Matt Johnson got me to sign up for Mubi

I’ve seen an ad for a film Matt Johnson featured in last year and it’s been on my Insta feed so often I went fuck it, I’ll take a week of Mubi, watch as much shit as possible in seven days and cancel. I think I can get Challengers and some other shit. ( I can’t so it might be region locked)

Matt Johnson represents the unattractive nerds I simped after in high school, or the guy who made me laugh way too much but wasn’t going to date me anyway. So his movies are just magnets for me. This isn’t one of his movies, so now he’s much more natural in Matt and Mara, even though his name is literally Matt Johnson. He and Mara are writers and I’m gathering so much intel to justify staying out of this world. I thought this was muddily shot but it’s much cleaner now. I’m so determined to speed run as many movies as I can so if I can find any other shit of his, I’ll watch it.

I like the pace of this and the kind of improv/mumble core vibe it’s giving without that level of pretentiousness. It’s also one of those woman a bad marriage falls for someone else and you don’t know if she’ll leave the husband. It’s giving Adaptation, she’s a very muted Meryl Streep, less sexual or sexually driven and more seeking something with the fear of realising her desires. Her interactions with her students made me realise how little fucking one on one interaction we really got. Was I supposed to go to my lecturers and force them to help me with my independent study project? Did I cheat myself not going to an extra course? I was so disillusioned and disappointed and I felt unmotivated to do my absolute best. She doesn’t belong in the husband’s world at all. And the husband’s the classic “oh, he doesn’t get her really, he’s passive aggressive, he’s an arrogant musician who just plays when he wants. and has musician friends who are assholes to her”. But funnily, Matt’s not entirely kind, either, and I’ve dealt with that too, their attraction doesn’t make them nice to you, he’s kinda neggy too.

I’m not familiar with the director but if I can find the other film he did with Matt, I’ll watch it too, despite it possibly being the spiritual prequel to Matt and Mara. I can absolutely identify with poor Mara trying to engage with her students, her husband, her child and her colleagues and her own boss. Matt’s also unapologetically confused and ignorant to a lot of stuff but still knowledgable. He belongs more in her world, but I couldn’t live with a writer, personally. I’d be too pissy about any success and I couldn’t trust a man being mean to me or condescending about my work. Matt still has his “manic” moments but he’s not “Matt” the way I understand him, he’s grounded but still insistent about his opinions. Mara defends him to other people. I don’t know enough literature to even have a casual conversation, I can’t blend with artists, I’m a guy in A Crash Test Dummies song complaining about artists when you go out with them.

And I’m struggling to think of a “cheating” movie that didn’t portray the cheated upon as perfect and kind and not deserving of being cheated on. It’s inexcusable to some regardless, but narratively it’s integral for the audience to at least understand the motivations of the main characters’ intentions. Even if nothing happens, like Lost in Translation, people will still see emotional cheating, and it’s still important to make their significant others less appealing by comparison.

Mara does a very depressed Bevis as Cornholio impression with her turtleneck. I feel like there’s a meta commentary about Matt as a director and creator being off the wall and controversial. He’s hiding behind death of the author stuff and being completely off the wall. Mara’s husband dips on her because he has to do another musician thing and Matt does it for her. He takes her to Niagara Falls. They kiss under the water, a nice reference to them in the square jumping over one of those fountains that come up out of a grate (I thought they were in Perth, which is the other reason I stopped on the trailer). Her friend’s already mentioned conferences are just hotbeds for affairs with likeminded people who are in their element. I’m so glad I never got this far, I have opinions nobody gives a shit about.

Matt runs into another familiar face, which will likely affect his “relationship” with Mara, strained now because she booked a separate room on another floor for him. He’s bailed on her obviously so she gets room service and refuses to go meet him with this other girl. I’ve seen that trope before, that was Bill Murray in bed with the lounge singer and now Scar Jo is pissed as hell, especially when she finds the earring of the most famous person at the conference, they fight and he tells her he loves her, she accuses him of emotional manipulation. She goes back to her husband. I prefer the pacing again, this is a lot of quick, impactful moments, we don’t linger between anything.

Matt’s father’s also dying and he passes and Mara’s immediately sympathetic and he has to face the bureaucracy  of death. Including dressing for a funeral, and the writer (I identify with this I think people believe I would’ve coughed up the most profound wedding vows or a eulogy of great import and I don’t have fucking words for this in reality) doesn’t know what to say. The funeral becomes another awkward moment for them both removing a crucifix to lie it on the ground despite Matt not wanting to touch it. 

I also saw A Ghost Story ages ago and that was hardcore mumble core I missed all the dialogue but there’s a moment the husband shares his song only we don’t get to hear it. She reconnects with the husband, takes a dry cleaning receipt, puts it in the book he wrote full of her ideas and it ends there. The trailer had this clip but there’s no context to tell you it’s the end. I like it, I don’t know if I’d buy it but I’m glad I saw it.

I’m bummed as I’m not seeing a lot on Mubi so I need to do searches. I need to do some digging for a week.

Heavenly Creatures…

I had a friend when I was eight or nine I think, who was probably so desperate to escape her reality she made up stories of cartoon characters and celebrities coming to her house and doing stuff, some of it way too explicit for a kid to be saying. We went outside where something was buried, (I think she said it was a kangaroo) and she had a story about it. She was imaginative, even before I was, and I basically believed her. Her sister had cancer, and her mother was pretty mean about how badly she was doing at school. I had a few friends like that whose parents were just assholes to them for not doing well when they might have actually unaddressed difficulties.

I haven’t seen Heavenly Creatures for ages and I forgot how much Juliet was like this girl, full of cheerful fantasies she gives to Pauline, who’s so enraptured with Juliet she joins in on the fantasy. Juliet’s certain too her novel will be published so Pauline gets caught up in her own writing, and her poem is absolutely stunning.

I’m not a Peter Jackson fan as such, but I considered this my favourite film of his. I forgot how theatrical Winslet is besides Pauline’s churlish silence. It’s such a chaotic film, his camera work is frenetic, his sets have a lot of intricate detail, the sepia tones reminiscent of old photos. Everything’s operatic and sweeping and romantic, almost in a maniacal sense. You get a lot of Bridge to Terabithia vibes, by the Lovely Bones he had more money to create this fantastic worlds the girls basically hallucinate, if you want an actual folie a duex, it’s this story. It’s a tragedy with some comedy, basically the girls use dissociation and fantasy to escape their reality.

I also had nuns come to me in the religious hospital I was in (Mummy and Daddy would never put me in the poor’s hospital). Jackson’s penchant for dealing with pantomime horror and gore is also put to good use, someone else could’ve made a rather dull or twee representation of this true story. And people probably assume Titanic was Winslet’s first role, when it was this one. She really outshines everyone, and Melanie Lynskey doesn’t get enough props for how talented she is, she wasn’t just the sappy stalker neighbour she played in Two and A Half Men, she can perform nuanced accents really well, most people never knew she was from New Zealand. She’s great in Yellowjackets. But it feels like a repeat of Ghost World where Thora Birch was just a good an actress as ScarJo but by her own admission, wasn’t “pretty enough” or willing to be pretty enough to get the same roles ScarJo did. Winslet went on to win more movie roles, Lynskey stuck to independent films, but I haven’t detected her being bitter at all.

The clay people scenes stuck in my head as much as the very Lynchian moment the girls run at the camera screaming. I assume this is part of his imagination so it’s impressive he could be this creative with the story. He felt it was better to focus on their relationship rather than the trial regarding the murder. He’s pieced together such a believable fantasy realm full of romantic movie moments, Juliet sweeping down the stairs to Pauline like a movie heroine, shades of Gone with the Wind in the staging and music and soft lighting. I still find the clay people so off-putting but such an ingenious way to bring you into their world, their love scene is less graphic by translating it through this weird clay people orgy in the castle, and he gets away with lots of fake blood and body horror that he’s known for. Their obsession with film and Orson Wells is more immersive and bizarre, and again Jackson gets to play with horror and thriller tropes to include in this amazingly cohesive blend of movie genres.

I feel like the ageing makeup on the father is a bit over the top, I don’t know if he looked too young at the time. I like Juliet’s father comes off as the villain of the story, despite Jackson saying it was a murder story with no villain. However, Pauline and Juliet defend him more than anyone and he’s the most keen to split them up without them realising. This dichotomy is well explored. Her parents were absolute assholes, they lie they’re still together after privately divorced, which was a common occurrence at the time, you think the British are proper but it’s all a smokescreen to cover up their negative aspects. If they’d been alive now, society might’ve treated them better even if they’d had unhealthy thoughts. I have this thing about blaming Society in media whenever a character is conflicted or adversely affected by a social norm being forced on them, that if you removed the norm, they’d likely have avoided their misfortune. Putting it all in a diary isn’t a good idea obviously, but Pauline wasn’t planning on getting caught, most moiderers don’t.

Gay conversion therapy also features in the story. Pauline’s affections for Juliet are “unwholesome” and also reciprocated, so rather than have Juliet’s father “fix” Juliet, he decides Pauline’s parents should get her fixed instead, it must all be Pauline’s horrible influence. She’s mentally disturbed, essentially, but going through a phase she’ll grow out of it, but they can also “zap” it out of her when the technology becomes available. None of that will work. I don’t think they were necessarily unwell, just traumatised and desperate to escape their oppressive existences, the courts declared them sane but were less certain if homosexuality was at play given Pauline doesn’t admit same sex attraction to any other woman. And homosexuality was an illness, practically a comorbidity of insanity, or intrinsically linked. Using Pauline’s diary obviously excludes Juliet’s thoughts but there’s so much for Winslet to work with from Pauline’s account of her. Juliet’s letters are included.

Some people also need to take a lesson in when not to use any music at all. The murder scene is interlaced with the fantasy of them separated for good. You can only hear screams trapped in an empty void. No music, and the score is otherwise present and used for effect, but the lack of it gives the scene more weight and terror. Crash evidently abuses music for emotional effect to a manipulative degree, as do a lot of other movies.

The trial is then a footnote to the story, set to tragic music, the two were told to stay apart as a condition of their release, they were too young for the death penalty. But the separation condition wasn’t true, apparently. And Pauline has no individual Wikipedia page, bizarrely, Juliet does, she managed to go by a different name and get published and wasn’t found out to be a murderess until much later. I vaguely remember a documentary that brought the murder to my attention, and I’m always fascinated by romances that were broken apart by horrid circumstances. Sapphic yearning is a whole sub-genre of romantic and erotic fiction, you could have really exploited this aspect but Jackson’s respectful in his portrayal I just want to know the reaction people had to his clay people orgy scene. It obviously survived scripting, pre-production, production and pre-screening, and he’s kind of New Zealand’s answer to Jim Henson, having his own production company full of people who can come up with these costumes, it’s sort of his brand. I don’t want to see Meet the Feebles or any of his older films, but I remember seeing them in video stores as a kid before I realised Jackson was behind them, so when he was given Lord of the Rings, it felt worth pointing out his background. He’s been lauded for his practical filmmaking, I do appreciate Lord of the Rings from a film perspective I just don’t love them to sit through them multiple times. So this will remain my favourite film of his while I’m not inclined to explore any other film of his once or more than a couple of times. I was irritated by the Hobbit being three movies, which wasn’t his plan, we collectively know where the blame lies for that shit.