Movies: various
Here is what I am watching (so far) during the quarantine for COVID-19.
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Feels Good Man
Can a meme be dangerous? Feels Good Man is an insightful documentary about Matt Furie, the creator of Pepe the Frog, and how his creation was eventually co-opted by the alt-right. If there is any lesson to be learned from Furie's experience, it's to copyright your shit. Furie is just an average comic book nerd, with no Nazi or alt-right leanings. Pepe was one character in Furie's comic Boy's Club. Furie shared his comic on MySpace, and folks took a particular liking to Pepe, the laid-back frog with an "if if feels good, do it" attitude.
But it was the infamous hive of scum of villainy, 4chan, that eventually turned Pepe into a symbol of all things nasty, racist, and misogynist. They were pissed that "normies" were sharing Pepe memes, so they began to create memes with Pepe as Hitler, Pepe as a terrorist flying a plan into the Twin Towers, etc. And by the time the face of American Neo-Nazism, Richard Spencer, was explaining his Pepe pin to a reporter when he got slugged in the face, the die had been cast: Pepe belonged to the alt-right.
Feels Good Man shows how Furie took back some of his power by suing various people and companies--namely, Alex Jones--for using the image of Pepe on merchandise (Furie has won dozens of cases). But more importantly, it answers the question of why the alt-right would even want Pepe as a mascot in the first place. The answer is simple: if they have a silly mascot, they can hide their repulsive ideas behind the thin curtain of "it's just a joke". Adam Serwer, a writer at The Atlantic, puts it best when he says, "They [the alt-right] want you to be scared of the threat, and be mocked for being scared in the first place".
Grade: B+
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A Cure for Wellness
I so desperately wanted to like this Gore Verbinksi thriller. It just feels like it should be a lot scarier, cooler, and sexier than it actually is. The film takes place in modern day, but has a distinctly vintage feel about it. Dane DeHaan (aka "young Leonardo DiCaprio") plays a businessman named Lockhart (no first name, a trope in movies that annoys the fuck out of me) who is sent to the Swiss Alps to retrieve a senior member of his firm from a wellness spa that the older business man went to for a vacation and then just refused to leave.
After he is told that he won't be able to see the man he came for, Lockhart gets into a car accident on his way back down the mountain, and winds up basically a prisoner of the strange spa: with his leg in a cast, he has few options for escape. The spa is run by Dr. Volmer (Jason Isaacs), who believes in the curative powers of water--and the first minute he encourages Lockhart to drink up, we know something is wrong with the H2O.
A Cure for Wellness starts strong but quickly falls apart when Lockhart discovers the secret of the spa (which is painfully obvious long before it is officially revealed). The film has beautiful and disturbing imagery, mixing a little body horror in with the psychological tension. But by the film's final third, it's more ridiculous than scary. I have a weird interest/possible slight kink (?) for the concept of medical spas where sinister treatments are performed for "your own good", so this movie seems made for me. But alas, I think A Cure for Wellness has more style than substance.
Grade: C
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Sator
Sator is a low-key horror flick about a demon that haunts a family. Spoiler alert (or maybe not): the demon is a metaphor for mental illness. Sator is one of about 10 horror movies I can name off the top of my head where the subtext is all about what we inherit from our parents and what we pass down to our kids. It's a trend!
I would say that Sator, which stars a bunch of unknowns, is effectively spooky, but ultimately forgettable. It opens on an elderly woman, Nani (June Peterson, the director's actual grandmother), discussing with surprising frankness, an entity named "Sator" who basically would jump into her head and tell her stuff, which she would then write down. The film hops between Nani's house, where family members congregate to help her out, and the little cottage out in the woods where Adam (Gabriel Nicholson), one of Nani's grandsons, lives. It becomes apparent that both Nani and Adam's mother had the "gift" of communing with Sator, and Adam knows he is next in line. He seems to be trying to avoid his fate by living alone in the woods. But just as family history tends to catch up with you, it's only a matter of time before Sator sinks his claws into Adam.
Definitely recommended for horror buffs, especially those who like the slow-burn style of horror, I would say that Sator is a fine but not great horror movie.
Grade: B
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Professor Marston and the Wonder Women
Professor Marston and the Wonder Women was a sweet surprise. It is your typical Hollywood biopic, but with more bondage and threesomes. So, even though it's about the creator of Wonder Woman, this is not a movie for the kiddies.
Professor William Moulton Marston was a teacher of psychology at Radcliffe and Harvard in the early 20th century (which functioned as "his and hers" schools back when most colleges were single-sex). He and his wife, Elizabeth, invented the lie detector machine as well. Long story short: they both fell in love with their student assistant, Olive, and the throuple begin living and raising babies together. This leads the Marstons to being fired from their positions, which spurs William Marston to create Wonder Woman and sell her to DC Comics as a way to make ends meet, but also to get his propaganda before the eyes of children. Yes, Wonder Woman was--in her creator's eyes--propaganda designed to get little boys comfortable with the idea of female supremacy. Marston truly believed that women were the ideal sex to run the world and that we would all be living in a female-dominated society by now (ha. ha.) He also believed that in order for people to be comfortable with submission, submission needed to be pleasurable. Thus, all the scenes of bondage in the Wonder Woman comics (see the end of this blog post for a taste).
So Marston was a poly, kinky fucker who invented one of the most iconic super heroes of all time. Pretty wild story, right? What's perhaps even more surprising is that after Marston's death in 1947, Olive and Elizabeth stayed together until Olive's death in 1985. This truly was a triad-style relationship, by all accounts, and not just two women humoring their man.
Although the movie is highly corny at times, it's a rare "mainstream" movie that completely normalizes poly relationships and kink. There are those in the poly and kink communities who don't want poly and kink to become "normalized" since the idea is to reject traditional relationship styles and the pressure to be monogamous, vanilla, etc. However, I tend to be of the mindset that so-called "non-traditional" forms of loving (between consenting adults) should be normalized because guess what--there is no such thing as normal! And I think it's good for people to be exposed to ideas like the concept of loving multiple people at once, or that ropes and pain can be a healthy form of sexual expression, because if these ideas are kept in the shadows, it's easy to dismiss them as wrong and sick. But the only "sick" thing is when adults are societally pressured into lifelong choices that aren't right for them.
So, the movie itself gets a "B", but I'll throw in the plus since it does God's work of making kink and poly a little less scary and a little more...intriguing.
Grade: B+
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City Island
City Island is a pleasant little comedy about a family of New Yorkers (or New Yahk-ahs, if you prefer) who each have one or more secrets they're hiding from the rest of the fam. Daughter Vivian (Dominik Garcia-Lorido) has dropped out of college and is working as a stripper--a revelation she knows would deeply upset her parents, neither of whom have college degrees. Son Vince Jr. (Ezra Miller) has a secret kink for large women and starts spying on his plump neighbor when he discovers that she has a website dedicated to making and eating large feasts.
Mom Joyce (Julianna Margulies) is dissatisfied with her marriage and feels like her husband, Vince (Andy Garcia), is keeping secrets from her. And boy howdy, is he. Dad Vince has two secrets--one, he's taking a weekly acting class but is hiding that from Joyce and telling her it's a weekly poker game. But the second secret is that two decades ago, he fathered a child. That child is now all grown up and... residing in the very prison that Vince works at as a security guard! Vince finds out that Tony (Steven Strait) is technically allowed to be out on parole, but has no family that will take him. Without revealing the secret of his parentage, Vince offers to take Tony in and give him a job fixing up an old boathouse in Vince's backyard. Vince does not consult his wife on this. Or tell her that Tony is, in fact, Vince's son.
Obviously, all these secrets come to a head and are revealed in the final act, which brings the family closer together than ever before. It's a really sweet film and reminded me a bit of The Slums of Beverly Hills with its lived in, comfortable take on family relationships. It's nice to watch a movie where you just know everything is going to work on in the end. A nice palate cleanser after some of the nastier films I usually watch.
Grade: B
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These were in the original comics, you guys.
Yeah, I know, right?
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