Conjectures and Refutations
Starting the new year by correcting for a mistake from last year's last entry. Four pictures from 2021 and four children's books.
A good friend pointed out a noteworthy error I made in the previous entry. Of It’s a Wonderful Life I wrote that “its high quality and watchability explain its enduring appeal” but also that “the timeliness of its release surely had much to do with its initial success.”
My pal informed me that in fact It’s a Wonderful Life was a financial failure and mixed critical success when it was released and that it was its enduring presence on television around Christmastime each year for decades afterwards that steadily but slowly enhanced its reputation and standing. So I think I was correct in the initial part of my point that the film endures because it is great, even though this wasn’t wholly apparent to the film-viewing public on its release, and I think I leveled some cogent points about Capra’s vision of small-town life and American values emerging from the War era. But I was wrong about the film having been a hit from the start and thus on very shaky ground in conjecturing that the public of the time were on board with Capra’s conception.
In any case, this raises a few interesting issues with regards to what I’m doing here. I try not to go on too long explaining things that are widely known and understood about some of the most influential works of art of all time, for example such as Pride and Prejudice by Austen or the films of Quentin Tarantino or the comics of Matt Groening. My personal goal with this project has always been nothing more or less than to consistently practice writing and editing so that I can get better at them and help me sort out my own thoughts about what I read and watch, since dishing about movies and literature is one of my chief pleasures in life.
But I’m adamant that each entry should be precisely long enough to cover the subjects and short enough to remain interesting. This balance needs to be adjusted with regularity, and in my haste to buttress my own broader point about It’s a Wonderful Life I made a factual error and therefore predicated part of my argument on a faulty premise.
Fortunately I can hear directly by email from people who want to take a differing view or wish to point out something I’ve missed or misunderstood. (I don’t necessarily or automatically care if someone doesn’t like what I have to say but I’m certainly open to hearing it, and in this case both my pal’s factual correction and his several aesthetic dissents were of interest.)
The other takeaway from this matter is that I could stand to do a bit more research before making a supposition, especially one about a film as influential and well-known as It’s a Wonderful Life. For the most part I consciously avoid reading other writers’ opinions or doing excessive research, but it seems that I could stand to do more and make sure I get my facts straight. An adjustment for the second year of this newsletter might be for me to tinker with that balance, be patient and take a bit more care to get things right.
Another friend and her wife recently met me for drinks in the neighborhood in San Francisco where I’m temporarily living and I happened to bring along the copy of Anna Karenina that I’m reading (thinking I might stop at another joint for a solo drink on the way home and get some reading done). My friend’s wife mentioned that she had listened to an audiobook version of the novel and jokingly described it as “The Real Housewives of St. Petersburg,” and in a sense I see her point, because we lapsed effortlessly into some very soapy dishing about Tolstoy’s dramatis personae: Vronsky’s thoughtless treatment of Kitty, Stepan’s problems in his marriage with Kitty’s sister Dolly, why we like and empathize with Levin, the charisma and je ne sais quoi that set Anna apart from other women in the book and why these traits weren’t enough to fully redeem Anna in my friend’s wife’s view. And also why Anna’s husband is an annoying buzzkill.
In the course of conversation a couple of movie titles came up. I was telling them about having just watched the newest feature-length offering from Walt Disney Animation Studios, the 2021 film Encanto directed by Jared Bush and Byron Howard with original songs by Lin-Manuel Miranda. Besides this newsletter my other pandemic hobby has been watching all of the feature films from Walt Disney Animation Studios in chronological order, from 1937’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to 2021’s Raya and the Last Dragon, so now I have reason to be excited every time a new one comes out, even (or especially) if I don’t end up loving each individual movie. The timeline of these Disney films is an interesting cultural EKG that lets you take the pulse of the myths and stories that some of the most skilled technicians and creative minds of any given moment are designing to have the broadest possible reach and salability and marketing as entertainments aimed at contemporary youth. They tell you a thing or two of significance about the current state of the culture.
In this case I wasn’t blown away by the overall quality of the finished project, but coming as Encanto does right after the mediocrity of Raya and the Last Dragon and the dud sequels Ralph Breaks the Internet and Frozen II, it seems that the Studio has levelled into an encouraging holding pattern after a steep downturn from 2016’s astonishingly strong one-two punch of the brilliantly-written and laughaloud-funny satire Zootopia and the captivating, gorgeously-animated adventure story Moana, for which Miranda also wrote songs (which were significantly better than his contributions to Encanto).
Encanto and its immediate predecessor also chart an interesting progression away from Disney’s earlier inclination towards a more conservative set of moral stakes that map onto a conventional mythological hero-quest. Zootopia and Moana are very different from one another but both involve a naive but likeable protagonist answering a call to adventure, confronting her own vulnerabilities, defeating villains of different sorts and restoring justice and order to her destabilized world. Ralph Breaks the Internet and Frozen II are cynical, misguided sequels with incoherent stories, while Raya and the Last Dragon and Encanto together represent both a modest course-correction and an interesting new narrative model for the Studio.
Raya and the Last Dragon has death-defying adventure but no villain per se; Raya’s quest is to unite belligerent clans by convincing them to cooperate and share their power and resources for mutual benefit. Encanto carries this a step further, making the quest not about national unity but about providing therapy for a close-knit but dysfunctional magical family who live in a traditional community in Colombia protected on all sides by enchanted mountains. Having established these stakes, the creators of Encanto make the interesting choice to go directly against intuition and decline to have the protagonist Mirabel, voiced by Stephanie Beatriz, answer a call to adventure beyond the mountains but rather to do the very opposite.
Mirabel’s journey takes her not away from but deeper into her home on a psychological and emotional journey, an interior quest, into the verboten recesses of her family’s house, a magical structure which represents at once their cultural heritage, family bond and magical uniqueness. (Each member of the family has his or her own particular and distinct magical power except for Mirabel herself, and one of her key objectives in the film is to do some self-examination and figure out why this is.) She’s literally going into the hidden and unacknowledged areas of her family’s lore and casting light upon the parts of themselves that they are afraid to deal with, embodied not by a conventional villain but by the character of a black sheep uncle who hides in the neglected spaces and is voiced by John Leguizamo, whom as I’ve mentioned before is one of my favorite actors because he gives unfailingly standout performances in wildly different types of material.
Encanto looks as dazzlingly beautiful as we have come to expect from the new crop of CGI Disney pictures and Miranda’s songs are catchy and head-bobbable, even if they don’t entirely cohere as a film-length soundtrack. Miranda of course is a prodigiously clever songwriter, but as with an opera or, say, Miranda’s own work on the most successful Broadway musical ever, a really excellent Disney animated musical has a soundtrack that stands up reasonably well on its own. The cycle of songs in Encanto feels like little more than a series of standalone sketches that each pertain to one of a gallery of distinct characters. Maybe this says something meaningful about the film’s tensions between tradition and modernity and between family and inviduality, but it doesn’t make for tunes that are in any danger of getting stuck in my head as several of Miranda’s songs from other projects occasionally do.
Overall I would argue that the novel structure and new moral approach make Encanto more creatively successful than the tentative half-measure of Raya and the Last Dragon, which to its detriment is pulling in opposing directions and now appears to have been a step towards the unapologetic hero-quest inversion of the newer film. Encanto feels far less conflicted in its attempt to drape a story about a female protagonist in a matriarchal community over the scaffold of a quest not to conquer or vanquish but to strengthen and preserve. For me Encanto just barely sticks that landing, but it’s a fascinating new direction and I imagine that posterity will acknowledge it as a prototype for a successful new Disney model. I predict that within the next two or three films, Disney will put out something along these same lines that will be an era-defining success on the scale of The Little Mermaid or Frozen.
In the course of conversation about Tolstoy and Disney my pal told me about another film from 2021 called Together Together which was written and directed by Nikole Beckwith. In this movie Ed Helms plays a successful, single forty-something man who wants to have a child and pays a twenty-six-year-old character played by Patti Harrison to be his surrogate gestational carrier (though not to contribute the other share of the genetic material for his offspring; that comes from a donor, so Harrison’s character’s job is just to carry the baby to term).
Literally the first thing I noticed was that the opening credits for Together Together use precisely the same old-timey white-on-black font that Woody Allen has been using for every single one of his pictures for decades now, which I gathered was a choice too specific not to be intentional. This turned out to be right when Allen came up as a conversational subject in the film; Harrison’s character makes a cogent point about the icky aspects of several of the leading characters Allen wrote for himself in several of his most well-regarded films. Beckwith has the good sense not to oversell this particular point by trying to engage with any of the controversial allegations or well-known personal transgressions in Allen’s offscreen life, though I’m not sure exactly what she was trying to say with the font-nod up front, which is pretty glaring since it’s the very first thing one sees when settling in to watch Together Together. Maybe some backhanded tip of the hat to Allen, some suggestion that she can still draw inspiration from his genius while keeping him at arm’s length creatively? I wouldn’t object to that conclusion on her part in the slightest; I’m just not sure if she would have any time for my conjecture and would be curious what anyone else who has seen this film thinks about it.
Together Together is a slickly-made, inoffensive, straightforward take on an odd and thoroughly modern situation that I’ve never seen depicted on film before. Beckwith quietly gestures towards but commendably avoids pursuing a too-obvious "will-they-or-won’t-they” romantic angle for the two leads and sticks to examining the peculiar nature of their arrangement, with the characters themselves negotiating a detente about whether or not they are friends, family, business partners or something else and therefore what part of this pregnancy is whose business. Thus the most interesting thing about the film is that it represents something we can probably expect to see a lot more of this decade — a comedy not of manners but of boundaries. This is interesting in a muted way, though aside from the novelty of the premise the film is rather reserved (one of the more important dramatic developments in the story is when the two protagonists finalize their teammate status by finishing watching every episode of Friends together). Commensurately this picture in general has an uninflected, soft-lit, down-comforter-and-throw-pillow aesthetic which even infiltrates the casting choices, for example with the drollest and driest of famous comedians Tig Notaro embodying a voice of reason as a wise, reserved, expressionless couples therapist.
And speaking of casting, the most fun thing for me about this movie was the surprise appearance of two performers from the outstanding and underrated HBO series Los Espookys, which if you haven’t seen you should be watching now instead of reading this. Julio Torres, co-creator and principal cast member on Los Espookys, submits a sturdy supporting turn as Harrison’s character’s bitchy Gen-Z coworker and Greta Titelman, who was hilarious in a supporting role in Los Espookys, has a brief but well-cast turn as a shop clerk in Together Together.
I have a different set of married friends who live in Oakland with whom I was staying when I wrote an entry back in August about hitting the road on a cross-country train journey. One of this couple, incidentally the same friend who corrected my error about It’s a Wonderful Life, invited me over to check out The Matrix Resurrections on his big, fancy new television.
The Matrix Resurrections was directed and co-written by Lana Wachowski, one of the creators of the innovative and paradigm-shifting original 1999 film The Matrix and its famously unimpressive sequels The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions. My buddy outright hated the newest installment; I went in with an open mind and rock-bottom expectations and came away finding it bland, unimpressive and tiresome but not altogether cringe and pathetic as I feared. Wachowski and her collaborators have done their best to fashion something that both stands on its own as a new installment in an ongoing franchise and a deeply metatextual and self-referential coda for the Matrix saga, an explicitly-stated bid to reclaim a measure of control over some of the deeply influential and culture-altering concepts and terminology Wachowski and her previous collaborator Lilly Wachowski made sexy and interesting in the original 1999 picture.
The Wachowskis to some extent are victims of their own genius and success; with the original film they made something so phenomenally great, universally respected and even politically and socially influential that almost everyone feels the temptation to have an opinion about what The Matrix and its sequels are “really” about, while the film studios and media conglomerates have evidently never relinquished the temptation to make more money from a blue chip franchise. As Lana and her collaborators quite clearly explicate through dialogue in The Matrix Resurrections, if everyone in the world is going to keep thinking that the moral framework of The Matrix is about his own pet grievance or worldview, and if the ruthless suits were going to produce a fourth Matrix film with or without Wachowski participation, then Lana was going to recenter her creative control away from both greed and ideology and make her own reflective and nuanced statement about her life’s work. This she does, though she has an easier time making these didactic points in the film’s first half than she does in the second keeping the plot interesting and carrying across a genuinely interesting science fiction/action picture.
Like its two predecessors and unlike the original film, this one is something of an overlong shambles which gets into the narrative weeds about halfway through and never finds its way back out. But it does have comments to make about the tyrannies of our online snake pits and zero-sum sociopolitical tribalization, managing to level one or two insightful analogues about how the latter gets mistaken for the former (for example through social media algorithms that devour our attention and emotions by keeping us glued to a screen) or the inverse (such as with our delusional political cults that take online nonsense and transmute it into violent real-world chaos).
The original 1999 film The Matrix still means a lot to me because I was precisely the right generation of film nerd to have his consciousness elevated and sense of narrative possibilities expanded by it. It was one of the best times I ever had at the movies, not only because the film is so great but because the studio did a phenomenal job marketing it without giving anything much away. All we had seen was a few teaser trailers that we thought were dumb, so me and several of my fellow asshole teenage friends went to a premier showing expecting to hate the movie and enjoy making fun of it. Two hours later we staggered out having had the most thrilling and exciting first-time viewing experience of our lives, having been able for once to enjoy an excellent, grippingly novel and deliriously entertaining movie without any preconceptions. We didn’t know what to expect aesthetically or narratively and the film more than delivered in both areas.
After seeing the second film I was cautiously optimistic if also confused and worn-out. When the third film was released a close friend of mine was working as a projectionist at a multiplex and he had to test-screen a print of The Matrix Revolutions overnight before its official release date, so he snuck some ten or dozen of us into an otherwise-empty theater for a private advanced screening. This was convenient because that film was really awful, so we got to hoot, cackle and yell at the dumb movie on the big screen without bothering anyone else. Like the first film, the third one ended up being one of the funnest times I’ve ever had at the movies for precisely the opposite reasons. For me The Matrix Resurrections gets ranked where I imagined it would: technically superior to the disastrously bad third film and just below the quality level of the overcooked second installment but less of a fun first-time viewing experience than either. And naturally like them it comes nowhere close in quality to the still-great original.
The day after The Matrix Resurrections I checked out the new Netflix release Don’t Look Up directed by Adam McKay. This film is about scientists trying to convince a proudly ignorant public, greedy monied interests and a know-nothing political class to care about the threat of a civilization-cancelling event headed their way. In this mold it owes a lot to older and better disaster comedy films like Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb and Airplane!
Like the other 2021 films listed above, Don’t Look Up is neither great overall nor as cringily bad as might have been anticipated. It has a strong look, tight storytelling and something substantive to say (which is eerily on the nose, since I gather the world-destroying comet premise for Don’t Look Up was originally supposed to be a comment about the threat of climate change but perversely and unsettlingly works even better as a metaphor for the pandemic). McKay seems to have set out to make the definitive tragicomic farce of our moment and managed an alright job of it, addressing some of the same strange social and cultural concerns as The Matrix Resurrections while mining painfully bleak and withering comedy from the twenty-first-century conundrum that situates us between existential dread and Sisyphean tedium.
Above all else McKay has bones to pick with the maddening cheapness and disposability of our trashy panopticon of a culture and with the exhausting public contempt for science, reason, objectivity and common sense that holds us back from meaningful progress in the face of serious problems. McKay does a pretty good job as a writer of balancing a sprawling and disparate array of characters but I suspect the film would have felt like a bit of a mess if not for the strength of its cast, which includes some of the best screen actors alive (Mark Rylance, Meryl Streep, Cate Blanchett) and several of my personal favorites (Ron Perlman and Melanie Lynskey). The whole thing is anchored by a triumvirate of solid and believable central performances from Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence and Rob Morgan. It also features the only onscreen discussion I’ve ever seen of the work of The Mills Brothers, a musical group I like that no one else I know listens to regularly. Not one of the best or worst movies I’ve ever seen but certainly one of the most timely.
In closing I’d like to mention only that I read two children’s books having to do with the Chinese New Year and two that had titles that could express optimistic, and hopefully not myopically naive, sentiments for 2022. My final reads of 2021 are Ruby’s Chinese New Year by Vickie Lee, illustrated by Joe Chou, Bringing In the New Year by Grace Lin, Thank You, Neighbor! by Ruth Chan and The Don’t Worry Book by Todd Parr. I will try to be a good neighbor wherever I end up and do my best to stay present and not worry. I have no idea what 2022 or the next entry is going to be about and I’m curious and interested to find out.