Mr. Cranky is cranky

Yesterday B. and I went to see Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. After the movie I was thinking about maybe writing a review of it, as I often think about writing reviews of movies I've seen (though wouldn't you rather read my reviews of movies I haven't seen?), and I thought how writing good reviews is not as easy as it looks, and not something I could do really well because I lack certain kinds of film literacy (and it strikes me that serious film people must be driven nuts by people who don't really know much about movies reviewing movies in the same way I'm driven nuts by people who don't really know much about weather doing the weather), but then I thought about Howard Adelman's different kind of (uh, "philosophical") film reviews, which are the kind of thing I can do, except that I lack the memory for detail and narrative you need to do even that well. These are all just vague thoughts I had while washing my hands in the washroom (which, if we're going to be honest here, is probably the best place to wash your hands in a move theatre), and the extent to which they're true or not is beside the point--the point is that I had forgotten (!) something I'd been annoyed by when I went and looked at reviews of Lady Bird after seeing Lady Bird last week: in the snippet on Rotten Tomatoes from Peter Rainer's review in the Christian Science Monitor, he gets an important bit of the movie badly wrong. (His review was corrected online about five or six days after it was posted, as you can see on the Waybackmachine, but the Rotten Tomatoes snippet is unchanged. The trouble with the correction is that it kind of makes nonsense of the assertion; the bit of dialogue he's quoting does the opposite of what he says it does, if'n ya ask me, which is why I was annoyed by the error in the first place--he says it undercuts the movie's seriousness, when it's really Exhibit A of the film's deadly earnestness and emotional manipulativeness.[1]) And then last night I get home and look at reviews of Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri and see that Rex Reed got something badly wrong. It's not really as important an error as Rainer's (which I guess may be in some part why Reed's hasn't been corrected), but it is more of an obvious one, in that Rainer's is a matter of who says what, which is always easy to screw up even when it's important, whereas Reed's is kind of like, how many little naps did you take in this movie anyway? Which is, in a way, too bad, because I largely sympathize with Reed's review otherwise, in that, like him, I found the movie pretty annoying--and was thinking more and more as it went along that it could have been great if it had been done by a serious director, like the Coen brothers (who, obviously, because when reviewers say this is Frances McDormand's best performance since Fargo, presumably they mean this is her most Fargo movie since Fargo), who might have forgone the bits of self-indulgence and audience-baiting. On the way in I was thinking something like, I don't feel particularly compelled to see this, but at least (unlike Lady Bird, and the Doctor Who Christmas special (on which, something, forthcoming, anon [3]), which were the last two things we saw in theatres) it won't be annoying. I was surprised how wrong I was, but on both counts--it's both more annoying and more interesting than I had expected, and it does seem to be one of those movies, for me, that are able to transcend their weaknesses when you think back on them [ETA: then again, this was quite a refresher, and also, for the most part, a good illustration of how political criticism can have its own particular way of showing what is not just distasteful but actually false], which is also somewhat the case with the Doctor Who Christmas special, but not at all with Lady Bird. (This is a thing about film reviewing I keep running up against: I basically agree with the complaints Reed makes about Three Billboards, and yet I think it's a very good movie. I was annoyed by it in a way that I couldn't possibly be annoyed by an actually bad movie--if I was made to watch a bad movie, or, you know, even a conventional superhero movie or gross-out comedy or whatever, I'd just be annoyed that it was wasting my time. The same even pretty much goes for Lady Bird. It is a well made, well written, well acted movie. That it is tremendously annoying doesn't make it bad. The familiarity-to-clicheedness of the story and characters, and the fact that it pushes your buttons rather than giving you anything, means it can't be great. But it's all right! I hated this movie! 3/4 stars! What?) Which is in some significant part due to the endings of Lady Bird and Three Billboards (which bugs me a bit, because as Joe Brenner once said somewhere, if you don't like the ending of a story, why not just forget it, make up your own, whatever? (The fact that it doesn't come naturally to us to do this speaks to how deeply we have come to understand stories as things we simply receive rather than as things we make our own. (I'm not sure fan fiction isn't an exception that proves the rule.))) Lady Bird just kept trying to make me hate it, and in the end left me with no choice.[2] (And what Gerwig has said about the ending confirms that it is actually as horrifyingly heartfelt on her part as it seems. (There is an important insight--I mean important for being a human being, especially being a human being who is a product of a nuclear family, or at least who was raised by a small number, such as one or two, of parent-figures--that Lady Bird lays right on the table and then smashes to bits with a sledgehammer, which is that while your mother or other important parent-figure who raised you and so has a God-like place in your life may be "big-hearted" and otherwise a real swell person generally, they may still very easily be horribly oppressive as your parent. (This kind of thing always makes me think of Kafka's "The Judgement", which, Holy Jesus, now there is a counterpoint to Lady Bird.) Lady Bird, that is to say, is not all that very far from being a victim-blaming paean to emotionally abusive martyr parents. (Have I mentioned that this film made me very angry?)) Three Billboards' ending, on the other hand, just barely manages to redeem it(self), after the movie had gone on twice when I wanted it to stop. (It may actually be better that the last scene is as it is. Or not. It puts an end to the blind raging inevitability of all the preceding events ... but maybe too explicitly, I dunno ... and maybe it shouldn't do that, I dunno. But it's at least good enough.)

So, yeah, point being, if Rotten Tomatoes Top Critics can make up details of movies willy-nilly to suit their preferred narratives, or just out of outright laziness, why can't I!

[1] I suspect he may be trying to come up with a reason to like a movie he doesn't like but thinks he should. I'm pretty much with him in his opening paragraph: "'Lady Bird,' Greta Gerwig’s solo directorial debut, is frisky and oddball in ways that are sometimes annoying and more often ingratiating. Gerwig, who also wrote the semi-autobiographical script, pushes all the emotional buttons – laughter, tears, heartbreak, nostalgia – right on cue, like a hit Broadway show, but she does so in such a seemingly haphazard way that it’s easy to miss (and forgive) the middlebrow calculation behind it all." Except that I'd reverse "annoying" and "ingratiating" and, I don't know, replace everything from "but" to "forgive" with something less, uh, forgiving.

[2] Although I'm sure I would've loved it when I was twelve, and if you're the kind of person who loves the kind of movies you loved when you were twelve (as opposed to the particular movies you loved when you were twelve, which is more forgivable), which apparently a lot of people are, then I guess you'd love it too.

[3] ETA Jan. 13: anon (adv.) late Old English anon "straightway, forthwith," earlier on an, literally "into one," thus "continuously; straightway (in one course), at once;" see one. As a reply, "at once, coming!" By gradual misuse, "soon, in a little while" (1520s). A one-word etymological lesson in procrastination.

Currently at Havelock: -6.8, which is the warmest it's been since Christmas Day, today being the first day since then it's gotten above -10. This winter is off to a way colder start around here than The Coldest Winter Ever--December was more than five degrees colder on average at Bancroft than December 2014, and yesterday was the coldest day yet. In 2014/15 it didn't get below -30 at Bancroft until January 7; this winter there have been five days with lows below -30 already.