Seeking Ferret

Bad Shabbos

Jews do not dance in this movie.

But it was nonetheless an incredible movie and I loved it so much and I laughed all the way through.

The film is a farce in the vein of a Neil Simon play- a modern Orthodox Upper West Side family prepares for a Shabbos dinner made fraught by the fact that the Catholic parents of the son's fiancee (who is in the process of converting) are visiting from Wisconsin. This process becomes a lot more complicated when a dead body, that the family has to conceal, turns up.

I love a precise farce and this is an incredibly well composed one that manages to squeeze multiple jokes out of every setpiece through callbacks and reaction shots and brilliant use of the limited set. The whole audience was constantly laughing for the entire movie.

I especially loved the incredible Talmud jokes, which testified to a writing team that not only is familiar with the text of the Talmud but also its vibes. I still laugh every time I think of the challah.

And I loved that it is a movie about a family sticking together through thick and thin. I remember complaining about This Is Where I Leave You that for all the funny moments the inescapable truth at the end is that this family doesn't like each other very much, and I found that deflated my enjoyment a lot. In this movie, for all the family dysfunction and disagreement, when things go down they team up to be dysfunctional together.

Little Sydney Sweeney double feature in recent weeks...

Anyone But You

I texted R early into the film "Oh, the romantic leads are named Ben and Bea, and it turns out Bea is short for Beatrice. I get it!" So yup, it's a modern take on Much Ado, with a breezy plot set at an Australian lesbian wedding (Claudio has become Claudia). There are some winking Shakespeare quotes in the background of scene transitions, for the Shakespeare nerds out there. There is some nonsense involving falling off a boat in Sydney harbor that my Aussie friend says is not how things would work. But it was fun and Sydney Sweeney had good chemistry with the male lead.

Madame Web

Way better than the reviews led me to think it would be? I don't get why everyone hated this movie? Dakota Johnson is good, Adam Scott is a good Young Uncle Ben, the baby Spider-Women including Sydney Sweeney were adorable. There was good SF stuff about the future and choices and how knowledge of how the future might be imparts responsibility to think about how to change it. There's lots of canon neepery if you're a Spider-man nerd but none of it felt essential to the story. My sense is that's why critics didn't like it, because it did all this nonessential canon setup work in the background and if you had canon setup detectors going the way you do in an MCU movie, you probably hit a point of confusion or irritation. Just tune it all out, dudes. If they make a sequel that uses some or all of these characters again, fun! They would fit in nicely with the long-prophesied Sinister Six movie. If not, the movie works just fine on its own.

I really liked Madame Web as a character! Johnson gives her a really fascinating blend of altruism and selfishness. And maturity. I liked that she starts this movie as a grownup and while she solves some mysteries about her past and definitely grows as a person, she's not growing from unformed personality into a hero. There's something about the way Cassie Webb was written and performed that that meant that she kept surprising me by her choices, in a good way, without feeling like she's just doing things randomly. But that combined with the sense of maturity made it feel like she's already been on a journey to heroism long before the movie started, so the movie feels like a window into one part of a longer journey. Which again also is consonant with the movie's themes of looking back at the past and looking forward to the future!

You are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah

Jews Dance in this Movie.

A lot. Like, the very first shot in the film is of Jews dancing, and the very last shot is Jews dancing, and there's near constant dancing in between. I think there was probably more Jews dancing here than in the filmed version of 13, and that was an actualfax musical!

Adam Sandler phoned this movie in hard, but I was thinking about it and it's possible the phoning in was in a caring way? I mean very clearly this movie was made because his daughters wanted to be in a movie and Sandler could make it happen so he did. And so to the extent that it seems impossible to understand Sandler-character's relationship with his daughter-characters as being honestly connected to Sandler's relationship with his real daughters, that seems to me to be a kindness of preserving some of their privacy. I don't think you can watch this movie and come to any other conclusion than that Adam Sandler loves his daughters very much, in an honest and authentic way.

It's a very joyful movie, as the dancing would suggest, and it does a good job in my opinion of summoning the atmosphere of hormonal confusion of being a teenager. It is not, per se, a good movie, but why should we let that stop us from enjoying it?

Oh, the other thing I wanted to say is that the movie is, for a film in the well-trod genre of Reform Jewish B' Mitzvah movie, surprisingly interested in God? The main character maintains a personal dialogue with God about God's expectations for her throughout the movie, in a way I don't really associate with Reform theology, and Sarah Sherman's wacky Rabbi character sings a song about theodicy called "God is random" that struck me as fascinating.

Oppenheimer continued

I think starlady's review is a perfectly cromulent review of the movie from someone who's familiar with the history, but I have such specific wishes for a Manhattan Project film that this movie didn't really satisfy, and was never going to satisfy. I mean, I never wanted an Oppenheimer film, I wanted a Manhattan Project film. I don't find the martyrdom of Oppenheimer all that interesting, what I find interesting is all of these brilliant minds thrown together in the middle of nowhere with both the greatest intellectual challenge of their lives and the greatest moral challenge of their lives. And also the logistics!

starlady isn't bothered by the lack of women in the film because the film is interested in the moral culpability of the creators of the atom bomb and she's satisfied with blaming the mostly white men in charge for the moral crimes of the Manhattan Project. That's fair enough, but the reality is that there were lots of women involved in the Manhattan Project, as scientists, as clerks, as 'human calculators' doing most of the actual mathematical calculations, and also as wives and mothers of other project workers at all levels. They were all pulling the same oar. And the thing that bothers me is the lack of interest in those stories, the lack of interest in them as people, rather than the lack of interest in them as formal moral symbols.

Nolan's first act shows the significance of Oppenheimer's Judaism quite sharply- he shows Oppenheimer in Europe, spending time with both European Jewish physicists as well as Christian German and British physicists and seeing the conflict between Deutschephysik and Jüdische Physik. He shows Oppenheimer telling Groves that the only advantage the US has over Germany in the atomic race is the Germans' unwillingness to invest in Jüdische Physik. And he shows in Oppenheimer's conversations with the (perfectly cast) ubergoy Lawrence the way in which Oppenheimer's moral uncertainty about the bomb is overridden by his desire to stop Hitler at any cost, because he has family in Europe and Lawrence doesn't. But then these very well drawn Jewish elements disappear, as if either Nolan loses interest, or he's asking the viewer to be sophisticated enough to read... something?... into the fact that Oppenheimer's Jewishness doesn't go away when you stop mentioning it. Sorry Chris, I don't get it.

There's this sort of chug-a-chug-a sound that echoes through a bunch of the later parts of the film as Oppenheimer worries about his moral responsibility for the bomb, and I wondered for a while if it was supposed to suggest the cattle cars taking people to Auschwitz, but we eventually get a reveal that the sound is the stomping of feet in an auditorium of cheering Manhattan Project workers thanking Oppenheimer for leading them to success- Oppenheimer is haunted by being praised for something he is not convinced is right, but is also not convinced is wrong. So as usual I was over-reading the Jewish narrative.

But mostly there are two and a half hours of movie and so damned much of it is tied up in the various post-War hearings of different government agencies- Oppenheimer's security clearance appeal and Strauss's cabinet confirmation hearing and that starves out the time that should be spent with... life at Los Alamos. It was such a tedious frame story given what I was looking for out of the film. There's a very brief recruitment montage where one of the scientists says he can't go without his family and then Oppenheimer says of course you'll be taking your family with you, but then Nolan shows no interest in what it's like to take your family with you. Kitty complains that her new house in Los Alamos lacks a kitchen, Oppenheimer shrugs and says they'll fix that, and then there's no resolution to the domestic complications. There's a Christmas party scene that was the cruelest in the film for me, because you have a bunch of Jews and atheists and freethinkers celebrating a Christmas party in the middle of New Mexico, come on here, dig into what's weird and messy about that!!! And of course, show me Jews dancing!!!!! Nope, they immediately run out of that scene to inject some war-based tension and drama back into the story.

I mean, this is profoundly not a useful review of the movie as Nolan made it; Like I said, go look at starlady's review if you want that. But the building of the bomb required thousands of people to make intense and significant sacrifices and if any of them had refused the project might not have worked, so the focus on Oppenheimer's moral qualms just seems incredibly reductionist and boring to me.

I wanted to see Szilard's humor, I wanted to see Feynman as more than just a bongo joke, I wanted to see Teller taken seriously (This was my biggest disappointment in the film, I had such high hopes for Benny Safdie's performance but he just... didn't end up being my Teller), I loved the three seconds of Vannevar Bush we got and wanted so much more. I wanted the Oak Ridge parts of the story to be more than just a handful of marbles. I wanted to see scientists discussing science. Nolan had this persistent sleight of hand of representing scientific debates by cutting to them just as someone was getting the last word in, because heaven forbid we see scientists actually debating science in a movie about scientists. None of these wishes are reasonable expectations for a Christopher Nolan Oppenheimer film, but nevertheless.

Kandahar

Mystery movie, not a movie I'd have seen by choice, and a movie I'd have been right not to see. The torments of indomitable white spies in Afghanistan, struggling to survive against a Pakistani intelligence agent. It was trying to be both a social commentary and a bare-knuckle action thriller and not quite succeeding at either.

Across the Spiderverse

So I was loving it until the ending, which felt like a kick in the face. It's a beautifully made movie, the visuals are amazing, but it reminded me of how I felt after Infinity War where I wasn't sure what the movie meant because it's contingent on the resolution coming in Beyond the Spiderverse. freeradical42 tried to sell me on "It probably felt the same way coming out of Empire Strikes Back back in the day", but no, I don't think that's right. Empire takes a moment at the end for everyone to catch their breath and take stock of where they stand, that makes it feel like a whole movie unto itself which is simply telling a story about the heroes losing. But Across the Spiderverse simply doesn't end, and that doesn't work for me. We'll see how I feel about it after Beyond comes out- I know Endgame did no favors to Infinity War's conclusion.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

It was a really fun watch, it understood the silliness required of an Indy movie, and it got the killing Nazis part down just fine. The CGI de-aging was surprisingly natural, the byplay between Ford and Phoebe Waller Bridge was electric, it was a good time at the movies.

No Hard Feelings

What can I say, I like Jennifer Lawrence and this was a perfectly enjoyable JLaw movie in a genre I don't particularly care much for. It was a gentle, sweet sex comedy.

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3

Jews do not dance in this movie.

Champions

This was the mystery movie, and I think it's a movie I would have steered a little clear of otherwise, because I'm generally distrustful of Hollywood's representations of people with disabilities, especially in movies that feature a non-disabled star actor surrounded by a group of disabled people. To its slight credit, Champions is aware of the pitfalls and acknowledges within the movie that "Is this exploitative?" is a question that anyone making a film like this needs to ask. To its greater credit, Champions is a warm movie that does an excellent job of individuating and characterizing its Special Olympians, and making the film as much about their victories as about Woody Harrelson's victories. I cannot speak as someone with huge experience with people with intellectual disabilities, but I enjoyed the film.

RRR

This was SO MUCH and I loved it. The dancing, the fighting, the animals, the bromance, everything was delightfully maximalist. I really enjoyed the depiction of the British, it felt appropriately over-the-top for a movie that goes over the top in every way, but it stayed within bounds where you remembered that the British probably really did almost everything they depict, albeit possibly with a little less mustache twirling. A little girl next to me in the aisle, perhaps eight or so, got up during "Naatu Naatu" to dance along and it was adorable, this was such a fun movie experience in every way.

I wish I'd been aware enough to catch this last year, but I'm glad I was able to see it in a theater, it definitely felt like a movie that worked better on a big screen.

The Fabelmans

Jews Dance in this Movie.

Like, seriously, Michelle Williams dancing in this movie made me want to make another Jews dancing vid. Whew.

Cirkus

The local theater that I'm still on an unlimited movie plan at has a lot of Indian film because there's a big Indian community in the Edison area. This movie, says Wikipedia, has gotten terrible reviews, but I liked it! It's an adaptation of Shakespeare's A Comedy of Errors, with two sets of twins separated at birth only to encounter each other as adults, with chaos and mix-ups ensuing. The core premise is that the idea of separated twins can challenge Indian ideas about caste and the importance of genetic destiny. Yet the film also recognizes a contribution of genetics, as one of the sets of twins turns out to be linked supernaturally by a strange ability to manipulate electricity.

Hijinks and mistaken identities undertaken in a farce of sufficient precision is a pretty guaranteed win for me, so I liked this even though I agree with some of the reviewers that a few of the comic performances were overly broad and annoying, and the special effects were sometimes kind of cheap looking.


Babylon

Some really great performances from Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie as silent film stars who struggle to cope with losing fame after the rise of talkies, but ultimately I was a little meh on this. There was just SO MUCH happening visually and it wasn't wholly satisfying how it all fit together. into a narrative Honestly it had me thinking of the Coen Brothers' Hail Caesar, probably my least favorite Coen Brothers film. If there was a movie that had Babylon's actors and visuals, and Hail Caesar's plot, that together would be a great movie.

The final scene of the film is a fanvid, a tribute to the history of film recognizably in the form of a fanvid. Probably the most expensive fanvid in history, I was saying, since one presumes they actually cleared the rights for all the source they used. I was utterly fascinated by that choice and what they were trying to achieve with it. Talk about vid as essay vs vid as affective narrative, I mean...

Often I outsmart myself. I realized that I wanted to see both Wakanda Forever and Glass Onion in the movie theater, and I discovered that somehow tickets around here are now as much as sixteen bucks. But Regal was advertising its unlimited plan at twenty two dollars a month, so if I was definitely going to see at least two movies in the month it seemed to make sense to consider it. It turns out that their plan has a minimum three month commitment, so it's seventy bucks to see two movies, not twenty two. Because sure, I'd be able to see other movies, but the motivation was to not pay thirty two dollars to see two movies and I had no specific intention to see any other movies, so no matter how many extra movies I see, I wouldn't have spent that money otherwise.

But I talked myself into it.

So now it's let's see how many films I want to see in the next three months. So far I've seen Wakanda Forever and Glass Onions, and also Ticket to Paradise and The Menu.

Wakanda Forever

It was a good movie, but I'm not sure it was a really good Marvel movie. They had to address their grief over the untimely passing of Chadwick Boseman and it loomed over the movie to the point of eating the movie. The acting was phenomenal, but it was such a sad movie, and I don't know, it feels unfeeling to say it but that's not why I go to see Marvel movies. I want escapist, I don't want all that reality intruding on the fantasy even though I don't know how they could've made the movie without delving into the grief.

I've never been a Namor fan and this version was clever but didn't really make me like the character any more. I loved Riri and I loved Shuri and Okoye and Ramonda, honestly I think the thing I liked most about the movie was how much it centered black women in power, I cannot remember any other movie that was so intensely from that perspective. Also science feels! Shuri and Riri building robots together! I'm getting closer and closer to having the source I'll need to make the MCU science vid of my dreams.

Ticket to Paradise

Not a good movie, and not a movie I'd have paid to see otherwise, but George Clooney and Julia Roberts understood their brief and it was fun to see them doing everything in their power to get under each others' skin for an hour and a half. They have amazing chemistry.

Glass Onion

This was so good and so much fun. Everyone, literally every character, was perfect. So many good cameos, I can't pick a favorite between Yo Yo Ma and Serena Williams.

I was really delighted that the movie takes place during the pandemic in a meaningful way. I think I've written about it before, there's something disorienting about watching new television where masks aren't even a thing anyone contemplates. I liked that it was a thing the movie was conscious of, the complicated social dynamics of who is wearing a mask and what kind of mask and in what circumstances, and then I liked that even though ultimately they didn't want to spend the whole movie in masks, they dealt with that problem on-screen.

I have to admit I'm a little disappointed they didn't go for the fan-proposed plan of having Benoit Blanc change his accent every movie.

Also, the music was great. We did get a bit of Beatles, but we got a lot of very thematically appropriate David Bowie and I loved it.

The Menu

I went in almost entirely unspoiled, except for knowing it was about a celebrity chef and it was in some way psychologically tense, and I'm very glad I was that unspoiled so I don't think I want to say much more, but I really found it mesmerizing. The pacing was so good, the cinematography was so on point, and I just never knew what was going to happen next. (Colin Stetson score, in case that's a selling point to anyone else.)

I don't watch a lot of horror, but I watched three horror films this weekend. Weird. Two are prep for Worldcon. And Nope just sounded like fun.


Demon

A young Anglo-Polish man returns to Poland to marry a Polish woman in her family homestead. During the wedding celebration, he is possessed by the dybbuk of a young Jewish woman who disappeared during the War. The bride's family tries to carry on the wedding celebration and deny anything is going on; it eventually develops that they probably expropriated a Jewish family's farm during the Holocaust and the way they carry on a similar denial about both their family's historic anti-semitic crimes and the possession skitters unsettlingly between farce and horror.

Jewishly, perhaps the most striking element is the way that the dybbuk defiesthe rules of Christian society- efforts by the town doctor and priest to remove the dybbuk through modern medicine or traditional Catholic exorcism are completely ineffectual. From the Polish perspective, that is the horror of the Jews: they're somehow outside of the rules.

And that had me nagging a little bit... In one sense, the film's sympathies are clearly with the dead Jewish woman and with anyone who empathizes with her, but in another sense the film's perspective is clearly Polish and not Jewish, and the Jewish characters have something monstrous about them. Even if that monstrousness just symbolizes Polish guilt, it still made me feel uncomfortable.


The Vigil

A young ex-Chasid is imposed upon to be the shomer for a night for an old man who died estranged from his children. It turns out the old man was haunted by a mazzik because of Holocaust trauma. As the shomer waits for the chevra kadisha in the morning, the mazzik tries to find a new host.

I loved seeing mazzikin instead of the usual dybbuks as the creature out of Jewish legend. I really liked how Yakov, the ex-chasid, struggled with a complicated mixture of family trauma and Chasidic habits he was struggling to grow out of. I loved the language, the way the film operates in a fluid mixture of English and Yiddish. Maybe I wanted a little bit more humor from it? And I definitely wanted the film to be a little more visually interesting, it tried to milk most of its horror out of the tension of static scenes in boring settings, but there wasn't enough payoff when the excitement came. But I liked a lot about the movie anyway.


Nope

Gosh, what a brilliant, complicated movie. I don't know what to say about it, the Ringer had an interesting review saying that the point is that it's not something you can easily wrap your head around and say "this is what the movie is about." It's about Hollywood and its history with black people, it's about mankind and our relationship to animals, and at its emotional heart it's about two siblings loving each other and figuring out how to support each other even though they're very different people. Keke Palmer and Daniel Kaluuya are so damned good, this is one of the best brother/sister stories I've ever seen. The movie is so deliberate and careful about every detail, creating a build where you are thinking and analyzing everything as you watch. And the final act is so joyous and scary and exciting, a marvelous feeling of release.