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Saturday, July 25, 2020

The Movie Rest-Cure

I watched two movies while resting up and drinking fluids yesterday, and I felt entirely well by late afternoon.

I. Miss, but Hit

Juanita (2019, Netflix) was close to being a good movie. 
But it wasn't.
I really liked it anyway.

The two stars, actors from a couple of my favorite movies, do a good job with poor material:
the wonderful Alfre Woodard (Lily in Star Trek: First Contact),

and Adam Beach, from Smoke Signals
It's like a Hallmark find-yourself love story that wants to be an indie film about characters with PTSD from war, racism and poverty.
It's a mess, but I recommend it (cautiously).

Juanita reminded me of the West German film Bagdad Café (1987): a far better made film with the same premise:
A woman from a particular culture (Germany/inner-city Cleveland) walks away from her crummy circumstances and washes up in another culture at an isolated restaurant in a remote location (Mojave Desert/rural Montana).

 BELOW: Marianne Sägebrecht and CCH Pounder in Bagdad Café
Pounder said, "I got tons of letters from people who wanted to leave the corporate world and reawaken their creative life. Or, many people tell me: 'I finally came out to my mum and dad.'"

From the Guardian interview "How We Made Bagdad Cafe" with director Percy Adlon (who also made Sugar Baby with Sägebrecht), 2018:
"We had this mix of people: the Native American who is the sheriff, the abused German housewife who has an urge to clean everything and this struggling black family trying to make ends meet.
They are all what Trump really hates.
Because of our strange time with this exclusion of everybody who is not white, our film is now more urgent and contemporary than when we shot it 30 years ago."

II. Tripe 

The second movie, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, I hated. 
(Susan, what's that rule about avoiding movies and books with titles that include cute food references?
[Susan answers in the comments.]

Getting exercised over a stupid movie was a nice distraction--probably did me a lot of good.

Guernsey was a flummery of falsehoods, from start to finish.
Well, I shouldn't say "to finish", because I didn't watch it all the way through. But I did hop, skip, and jump to the end.
If I'd seen it in a movie theater, it'd join my list of Movies I Walked Out On.

Forgive me if you liked it---I can see it's appeal--it's beautifully filmed, and romantically, by people associated with Four Weddings and a Funeral.

In fact, I watched the movie in the first place because of a visual detail: the hole at the neck of this sweater worn by Michiel Huisman, who plays a pig farmer. And a lover of literature.

(Someone was paid a lot of money to make his hair look so artistically dirty too.)
 Sometimes it's a good sign when movies take care to make clothing look real. But not in this case.

The whole movie could be summed up by the way it ignores the reality of pig farming.
The characters stand in pig pens and flirt. 

Have you ever been around pigs?
The odor of their waste is foul, and the stuff is toxic--like human waste, it's filled with bacteria and ammonia.


That beautifully well-worn sweater?
It would knock you down with its smell of pig shit and urine.

(If the farmer's never mending, and he's not shaving daily, he's sure not hand washing his woolens.)

Large-scale hog farming is insane [Guardian article "An unbearable stench: life near industrial pig farms"]. Even small-scale pig farms are plenty disgusting.

I stayed in a hostel in rural Spain downwind of a pig farm about the size of the one in Guernsey Society. The smell was so noxious, it was hard to sleep, much less eat food while breathing.
(We only stayed because we'd already walked 20 miles that day,  on the Camino de Santiago, and there was nowhere else to stay.)

Yeah, yeah, so what?
You can't smell a movie.


True, but this detail stands for all the other whitewashing, historical and emotional.


For instance, the way Britain has miraculously recovered from the war by 1946--there's no mention of rationing. 
Where did the pig farmer get his many, healthy pigs one year after the war ended, when we've seen that the Germans requisitioned all of his livestock?
Did the pigs regenerate once the occupation ended?

Worse, the way it turns out that a character who is a possible contender for the pig farmer's love has conveniently been killed by the Nazis because she protected a child.  
A cheap way for a writer to dispose of a likable, worthy rival.

Finally, if this was a terrible movie but the actors were on fire, I'd have enjoyed it anyway, despite the emotional crap.
But the only spark of eroticism is when Huisman's character, while delivering a calf, is aided by a handsome Nazi doctor (HND). All a good romp in the hay for these beautiful boys.

The HND is a good Nazi, you see. He becomes the lover of the Heroic Possible Rival --she who is later killed by the bad Nazis, but that's not HND's fault. He had no choice but to serve in the military. Right?

He is also conveniently killed off. 

Where Juanita is a like a knitting project gone wrong, Guernsey is tightly constructed, I'll give it that. 
But it stinks.

9 comments:

  1. Aside from the hole in the sweater, that guy looks like someone from a Lands’ End catalogue. Uh-oh.

    The weird euphemism for the pool of waste that goes with a hog farm: lagoon. Once in a while, we pass one on the interstate.

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  2. I had a pig once, she smelled like ham and grain, Her poos were magnificent for the garden
    But if there happened to be another pig anywhere near, the smell would not have been so pleasant.
    This is probably the best film review ever! thank you. I won't be tempted. Anything smacking of romance in a pig yard is so wrong....

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  3. MICHAEL: I'm surprised Land's End don't sell sweaters that are authentically and artistically worn at the cuffs and neck.

    I've seen "distressed clothes" but they look fake.
    Kudos to the clothing designers of The Guernsey Lagoon.

    (Lagoon? OMG. Those pig waste pools are like something out of Dante.)

    LINDA SUE: I can imagine that a healthy pig, or even a few, are lovely.
    I wouldn't want to stand in their urine and flirt though.
    I mean, even cow barns are pretty ripe...

    I'm glad you enjoyed my review.
    It's a bit of a harmless treat to see a pretty movie that gives offense.

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  4. Felt the same about Juanita, it was a Lifetime film filled with non-srandard characters (and the female lead did NOT invent a new way of folding napkins that made her rich beyond the dreams of avarice).

    And that Guernsey potato pie movie was sort of queasy, I watched when there was Nothing On when it was on years ago,.

    And I enjoyed Bagdad Cafe.

    The food title probably signals that the heroine won't meet a tragic end, and it is akin to my bro in law's objection to titles like "The shoemaker's wife's third cousin's scullery maid's bastard".

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  5. SUSAN: That's it! Thank you for answering my question!
    Avoid titles such as The Gardening Secrets of the Chocolate Maker's Lighthouse Keeper.

    Folding napkins! You crack me up.

    I wonder if anyone else has seen all three of these movies...

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  6. Glad you feel better. I will give Juanita a go. The other film has such an annoying title that it doesn't surprise me it wasn't great. The title tries to hard to be quirky. The title comments above made me laugh!

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  7. SARAH: You nailed it--trying too hard to be quirky is a sign: Fakery Ahead.

    It's fun to make up ludicrous titles of that type, I think.

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  8. I have never seen Bagdad Cafe, and now I wonder why. Maybe it's time to remedy that!

    I'll skip Juanita and Potato Peel -- though I am intrigued by the erotic scene featuring the farmer and the Nazi. Maybe I can find a clip online without sitting through the whole film. LOL

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  9. STEVE: Oh, the scene with the doctor and the Nice Nazi is VERY mild---I only mean there was no erotic tension between the leading man and woman.

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