This is What You Get When You Mess With Us

The Maltese Falcon (1941)

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Many years ago, pre-Pandemic, I was in New York City for the weekend. It is something I do rarely, but SHE WHO WILL NOT BE BLOGGED has a deep and abiding love for Broadway and that’s where we were headed. Pre-show, we had drinks at a roof-deck bar at one of the W hotels. On an otherwise sunny spring day, the space between the buildings was shaded; the hotel was projecting, with surprising clarity, The Maltese Falcon.

I would have stayed at that bar all night, straight through the play. The Maltese Falcon is one of those movies that, when it comes on, I have a very hard time turning it off. But I value my life, my marriage, and, besides, I have the film on DVD.

Trailer…
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Too Late (2015)

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I am a strong proponent of California Noir, especially the subset LA Noir. My memory of my family’s brief time in the City of Angels is piss-yellow and grainy, like the intro to James Gardner’s The Rockford Files or Emergency! Not the Kodachrome Los Angeles of mid-century musicals. Not the jewel-toned love letter to “trying to make it” of La La Land.

Noir pictures, and novels, fit this memory. So I seek them out, have my favorites. Chinatown… L.A. Confidential… both the movie and the novel, but for different reasons. He’s a right-wing wackadoodle, but James Ellroy can set a scene with a few words and write wicked dialogue. Widely panned by the Twitterati, I thought the second season of True Detective hit all of the beats of an L.A. Noir… I liked the story and characters, even though Vince Vaughn played a gangland version of his stock character… I still don’t understand the hate.

Violence against women at the hands of powerful men is the recurring theme in noir stories. The old “dame in distress” trope: murdered hooker, socialite in crisis for getting some of the same action any of the male characters take for themselves. As my hair goes gray, I find it harder to excuse this trope. I try to find stories where it’s subverted/turned on it’s head.

Really, the only poster…

Too Late, starring John Hawkes, isn’t that story. It dives head-on into the trope, like a hophead into the shallow end of an empty pool.

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High Noon (1952)

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Following up on my thoughts on Silverado, a 1980s film dripping with nostalgia for Westerns and serials the filmmakers watched in their Boomer youth, I decided I wanted to watch an ur-Western, preferably something without The Duke1 A palate cleanser, if you will; a film to set my understanding of the genre in the right direction. I chose High Noon from my Amazon Prime queue. Many reviewers on IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes called this movie “the greatest Western of all time.”

Theatrical Trailer

The epithet is certainly a bit of hyperbole. Perhaps modern reviewers have warm and fuzzy memories of watching it as children, and it has won a bunch of awards, but there are certainly more nuanced Western films. Reading about the production, many see the film as an allegory for the Hollywood blacklist: a man, with his life and livelihood at risk, standing up for what is “right,” is abandoned by the community that he helped to build.2 Helping him in a time of need, they believe, will end their good lives. That theme resonates today.

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  1. John Wayne made a good movie or two in his time. He was also rabidly racist and an arch conservative. His film, The Searchers, is a about a man who spends years trying to find his niece, who’s been “captured” by the Apache. Not to return her to her family, of course, but to murder her. She’s been defiled by a savage, he says. ↩
  2. the writer, Carl Foreman, was run out of Hollywood and the United States after production wrapped after refusing to name names to the HUAC ↩

The Croods (2013)

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We’ve seen The Croods at least three times in a bunch of Family Movie Nights… So often I barely remember other animated films. The Croods holds beachfront real estate in my brain. All other residents died of the common cold…

My girl laughs *uncontrollably* throughout the entire film. 

The Croods are a family of, presumably, Neanderthals (or some other pre-Homosapien hominid…  I’m not sure it matters.)  The Crood family lives in constant fear of anything new or different, snug in a cave, leaving only to dine on the rare bird’s egg or edible bug. This bunker mentality is necessary. Their environment is purpose built to kill them. As Eep, voiced by Emma Stone, outlines in the 10 minutes of exposition at the top of the film, each of the neighboring families have been killed by animals, plants, or viruses. The Croods are the sole survivors; they face extinction every minute of every day. 

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Twisted Balloons

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There was a great toy store in Potomac that closed after 41 years because of the pandemic. It was a great place to get kid’s birthday presents, including good puzzles, craft kits, and science-focused toys. Yes, they were more expensive than Amazon, but there was no wondering if what you buying was the real deal or some Chinese pop-up factory knockoff. They wrapped the gifts for you. They hired High School kids. It was nice to be able to ask people questions about what kids like and get an answer great than a poke at an end cap and a grunt.

Fun for the whole family!

Anyway, I bought this $5 kit during one trip in advance of a big weekend of birthdays. Again, one of the great things about a store like that was discovering something you might otherwise think about. I put it in a drawer and sometimes, when I’m giving the kid a tub, I make some wiener dogs.

Wiener Dog #1, Yellow

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My first attempt of the day

The kit is obviously made for much smaller hands (ages 8 and up); the pump is miniature size and the balloons are 1/2 the size of those that clowns give away on city streets.

Conveniently, if you want to give this a try and your local toy/magic show was closed because the Federal/States/Local Governments couldn’t get their collective acts together over the last 12 months, you can use your google machine to find an amazon alternative. Looking to expand my repertoire beyond long dogs, I got some adult sized balloons and a pump from a place called Bargain Balloons, where they don’t spend a dime on their website in order to pass the savings on to you.

My girl wants me to make many of these:

Tangled (2010)

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We typically order takeout for our Friday Fun Family Fun Movie Night, but I wanted to make my own pizza dough because there are enough hours in the day when you’d rather not watch another episode of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.

What Does *Your* Cutie Mark Say About You???

After slogging through a handful of personal anecdotes about how the writer to truly love bread-cheese-tomotosauce I found a dough recipe that looked straightforward and I made my pie. Shredded my own cheese! Baked it on my pizza stone!

Unfortunately, the bottom burned, the organic mozzarella ball was a touch past its prime, and the sauce was from a can.

Of course I ate it

SHE and the Bairn had bulgogi dumplings cooked in the air fryer. They were exceptional.

Anyway, our plan was to watch Penguins of Madagascar on Netflix because our girl loves the Madagascar films and the Penguins. But Your Wonderful Comcast decided Friday night at 5pm was the perfect time to reboot the Internet. So we dug through our Blu-Ray collection and pulled out Disney’s Tangled.

Tangled is a Disney interpretation of the story of Rapunzel. You can read the Grimm Brother’s version of it here. The Grimm’s telling itself is an interpretation of a story that occurs so often in traditions throughout the world, academics have assigned it a type: Type 310.1 The movie follows tale closely, but with a notable difference.

In the film, a magical plant grows wild, and the witch, Gothel (musical theater person Donna Murphy) nurtures it, but is certainly not interested in sharing the magic with anyone else. She has used that magic to keep herself alive and youthful for hundreds, maybe thousands of years.

The pregnant Queen is dying; the King directs his people to search the countryside for this mythical curative flower. The King’s men pluck the flower and turn it into a single dose elixir that saves Queen and gives their daughter, the princess Rapunzel, played by Mandy Moore, golden hair that can also cure the sick and heal the wounded. When cut, the magic hair dies at the root.

There are two bits of the film that trouble me; the first is the above. In the folktales, the witch cultivates salad greens (which is where the name “Rapunzel” comes from) and other vegetables, infused with her magic. A desperate husband steals these greens to heal his ailing, pregnant wife. To pay for this crime, the witch demands the child. The husband complies; the life of his wife is more precious to him than that of the child. The story never again mentions Rapunzel’s parents.

Although Gothel hoarded the power for herself, she kept the flower alive, recognizing the need to conserve it’s power. The King used up all of that power to save only his wife. How “good” can we assume this King to be if his people don’t object to using this power to save only one woman, even just a little? If the royal family had chosen to use his wealth and power to cultivate the magic flower, how many more of their people could he have saved? Gothel is “evil” for taking the child; the King exploited natural resources for his family alone, dooming the ancient Gothel and any other woman dying in childbirth.

I believe that any reasonable person would be angry enough to want to be made whole.

But this is a Disney Princess film and it goes as expected. Mandy Moore is funny, the script is funny and suspenseful (at least there were moments when my girl was really “scared” for the characters). Zachary Levi’s2 Flynn Ryder, who has stolen Rapunzel’s Princess crown3 from the castle, helps her escape from the tower. They spend the rest of the picture trying to stay away from his ex-partners, the witch, and the King’s soldiers, Rapunzel wants to see the floating lanterns the people of the kingdom release each year on her birthday. Thanks to her brains, his buffoonish bravery, and a mugging horse, they do succeed. It’s only after that they get caught…

Rapunzel is hopeful. Even though she is captive in the Tower and captive to Gothel’s guilt anxiety, she spends here time (shown in song) joyfully improving herself. And when Eugene (Flynn’s real name) comes along, he doesn’t rescue her. He helps, but she makes the choice and the leap to get out of the tower. Repunzel’s in control of herself, pretty ruthless with an iron frying pan…

And she is very conflicted.

Me, going to Target during the Pandemic

I thought this was incredibly authentic, especially for a Disney movie. She hadn’t been out of the tower for 16 years. Of course she’d be conflicted. This is a tremendous change for her. Thankfully, Flynn doesn’t try to make her stop, He lets her run it out. This is all very healthy.

Speaking of Gothel… yes, she’s made some terrible choices. But she is caring for this girl. She is parenting. She keeps Rapunzel confined, sure, but don’t we all? I can definitely see echos of their relationship in the mother/daughter relationships I know in real life. It’s certainly more realistic than other movie portrayed parent/child relationships.

But is Gothel “evil?” I’m not convinced. Angry, for sure. And scared.

The second bit I had a problem with was the resolution, especially considering Flynn’s openness to Rapunzel’s agency earlier in the movie. Ryder is mortally wounded by Gothel. Rapunzel is willing to stay with her if Gothel lets her save his life. Ryder, however, cuts off Rapunzel’s hair, killing her magic, and, ultimately, killing Gothel.

But are her powers gone?? Expectedly, Rapunzel’s tears heal Ryder and great joy is had by all.

Rapunzel made a reluctant choice to go with Gothel to save a person she loved. Flynn killed a part the root of her power (haha). He took away her agency. It worked out for him, of course. He lived. But Flynn he was more than willing to take her powers. That’s not a positive story. She didn’t ask to be rescued that time.

Anyway, my favorite scene:

Dream big, villains…

In all, I’m going to rate Tangled 6 out of 8 frying pans. My Bairn really loves it.4 So, watch it with your kids, but like all Disney movies, but with context.

  1. I like to think of myself a writer, and my dream has always been (and will likely always be) to write a novel. I read a bit and had a solid ‘3’ on the AP English exam I sat in 1996. I was not aware that there is an academic classification for Folktales. But there is. Explicitly stealing from the past and covering it with “tradition” is going to make writing stories for my Bairn a shit ton easier. ↩
  2. Levi also, too, is a lot to deal with. He delivers lines like he’s in some Tracey/Hepburn film, riffing with some spunky girl reporter who he marries in the last reel. Loud and Fast, not unlike his character in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. Loud and Fast does not make something funny. It’s not a necessary ingredient in funny. Sherman-Palladino’s dialogue is not clever or smart; she tries to make up for that failing by having actors deliver it from a Gatling Gun. ↩
  3. Which the miserable King and Queen keep on a pedestal in the thrown room, awaiting their daughters return ↩
  4. She also likes the Disney+ TV version which, unlike other TV shows from movies, have all the voice actors from the movie reprise their roles. ↩