Wonderful, vibrant performances completely let down by a lazy, lifeless screenplay. Robin Johnson and Trini Alvarado give some of the best on-screen depictions of proper angsty punk teenage rebellion almost in spite of a screenplay that doesn’t know what to do with the characters beyond some surface level bullshit.
Interesting how you can really see the bones of Empire Records here though!
This isn’t wildly different from Kenji Lopez Alt’s advice, but I’ll use any excuse to add to my cacio e pepe tag.
The screenplay suffers from being a little too contrived and Save The Cat-y. The injected emotional drama in the second half never felt believable and ironically achieved the opposite result by detaching me from the emotionality of the story. But my goodness, the performances are incredible. Colman Domingo holds everything together with some genuine movie star magic, but the semi-/non-professional performances are the real beating heart of the film.
Astonishing.
Every film I watch only gets so much of my suspension of disbelief. A coincidence here or there? No problem. A convenient meeting of two characters at just the right time? Sure, I’ll go with it! Too much, though, and it feels like lazy writing. The happy chances stack up and cross a line and lose me.
North by Northwest blasts through its disbelief budget in the first 10 minutes. The plot hinges on so much flimsy serendipity that the film strains credulity. At no point in this film does James Mason even say “hey given this nationwide manhunt for Roger Kaplan, maybe my dopey henchman’s dopey plan didn’t identify the right guy”. And the film just keeps rolling with it. On to the next “and it JUST SO HAPPENS that…” until you find yourself in a house just two minutes down the road from the top of Mount Rushmore. Riiiiiight.
And yet! AND YET! Honestly, who needs credulity when you’ve got stars like this? North by Northwest perfectly demonstrates that, sometimes, megawatt charisma really can carry a movie.
A charming shaggy dog detective story that feels like the marriage of Encyclopedia Brown and The Long Goodbye. Adam Brody is terrific. Perfect hungover Sunday matinee viewing.
A handy app for connecting to some self-hosted services (e.g. Sonarr, Radarr, Sabnzbd). It’s replaced a whole folder of bookmarks on my home screen.
Danny O’Brien on mystery of whether Elon Musk is Adrian Dittmann:
I feel like I’m spoilering about a week or so of social media entertainment for you here by not trying to lead you down the rat-hole of evidence in favor for Dittman-Elon, but this Spectator piece, apparently based on research conducted by crimew and frends, lays out the counter-argument — in that they kinda doxxed the real Dittmann. It’s not as the lawyers say, dispositive, but I think it holds water better than the pro-Dittmann!Elon arguments. (I’m using the fanfic bang notation here, where Dittmann!Elon is an official variant of the canonical Elon).
Every year, my wife and I do an escape room for my birthday (this year’s was Incognito’s “Prohibition”, which was ace!). Morty is like Yelp but for escape rooms and immersive experiences. Very handy for nerds like me!
