Passing the Time in Quarantine

As the covid19 quarantine stretches on, it's important to find ways to pass the time. So to take a break from the more serious things, I just want to do a quick run down of some of the stuff I've been watching during over the last few months.

Funnily enough, haven't been watching a whole lot of movies even though we have all the time in the world to watch them. But what I've watched, I've really enjoyed. I watched Mulholland Drive as part of my girlfriend's ongoing quest to expose me to the works of David Lynch. I enjoyed most of Twin Peaks, less of Blue Velvet, and positively adored Mulholland Drive.

Mulholland is definitely the most effective of Lynch's work I've seen so far. Episode 8 of Twin Peaks: The Return ends with an awe-inspiring, surrealist montage that sees Lynch at his best, but in Mulholland Drive we see Lynch maintain a surrealist, dreamy tone for more then an inscrutable set piece or to spite his fans for daring to ask for cohesive narratives. 

For all its turns, Mulholland Drive is straight forward, relatively speaking, and is easy enough to untangle if you pay attention to what Lynch lays out if front of you. What I like about it is how, at heart, its an incredibly human story of longing, passion, regret, resentment, jealousy, and envy and how all of those feelings are born out of and strengthened by each other until we feel like we're drowning so we do something drastic to break free. Its only when we come up for air that we realize what we've done, when we hope against hope that this time, too, the world will scoff at our plans so we won't have to live with the consequences of our choices.

Except, we're never that lucky, are we? Come for the exploration of the misery of existence, stay for the heavenly cover of Roy Orbison.

In other good movies, we also checked out Uncut Gems with Booksmart as a chaser. Gems is perfect showcase of if you give Adam Sandler a project he wants to put in real work for, you're going to get a real performance out of him. Paul Thomas Anderson knew it, even Spanglish has good moments in it. I know he makes movies so his friends can take vacations and get paid at the same time. But it's ridiculous that we're going to throw away someone with actual skill out of resentment for making movies that get him and the studios paid. He played the game more obnoxiously then others for sure, but is that really worth tanking his career so we just get more horrendous shit like The Ridiculous 6?

Anyway, watch Uncut Gems. It is a stress inducing experience that throws you right in the middle of life as a gambling addict. The thrill of a bet paying off, the despair when it doesn't, and, underneath it all, the irresistible pull to keep going back for more. I can understand if it isn't your cup of tea, but it's still worth checking out at least once.

And, you'll need a relaxing movie to come down with. And for that, I Booksmart will do just the trick. Directed by Olivia Wilde, Booksmart is the last night of school coming-of-age story like Dazed and Confused or Superbad, but with girls. That twist helps the movie feel like a fresh new take on a well established genre all on its own, but the movie doesn't just rest on that alone. The uber ride with their principle has one of my favorite jokes in movie history. Beyond all that though, the movie works better then most gross out teen comedies because unlike most, it wears its heart on its sleeve from the beginning and doesn't feel like they have to hide it because having emotions is gay or whatever. Cutting to the chase saves everyone so much time, time the movie wisely spends on jokes and satisfying character arcs.

But, you gotta make room for trash, too. Aquaman fits that bill really well, albeit surprisingly so. Jason Momoa is still incredibly charming as the lead, the movie as a visually popping color palette which is a welcome relief from the visual slop of the Synder movies. The movie is unfocused, changing genres almost every half-hour, the romance between Momoa and Amber Heard is pitiful to watch since what chemistry they have comes overwhelmingly in their platonic moments with the soundtrack doing its level best to force the romantic aspects.

Mostly, I appreciate the movie for being a prime example for why superhero movies should be animated as a rule and live action only by exception. The underwater scenes in this movie are hilariously bad. It's so awful that they gave Patrick Wilson and Wilhem Dafoe short hairstyles so they'd only have to animate the flowing hair of two characters at a time. I mean, compare the underwater scenes from The Little Mermaid to anything in Aquaman and tell me why do we have to wait another ten years before live action CGI capabilities catches up to what 2d animation could do thirty years ago?

It won't happen, obviously. Americans are too conditioned to view animated works as kids shit except in extraordinary circumstances. That unimaginative way of doing things pigeonholes what is considered an economically viable  medium to tell our stories so even though everyone is starting to get sick, with good reason, of superhero movies awash in obvious CG fakery, the bias against animation means you won't see the push to tell these stories in the way that they'll be most effective and compelling so, that's cool.

For the real garbage though, the silver screen provides. And there's no one who does entertaining garbage like Shonda Rhimes. She's built a primetime empire with Shondaland on ABC and after watching two seasons of Grey's Anatomy and How to Get Away with Murder, it makes sense why she's been so successful.

Grey's Anatomy is a fascinating watch because it tries to capture the real world feel of ER and the tragicomedy moves that Scrubs pulled off so well. And it faceplants, hard, on both of these fronts. The voiceover is so heavy-handed that any pathos it wants to delivered is crushed by its self-serious, armchair philosophizing tone. The jokes are rarely funny, mostly because the show is so committed to the soapy serious feel of being a serious show about serious people with serious problems to work through.

Also, so much of the conflict in this show just doesn't matter. Like, at all. For one arc, Meredith Grey is competing for a medical research prize and needs permission to use something from an old, Spanish doctor. As these things go, it turns out the original patent holders daughter is an old friend of Meredith's mother who we come to find out co-developed the technique that made Meredith's mother famous. All she asks for is that Meredith rename the technique to reflect this fact and she'll let Meredith use her patented technology free of charge.

It's a simple enough request, but Meredith refuses. She has a lot of long talks with people about how she shouldn't have to pay for her mother's sins or why she shouldn't throw away her mother's legacy so she makes the decision to potentially sabotage her own research to keep her mother's name clean. And then there's a sexual harassment revelation about the man ran the foundation who provides the prize required all the women who settled their accusations against him to withdraw from competing for the prizes his foundation put on. Meredith's sorta godmother was one of those women, hence why her mother covered up any of her involvement and took sole credit for a revolutionary procedure.

After all this comes out, Meredith does what her godmother wanted from the beginning and everything just... goes on like nothing happened. The show is an exercise of Drama created via drama of the high school variety; it's never ending, borne out of stubborn pride or easily fixed miscommunications if anyone bothered to just tell each other anything. But that's what makes things so palatable, for all the drama, there are rarely any stakes. All the dramatic escalations come so fast and so often that they just pass over you like a wave but in a soothing, background noise kind way.

Which makes How to Get Away with Murder a testament to Rhimes talent for variety. If Anatomy is the fake fireplace you turn on with a light switch to pretend you have warmth, Murder is a man on fire jumping into a pool of kerosene. There are so, so many things wrong with show that I have a hard time believing everyone involved isn't in on what a trashy mess it all is. Everything related to the legal aspects of the show feel like the staff googled a term or procedure, read a paragraph about it, then made everything else up. Literally every episode the team commits at least one crime connected to their defense they build for their client and it's honestly amazing. You're supposed to feel like Annalise Keating is a complicated woman who will do anything for her clients, but I genuinely believe the show doesn't know the depths of awful they've taken her to.

In the first episode, they have Annalise take her entire first-year law class to an interview with her client while the client tells them all detailed aspects of the case. As this video points out, none of those students are lawyers or employees of Annalise, attorney-client privilege doesn't apply to anything Annalise's client said. Later, Annalise sneaks an illegally obtained piece of evidence into the record by lying about its chain of custody, saying that they didn't include it in their discovery to the prosecution because she just assumed her client's previous counsel included it in their discovery pack.

This doesn't even touch the crimes Annalise and her student employees commit independent of their cases. The murders and coverups are so extensive, involve so many coverups, that Annalise is basically Saul Goodman without the self-awareness.

The one unequivocal thing I can say about that show is that Viola Davis is a goddamn hero. She takes the ludicrous situations she's handed on the page and through sheer force of will turns it into something compelling. Her ruthlessness and vulnerability are the nuclear reactor that powers the show but also the danger that if she ever collapses, everything goes down with her. It's a stellar performance and I can't think of anyone who could've come anywhere close to carrying this circus on their shoulders so easily. 

Honestly though, bad as both of those shows are, they are still nowhere near as infuriating as Sword Art Online. I wanted to like this show, I really did, because its premise is so goddamned promising. The anime is about this game, Sword Art Online, that's an MMORPG in the vein of World of Warcraft, without elves, orcs, or magic. When the players login on the game's launch day, they find out that they can't logout of the game and, if they die in game, they'll die in real life, too. Oh, and, if anyone tries to take the VR headset they all put on to play the game, they'll be injected with a poison that will kill them anyway. The only way to escape, is to clear all 100 floors in the game, proving themselves worthy in the designers little psychodrama.

Why I like this premise is that it opens up a lot of potential to explore the fact that humans will adapt to pretty much any condition and carry on life as normal. And the anime does touch on this, a little bit. There are villages on the lower floors made up of people who aren't all that good at the game and just want to spend time fishing, building relationships, and making a home for themselves in the circumstances they've been dealt. There's also the potential to explore how, as the floors get harder and harder, the pool of players with the skills necessary to clear them and get everyone home dwindles, making the possibility of ever leaving further and further remote until the question becomes "should we even try to leave?"

Again, the anime dips its toes into all of these conflicts and themes, but it suffers from what can only be described as "I'm the writer and I'm bored with this" disease. Right as the heroes clear the boss of the 75th floor- which mopped the floor with them and killed about half of the party- the despair that things only get harder from here starts to set in, leaving us at just the right nadir for season 2 to pick up from. Instead, what happens is that the main character figures out that the developer wouldn't be sitting on the sidelines watching everyone play the game, and deduces that he's actually masquerading as the leader of one of raiding guild most of the players work for. Sounds like a cool cliffhanger, right? Finding out that the boss is actually the guy who made the game and can change the rules on a whim, making the chance of escape seem even more impossible and out of reach?

Except... the season ends with the main character and game designer fighting in a duel that kills them both. The hero lives thanks to a resurrection item he collected and gave away earlier in the story, and hurray, everybody goes back to life as it is.

It'd be bad enough if things ended here but no. We move on to the real world to introduce a love triangle, huzzah. But not just any love triangle, that wouldn't do at all, oh no. This triangle is extra special because it involves the main character's sort of but not really sister, who's been in love with him for years. Isn't that tragic, isn't it heartbreaking? What's more, she doesn't even know it's him because she thinks she falls in love with a different person because most of their interactions happen in the new VR game that's exactly like the first except everyone can fly and they all look like fairies. Imagine how crushed the not-sister is when she finds out that the man she thought she could abandon her illicit love for was in fact, her own not-brother all along. Does your heart not ache for her? Is your vision not blurred by the tears welling up in your eyes as the not-sister sacrifices herself (but not really) so her not-brother can finally meet up with his virtual love in real life?

Wait, hold on, I'm being told that none of this is very moving at all and is just a massive waste of everyone's time. Every body carry on, nothing to see here.

There's a third season, which introduces a new game where everyone has guns instead and we didn't finish it because holy shit is it so much worse then what came before and that is saying something.

To end on a good note, I decided to check out later era Miles Davis and gave A Tribute to Jack Johnson a listen. I felt stupid afterwards because I don't know what took me so long to give this album a spin because it's everything I love about music rolled into one package. The album was a soundtrack to a documentary about Jack Johnson's life, and was taken from two sessions in February and April 1970. The album consists of two 26-minute tracks and it was an absolute joy to spend an hour listening to this.

The music is driving, restless, brooding on riffs until the band has come at them from every possible angle before they move on the next. Like most of Davis' fusion output, there's no formal structure to the songs, the band moves from one improvised theme to another as they feel the need to, with Davis's trumpet cutting in and out as he's needed. It's not everyday you feel the need to talk about the political aspects of instrumental music, but it feels appropriate here- you can feel the restlessness brought about by the struggles of Johnson's life plus the fallout of all the assassinations at the end of the 60's bleeding leading into the cynical edge of the 70's. It's all there without a word and, for me anyway, is proof all over again that music itself is its own voice, if you just listen to it.

I can't recommend this album enough although it is with the caveat that if you're not familiar with Miles' music, don't make this the first thing you listen to. You gotta ease your way in to something like this, it's not an easy listen and it's not something you can just have in the background while you pay attention to other stuff. If you're new to Miles, start with his 50's stuff like Birth of the Cool, Bag's Groove, 'Round About Midnight, and Kind of Blue. Then you should move on to the second great quintet albums in whatever order you please, there's no bad option as far as that goes.

Once you've worked your way through those, then you should be ready to take the plunge and give yourself over to the experience of A Tribute to Jack Johnson. I know it feels ridiculous getting what's basically homework to listen to an album but, you do need that context to understand what Miles uses his music to do and how his approach to doing it evolved over the years as he kept questioning and exploring every avenue of expression he came across. Plus, you get to listen to some of the greatest music ever recorded, so, what are you really missing out on?

The summer is going to get bad. Please, resist the urge to act like things are dying down or we're going back to normal, and stay as safe as you can. Peace out, and I'll see you on the other side.