NFLX2019 April 5th: Unicorn Store

Unicorn Store. Brie Larson. 2017. ☆☆☆★★★

Huh. Brie Larson? But she’s Captain Marvel? Two movies released at the same time?

It screened in the Special Presentations section at the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival. It was released on April 5, 2019, by Netflix.

So it’s two years old, but now suddenly it’s a “Netflix Original”? Hm… perhaps that means that nobody would pick up the movie for distribution? But then Netflix did… for release at the same time as Captain Marvel?

Anyway: This movie was released on Netflix yesterday, which means that I’ve officially caught up with the Netflix release schedule, and further entries in this blog series will be pretty close to release dates. Probably.

This is a cute little movie. It goes for a zany cooky vibe. Think… er… Yeah, like that TV series Dead Like Me. Perhaps it aims for Wes Anderson, but it hits Bryan Fuller.

It’s like it doesn’t have confidence in itself. Brie Larson, when confronted with craziness, is given lines like “This is crazy!” And all scenes of wonder are fully scored with tinkly winkly orchestral music, like they have to tell the audience, yet again, that something wondrous and kooky is happening before their very eyes.

So it doesn’t really help that much that Brie Larson is charming and Samuel L Jackson does his usual magical wise guy bit.

But there’s little bits in here that it’s impossible not to snicker at. And the characters are charming. It’s OK, but it works best when it avoids the drama.

I can see how the final scenes gave everybody cancer. It’s a lot.

This post is part of the NFLX2019 blog series.

NFLX2019 March 29th: The Highwaymen

The Highwaymen. John Lee Hancock. 2019. ☆★★★★★

Does it say anything about our times that Netflix found it attractive to make a movie about Bonnie & Clyde where the heroes are the men who hunt them down? Or is it just the result of a random walk performed by the Netflix movie generator script?

I’m thinking it’s the latter, because this movie is nothing but clichés strung together, from the hire-the-retired-cop-for-a-final-job to… well, every cinematographical choice made.

Oh, right, it’s yet another project that Netflix picked up after all the other movies passed on it for more than a decade:

The film had been in development for many years, with producer Casey Silver looking into the project as early as 2005. Originally pitched by Fusco as a possible Paul Newman and Robert Redford project, the film began development at Universal Pictures but never came to fruition.

Oh!:

The production reportedly had a budget of $49 million.

It doesn’t look like it, so I’m guessing 90% of that budget went to the Waterworld guy and the Cheers guy.

I can see why the Netflix ML chose to pick up this movie: There’s a sizeable audience that wants to see the Waterworld and the Cheers guy talk half an octave below their natural ranges about manly, manly stuff. The level of gruff cannot be overstated. The movie is one “cool” scene after another. I mean, you can’t beat the Waterworld guy going into a gun shop and buying half their stock to the bewilderment of the sissy-men gun sellers. Whooo-heee! *punches air*

It’s a risibly heavy-handed movie. If you can’t switch off your eye-rolling instinct you’ll miss two thirds of the movie.

I like slow movies, but this doesn’t really have anything more to fill the ponderousness with than TV cop show clichés.

It’s a pretty loathsome movie: it’s a paean to police brutality and murder, but it’s also whiffy in other ways, like the lingering shots of stunningly fake 30s destitution which looks like they’ve rolled in a bunch of extras and painted them up with Dirt, The Make-Up For Hobo Parties.

Scott!

Heh heh::

An insolent gas station attendant claims not to have any intel on the culprits’ whereabouts, and that he wouldn’t share it even if he did, so Hamer assaults him. He then gives a stirring speech about responsibility and justice to take the edge off of the casual police brutality, and the man nursing a mouthful of broken teeth undergoes a change of heart.

Indeed.

In conclusion: This movie is insanely boring, and for that I deduct one ☆ it perhaps deserved otherwise.

This post is part of the NFLX2019 blog series.

NFLX2019 March 29th: 15 August

15 August. Swapnaneel Jaykar. 2019. ☆☆☆★★★

Hey! Another Indian movie. Netflix are really going after the Indian market?

The other (three?) Indian movies so far this year haven’t all bin good, but they have a better track record than the American Netflix movies, so I’m excited.

One slight puzzling thing about the Indian Netflix movies is that none of them have been… well… entertainment? They’ve all dealt with some Social Issue. This one looks like it’s going to be more fun, but still no big dance numbers.

The cinematography is playful and interesting. It’s mostly subdued colours… perhaps a bit too adjusted towards teal? But it’s quite picaresquely pretty.

You know what this movie reminds me of? Fellini’s most meandering looks at small town life. It’s got the huge cast and the way the film progresses less by plot than by scenes happening adjacent to each other.

You’ve also got the humour and the tragedy and everything intertwined.

In these kinds of movies, it all depends on the cinematography (which this movie has nailed) and the acting. Which is… Well, you can’t do naturalistic acting, but the style they’ve adapted here isn’t super-stylised either. It’s kinda just TV acting. Which is a pity.

This is basically a farce (with a very annoying central conceit), but it’s not actually funny. It feels way too long. I can understand why, because individual scenes have good pacing, and they probably wanted to have it build and build in absurdity.

I loved the bit where the forlorn lover is looking forlornly at his beloved and it starts pouring rain. Most amusing. And the over-the-top ending is brilliant. But it took us a long time to get there.

This post is part of the NFLX2019 blog series.

CCCB: Marya: A Life

Last week I did croissants to indifferent results, so why not try something that has almost as bad reputation for being tricky: Macarons.

And then I found this recipe for liquorice macarons. Yes! But then I started to study it, and it seems kinda odd. I mean 2 cups of chocolate chips for the filling? That’s (according to Google) 350g? That’s… a lot of filling for 20 little crackers.

So I googled on and found https://www.davidlebovitz.com/french-chocolat/ this one, which has 120g chocolate for 16 macarons.

*shrug*

I mostly went with the latter recipe, but I left out the cocoa and added liquorice powder.

The usual collection of ingredients…

I used 200g of white chocolate. The first recipe said to melt the chocolate in the micro and then stir into the hot cream/liquorice, which sounds reasonable to me, but the other said to just head the cream and then add the chocolate directly. Less work! So let’s go with that.

Cream and liquorice. Yum yum.

Add chocolate. And it melted straight away. Strangely enough, the mixture got a very heavy caramel flavour… was it too hot? Did the chocolate sugars caramelise? I mean, it’s not a bad flavour, but it’s unexpected. You can hardly taste the liquorice…

Anyway, into the fridge harden up for an hour or so.

For the macaron shells, I’m grinding up some almonds. I googled a lot to find out whether using unblanched almonds was acceptable for macarons, and google said… no! yes! no! yes!

So I gave it a go.

And sifted the almond flour to get rid of bigger chunks. I think about three quarter of the almonds made it through.

And then mix up the dry stuff…

Whip up egg whites and sugar…

Mix mix mix.

Pipe pipe pipe…

Pipe pipe… Oh, they float out a bit more than I thought. Those are perhaps on the big side.

And that’s the only silicone mat I have, so let’s go with baking paper for the second sheet. And these are somewhat smaller.

Let’s hope they don’t stick too much… or swell up so much that they join up…

Then they’re supposed to be out in the open for half an hour to dry out a bit and form a “skin” on the top. I guess that’s to… er… to… keep shape in the oven? To… er… it’d be nice if recipes explained stuff…

OK, they came out…

AAAARGH!!!

I forgot the food colouring! These were supposed to be black!

Geez.

Well, too late now.

They look kinda like macaron shells, don’t they? What with the frothiness at the bottom and the smooth top.

I’m not all that impressed with this silicone mat: They stick quite a bit… I mean, nothing dramatic, but I had hoped that there’d be no stickingness. But I got all six of the large-macaron first batch off.

And then the second batch with more misshapen, but smaller ones. They didn’t all flow together into one macaron landscape! Yay!

Looks OK to me.

Hey! The baking paper is a lot better than the silicone mat… I think I’ll just ditch it.

And now they just have to chill before I can put them together with the ganache, so I can choose a book to read while eating them.

Well, there’s not much to choose between here, is there? Among the books I bought in the early 90s, but have avoided reading (so far) there’s only three left, and I choose Marya: A Life, by Joyce Carol Oates.

I had two books by Oates in this series: The first one was a solid collection of horror stories. This one, I’m guessing, is more horrifying: Just based on the title (I’m neurotic about never reading the back cover of books), my guess is that this the tragic life story of somebody growing up poor, with abusive parents, and then sexually abused as a child, and then raped as an adult, and then marrying an abusive guy, before getting an abusive son and a cruel daughter.

I don’t mean to be dismissive! I bought it myself (on a sale, I think), and I’m pretty sure that Oates is a good author. I’ve read a bunch of her essays in the New York Review, for instance, and she’s smart and interesting.

But I’m honest here, and that’s why I haven’t read it yet: Every time my eyes have scanned the spine of this book, my own spine has gone jello and I’ve just “I can’t”.

But let’s see! Perhaps I’m all wet and this is about something fun!

Huh. There’s a couple of names on the inside front cover? Did I buy this used? It’s totally unread, anyway, so Rune & … Lina? didn’t read it either after buying it.

Huh. That’s odd. It’s copyrighted by The Ontario Review? Oh!

It’s Oates’ own publication:

Ontario Review, A North American Journal of the Arts, was published from 1974 to 2008 by Raymond J. Smith and Joyce Carol Oates.

More confusing is that portions of this book has previously been published all over the place, in ten different magazines. And there’s 11 chapters in this book. Is this really a short story collection that’s been novelified (that’s a word)?

Oh, well, let’s read the first two pages together:

OK, we’ve got a nice father, but an abusive mother. Semi-check on my prejudices.

And the sexual abuse starts when Marya is eight (an older cousin).

*sigh*

Oates, on a paragraph by paragraph basis, is a great writer. She drops these little details here and there that feel so true, and it all flows so easily. Even when being obscure, there’s she pulls the reader along.

But now the macarons should be all chill and stuff.

I got… ten and a half macarons. The recipe said 16, and with my four supersized ones, that sounds about right.

Mmm! That ganache sure looks… er… uhm…

OK, let’s pipe it.

That’s not so bad!

For half of the macarons, I wanted to add some ammonium chloride, because that’s what goes with liquorice.

Whaaat?!?

And I added some black food colouring, too. It was supposed to go in the dough and not in the ganache, but whateves.

Well, that’s a… colour…

Look! How… well they… go… together…

Anyway, I pipe it onto the shells and…

That looks like a macaron!

So let’s read some Marya and see how they go with the book…

Mmmm! Crunchy on the outside and soft on the inside. And the ganache is really good. Especially after resting in the fridge for some hours, the brownish non-ammonia ganache surrenders some of its caramel flavour and gives you more liquorice action.

But the salmiak ganache is so much better. You can’t really taste the ammonium chloride that much, but the ammonium salt has elevated the liquorice flavour itself hugely. It really smacks you about with its total liquoriceness. (That’s a word.)

Oh, yeah, I forgot that the recipe called for edible silver dust, too. I’m really bad at remembering those aesthetic details, apparently…

Nom nom. These are really quite something.

Anyway, my predictions for this book seem to turn out to be wildly inaccurate. Instead of a catalogue of horrifying things Marya has to go through, instead we seem to be whiplashed between various random characters that Marya encounters. And the styles are pretty random, too… In the chapter about one of her high school teachers, we seem to get into an elegiac circling structure. (He’s introduced and then almost killed off within the chapter.)

In the next one, we get the story about when she wanted to become Catholic, so we’re introduced to a priest (who’s then killed off), and the style shifts to this rambling formless thing.

Which brings me back to my initial suspicion: Is this novel a fixer-upper? Oates has taken a series of short stories (about Marya, I’d guess) and then slightly moulded it into something resembling a novel? It’d also explain some of the repetition that creeps in here and there, as Oates familiarises us with some stuff we’ve just read a dozen pages earlier.

I wouldn’t really call it a short story collection, either. It’s a collection of anecdotes arranged chronologically. Some of these anecdotes feel very personal, which makes me wonder whether this is a semi-autobiographical book.

The most anecdotey of all these anecdotes is the one about the awful janitor.

To be fair, in the final… er… I don’t want to call them “chapters”… In the final section of the book, Oates ties some threads together, and almost successfully makes this into a… thing. Because as well-written as these anecdotes are, reading one after another in this way, where no anecdote leads to something more, something important, something that builds…

It’s not very exciting.

4AD 1999

Listen to 4AD 1999 on Spotify.

This is the end!

Not of 4AD, but this blog series, and more importantly, an era: Ivo Watts-Russell sold 4AD to Beggars Banquet.

So what did he do as the final year as the label boss?

Release a buttload of Gus Gus things, and a smattering of “best of” and collections and the like. We get a “best of” from His Name Is Alive and Red House Painters; we get the first two Dif Juz EPs finally collected (in original form); and we get a double album’s worth of Birthday Party live in 1981-82.

There isn’t much new non-Gustian music this year, but Brendan Perry finally releases his long-threatened solo album. He played most of this material live at the Thirteen Year Itch festival in 1993, and then waited all this time to release the album. I felt that the concert was great and I couldn’t wait to get the album, but the songs felt a lot… duller? when they finally arrived. Did he torture them to death in the studio?

So it’s not the most auspicious way to go out, but… It’s not as bad as 1997. But… what a ride it’s been! From the humble post-punk beginnings in 1980, to the imperial years 1982-1990 when everything 4AD released was vital to have. It’s a legacy that hasn’t been touched by any other record label or record label boss. It’s a magnificent achievement to have nursed these handfuls of unique and idiosyncratic bands to artistic success.

Let’s all give him, Vaughan Oliver and the rest of the 4AD staff a hand! It’s been thrilling to listen to this music again in context, and gaze at those lovely covers again.

Watts-Russell hasn’t produced any music after ending his 4AD stint, I think.

4AD would lumber on for several years as a Beggars Banquet imprint, releasing things at a pretty lethargic rate. A few of the acts with a history at 4AD would continue their association with the label (Kristin Hersh and The Breeders in particular), but it’s my understanding that at the time, 4AD didn’t have a separate staff, so it wasn’t really… “a thing”. It was just whatever Beggars Group had that they thought they could sell better under that label than under any other of their dozens of imprints.

About a decade later, Beggars decided that having all these imprints made no sense, so they downsized to one name only, and they chose the name that had most brand recognition: 4AD.

So these days, there’s a gazillion 4AD things being released. Some of them are great, some are OK, some are awful: It’s just like a normal label is supposed to be. Nobody can be a “4AD fan” any more, and that’s probably for the best.

A certain somebody (I won’t name any names because they might very well regret it) over on the 4AD Posters group has threatened to continue this Spotify playlist series with the post-Ivo years, and I think that might be interesting, so I hope that happens. I’ll be listening.

1999

	BAD CD9001 Gus Gus — Ladyshave Ladyshave, Ladyshave (Roy’s Lady Soul Mix), Ladyshave (Old Skool Lego Mix)
	BAD D CD9001 Gus Gus — Ladyshave Ladyshave, Ladyshave (Fully Bearded Mix), Ladyshave (Gigi Galaxy Mix)
	CAD CD9002 His Name Is Alive — Always Stay Sweet Are You Coming Down This Weekend?, Her Eyes Were Huge Things, E-Nicolle, If July, How Ghosts Affect Relationships, Chances Are We Are Mad, As We Could Ever, Are We Still Married?, Why People Disappear, Blue Moon, Cornfield, Home Is In Your Head, Underwater, We Hold The Land In Great Esteem, Last One, Sitting Still Moving Still Staring Out, The Sand That Holds The Lakes In Place, In Every Ford, Baby Fish Mouth, The Dirt Eaters, Man On The Silver Mountain
	TAD9003 Cuba — Black Island Black Island (instrumental), White Shadow
	BAD CD9004 Gus Gus — Starlovers Starlovers (edit), Starlovers (Red Snapper Mix), Starlovers (Freddy Fresh Main Mix)
	BAD D CD9004 Gus Gus — Starlovers Starlovers (edit), Starlovers (House of 909 Mix), Starlovers (Megatron Man Got Together 97 Mix)
	GAD CD109/116 Dif Juz — Soundpool Hu, Re, Mi, Cs, Gunet, Heset, Diselt, Soarn, No Motion
	M2 The Hope Blister — Underarms Sweet Medicine, Friday Afternoon, Iota, Dagger Strings, White on White, Sweet Medicine 2, Happiness Strings
	CAD CD9005 The Birthday Party — Live 1981-82 Junkyard (live), A Dead Song (live), The Dim Locator (live), Zoo Music Girl (live), Nick The Stripper (live), Blast Off (live), Release The Bats (live), Bully Bones (live), King Ink (live), Pleasure Heads Must Burn (live), Big Jesus Trash Can (live), Dead Joe (live), The Friend Catcher (live), Six Inch Gold Blade (live), Hamlet (live), She’s Hit (live), Funhouse (live)
	CAD D9006 Gus Gus — This Is Normal Ladyshave, Teenage Sensation, Starlovers, Superhuman, Very Important People, Bambi, Snoozer, Blue Mug, Acid Milk, Love vs Hate, Dominique
	AD9007 Kristin Hersh — Echo Echo, Pennyroyal Tea, Everybody’s Got Something To Hide Except Me And My Monkey
	CAD CD9008 Kristin Hersh — Sky Motel Echo, White Trash Moon, Fog, Costa Rica, A Cleaner Light, San Francisco, Cathedral Heat, Husk, Caffeine, Spring, Clay Feet, Faith, (Outro)
	TAD9009 Lakuna — So Happy So Happy, So Happy (Thunderball Mix)
	GAD 9010 CD Lakuna — Castle of Crime Lemongrass, Vega, The Veil, On The Floor, St. Paul’s Piano, So Happy, Planet No. 3, The Very Next Day
	DAD CD9011 Red House Painters — Retrospective Shock Me, Grace Cathedral Park, Katy Song, Summer Dress, New Jersey, Medicine Bottle, Michael, San Geronimo, Bubble, Mistress, Drop, Evil, Rollercoaster, Funhouse (demo), Waterkill (demo), Uncle Joe (demo), Helicopter (demo), Brown Eyes (4 track demo), Dragonflies, Japanese to English (live), Shock Me (live on KCRW), Over My Head (4 track demo), Brockwell Park (4 track demo), Shadows, Mistress (live on KCRW), Summer Dress (live on KCRW), Instrumental
	CAD9014 Cuba — Leap of Faith Cross the Line, Devil’s Rock, Black Island, King of Kelty, Starshiney, Peak Flow, Winter Hill, Havana, Hail Mary, Urban Light, Foxy’s Den, Fiery Cross
	CAD9015 Brendan Perry — Eye of the Hunter 6909e508 150 20435 45392 73139 89029 112056 130091 156059 2535, Saturday’s Child, Voyage of Bran, Medusa, Sloth, I Must Have Been Blind, The Captive Heart, Death Will Be My Bride, Archangel
	BAD9016 Cuba — Black Island Black Island, Black Island (Agent Sumo Mix), Black Island (Groove Armada’s Desert Island Disc Mix)
	BAD9016 Cuba — Black Island Black Island, Black Island (Isla Negra), Black Island (Groove Armada’s Desert Island Disc)
	BAD CD9017 Gus Gus — VIP VIP (Radio Edit), VIP (Masters At Work Vocal Mix), VIP (Francois K Vocal Edit)
	BAD D CD9017 Gus Gus — VIP VIP (Radio Edit), VIP (Heller and Farley Fire Island Dub), VIP (Ron Trent Remix)
	TAD9018 Lakuna — Lemongrass Lemongrass, Lemongrass (Schizoid Man remix), The Very Next Day, The Very Next Day (Grantby remix)
	BAD CD9019 Cuba — Starshine Starshine (edit), White Shadow, Starshine (Rae & Christian Remix)

This post is part of the chronological look at all 4AD releases, year by year.

*) Missing from Spotify.