{"id":12614,"date":"2019-07-31T14:43:05","date_gmt":"2019-07-31T18:43:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/?p=12614"},"modified":"2019-07-31T16:12:26","modified_gmt":"2019-07-31T20:12:26","slug":"if-my-heart-was-a-house-youd-be-home-by-now-two-short-movie-reviews","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/2019\/07\/if-my-heart-was-a-house-youd-be-home-by-now-two-short-movie-reviews.html","title":{"rendered":"If My Heart Was a House You’d Be Home By Now: Two short movie reviews"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

The Last Black Man in San Francisco<\/strong><\/em>: I thought this would be a story of gentrification; it\u2019s sort of that, but mostly something stranger and more haunting. Jimmie Fails (played by an actor of the same name, who also co-wrote with his childhood friend Joe Talbot) is obsessed with the house he grew up in, which has passed into the hands of a white couple. With his best friend Mont (Jonathan Majors) he visits the house and engages in guerrilla upkeep; when the white couple breaks up and moves out, they squat there as they try to figure out whether they can buy the house for real.<\/p>\n

The house is gorgeous<\/em>, from its painted ceilings to its witch-hat tower room, and you\u2019ll want these two guys to succeed in their Comrade Quixote quest\u2013but at a certain point you may notice that this is all about the ownership of stuff. When the two friends begin to put their plan in motion the first thing we see is them walking down a flight of steps flanked by two columns of homeless people. The hunger Jimmie feels for specific, highly-symbolic land and furniture begins to feel clutching, unsettling, misplaced; and believe me, the film will pay off on that tremor of doubt.<\/p>\n

This is a film about two guys who have not succeeded by conventional standards. They don\u2019t have wives or girlfriends; they don\u2019t have kids; they don\u2019t own the home they\u2019re illegally sharing. (If you keep a running tally of the kinds of places poor people can live, this movie will leave you with a double-digit list: SRO, group home, abandoned house, your car; somebody else\u2019s car\u2026.) They do have one another, and their friendship is portrayed with such sweetness. At one point the camera draws an extremely unsubtle parallel between these two best friends and a straight couple. This is the friendship of two artsy guys who feel alone in the world, without city or community, homeless except when they\u2019re with each other. And the fact that the final shots of the film show one of the friends rowing a boat out on the unresting waves of the Pacific Ocean, and then rowing the boat offscreen so only the waves are left, may suggest that this world doesn\u2019t let you keep what you salvage.<\/p>\n

There are many, many semisatirical moments in this highly theatrical film, like the tourist party bus blasting \u201cSomebody to Love\u201d as it rolls past the naked guy waiting at the bus stop. The portrayal of San Francisco\u2019s cuckoo aspect helped me deal with the fact that the movie\u2019s climax is an act of political theater\/nonconsensual audience participation. Maybe that is just how people in SF express emotions?<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a lot in this movie which spoke to me, especially in its unexpected twists and moments. I\u2019m not sure I\u2019ve seen another film where the relationships which compete with the central friendship are not romantic relationships, but relationships with your family of origin. I loved the quiet, nerdy-kid humility with which Mont says, when Jimmie catches him drawing portraits of the dudes who just insulted him, \u201cI shouldn\u2019t get to appreciate them \u2019cause they\u2019re mean to me? That\u2019s silly.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is a movie about the search for a home\u2013the inability to find it where you thought you\u2019d left it; maybe the inability to find it at all. There\u2019s a lot to say about the politics of gentrification, but in this film gentrification is a synecdoche for a universal condition of exile.<\/p>\n

Mad Max: Fury Road<\/strong><\/em>: On a very different note\u2026 this kicked. So okay, I\u2019d avoided this when it came out because I made the mistake of being on social media, even a little, and found the whole *~*discourse*~* of \u201cIs this a good film because it\u2019s feminist??? Or is it a bad film because it\u2019s feminist???\u201d so dumb and depleting. Started to feel like the people who liked it only liked it because it wasn\u2019t<\/em> something they resent, not because it was something awesome.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s something awesome. It\u2019s all hot orange and brown, the glamor of the punishing desert wind, it is completely OTT and it can\u2019t go five minutes without an explosion and I loved it<\/em>. The dialogue is often dumb in a way I don\u2019t enjoy, but fortunately there\u2019s little dialogue overall. One of my very favorite genres is \u201cbatshit pleasure-idiocy for the bad sweet tooth + genuine harrowing emotion,\u201d and Fury Road<\/em> is a classic of that vertiginous genre. You\u2019ll feel things! You\u2019ll respect these characters, you\u2019ll love them and want their hard world not to break their spirits, and you\u2019ll also get to cheer while they fight dudes on GIANT FREAKING BENDY POLES WITH FLAMETHROWERS. It\u2019s so good.<\/p>\n

Lots of just very smart choices, in a movie which is also pure dumb pleasure. The mistrust and violence between our two heroes (MAX ROCKATANSKY and IMPERATOR FURIOSA, because this movie loves<\/em> its audience with a swooning, surrendering love) is a smart choice. The fact that they meet an all-women\u2019s community but it\u2019s neither secret dystopia nor pacifist Earth Mother solution to their problems is a smart choice. The whole weird sad thing with Nux is a smart choice. The fact that the dictator\u2019s army has a bard, and it\u2019s A DUDE STRAPPED TO A WAR TRUCK WITH AN ELECTRIC GUITAR THAT SHOOTS FIRE, is\u2026 sure, okay, it is a smart choice. In general I pretty much loved all the people strapped to trucks. It\u2019s such an immediate visual symbol for helplessness and complicity, and it makes the fights weird and unexpected.<\/p>\n

The heart of this movie is a scene in which Max gives freely what was taken from him by force; it\u2019s a genuinely beautiful, hard-earned portrayal of sacrifice as an assertion of one\u2019s humanity.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the heart of this movie. The brain of this movie is the electric guitar war truck fire guy.<\/p>\n

Witch hat house a few blocks from where I live, in the gentrified remains of my home sweet hometown, via Wikimedia Commons.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Last Black Man in San Francisco: I thought this would be a story of gentrification; it\u2019s sort of that, but mostly something stranger and more haunting. Jimmie Fails (played by an actor of the same name, who also co-wrote with his childhood friend Joe Talbot) is obsessed with the house he grew up in, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1071,"featured_media":12620,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[61,56,381,78,77],"class_list":["post-12614","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-art","tag-california-dreamin","tag-friendship","tag-girls-like-violence","tag-home-is-anywhere-you-hang-your-head","tag-prepare-for-life-in-capitalist-america-play-class-struggle-the-game"],"yoast_head":"\nIf My Heart Was a House You'd Be Home By Now: Two short movie reviews<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The Last Black Man in San Francisco: I thought this would be a story of gentrification; it's sort of that, but mostly something stranger and more\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/2019\/07\/if-my-heart-was-a-house-youd-be-home-by-now-two-short-movie-reviews.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"If My Heart Was a House You'd Be Home By Now: Two short movie reviews\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The Last Black Man in San Francisco: I thought this would be a story of gentrification; 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