Movie Bully Summer School
"All These Beach Bodies Watching Avatar The Last Airbender now. Makes me wanna puke. They belted me for that!"
Case Closed
"The Ventriloquist's Illusion”(2016)
Directed by Yasuichiro Yamamoto
Based on the manga by Gosho Aoyama
2 of 975 episodes watched for review
A manifestation of the spirit in total blunder. Instead of concentrating on aspects of my person that could’ve blossomed if it wasn’t for the pandemic—which if you’re good has been unavoidable and what everyone decent is feeling—and instead of concentrating on aspects of my person I can blossom because of or due to the pandemic, I make the worst choices. Instead of being happier I’m sad (that’s not really a choice but you can at least make directions towards something). Instead of wearing better clothes and looking like an art thief (Blue Jacket Lupin with a little bit of Green Jacket Lupin) I’m wearing indigo shorts and a comic book character t-shirt. Instead of running everyday I’m walking with the runners I bought for running. Instead of becoming a Berlin guy who can say “Oh I love it here everyone is so nice and welcoming” and living in a nice apartment the size of my room now but in Berlin I’m here toiling in the same place I’ve been as a kind of mania swelters the sky. Instead of writing about movies in a fun way I’m writing about them in a dumb academic way that takes too much time and becomes homework. Instead of watching movies I’m watching television. Choosing to watch a cartoon where a little boy detective solves the mystery of how a ventriloquist killed his wife with or without the doll’s help. Instead of watching another cartoon I’m already in the middle of.
Case Closed also known as Detective Conan is a long running manga (ninety eight volumes) and anime (almost a thousand episodes) that’s not too hard to get at even when the contents of it seems insurmountable. A teen detective is drugged by the mob and turns into an eight year old who then uses an adult P.I. as a puppet to continue consulting on cases that—if this one is emblematic—seem inappropriate for a child to consult on even if there isn’t any blood or bruises. Dead bodies disappear as the scene of the crime has a missing or hidden element that draws out the flaw of the thought-out murder. It’s been going on for twenty-five years and he’s still a little boy. Resembling so much of radio and early tv serials and procedurals with a formula that’s foolproof in how it’s not only working but supposed to work. You have the one episode that is set up and the act. Then the next one recaps most of that episode and shows off the solution of who did it and why. Not necessarily original or breaking boundaries but when you consider how the more liberal mystery fiction handles these objects of deductive reasoning by deconstructing the form to the point where you’re seeing the murder, already know with your gut who the killer is, and the text not denying that lazy thing disguised as a clever thing (Knives Out), it’s probably comforting and more reliable to take in this than that. I think a town in Japan has renamed itself after this kid. That’s how popular this entity is. It’s media so comforting it became a lot of people’s address.
But starting here is incredibly upsetting. Especially when there were other things to watch I decided in the moment I wasn’t in the mood for and without realizing it having to renegotiate a fear with ventriloquist dummies not kindled since a Family Matters Halloween special and Bride of Chucky commercials I had to figure out how to avoid*. Normal People was enough to deal with. What I watch in terms of research—for what you’ll probably know more because they might be red flags (this definitely one of them)—was probably less damaging than watching this one guy get egged on to kill his wife through his puppet because she’s been cheating on him with his apprentice. Having to absorb that narrative when it’s almost midnight and right before I’m about to go to sleep. Seeing the credits roll and it is these images of this little kid detective’s little kid friends running around pretending to be detectives and being cute. Already knowing the mistake I made but those feelings blow-drying as bewilderment settles in. What am I doing? Why am I paying seven dollars a month to feel this way?Do I watch another one?
The Short and Curlies (1988)
Written and Directed by Mike Leigh
Starring David Thewlis, Sylvestra Le Touzel, Alison Steadman, Wendy Nottingham
Another night but the same feeling, Mike Leigh is probably the only director I respect and enjoy where I’ll bail if the thing is too much of a singular kind of annoyance. This happens mostly with the early films for TV and B-sides between breakthroughs. There was one about a nerd couple going to camp out in a field that wasn’t preparing to turn into a slasher movie. Then there was Career Girls. A film I’ll return to but when I tried to get through one time after a long day of thinking “wait do I come across like a maniac at the coffee shop as I’m writing in a little notebook?”, “I can’t imagine the horror it must be to look at me writing”, and “at least the Joker’s notebook had naked ladies in it mine just has ideas for podcasts” couldn’t fathom continuing after forty-five minutes. A trio of Joker-level performances expelling an energy of bare nerve neurosis as these actors try to re-enact the actual emotional chemistry of being younger people who couldn’t properly manage the routine of being human yet (and whatever that means). I couldn’t handle it.
The Short and Curlies maybe not so much in contrast but as a shorter example of the work Leigh channels with his actors, doesn’t feel like a honed vision but maybe tells the viewer not to expect another kind of thing when you’re discovering the work. They’re all like this. A “Mike Leigh Slice of Life Comedy” will always mean a more horrific proposition where jokes thought up aren’t necessarily vicious but don’t soften the dire mood. More amusing than what’s in a modern sitcom and more terrifying than anything a Grad School boyfriend thinks is scary. Realism not so much a process of polishing and rigidly working and treating art as the schedule but simply an act of observing a collapse and how the figures focused on survive through the ordeals of walking through the world the artist—the actors, the sound dudes, the director, etc—has to mimic as if it’s all natural.
A young man nagging a young woman to go out with him when he’s either the only option in the neighbourhood or the only guy paying attention to her. A synecdoche of the Hell endured as he goes through jokes she doesn’t laugh at but also the fire escape that makes a hard life less lonely. A woman working at a hair salon saying everything she’s thinking as a way of chattering with clients and battering her pregnant daughter who has to listen to her failures played back through her in a cheerier tune. Producing a monologue from a place of love that bitters as it travels out the mouth. Structure if we think of it physically coming from how these parties connect or don’t connect at all but also hardening the feeling of how these people live and how this landscape—whether that be the actual environment or the people that stand in their lives—constantly reminds them of a dread they always anticipate in the pursuit of finding joy. An echoing that might be reverberating like laughter bouncing off walls. A joke you have to shrug off as necessity when you hear it too many times.
Normal People (2020)
Directed by Lenny Abrahamson and Hettie Macdonald
Written by Sally Rooney, Alice Birch, and Mark O’Rowe
Starring Daisy Edgar-Jones and Paul Mescal
Two more episodes watched (Episodes 6 and 7)
Emotionally still very relatable but materially starting to resemble opinions in craft I wouldn’t make or find that appealing, Normal People is getting comfortable being a television show. I’m maybe at the peak before it gets trashier but I can’t in good conscious endorse choices the sixth episode makes. First doing that very dumb very television-writing trick of taking a slice of the ending or climax of the episode and having it be the opening shot and then putting a “Six Thursdays earlier”(it’s always a dumber measurement of time because a TV writer is going “What’s not cliché? Eleven minutes instead of ten! I just have to type one button twice!”) title card after that shot. It’s always useless. It’s padding. The shot’s emotional architecture should be enough to be felt in the moment if everyone is doing their job with the material (and they are). Showing off a lack of confidence in what the writing should do naturally. I’m already six episodes in and I don’t need hooks to keep me going. Maybe it’s an editing decision but I can’t imagine who likes that device—probably the same people who like liquorice jelly beans—and I don’t understand why it still exists or who was the person who came up with it, taught it, and encouraged it as good writing. I can imagine the receding hairline and glasses of that person but I can’t for the life of me envision the horrors that dwell behind and inside them. Sunset Boulevard does it but Sunset Boulevard is also about a dead hack screenwriter narrating a story they can’t narrate back plausibly**.
The second using a weaker Carly Rae Jepsen song. Without sounding troubling or cooling down the troubling expressions already expounded to be scientific, to look upon Dedicated (if we limit it there) and picking “Too Much” out of all the songs that would clearly evoke the horned up but mechanical passions of these two people is akin to how a grocery store randomizes a playlist (and grocery stores now play “Rhythm of the Night” and “Goodbye Horses”). “Julien” works if that was Connell’s name. “No Drug Like Me” and “Now That I Found You” have the liveliness and propensity that works with montages or snippets of doing it. “Want You In My Room” is too threatening and direct for this even weirder doing it/denying feelings and not doing it weirdo couple who look at each other longingly at pool parties in overcast weather while everyone at the party is “worried” for them. “Everything He Needs” with it’s Popeye and Olive Oyl allusions—speaking to a Joycean universality in a way where this big dude and little lady invoke the images and performances of cartoon characters or figures from art in their life—and Mary-Ann’s own overwhelming lusting over this former rugby star turned English Major would be like a neutron bomb that evaporates bodies while leaving buildings standing still. “Happy Not Knowing” and “I’ll Be Your Girl” working if the cool down periods were more pronounced in the way will they/won’t theys normally work in twenty-two episode seasons. “The Sound”, “Automatically in Love”, “Feels Right (feat. Electric Guest)”, “Right Words Wrong Time”, “Real Love”, and “For Sure” all fitting the mood already understood by the art of another artist. An artist who through the commerce of pop song writing is always in the midst of controlling the chemistry of longing for and engaging another human being physically*** into an experience of utter simplicity. “Too Much”—the downer version of “Higher”—seems a little too safe (sorry) and the least explicit choice in a show about trying to achieve zipless fucks (sorry again). Picking the song that you skip because it lacks the fun of others but is also mixed terribly—a consistent style in how music is done on the show—and muted when mouth sounds and moaning are either more forward or louder. Always having to have the remote on hand as you’re watching this in a house with other people who are sleeping or trying to but can’t because of the good time apparently happening in the basement where no hot people dwell. Thinking a “Party for One” is going down when “watching Normal People” is very much the exact opposite of that euphemism and shouldn’t be encouraging.
Being television that’s trying to be film but longer already is naturally going to be a process of pulling on a ton of influences—you won’t see a lot of new visual ideas in TV before film—but Normal People also feels like a piece of television that’s very in-debt to the template of “good” television. The flash forward structure of episode 6, the needle drops before the first end credit pops up like in Mad Men, using the Yaz song made popular again because of The Americans (which is also a fade to credits tack), earnestly trying to take back the Imogen Heap song from The OC and the “Dear Sister” sketch from SNL by not playing that chorus. The presentation is limiting. There is an awareness of what the creators have seen and are emulating for marketing. Following the more abrasive trends that are turning generic because every serious show pulls the same tricks in form even when all these shows are going for minimalism as a way to break from traditionally thought of formalism. Subconsciously understanding maybe they’re not going to top or even equal the theme song to Perfect Strangers so offering nothing seems more honourable than cowardly. You’re watching another show without a theme song and a black out title card. Only noticing how the fonts are different for this one. All of it clearly superficial because you can’t help but notice what’s the priority and what’s actually cared about.
I’m not entirely sure what Sally Rooney’s style looks like. I haven’t read the book and the work I see in the show is de-material or mainly working with the whims of the directors. But being a younger writer—and this is maybe a generalisation but one I think happens because of MFA programs and the tricks and struggles for young writers getting out of those programs and really hammering the discipline needed for the craft and labour of writing—she might not have a style but influences to pull. Some influences more physical than others as Mary-Ann reads The Remains of The Day and Connell recommends The Golden Notebook but maybe the main ethereal source text being Mrs. Chatterley’s Lover. A book where the reputation mainly comes from not being able to read it and only hearing of it but where so much of the fissures of those bare pornographic set ups can be toyed with now. How watching eroticism doesn’t phase the viewer or reader in the same way because of more relaxed attitudes in how it simulates and the acceptance of that stimulus. How in reality it’s much more normal and an open secret to engage in an open relationship and the embracing of a “taboo” becomes the stricture needed to maybe form the fantasy to truly enjoy the erotic action (I can’t believe I’m doing this) as a physical procedure. Only getting weird or being disrupted because of class. The starts of Connell and Mary-Ann’s relationship always building towards a foundation that negates or ignores class—less of an apparent and clear problem now than at the start of the last century or a thing ignored in this century—that has to fall apart when they get closer in proximity to each other’s actual social circles. Connell’s preamble that sounds like a break-up that’s actually asking Mary-Ann if he could move in with her. Mary-Ann seeing Connell at her father’s memorial mass feeling more intimate and un-knowing when she has been the most alone with this person already. There is a design maybe not embellished but carried out. I’m not exactly sure how you really hone those feelings into a style but here it all is clearly or the best you could articulate it.
-Sasha Makarewicz July 2020
Next Time on Movie Bully: The Castle, Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda, First Cow
Coming soon on Movie Bully: “Who is this Clown?”: The Roast of Jaime from Normal People, Pardoning Donnie Darko, Is My Best Friend’s Wedding legit?, Trigun, Jin Roh The Wolf Brigade, Getting The Oa back on the air, AND MORE!!!
*This is embarrassing but when I was a kid (19) I couldn’t watch The Simpsons on certain channels because after I think six o’clock they would play those ads.
**and it’s never as good a shot as the one in Sunset. It’s always either someone breaking a glass or having a black eye. That’s why movies rules and tv drools.
***Look I know you dialled the first 1 already but The Dedicated B Sides having two versions of the same song where you are listening to the least horned-up version and then the absolute horned up version is giving us a peak into this process.