Tagged review

the other day i watched the amazing 1985 film based off the eponymous board game: clue! and god let me just get it out of the way: this movie isn't very good. i think it is aware that it isn't very good. the humor lands and then it doesn't. the acting and slapstick choreography is filmed bizarrely and the film seems to forget about it every few minutes. the set design and costumes are… honestly pretty good. no complaints there. it's all very 'camp', as some might say.

the next few paragraphs are going to contain spoilers, if you particularly care about spoilers for clue, from the year 1985, for whatever reason. for the record, it doesn't really matter. if you don't already know this movie has 3 different endings. most online listings of the movie scaffold these endings into one long sequence.

so: i was not prepared for how theatrical this movie felt? which maybe is my own problem, we'll get to that, but the acting and script and situations are sooo profoundly hammy and over the top and it was a really pleasant surprise. as was finding out how much of the cast was composed of successful actors that i'd heard the names of before. unlike my mother i'm really bad at recognising famous people in movies. when i realised the butler was tim curry i literally sat up in my bed and went "no way."

the main reason this film was under my radar was due to having an art school assignment centered around film genre research. more specifically i had to look into “slapstick” as a genre and deconstruct it. it’s an interesting topic, but not enough to delve into here. at least not after wringing my hand writing about it for uni already. instead i want to talk about my personal critical thoughts on the movie!

ive been pitching this movie as “kind of shit” to anyone who’ll listen to me talk about it, and the main reason i do is honestly because it has some amazingly bad writing ‘quirks’ that entertain me a lot but are objectively… sloppy? sometimes offensive? for example the treatment of women in this film is kind of trashy and very of its time. most notably you have yvette, the sexy french maid who speaks in a fake accent the whole movie and is victimised for partaking in sex work by multiple characters, then ms scarlet who runs a prostitution ring and is characterised as a vile femme fatale mastermind in one ending, mrs peacock who’s kind of just a hysterical old lady, then mrs white who… is actually my favorite, being a five-time widow who murdered all her husbands. she feels like a nice inversion of the typical ‘dead wife manpain’ archetype. i get the same enjoyment from her that i get from the typical kurt vonnegut ‘morose wife’ kind of character.

the men? i barely remember them save for wadsworth who is extremely charming. they tried to give colonel mustard this bit of not understanding double negatives but it’s just not very funny… and though it may be ‘problematic’ (or more accurately, nonsense) i think the one twist with mr green going home to fuck his wife after lying about being gay is pretty fucking funny if only because of the way the actor delivers the reveal.

what else did i like? i thought the bit at the end with the cops swarming in like bees in while heroic music blares was really funny. did not expect to be so stressed out by all the times a stranger walked up to the mansion about to discover a dead body. just the base concept of a movie having multiple endings is really spectacular and dare i say made even better with the combined cut that pieces them together in a very stupid arbitrary way. HOWEVER that also causes a major narrative problem where characters don’t really get to have coherent backstories or development, since the film relies wholly on a twist ending. or three of them, i guess. and honestly i think this flatness is very well-executed and feels right as an anthropomorphisation of a board game that does… indeed… hand off flat character archetypes for players to embody. though of course this is also just the result of a capitalistic endeavour to transplant a franchise to the big screen. who knows how much of that philosophy was intentional! but i do like thinking about it.

END OF SPOILERS!

now let’s talk about broader implications.

anyone who knows me knows that there is little i hate more than having to sit down and watch a movie. it’s just not an engaging art form to me. it feels too subjective in a way that isn’t fun, and it’s so thoroughly visual which also feels like the easiest of five senses to work with. not to mention the permrnant feeling of wasting time whilst filmgoing, because these things require your full attention and engagement with the imaginary. and more broadly… you can’t occupy your hands with anything else. and yes, it’s because i have adhd, and yes, it is also because i am a strange snob.

a huge thing that scares me, somewhat, about filmmaking is the sacrifice of artistic vision to a collage of different specialists that may or may not be on the same page as you. it’s like the hypothetical discrepancies people suggest about color sight — do you see the same red that i do? and obviously the counter to this is ‘everyone who works on a movie brings their own vision to the project, that’s part of the appeal’ but it also means the majority of films are generic and mood-based and only interested in pathos, as the most universal human experience, alongside things like ‘making sense’. part of why i love mediums like writing (especially independent self-published works) is because it is quite literally the raw unfiltered hand of a creator being pressed against your brain, patting you like a dog. there’s always distortion between mind and body… but at least it’s connected by the same brain when it’s one auteur. the potential of loss in translation is lessened… and at least it’s not an error in interpersonal communication. which is just the worst!

to summarise, in the brave words of that one tumblr post: movies are amazing, a bunch of people gather to make something that ends up not very good.

so why do i like clue? because it feels like a shitty auteur film, in terms of direction and mood, but ALSO it has a very improv-esque spirit of the actors having fun and exaggerating their own directions to create something unique. a lot of clue’s failures that i mentioned before are things i actually find hilarious — and of course, memorable. and there is nothing worse than being forgettable. clue passes the check!

the last movie i watched prior to clue was rubber 2010. its an insane auteur film about a sentient tire that explodes people into meat and finds a naked woman sexy, with some twin peaks-y style humor and commentary on metanarratives. it’s ‘trashy’ in my mind the same way clue is, not necessarily due to specific elements as much as a general ‘vibe’ of earnest insanity. perhaps i’ll talk about rubber in depth some other time, but i think it’s landed us with a pretty good thesis…

that being: it’s great when movies embrace inconsistency, bewilderment and inhuman logic that can only come from the natural mismatch of abstract ideas. it’s amazing when multiple minds come together to contradict themselves and look insane.

this was going to be longer and more poetic but honestly this is kind of just it. i like it when movies are… um, bad. because it keeps my attention up far better than when a movie is actually serviceable.

starting off this blog with the last read of the year. (inversion is always fun!) i read why fish don’t exist by lulu miller in what was basically two sittings, one while battling insomnia and the other the following evening. overall review: 8/10, generally excellent with some portions and creative decisions that i’m not the most partial to. or mostly just conflicted about.

the basic premise of the book follows an interwoven narrative between the author’s tumultuous life and the life story of david starr jordan, a scientist who named and identified hundreds of fish. eventually it also features discussion of taxonomy and philosophy, thus the title of the book.

it’s gorgeously written (for the most part!) with the kind of casual but artistic narration i love best in nonfiction. in runs into some cliche near-midwest emo sounding phrasing sometimes, especially in the more generalised and self-reflective portions, but it’s honestly charming and felt very genuine. the historical aspects are woven together in a way that is engaging and sensible: though sometimes you might get impatient with the autobiographical interruptions. they never go on TOO long.

i’d urge anyone reading this review to just pick the book up any way they can. it’s about 300 pages on my huge text epub copy, and only around 200 in print. the conversational tone is easy to read. it’s not dense at all like some nonfiction can be. i’d really recommend it to anyone. there’s a couple of twists in the stories that i think are best experienced cold.

alright. we’ve all finished it? now i can air out my minor misgivings.

when i logged the book on goodreads i accidentally got lost in the negative reviews and the first one i saw bemoaned the fact that the author spent too much time on jordan as a luminary figure and not enough on his eugenicist ideology, and as someone who was already aware of it, they felt like miller was ‘whining’ about having to cancel an idol. and presumed it to be the crux of the book. now i disagree with that assessment and i don’t think it devalues the narrative — it’s not an author’s job to handhold and betray a dramatic narrative with the presumption you won’t finish their book — but it did raise some important questions in my mind that i wanted to exercise, let’s say.

first, i don’t agree entirely with the ‘cancel’ comment. we’re clearly meant to follow miller’s own personal thoughts and she does a very good job at presenting jordan in a good light specifically to strip that away. i think it’s done very well. but i do see how it can be grating to have to sift through the extended thoughts of a white woman being sad that her favorite old white man is a racist. i’ve known plenty of people who have felt the need to atone to imaginary brown people (or worse, me, a tangible brown person) and a lot of the time it can be self-centered and focused more on the disappointment someone feels instead of the actual harm their ‘problematic’ idol has caused. that being said i think miller gives it a lot of grace and distinctly acknowledges how this idolising is unhealthy. i think there’s a degree of self-disgust and awareness you’re supposed to tap into and in a way, i think her approach would definitely make people with a surface level knowledge on the topic more critical of jordan. i think if the book started off decrying him as a eugenicist and going into the history of the movement, it would’ve been a less accessible read — or at least i’d be more hesitant to pick it up, unsure of what knowledge i’d need as a prerequisite. i’m sure this applies to a lot of others. so ultimately i don’t mind this mixup.

second, as an extension of that point… i do feel conflicted about the sort of bait-and-switch narrative about the women in the colony. i think it’s good the book highlights these stories, and evidently the women themselves were comfortable enough with it. however my mind can’t help but shake the ethical dilemma of hiding these stories within the external fabric of david starr jordan. i’m often really critical of art (especially live performances!) that encases commentary and political awareness in pseudo-generic fact retellings that depend on you being unaware of greater societal problems. i see it a lot in narratives about race — first we must gesture towards the racist imagery, and then we talk about how it’s bad, actually. a lot of it is done under the approach of the audience not being a part of a minority group. even if the subject matter is directly about them.

i kind of get that with this ‘subplot’ though obviously less about being condescending and more about the unfortunate consequence of only giving voice to victims of violence by first giving voice to their oppressors. i think miller did a good job of ‘deplatforming’ jordan and setting up his early racist and ableist inclinations, so it’s not as bad as the aforementioned example. and again the women were in full conversation with miller and consented to inclusion. i think it’s just the author in me that is fascinated by how exactly to navigate sympathy in an audience, and how much the ‘skeleton’ of your writing impacts the messaging.

otherwise, the end focusing on the philosophical categorisation of fish and proximity to humanity started to get a bit grating. just a bit. i don’t like it when people equate humanity to animals, not because it’s not true, but because it’s often done to justify carelessness and lack of accountability. miller doesn’t do this too much, thankfully. but there is a lot of ‘blood cup’ about how it’s impossible and foolish to define fish as a category — which miller does acknowledge as silly, somewhat? at least includes an anecdote about how it’s still a useful categorical term to most people. and i think there we just get tangled in the ever-confusing web of convenience in linguistics and how direct etymology and traditional usage doesn’t really dictate how words ‘should’ be used. for example: most people know that ‘a couple’ technically means two, but it’s often used for a general ‘small amount’ of things. i don’t think the philosophical quandary of why people don’t use it correctly all the time is all that intriguing, really — humans just love convenience.

though i’ve only really mentioned the negatives in depth, they’re nitpicks that i mostly only notice because the book is written in a way that resonates with me, and because it’s so close to being a perfect 10/10 that it’s impossible not to mention these flaws. it was definitely up there as one of my favorite reading experiences of the year though. it makes me want to dig around for more nonfiction, which i’ve really been trying to read more of, as of late.