Yesterday, they announced the lineup of Woodstock 50. Looking over the acts, I noticed that apparently there’s going to be absolutely no EDM at the three-day festival of peace, love, and greed. Woodstock 50 is going to be irrelevant before it even begins.
To quote the artist behind today’s music video of the day, “The fact is that EDM is no longer just a phenomenon or hype, it’s a cultural thing. It moves a generation of people.”
Enjoy!
What’s an Insomnia File? You know how some times you just can’t get any sleep and, at about three in the morning, you’ll find yourself watching whatever you can find on cable? This feature is all about those insomnia-inspired discoveries!
On Tuesday, if you were having trouble getting to sleep around one in the morning, you could have turned over to Cinemax and watched the 1994 film, Disclosure.
The majority of Disclosure takes place at DigiCorp, which is some sort of technology company that Bob Garvin (Donald Sutherland) founded because, as the movie explains it, he only has $100 million dollars but still dreams of being a billionaire someday. With a huge merger approaching, Garvin announces that he will be promoting Meredith Johnson (Demi Moore) to run the new CD-ROM division. This shocks a lot of people, as everyone was expecting the promotion to go to Tom Sanders (Michael Douglas). However, Garvin explains that, ever since his daughter died, he’s wanted to promote a woman.
(Presumably, if a male relative had died, Tom would have gotten the promotion. I have to admit that I kept waiting for the film to get back to the subject of Garvin’s dead daughter but, apparently, that was just an odd throw-away line.)
Tom and Meredith have a history. They were once lovers, though Tom is now happily married to Susan (Caroline Goodall) and has a family. Meredith takes one look at a picture of Susan and says that Tom must miss being able to take his lover from behind whenever he felt like it. Tom says, “Mrs. Robinson, you’re trying to seduce me.” No, actually, he says, “No, no, no, no, no, no…..” It all ends with Tom fleeing Meredith’s office while Meredith, in her bra, chases after him, shouting threats all the way. The only witness to this is a cleaning lady who sadly shakes her head before returning to her dusting.
Tom is so traumatized by the experience that he has a bizarre nightmare in which Donald Sutherland says that he likes his suit and then attempts to lick his face. Tom’s trauma continues when he goes to work the next day and discovers that Meredith has accused him of sexual harassment! Tom responds by suing the company and it’s time for an epic courtroom battle, one that will deal with one of the most important issues of our time….
….except that never happens. Here’s what is weird. For all the talk about abuse of power and all the scenes of a remorseful Tom apologizing to both his wife and his secretary for his past behavior, the whole sexual harassment plot turns out to be a red herring.
Instead, the film turns into this weird techno thriller, one that involves Tom trying to figure out how to make a better CD-ROM. That may have been a big deal back in 1994 but today, you watch the film and you think, “Who cares?” (Even better is a scene where Garvin brags about how his company is on the cutting edge of fax technology.) Once Tom realizes that Meredith only accused him of sexual harassment to keep him from building the perfect CD-ROM, we get a scene of him using a virtual reality headset to search through the companies files. At one point, he spots a bot with Demi Moore’s face destroying files and he shouts out, “She’s in the system!” It’s just strange.
The film’s plot is often incoherent but the cast keeps things amusing. Michael Douglas spends the first half of the movie looking either annoyed or terrified. Things pick up for him in the 2nd half of the movie. Whenever he gets good news from his lawyer, he jumps up in the air and goes, “Yessssssss!” and it’s so dorky that it’s kind of endearing. Meanwhile, Demi Moore doesn’t even try to make Meredith into a credible character, which is actually just the right approach to take to this material. There’s no room for subtlety in a film as melodramatic as this. Finally, Donald Sutherland is his usual avuncular self, smirking at all the right moments and suggesting that he finds the movie to be just as amusing as we do. For all of its plot holes and problematic subtext, Disclosure is an entertainingly stupid film. A lot of the credit for the entertaining part has to go to the cast.
As I said, Disclosure is just strange.. As with most films from the 90s, its sexual politics are all over the place. On the one hand, Tom learns that even inadvertent sexism can make the women who wok with him feel unsafe. On the other hand, the only woman with any hint of a personality is portrayed as being pure evil. In no way, shape, or form is this a movie to be taken seriously. Instead, this is just a weird film that cries out, “1994!”
Previous Insomnia Files:
On Monday night, I was on twitter and I ended up having a conversation with a number of people about how much we all loved the 2007 Irish film, Once. Once is the touching love story between an Irish musician (Glen Hansard) and a Czech woman (Marketa Irglova). Together, they create beautiful music. Even though the film ends on a bittersweet note, Once is still one of those movies that makes you believe not only in love but also in music. If you don’t cry while watching Once, you should be concerned.
It’s definitely one of my favorite films of all time. If you asked me, off the top of my head, what film won the most Oscars that year, I wouldn’t be able to tell you. But I do remember jumping up and down and cheering when Once won the Oscar for best song. Glen Hansard gave an enthusiastic, likable, and very Irish acceptance speech. When Marketa Irglova got cut off by the band, host Jon Stewart brought her back out on stage so she could give her speech. Here’s what Irglova said: “This song was written from a perspective of hope, and hope at the end of the day connects us all, no matter how different we are…”
The title of that Oscar-winning song is Falling Slowly and it’s today’s music video of the day! As you can tell, the majority of the video is made up of clips from Once but that’s okay. Beautiful song. Beautiful film. Beautiful world.
Enjoy!
Today’s music video of the day is about all the fun stuff that you can do while time stands still.
You can fall in love, which is probably why time is standing still in the first place.
You can take pictures of people suspended in mid-air. (Of course, once time starts again, she’s probably going to plunge down to the stage and injure herself so badly that she’ll never dance professionally again. Have these people never seen Red Sparrow, not to mention The Curious Case of Benjamin Button?)
You can go to the carnival and laugh at the clowns.
You can go to the bar and ruin a stranger’s pool game.
You can get into a fight on a bridge without having to worry about any cars hitting you while you’re running back and forth. I have to admit that the bridge scene reminded me of the ending of Lucio Fulci’s Zombi 2. It just needed a horde of undead to show up.
You can throw paint at your partner, which is hella messy and can lead to delusions of being Jackson Pollock.
At least these two people seem to be benevolent-at-heart. If I was in their shoes and I was moving around while everyone else was frozen in time, I’d probably start things off by robbing the bar and then I’d work my way up from there. But that’s just me.
Anyway, enjoy!
(WE MISS YOU, AVICII!)
Happy St. Patrick’s Day, everyone!
Another week comes to a close and what a week it was. It started with celebrities bribing colleges to ensure that their children were accepted and it ended with James Gunn getting his old job back. For one group of students, Spring Break has ended and, for another, it has just begun. And I can hear the voice out there, all asking, “Lisa, when are you reviewing Captain Marvel!?” Next week, I promise.
As for today, it’s St. Patrick’s Day. Among his many accomplishments, St. Patrick banished all of the snakes from Ireland. Some people will tell you that there were never snakes in Ireland to begin with but those people would never have the courage to say that to St. Patrick’s face.
Here’s hoping you’ve all had a great week and that you’ve all had a great St. Patrick’s Day. Here’s what little I accomplished:
Movies I Watched:
TV Shows I Watched:
Books I Read:
Music To Which I Listened:
Links From Last Week:
Links From The Site:
Want to see what I did last week? Click here!
Have a great week, everyone! Remember, it’s always Spring Break somewhere!
So, last night, I finally watched FYRE: The Greatest Party That Never Happened, the Netflix documentary about the infamous Fyre Festial.
As you may remember, the Fyre Festival was supposed to be the greatest party of 2017. Influencers played it up on Instagram. A commercial for it, one that featured the world’s top models on a beautiful island, was pretty much inescapable on Facebook. It was going to be the greatest musical festival of all time, with luxury villas and yachts and private chefs and …. Blink-182? Even before the entire festival was revealed to be a massive fraud, I have to admit that I was kind of like, “All this for Blink-182?”
Anyway, the festival did turn out to be a disaster. A lot of people paid a lot of money to end up on the beach, staying in rain-soaked FEMA tents and eating pre-packaged sandwiches. The bands cancelled so there wasn’t even any music. After the festival was officially canceled, several people found themselves stranded on the island. Those of us who weren’t there followed the drama on twitter. We joked about the Lord of the of Flies. One of my favorite tweets about the whole mess compared it to an episode of It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia. “The Gang Puts On A Music Festival.”
At the time, very few people had much sympathy for anyone involved in the Fyre Festival. Not only did the organizers seem to be a group of insufferable douchebags but so did the people who paid thousands for dollars for a FEMA tent, a cheese sandwich, and Blink-182. Having now watched the Netflix documentary …. well, I still don’t have much sympathy for the organizers or the participants.
I do have sympathy for the people who actually lived in the island. They were taken advantage of and most of them received no financial compensation for the work that they put into the festival. While we were all laughing on twitter, one poor restaurant owner lost a fortune feeding all of the people who were stranded in the Bahamas. While we were making jokes, the people who actually did all the work went unpaid.
The documentary starts with festival organizer Billy McFarland and celebrity co-sponsor Ja Rule annoying Bella Hadid, Emily Ratajowski, and Hailey Baldwin on an island that once belonged to drug lord Pablo Escobar and it ends with McFarland heading for federal prison. Billy McFarland emerges as a professional con man who built his success by exploiting people’s desire to be a part of an “exclusive” club. Before Fyre, McFarland ran a credit card company. Even after the disaster of the Fyre Festival, McFarland continued to use the Fyre e-mail list to try to sell VIP access that he couldn’t actually provide. Even when under indictment, McFarland allows himself to be filmed while he brags about “hustling.” He really can’t help himself.
Ultimately, this documentary works best as a portrait of the power of fame. From the start, it’s obvious that the festival is going to be a disaster. Everyone who is interviewed states that, at no point, did they think Fyre would be a success. (One person explains that it takes at least a year to set up a successful music festival. Fyre tried to do it in a matter of weeks.) But, because Billy McFarland paid Kendall Jenner and a bunch of other social media superstars to promote the festival, people who should have known better paid a lot of money for a tent and a stale sandwich. McFarland may not have known how to put on a music festival but he definitely knew how to exploit our celebrity-obsessed culture.
During the documentary, one of the festival’s organizers — Andy — tells a story about how he was prepared to give a customs official oral sex in order to get him to release a delivery of Evian water. Reportedly, due to the success of the documentary and the popularity of that anecdote, Andy will be getting his own reality show. That seems like a fitting coda for the whole thing.
Happy St. Patrick’s Day, everyone. Stay safe and enjoy!
Here’s a lesson for any and all aspiring film bloggers:
Even if you’ve seen the movie before, always rewatch a film before you write about it. This is especially true if it’s been a while since you last saw the film. Often the pressure to say whether a film was bad or good can lead to your memory playing tricks on you.
That was certainly the case with me and the 2000 film, The Beach. For the longest time, I remembered The Beach as being a gorgeously shot but rather shallow film, one that featured one of Leonardo DiCaprio’s least impressive performances. Whenever I had to explain my theory that DiCaprio didn’t become a consistently good actor until 2003, The Beach was inevitably one of the film’s that I would cite as proof that, early on in his career, DiCaprio had a tendency to overact.
In short, if I hadn’t rewatched the film on Saturday morning, you would currently be reading a really negative review of The Beach. However, I did rewatch The Beach and I discovered that both the film and DiCaprio’s performance were a lot better than I initially remembered. Now, don’t get me wrong. The Beach is still a frustratingly uneven film and the voice over narration (which DiCaprio recites in a rather overwrought style) still makes me cringe. But still, it’s hardly the disaster that I initially remembered it being.
DiCaprio plays Richard, a privileged American who finds himself in Bangkok, searching for adventure. When he meets the appropriately named Daffy (Robert Carlyle), a bemused Richard listens as Daffy talks about an uncharted island in the Gulf of Thailand. Daffy swears that it’s a paradise that is populated by other travelers. When Richard smirks and asks Daffy if he’s “fucked in the head,” Daffy responds by drawing Richard a map and then promptly committing suicide. Richard and his two French friends, Françoise (Virginie Leydon) and Étienne (Guillaume Canet), go searching for the island.
And they find it! It turns out that Daffy knew what he was talking about. On the island, they discover a small but thriving commune. Soon, Richard is killing sharks, having affairs, and becoming close to the leader of the commune, Sal (Tilda Swinton). Unfortunately, Richard is also starting to lose his mind. He grows to love paradise so much that he chooses ignore the dangers all around. When a member of the commune is attacked by a shark, he’s left out in the middle of the jungle because no one wants to deal with the reality of his suffering. Even more dangerous are the neighboring marijuana farmers, who allow Sal and her followers to live only under the condition that they keep the island a secret. The problem is that Richard’s not good at keeping secrets. Before he even knew if the island was real, Richard showed the map to a group of American surfers. And now, the surfers are coming….
The Beach was directed by Danny Boyle, so it’s not a surprise that the film looks great and that it has an absolutely brilliant soundtrack. (The film makes great use of both Moby’s Porcelain and Out of Control by the Chemical Brothers.) At the same time, Boyle is too much of a subversive to fully buy into his film’s vision of paradise. From the minute that Richard and his friends reach the island, Boyle is offering up hints that utopia isn’t as wonderful as people assume. When Sal asks for a volunteer to accompany her to the mainland on a supply run, Boyle practically delights in showing everyone freaking out at the idea of having to indulge in responsibility. Boyle often contrasts Richard’s pretentious narration (which, at times, sounds like it could have been lifted from a Beto O’Rourke medium post) with the rather mundane details of living on the island. Though it may not be obvious from the start, The Beach works best when viewed as being a satire of middle and upper class ennui.
As for DiCaprio’s performance as Richard ….. well, let’s just say that he spends a lot of time yelling. During the early part of his career — essentially the pre-Scorsese years — DiCaprio had a tendency to overact. For all of his obvious talent, it took DiCaprio a while to really get to a point where he seemed as comfortable underplaying as he was just going totally overboard. The Beach has its moments where DiCaprio gets awkwardly shrill. (The scene where Richard talks about killing a shark always makes me cringe.) But, at the same time, DiCaprio’s performance gets better as the film progresses. (The scenes where DiCaprio is running around the jungle and trying to act like an animal are actually quite good.) If DiCaprio’s performance sometimes seems shallow or histrionic, that’s because that’s who Richard is meant to be as a character. (In one scene, Françoise even calls Richard out for being shallow and pretentious.) Just because Richard’s narrating and is played by the star of the film, that doesn’t meant that we’re necessarily meant to like him.
These are all things that I didn’t really understand until I rewatched the film. Maybe I was too immature the first time I saw the movie to understand what Boyle was really going for. Maybe I was just having an off night the first time that I watched The Beach. Or maybe my memory was just faulty. For whatever reason, I’m glad that I rewatched this often uneven but still rather interesting film. For all of its flaws. it was definitely better than I remembered.
Enjoy!
One of the surprise box office hits of 2017, 47 Meters Down tells the story of two sisters.
Kate (Claire Holt) is free-spirited, glamorous, and always up for a new adventure. Her older sister, Lisa (Mandy Moore) is more serious and responsible. If Kate craves constant stimulation, Lisa seeks stability. When we first meet them, they’re on vacation in Mexico. Lisa has just admitted to Kate that her boyfriend has dumped her because he feels that she’s too safe and that she doesn’t take enough risks. What is Kate’s solution to all of Lisa’s problems? How about going on a cage dive and seeing the sharks!?
Now, I should stop right here to point out the main strengths of 47 Meters Down. The main character is named Lisa. For me, this made her instantly sympathetic and I was able to relate to her, even though I’ve always been more like Kate. I can’t even begin to tell you how many movies could have been improved by renaming their main character Lisa.
Anyway, Lisa and Kate find a group of slightly seedy sailors who own a boat and a cage and soon, they’re off to see the sharks. Before getting into the water, both Lisa and Kate are warned about all the bad things that can happen during a dive. You can run out of oxygen. You can get eaten by a shark. You can resurface too quickly and get “the bends.” We here a lot about “the bends” over the course of the film. That’s when you get nitrogen bubbles in your brain and it can cause you to get delirious and hallucinate. It’s a pretty serious thing but I have to admit that I kept giggling whenever anyone said, “Be careful, you’ll get the bends!” because ….. listen, it just sounds silly, okay? I get that the bends are a real thing and that they’re really dangerous and that they should be taken seriously but “the bends’ just sounds like a punchline to a vulgar joke. Whenever I heard anyone in the film use the term, I was just like, “Wasn’t that Beto O’Rourke’s college band?”
Lisa is nervous about going in the water. Kate isn’t. It turns out that maybe Lisa had the right idea because, almost immediately after Lisa and Kate are submerged, the cables holding the cage snap and suddenly, the two sisters find themselves trapped 47 meters down. If they leave the cage and attempt to swim back up to the surface, they might very well get eaten by a shark. And if the sharks don’t get them, there’s always …. the bends! The men on the boat swear that they’re going to rescue the two sisters but who knows if they can be trusted. Meanwhile, the oxygen tanks will soon be empty….
47 Meters Down may have been a surprise box office success when it was released in 2017 but the critics absolutely hated it. Watching the film, it’s easy to see why. The critics who complained that the film was predictable had a point. However, the audiences who didn’t care what the critics thought had a point as well. Silly as the film may occasionally be, it works. When that cage sinks down into the murky darkness of the ocean, the film captures some very primal fears. When Lisa and Kate argue about what to do next, it’s a scene to which anyone who has a sibling should be able to relate. The relationship between Lisa and Kate felt authentic, which made the film’s final twist far more powerful than it had any right to be.
47 Meters Down is somewhat silly but it’s still an effectively entertaining look at sisters, divers, and the sharks that like to eat them.
