MOVIE DIARY 2023: BACK TO MOVIE DIARY 2023 pt. 1
Hello! I’m back from my little hiatus, and I’m here to bring you more MOVIE DIARY 2023 like I said I would. A lot of stuff happened for me in July but I wasn’t taking a hiatus from watching movies! I’m gonna do a sort of lightning round thing over the next few posts to get you all caught up on my first watches, then I’ll probably get back to the classic format after that. Part one of this catch up is here, and it’s about some of the big releases (minus Oppenheimer, I still haven’t been able to get out to see that yet, sorry), plus the best movie I’d seen during my hiatus (and the worst one).
I also said that I’d be back with some more special guest writers, and I’ve got a great special guest this week, A.A. de Levine! I’ve been a big fan of her writing for a while now, and I’m so glad to finally get a chance to have her on MOVIE DIARY 2023!
Anomalisa (2015) - dir. Charlie Kaufman, Duke Johnson
SPECIAL GUEST WRITER: A.A. DE LEVINE
A few weeks ago, I searched YouTube for some combination of words like “writing inspiration how not to die every day” and happened upon a speech by Charlie Kauffman. I find the speech very moving–it’s earnest and vulnerable and it makes one think a lot about the speaker, Charlie Kaufman, and how earnest and vulnerable his work may be. What type of art does a vulnerable person make? How embarrassing, how exposed and exposing can a project be and still offer a way for a stranger to find their way in? How real, how fake, how true? Can a mirror be a window?
So, in an effort to find answers, I re-watched Anomalisa (2015), a film possibly about disconnection to which I’d long felt disconnected.
Anomalisa began life as a play consisting of three actors (David Thewlis, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Tom Noonan), musicians, and a foley artist. This play, written and directed by Kaufman, was then adapted with co-director Duke Johnson into a stop-motion film using puppets. The puppets are uncanny and magnificent, simultaneously fleshy and fuzzy, their intricate facial structures offering subtle emotional hues to flit across their brows and jaws while their eyes maintain a certain emptiness.
Which brings us to Michael (David Thewlis).
One thing Michael, Charlie Kaufman, and I share is that we have all worked in customer service and we all hate providing service to customers. There is an emptiness at the core of every customer service interaction.
The movie begins in emptiness, too. In darkness. We hear overlapping conversations and then, as they fade, we find ourselves on an airplane cutting through cottony clouds. We notice new voices, which are all the same voice (Tom Noonan). On this plane with all the same voices sits Michael, heading to Cincinnati to speak at a conference. He is obsessed with an ex-girlfriend, who has the same face and same voice as everyone else: everyone on this plane, at the airport, and even at Michael’s hotel, The Fregoli (which is a nice little joke). Everyone is also annoying and chatty and dumb, constant small talk dribbling from their identical mouths. They never really listen, these people, to anything Michael says. A whole world of customers.
At the hotel, Michael calls his wife. He lights a cigarette. He watches a man masturbate. He practices his speech. Michael is restless, here at The Fregoli, and in his restlessness, decides to meet up with his ex-girlfriend. It goes just as well as could be expected, which is not very well at all. Walking out on someone without an explanation and then inviting them to a hotel is never a good idea, even in Cincinnati.
Still restless, Michael wanders. He wants to buy a toy for his son and–because no one ever really listens to Michael, because no one really hears him–he accidentally finds himself at an adult toy store. There, he buys an automaton in the shape of a geisha. He finds her fascinating, this mechanical doll, with her painted face, all cracked along one side.
Back at the hotel, Michael hears a voice (Jennifer Jason Leigh). A real voice, distinct, not like everyone else’s. The voice belongs to Lisa, who is attending the conference. Michael finds her fascinating, this customer service rep, with her unique face, all scarred along one side.
After many mojitos, Michael invites Lisa to his room. He asks to kiss her scar and she asks if he’s a pervert, but they soon fall into a sort of pattern where Lisa tells Michael about her life and her interests and she sings to him and Michael doesn’t really listen to her. They have sex.
The next morning, Michael receives a call from the hotel management asking him to discuss an important matter. Something else Michael, Charlie Kaufman, and I have in common is that we find architecture funny and scary: offices that house tunnels into John Malkovich, an entire life staged in a warehouse, a dank hotel basement where upper management asks why you’ve invited someone to have sex with you in your room and then, in this strange cavern, announces that they love you.
Everyone loves Michael, is the thing. Everyone is obsessed with him and adores him and wants to have sex with him. It’s par for the course, working in customer service, but it’s even more pronounced for Michael. Everyone wants him, but he only wants Lisa. She’s unique among all these drones. She has her own voice and her own scarred face and she loves to sing and is nervous about getting eaten out and she loves Japanese, obviously, but the thing about Lisa is that when she eats scrambled eggs, she clicks her fork against her teeth and gives him advice on how to leave his family and in a way, really, is just like everyone else. She sounds just like anyone else.
Does anyone ever really listen to one another?
“Always remember,” Michael tells the convention-goers, “the customer is an individual. Just like you.”
How do you talk to a customer? What does it mean to be human, born and dying all alone? Did Michael forget to take his Zoloft? Can a customer tell when you’re smiling on the phone? Can a mirror be a window? Can a film be a tunnel?
Michael goes home. He gives his son the automaton, which loves to sing and loves Japanese, obviously, and is full of semen. Michael’s loved ones are all there, at the house, and they all love him, but no one is listening to one another.
Somewhere, Lisa is heading home. She looked up “anomalisa” in her Japanese-English dictionary. She has her own face, and so does everyone else. How do you talk to a customer?
The movie ends in emptiness. In darkness. We hear overlapping conversations.
So. What type of art does a vulnerable person make? How embarrassing, how exposed and exposing can a project be and still offer a way for a stranger to find their way in? How real, how fake, how true? Can a mirror be a window? Is this a movie about how much it sucks to work in customer service, how listening to people’s rants about discounts and defective merchandise, their lies, their threats, their fears, their hopes for their beautiful new products and services, makes you not like people? Is disconnect the result of an overconnected world? A world built on service, convenience, on treating every customer like an individual and knowing they are not?
There are theories online that Lisa never existed, and that this is really a movie about a man having sex with a doll he bought in Cincinnati, but that’s cheating since that’s what every movie is about.
Ultimately, though, it doesn’t matter what we think the film is about or what themes it’s exploring because we’re all customers and, as customers, we’re all individuals. We all have our own way into the story. We’re all loved, and not one of us is listening.
I don’t know whether I feel more connected to Anomalisa, or whether I can find a way in beyond being a customer service professional who is universally adored. It’s an odd film, bathed in warm golds and oranges throughout and certainly very funny, but still always a little cold, always at a distance. It’s a movie that speaks around rather than to, like people on a plane or at a hotel bar.
I think it’s a movie about customers.
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A.A. de Levine is a writer, an editor, and, above all, a customer. Her short fiction and essays can be found in New Gothic Review, Taco Bell Quarterly, NoSleep, Good Night Sweet Prince, Medium, Film Da Da, and right here. She reads short fiction for Coffin Bell Journal and hybrid chapbooks for Wrong Publishing.
Barry Lyndon (1975) - dir. Stanley Kubrick
This was the best movie I saw in July. Hands down. Full stop. I saw this movie and I couldn’t shut up about it. Everyone I encountered for the rest of the month had to hear me go on about how amazing Barry Lyndon is, how beautiful it is, how it was the best movie I’d ever seen. I loved it, and it’s definitely now among my favorite movies. Also, I saw this Barry Lyndon x 21 Savage clip (the original one seems to have been taken down) before I’d seen the movie, and I thought it was just a funny goof, but it turns out it was basically just the movie? Great clip, great joke, perfect movie.
Ryan O’Neal is absolutely perfect in this. It’s such a delight to watch this man brazenly fail upwards for the first half of this movie and then to watch it all come tumbling down around him in the last half of the movie. It’s the Kubrick version of the reaping / sowing tweet. This movie has it all— duels, espionage, war drama, brotherhood, romance, jokes, betrayals, grudges, tragedies— it’s all there and it all looks so beautiful. Every shot is breathtaking, and some of the big wide shots that were inspired by oil paintings of the time period just had me shocked, and then I was a little bit furious that movies largely don’t look like this anymore.
Asteroid City (2023) - dir. Wes Anderson
I thought this movie was delightful, and maybe among Wes Anderson’s best. It’s aesthetically playful, and there’s some fun experimentation going on with the framing device of the production of the play. The sets have this very staged, artificial quality to them, and there’s an actual narrative reason for them looking like they do since what we’re looking at as “Asteroid City” is a performance of a play. It’s a neat device, and it also acts as a sort of nod to the idea of the type of stylish artificiality that is apparent in many of Wes Anderson’s movies.
Great performances from everyone. I think a lot of movies of the past few years can have such an overwhelming cast list as an obviously big marketing/publicity item, but this one felt like everyone was important, everyone was in there for a reason beyond just being a big name. Jason Schwartzman was perfect, playing a kind of evolution of his usual shtick that feels like a natural development of a “Jason Schwartzman” performance. That Schwartzman combination of petulance, smugness, and self-centered neuroses that can come off of his characters seems to have matured and honed to create a level of depth and complexity for his character. It’s a really interesting, layered effect that happens. Jason Schwartzman is in the movie that we’re watching called Asteroid City, and in it he plays Jones Hall, an actor who plays the character of Augie in the play “Asteroid City.”
This sort of chain of influences expands to everyone in the movie. Everyone has some sort of contribution, something that they bring to the performance from their own personal lives, and these contributions affect the play and the rest of the movie around them. For instance the scene where Augie puts his hand on the griddle and Midge starts quietly panicking. Then when he walks off set to talk to Adrien Brody about why he put his hand on the griddle, there’s a realization that Jones Hall, the actor who plays Augie, made a choice in the moment for Augie to burn himself, and when we saw Midge freaking out, that was actually Mercedes (the actor playing Midge) breaking character because she was genuinely shocked about what happened. It also makes for some solid comedy, like when you find out that the actor who plays the twangy singing cowboy has the most British accent you could conceive.
The scene where Augie burns himself ends up being really important to one of the main things this movie is about. The conversation that Jones has with the playwright Schubert Greene starts as a question of why Augie would do that, but then it turns into a discussion about art, faith, and persevering on the creative path. The old story of artists trying to find meaning behind their creative process can sometimes feel tiresome or unoriginal, but Wes Anderson’s interrogation of creating art via multiple levels of storytelling in this movie felt so moving to me, and he creates this perfect sense of wonder that is both self conscious and still so affecting.
Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One (2023) - dir. Christopher McQuarrie
I really really hate to say this, but this was maybe the worst movie I saw in July. I’m sorry, I’m a big fan of this series, I love that fucking maniac Tom Cruise, but this was super disappointing. And maybe it’s my fault for getting too hyped up about this. The stunts and the action sequences were a lot of fun, and I loved the big motorcycle jump and that bit where they’re trying to get out of the train before it falls off the bridge, but that’s about it for me.
First off, I hated the villainous AI plot line. It felt like McQuarrie was just rolling with some half remembered bits from Person of Interest, and honestly this kind of makes it doubly disappointing because I would have thought McQuarrie and Cruise doing a riff on Person of Interest would have been so cool!
Hayley Atwell’s addition to the cast is fine, but she has maybe the most cliched backstory. She’s an orphan (sure) who has no attachments (yeah yeah) and has trained herself to be a master thief (of course because orphans are all thieving street urchins). Tired backstory aside, she’s still a step above Jeremy Renner’s useless bureaucrat, and it looks like they’re doing more to set her up as a successor to Ethan Hunt than they did with Renner, so the transition to Atwell that will happen when Tom Cruise dies making one of these movies will probably be smoother than it would have been with Renner. Really, though, I’m just mad about how all the Ilsa Faust stuff played out. I rewatched the other McQuarrie Mission: Impossible movies before this one, and Ilsa Faust is legitimately the best addition to this crew since Ving Rhames (what’s happened to Luther over the course of this series is another gripe that I’ll save for another time), and I think they really did her dirty in this. However, I am open to the possibility of her death being a fakeout! Rebecca Ferguson rules and I’d love to have more Ilsa Faust in these things. Ilsa Faust, murderous angel, gone too soon. (Historically MOVIE DIARY 2023 is by no means a horny fandom blog, but: Ilsa Faust please choke me til I blackout, hit me with a motorcycle, mangle my corpse so I can’t have an open casket funeral, etc.)
There were also just too many dumb self aware/self conscious jokes that didn’t land for me. Like that whole scene where all these government leaders are in a room just fucking riffing on how ridiculous the Impossible Missions Force is, rattling off Whedon-esque barbs and obvious meta commentary that made this feel less like a Mission: Impossible movie and more like waiting in line for an improv show attended only by other improvisers and their dates who don’t know any better. Personally, I think that Mission: Impossible works best when it’s taking itself seriously, and I don’t think the characters should be pointing out how ridiculous these extreme situations can be. That’s for the audience to do. Trying to play off these characters as if they’re in on some kind of joke for the audience seems cloying and desperate to me, and I don’t like it. I don’t need to identify with these people, I don’t need to see myself and my friends in them!
Beyond the dull jokes, there also seemed to be an element of self referential homages to earlier movies in the series that maybe would have been fine if it were a better movie, but it really just sort of ended up making me wish I were watching one of the other better Mission: Impossible movies. It seems ridiculous to me for these movies to have any sense of nostalgia about themselves, but I feel like I can see this kind of navel gazing, later era Fast and the Furious movies-style droning on about “family” starting to creep into these movies, particularly with this series sort of pivoting to emphasizing this idea that Ethan is some sort of volcel (positive) who would do anything to save his teammates. This movie seems to be setting the stage for some sort of revelation about Ethan’s past before he was with the IMF, but when you’re making movies about going back to the origins of the very cool stuff that has happened in previous movies, that to me is sort of a canary in the coal mine— your franchise is bloated and in trouble. Who gives a shit what Ethan did before the IMF? I guess I better start giving a shit because it looks like there’s going to be a whole other interminable movie about it that I will definitely see. At least the stunts will be cool.
Barbie (2023) - dir. Greta Gerwig
There’s a lot of fun stuff in here, plenty of really solid jokes but there’s also a lot of very heavy handed dialogue serving a sort of mixed message. Pretty uneven, but maybe it’s fine; it’s a silly pop movie and while the message might be mixed up, it’s mostly all positive and it’s set up to make kids and adults feel good about their choice to watch Barbie, so I guess it’s done what it set out to do.
Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling are both very funny in this, and it made me I wish they’d both do more comedies (The Nice Guys (2016) was fun, Harley Quinn doesn’t count). My favorite bits were Gosling scowlingly doing disco choreography, and that part where Robbie flops down on the ground defeated, falling over like a discarded Barbie doll (a special bonus was watching Simu Liu’s character be what I think Simu Liu is probably like in real life). I think people haven’t really responded that well to Noah Baumbach’s later work, and a lot of people (at least online) seem to have forgotten that this guy can write a fucking joke, he knows how to do funny. I think Kicking and Screaming (1995) is so funny! His collaborations with Greta Gerwig are so funny too, and there’s a looseness to them that’s really endearing; they work well together, and Barbie’s no exception to that. I think the Baumbach/Gerwig collaboration on Barbie is kind of a nice bridge between Gen-X humor and Older Millennial self consciousness. Barbie seems like an actual movie of the kind of thing that the Gen-X post college slackers of Kicking and Screaming would have been ironically riffing about in between self-inflicted indignities.
Unfortunately, the real world shmaltziness is not really as strong as the rapid, precision jokes in Barbie Land, but I did love the joke of Ken loving Century City as this bastion of patriarchy, and later his confession that he thought patriarchy was mostly about horses. With the real world stuff, I thought the central mother-daughter relationship was a little bit tiresome, and America Ferrera’s speech explaining the pitfalls of being a woman to the Barbies to deprogram them felt pretty 2010’s internet-y, but I don’t know, if it works to get more people to a place of understanding, then I guess that’s not really my place to criticize any of that. It just didn’t move me in any effective way, and that’s fine, it wasn’t really meant for me anyway.
Overall I think this movie is totally fine, I’m looking forward to watching like 20ish minutes of it every now and then on TNT or something in a couple of years, but the more I think about this movie and its massive marketing campaign, and the more I think about how movie studios will probably take away the wrong lessons from this movie (we’ve already got news about more movies based on Mattel products, which is obviously great because I love products and movies about them), the more I think that all of the positive thoughts I have of this movie need to be appended with “… but at what cost?”
The third part of the blog, where I plug the MOVIE DIARY 2023 Discord
The MOVIE DIARY 2023 Discord is still up and running, and we weren’t taking a hiatus over there! Please join up and let’s talk about movies and whatever else you sickos are into.
Thanks to everyone for the great response to my first album! If you haven’t listened to it yet, you can check out my synthesizer project AISUS on my Bandcamp. I’m really happy with how the album turned out, so I hope you like it!
I’m still trying to get good at Street Fighter 6. Ken’s my main dude, but I have liked using Jamie’s drunk ass, and I want to learn Marisa and Manon because I just love their designs (I laugh every time I see Marisa’s win animation!). I started doing ranked online matches and I’ve managed to get myself up to Iron level, but getting to that next level has been tough for me.
Weary viewers of my Instagram stories will attest to this: While I was on my little hiatus from MOVIE DIARY 2023, I also found myself heavily getting into Legion of Superhero comics. I’ve always liked the 5 Years Later era of LSH, but I never really “got” LSH back when I was regularly reading superhero comics. I was always too hung up on how unwieldy it all felt. There are like a million Legionnaires, the timeline is complicated, the character names are so fucking goofy, all the usual gripes that people have with LSH. But now I’m finding that all of the things that turned me away from it back then are reasons why I’m gravitating towards it now. I kind of love when that sort of thing happens. This was the first time I’d really sat down with any other LSH besides that 5 Years Later era, and I’ve been loving it. I started with Vol. 2 #259 from January 1980, and I’ve just been going forward from there. I’ve just finished reading The Great Darkness Saga, and it’s one of the best LSH stories and one of the best post-Kirby Darkseid stories I’ve ever read, it’s incredible.
Ok that’s all for now. Next time I’ll continue with another lightning round to get us caught up, and I’ll do my best to thematically tie some of that stuff together. I’ll also maybe at some point do a Friedkin post because we’ve been watching some of his movies since he passed away and I’ve loved all of them. RIP William Friedkin, what a guy!