#4, 2020 Skandies

Apparently the idea here is that the film­makers wanted to make a movie docu­menting the last day at a dive bar in Las Vegas before it closed down, but didn’t think that really filming such a thing would result in very good footage.  Also, they couldn’t afford to film in Vegas.  So they did a casting call for New Orleans-area barflies to play Vegas-area barflies, selecting those they thought would make for a varied assortment of big personalities.  There was no script: they just stuck the folks they hired into a bar, plied them with real drinks, waited for the alcohol to take effect, put a recording of a Vegas newscast on the TV, and there you go, a simulacrum of the last day at a dive bar in Las Vegas.  An hour and a half of elderly drunks croaking gibberish at each other.  I lasted about fifteen minutes.  I am significantly better able to stand to be around people who have consumed alcohol in moder­ation than I was twenty years ago, but that is still about fourteen minutes and fifty-five seconds longer than I would last around outright drunks at an actual dive bar.

The gimmick to this one is that you never know how much time will pass between one scene and the next.  In one scene the main character will be single.  The next scene might initially seem to be taking place the next day⁠—except in walks some guy we’ve never seen before, and it turns out that actually a year has passed and she’s had this guy as a boyfriend for the past ten months of that.  At first the movie is kind of a slog, because not much is going on: it’s just a bunch of unremarkable young adults in New York hanging out in bars and each other’s apartments, like a version of Friends with all the jokes removed and the personalities turned down by like 80%.  But as other characters come and go, two stick around, and their relationship gradually comes to the fore.  These are Mara and Jo, best friends dating back to middle school, and initially they seem to be sharing a seat on the struggle bus⁠—but while Mara manages to find a mod­icum of stability, landing a job as an elementary school teacher after years of low-paying aide positions, Jo seems to disintegrate further with every scene, and Mara finds herself called upon to help, over and over.  Help Jo find a job, since she keeps getting fired after sleeping through her shifts.  Try to steer her away from these new friends of hers, because they have her dabbling with harder drugs than she’s used in the past.  Talk her down, because she just pulled a knife on someone!  Keep her company as she’s stuck at her parents’ house, fresh out of rehab.  This is the sort of pattern, the film observes, that can corrode even the deepest friendship.

Speaking of friendship: this movie was made by a member of the Skandies panel, so perhaps its placement reflects the fact that the voters were his pals.  He made it on a very small budget, under $100,000, and one thing I have found with such films is that frequently the element that is most conspicuously missing is the one that should theoretically be free: acting talent.  It turns out that casts of unknowns are often unknown for a reason, and the line readings in the first half of the film are not great, Bob.  Like I said, it starts out as a slog.  But by the end Fourteen had to some extent won me over, and I read an interview that made me realize why.  In the movie, Mara eventually has a daughter.  The strongest scenes are between her and this five-year-old girl.  Dan Sallitt explained that this small child couldn’t memorize pages of dialogue, or even sit through pages of Mara’s dialogue, and so these scenes had a lot more improvisation than the rest.  And, wow, suddenly we get scenes that don’t come off as unnatural recitations of written dialogue!  Perhaps there’s a lesson there.

So in 2020 there was this pandemic thingie that shut down the movie theaters, meaning that the year’s Skandie list was bound to be a little weird.  Counting down from #5, we have a documen­tary, a fake documentary, the voters’ friend’s micro-budget movie, and now at #2, an episode of a BBC miniseries.  After about ten minutes I got impatient and looked at some reviews to see whether this was going to be anything more than just seven­ty minutes of people dancing.  The answer: not really.  Apparently a lot of viewers were captivated by the experience of watching people dance for seventy minutes.  I thought, okay, since this isn’t a conventional story that can be spoiled, maybe I’ll just start with the biggest highlight and watch the rest if I get any­thing out of it.  Lovers Rock won the 2020 Skandie for Best Scene, after all⁠—when was that scene?  Initially I thought I’d already seen it, because it was listed as “Silly Games”, and I’d already sat through a scene in which three women sing an ear-splitting a cappella rendition of some British reggae song I’d never heard of but which contained those words.  It turns out that there’s another scene later on in which more people sing it, and it’s even more ear-splitting.  So, yeah, time to stop.  I mean, let’s get real⁠—I’m not going to get much out of a movie about dancing even if all the music is by Poppy.

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