Category Archives: movies

Going the Distance

The best thing about The Bear, I think, is that it tries so hard. The writing alternates between brilliant and painful. (For examples of the former, see this monologue and basically anything Richie says.) The setting is rich and detailed, but also strangely empty. (Why do we never see any customers?) The filmmaking is boring in one episode and gutsy in another. (Episode 7 is one continuous shot set during the ten minutes before the lunch rush.) The one thing that is consistent is that Jeremy Allen White never stops looking like Rocky Balboa.

Maybe that’s enough. Maybe the unusual charm of the show comes from the fact that it feels like a film made by an MFA student on a shoe-string budget, the kind of film where no one gets paid, but pours their guts out anyway; where the cast and crew are basically the same people and craft services is someone’s mom dropping off chili. That scrappy vibe serves the show well because it’s also what the story is about—a restaurant that could be great but isn’t quite there yet. The Bear, The Beef, and Rocky all seem to have the same goal: to prove that, despite appearances, they’re not just some bum from the neighborhood.

UPDATE: I added some things to make my point more clear.

Thanks I Hate It

If you want to know why I boycott Disney’s live-action remakes (and why you should, too), watch this video on 2017’s Beauty and the Beast. (Thanks, Alastair, for sending it to me, even though it took me roughly three years to watch it.)

If Disney ever gets around to remaking The Aristocats as a misunderstood-villain version focusing on Edgar, I’ll fork over the dough. Otherwise, the boycott stands.

Criterion

For my birthday, T got me a three-month subscription to the Criterion Collection’s streaming service. Why three months, you ask? As she pointed out, it’s a time frame short enough to motivate us to watch as many movies as possible to get our money’s worth. Plus, for a teacher, the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays are the most relaxing time of the year. I expect to be glutted with film by the end of February.

Last night, we watched Kurosawa’s High and Low, a police procedural from 1963. I’m not planning to review each Criterion movie we watch, but here are a few notes about the film.

  • Along with obvious “high vs. low” imagery, Kurosawa plays with light and darkness. Gondo’s living room is flooded with white light, which makes him vulnerable. He must close the curtains to be safe. His wardrobe also goes from white to dark over the course of the movie.
  • T commented on how Westernized everything in 1960s Japan was. The characters wear business suits. The children pretend to be cowboys. There’s an extended scene in a frenetic dance club populated by Americans (where, according to IMDb, Tarantino got his inspiration for the famous scene in Pulp Fiction). Mrs. Gondo goes back and forth between wearing a traditional kimono and wearing the garb of an American housewife.
  • In American crime dramas, the detective almost always works alone, sometimes outside the bounds of the law. In High and Low (as in Memories of Murder, which I also watched recently), the detective is surrounded by a team. This is extremely obvious in the scenes where the members of the team report on their progress. The whole frame is packed with people.
  • Kurosawa’s long takes let the actors make the most of the time between cuts. ‘Twas delightful.