Shut Up, Dude: This Week’s Best Comments

Here's some reviews of 2 films I saw recently: The Green Knight and Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves.

They're worth discussing together, as they are both fantasy movies, and use contemporary styles to go in opposite directions with the genre. I grew up watching 80's fantasy films like The Neverending Story, The Dark Crystal, Labyrinth, Legend and Willow, so I have a big soft spot for the genre.

I would describe The Green Knight as mixing Arthurian legend with the A24 prestige eerie-folkloric style of films like The Witch and Men. I would describe the D&D film as mixing together a fantasy adventure with a quippy MCU-style film along the lines of Guardians of the Galaxy.

I saw The Green Knight this week, as it had come up, I watched a trailer and was interested. It was very strong visually, with great cinematography, colors, filming on location, and an all-practical creation of the title character as an actor in proesthetics and makeup. The sound design and music were also excellent.

In terms of story, it's based on a poem from the 1300's that itself was likely an adaptation of older pre-Christian Celtic Welsh legends. The movie leaned into the tension between the Christian and Pre-Christian "pagan" roots by portraying the Green Knight as a "Green Man" archetype embodying the natural world, which both gives life and takes it back.

They also portrayed the main character Gawain with more shades of anti-hero than hero, which I felt let the film move beyond the superficial aspects of the Hero's Journey archetype. Having read books about Jungian psychology, the Hero's Journey plays a function of the transition between adolescence and adulthood, and maturing as a person means navigating the immature shadow aspects of the archetypes we aspire to. A film like Star Wars and most "journey" films do this more superficially, as I don't know that Lucas ever imbued Luke Skywalker with either complex shadow elements, or maturity of much depth. In most of The Green Knight, we see Gawain actively wrapped up with these shadow archetypes that are actually immature masculinity: egoism, hedonism, selfishness, greed, callousness, inability to love, cowardice, dishonesty.

Overall, a slow burn of dreamy, contemplative imagery that left space for meaning-making afterward. Also, I looked up the source poem, and it turns out the most bizarre, head scratching elements of the story come from the original source, which is funny and fitting, and the changes made actually smoothed out the story to help it make more sense.

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves was a film that I ignored when it came out, as I had seen the crap D&D film that came out in 2000 on TV at some point, and this didn't look too different. Later, I heard basically: "This movie has no right being as good as it is," which is a backward kind of high praise. Even being told that, this movie still exceeded my expectations.

I found it very funny, laughing out loud throughout, and I still smile when I think about certain scenes. Furthermore, the humor is mostly character based and dovetails with the plot, so it's not lowest common denominator gags.

This is ended up being my favorite performance by Chris Pine: it tapped his potential as a comedic actor, as well as bringing out what is unique in his charm and appeal.

The movie is funny, but also works well as an adventure film where we enjoy the characters and their relationships, and are interested in how things play out for them. It had me reflecting on how in the Star Wars sequel trilogy, even those elements got botched, like believing the characters like each other.

As I said, this had a lot in common with Guardians of the Galaxy: team of heroes/wildly comic tone. People's feelings about that series and whether they like fantasy movies will be a good barometer of whether this movie is for them or not. I think I actually ended up liking this better than Guardians, because it was lighter and had fewer elements that rubbed me the wrong way.

It blows my mind that people don't like The Beatles

There are so many things one could nitpick here, but I’m just going to enjoy it for what it is, and it’s very emotionally satisfying.

The Beatles are a miracle.

Policing of Indian-ness, especially from an institution like the CBC, is so retrograde! Sovereign Native governments have the full authority to make their own rules and designations about who is a member of the Tribe. If the Piapot First Nation considers Buffy Sainte-Marie one of theirs, case fucking closed and fuck off with your damned exposé CBC. She grew up with Native parents, Native learning, Native identity. She represented those values over many decades as a public figure, far before it was cool to do so. Nobody who's familiar with Buffy Sainte-Marie's work would accuse her of being a Rachel Dolezal. She's the real deal.

This type of blood policing is not a far stretch from the policing of mixed race people in the 18th and 19th centuries. Mulatto, quadroon, octoroon... these terms are banished to the waste bin of history for good reason.

If CBC is smart they will throw this so-called reporting in the waste bin before it sees the light of day. I doubt any Native people will appreciate this muck, nor will their affection for Buffy be damaged by it.

One bright note, CBC did find out that she's related to Herman Melville.

My memory of this song has always been weirdly vague. On October 14, 1989, I got married, and being a Catholic girl and a Jersey girl the process of getting married had pretty much consumed my existence since graduation in May. The songs that grabbed my ear that year were indelible- "She Drives Me Crazy," "Buffalo Stance"- but many others didn't make the impact they otherwise might have. I distinctly recall that when this turned up as one of the production numbers on American Idol 18 years later it didn't ring any bells at first.

I like it better than Tom does, but it's no "Everybody Wants to Rule the World."

"The animated stuff looks like a Fruitopia commercial"

Thank you for this flashback, Tom. Almost a year after the wedding, we were sitting in our un-air-conditioned rented house in a late September heat wave. I was nine months pregnant and bigger than a beached whale, and I was bitching and moaning and my poor husband was trying to relax.

And then on TV there began a Fruitopia commercial, with its kaleidoscope motion and misty music (by, of all people, Kate Bush, I later learned), and we saw these words on the screen:

"there is a wonderful person inside you who is dying to get out"

We went hysterical. We literally rolled (well, he did, I couldn't). We laughed until we cried. It was fantastic.

This is like Jeff Bezos saying "I'm loving where e-commerce has gone".

Now n Then absolutely incredible biblical celestial heartbreaking and heartwarming all at the same time long live The Beatles LG x

— Liam Gallagher (@liamgallagher) November 2, 2023

I don't know the truth of this story but this statement from the Piapot first nations makes an important point:

"No one, including Canada and its governments, the Indian Act, institutions, media or any person anywhere can deny our family’s inherent right to determine who is a member of our family and community," the statement signed by Debra and Ntawnis Piapot said. "Buffy is our family. We chose her and she chose us. We claim her as a member of our family and all of our family members are from the Piapot First Nation. To us, that holds far more weight than any paper documentation or colonial record keeping ever could."

I just discovered The American Analog Set a couple weeks ago when the new album was announced. I saw how much people around here love them and have been going through their back catalog and I gave the new album a listen today. This is the kind of musical discovery that I live for. I can’t believe that I hadn’t heard of them till now and I can’t believe that I can still be so enamored with new music. This band seemed tailor made to my tastes and they are just incredible in every way. I’ve just been enjoying digging into their catalog and feeling overjoyed that there is still music I can discover that feels like it plugs directly into my core and lights up all the best parts of my being.