skygiants

When I found out that Grand Theft Hamlet was playing at one (1!) theater in Boston on Saturday, I immediately rearranged my whole schedule to see it. I am posting about it Now in case this is true for anybody else, because I do think it's worth seeing in theaters if you can -- the whole thing is, of course, shot entirely within Grand Theft Auto and the fact that it looks absurdly beautiful on a big screen is I think part of the absurd charm of the whole thing.

Grand Theft Hamlet is a documentary about a pair of out-of-work actors who decided to stage a production of Hamlet during the pandemic, using the tools at their disposal: to wit, the virtual world of Grand Theft Auto and any Grand Theft Auto players who could be convinced to turn up and recite Shakespeare instead of committing random acts of violence at auditions. It's a documentary because one of the actors happens to be married to a documentary filmmaker, who decided to join him in GTA to find out what the appeal was.

For those who haven't seen it, here's the trailer:



I enjoyed this movie exactly as much as I thought I would enjoy it, which was a tremendous amount. aria described it as "like watching Slings & Arrows and Staged kiss while cool funny explosions happen in the background," which I think is extremely accurate. I love people getting through rough times by getting very invested in artistic passion projects; I love backstage problems; I love extremely that it is apparently impossible for any actor to go through the experience of putting on Hamlet without having an existential crisis about "To be or not to be," even if they are doing it in Grand Theft Auto.

As a sidenote, I think it's very funny that I seem to have backed myself into being a fan of Hamlet by becoming very passionate about several pieces of media about people putting on productions of Hamlet ... I am a simple person with simple enjoyments. Show me an actor going into an absolute tailspin about how to deliver a soliloquy that's previously been performed by all of history's greatest while something about the production blows up metaphorically or literally in the background and I am contented every time.

Over the summer I've seen a large-for-me number of movies, several of them in theaters (repertory and new) that I've been meaning to capsule review.

( Johnny Eager )

( The Rocketeer )

( I Saw the TV Glow )

( Thelma )

( White Heat )

( Infernal Affairs )

It's Jean Arthur week at the Brattle, and since the one Jean Arthur movie I've ever seen (The Talk of the Town) is one of the dozen or so films I'll watch any time anywhere with anybody, it really seemed I ought to give some of her other movies a shot as well.

After comparing the film list against our respective schedules, genarti and I decided to shoot our shot on If You Could Only Cook and The Whole Town's Talking.

In If You Could Only Cook, Jean is down and out and scanning through job ads in the park when she suggests to the fellow down-and-out sharing her park bench that they should get fake married to apply for a well-paying cook-and-butler position. LITTLE DOES SHE KNOW that her fellow down-and-out is actually a millionaire auto executive who is only pretending to be down and out because the prospect of being fake married to Jean Arthur sounds like a hoot!

[We did spend some time after this trying to figure out if you could do a modern version of this plot, mostly because Jean Arthur's complaints about the job market do feel very contemporary and relatable, but it is hard to imagine a modern job that would require one to get fake married ....]

The most charming part of this movie is Jean Arthur's gangster employer, who falls deeply in love with her cooking and decides promptly that he is going to do whatever it takes to keep her happy and in his employ. Does she want to marry him? Great! Does she want to marry this other guy? We can make that happen! Does she want revenge on this other guy? Okay, boys, we're gonna rub him out, let's roll! Does she want him to go straight and do no more crimes? Well, that's fine, as long as he gets to keep eating her delicious garlic sauce.*

*Jean's secret trick for delicious garlic sauce is not to put any garlic IN the sauce but to WAFT a single clove of garlic PRECISELY SIX INCHES over the top of the sauce, no more and no less. This is obviously appalling but hey, it makes them both happy.

Anyway, it's a very light and fluffy screwball and made for fascinating double billing with The Whole Town's Talking (NOT to be confused with Talk of the Town), which also has Jean Arthur and a mob plot but is otherwise in no way comparable.

In this movie Jean is the wisecracking love interest to Edward G. Robinson as Jones, a sweet and shy salaryman who is unfortunately and coincidentally identical to MURDEROUS ESCAPED BANK ROBBER PUBLIC ENEMY NUMBER ONE!!! After Jones' public and embarrassing accidental arrest, the police eventually let him go with a little 'I'm not a bank robber please don't arrest me' ticket to carry around with him, which of course results in Shenanigans.

... although to Jones, buffeted between unasked-for fame on the one hand and MURDEROUS ESCAPED BANK ROBBER PUBLIC ENEMY NUMBER ONE!!!! on the other hand, they are not really Shenanigans; everyone around him is bouncing through a screwball (especially Jean Arthur, who has the time of her life being mistakenly arrested as a moll and is delightful doing it) but Jones is living a genuine nightmare. Obviously Edward G. Robinson is an extremely good actor and every time he's onscreen as his alter ego the whole genre shifts from lighthearted comedy into something very tense and suspenseful where murder could (and sometimes does!) really happen.

It makes for kind of a weird film -- it feels like it wants to be a witty Hitchcockian suspense thriller, something like North By Northwest or The Man Who Knew Too Much, but the genre hasn't quite been invented yet so instead it vibrates rapidly between the two poles. And it's pretty good at being whichever pole it's being! Everyone is very charming! You just sort of get whiplash on the way! Very cute to see Edward G. Robinson play comedy, though, and very cute to see him get the girl.

There is no explanation for why Jones and PUBLIC ENEMY NUMBER ONE are so identical and in the absence of other evidence I've got to assume they were part of an early Orphan Black-style cloning project and poor Jones is just going to keep running into inconvenient doppelRobinsons for the rest of his life.

As many of you are no doubt aware, James "Biggles" Bigglesworth is a fictional WWI fighter pilot from a extremely long series of midcentury Adventure Novels, in which he does things like hunt treasure and get stranded on desert islands and foil plots against Britain and have homoerotic tension with enemy fighter pilots. Unlike much of my DW reading list at this juncture, I have never read a Biggles book. However, a.) osprey_archer and genarti have both read and enjoyed several Biggles books, and b.) the Biggles movie is a notorious mess and I enjoy mess! so when osprey_archer was staying with us a few weeks ago we were all in accord that the Biggles movie had to go on the docket.

This movie is properly titled Biggles: Adventures In Time and it is about Biggles, WWI fighter pilot, foiling an evil German plot to develop a sonic super weapon that will give Germany a decisive advantage in the war!

Sorry. Let me amend. About 35% of the movie is about Biggles, WWI fighter pilot, foiling an evil German plot to develop a sonic super weapon. The rest of the movie is about Jim Ferguson, TV Dinner Sales Executive and Marty McFly Lookalike, who is simply trying to keep his TV dinner company afloat but keeps accidentally finding himself zapped to the past to help foil a sonic super weapon plot, because Biggles, WWI fighter pilot, is his Time Twin!



What is a Time Twin? GREAT question. We don't know either. The only person who knows: Peter Cushing, who keeps popping up to tell Jim Ferguson, TV Dinner Sales Executive, that he must temporarily abandon his TV dinner career because he has an important Biggles-related destiny that he cannot ignore!

This movie was released a year after Back to the Future and it cannot be a coincidence. Everyone in the WW1 era is doing their level best to really enthusiastically and affectionately embody an iconic archetype from a series of much-beloved adventure novels, and meanwhile every modern actor wanders dazedly through the plot like they have no idea why they are there or what they are doing*, which you might think is method acting for the experience of being transported unexpectedly into WWI, except they also do that in scenes where they are, for ex., pitching a new kind of fancy TV dinner to a big TV dinner buyer at the local TV dinner expo.

*except Peter Cushing. Peter Cushing always knows where he is and what he is doing and even why he is doing it [to get that paycheck] and will carry it off with supreme confidence and panache regardless of how objectively stupid it is.

Anyway, our working theory is that the Biggles cast were in fact hired to do a straightforward pulp adventure and then halfway through filming some executive somewhere saw an early cut of that year's Big Hit Time Travel Film and was immediately struck with a Brilliant Notion.

Particularly notable moments in Biggles: Adventures In Time:

( I guess technically this is all spoilers )

If you are interested, you, too, can experience this full experience on YouTube for free! We had a great time but I would not advise paying money for it.

Believe it or not, I have actually seen a reasonable number of films in theaters recently besides Cats (2019).

( Knives Out (no spoilers) )

( Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker (major spoilers) )

( Jumanji: The Next Level (minor spoilers) )

( Little Women (structural spoil...ers?) )

( Daughter of Shanghai (spoilers for a film from 1937) )

I've been desperately impatient for Yuletide reveals this year because ever since remembering the existence of The Talk of the Town (1942) and then rewatching it for Yuletide canon review I have been dying to tell everyone about it, and I had to WAIT and it was EXTREMELY FRUSTRATING.

Okay, so: The Talk of the Town. It stars Cary Grant as a labor organizer who gets falsely accused of murder and arson and has to hide out in the house of the local schoolteacher while avoiding detection by her subletter, a Supreme Court nominee.

It is, of course, a screwball comedy.

SUPREME COURT NOMINEE RONALD COLEMAN: The law is built on reason and principle
FUGITIVE LABOR ORGANIZER CARY GRANT, FORGETTING THAT HE IS SUPPOSED TO BE IN HIDING, AND EMERGING FROM THE BUSHES IN RIGHTEOUS ANARCHIST DISDAIN: The law is a gun pointed at somebody's head!
STRESSED-OUT SCHOOLTEACHER JEAN ARTHUR: ... so this is .... Joseph the anarchist gardener???

And then the next half hour of the movie is just all of them living in a house together arguing about legal ethics and falling in love while attempting to make sure that Supreme Court Nominee Ronald Coleman doesn't notice that his new favorite radical gardener is actually a fugitive on the lam?

Actual quotes, from this actual movie:

JEAN ARTHUR: That professor's got a mind like a steel trap. And sometimes he seems like such a little boy, I feel like kissing him.
CARY GRANT: Not a bad idea.

RONALD COLEMAN: We must get some [borscht] for Joseph.
JEAN ARTHUR: We haven't the time.
RONALD COLEMAN: But think of his face, the ecstasy.

RONALD COLEMAN: Leopold, what a fine fellow. I've been thinking, Nora, that if someone took his hand and said, "Leopold, my reckless friend, here's love and companionship forever." Well, some day that man would... You see what I mean, Nora?

Guys, it's good. It's SO good. It's so VERY good that the studios were so indecisive about what the actual endgame was supposed to be that they filmed two whole different heterosexual endings and just kind of threw one at the screen at random, and the ending they picked doesn't actually read any less like a threesome, so well done, team!

Anyway all this is to say that my primary Yuletide assignment was Labor Relations for Talk of the Town; my recipient asked for threesome fluff, which is the absolute correct thing to ask for out of this film, and I instead ended up spending several hours researching major union-related Supreme Court cases of the thirties and forties because unfortunately sometimes I cannot be stopped.

(I had a blast writing for this movie in several directions, but the real personal giveaway here was the minor plot point involving obsolete recording technologies.)

Last night genarti and I watched the 1956 Anastasia movie with Yul Brynner and Ingrid Bergman, and I find myself kind of fascinated by it.

The thing about watching the 1956 film is that you can definitely see how they took the bones of that movie -- sad amnesiac is picked up by con artist, manages to convince the Dowager Empress of Russia that she's Anastasia Romanov, but in the end disappears with the con artist rather than claiming her wealth and station -- and filled them out with sparkles and romance and zombie Rasputin and got a Bizarre Children's Classic, the 90s Anastasia on which I grew up and which I will always love.

But, I mean, there's a lot of bones to fill out, because the 1956 Anastasia is nothing but questions all the way down, which makes it a WILDLY DIFFERENT film.

When the movie begins, we're told that Anna has been in an institution claiming that she's the long-lost Romanov, but at the time of the film's beginning she has no idea who she is and no interest in anything but getting away from the people demanding things of her that she can't explain. Eventually she becomes -- maybe -- convinced that she really is Anastasia, but is that really all that surprising when she has people around her telling her that she's Anastasia and pouring constructed memories into her ears every day?

Meanwhile, Yul Brynner -- his character's name is General Bounine and I keep wanting to call him Dmitri so we'll just stick with Yul Brynner -- anyway, Yul Brynner's motivations as he alternately bullies and coaxes Anna through the role of Anastasia are equally ambiguous. Is it true that he just wants the money? Or does he get his kicks from puppeteering people and watching the fallout? Is this all an elaborate scheme to get revenge on a royal family for imagined slights from long ago? FEELINGS: DOES HE HAVE THEM. WHO KNOWS. Certainly not this movie, which amazingly refrains from showing any explicitly romantic scenes at all between these two extremely attractive people playing out this intense and unhealthy dynamic. The dance scenes are drills, and exhausting; every conversation is some degree of mind game. The closest we get is drunken Anna, giggling and shouting out to Yul Brynner from her bedroom: "It must be very dreary in your room! Everyone in mine is having a wonderful time!"

And then, of course, there's Helen Hayes as the Dowager Empress: a woman who has lost her whole family, and is presented a chance to have a portion of it back, in a way that she absolutely can't trust. There's a really good hug between Anna and the Dowager Empress and it hurts a whole lot: "Oh, please, if it should not be you, don't ever tell me!"

( I have a lot of feelings about the very strange end of this very strange movie )

Anyway I am also making plans to see Anastasia on Broadway as soon as humanly possible because now I really feel like I need to hit the trifecta.

I've seen and enjoyed a fair number of movies in the past month!

( Hail, Caesar! )

( The Mermaid )

( Rudramadevi )

( Act of Violence )

( Crack-Up )

( Zootopia )

A couple weeks ago tlvop and I were talking Yuletide. "I dunno," she said, "I'm thinking maybe I'll nominate some noir? Do you think anyone would write me The Thin Man?"

"Oh, yeah," I said, "I feel like there's usually a couple Thin Man fics every year anyway. For the movie more than the book, but --"

"THERE'S A MOVIE?" she said.

So this weekend innerbrat, tlvop and I Skype-watched The Thin Man -- and since I remembered I'd never actually read the book, I went ahead and read it for the sake of comparison.

If anyone's unfamiliar, The Thin Man is maybe the ur-example of the Charming Married Couple Crack Wise, Booze, Solve Murders sub-genre -- which, I mean, who doesn't love watching a Charming Married Couple Crack Wise, Booze, Solve Murders? I think Tommy and Tuppence, the other classic Charming Married Couple Who Crack Wise And Solve Murders, beat The Thin Man into print, but Nick and Nora Charles got a leg up in public acclaim by landing a series of feature films starring the adorable William Powell and Myrna Loy, PLUS a really cute dog.



TL: Asta's in the MOVIE?
Me: Asta's in the BOOK?

It's like with Djali in Hunchback of Notre Dame, I always just automatically assume the cute animal companion is a Hollywood addition.

In fact, I was consistently surprised by how similar the book and movie were to each other overall. Not that there aren't dramatic changes, because there are -- the twelve distinct varieties of extreme dysfunction displayed by the victim's family in the original novel are toned down to probably only four or five, and the movie gives Nick a really fabulous set piece of an "invite all the suspects to a dinner party" conclusion that I can in no way imagine Dashiell Hammett putting in a novel.

Actually, the fact that the movie feels like it concludes at all is a maybe the most drastic departure from the book, which ends on Nick telling Nora that murder doesn't round out anybody's life except the murdered and the murderer's, and Nora complaining it all seems a little unsatisfactory.

That said, a solid 50% of the film's dialogue or more is taken straight from the book, the details of how the murder works itself out hew remarkably true to the original, and Nick and Nora themselves are -- pretty much the same across adaptations? To be honest, I was expecting the book to be a little bit grimmer, a little bit darker, and possibly a little less fun. The book definitely has a little more leeway to show the sordid side of humanity than the film, but in fact Nick and Nora's sparkle is pretty consistent no matter which version you pick up.

I will also add that I did not expect the book to contain a lengthy and completely plot-irrelevant digression on cannibalism? THAT WAS ALSO A SURPRISE.