Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere

 

★★★—Eh, it was fine. Following around a bunch of boring douchebags who constantly do and say outrageous/stupid things gets old super quick. The doc doesn’t really take these losers desperate for attention to task in a way that’s worth watch. I think this could have been done better. It gives these guys too much of a platform, doesn’t go at them hard enough. For the most part it implies people who give these dudes the time must be really lost… what they touch on briefly at the end is that the people that watch, and are being influenced, are children. So, yeah, fuck these guys. We get a glimpse of this disturbing, dangerous world, but it could have been more. 

Slanted: The things you do to become the promcoming dance queen

★★★—Watched this last night at AMC Scream Unseen event. If you love Mean Girls and body horror, then you’ll probably like it. First off, there is a character named Cat Fisher, which caused me to audibly groan when her name gets said at the climax of the movie. Not where you want to be watching a movie when the shit starts to go down.

However, for an ok movie, this really disturbed me, and I’ve been thinking about it all day. The idea of completely changing who you are externally is nothing new. Hell, some people do it IRL. But this transracial concept is extremely interesting. Sort of touches on a lot—assimilation, belonging, beauty standards, race—and it’s heavy with metaphor. But it all felt a little obvious/shallow. Just sort of throws these ideas out there without any real emotional payoff, with a few exceptions, notably when the parents celebrate 10-years in America while their daughter goes to the big promcoming dance, which she is absolutely obsessed with. I get that maybe some kids do care about such things, but it is such a trope at this point that you really must do something extraordinary to subvert it. I feel that it had potential there but didn’t get over the hump. 

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That said, the performances were flat out stellar with the females being especially strong. Shirley Chen and McKenna Grace (just saw here in Scream 7) take turns as the lead. Both knock it out of the park. Vivian Wu plays the mom, who maybe stole the show. Maitreyi Ramakrishnan from Never Have I Ever is very good. Then there was Amelie Zilber, the alpha mean girl from the high school. She basically IS Regina George. Except hotter and more of a bitch. Good god she is fine. Kind of reminded me of Mia Sara. Her character was flat AF though with no emotional payoff. She is just kind of there, being horrible, and then suddenly not. 

Overall, the tone might be the biggest problem. In immigrant teen satire territory at times, but then with disturbing body horror thrown in making it not funny. Then it ventures into heartwarming, coming of age with a deformity with a meh, lame, run-of-the-mill ending. Result is some ick/WTF, and a feeling like maybe director Amy Wang either lost creative control and/or focus at the end. 

The Bride: I Prefer Not To

★★—The Bride? More like The Ex. Am-I-right? I sort of liked this, at first. It seems that it is universally hated, but I thought it was sweet, though incredibly unfocused. I think it would be more accurate to say I wanted to like it… But the more I think about it, the worse I feel about it. 

 

Recent Oscar winner Jessie Buckley is Jean Harlow is Marla Singer… with some shit on her face. She’s also inexplicably possessed by Mary Shelley some of the time. Quotes Melville a lot, ye olde “I prefer not to.”

 

Some Gyllenhaal-on-Gyllenhaal action. Maggie directs what I assume will be her last film for a while. Jake plays a Fred Astaire type that Frankenstein is really into. Speaking of weird siblings, this super niche Swedish electronica band, the Knife, showed up playing not period music. The band is made up of Karin and Olof Dreijer. You can’t miss them. Karin looked more like a zombie than Frankenstein. 

 

Like Christian Bale in everything. This was no different, though it was no Big Short. People are constantly trying to fuck with him. Kids, if you are listening, picking a fight with a large man that looks like that is ill-advised. Then again, he passes as a waiter at one point. Am I sure I liked this movie? 

 

Takes place in the mid-1930s, roughly around the time Bride of Frankenstein came out. Love a period piece, usually. Way more dancing than I was expecting. Lot of film references. Ones I recognized, in addition to Bride of Frankenstein, include Bonnie and Clyde, Natural Born Killers, Moulin Rouge, Poor Things, Young Frankenstein. 

 

Overall. Too long. Too referential. Too little substance. Plot is insane, but not in a good way. Everything with Peter Sarsgaard and Penelope Cruz was unnecessary. 

Soul Power: The Legend of the American Basketball Association

★★★★--Loved this well-done documentary about the American Basketball Association, an NBA rival with a different style of play that merged in the mid-1970s. There are many extremely engaging first‑hand accounts from figures like Julius Erving (aka Dr. J), George Gervin, Larry Brown, Artis Gilmore, St. Louis Spirits owner Daniel Silna, Dan Issel, Spencer Haywood, and Bob Costas, all of whom got their starts working for ABA franchises. Common, whose dad played in the league, narrates. Even if you know nothing about professional basketball, it's still a solid watch. 
 
Most interesting part is the business aspect, going through the successes and mistakes along the way that helped them survive and die out. A big win was that they acquired the second best player on the planet at the time, Julius Erving. He was the face of the league from 1971 to 1976. He is pretty universally considered one of the coolest people ever and was something of a proto-Michael Jordan, both on and off the court. They also nearly got the best, Kareem, but the league commissioner, George Mikan, a former pro and Republican politician, low-balled him, costing Mikan his job and probably ultimately killing the league. 
 

Erving was definitely the star of the doc, just as he was the star of the league. Dude is cool and charismatic as hell. A pretty safe choice as your marquee player, he was a black icon, but didn’t venture into racial politics, which I find disappointing but white dudes of that time were already well into that “shut up and dribble” mindset. 
 
It’s wild that the NBA still shits on this league that gave it the slam dunk contest and the three-pointer. The end talks about how the players from that league got screwed out their pensions until recently even though that was part of the agreement when the merger happened. Also, the NBA doesn’t count ABA stats, basically still arguing the league was inferior. It was not, and they even played about the same number of games each season, which makes things easy.
 
Just a couple little complaints. Something I hadn’t really noticed was the way some ABA teams made an effort to draft local college guys to boost ticket sales since people from the area were already fans of many of these guys since high school. I wish they had gone into this, but it isn’t even mentioned. It was something I noticed and then did some half-assed internet research to confirm it. There were several Indiana guys that played for the Pacers those years, guys from Notre Dame, IU, and Purdue, one from University of Evansville, and some regional players from various Michigan and Ohio schools. 
 

Another guy that stayed in the state where he was a college legend was Hall of Famer Dan Issel, who was one of the players that gets a lot of recognition in the documentary, and is still University of Kentucky’s all-time leading scorer. His three years on varsity (this was when freshmen weren’t eligible, which is stupid, this being 1967-70 were a pretty exciting time for college basketball even though those Kentucky teams always underperformed, losing in the round of 32 each of the three years he played at UK. This was during UCLA’s dominance with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (Lew Alcindor at the time) winning national player of the year in 68 and 69. Regardless, the SEC was still the conference to be in with Issel and Pete Maravich of LSU as the top two players. Maravich in just three years is still the NCAA’s all-time leading scorer with at a more-or-less untouchable 3,667 points. He averaged and incredible 44.2 per game and his pickup style game was practically made for the ABA. He was another of the league’s prime targets (which isn’t mentioned) but stayed in the NBA. 
 

Interestingly, Kentucky didn’t integrate until the year after Issel graduated. It wasn’t until he played in the ABA that he ever played with a black person. The racial aspect of the film, while interesting, was maybe a little overplayed, calling it “the first integrated workplace in the United States.” It’s not like racism wasn’t rampant then or now. 
 
The only other thing that disappointed me besides trying to keep local college players with nearby teams wasn’t a fault of the documentary. It was that more footage hasn’t survived, especially from the early years.
 
Lastly, loved that my beloved Indiana Pacers were featured. There was a great local PBS documentary about those championship teams that came out in the early 90s. My uncle played ball with two of the guys in the doc, Billy Keller (my uncle was on JV when Keller was the man there) and George McGinnis, both Indiana Mr. Basketball winners. My uncle, Bob Jones, career was sandwiched between the 1965 Washington championship led by Keller and the 1969 championship led by McGinnis. They drafted a third Washington guy in 73, a guy named Steve Downing who played at IU, but he ended up going to the NBA. Again, wished they would have focused on the local guys aspect a little more.