Young and Full of Fluff

I’ve been a big fan of Kenneth Branagh’s Poirot movies. I love Poirot (I’ve watched every David Suchet adaptation, and he adapted 100% of the Poirot novels and short stories), and I especially love when new adaptations have different takes. I also think that Poirot is Branagh’s highest and best use—he’s hammy and melodramatic in both his acting and directing anyway, why not put that to work in playing a character that is best served with all the ham.

The first two movies were arguably the most famous Poirot stories—Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile. I’m most familiar with Death on the Nile, and Branagh’s movie managed to surprise me with some of the changes made, but ultimately the solutions to both mysteries remained the same.

Not so A Haunting in Venice. A Haunting in Venice is ostensibly based on the 1969 novel Hallowe’en Party except…not really. I just rewatched the Suchet adaptation of that book and other than being set at Halloween, the names of the characters, and one very memorable murder method, there is no relationship between this movie and that book. Which is for the best, really—the book was panned when it came out and, I have to say, the solution is duuuuuumb. Like. OMG. Christie wrote a lot of stuff, and for every real corker there’s one or two mediocre stories and a dreadful one. Hallowe’en Party, despite its memorable hook, is in the dreadful category.

Which leaves A Haunting in Venice to be entirely its own thing—and it’s a supernatural thriller. It still feels very much like something Christie would have written. I didn’t know the solution, but general genre awareness had me guessing a few of the key twists (but not all of them). It’s beautiful, the mood is fantastic, and like the others, has some really delicious performances (Tina Fey and Michelle Yeoh are stand outs). It is, however, edging into horror a bit more than I generally like.

Christie, though she’s considered the progenitor of the cozy mystery, did not shy away from the darker parts of human nature in her stories. This adaptation leans into that, with a Poirot in retirement because after years of being around murder and two world wars, he is weary of the world. (In one of my favorite lines from the film, Poirot explains his method as: “When a crime has been committed, I can, by application of order and method, and the slow extinguishing of my own soul, find without fail or doubt, whodunit.”)

There are quite a few jump scares, which will either be pleasantly mildly spooky for you or Too Much. I’d definitely recommend this, but understand that it’s genre bending a little while remaining very true feeling to Christie’s work. (I mean—she wrote horror sometimes. What else would you call And Then There Were None?)

Mostly, I just want to keep getting more of these and more Christie adaptations in general.

The other night, I suggested S and I watch WarGames (1983) because I’d never seen it and it gets referenced a lot. It’s much better as a distillation of a moment--both in our thinking about the Cold War and nuclear policy and in our thinking about supercomputers and the emergent culture of hackers--than it is as a movie per se. (Oh lord, the music. Oh, the hacky writing.)

In reading reviews of WarGames, I found one that called it “Fail-Safe for the computer age.” So I went—huh. What’s Fail-Safe?

Fail-Safe is a 1964 thriller about nuclear war starring Walter Matthau and Henry Fonda (also Larry Hagman, most famous as J.R. of “Who shot J.R.?” but fantastic in this), directed by Sidney Lumet (12 Angry Men, Network, Dog Day Afternoon and many others). It happens in real time as a standard procedure of sending bombers with thermonuclear warheads to stand ready at “fail-safe” points whenever there is an unidentified aircraft detected in US air space leads to an accidental go signal to one of the bomber groups.

As S and I were watching, we kept pausing and going—huh. This is really like Dr. Strangelove. This is really like Dr. Strangelove. Holy shit, was Dr. Strangelove imitating this? Why is this film completely forgotten?

The answer is—no, Dr. Strangelove is not imitating Fail-Safe. Both are based on books, Red Alert for Strangelove and Fail-Safe, whose plots were so similar that there was a lawsuit. A lawsuit Kubrick instigated when he found out about the film production of Fail-Safe. The lawsuit was settled, but part of the settlement was that Columbia, which was distributing Strangelove, would also distribute Fail-Safe, which was an independent picture.

Then Kubrick buried it.

Dr. Strangelove came out in January of 1964, and Fail-Safe was held until Strangelove was completely out of theaters, releasing in October 1964. After you watch a satire of something, it’s hard to watch the deadly earnest version. Fonda even said he couldn’t have acted in this if he’d seen Strangelove first. So Fail-Safe bombed (if you pardon the expression) at the box office and disappeared into obscurity.

I watched Dr. Strangelove in school as part of learning the history of the Cold War. It might have been more effective to watch Fail-Safe instead.

This is an absolutely stunning movie—one of those films you watch and just need to talk about to everyone. It is shot in high contrast black and white, like a newsreel, and every frame is gorgeous. The acting is fantastic. It’s so tightly written that I kept pausing and saying to S, that’s exactly what would happen. That is an incredibly insightful analysis of the situation. I agree with this entire argument.

And it’s also one of the most upsetting films I’ve ever seen. Unlike Strangelove, whose commentary is look what boobs and egomaniacal children are in power, everyone in Fail-Safe is competent, intelligent, and acting in good faith to the best of their ability with their understanding of the situation. Which makes the events of the movie more and more horrifying. Fail-Safe’s central point is that a machine will do what it was built to do, and if you build a machine to murder millions of civilians, that’s what it will do.

Matthau in this movie plays a political scientist, based on Herman Khan, who was also the inspiration for the character Dr. Strangelove. Matthau’s character is giving a briefing to the joint chiefs of staff when the movie begins, and serves as the voice for the thought that lead to the creation of the infrastructure of mutually assured destruction. Fail-Safe is trying to show that the evil is that type of thought—because it doesn’t take into account that systems don’t work perfectly. Accidents happen. And if you load a gun and point it at someone then take the safety off about six times a month, one of those times, the gun is going to fire. That’s what it was built to do.

So I’d very much like more people to watch this movie and come talk to me about it, but I fully understand why one would chose not to.

( Spoilers )

A short clip from the movie (the trailer is garbage).

I rewatched the 2002 film of Chicago last night.

- I know every single lyric in this and I was trying to figure out how many times I had to listen to something to pick up the words. Because I saw Chicago on Broadway in 2001 and the movie in 2002, and I’ve listened to the cast album maybe two dozen times? I think this also has both clever lyrics and orchestration that makes them very clear to understand. But still—I don’t think I have to listen to something very much to memorize the words, even without meaning to.

- I know the lyrics of this well enough that I went to see the Takarazuka Revue of it a few years ago, in untranslated Japanese (which I don’t speak). And you know—I don’t think I missed anything.

- I was trying to explain to S (who did not like this much) that the stage version has about a third more songs and a quarter of the characterization.

- The cuts to the songs also made Velma kind of…extraneous? They cut a lot of her songs: My Own Best Friend, I Know a Girl, When Velma Takes the Stand, Class. The choice to make all the musical elements in Roxie’s head also centers her way more. In the show, Velma speaks to the audience at times and comments on what’s going on. The show is more about the rivalry of these two women. So their team up at the end of the movie kind of comes from nowhere. If you don't have My Own Best Friend, how can you pay it off in Nowadays?

- It felt like the movie was trying to be about the trial of Roxie, as if the main conflict was whether she’d be acquitted. I don’t feel like the stage show is really about that? It’s more a commentary on fame and the press. So reframing Roxie’s murder as one where Fred hit her first makes her sympathetic, whereas the show’s murder is totally unsympathetic. Like, every time they tried to make me feel empathy for Roxie in the movie it felt like they were fighting the tone of the show.

- This movie, with Moulin Rouge, set us on the path of modern movie musicals that value actors doing their own singing that led straight to Cats. And none of these singers are particularly great. They do fine, but especially for Richard Gere, he’s compensating for a thin tone by making it more nasal. Why can’t we just dub actors like Bollywood and be fine with that?

- I was reminded of the incredibly shit press attention given to Renee Zellweger’s weight between this and Bridget Jones’s Diary. Like for that movie, they made a big deal of her putting on weight, when she just looks like a normal person. Then a year later she’s in this. If you google Renee Zellweger still you get a ton of photos comparing her size in Chicago to other movies, as if the size she was when doing a dance movie is what she was supposed to always be. It’s so ugh.

- The data compression for streaming REALLY can’t handle falling sequins on the screen. It totally fucks with the key frames.

Overall, this is a good movie, but it’s not my canonical Chicago. I wonder if I went back to it on Broadway, where the 1996 revival still is, if it would have any life left in it. Sometimes when shows run this long, the performances get more than a bit perfunctory.

You know how “Nowadays” has the line, “In fifty years or so/it’s gonna change you know”? That was written in 1975 to reference the gap to when the show was set in 1925. Aaaaaaand now it’s been nearly fifty years since that line was first sung.

So ( WW84 )

I have watched both Stephen Hawking biopics so you don’t have to.

(I should say I know next to nothing about Hawking’s actual life, so I can only rate for accuracy where I’ve seen press coverage about it.)

( Theory of Everything )

( Hawking )


So, yeah. What I’m saying is, Hawking is actually a pretty decent movie, so if you’re interested, give it a go. But don’t watch Theory of Everything. Ew.

As a bonus mini-review, Imitation Game is actually a solidly entertaining movie. That bears almost no resemblance to reality. So take that as you will.

I've been watching a lot of old movies lately. "Old" being anything from the 1930s to the 1970s. I like watching not just the famous ones, but also the forgotten ones. It helps me to get a more complete picture of the past, even if they're terrible (and oh, some of them are terrible).

Stagecoach

This is a classic Western, and will be enjoyable directly in proportion to one’s tolerance for the tropes of classic Westerns. It is perhaps less bad than some, but…yeah. The reason to watch it are the stunts, which are unbelievable. You know the stunt in Raiders of the Lost Ark, where Indiana Jones is dragged along under the middle of a truck? That was inspired by this, but in this, it is a guy doing that between the legs of six horses. If you just want to see the stunts, check out the Stuntmen React video, which goes through the gnarliest of them.

This movie is also filmed in Monument Valley. I’ve read about the history of Hollywood filming there, and the very complicated relationship it has with the Navajo, whose land it’s on—let’s just say, they got screwed over, though Hollywood made Monument Valley famous enough to persist as a tourist attraction. The amusing thing is, though, that the action of Stagecoach takes place over several days of stagecoach riding, but the same geologic formations are in the background the whole time. Which makes it seem like they’ve fallen into to some existential loop where no matter how far they go, they’re still in the same damn place.

She Done Him Wrong

The pre-codiest of pre-code films, this is Mae West’s second film and debut of her line, “Why don’t you come up sometime and see me.” It’s also one of Cary Grant’s first films. At 66 minutes, it’s the shortest film ever to win the Oscar for best picture. Mae West’s life story is fascinating—she was 40 when she broke into Hollywood, after a long theater career that involved multiple problems with censors and even being jailed for obscenity. She Done Him Wrong is an adaptation of a play she wrote and starred in. The plot is irrelevant (though does not land where I expected it to)—the reason to watch this film is to watch Mae West. Her voice and movements have been so parodied it’s incredible to watch the original and realize that there was a person who actually did talk like that.

How to Murder Your Wife

Oof. Oof. I came across this film digging through the filmography of Terry-Thomas, who stars in It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. He has an enormous filmography of things I’ve never heard of, and then this one movie with Jack Lemmon. Since I’m always interested in expanding my knowledge of the lesser known movies of the past, I thought I’d give it a go. I expected it to be sexist, with a title like that. I did not expect it to take quite the turn that it did.

Imagine if Stepford Wives was actually a comedy told from the man’s perspective that ended with the main character’s husband being put on trial for her murder and a jury of men acquitting him because they, too, all want to murder their wives. That is this movie.

Jack Lemmon is playing the author/artist of a syndicated newspaper comic strip about a secret agent called Bash Brannigan. Because this is 1965, this makes him a wildly rich minor celebrity—he lives in a literal mansion in mid-town Manhattan and has a manservant, played by Terry-Thomas. One night, at a friend’s stag party, he gets black out drunk and marries the girl who pops out of the cake in a bikini. He immediately wants to divorce her, but because she only speaks Italian, he…doesn’t? Cause annulments don’t exist?

The middle of the movie is then about how she ruins his life by…cooking for him, and organizing dinner parties, and being overall bubbly and wonderful. Oh, and she watches a lot of TV to improve her English. What a shrew. (The wife, played by Virna Lisi, is the best thing about this movie. She is wonderful to watch. She’s stunningly beautiful, and all the sixties makeup and fashions are marvelous.) The movie also, weirdly for the premise, does not make her a mean or unlikeable character. She doesn’t at any point do anything unreasonable. The movie just totally fails to provide any justification for why she wants to be married to this guy at all.

Lemmon, because he can’t write anything in his comic strip that isn’t self insert, turns his comic into a family friendly strip about married life in which the husband is a “hen-pecked boob.” It becomes even more wildly popular.

After a few months of this, he decides his life is awful, everything is terrible, and he is going to kill off the wife in the comic strip and make his character a spy again. The movie, weirdly, is very aware that this is a terrible idea—all his editors tell him to absolutely not do this. You hear a clip from a radio show saying, “What’s next—Dagwood murders Blondie?”

Because Lemmon is incapable of writing anything without first acting it out (which is established in the prologue), this mean that he goes through all the motions of murdering his wife with a lookalike mannequin. He also drugs his real wife with tranquilisers for—they don’t actually give a justification for that. The wife then finds the comic strip where her husband has not only written about the non-consensual drugging she just experienced, but continued on to illustrate in great detail murdering her and dumping her in the cement foundation of the building next door, FUCKING LEAVES. Because DAMN RIGHT SHE DOES.

This, though. This is where the movie goes from “yeah, this is pretty sexist” to OH SWEET BABY JESUS. Since his wife is missing—and he has just published a murder fantasy in hundreds of papers nationwide, he is arrested for her murder. You then get a trial scene where the evidence against him is pretty damning. Including his manservant, who had been filming the whole playacting the murder with a mannequin so he would have references for the strip, becoming convinced that he had actually witnessed an actual murder and being ecstatic about it because it means that woman is gone. (!!!)

Lemmon then decides to represent himself, and in one of the most excruciating scenes I’ve ever watched, argued that he is only accused of doing what every man wants to, and that they should acquit him to strike a blow for men’s freedom. Which they do, to show their own wives a lesson.

So yeah. That movie deserves to stay in the bin. Even the NYT review for 1965 is like, yikes: “Never have I seen a movie, serious, comic or otherwise, that so frankly, deliberately and grossly belittled and ridiculed wives…Believable or not, this stuff is funny just so long as one can go with the sour joke- -and that depends upon one's tolerance of trivia and also, perhaps, upon whether one is a fellow or a girl.”

This movie honestly made me wonder whether the screenwriter’s wife is okay.

Yikes.

I've been entertaining myself lately by watching big special effects movies that were critical failures. So! Learn from my suffering:

John Carter
I've been familiar with the John Carter of Mars books from early childhood because they are some of my father's absolute favorites, from when he read them as a child. (You know what they say, the golden age of science fiction is eight.) I collected all the Edgar Rice Burroughs I could find at yard sales, and managed to piece together the whole series in an era before eBay and Project Gutenberg.

And then I read A Princess of Mars. And let me tell you--it is not good. Nothing ages worse than old science fiction, and a serialized pulp sci fi saga from 1911 ages not at all.

So, the movie. From what I remember of the book, it follows it pretty closely. Which is maybe the problem. Look--you can't really call Burroughs cliched when he was the origin of a lot of the cliches. But this plot is dumb and sexist and the movie (and book) is populated by all sorts of offensive Native American allegories. I mean, there is a race of people called the Red People, and they are played by Caucasian actors in face paint.

It's pretty incredible to see Tharks finally up on the screen--the animation is great. And this was a series that inspired a lot of people, including George Lucas. It even ends with the classic pulp cliffhanger from the book. But we need to let old sexist, racist literature die.

(Also, Michael Chabon is one of the screenplay writers? Dear god, why? And why is this film dedicated to the memory of Steve Jobs?)

A Wrinkle Time
I know I've read this book, but danged if I remember anything about it. But--did the book make this little sense? Cause the movie makes NO sense. Stunning visuals interspersed with exposition. Everyone's acting their heart out, but I dare you to tell me what even happened in this film.

Worth a look for the visuals alone, and for the first movie with a hundred million dollar budget ever to be directed by a black woman. But I could hope for something better.

The House with a Clock in its Walls
I love John Bellairs. We read a lot of Bellairs in my house when I was growing up (though entirely from his other series). So I was pretty excited when they announced they were adapting this--I mean, do they often adapt children's horror novels from the seventies?

And it's...fine.

The kid playing Lewis is just not up to the part, unfortunately, and they make some seriously weird creative decisions in the third act (like de-aging Jack Black into a baby, but keeping his adult head--nobody needed to see that). But it's. Fine. Again, I could hope for more. This pretty much ensures that they're not going to adapt any of the Bellairs books I *have* read.

Venom
This movie is incredibly not good. I'd been warned, but wow. And it's very short (under 90 minutes). Could have done something interesting, but chose not to. I see why fandom loves it, though, all of Venom's lines to Eddie come straight out of a bad romance novel.

I've been listening to the You Must Remember This podcast, which is "forgotten stories of Hollywood's first century." I can sell this podcast as she reads all the out of print celebrity memoirs so you don't have to. The result of listening to this is I've ended up with a passel of old films to watch.

I've listened through two of her seasons, Dead Blondes and Six Degrees of Joan Crawford. Prior to this all I knew about Joan Crawford was Mommie Dearest. So I dug up some of her films (and by "dug up" I mean you can find almost anything on streaming nowadays).

Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?
Watching this film, I can't help but feel like the whole problem would have been avoided with appropriate handicap accessibility. It's a solid psychological thriller that apparently inaugurated the "psycho-biddy" subgenre (which the internet assures me is a real thing). What I find most amusing about it is that when it initially came out, it was rated X in the UK. It's now rated the equivalent of PG-13. It speaks to a certain innocence in films in 1962 that this could be considered an X.

Daisy Kenyon
Joan Crawford gives great melodrama. In this film from 1947, Joan Crawford plays a working woman involved in an affair with a married man and a relationship with a WWII vet with PTSD. It interrogates some of what it meant to be a woman in the immediately post-war era, but is mostly interested in the melodrama of the love triangle, where everyone's damaged and complicated and there's no obvious answer. As I would say in my book reviews when I didn't know what else to write, if this is the sort of thing you like, then you'll like it. In other words, if you want to wallow in melodrama, check it out, but it's otherwise pretty unremarkable.

The Women
A movie that poses the question: is it possible to fail the Bechdel Test in a movie that only has women in it? The answer? Very nearly. This is a movie about one woman, Mary, finding out that her husband is having an affair with a shop girl (played by Joan Crawford). As there are only women in the film, that means the entire emotional aftermath of this is orchestrated by and played out against other women: the gossipy socialites who pretend to be Mary's friends but really want more scandal to keep themselves entertained, the eavesdropping servants, and the conniving other woman. This is a film of moral absolutes: the wronged wife is a saint, the other woman is a bitch. Its gimmick means that it sometimes contorts itself to keep men out of the cast--like the climactic fight between man and wife in which she asks for a divorce is related by the maid to the cook, as the maid breathlessly runs up and down the stairs to hear more of the fight so she can then narrate it to the cook. This also means that when it comes time for Mary to sort out her relationship with her (now ex) husband, she does it by getting catty and tearing down a bunch of other women, including one who was a friend of hers and never did anything to hurt her. I suppose having the men be passive prizes to be one based on women's interactions with each other is novel, but it also means that it's other women who disrupt marriages and must be fought, and not, you know, the cheating husbands.

The lesson of this movie, from 1939, is that Mary lets her pride get in her way, and when she found out her husband had an affair, she should have kept her mouth shut and done nothing about, rather than being a "modern" woman and insisting on a divorce. Also, women are awful. That's the moral. Which makes me wonder why in the name of god this was remade a few years ago. I can take overwhelming sexism in movies made 80 years ago. I have a hard time watching it in modern films.

Also, I had to pause this movie in the middle and do research in wikipedia because the plot had suddenly become incomprehensible. About halfway through the movie, she gets on a train to Reno that is filled with other women getting divorced, and then goes and lives on a dude ranch. Wikipedia tells me that, at the time, Nevada was the only state in the nation with no fault divorce, and in order to take advantage of this, you had to live there for six weeks to establish residency. Hence the dude ranch. They called it getting "Reno-vated." The movie was based on a play that was written about the author's actual experience getting divorced. Which doesn't make the sexism better? But maybe more sympathetic.

The other thing about this film is that, for being in 1939, all the women in it are disgustingly wealthy. When they throw around price tags ($100/hour therapy, a $225 nightie) I looked it up and found that that's around $3,000 and for the nightie. For the height of the Great Depression, excuse my lack of sympathy for the cat fighting of these women. (Yes, there's a literal cat fight, too.)

~*~

From the dead blonde series, I watched the following:

I Married a Witch
Though this is only a little over an hour, gosh it feels longer. Veronica Lake plays a witch who tries to seduce the descendant of the Puritan that imprisoned her to enact her revenge. Then she accidentally drinks her own love potion and falls for him. And he marries her cause...they need to stay overnight at a hotel with only one available room? No really, that's the reason. The innkeeper's husband happens to be a justice of the peace. Then Lake proceeds to magically get her husband elected governor because voter fraud is hi-larious. The highlight of the film is the witch's father, who keeps turning into a puff of smoke then hiding in rum bottles, which leads to him being too inebriated to remember any of his curses. This movie is a thing that happened.

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
This Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell film is a classic for a reason. It is delightful fluff to watch. And its ultimate message is that gold digging is perfectly legit. Monroe's winning argument to her would-be father-in-law at the end of the film is that wanting to marry a rich man is like wanting to marry a pretty girl: it's not necessary but it helps. In other words, if guys want to buy it, she's got no problem selling it. It comes across as vaguely feminist, but only for the time and only if you assume the patriarchy will never change. It seems to say the only valuable thing about women is their looks, so get everything you can while you've got 'em. Yay?

Sullivan's Travels
This is an odd one, and one I'd had recommended to me elsewhere. Filmed in 1941, it's about a movie director (Sullivan) that wants to make a great epic about the suffering of the poor titled O Brother, Where Art Thou? If you're scratching your head over that title, the Coen Brothers took it from this film.

( I'm actually going to put this behind a cut, cause this got long )

On the one hand, this is a really good analysis of privilege and how hard it is to give up, even when you ostensibly want to--after all, Sullivan retreats to his safety net over and over again whenever he hits a bump in the road. On the other hand, I don't think they meant to say that?

So yeah, it's a good movie, and you should check it out. But it's a bit through the looking glass for its tone versus its content.

Teacher's Pet
I also watched this, because it was on Netflix. It's a Clark Gable/Doris Day romantic comedy, and if you are thinking that Gable is old enough to be Day's father, you are correct. The plot is that Gable is an old-school newspaper man and Day is a newfangled journalism teacher. Gable enrolls in her class under a false name in order to humiliate her and show her that teaching journalism is futile. And then they fall in love. And that's a happy ending, we are told? Skip it, skip it, skip it.

D was over last night, so I suggested watching The Manchurian Candidate. He hadn't seen either, so I thought we should go with the original. I'd watched it for history class in highschool and remember being absolutely gripped.

Here's the thing. It's really clunky. Really clunky. The acting is stiff (with notable exceptions for Angela Lansbury and Vivien Leigh, who got top billing and about 15 lines of dialogue). The camera angles are ostentatious but artless. Things are constantly out of focus. I was retroactively even more impressed by Citizen Kane for its ability to pull off deep field focus, cause this movie utterly fails at it, and it was made thirty years later.

And the structure, too--oof. There's a third-person narrator for exactly three scenes. I assumed it was a news reel until it started talking about Frank Sinatra's nightmares. And then...it disappears for the rest of the film. The first hour to hour and a half is exposition. Some flashbacks, but mostly just lengthy expository speeches. I understand why it's reputed to be one of the worst books ever written. This film is also full of people proposing marriage at first sight, and everyone else just rolling with that.

But for all that, it is completely unmatched for its capturing of a political moment. I'm going to rewatch the remake tonight to see, in direct comparison, how it solves the narrative shortcomings. But a movie made in 2004 comes from a very different context than one from 1962.

So definitely watch the original.

I think it's striking, too, in that the movies that were made in the 60s that we still watch were remarkable or ground breaking in some way. It's easy to forget what they were remarkable in comparison to. We don't generally watch the run of the mill cinema from the era. So being thrust into something that mishandles black and white and can't focus the camera is jarring. (Also people blink SO MUCH. I don't know why, but it's distracting.)

ETA: just rewatched the 2004 remake. It's an all around better film, but somehow less special for being a more standard paranoid psychological thriller. Does some very interesting things with the original, including giving the women way more agency, and not having everyone act like a nut. (Seriously, in the original--people just don't behave that way. I don't mean the brainwashing. I mean everything else. I don't think the author understood how human beings work.) One hundred percent worth watching both, especially to watch Liev Schreiber and Denzel Washington both slowly breakdown in extreme close up staring straight into camera. Seriously, they are both magnificent actors, and well worth watching.

I watched Mad Max: Fury Road yesterday and...I did not expect to like that, I was going cause a friend wanted to see it, but I did. I really really did. I've never seen any Mad Max movies before, and I spent the whole film gripping my arm rather hard, and definitely gasped and flinched in certain parts, but that film worked for me. The over all visual design is stunning, the worldbuilding is plausible enough (I could poke holes in it but nothing leaped out as implausible (except for the design of the brand--you can't design a brand that is a closed circle! the skin in the middle will slough off!) but anyway), and what can I say, it hit my emo buttons.

I suppose I will have to go back and watch the originals now, though I'm going to bet that Fury Road still comes out as my favorite of them. You know a movie is good when the mood of it clings so much it tinges your dreams.