Today, I will talk about the stuff I have seen on Netflix recently. (See, my life does have content!)
First, the Life of Pi. I am around half way through the movie now, and it is not hard to see why it got all the love when it came out. It has absolutely gorgeous cinematography. Everything in it looks beautiful, moves beautifully, and seems realer than real in that way the dreams can.
Plus, India. It is no secret that we in the West are fascinated and pleased by India. It is a billion people living a life that is both shockingly familiar (because of the British influence) and enchantingly exotic (because India. )
And in our innocently ignorant minds, India seems like the perfect place for the sort of dream-state story that Life of Pi seeks to tell. Like I said, like a religious vision brought on by frontal lobe epilepsy, everything seems realer than reality, and that lends a great deal of storytelling oomph to the movie.
I am not, however, a visual person, so while everything is beautiful and impressive (or in the case of the shipwreck, incomprehensible and impressive), I feel like the visuals are just a shimmering veil of illusion and what matters in a movie is what is going on behind the curtain, namely the actual story.
And I can’t shake the feeling that the part of the movie in India is somehow India For White People, the India of our collective dreams, instead of the real one. A cleaned up, scrubbed down, movie set sort of India. And for some reason, that sort of bothers me.
I mean, it’s not like I feel I need to see dung heaps and garbage piles and children running naked and starving in the streets in order to believe I am seeing the real India. That would be quite racist of me, to be honest, or at least wrongheaded.
I guess my own fascination with India leads me to want to see the real India, the good and the bad, side by side. A full, rich, detailed view, and not just one vision or another.
Another movie I watched recently is a silly little kid’s movie called Good Boy.
It is the story of a boy who accidentally learns that all dogs are the descendants of a race of aliens who were sent here a thousand years ago to conquer the Earth, but obviously got a wee bit distracted along the way. In the course of this revelation, the boy also learns to understand dog language, which conveniently turns the five dogs he regularly walks into a demographically diverse group of wacky friends.
The story kind of meanders a bit, and as this is a kid’s movie the humour is not what you would call sophisticated, but the movie was surprisingly painless to watch. Perhaps I am simply mellowing with age, but I had no problem just accepting it as a silly little slice of Spielberg-esque froth and going with the flow.
It is a fun little flick as long as you are not exactly expecting cinema at its very best. The premise is goofy good fun (it’s what got me to watch the thing in the first place… dogs are from outer space? OK, gotta give this a look) and the movie is quite well made.
And for us SNL fans, there is a pleasant frisson to be gained by seeing the protagonist’s parents being played by Molly Shannon and Kevin Nealon, two ex SNL alums who were, as far as I know, part of the same cast.
There is an intriguing subplot about how the protagonist’s parents are always renovating and then selling their homes, so the poor boy never gets to live in the same house for all that long. I thought that made an interesting little side comment about renovation madness and its effects on today’s kids.
Still, because this takes place in Spielbergia, where it is always sort of kind of really the 1950’s, there is a surprising lack of video games, cell phones, and even minivans in the movie.
Okay, I have saved the best for last. The thing that truly blew me away on Netflix was the Bo Burnham special, “what.”
First off, I am so glad that Bo made the transition from Internet hit to real world star. Some of his later Internet videos gave me the feeling that he was not handling the sudden success and pressure well, and I was worried that he would just burn out early and go hide in his introvert cave forever.
But no, he recorded a special last year, and it blew my socks not just off but onto an entirely different continent, because it is the most dense, innovative, fast-flowing, utterly genius thing I have ever seen.
He uses music, performance, wit, and a real flair for theater to create a show that has more comedy in its sixty minutes than in a dozen seasons of SNL. He was obviously determined to make a show with absolutely no dead spots, no filler, no chance for the ball to drop.
As such, watching it is a delightful but kind of exhausting experience. You can’t take your attention from it for a second without missing something. It actually made me feel like my mind was a little flabby and out of shape, and brother, that is not easy to do to a mind jock like me.
I must say, as a comedy geek, I am absolutely thrilled by it. Clearly the young people of today are just as determined to move comedy forward as I would want them to be, and I feel the future of comedy is safe in their hands.
And mine too, of course, but I am a little too old for something THAT strenuous. I mean, Bo does all these things in the show that require a huge performance effort AND a lot of precise timing. I can’t imagine doing that myself.
A little part of me worries that comedy will eventually get too dense and fast for even me, Mister Comedy himself. That would make me pretty sad.
But hey, nothing says I can’t write high density comedy.
I just can’t perform it!