Coping Mechanisms for Strange and Stressful Times - Friday Video Distractions with Mike Norton

 

   We made it to October somehow. I'm not feeling it yet, but I'll try to lean in on more horror themes somewhere this month.
  Another odd mix this time. I could claim subjective reality as a linking theme, but, really, wouldn't that apply almost every week?
   I'll start with the weakest of the recently-viewed items; this one I found on Hulu.

    As if Australia wasn't naturally teeming with things out to kill you, writer/director Sandra Sciberras brings us a space-bourne menace with The Dustwalker (2019; 95 min; Unrated? I couldn't spot one. There's some violence, blood, and some marginally gory remains, but all fairly tame. No sex scenes. I'm fairly unresponsive to profanity these days, so, what may be there I didn't notice.)
   A small town in the desert-bound outback, where the sheriff and her family are within days of leaving for a new life in The City, something falls from the sky overnight. Damage to the local cell tower buggers usual communications, a few people go missing at first, some show up, though behaving very oddly -- and badly. A strange dust storm, forming a wall on the outskirts of the town, prevents anyone from leaving.
 The vibe goes from suspicious to threatening to violent as the townspeople try to keep themselves and loved ones safe, but increasingly have problems with that as it's loved ones who are the instruments of mayhem. Then, just as some of that's starting to sink in, they see something larger and decidedly inhuman on the hunt.

    Not a bad film, but hardly a great one. The cast and crew did a creditable job with what had to be a tight budget. There's a plot turn late in the film that I'm going to presume most of us were expected to see coming, and on the bright side it was nice to see key characters bright enough to recognize it, too rather than layering in an unnecessary conflict.
   What struck me the most once it got rolling was how much having gone through over half a year of pandemic has affected the way I process situations where there's even a chance that an infection is at work. Why are you getting that close?!  No, don't touch him?!!

  Over on Amazon Prime is an item that's been around for seven years, though I only just ran across it this week: The nature of comedy, of humor - the mechanics and culture - are interesting topics to explore, with the caveat that beyond the examples of jokes the subject risks becoming less than funny. When Jews Were Funny (2013; 1 hr 28 min) is a Canadian documentary by Alan Zweig, focusing on Jewish comedians of North America, mainly in the 20th century. Primarily asking the questions whether Jewishness is an essential part of what made the comedy work, and whether or not it's all of an era that's already all but passed.

  The list of comedians interviewed for it is too long to bother listing here -- you can see the full cast and crew in its IMDB listing. It's a good survey, and includes archival footage of several comedians who had already passed away before this was made.
  Seeing how the reactions to the questions varied with the vintage of the comics was among the points of interest, with many of the oldest of the crew having reflex reservations about openly connecting their ethnicity to their craft. How much of this reflects their own well-examined beliefs and how much was simply a matter of survival - as one rolls back through the years it was less and less of an asset, as it was better to not call attention to it - is open to interpretation by the viewer.
  Among the more interesting aspects are considerations I've come across several times over the years, concerning comedy being more effective when it comes as commentary from someone in some fashion outside of a society's mainstream. That humor is most effective coming from a position of relative powerlessness, where it's able to provide a potentially enlightening, or at least entertainingly skewed view without crossing the line into stinging insult, is also part of it. That last item leads to one of the interviewees speculating that perhaps in a society where someone is less of a cultural outsider and  underdog, that empowerment may make humor that is so frequently rooted in the soil of the kvetch inherently less funny.
  Another interesting consideration, more of a mechanical one, is how much of this may simply be a matter of the rhythm of delivery.
  I would be interested in finding out is there were others who were approached for this project who for whatever reasons weren't open to participating. Several have noted the absence of Woody Allen, Mel Brooks, Jerry Seinfeld, and Larry David, among others.
   In the mix are attempts to find a quintessential bit of Jewish mindset humor, so while one shouldn't come to this looking for a stand-up act, there are a few jokes in the mix. I don't regret having taken the time to watch it; it's a worthwhile set of topics to at least turn over in your mind, and to discuss with the right people.

The Ghoul (2016, currently on both Hulu and Amazon Prime, 1 hr 22 min) - not to be confused with the 2015 supernatural horror film... nor the other supernatural horror film starring Boris Karloff, from 1933, both with the same title - at least starts out with a detective going undercover as a depressed man seeking psychiatric help, investigating a double murder with a bizarre aspect. The title is an almost throw-away term, a term applied to an individual who seems to be drawn to morbid, lurid circumstances, and so often becomes a person of interest in criminal investigations as detectives try to determine whether he's merely an observer, a direct participant, or the mix, a provocateur.
   Ultimately this film sits in a Venn diagram that includes films like I'm Thinking of Ending Things (one of the films I discussed last month), where we become lost in the film's subjective reality and end up asking the eternal question, "Wait, what?"
   In the case of The Ghoul, in the spirit of fun is where you find it, it's a matter of trying to decide when the story you thought you were in turned into something else. Ultimately it is as satisfying or unsatisfying as a dream. Not to ascribe the same style points to it, but I'd suspect that those who are fans of David Lynch movies will dig this film more than others would.

A 2019 mini-series that facebook friend and C7 confrere Dede Grant (who posts here on Sundays) recently recommended, Years and Years (HBO, originally BBC One, 6-part series), is next.
  Created and written by Russel T. Davies, the series follows a Manchester family through a speculative 15 years of social and political upheaval. It's a "darkest timeline" affair, which means that the events of the past year have only made it feel closer to reality than ever. Opportunistic, jokestore politicians with media gimmicks and little to no grasp of how things work ride waves to power essentially as entertainers, appealing to people too dim to understand what they're really doing.
  Through it all, while we in the audience are aware of much more than any of the individual members of this sprawling and diverse family, we're ultimately bounded by what any one of them know. Consequently, we're left to speculate on any of the shadow forces backing the social and political changes.
  It's also a contemporary science fiction affair, which fits as a creation for the man who oversaw the 2005 rebirth of the Doctor Who franchise. We see how tech suffuses the lives of these characters, potentially masking some problems and enabling questionable-to-bad behaviors, and the dangers of blindly turning too much over to it, but we also, eventually, see the hope it embodies.
  The general dumbing-down of society, also in tandem with much of the ubiquitous tech that so few of its users understand, is a strong theme. Who among us hasn't had at least a few moments of feeling stunned and hopeless as some friend or family member has fallen under the sway of some ridiculous conspiracy theory in a world where there are obviously conspiracies in play? One example touched on briefly in the show is people with no understanding of science being gulled into believing that germ theory has just been a hoax pushed by pharmaceutical companies, and that there are in fact no germs. Sadly, this isn't as much of a joke as it should be, in a world that's only slid farther and farther down the rabbit hole. Even a massive event with global impact, a nuclear attack, becomes part of another conspiracy theory as we see one particularly odious character in this series push the notion that it may have not -- probably didn't -- even happen. Worse, as the person pushing this -- someone whose lack of humanity and ethics has made him a "winner" in the chaotic upheaval -- he gets the satisfaction of getting one of the main characters bend knee to this absurdity despite it being an event that his celebrated sister was a witness to, indeed to the degree that it has likely drastically shortened her life.
   A good mix of characters, there are plenty of chances to see pieces of people you know, along with fragments of one's own reflection. All making for good topics of consideration as we still don't have sight of the potential bottom we're facing out here in our own, mad reality.
   Cascading chaos as culture degrades, tech outpaces judgement, ethics are lost in the fog, truths become subjective, attention spans shrink, and opportunism rules, at least for a time.
   I went with the BBC One trailer, though HBO had their own.

 Related by the theme of mad times sweeping everyone up, even the most innocent souls, I did want to mention writer/director/co-star Taika Waititi's Jojo Rabbit (2019, currently on HBO).
   Based on Christine Leunen's book Caging Skies (2008), it centers on Johannes "Jojo" Betzler, a Hitler Youth member navigating the waning arc of WWII from inside Germany, where the official word is always that victory is both imminent and inevitable despite all signs to the contrary.
   Drenched in institutionalized propaganda since birth, the generally good-hearted Jojo has made as his imaginary friend a fanciful version of Adolf Hitler, played with suitably mercurial verve by Waititi. Imaginary Hitler is Hobbes to Jojo's Calvin. Scarlett Johansson plays his mother, raising him lovingly while unable to directly tell him any of the truths about the heavily-monitored and politically-manufactured world he's had the misfortune to be born into.
   Great, thoughtful, fun, with moments of loss, sorrow and painful tragedy. Madness from all across the scale -- the tragic but also the sublime.

    ...and that's plenty for this week. I hope you find something in there to enjoy, or at least got enough of a taste to know what isn't likely to be for you.
      Take care, and I hope you'll be back next week.  -- Mike