or Gomez pushing Pugsley to work a tradition the same way he did, to the family unit ticking like clockwork to unintentionally freak out a nosy neighbor.

Matters aren't helped by how the film's vision of normalcy is itself decidedly skewed.  The villain, Margaux Needler, a designer home flipper, seems a pretty decent foil to the family in the mold of the villains they faced in the 90s films, with a few added doses of more obvious "conformity is bad" commentary slathered on so the younger kids can get it without trying.  Issue is, the same impulses that make her so obvious a foil on the surface also drive the writers to make her a far more conventional, active villain, which leads to... weird choices.  Choices like the same film that's trying to make general social intolerance to difference scary deciding to have its villain artificially engineer any and all hate towards the Addams' via social media.  Choices like bringing the intolerant villain round to the heroes' side without any idea how to do this, so she just goes from full-scale meltdown over her failure to blissful acceptance after some off-screen romancing from Uncle Fester.  Normal as a concept basically has to adopt two contrary versions of itself, the default state of the world by natural order and something forced on others by control-freaks, in much the same way the family's dynamic flip-flops from its classic form to more conventional dysfunction and back again.  It all reeks of a production with multiple differing visions, and no real compromise on how to make it a cohesive whole.

On the somewhat positive side, the individual characters as realized by their voice actors slot into their roles quite nicely.  Pugsley in particular feels like a big improvement over other incarnations of the character, having an actual personality and arc to play through compared to his usual state of Wednesday's chew toy.  He's still a little heavily reliant on the "little tyrant boy obsessed with explosives" archetype common to pretty much all forms of kooky family media, Finn Wolfward's performance occasionally trends towards generic in ways the other cast members don't, and I'm still not entirely convinced the idea of Gomez feeling ashamed over his son's interest in explosives over swords isn't against the franchise's general spirit... but it leads to some sweet moments in the finale, allows Pugsley a chance to shine, and gives the family's most cipher-like character some good definition, so I take the good I see here over the bad.  Oscar Isaac and Charlize Theron don't bring much to their characters Raul Julia and Anjelica Huston didn't already put there, though they feel right for the parts, and Chloë Grace Moretz has the right sort of deadpan to make her more rebellious take on Wednesday play well.  Nick Kroll as Uncle Fester... look, he's in basically the right vocal neighborhood registry of a Jackie Coogan imitation, but there's something about how gargly he sounds at times and the implications of the character as a class-A pervert that turns me off the performance.

As per always, Lurch and Thing remain my personal favorites.  Perhaps my love for characters with minimal dialogue and no major part to play in the plot says something about the film's quality.  I'm still out here loving Lurch living his best life, even as he's mostly here to provide musical gags.  I adore him all the same.

I wasn't expecting much out of this film, and sure enough I didn't get too much.  Between its inconsistent characterization for the family, weird insistence that the Addams' of all families need to learn tolerance and acceptance of difference, and somewhat slow pace (it feels like we spend an hour setting up all the conflicts going down throughout the film, then toss out half and rush through what remains - there's a few teased-out lines regarding Morticia getting in over her head that never go anywhere, for example), it's definitely a prime candidate for a studio product existing for the sake of its own existence above any driven need to tell a story.  Knowing as I do, however, how the Addams Family can be far duller and far more inappropriately disturbing (yes, even for them) as per the wretched 1977 Halloween special, I can't really say this is TOO bad.  Confused, low-energy, and not so classically Addams as to properly earn the admittedly fun replication of the 60s series' intro before the credits, yes, but not awful.  Not intolerable, or ruinous, or a blight on the cinematic landscape, or whatever some more hyperbolic reviewers are claiming.  Definitely a good time for the kids, though probably destined to become less a beloved nostalgic classic than "the HELL was I thinking liking this so much?" when they grow up.  It exists, won't make much money, and will pass from memory before you know it - why should I do much more to it than point out what I think is wrong, note what it gets right, and go, "Eh, y'know, if it's your thing, why not?"

(They slot a Young Frankenstein reference AND an Invasion of the Body Snatchers reference right next to each other.  It's weird.)

2.5/5

The Halloween That Almost Wasn't (1979) - It's one of those days I wish I was dead! And stayed dead!

Made For Halloween Marathon 2019!

Y'wanna hear some neat trivium?  This here 1979 Halloween special from ABC was in competition for a few Emmy Awards!  Even went and won one!  Course, there's a little bit of weirdness going on - between 1968 and 1972, and again from 1977 to 1982, the Emmys split the category for Outstanding Achievement in Children's Programming into two categories, one for the outstanding achievement in general handed to the producers, and one for outstanding individual achievements, awarded to higlighted cast and crew.  The latter category is rather interesting to look through, as it allowed craftspeople and actors who wouldn't normally get a shake (due to children's programming only hosting the one category for producers in the years before and after) a chance to have their work honored.  From what Wikipedia shows in their tables for the category, it didn't work out every time, as the award was juried and required one nominee to receive 50% of the ballots to justify a win, which often meant nobody earned any honors.  There were even a few years where the category judges only nominated two people, and the jury still couldn't come to a 50% consensus.  Imagine having only two options and somehow not achieving a majority consensus in either direction.

Anyhow, The Halloween That Almost Wasn't was pretty well set to win the individual achievement category in 1980, as it had three contributors nominated, compared to Sesame Street in Puerto Rico's two.  Arthur Ginsberg was nominated for his editing, Mariette Hartley for her performance as the Witch, and Bob O'Bradovich for his makeup, which won the award.  I wish I could speak more to Ozzie Alfonso's direction and Nat Mongioi's art direction on the Sesame Street primetime special, but unfortunately nobody has it anywhere, save an upload of the first episode containing segments that aired over the following week.  S'in pretty poor quality anyhow, so I'm not sure I could much judge it none too well.  Something tells me I might feel just a touch biased towards wanting to say one of the two deserved the award sight unseen, since O'Bradovich's winning make-up is... what it is, and it feels more right to say a piece of programming from Sesame Street in its prime is more deserving of accolades than something comparatively lighter and fluffier.

Also wish I could give Sesame Street the same consideration for the overall Outstanding Achievement in Children's Programming category; however, balked as I am there, I CAN give such consideration to the winner, Benji at Work.  Of the two programs I can judge, I think it fair to say Benji's little documentary was more deserving of the win.  It has some weaknesses in how it keeps up some dishonesty around the realities of Benji's life, as it feels a little weird how they constantly insist on calling the female Benjean a he to maintain the illusion, even as Mr Rogers was more than comfortable showing children the faces and processes behind other beloved fictional institutions.  On balance, though, it's a nice enough look into how Frank Inn worked with his animals and collaborated with filmmakers to get the hero dog acting so well.  Regardless of how the film they're documenting turned out (quite the stinker, as I understand), the special makes a fair mix of entertainment and education for children, and has an endless parade of shots showing Benjean acting like a cute pupper.  The thing's got my approval, even as I could personally do without Adam Rich as host.

S'more trivium for you!  The actor playing...

...oh right, we're supposed to be reviewing The Halloween That Almost Wasn't.  Truth be told, I've been dodging around doing so.  Applying my usual standards for critique here just doesn't seem fair or proper.  It's a light piece of children's entertainment from 40 years ago, and while I can certainly identify flaws aplenty with its concept and execution, ragging on it like something produced with any higher ambitions than keeping kids entertained with silly puns and goofy costumes for half an hour seems in bad sport.  Still, this is a review site, and I did put it on the list with the intention of providing some semblance of a discussion, so... why not?  Just a little critique, in bullet points.

-Without Judd Hirsch, I'd probably tear into this program quite a bit more.  He's quite plainly having a very good time playing Dracula, leaning into the character's pompous attitude and flustered reactions to his fellow monsters having gone soft and/or unionizing.  The jokes and pratfalls he's running through may be juvenile for even his audience, but they're functional enough and earn laughs - though I must admit, my laughing at a Young Frankenstein reference comes entirely from the thirty-second "did he really just..." process that followed rather than any real cleverness.  Honestly, if I had to choose an actor to nominate for their performance from this, he'd be they.

-This said, Mariette Hartley doesn't deliver a half-bad performance as the Witch.  The writing on her is a bit shaky, oscillating between "I want to break Halloween because you don't respect me enough or share your controlling interest with an equal business partner" and "I want to break Halloween because people think I'm ugly and mean, and I don't want to be that anymore," with neither taking over long enough to get a clear picture of the intent beyond "Witch bad, gotta stop her."  As such, her sharp-tongued, smarmy Brooklyner approach to the character gives it an appreciable, endearing quality where the writing lets her down.  She has a sweet scene with a little girl who loves witches towards the end, so y'know... it works out to something good enough to praise.

-The other monsters are drastically underserved by the structure.  The Wolfman and Frankenstein's Monster at least get highlighted entrances and a few one-liners when Dracula chews them out for giving into corporate marketing deals.  Zoltar the Zombie King and the Mummy are barely afforded time for Igor to speak their names on arrival before they shuffle out of frame, and for the rest of the picture they're only allowed to stand around looking kinda bored without delivering any dialogue.  And for as much as the first two monsters get to do during their introduction, they too fall into the background as part of the indistinct crowd behind Dracula as he and the Witch spar it out.  I think the writing team only had one good joke for the Creature, the one about how his feet aren't his, and didn't know how to make the other undead monsters work without repeating the concept of detachable body parts.  The Mummy gets to pratfall at one points, but it's slow and awkward and does nothing for me, so that's a bust.

-I can appreciate the suburban family watching TV as the news comes in that Halloween may be cancelled forever if Dracula can't get his act together, insofar as they're a semi-absurd element of blissfully modern stuff intruding on what's supposed to be an evocation of Gothic Eastern European stylings.  They don't come back into it past the introductory scenes until the ending, and I think it would've helped the special feel a little more cohesive if there'd been a beat of Dracula or Igor or someone realizing they need a different tact to get the Witch back on their side.  At very least, the dad should've come back in with his children, just so we could get some more good ol' gum-flappin', square-lookin' all-American 70s sitcom dad goodness.

-The ending of this movie is probably why disco is dead.  John noted that it works on some level, since undead monsters probably only listen to dead music.  I don't know if I agree, but it seemed an interesting enough observation to share.

-Rating films gets tricky sometimes, as the definite number attached to a review is so easy to take for the total opinion when it's more a general barometer for where I am on work, with the lengthier passage serving to fill in details.  I'm going with a 2.5 for The Halloween That Almost Wasn't, which is normally one of my bad scores, typically dolled out to films I find sink juuuuuust below the barrier of quality to be called good.  Again, though, I think it highly unfair to treat this slight lil' thing as a full effort with all that implies - yet I also can't exactly say its problems don't bother me or prevent me from having as good a time as I'd like, children's show or not.  To this end, I'm keeping the 2.5 rating, but additionally noting how it's a 2.5 that could very easily transform into a 3 if I'm feeling the tiniest bit more generous at some point.

So, like I was saying, one more fun little bit of trivia here.  The actor playing Frankenstein's Monster here, John Schuck, went on to play Herman Munster in the late 80s Munsters revival series, The Munsters Today.  If that ain't enough neat connections to other noted light horror-adjacent TV, consider how Igor's actor, Henry Gibson, voiced a character for the 1973 Munsters animated telefilm, The Mini-Munsters.  Or, my personal favorite of the connections, Wolfman actor Jack Riley played Gomez on the Addams Family Fun House variety hour, which I STILL want to see for the purposes of tormenting friends.

Writing about old, idle-watching TV ain't my strength, and the next entry in this year's Halloween marathon is gonna test my ability to pull together a coherent piece even more.  Fun!

2.5/5

Tabu: A Story of the South Seas (1931) - Always driven on by fear... fear of the avenging tabu...

Letterboxd Season Challenge 2019-2020! Theme three, part one - a film chosen by Cahiers du Cinéma as one of the 100 essential to an ideal library!

(Chosen by me!)

The story is simple: The young man Matahi lives on the island of Bora Bora, wiling away his days amidst the springs and waterfalls with lover Reri.  The chief of all tribes across the island chain has selected Reri as the new honored virgin, paragon of all virtue amongst their people, and so declared her tabu.  With Matahi unwilling to accept this declaration and Reri devastated by the loss of a normal life, the two steal away through a stormy night to a nearby French colony, where they try to establish a new home.  Unfortunately, the old warrior Hitu is on their trail, determined to enforce the custom of the tabu, while societal forces beyond the young couple's control seemingly conspire to bring the dreaded curse down upon their heads.  Fill in key details, and you've a classic story of youth defying tradition, and learning how you can't outrun the consequences of your actions.

In Tabu: A Story of the South Seas, the details are filled by none other than F.W. Murnau (with influence from early documentarian Robert J. Flaherty), and so the yarn communicates a powerful strain of those old world sentiments through a modern medium.  Having grown weary with the American studio system after his previous sound pictures bombed, Murnau fled to Tahiti for a year to make a movie his way, in the silent tradition.  Though his partnership with Flaherty fell apart thanks to a disagreement in style and technical troubles in the shoot's first days, the opportunity to return to the format in which he made his clearest mark did wonders for this, his tragically final film.  And not just a return to the silent tradition - the early cooperation with Flaherty and the subsequent shift to a more ethnographic approach, the employment of purely native newcomers for cast and crew, and the opportunity to experiment with his free-floating, subjective camera along new dimensions all help push Tabu to feel like a director doing whatever's necessary to draw just the right qualities from his material.  Just as the cinematic verve of Nosferatu's self-moving shadows and dissolving bodies added to the film's sense of a centuries-old horror, so too do the fresh filmmaking angles here help Tabu play as a millennia-old tale with strong ties to the modern day.

You take the three elements I highlighted, and you get something like the boat-bound scenes, wherein we watch the simple act of real seafarers organizing a party to meet an inbound sailboat, for the simple sake of watching what it looks like when actual mariners from this part of the world engage in such an activity.  It's enough to see them perform these actions, and enjoy the narrative twist of Matahi's little brother calling him back to the mainland at the worst time possible, but Murnau adds that key something extra by placing the camera directly on the bows and sterns.  While I'm certain they were well secured (this ain't no Evil Dead running around with the camera on a plank of wood recklessness), and while we've seen cameras placed in dangerous positions many times over the years, one really has to appreciate the danger involved at this time and place in strapping a valuable piece of equipment to a pitching wooden vessel just to authenticate the shot.  Even when not putting his most necessary tool at risk, Murnau is right in there with the characters, allowing the lives, habits,and ceremonies of the tribespeople dominate the first chapter of Paradise, which is far more about spearfishing and ceremonial message reading and traditional dance than it is plot.  When we transition into Paradise Lost, the ethnographic elements fall away a touch, yet the sense of living a true life never goes away, regardless of how much story intrudes.  After all, we're still with the same folks, and even the colonialist supporting cast hail from the region.

This, I think, demonstrates Murnau's strengths as a storyteller, and the happy accident of losing Flaherty's more overtly observational (if still well-known manipulative) tendencies.  Through most scenes of the natives living and performing, Matahi and Reri are still communicating their despondency over the situation, and play out a nice little teen drama of self-pity and anti-traditionalism without uttering a single word.  Though the choice to go dialogue free isn't as extreme here as in Murnau's earlier The Last Laugh - we're treated to plenty intertitles in the form of in-story letters, which I suppose is a necessary evil when trying to fully expound on some of the concepts around mandated virginity and imperialistic intersections with local values - it sure as hell works in the young couple's favor.  Both because their actors rise to the occasion and give no indication they've never done this before, and because it again allows Murnau to play about with cinematic techniques to great effect.  Consider the way the old warrior Hitu haunts Reri's waking eyes in every doorway, or how Matahi gets completely lost in how the colonists enable him to put on an even wilder party than those back home from seemingly the good of their hearts, only to discover later than money and debts exist.  Where the thoughts and feelings of the local ship captain and outpost master are communicated through his diary, Matahi and Reri remain purely visual actors through expression and cinematic form.

And really, when it all comes to a head, it marks the themes about societal taboos and the strange power they exert over youth draws on all this to such interesting effect.  I especially like the scene of Matahi's troubled dream: it's the most expressionist piece in the picture, and ties together the tribe's tabu of sullying the sacred virgin with the colonists' taboo of defaulting on your debts, by way of a third forbidden practice.  Being backed against the wall, ignorant of Hitu's imminent arrival yet fully conscious of what will happen if he can't pay his bills, Matahi dreams of overlapping images, the debtor morphing into an off-limits patch of sea, where we push in through several fades to the sandy bed and the great pearls within, the largest of which grows to fill the screen before transforming back into a satisfied debtor.  In effect, if Matahi can breech just one more tabu, he thinks himself set for life - the twin sharks of Hitu and the literal sharks guarding the pearls never once crossing his mind.  It's a lovely sequence, and, in cooperation with how Reri's attitude towards her position changes from one of despair before she flees to one of ceaseless guilt and fear afterwards, makes clear the film's position.  Even if there's no mystical force chasing down those who cross an invisible line in the sand, the sense of shame and need to continue crossing lines to stay ahead of the consequences get the job done just the same.  Matahi's equally doomed by Reri's failing convictions and his decision to leave her alone to go on a risky pearl dive to save their hides as he is by Hitu's final dreaded appearance.

Now, there's places I don't think Tabu entirely works, and feels more a product of its time than an old story captured on film.  Chiefly, while the accompanying score is cleverly integrated with musical cues that respond directly to the action on-screen and generally contributes to high engagement with the material, it also seems too Western in conception, too much like a Hollywood studio band blaring a marching tune of "FEEL THIS!  FEEL THAT!" over Murnau and the locals' more effective filmic and acting choices.  It's just a little bit too much imposition from the emerging American tradition to fully gel.  One of those cases where something's good on the face and endears itself well to the crowd, but doesn't quite belong amidst the other choices.

I can't and won't say the score sinks the movie, though.  It's too perfectly sharp and clear a portrait of life and tradition in Tahiti at the time through the eyes of a great expressionist mind as tempered a naturalist for "this music doesn't sound quite right for what we're doing" to even dent the hull too much.  I mean, one can handily tell we're talking about a great work of art when one considers how its message boils down to "youthful rebellion cannot hope to overcome the societal forces puppeteer their lives, be it virginal traditions or colonialist capitalism," and I like it this much.  Me, Mr Let The Youth Run Wild And Get The Hell Out Of Their Way.  The image of Matahi struggling to keep his head above the waves as the full force of all his poor decisions and boundary crossings weigh down upon his tiring arms is too potent for me to say otherwise.

The world really did lose Murnau too soon.  S'a damned shame Chaplin got to bow out of silents on his own terms with City Lights in the same year, while Muranu died and didn't have a choice in the matter.  RIP to him, even nearly 90 years on.

4.5/5

Fire and Ice (1983) - I spit on peace, woman! I spit on you!

Letterboxd Season Challenge 2019-2020! Theme two, part three - a swords and sorcery film!

(Chosen by John!)

After making our way through an exaggerated, dirty, satirical take on medieval Britain with fantasy elements squashed in round the margins to highlight how pathetic everything looks, and a Japanese legend retrofitted to play with martial arts and tokatsu sentai conventions, we come to the real deal swords and sorcery film. A primitive realm where enormous spiked iguanas roam the misty jungle swamps, great barbarian heroes cleave through wicked minions with ease, kingdoms of base elemental nature clash in gouts of raging lava and freezing glaciers, and nobody wears anything more than a loin-thong and maybe a few additional fabric scraps. From a collaboration between Ralph Bakshi in the wake of his one-two adult animated feature punch of Wizards and Lord of the Rings, and illustrator Frank Frazetta after two decades of redefining the public perception of Conan, John Carter, and Tarzan with his painted illustrations for their rerelease covers, we are gifted Fire and Ice. Boasting as simple a premise as one could ask - minions of the dread ice wizard Nekron chase Princess Teegra of Firekeep through the equator's underbrush, while wandering warriors Larn and Darkwolf follow in hot pursuit and hopes of penetrating the wizard's glacial keep - this movie gives itself over to extended sequences of characters wandering the world, coming across strange creatures and characters, and letting their simple but forceful personalities explode at appropriate moments, well before it ever considers doing something different. Much as the aesthetics of Jabberwocky and Takeru Yamato were enjoyable distractions from their iffy stories and structures, it's so nice to sink oneself into an unapologetic evocation of Robert E. Howard and Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Mark you, unmitigated replications of those turn-of-the-century fantasy stories isn't a universal good. A LOT of Fire and Ice's fantasy action revolves around Nekron's minions as they alternate between dragging Princess Teegra through the jungle, following her escaped tracks, and engaging in battle with the heroes. They are, to put it bluntly, near-carbon copies of every racist depiction of the savage horde from those works. Their skin tone is substantially darker and duskier than almost anyone in the film, their faces somewhere between Neanderthalic and outright apish, their movements shambling and uncoordinated, their speech either obscured behind an untranslated foreign tongue written to sound brutish or simple grunts with no real meaning behind it I can't tell since it changes from scene to scene, and when we finally get a name for what their group is, it's "subhumans." Some praises I'm going to offer the film are blunted somewhat knowing they involve how characters interact with these minions, as they are so clearly unintelligent and incapable in the mold of so many impossible-to-civilize, inherently-inhuman beastmen. It's made a little better by their close-ups all looking distinct from one another, their deaths being played for some minor pathos when not delivered by heroic hands, and a moment of mercy at the very end, but there's so much overt coding going on otherwise as to make these humanizing aspects feel not nearly sufficient. The film occasionally approaches toying with how they are wrongfully enslaved by a powerful master, and should've leaned into this further, failing the option of "don't call your slavering, dark-skinned monster people subhumans."

Switching gears to more positive aspects while still talking blatant negative coding, the film's other major villainous presence in Nekron actually works very well for me. Nekron, to my eyes, only reads as gay: the very first proper animated thing we see after a sketched introduction is Nekron writing about on his throne, his face in twisted ecstasy as he exercises his considerable powers to make his glacier advance on a helpless village, massive phallic pillars erupting skywards before the tips shatter and bury the soldiers in hunks of semi-solid white. This marks him as a very sexual character, but given how spiteful he is towards his mother for daring to bring him a near-naked wench for breeding purposes before taking special interest in the equally naked barbarian hero to the point of shedding his robes and sparring the man in naught but a thong himself, it's difficult to shake the impression. I can see how this is MEANT to read as the evil wizard possessing gay characteristics to repulse the audience and make hating him easier, and so can see the point where I'm supposed to condemn Bakshi for such a homophobic character concept. With Nekron, though, I just can't go there. The coding is too far above subtext, too obvious and easy to scan as "This man's character traits are the following: ice wizard, no pants, gay as hell" to register as hateful or damaging. Nekron is a dweeby little twenty-something who knows exactly what he likes, hangs around his mom's house masturbating day in and day out, throws a fit whenever she tries to marry him off, and gets off to how much better he is than everyone. I'm half-tempted to say he's a perfect subject for reclamation, an animated gay icon if there ever was. Where the "subhumans" are too entrenched in attitudes from centuries past for their sympathetic elements to work, Nekron is too perfectly pissy and smug and endearing in a very modern way for his all-too blatant gay coding to harm his presence.

And hey, wouldn't you know it, there are parts of Fire and Ice that DON'T revolve around sociopolitical topics! I'm very much a fan of how Teegra is written as a far more dynamic character than most kidnapped princess in the subgenre. Not really a deep character, because let's face it, nobody in this movie has personality beyond what you get on sight; rather, one who's always responsible for her own escape, and gets to kill substantially more than even the rare single pity kill such characters are typically afforded. True, she's drawn, animated, framed, and generally treated like a sex object way more than any other near-naked character in the film, female or otherwise, but it doesn't come at the expense of her getting to be competent or badass in her own way, even if the creatures she outwits are presented as half-wits. Granted, everyone in the film seems like a wimp compared to badass supreme Darkwolf, who is my favorite character. Making the hulking, hypercompetent warrior guy who'd otherwise serve as the protagonist in this tale a mysterious figure who watches from the shadows and only intersects with the protagonists to rescue them from a bad situation or effortlessly cut his way through an entire army helps his appearances play so much larger than life. He looks and acts like a prehistoric mix between Batman and Black Panther, he gets to turn the background a solid color with the sheer power of his enraged bellow twice, he does cool things like save the main character's life by hurling him off a cliff, and he's the one who engages in the final duel with second-best character Nekron. I love him to pieces, and think he shows up in the film exactly as much as he should.

He also takes the pose of the Death Dealer a few times throughout, which brings us to another major strength of Fire and Ice - Frank Frazetta's designs and backgrounds. It's impressive how many of these paintings we only glimpse for a few brief seconds. They're decidedly sketchier than his full-sized cover work and standalone pieces, as they need to match both budget and character aesthetics, which demand a simpler style than his usual bent. Through this, he still does a great job of evoking steamy jungles, festering swamps, crumbling ruins, and frigid ice fortresses, often from multiple angles for the same scene. A great enough job that the aesthetic pleasure of looking at his backgrounds almost distracts one from how exposed everyone is, and how they should definitely look significantly more marked by their environments if they're so close to total nakedness. It's a weird decision, one you can easily parse as making sense in a line of text yet feels weird on rotoscope-animated characters, but it makes the film more distinct and gives it a solid ancient vibe more often than not. In a rare case for me, I kinda wish the film were a bit bloodier and gorier, with all these grievous blade and axe wounds on unprotected skin - it seems there's supposed to be a greater degree of brutality to this murky, sketchy world, and the most one gets whenever steel meets flesh is a small, brief spray of black dots. Doesn't quite jive with how well everything else ties together.

Fire and Ice is no grand triumph of animation or fantasy storytelling - it's too content to play things out according to the beats and conventions of narratives seventy years its senior to rise so high. It is, however, an incredibly solid, enjoyable piece of animated pulp entertainment, indulgent in its chases and skirmishes throughout a fantasy world populated by... OK, two really great characters, and a bunch of mixed weirdos and sturdy stock figures. I do wish it had a little more, considering how the ending takes a suddenly apocalyptic turn and implies some grander purpose behind the whole adventure than anything else in the movie. Such a gripe can't prevent me from having liked the ride for all its backwards thinking flaws. A standard swords and sorcery romp without any frills has its own charm, and this one has Nekron and Darkwolf being respectively flamboyant and awesome on top of everything, so I'll come away from here serviced any day.

Seriously, though, don't fucking call your minions "subhumans." It'd be bad enough if just Nekron did it, cause they show he's bigoted towards anyone and everyone, but other characters take up the name too, and it's uncomfortable 'n' weird.

3.5/5

Joker (2019) - The worst part about having a mental illness is people expect you to behave as if you don't.

(Goin' full spoiler mode for a film that's still in theaters, so turn back if you aren't down for that.)

Right.  Let's have ourselves a talk about the quote in the title.  It's been in the trailers, gone viral as part of the marketing, gotten propped up as one of the big iconic capital-T Things from the movie alongside Joaquin Phoenix crying as he stretches his mouth into a fake smile and Phoenix smash-step dancing on the stairs.  And it has been... interesting for me.  Because I've said that quote before.  Paraphrased or verbatim, I've hit low points where all I want to do is lash and rant and hurt whoever's listening, and said that it's so goddamned frustrating having to go through my day under the expectation I'll act all normal when inside I'm getting angrier and angrier at myself and everyone around me.  "Yeah, me," I'll say, "it really does suck not being allowed to go round unloading all your damage on other folks whenever you want to, and getting called out when you decide to anyways out of the blue."  It is a Bad Thought, one of the repeating lines that comes up when my mental state hits its worst point, and one of those things I constantly promise myself I'll never unload with again before whoopsy-daisy!  Turns out we're right back here.

Hasn't exactly been one of those situations where it's this major trigger every time I see it - despite my problems, I'm generally collected enough to not deal with that problem, though I understand plenty others do and wish them the best in coping and overcoming.  It's more a strange situation because there's been all this talk about how Joker will get audiences inside the famous supervillain's head, make them see the world as he does, make us sympathize with the mad clown.  And it all sounds a lot of marketing guff reinforced by folks on the internet who're more than happy to repeat marketing guff if it's guff written to appeal to their sensibilities.  Until there's that thing I say when I'm having problems. My self-pitying, self-justifying line, which functions so well as a means of hurting others by implying they're doing something wrong by not tolerating my overly-aggressive nonsense, and hurting myself by explicitly stating the out-of-control, undercutting, unstable mindset is the healthy one.  That... sure is one hell of a Thing to have at the forefront of a marketing campaign.

And y'know, cliched and close to incel sadboi talk as it may sound, in watching Joker, there's an awful lot've Things in Joaquin Phoenix's performance I recognize from my own struggles with mental problems.  The tendency towards performative behavior when feeling cornered.  The attempts to sound decisive and harshly-spoken made ridiculous by storming off into a glass door or some other such unaware pratfall.  The struggle to break out of your own headspace and properly connect with folks.  The fantasizing - so much of the fantasizing.  Placing yourself in situations where you know you'd otherwise recede into the background or bomb if put on the spot, and imagining how you'd effortlessly breeze through it and get all the veneration and positive reinforcement you'd ever like.  And then when you can't idly dream anymore and come back to reality and find things aren't so good as you'd like, tearing everything out of a small space, crawling in, and not coming out for hours on end.  I've definitely done that last one more than a few times myself.

It should be noted, my life doesn't suck the same way Arthur Fleck's does.  I'm not dangling over a pit of economic ruin in a city on the verge of social revolt with an equally-ill mother to take care of and a need for multiple medications that the state pulls away once social programs get the axe.  Things are, in spite of how I feel many hours of the day, generally fine.  But Joker is out here smartly working the fears that things might be this way one day, or worse, how they might be so right now.  It's rote to say a film plays with your sense of reality, yet this film's right up front with how it does this, inviting you into Arthur's head to see how readily he detaches from reality early on, and evoking the same sudden shifts to the world acting flattering towards him at multiple points to slyly indicate when he has a break.  Most of the time, these breaks come when his situation is deteriorating, and while moments like his realizing the woman he's been courting never spoke to him beyond their initial meeting are obvious, other bits like the yuppies he murders taunting him or the city reflecting his self-image in the adoption of clown masks as a means of performance take longer to resolve themselves as real or not, if they do at all.  For the record, while I unfortunately had to give up a theory that the clown masks were all in his head (the third act doesn't really work as a narrative if you hold to it), I'm still nursing a notion that the guys he kills on the subway didn't actually do much to him, given the oddity of their singing Send in the Clowns before beating the shit out've him in the same way the street punks do at the beginning.

It could all be wrong, is what I'm saying.  Life could seem good, and the things you hold dear could all be inventions of perception to make yourself feel better.  S'a terrifying thought, and one I frequently have when down in a really dark place.  Cinematically, it's an easy place to explore, and would make a fine film on its own merits.  Where I think Joker goes right, where I think it earns the accolades it has claimed in this last month, and where I think it dodges the traps inherent to a story about how your reality isn't true and the world really wants to just beat you down, is in its refusal to validate.

Phoenix is key here.  He spends so much of the film chasing after some notion he's more important than he feels, be it a career in stand-up, a place as Thomas Wayne's son, or someone who can hold a lasting relationship.  When all lead to dead-ends, and he is left with this hollow, hating feeling inside, he breaks, and turns fully performative.  He's more dynamic in his movements, playful in his speaking, clever in his speech, more the image of a man treating the world as something to kick back against.  That fantasy of going out there, making a grand statement, and blowing your brains out for all the world to see (another one I get at times) constitutes his whole plan for the third act, and his every action is played as if however the world reacts, he'll take it as validation.  Yet the film does not reinforce, nor does it condone, because it treats his actions as disturbing, shocking, and vile as they are.  This man has killed people to make himself feel better, taken advantage of the big shot he's always wanted to enact a small-screen suicide, found a way to control his inappropriate laughter by deliberately, forcefully laughing at the horrific acts he perpetrates.  Each and every action is an act, and it is act to get attention, to feel important, to raise a middle finger at the world and tell it all to piss off.

And it is wrong.  The film treats it as wrong.  Phoenix's performance indicates he is wrong.  The whole big fantasy of becoming an important person, and what does it involves?  Breaking down on air, violently oscilating between performative and self-pityingly angry, blowing a man's brains out, and becoming the cult leader of an aimless, needlessly violent movement based in destruction as an ideology.  Big whoop, buddy.  Your dream's everyone's nightmare.  MY dream's everyone's nightmare.  That's why I push it down and try to get better.  And the thought that there might come a day when I can't push it down, because I can't control it or because the wrong stimuli come along or because I can't get the help or support I need any longer is terrifying.  And that's the big success of Joker - taking all those what if fears of living with a mental illness, playing them out to their logical conclusion, and condemning the result.  This is wrong, because the end result is the JOKER.  This is his world, this is what I get if those impulses are acted on - a nightmare world where the veneration  I want only comes from people who might want to serve a goddamned supervillain.

Now, if I've any big issue with Joker, it's in how it adheres to the whole supervillain thing.  Namely, at the climax, as Arthur's story is reaching its climax, we cut over to one of the rioters chasing a rich couple out of a movie theater, and gunning down Bruce Wayne's parents.  The camera stays with the little boy for a little too long for my tastes.  If it were incidental, a sharp punctuation note in the midst of all the chaos he's needlessly inspired, I might be good with it.  As stands, this feels like a far worse attempt to tie Batman and the Joker's origins to one another than the Tim Burton Batman film.  At least there, the connection was more casual, a nice third act twist to make the stakes more personal in the way a thousand other action films have.  Here, we've a film whose writing and star performance work their asses off to show how this is all the result of a man disintegrating and taking every little thing as an opportunity to scream at the world about how unfair it all is and work his damage out on everyone who crosses his path, and how none of it is right or justified regardless of how he feels... and then throws a little "And this was all the start of a great franchise rivalry!" note in right as it ends.  It's far, FAR too close to making his actions seem righteous and exciting rather than hellish and terminal.  A story like this, this sort of sympathetic but still firm and moral look at the Joker, should not end with Batman's creation.

I should dive out, back into healthier waters.  This has been a lot more soul-baring exercise than proper review, even though a lot with regards to the film's editing, sound design, other performances, and general visual feel deserve praise.  Just for a quick little example, it's smart in the way it brings in the Taxi Driver and King of Comedy homages, as they mostly play into Arthur's runaway, self-destructive myth making, and function as means of showing how he's taking the wrong path more than making him look cool in a shallow way.  But I've gotten dark here, and possibly implied some things about myself in finding a mirror in this movie that I really don't intend.  I just want to say, in spite of how much of my worst thoughts I find in this movie, how much I feel the fear of giving up and doing whatever and taking even the most horrific things as a means of feeling great, I am OK.  I wouldn't appreciate Joker quite so much if I wasn't OK.  In much the same way Psycho is a scary but enjoyable way of watching a mentally ill person wrench the movie's narrative away from its original track and refuse to let it go with each plunge of the knife, Joker is a terrifying look at all my intrusive thoughts and imagined scenarios.  It's a good way to see that all actualized with a palpably horrified reaction to what it all means if brought to a conclusion, and then lean back, self-reflect, and say "Let's not go there.  Let's be healthy."  Hopefully it stays this way, and we don't see it all blown to bits by Phoenix coming back to fight Batman as a more standard take on the character.

(Last note: Todd Phillips has been talking a lot of nonsense in interviews of late, all this stuff about how comedy is dead because the leftists and SJWs are out to cancel all comedians, and how he's trying to smuggle a REAL movie into the world of comic book fluff.  I very much disagree with his perspectives, and will be quite disappointed if further thinking on this film turns up that ideology in his construction.  It still works quite well for me, though, and I can't find reason to condemn his comments in the same way I condemn other directors for endangering/abusing cast and crew, so y'know... fuck what he thinks.  Movie's still good.)

4/5