Jojo Rabbit

The movie critic Judith Crist wrote about a screenwriter she knew. He said he was writing a World War Two movie, but this movie would be different. In his script, the Nazis were bad.

There was a long period where Hollywood movies about World War Two presented Germans as secretly anti-Nazi, talking privately about their hatred for Hitler but still fighting the war out of simple patriotism. 

One of the more repellent examples was The Eagle Has Landed. Michael Caine plays an English-speaking Nazi who leads a band of Germans on a mission to kidnap Winston Churchill. In an early scene, Caine rescues a Jewish girl from some less virtuous Nazis. 

I don't know that Jojo Rabbit was much better. They loved Hitler and hated Jews in a cartoonish way, but the Nazis were either nice or ineffectual or adorable. It was the U.S. that firebombed Dresden, but in the end, the movie made the Soviets the villains. All the Soviets did was fight the Nazi Army. They were killed by the tens of millions. At least 40% of Soviet troops taken prisoner by the Germans died.

Make it a double feature. Watch it with Tarkovsky's Ivan's Childhood or Klimov's Come and See, both movies about boys in World War Two.   

On further reflection, maybe The Tin Drum would be a more fitting second feature.

"Year of the Jellyfish" (France, 1984)

I never understood why Baywatch was so popular in Europe. Don't people walk around naked on beaches there? Maybe people in swimwear was a nice change.

Year of the Jellyfish is a surprisingly dreary French movie about nude and semi-nude French women vacationers. It was popular in France in its day. Seeing it in movie form was probably better than having to walk around on a beach in the sun and the heat.

Come to think of it, I didn't like The Sun Also Rises because it was about people hanging around on vacation. The stakes seemed really low.

An eighteen-year-old has been impregnated by a middle-aged family friend. Her mother is sleeping with a guy who gets girls for rich men. They lounge around on the beach and take their clothes off all the time.

It does pick up at the end.

Might make a good double feature with Death in Venice or Mr Hulot's Holiday depending on your mood.

"Good" movies I don't want to watch over and over

I don't know if it's just my family. We were hanging around. The TV was on with the sound turned down. I put it on Jaws: The Revenge, a notoriously bad movie, but it was perfectly pleasant. There wasn't anything disturbing or upsetting and I was amused by it.

But my sister saw that Jaws was coming on next and she wanted to watch it. I've seen it several times and don't need to see it again. I really didn't want to watch the horrible bloody death of a child and I didn't want to see adults die, either. But she acted like I was some kind of tasteless monster for watching one movie but not wanting to see the other.

Does liking a movie or thinking it's "good" mean it's appropriate for every occasion?

I've gone through this with my mother wanting to see Judgement at Nuremberg. We all had to watch it on Xmas several years ago. I really don't like watching concentration camp documentary footage and I didn't like Burt Lancaster as a "good" Nazi who didn't want Maximilian Schell needling a witness.

I tried to get my mother to watch Downfall. I told her what it was about and that it had lots of Nazis committing suicide, something I'm happy to see, but she didn't want to watch it.

Dylan Farrow's book

Did I misjudge the weird appeal Dylan Farrow has with people who couldn't possibly know anything about her? It would explain a lot.

There are "reviews" of Farrow's young adult novel on a site called Goodreads. One of them simply says, "When Dylan Farrow publishes a YA fantasy, you read it."

An excerpt from another review consisting mostly of animated gifs by someone who hasn't read the book:

COUNT ME IN FOR ANYTHING AND EVERYTHING BY DYLAN FARROW. If her writing is as good as her brother's (the perfection that is Ronan Farrow), this is going to blow my mind. AND IT'S DYSTOPIAN TOO LIKE YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAS GIRL.

These were obviously written by girls in Farrow's target audience. It's stupid to criticize them. But how do they have any idea who she is?

There were a few critical reviews questioning, among other things, why she wrote the book in the present tense.

...I’m so confused as to how this a “feminist fantasy.” It isn’t. Not at all. Among other things, the heroine is literally saved by a male character in the end.

...

...Then bang ... we hit a wall of storytelling in the present tense, an account with so little tension, zero dynamic characters, and voice with no charisma, that I was out. I slogged through the rest because I wanted to write a fair review. By the end, I wasn’t any more invested. The MC is whiny, selfish, directionless, and too moony-eyed over boys to be any sort of female/feminist role model...

Girl on a Train (France, 2009)

Jeanne, a young French woman, humiliates herself in a job interview, her boyfriend is stabbed, the police threaten her because the guy she works for turns out to be a criminal. So she draws a swastika on her stomach, gives herself a couple of superficial knife wounds and implausibly claims to have been attacked by non-descript anti-Semites on the subway who mistakenly thought she was Jewish because they found a Jewish lawyer's business card in her purse.

The movie has a kid getting geared up for his bar mitzvah. His parents are divorced and sort of hate each other and they're both annoyed with him. Makes those books about French child-rearing seem less appealing. His grandfather is the Jewish lawyer whose business card the girl claimed she had. The girl's bad job interview was at his office where she was interviewed by the kid's mother. The girl's mother encouraged her to apply because she used to know the lawyer.

All the connections between the characters saved money by keeping the number of cast members down. The lawyer also specialized in anti-Semitism cases. The cops investigating the boyfriend's stabbing also investigated the alleged anti-Semitic attack.

I'll give away the ending:

The lawyer, it turns out, saw right through the story. In fact, the 13-year-old boy saw right through it, too, and convinced Jeanne to tell them the truth. The lawyer didn't care. He's not the police. It's not his job to expose her. He doesn't understand how the cops fell for such an obvious hoax.

Jeanne's embarrassment didn't seem as acute as I'm making it out to be. She wasn't Jan in a Brady Bunch episode. She seemed at ease with the job interview since she knew she wasn't qualified for the job in the first place.

The poor girl just wanted to rollerblade around Paris. She didn't want to work. I don't think she wanted a boyfriend. Her mother insisted she apply for the job. Everything that happened happened because people wouldn't leave her alone.

Wilford Brimley RIP

Wilford Brimley has died at 85. I don't know how he felt about playing one of the old people in Cocoon when he was in his 40's, but that was what made him a success.

Brimley was in the old family drama Our House which I was aware of but didn't watch. When I did see it, I was surprised that he played such a gruff character. I was flipping through the channels and stopped to watch a few seconds of an episode. Brimley was trying to intimidate a young man by telling him the battle he was in when he was his age during World War Two. I would have assumed that his wartime experiences left him a physical and emotional wreck and that you'd better not provoke him or you might have to sit with him until an ambulance or social workers arrived.

His first credited role was in The China Syndrome. Say what you will about the oatmeal commercials, he was in some pretty good or at least well-received movies.

TikTok

I'm not really clear on what it is, but I feel like getting it.