{"id":13402,"date":"2020-08-12T12:13:06","date_gmt":"2020-08-12T16:13:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/?p=13402"},"modified":"2020-08-12T12:24:07","modified_gmt":"2020-08-12T16:24:07","slug":"how-to-be-an-extra-in-your-own-life-several-short-film-reviews","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/2020\/08\/how-to-be-an-extra-in-your-own-life-several-short-film-reviews.html","title":{"rendered":"How to Be an Extra in Your Own Life: Several short film reviews"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

or film impressions, or what have you. Saving the best for last.<\/p>\n

Tragedy Girls<\/strong><\/em>: High-school BFFs seek social media fame by tracking a local serial killer\u2013but they\u2019re really doing all the kills themselves, for the likes. This blank-hearted film has two charismatic leads (Brianna Hildebrand and especially Alexandra Shipp), and there\u2019s a great late-breaking subplot about democracy as social media, but otherwise this did nothing for me. It\u2019s neon-pretty but so are lots of horror movies. If you want hilariously-dressed teen girls, colorful cinematography, and incisive commentary on social media, ignore the ridiculous title and hit up #horror<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Crawl<\/strong><\/em>: This, on the other hand, is a killer-croc film that made me care a lot. Haley (a fierce-faced Kaya Scodelario) learns that her semi-estranged dad (Barry Pepper) is stuck in the path of a Cat 5 hurricane. She rides to the rescue, but flooding and gale winds aren\u2019t her biggest problem, because KILLER CROCS. (Or actually, I believe, murdergators. They\u2019re lethal reptiles, that\u2019s for sure.)<\/p>\n

Alexandre Aja builds ferocious tension, and everything looks very dirty and visceral. But the relationship between dad and daughter really sells the film. They\u2019re hardworking, hard-bitten; they\u2019re prepared, but life will hit you with things you can\u2019t prepare for. I started loving this movie early on, but what really pushed me over the edge was realizing that the film wasn\u2019t condemning the dad for the crazy, stupid decision to stay in the path of the storm. His bullheadedness was coming from the exact same place as his daughter\u2019s determination, as his coaching her to victory in swim championships. He\u2019s clawed his way through life (and a broken marriage) and now the same ferocity which has gotten him this far is gonna kill him, and I was so sorry. Your life shapes you into somebody who deserves it, and then everybody says you deserved it.<\/p>\n

Great little moment when the radio announcer says he\u2019s sure all the parents out there are thinking about how to protect their families, as we see Haley rolling up to the house. Few divides are as stark as the divide between the families where that\u2019s the parents\u2019 job and the families where it\u2019s the kids\u2019.<\/p>\n

Late in the film we get some unnecessary, saccharine reconciliation speeches about The Divorce and such, but that\u2019s maybe the only flaw in this fast, heartfelt movie about a dad, a daughter, and some lesser predators.<\/p>\n

Boomerang<\/strong><\/em>: Eddie Murphy and Robin Givens work hard on this fairly shallow sex-comedy material, but mostly this movie made me think I underestimate Jane Austen.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve generally thought that if you like Austen that\u2019s great, I\u2019m sure she\u2019s great in an objective sense, I just find myself never caring. Whit Stillman is, of course, a huge Austenite, and somewhere or other (the DVD commentary to Last Days of Disco<\/em>???) he\u2019s said that part of the appeal of Austen for him is that characters get the love interest they deserve. Bad with bad and good with good. That all sounded so miserable to me (all people are bad people!!!) that I didn\u2019t realize it\u2019s crucial to making Disco<\/em> work.<\/p>\n

Spoilers I guess, but in Disco<\/em> the two nice characters wind up together, and so do the two flailing disasters who viciously, publicly humiliated the nice ones. I overidentified with and fell for the disasters, of course. It\u2019s a good thing I\u2019m not heterosexual or I would\u2019ve already divorced like two cokeheads. hashtag team erlend<\/a>. Anyway the point is, the film lets you love the horrible ones but also kinda cages them together, very satisfying. Boomerang<\/em>, by contrast, gives you Eddie Murphy as a dog who dogs out women, then lets him meet his match in his boss (Givens), a LADY who DOGS OUT MEN. What is this strange new feeling?? Could it be\u2026 love? Could it be, even better, the desire to become a decent person?<\/p>\n

The obvious storyline here is that he strives for the moral life to win her fidelity, and she says she\u2019s not about that moral life, but then she<\/em> wonders, \u201cWhat is this strange new feeling??\u201d and has to go on a parallel journey. But Boomerang<\/em> cares about the lady\u2019s moral journey exactly zero, so, spoilers or whatever, the dog dude ends up with a nice lady and the maneater ends up alone. Gross, no fun.<\/p>\n

Hail, Caesar!<\/strong><\/em>: An immensely pleasurable Coen Brothers joint about a scrupulous Catholic Hollywood studio-era fixer trying to maintain order on the set of a sword-and-sandals epic about \u201cThe Christ.\u201d Gosh, I adored this. I loved the portrayal of Tinseltown, the dream factory, as a place where people are genuinely wrestling with life\u2019s meaning\u2013the Communists are doing this as much as the Catholics. The film\u2019s moral seriousness was just ridiculous enough<\/em>, and it provoked a whole bunch of insights in between the pastiches (that homoerotic Navy dance scene!) and the wisecracks (that rabbi sniping at the priests!).<\/p>\n

A big thing in this movie, I think, is the role of the extras. Is it that everybody\u2019s a principal in his own story, even when he looks like an extra in ours, or is it that everybody\u2019s an extra in his own story, even though he thinks he\u2019s the lead?\u00a0On a moral, rather than metaphysical level, what does it mean to treat everyone as a principal, and what would it require to become an extra in one\u2019s own life? I loved how our immensely serious Catholic hero weighs the morality of one specific choice throughout the film, and never identifies the central moral issue involved, even though the literal actual pope at the time was quite clear on it! That\u2019s his whole shtik as a character, he cares intensely and sweetly about the moral answers<\/em> and he never gets the questions right. But does he have to?<\/p>\n

That rabbi at one point shoots down the suggestion that Jesus \u201cis Who Is\u201d by saying, \u201cWho isn\u2019t<\/em> Who Is?\u201d No idea if you can get away with that in, like, normal Jewish theology, but it\u2019s close to the heart of this movie, which uses its synchronized-swimming numbers and Commie blackmail plots to tell a story about awe and humility, and the necessity\/impossibility of deriving a coherent moral picture from those two things.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

or film impressions, or what have you. Saving the best for last. Tragedy Girls: High-school BFFs seek social media fame by tracking a local serial killer\u2013but they\u2019re really doing all the kills themselves, for the likes. This blank-hearted film has two charismatic leads (Brianna Hildebrand and especially Alexandra Shipp), and there\u2019s a great late-breaking subplot […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1071,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,7],"tags":[258,1471,202,119],"class_list":["post-13402","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art","category-mackerel-snapping","tag-a-hard-man-is-good-to-find","tag-coen-brothers","tag-et-exaltavit-humiles","tag-horror"],"yoast_head":"\nHow to Be an Extra in Your Own Life: Several short film reviews<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"or film impressions, or what have you. Saving the best for last. 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