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:
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?
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 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.
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.)
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.
