Love
and Wolbachia: Directed by Sayaka Ono. Running Time: 94 minutes.
Rating:
3/4
This
brave, challenging documentary by Japanese director Sayaka Ono, just the second
feature-length film she’s made, has quite a lot in common withKomunia, another compact, deeply
intimate film whose power comes from how it simply allows us to observe the
existence of its characters.
Initially
supposed to do a short TV doc on this topic, the director found herself
increasingly fascinated by the unique lives led by Japanese people who defy traditional
gender and sexual roles in a country and culture still very rigidly defined by
them.She ended up spending several
years filming various parts of their lives, her biggest focus being, among
others, men who do drag, transwomen struggling with whether or not to fully
transition, and men/women who sit directly on the fence of gender identity and
don’t know where they’ll eventually land, if they ever land at all.
This
is that rare film able to approach gender and the people struggling with it in
a way that does not assume one gender role or the other; each of the people we
meet are fantastically unique in how they identify themselves, and many of them
have been able, often after much pain, to build an existence where they are
freely themselves.For others, it’s still
a challenge; one of the transwomen filmed “dresses up” as a boy for her regular
office job so as not to arouse the suspicion (and possible ire) of her boss and
colleagues.Another transwoman, herself
not interested at all in a full-on physical transition, is dating another
transwoman hell-bent on going all the way, and we see, briefly, how keenly that
strains their relationship.
Throughout
the years of their lives we see, the camera is clear and close to people’s
faces.Many scenes are filled with warm
colors, oranges and reds commonly associated with love, friendship, welcoming
intimacy.I truly felt, from beginning
to end, that I was seeing each of these people in their entirety- complex,
hurting, loving, struggling, living.This is that rare film that truly deserves to be called kaleidoscopic,
because it manages to encompass so much of the spectrum of human existence and
affirm the worth and dignity of every one of us, without exception or
qualification.
It
is not a film without flaws; there are so many different people shown and so
many names we are given that it gets hard at times to keep track of them all,
or remembering where and how they are connected to each other.Sporadic narration by the director attempts
to correct this, but these moments tend to be rather clunky, breaking the mood
of a scene to state explicitly something that the movie is perfectly able to
convey without words at all.But none of
this, in the end, can detract much from what is a strong, memorable, and
compassionate portrait of love’s power to transcend, to bind us together
despite our flaws and our struggles and make this weird, messy life still
something worth seeing out to the end.
We
were not able to get as many recorded episodes out this month due to scheduling
difficulties, for which we profusely apologize.However, those we did work in were of particular meaning to us, so they
are still worth listening to and downloading on our Itunes page!
May
9th: Avengers: Infinity Wars
Our
Marvel role continues with our long, and very detailed, examination of the
latest and biggest MCU installment, where we decide if we felt the buildup and
wait of a decade was worth it.
May
14th: Our Movie Memories with Mom (mini)
In
honor of Mother’s Day, we each shared a particular movie, franchise, or theater
experience that is of particular importance to our relationships to our
mothers.A bit cheesy?Maybe, but every bit of it is from the
heart.
May
23rd: Our Favorite Comic Book Movie Villains (mini)
Our
saga of exploring every which way of superhero movies continues!We already have an episode dedicated to our
least favorite comic book villains, so it’s only fair we took the time to
discuss our favorites as well.
Please
continue to like, share, and recommend our podcast to all with ears!And even those without!
Taste
of Cement (2017): Written by Ziad Kalthoum, Ansgar
Frerich, and Talal Khoury, directed by Ziad Kalthoum. Running
Time: 85 minutes.
Rating:
4/4
Unlike
last year’s Human Flow, a
sprawling epic of a film that sought to cover the global nature of the current
global refugee crisis, Taste of Cement
is hyper-focused on just a handful of Syrian refugees in Beirut, the capital of
Lebanon, Syria’s closest neighbor and currently the unwilling host to over a
million Syrian refugees- a quarter of the population.
The
men have found work to get by on as construction workers; by day, they scuttle
around the top of a massive highrise that seems to loom endlessly over the city
and sea surrounding it, like a modern-day Tower of Babel.By night, they sit together and sleep in a
large basement hold directly beneath the construction site, which they enter
via a slanted hole and staircase cut into the concrete.Because of discrimination and threats they
face from locals, Syrian workers strictly required to stay in their work area
during nighttime.
Their
world is one of constant, unceasing noise and withering heights.Cutting stone and wood, mixing cement,
working brick by brick and level by level as the building stretches ever-higher
into the sky.The rest of the city and
its buildings appear so miniscule and far away compared to where they work,
like they are merely a painted backdrop, nothing real to touch or connect with.The wiry, uncovered metal rods waiting to be
covered with cement are like bars on a jail cell, keeping the workers
permanently separated from the world around them.They are surrounded on all sides, day and
night, by cold hard cement and a pitiless sun.And always, to the West, the seemingly endless blue of the sea.
What
sort of film is this?A documentary in
part, certainly- all the footage is of real workers doing their real jobs- but
not entirely.No one on-screen
speaks.There is a narrator, but whether
he is one of the workers relating his specific tale, or an actor hired to read
the part, or whether what he says is even the true story of a single person or a
collection of several people’s stories combined into one, are all things we do
not know and are not told.And that’s
rather beside the point.Films like this
ultimately are not about what’s “true,” but rather about what’s real; and this
film’s essence is powerfully, viscerally real.
If
there is a structure to the film at all, it’s that the scenes loosely follows
several days of their work, with the scenes going more or less sequentially
from morning to day to night and back again.It is at night, when the chatter of a jackhammer can no longer distract
them, when the news repeatedly plays scenes of bombing and destruction in their
homeland, that the nightmares come, and the film strikes with its most deeply
provocative footage.An image of falling
bombs overlaying a man on his cot, trying to fall asleep.Videos of explosions shown, not directly on a
TV screen, but reflected in the eyes of those watching.Scenes of carnage and destruction that play
more as dream, or rather nightmare, sequences, as opposed to reality.Perhaps that’s the only way to live with
it.
The
second dream sequence brings this to a profound climax; we are stumbling
through a corridor filled with what looks like rain; the camera is in
slow-motion, moving as if through thick water.The corridor leads to a door.The
color is washed out, the sound is heavily muted, until we go through the door,
and sound and focus return; the screams in the aftermath of the bombing ring
out, painful and clear.Cracking stones,
screaming children, men yelling.The
most terrifying image is in a part of a building that has collapsed; a man has
crawled into a tight space in the wreckage and is slowly shoveling out
refuse.It was only after the film had
cut to this moment several times that I understood why.Something finally shifts behind the man’s
body- it’s a head.A living, blinking
head, protruding from the wreckage, caked in cement.The sound eventually seems to overwhelm the
camera itself, and we pull back through the door, and are once more encased by
a watery-like silence.
Early
in the movie, the narrator seems almost amused by the idea that the workers are
all below the city at night, unseen, and above it during the day, still
unseen.Until he realizes that this is
merely an illusion; they are always below Beruit, surrounded by sea and cement,
alone, waiting for the next wave coming to break upon their heads.
It’s
such a simple idea, perfect for an amateur starting out with nothing more than
an idea and a camera- sit in total darkness, save for just one well-placed lamp
to highlight your silhouette, set up the camera and mic, and just talk. It’s so
basic it’s something of a wonder that no thought of it before Todd did.In that sense, the trajectory of his internet
career perfectly encapsulates the Wild West nature of the early Web, where
whoever happened to try out a particular gimmick first then had that niche
effectively cornered forever.
It’s
also an extremely durable style that, location changes and the occasional camera
upgrade aside, Todd has not had to alter at all since he began his videos in
the Fall of 2010, and he, or rather, his shadow, has remained a constant
presence providing regular, sharp, on-point music commentary ever since.
It
wasn’t too long before he started out on Youtube that Todd was invited to join the
TGWTG team, and by 2011 he had already established himself as one of the site’s
heavy hitters.He had a particularly
close working relationship with Lindsay Ellis (aka Nostalgia Chick) and
Allison Pregler (Obscurus Lupa); the three would make frequent cameos in each
other’s videos, and at one point even created a particularly tortured love
triangle between their respective personas in the year leading up to To Boldly Flee (and say what you will
about the film as a whole, the reveal of Todd’s “face” was one of its most
inspired moments).His videos remained a
major part of the website until March of this year, when, right when
#ChangeTheChannel started to really heat up, he became one of the first to
publicly break with the site, and was soon followed by, well, everyone.
The
span of his pop song reviews, which make up the bulk of his work, serve as a
remarkable glimpse at how trends, figures, and styles in the American pop scene
have shifted over the past decade.His
early videography is dominated by Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, Black Eyed Peas, and
Kesha, among others, but they no longer define the pop charts the way they did
at the turn of the decade.Train forced
its way onto his radar for a few years with a series of hideous number ones,
but has since faded.Sadly, Taylor
Swift, Maroon Five, Chris Brown, and Justin Bieber have continued to be regular
(and necessary) targets of his ire.
For
a number of years now, though, he’s also worked to expand the sort of work he
does.In “Cinemadonna,” he went through
each and every film appearance of Madonna in her efforts to establish herself
as acting as well as a musical threat (spoiler- she didn’t).He’s released a small number of videos under
the title “Trainwreckords,” about particularly disastrous albums released by
major musicians.My favorites, though,
are his “One Hit Wonderland” videos, where he examines a wide variety of
one-hit wonders from musical history and provides a remarkably comprehensive
look at the origins and eventual fates (some good, some not) of musicians that,
for one reason or another, were able to streak across popular culture and make
a mark for a brief moment before fading from public view.
His
style and tone has also altered little- his style has always been quieter, more
subtle, and effortlessly self-effacing, eschewing the theatrics more typical of
his contemporaries.That noticeable
difference may be a key to what made him stand out early on and allow him to
build his own fanbase.Plus, the fact
that he has consistently stayed “in the shadows,” resorting to an eye-covering
mask when forced to appear in harsh daylight, has allowed him to retain a
certain anonymity increasingly rare in our digital world.For his sake, I hope it stays that way as
best as it possibly can.I have no doubt
there exists a whole cottage industry devoted to “spotting Todd,” but I intend
to remain perfectly ignorant of it for as long as I live.
Movies
and video games were early and easy targets during the rise of internet
criticism, but Todd was one of the first to realize the untapped potential in
being a video music critic, and his establishing of himself in this field makes
him as important and as influential an entrepreneur in the world of online
video as anyone.His videos are fun,
funny, and are never less than immensely informative.Here is a shortlist of my favorites (thus
far).
All
His Top Ten Best/Worst Pop Songs
The
links above are for his latest Top Tens for 2017, but all of them are amazing
time capsules worth your time, as they consistently rank among his best and
most entertaining works.
The
One-Hit Wonders
Here,
again, all of these videos are worth your time, and are on such an equal plane
I feel it would be unfair to pick out the “best,” but for the record, the ones that,
for one reason or another, have the most personal meaning for me are 500 Miles, Who Let The Dogs Out, Float On, and Safety Dance.
Todd’s
Pop Song Reviews
There
are SO MANY of these at this point, all of them are solid, most are great
enough to merit repeat viewing, and given vagaries of taste and humor style
there’s no way one person could categorically list the “best,” but here are a
few that have remained all-time favorites of mine-
Firework
vs. Born This Way
One
of his earliest videos, this contains some of his best examinations of the dual
careers of Lady Gaga and Katy Perry, especially since I always felt both these
songs were a bit overrated at the time.It’s hilarious to watch it now and think over just how radically
different the trajectories their respective careers have since taken.
Turn
Up The Music
Despite
the best efforts of the entire Republican Party, Chris Brown remains at the top
of the list of the most vile human walking the face of the earth, and in one of
his first videos directly dealing with him, Todd breaks down as best as anyone
can why.
Talk
Dirty AND Wiggle
I
actually had to sing an early Jason Derulo hit with my college acapella group
way back when, so when he reappeared on the pop charts with these two songs,
both of which are particularly heinous examples of “bro” music, Todd’s
takedowns were especially needed to help me rebuild my faith in humanity.
The
Time/Dirty Bit
One
of the biggest drivers in Todd’s early videos was the rage induced in him by
the worst of what the Black Eyed Peas were putting out at the time, and this
video, right when the group was finally falling apart, is where it all comes to
a head.
Look
What You Made Me Do
The
last Taylor Swift single I was able to stand, and actually liked, was “Mine.”Since then it’s been all downhill.Todd has a somewhat more mixed opinion, and
has argued in favor of a number of her lesser hits from recent years, which I
can get, but the bad Taylor stuff has been really, really bad.All of Todd’s videos of her work are well
worth watching, but my favorite remains last year’s examination of, arguably,
her worst one yet.
Are
there any former TGWTG/CA producers you’ve been missing and what to get caught
up on? Then check out and follow the Unawesomes page on Twitter. Let’s
make the internet economy of tomorrow a better, more equitable place, starting
now.
Infinity
Wars (2018): Written by Christopher Markus and
Stephen McFeely, directed by Anthony and Joe Russo. Starring: EVERYONE. Running
Time: 149 minutes. Based on the
comics created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby.
Rating:
3.5/4
It’s
all been building up to this.10 years
of some of the most ambitious expanded-universe filmmaking in cinematic
history, and the cumulative effort has finally hit theaters and is already
breaking box office records.And for my
money, one of the most highly-anticipated movies of all time pretty much
manages to meet most of what could have reasonably been expected of it.It has far more named characters than any
other superhero movie to date, and there are about a dozen moments where the
whole thing could have easily flown apart at the seams, but it works (mostly).It’s beautifully crafted and realized, and is
noticeably more cohesive and tightly-managed than its predecessor, Age of Ultron.While I’m not sure its one of the “best MCU
offerings ever” (though definitions of that are highly variable), it is a solid
work worth seeing and experiencing cold on the big screen.
One
of the smartest moves the creators made- one really only possible with a
dozen-and-a-half prequels backing it up- is to not stop for more than a few
seconds at a time to try and exposit who Thanos is, what infinity stones are,
and what they do. The story and action
just starts, and flows until the end.As
such I, too, will not bother to try a plot summary, because this is an Event
Film, and no one’s here for the story- we’re here to see Ironman and Doctor
Strange try to out-wit each other while fighting off a Space Magician.And besides, anyone committed to knowing the
minutia and lore already does, and anyone who doesn’t will have no trouble following
along, because the primary plot of “Magical McGuffin is bad, no let Bad Guy get
Magical McGuffin” is about as simple and straightforward as human storytelling
gets.
The
real trick is in taking the sheer number of named characters coming together,
in many instances interacting for the very first time on-screen, and balancing
out their scenes to let them feel fun and interesting and action-packed, but
not too uneven.Thankfully, the movie
pulls this off; this is a massive, loooooong
cinematic undertaking, but it pretty much never drags or feels padded out just
to get one more quip between Thor and Starlord muscled in.There are plenty of jokes that made me laugh
out-loud, but many of the central characters get powerful acting moments that
build on character development set up in previous films.Thor, Starlord, Gamorra, Spiderman, and Captain
America each get to do some real heavy lifting here, highlighting some of the
best scenes in the film.
And
that, for me, speaks to what has always been the greatest strength of the MCU,
one that I suspect is the key to their success, despite the very real flaws in
many of the movies and in the expanded universe concept as a whole.For all the massive budgets and fancy special
effects and oddball fighting powers they toss around, these movies ultimately work
because they have always gotten the characters right, through perfect casting
and solid writing.These characters have
always felt vibrant and real even in the weakest MCU offerings, and the scenes
that make this movie one of the best are all scenes that hinge on one or
several characters having moments of real emotional pathos.
This
is especially true for, of all people, Thanos.I have always felt the trope of “MCU villains always suck” to be a tad
overblown- they’ve had plenty of effective antagonists, even if few of them are
really great- but Thanos easily earns a ranking as one of the best.Josh Brolin is able to convey the twisted
internal logic of Thanos’ mind through facial expressions and his voice despite
all that fancy CGI work making up his body, proving yet again that he is both
one of the best, and yet most underappreciated, actors working today.That said, some of the debate around his
character has already gone way too far; why no, having a purely logical
argument in its favor does NOT make genocide okay, because that’s what separates
Fascists from Not-Fascists.
We
are long past the point where any one human can reasonably be expected to have
followed up on EVERYTHING in the MCU, and we are also long past the point where
there is much use in trying to bring people in cold who aren’t already
on-board; either you are with this crazy ride, wherever it may lead, or you
aren’t.And if you aren’t, that’s
fine!But if you are, this movie is as
great, and in a few instances as daring, as anything this project has yet
offered us.
This
is update is a bit delayed this time around, which is all on me.It was another fairly low-key month for us,
but May will already start out with a bang, with our upcoming episode on Infinity
Wars.Until then, check out our work on
our Itunes page.
April
1st: A Wrinkle In Time/The Polarization of Film Criticism
April
8th: Our Favorite Underappreciated Character Actresses (mini)
April
18th: Ready Player One/ The Beauties and Perils of Nostalgia
April
22nd: Our Worst Comic Book Movie Villains (mini)
The big shift, in my mind at least, was the Rent video.
On New Year's Eve 2016, in that time
following the 2016 election when the Trump years hadn't officially started
yet and we had nothing solid to try and mitigate our fears with, Lindsay Ellis
released a 45-minute examination of Rent
(both the show and the musical) that genuinely felt like a shot across the
bow of American culture, a statement of the kind of critical thought and active
engagement we would need to survive what was coming.
She'd been doing longer-form video
essays for a while before this; after debuting her original internet persona of
the Nostalgia Chick on That Guy With The Glasses in September 2008, she continued
to build her audience and develop her voice as a critic and analyst after
leaving the site in 2015 (under patently awful circumstances) with
her Loose Canon series, where she examined the cultural evolution of how
various characters and topics are treated in media (a pre-election examination
of comedian interpretations of Hillary Clinton ended up being particularly,
painfully prescient).
But something about the Rent video felt, and still feels,
fundamentally different. It was angrier, more pointed, and cut much
deeper not just into the direct matter of the movie itself, but in what the
movie's treatment of the AIDS crisis failed to do when compared to the
real-life struggles of the LGBTQ community in the 80's to gain the
recognition and help they deserved.
And she's been on a non-stop tear
since then, regularly releasing massive video essays of similar length on a
wide, wide range of shows, movies, and topics, and never failing to actively
critique and consider how our production and consumption of media reveals
truths in our society we'd often rather ignore, as well as what we can do about
them.
When examining the collective body
of work Ellis has produced in the past few years, I see a deep, thoughtful, and
keenly perceptive mind producing some of the best and most meaningful film
criticism to be found just about anywhere today. Her dry, often ironic
and/or detached style of humor is unlike anyone else online at the moment,
making her unique voice all the more essential. All of her work is worth
checking out, but here are the works of hers that have made the biggest impact
on me personally.
Nostalgia Chick- The Lord of the Rings
This was one of the last sets of
videos Ellis officially did as Nostalgia Chick before leaving TGWTG, but given
how much of her history with the franchise jives with mine, her in-depth
examination of not only the movies themselves, but the stories around their
development and the legacy they left behind makes this essential viewing for
any fantasy fan.
Loose Canon 9/11
All of the Loose Canon videos are
fascinating mini-history episodes worth watching, but my hands-down favorite of
them all is this two-parter where Ellis explores the history, not of 9/11
itself, but of how we’ve processed it (or rather, haven’t) through film and
television, noting different waves or phases in how we’ve thus far tried to
interpret and tackle this terrible tragedy.Like her Hillary Clinton episode, this was one that ended up being
uncomfortably prescient in 2016.
Rent
With the abyss of a national
government committed to eliminating health care and other systematic
protections for the poor and vulnerable staring us in the face, Ellis’ closing
segment of this video, featuring clips of a real speech exhorting action in the
face of tragedy and ending with the echoing protest cry “Health care is a
right!” was Goddamn revolutionary, and it was exactly the jolt in the arm I and
many others needed.Even well over a
year later, it still gives me chills.
The Whole Plate- Michael Bay’s Transformers
This series is still ongoing and far
from completion, but although I loathe this bloated corpse of a franchise as
much as anyone, Ellis is right on point when she questions our willingness to
not examine the cultural significance of one of the highest-grossing film
series of all time.Plus, watching her
dig into more detail about these films than Bay has ever deserved it just plain
funny, as well as hella educational for anyone who didn’t go to film
school.
The Producers
Mel Brooks remains one of the
greatest comedic filmmakers of all time, but his legacy has become all too
often abused by people trying to find a shield to cover their own lack of
talent and/or actual racism by using Blazing
Saddles and The Producers as “proof”
that society is too up-tight and politically correct these days.This is wrong-headed for a number of reasons,
and Ellis goes through each one in great detail, and for good measure she
throws in a fairly comprehensive look at how American interpretations of WWII
and, by extension, the Holocaust shifted in the decades between the war itself
and the premiere of The Producers.
Pocahontas
This might be my top favorite of
Ellis’ videos, if for no other reason than that the continued global cultural
myopia among whites and Westerners about the true extent, legacy, and price of Western
colonialism is one of my biggest, most race-inducing bugbears.It is a massive topic that can only be
grasped through serious, complicated thought, but here Ellis did about as good
as a job as can be done distilling it into a single sentence, which is quite a
feat.
Stephanie Meyer
I was all-in on Twilight hate during
my college years, and so was Ellis.So
were a lot of people.There has always
been a certain disingenuousness to that, but it never really struck me until
Ellis became one of the first major voices to point it out and examine the
latent sexism in much of our “dialogue” about this odd franchise. Not an easy take, to be sure, but a needed
one.
The Hobbit
Her latest major work (as of this
writing), a long-awaiting follow-up to her examination of the LOTR franchise,
is a massive journalistic undertaking.I
was and have remained a defender of The
Hobbit movies over the years, but following Ellis’ explanations of the
many, many ways in which both the production of the films itself went south and
how its legacy adversely impacted the New Zealand film scene have led me to seriously
reconsider my stance.Which is, in the
end, the whole point of good film criticism.The whole scope of the downfall of the franchise as Ellis paints is damn
near the level of a Greek tragedy, one that I hope does not, in the long run,
adversely affect the legacy of LOTR.Sadly, as Ellis points out, a bit of that is unavoidable.
Are
there any former TGWTG/CA producers you’ve been missing and what to get caught
up on?Then check out and follow the Unawesomes page on Twitter.Let’s make the internet economy of tomorrow a
better, more equitable place, starting now.
