Paul Schrader, 2017 #3, 2018 Skandies

significant
   spoilers

So I have to assume that Paul Schrader thought, “Wait⁠—what if I wrote Taxi Driver all over again, but this time the failed assassin actually does have stomach cancer?”

I had some whiplash where this one was concerned.  Initially, it looked like it was going to be a priest procedural written by a guy who has famously spent a career grappling with his strict Calvinist upbringing, and as Pattern 17 suggests, I could hardly be less interested in that.  My interest took an upward swing when the main character, a minister, begins counseling a militant ecological activist in the throes of despair over the state of the world⁠—and another upward swing when the activist kills himself and the minister finds himself adopting the activist’s cause.  The minister’s medical woes were uncomfortably relatable to me, though my versions of his specific complaints have been milder, I am relieved to say.  And while I have negative interest in Chris­tianity as a belief system, I am somewhat interested in its role in society, so the relationship between the 250-year-old church for which the protagonist serves as pastor and the glitzy evangelical church with which it is affiliated, and the relationship of both of them to a local captain of industry who thinks of this city as his own company town, furnished sufficiently absorbing material to keep me from reaching for the stop button.  Even the big genre swerve with the “Magical Mystery Tour” worked for me.  But then…

…yeah, the whole voiceover of journal entries, living in an aus­tere set of rooms, pouring hard liquor onto his cereal business already felt too familiar, so when the main character started cobbling together an assassination plot, and especially when he found himself needing to change plans in a panic, the movie started to feel less like First Reformed than like Second Taxi Driver.  One big difference is that this time around, the protag­onist’s Plan B is silly enough that I could hear the points drop­ping off my tentative score.  And the ending was even sillier.  I went looking for a writeup that might explain what Schrader might have been thinking with this ending, and found one on a site called Vulture in which the author approvingly notes, “Few modern films take spirituality as seriously or as thoughtfully as First Reformed does.”  And ultimately, that’s why this movie was never going to work for me.  “Spirituality” should not be taken seriously.

	Andrew Bujalski, 2018 #2, 2018 Skandies

There’s a meme you may have seen that comes in a handful of different versions, but which always offers up some variation of an exchange in which an older person says, “Why don’t kids play outside anymore?”, followed by the caption “The outside they built:” and a picture of some unwalkable hellscape.  Here is a (quite large) Google Earth rendition of such a hellscape.  Specifi­cally, it is a Google Earth rendition of the actual filming location of Support the Girls.  This is in Texas, but from sea to shining sea, most Americans live in places like this, where commercial zones are dominated by gigantic parking lots adjoining big-box stores (the same handful everywhere) with smaller boxes in between: cell phone stores, smoothie shops, eyebrow threading salons (whatever eyebrow threading is), etc.  These parking lots are generally dotted with a scattering of stand-alone islands, usually chain restaurants.  And for a huge number of people, this is life: wake up, commute to one of the boxes, do scutwork (or, if there are no customers, vegetate) for hours on end, and make just enough money to be able to afford to go home and do it again.  This does leave a few hours in the day to seek some sort of balm for such an unfulfilling existence, and Support the Girls is about a business, located in one of the parking lot islands, that attempts to make money by providing that balm to a certain segment of the population: it is Double Whammies, a Hooters knockoff that offers its customers awful food, large quantities of alcohol, TV sports, and skimpily dressed 20-year-old women who will give you 120 to 180 seconds of attention (and attempt to upsell you) as you order the aforementioned food and drink.  To the custo­mers, it is a place to unwind after a day of strip-mall scutwork.  To the employees, it is the strip-mall scutwork.

Support the Girls is billed as a comedy, but I saw a commenter on a review ask, “So, is this one an actual comedy, or one of those sad/upsetting movies with jokes in it […]?”  Another commenter attested, “Done, not funny. I kept waiting for comedy, and never got it. More like watching people’s sad lives.”  And yeah⁠—it does seem that part of the point of the movie is that early 21st-centu­ry American capitalism makes most lives sad.  A couple hundred million people have to devote the prime years of their lives to pointless bullshit so a handful of people, not even seen here, can live in luxury.  The jobs held by these characters are not as gruel­ing as working in an Amazon warehouse or a Foxconn assembly plant, but they do require emotional labor and commodify the employees’ sexuality.  The primary focus is actually not on the waitresses in the crop tops and short shorts, but on their mana­ger, forced to deal with a cascading series of crises.  What makes the movie a comedy is not the jokes but rather the way it spot­lights a good person who does her very best to make life better for those around her⁠—in short, to support the girls (and even a handful of boys).  And they appreciate her for it.  Support the Girls is a comedy because it looks on the bright side of life⁠—mo­ments of warmth in a cycle of drudgery.  This movie is not even in the same league as The Florida Project, but I was reminded of the scene in which little Moonee is digging around in a patch of dirt adjoining a parking lot and announces that she’s building a sandcastle.  Lisa the manager says something similar: listening to the traffic roaring by on I‑35, she says, “I do love that highway sound. The cars just driving by. I close my eyes and it’s like I’m at the beach.”  This semester I have been auditing Robert Reich’s class on wealth and poverty⁠—the final edition! he’s retiring!⁠—and I was surprised by some of the data concerning air pollution.  I had assumed that air got mixed around enough that the impact of pollution would be fairly consistent throughout a region⁠—I grew up in a relatively undeveloped exurb in Southern California, but we were blanketed in smog like everybody else.  However, it appears that proximity to freeways has a huge effect on asthma rates: even a hundred meters makes a significant difference!  And it’s not just kids who have to worry⁠—at the other end of the age curve, proximity to major thoroughfares has been linked to de­mentia, Parkinson’s, and a host of other ailments.  The hellscape’s hurting people in more ways than I’d thought⁠—even the parts we might kind of like are killing us!

Burning

Haruki Murakami, Oh Jung‑mi, and Lee Chang‑dong, 2018

#1, 2018 Skandies

Well, I didn’t give up on this after twenty-five minutes.  It was the #1 Skandie film for 2018!  And the #1 A.V. Club film, for that matter!  So I gave this more than seventy minutes before I finally acknowledged that, you know what, I have no idea why I am continuing watch this.

So what was I supposed to get out of it?  Let’s see:

“It received almost universal critical acclaim, particularly for its sense of unease [and] ambiguous narrative”

Oh.

“operates at a slightly disoriented remove, with multiple structuring absences juxtaposed against a single galling omnipresence […] calculated ambiguity”

Oh.

Yeah, this ain’t for me.

So I guess that wraps it up for my tour of the 2018 Skandies!  For 2017, far and away my favorite movie was The Florida Project, and in this the film critics’ associations of San Francisco and Toronto agreed with me.  For 2018, they both went for Roma, so I guess we part ways there.  It looks like my favorite film of 2018 was The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, and in this I seem to be joined by… uh, nobody.  But Buster Scruggs did top the Skandies in one category: Best Supporting Actress for Zoe Kazan!  So I guess I’ll be sticking with the Skandies for 2019.

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