fabrisse

The Savannah Film Festival isn't big in the same way that TIFF or SXSW is. It's mostly a chance for film students to learn from well known and respected professionals about the ins and outs of movie making. Just about anyone important who shows up gets an award of some kind, but the important thing is that they give masterclasses to the students or have open interviews where they'll take questions or participate in panel discussions.

As an example, I went to a panel on how costumers work with directors and actors. While I didn't recognize their names, I absolutely recognized the films they'd worked on. The stories they told were interesting, too.

Mona May who, among many other films, designed the costumes for Enchanted, talked about working with the 2D animators to show them how different fabrics moved so that the costumes that went between worlds looked believable in both.

Arianne Phillips discussed working with vegan actors. If the budget is small, the actors will sometimes compromise by wearing vintage items (e.g., nothing new was killed for these shoes), but if the budget is large enough -- and the actor is important enough to the production -- the costumers have to find a way to make vegan work. I had no idea that tree bark could be used to emulate bear fur, for instance.

More importantly, Ms Phillips brought up the fact that costume designers for movies do not own their intellectual property. If someone designs costumes for a Broadway show, they own those ideas and get a teeny-tiny part of each ticket sold. If they design for films, bupkis. It was just this year, per another panelist, Janty Yates, that costumers achieved wage parity with some of the other departments.

I would like to recommend three very different films that I've seen so far during the festival:

September 5 follows the ABC network's sports journalists as they cover the hostage taking during the 1972 Munich Olympics. It's pretty stark and admits the mistakes as well as the ingenuity they used to get the coverage. The only funny moment was in the subtitles where the German word "Scheisse" was translated as "Dammit." Not the same feel at all.

Blitz, directed by Steve McQueen, was a very detailed look at the East End of London in the very early days of the Blitz. The focus is on a boy evacuated to the country and his family. I looked up reviews on YouTube and was shocked that many of them found the movie basic. The whole film takes place over three days, and it's the only movie I can think of that approaches the war from the perspective of East End factory workers and their families. The closest I can come for an earlier film would be This Happy Breed which was propaganda. Don't get me wrong This Happy Breed is a good movie, but it's a much cleaner war than the reality.

The Young Woman and the Sea is currently available on Disney+. It's a great story about the first woman to swim the English Channel, Gertrude (Trudy) Ederle. It has setbacks and triumphs, but it felt like more than an average sports movie. I wept, and I don't do that often at movies. I admit, I'm about to read the non-fiction book it's based on so that I can find out how much is Hollywood fantasy, but the fact that we don't know about the female athletes like Ederle and Didrickson in the same way that we do about the male athletes -- I had Jim Thorpe and Jesse Owens in my history classes, but no mention of any women at an all girl school -- is a crying shame.

I haven't seen it yet. I plan to this weekend because for me, as well as many other girls, reading this book in around 6th grade is ground zero for science fiction. The reviews are wildly mixed. So far my favorite quote is from David Fear at Rolling Stone who referred to parts of it as "toggling between very familiar multiplex fodder and a sort of Fischer-Price's[sic] My First Acid Trip."

Honestly, I'd go see it for that assessment alone.

1) My concussion turns a year old today. I still occasionally have words just stop, but all the other symptoms seem to have gone. This isn't what most of my parents' generation describe as "getting old" which seems to be the feeling that the right word is "just on the tip of my tongue," but a literal blank wall where I can't remember any words related to the topic for anywhere up to a minute. I don't like it, but I'm really grateful everything else has gone away and hope never to be concussed again.

2) neotoma73 was very kind and saw Now You See Me 2 with me last night. I know the rating at Rotten Tomatoes is only 38%, but I loved it and grinned all the way home. Visually it's very stylish using objects as framing devices to give an impression of an eye. One of the big complaints in the reviews is that the illusions aren't really shown, but talked about afterward. The biggest misdirection sequence is all visual, though and it's beautifully done. I felt exhilarated after watching it. There's also a very nice line in subtle foreshadowing throughout. In some ways, I feel like the critics didn't pay attention and then got cranky because they missed stuff.

3) I've started really walking again, just this week. I've done the 1.3 miles between my apartment and the Archives metro stop four mornings this week and did the 1.7 mile walk home from the movie last night. I iced my foot when I got home and had no more pain than usual on my walk this morning. I hope that I can keep this up.

First of all -- if you haven't seen it in the theater and it's still playing near you, go see it. The scene in Paris alone is worth the price of admission.

I'll be honest. I'm not entirely sure what I expected from the film. I know that the three adults I've met who'd seen it would only say some variation on "it's a head trip" with no spoilers. Now that I've seen it, I completely agree. I can't give away spoilers because I think it will reduce the impact of the movie.

So. This is Brad Bird's first live action movie. It's well directed and cast. He's also one of the screen writers with Damon Lindelof.

The young actors are all excellent, particularly Raffey Cassidy who's only 12 (probably 11 when it was being filmed) and is still able to carry a good portion of the action -- both in terms of plot and kicking ass -- on her shoulders.

The effects, since many of the gadgets are supposed to be prototypes from home inventors, are very imaginative. Plus, that scene in Paris. *sigh*

I cried at the end. I see too many people talking about "the millenials" as self-centered. (One report on the Charleston shooting suggested that it was at least partially because the shooter was a millenial and trying to be "unique" which is a hallmark of the generation. Working in employment services, I can show you that the millenial generation is the only age group who's hiring level has not increased in the last two years. We may be in a burgeoning economic recovery, but not for them.) I see them, in general, interested in ideas, in learning new things -- whether it's programming, knitting, or both -- and, in my city at least, working locally to make things better for themselves and their younger siblings. This movie sees this generation in the same way, but what I found thrilling and touching was that people my age and older were also seen as part of Tomorrowland's ethos.

pleasance, another friend, and I saw this today before the snow hit.

It's bloody. It has moments of vulgarity (no, I'm not referring to the language, although there's some of that, too.). In short, there are a few issues with it.

I loved it.

For one thing, the villain had an actual plan. Through the villain's plan there was actually some good information about climate change.

There were a huge number of references to classic spy stories, mostly from the 60s. I saw references to the Bond franchise, of course, several of them through Mark Cross. There were also references to:

* The Avengers (Steed and Peel, not Cap and Hulk)

* The Man from UNCLE (and we also saw a preview for the new movie. Their Illya Kuryakin isn't pretty enough.)

* The Harry Palmer movies (Ipcress File, Funeral in Berlin, Billion Dollar Brain)

* Secret Agent (John Drake as played by Patrick McGoohan)

There's a lot to see, but I think one of the big takeaways for me is that most of them don't enjoy killing -- even with a blood ballet that Sam Peckinpah would envy.

I've been thinking some more about the fictional characters on whom I've had crushes. Phileas Fogg and Sherlock Holmes vied with D'Artagnan and Donny Osmond in my pre-teen fantasy life.

There's one very interesting one to me, though, partially because it's an adult "crush" and partially because the character was neither a real person nor particularly literary and that's Daniel Jackson of Stargate and its later iteration, Stargate SG-1. He even, eventually, made it to the Pegasus Galaxy.

I saw the original movie on its opening weekend with my sister down in Orlando, FL. Sis didn't enjoy the film as much as I did. For her, it was more a "two hours off the tour" movie than a cool mix of old serial sci-fi and archaeology by way of Caesar's Palace. (Seriously, some of those costumes would make Liberace go "It's a little much, don't you think?")

Not only did I come out of the theater with a smile on my face, I'd fallen for Daniel Jackson. He exchanged gifts with the natives, in his case a 5th Avenue candy bar that he'd had in his pack. Unlike the TV series (most of the time), there was a real effort to make the linguistic side of his knowledge important, and, as someone who's been known to translate languages I don't know, I found that thrilling. He taught the natives how to read the inscriptions around them. He died. He resurrected and figured out another way to destroy Ra without destroying the people. And he opened the Stargate because he was able to make a connection no one else had. It's one of the very rare portrayals of a particular type of genius -- non-mathematical, non-hard science, deeply intuitive -- that, other than the instance on his allergies, didn't make the "geek" selfish, a coward, or completely out of touch with the rest of humanity.

But the real cherry on top of this lovely banana split is that I really, really cannot stand James Spader as an actor. There is not a single other role I like him in. I usually find him wooden and detached. And yet, I fell in love with Daniel Jackson.

SG-1 had been on for over four years when I saw my first episode (a season 4 episode in repeats prepatory to season 6 being shown). The first one I saw (Window of Opportunity) wasn't that great, but SciFi (before it became SyFy) was showing the series in four hour blocks, and the next one (Watergate) wasn't much better. The evening ended with The First Ones, an episode highlighting Daniel Jackson's linguistic ability ("Now, don't say 'ka' till you've tried it."), his anthropological background, and even a bit of archaeology at the very beginning. And I remembered sitting in a theater near Disney in Orlando that was packed to the gills with a smile on my face.

This is going to be shown on PBS as part of "The American Experience" series.

The first twenty minutes were, as an audience member pointed out at the end, way, way too whitewashed about the situation in Saigon in the wake of the Paris Peace accords. The filmmakers didn't even mention that one reason it would have been impossible to send troops back to Vietnam was that the draft had been abolished.

Ambassador Martin came across as venal. Stuart Herrington came across very well (he was a captain at the time and privately got several people out as well as helping on the final day), but I also know the man (not my father) who authorized his black op, so it wasn't as much under the radar as the film implied.

I couldn't have sat through the whole thing and the panel without neotoma sitting beside me. It was sweet of her to volunteer and even nicer that she actually made the long trek for a movie that began at 10:45 a.m. Brunch afterward was all the sweeter. Must find a way to afford Co Co. Sala again.

Star Trek Into Darkness -- the movie that colons forgot. Spoilers, for a year old movie, under the cut.

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I last saw Advise and Consent in the mid-1970s when it was already a period piece. It must have been in 1973 or 1974 because it had been awhile when I finally read the book, and I know I did that in 1976.

It was one of the first things I remember seeing about "gay" issues. Although, to be fair, it's much more about the process of governance in DC. Wikipedia tells me that Anita Bryant's big campaign was a year later, but I was already aware of gay people in my neighborhood (one couple was very nice and another hated when kids played in the cul-de-sac near them -- you know, just like real people are different). It was shameful. Forbidden. The jokes at my all-girl boarding school and summer camp about lesbians were uneasy, at best.

I thought the movie would be heavily coded, but Preminger presents a small Greenwich Village bar pretty straightforwardly. There's no doubting what the milieu is which is probably why I remember bits of it so vividly. Of course, the married Senator who had a relationship in Hawaii during the war had to die. It was a plot point. But the film is sensitive to him, if not to closeted men or gay men in general. He's trying to do the right thing, being blackmailed, and, ultimately, commits suicide rather than give in to the blackmail.

In its own way, the most fascinating thing is that the movie was clearly filmed on location here in DC. I not only knew the big buildings, but some of the smaller homes they used as the fronts for the characters' residences. The mall has so many more buildings on it now, of course. The political power structure has changed. There are no more hostesses like the character of Dolly Harrison. But I've been around and reading the newspapers through some of those changes. I'm, mostly, glad that the hostesses power has gone.

And I'm ecstatic that there are now movies where the gay person doesn't have to commit suicide to further the plot.

Look, I don't know why I'm looking forward to the next Hunger Games movie, but I am.

If anyone in DC would like to see it with me on opening weekend (preferably opening night) at the Regal Gallery Place, let me know. It'll have to wait until after work (i.e., the movie has to start after 6:00 pm), but I want to be there.

Also, Lorde's version of Everybody Wants to Rule the World from the soundtrack is being sneak-peeked in various places. It's very stark, nearly suicidal sounding, which makes it a good match with the lyrics. I still prefer the original, but hers is definitely a different and fascinating take on the song.