MOVIE DIARY 2023: I'M THE ONE WHO SHOULD BE RESPECTED, BUT OBVIOUSLY NOT.
It’s been a busy week for me, and I’m still catching up on my backlog of movies to write about, but don’t worry! MOVIE DIARY 2023 is here yet again with old pal and former special guest Brett Rader! Brett’s talking about a modern cable TV classic, a movie that I always had in my head as every jock’s favorite movie. I don’t really know why I have this association, but I don’t think I’m wrong. It’s my blog, I can write whatever I want.
The Shawshank Redemption (1994) - dir. Frank Darabont
SPECIAL GUEST WRITER: BRETT RADER
Getting around to one of your cultural blindspot films is always a weird experience. Everyone has a few. What, you haven’t seen Citizen Kane?* You often have such a clear vision of what the film is in your mind – from famous scenes, Simpsons parodies and just general societal consciousness – that the actual movie often plays out in different ways than you had imagined.
*Dear reader, I’ve seen Citizen Kane… and it’s dope.
My 11th-grade AP Statistics teacher spoiled the end of The Shawshank Redemption for me and about thirty other teenagers sometime in early 2004. The school year was drawing to a close and for some reason or another, the advanced math teacher whipped out a DVD (or what is a VHS?) of Frank Darabont’s 1994 feature directorial debut and scrubbed all the way to the very end of the movie – after Andy Dufresne had escaped prison, after Bob Gunton’s evil warden Norton put a bullet in his own head – and took us to Morgan Freeman’s final narration. We watched Freeman link up with Tim Robbins in Mexico, share a laugh as they got to sanding that grounded old boat as Red talked about not giving up hope. Then the lights came back on.
My math teacher then gave us a weirdly somber and vaguely spiritual lecture about why hope was very important and the significance of maintaining a positive mindset. The whole thing was genuinely odd for the teacher/basketball coach who often wove dry humor into a math class about calculating standard deviations and p-values. It was giving, “I’m not making this superficially about Christianity because this is a public school, but I’m gonna ride the line here as close as I can.”
Why would this be part of a math lesson? Why did it feel like there were hidden religious tones to the lecture? If the film teaches of maintaining a positive mindset through the most atrocious and hopeless of human struggling, wouldn’t we extract that lesson better through experiencing Andy’s highs, lows and ultimate triumph?
That’s what I had in my mind. But this movie is not that.
Nearly twenty years went by, and despite it being one of the most well-regarded films of the 90s, it was one of those ones I just never got around to. Mainly because I knew how it ended! Most friends who had seen the film – and heard me tell the tale of my weirdo AP Stats teacher’s five-minute ecclesiastical screening – told me that the suspense of the film hinged on seeing Andy go through such brutal shit and not knowing whether he’d survive, let alone escape from Shawshank Prison.
What I thought was going to be an R-rated, yet saccharine parable for semi-religious public school employees was much more ambiguous, and occupied more in the gray areas of morality than I had expected.
For one thing, I was surprised at how long the film goes without directly addressing whether Andy was innocent or not! My dude is on trial for the double murder of his wife and her lover and is sort of smirking through it the whole time! Andy’s aloof demeanor appears to be the deciding factor in terms of his verdict and sentencing. For a majority of the film, Andy doesn’t directly deny the murders either! Only in the final hour is it confirmed that a tertiary character once briefly was cellmates with the real killer. And Andy’s friend Red and all their other buddies? Yeah, they’re definitely criminals and murderers.
Woah, okay. Not as much about the triumph of innocence as I had imagined.
Then surely, this film must’ve been about the process of how said innocent man elaborately planned his own escape from prison.
Also, not this film! The climactic prison break is yada-yada’d about 10 minutes before the final credits (and about five minutes before my 11th grade presentation first picked up). The film drops some Morgan Freeman voiceover and flashbacks to piece together how Andy’s breakout happened. It’s cool and very much earned, but plays out as almost an afterthought to a movie that mostly concerns itself with the various tasks Andy gets up to in order to pass the time and curry favor with the guards.
Well at least it’ll convey some subtle religious messaging if that’s what my math teacher took away from it.
My friends – I was 0 for 3. The only ties this film has to Christianity is Gunton’s evil warden quite literally beating inmates with his bible. Andy’s escape is revealed to have been due in large part to him carving up the inside of a bible and using it to store his cute travel-sized pickaxe. Religion in this film is used as a tool of oppression and as a mask that both our protagonist and antagonist wear to hide their true intentions. Warden Norton uses it to sheathe his cruel and greedy nature. Dufresne uses it to cosplay as the model inmate and misdirect from his escape attempt.
I don’t have a good way to tie up the themes here today. There is no principle that ties together me skipping out on a 29-year-old prestige drama to the fact that a statistics teacher somewhere thinks that one specific five-minute stretch of this film conveys the universal ideas of hope & perseverance. Other than the most basic plot elements, everything I thought I knew about this movie was skewed ten percent in a direction I didn’t expect.
See the movies that everyone says are great and that you haven’t gotten around to! They’re probably different and better and more idiosyncratic than you think. Don’t let someone with a necktie or four thousand memes or like eight movies doing the Jurassic Park water ripples bit get in the way of how you experience film. You’ll be smarter and better off for it. Now there, that’s my message of hope.
Brett is an executive producer at Yahoo Sports where he works on a number of podcasts and videos, if you're into that sort of thing. If you're really into that sort of thing, he also hosts a podcast called Hey Julie! where he talks about Survivor and Big Brother.
Showing Up (2023) - dir. Kelly Reichardt
SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS
I really liked this, but I have to say, I think I had some trouble wrapping my head around what Kelly Reichardt was trying to say with this one. I’m gonna try my best here, but if you had a different takeaway from this movie, why don’t you hop into the MOVIE DIARY 2023 Discord so we can talk about it?
Lizzy (Michelle Williams) is a sculptor who works at an arts college. She’s been under a lot of pressure lately. She’s got a gallery show coming up and she’s still not done with her sculptures, her landlord/frenemy/main artistic rival Jo (Hong Chau) hasn’t fixed the hot water in too long, and her brother might be heading towards another nervous breakdown. Also she’s somehow found herself taking care of a wounded pigeon. Great performances from everyone, plus I always love when André Benjamin (née 3000) shows up in something. It’s about art, it’s about people, it’s about people making art, but I also left thinking it’s about those times when life happens and you’re unable to use art as an escape.
There are a few scenes watching Lizzy sculpting her new pieces for her upcoming showcase, but we spend a lot more time watching Lizzy deal with the frequently frustrating interruptions to her work. The times we do get to spend with Lizzy working on her sculptures are so pleasing and peaceful, and it feels great to get wrapped up in these moments with her. When she’s able to sit down and work on her art, we’re able to see her shutting out all the noise of day to day life and focus on her craft, and it’s beautiful. These are the only times that Lizzy feels like she has any control over anything, so it makes sense why she’s so eager to get to work on her art. All Lizzy wants to do is finish her pieces, but stuff* (*the people in her life) keeps getting in the way, and all these tiny little annoying things start bearing down on her emotionally.
We frequently hear about art being an escape for artists, a place where nothing else matters except the craft, and I think this movie is more focused on what happens with all the other, menial, unglamorous business going on in an artist’s life. Every artist wishes that they could devote their time exclusively to their art, but it’s impossible. Life will always be happening around you, and annoyingly, life can, and frequently will, also happen to you. Because of the pressure of her gallery show opening up soon, I think Lizzy is letting the pressure get to her, and that’s coming out in the curt way she’s interacting with the people in her life. I also got the sense that she’s starting to fray because she does genuinely care about these people, but being there for people and. . . showing up. . . while not letting your own needs fall to the wayside can be difficult.
Jo is presented as a kind of counterpoint to Lizzy. She’s impulsive, carefree, seemingly beloved by almost everyone, and she’s able to put her needs up top. (Sidenote: If my landlord were an artist, I would kill myself.) The trouble is that Jo can be flaky and inconsiderate when it comes to other people’s needs. The ongoing gag is that whenever Lizzy complains to Jo about the lack of hot water, Jo tells her she’s on it, but she’s obviously not even thinking about it because she’s too wrapped up in her own stuff. There’s also the wounded pigeon that Jo just kind of pawns off on Lizzy even though she knows she’s busy trying to finish her pieces for her show. When Lizzy tries to call Jo to let her know that the pigeon is breathing weird and she doesn’t know what to do, we see Jo purposefully ignoring Lizzy’s call then get back to setting up for her own gallery show. I don’t think Jo’s trying to sabotage Lizzy or anything like that, at least not consciously, but it’s obvious that Jo’s someone who primarily looks out for herself and she just sort of assumes that Lizzy will put up with it because she probably always has.
The rest of the people in Lizzy’s life, her family and her colleagues, are presented in kind of an interesting way. We see that Lizzy cares about them, but she definitely feels put upon by them. However, no one’s really doing anything egregious or awful to her. The people in her life definitely seem like they do care about her and need her, but Lizzy always comes off as unaware, or worse, a little annoyed by all of it. There’s that one visiting artist Marlene (Heather Lawless) who seems to really like her. She’s really nice to her and she even goes so far as to bring a curator friend from a museum in New York to see Lizzy’s gallery show, but Lizzy meets all of this with a distracted indifference. (It’s understandable; I’m sure if it were the first night of my gallery show and my troubled brother were maybe missing, the last thing I’d be able to do would be networking.) I think this is probably just another symptom of Lizzy’s stress levels affecting how she interacts with people in general, but maybe it’s also a symptom of being too involved in your own world to recognize how you’re coming off to others. This seems like a kind of parallel to what’s going on with Lizzy’s brother Sean (John Magaro). He’s struggling with some mental health issues so it’s a bit different, but he’s completely wrapped up in his own head, so much so that he’s become a recluse who goes for long stretches without seeing anyone unless they’re checking up on him. If Lizzy is an artist who is struggling to find time to commit herself to her art because of the intrusions of day to day life, I think Sean embodies the idea of an artist who’s thrown himself fully into his own world, ignoring the real world around him, and letting both his relationships and his own needs become secondary to his obsessions.
I feel like there are many movies that celebrate art and the artist, and maybe Showing Up does that too in a way, but it’s also a movie that has a more nuanced view of an artist’s relationship to their art, and how they are affected by the mundanity of life around them. When we finally get to Lizzy’s gallery show, and we see all of her pieces, we see some that some of these resemble some of these people in her life (kind of funny that the very self-involved Jo immediately sees herself in one of Jo’s pieces), and I think it’s a sort of revelation that Lizzy hasn’t so much been trying to shut out the world so that she could focus on her work as she has been trying to focus on her work so that she can process what’s happening in her world.
Birth (2004) - dir. Jonathan Glazer
Hahaha wow this movie was fucked up, I thought it was great. Anna (Nicole Kidman) is about to get married to a new man ten years after her husband died suddenly while jogging through Central Park. One night, a mysterious ten year old boy that she’s never seen comes up to her apartment and tells her that he is not a ten year old boy— he’s actually Anna’s old dead husband and he’s been reincarnated as this child. Birth has a very goofy premise, but it’s played out so extremely seriously that it moves from goofy to tense and upsetting, which is one of my favorite things.
I think what I liked most about this is that the movie is less focused on the specifics of how this could happen and more on how this situation really fucks up this particular set of people. Everyone immediately treats this like it’s some kind of joke or a prank, then when it’s clear that it isn’t that, and that this kid seems to have very intimate knowledge of Anna’s relationship with her dead husband and her family, their reactions change to confusion and anger. But there’s something about this that Anna can’t shake, and she knows that a part of her believes this boy’s story. Is it true that her husband’s been reincarnated? Is this just Anna still unable to get over her feelings for her dead husband? Either way, it’s driving a wedge between her and her fiancé Joseph (Danny Huston), who at one point gets so worked up about this kid he physically assaults him at their engagement party (it’s kind of a shocking scene, but it’s also honestly kind of funny to watch Danny Huston try to shove a grand piano into a kid).
To me one of the more interesting parts of this movie was seeing how this has affected the kid’s parents. Apparently before all of this, he was just a regular kid, then all of a sudden he wakes up and he’s convinced that he’s the reincarnation of a grown man, trapped in this child’s body. At one point the kid is with his mother, and she’s tucking him in, talking to him the way that mothers do, trying to soothe him because she knows he’s maybe having a tough, weird time. He turns to her and he says, “I’m not your stupid son,” and you can see that it really disturbs her. We spend a lot of time with Anna and her family going through their own fucked up experience, but it’s also equally traumatizing for the other end with this family feeling like they’ve just lost their own son, and maybe thinking Anna is some kind of sick woman for entertaining this.
Nicole Kidman is really amazing in this movie. It’s such a weird role, but she navigates it perfectly. You can see that Anna starts out thinking this is all ridiculous, but as this situation persists you see her starting to get more and more convinced that this is real, or maybe that she’s just so desperate for it to be real. It’s a real tightrope walk, wanting this to be real, but knowing that it’s wrong. It’s truly a head vs. heart situation for her, and Nicole Kidman really brings that inner conflict to the surface in her performance.
By the end of this, we don’t really have any answers, everyone is upset and unhappy, and no one gets what they want. Everyone’s just had a really fucked up time that they won’t ever recover from. What more could you ask for?
The Super Mario Bros. Movie (2023) - dir. Aaron Horvath, Michael Jelenic
A fun little movie for kids, I don’t know what else anyone could have been expecting. I’ve seen a few places talking about how this movie doesn’t really do anything subversive or how there aren’t any serious* (*obvious, overly sentimental, openly manipulative) themes, and I think that’s kind of a weird way to approach this movie for kids. “My problem with this movie for kids is that there wasn’t enough adult stuff.” Grow up, dude. Who cares? Plus, I think it’s kind of nice that this movie is all surface level. Let the kids enjoy this stuff on their own level, then when they look back on it and revisit it in like high school or college or whatever, they can create their own weird horny deconstructive ironic takes on it. I think it’s nice that that sort of stuff isn’t necessarily built into the subtext of the movie (this movie is bravely almost exclusively text). I think we owe it to future generations to let them make their own subtext for the media of their youth.
Jack Black is having a blast doing the voice of Bowser, and he’s the best part of the movie. I love that they play up that Bowser is doing all of this because he’s got a crush on Peach and he’s trying to impress her so that they can get married. The running gag where he’s obsessed with having his minions spying on her and Mario so that he can see if she likes Mario is so silly, and I love that all of Bowser’s guys are just confused by his endgame being throwing a lavish wedding for himself and Peach. Good stuff.
Having Jack Black go to 11 with his performance is obviously great, but it also has the side effect of spotlighting how lacking Anya Taylor-Joy’s performance as Peach is. I generally don’t have a problem with her performances, but her very nonplussed voice never really matches up with the very animated Peach, and she really sticks out like a sore thumb. I honestly was thinking that Chris Pratt would be the weak link here, and his voice acting isn’t really anything special, but it’s boring in a way that sort of fits? Mario has never been the most interesting part of a Mario game, so why should we expect this to be different?
The movie is only about an hour and a half-ish, but they cram so much shit in here. It’s so dense, so much happens, and it all happens so fast too. I have to wonder if they were worried that this thing wouldn’t get a sequel or something like that. To its credit, it never really felt like they were setting up spin off franchises or anything like that, but also I just hate that we have to approach media for kids these days through this very marketing-conscious, profit driven way. Kind of a bleak thought, but the movie is filled with bright colors and action so there’s not a whole lot of room to get depressed at the state of kids media when you’re watching Donkey Kong beating the shit out of Mario so that his dad will respect him.
Let’s see… what else… I liked all the parts in Brooklyn, and I loved watching Mario and Luigi’s big Italian-American family around the dinner table just mercilessly roasting Mario and Luigi for their poor business acumen, the Mario/Donkey Kong rivalry was fun, Toad insisting that he’s Mario’s best friend throughout the movie got a few laughs from me, the animation during that one scene where Luigi is getting chased by the Dry Bones was actually really cool to watch, there’s also this dog that’s animated in such a hilarious way, I couldn’t stop laughing at that fucking dog, and then there’s a part where Mario kicks the dog. That’s right, small business owner, beloved videogame character, and face of Nintendo— “Super” Mario Mario himself— kicks a dog in this movie and no one has the guts to talk about it except MOVIE DIARY 2023! Don’t worry, the dog is fine, and by the end of the movie we see the dog begrudgingly respect Mario and Luigi (yet another hilarious animation), but still! YOUR CHILDHOOD HERO MARIO KICKED A DOG IN THIS MOVIE!
Ok that’s all for now. I went out to watch the 4k restoration/director’s cut of The Doom Generation (1995) the other night, and that was really great. I didn’t write about it here because I’m only doing first watches for MOVIE DIARY 2023, but you should check that out if you can. Incredible looks, an iconic 90s aesthetic, a lot of dumb fun, some wild cameos, and a very violent, fucked up, feel bad ending.
Make sure to join your peers in the very fun, very chill MOVIE DIARY 2023 Discord for the full MOVIE DIARY 2023 experience! See you next time!