Florence Foster Jenkins. Stephen Frears. 2016.

Hm… why did I buy this, then? And on bluray no less. But just 2K.

Oh, right, it’s by Stephen Frears, and I remember him doing a good movie just like 30 years ago.

Oh, wow, I thought I was exaggerating, but I was understating it: I remember liking My Beautiful Laundrette in 1985, and then not liking Prick Up Your Ears in 1987, and since then I may not have seen any of his movies.

Weird but possibly true.

So now I’m curious: Is he any good at all?

I like Meryl Streep, but everybody does. Hugh Grant is likeable, of course, but not really like you know good.

I’m half an hour in, and it’s a somewhat odd movie. Of course, Florence Foster Jenkins is a figure of ridicule, and Streep sings wonderfully awful. But Frears has chosen to add a lot of pathos, making this veer between tragedy and comedy at the drop of the hat.

But it works. The funny bits are funny and the serious bits are touching. I’m dreading the inevitable third act when All The Drama has to happen, but I’m guessing it’s going to be enjoyable until then, and then the rest of the movie will be unbearable.

[time passes]

The structure of this movie is quite unusual, and there’s no third act per se. Instead it’s the second third that’s the boring bit, and then the last third is all the boring normal bits that were edited out of the first two parts.

Or did makemkv rip the bluray wrong? In any case, it’s kinda interesting, even if I don’t know whether it’s quite successful.

OH! IT WAS A MAKEMKV ERROR!

There’s two .mkv files here, and the second is longer and seems to be in a more… normal… order.

No now I don’t know how to rate this thing. The version I say, which was edited down by the makemkv program, to 1:30 was quite fun, but I saw most of it out of order, and missed half an hour?

Ripping errors should happen more often.

Looking for a Thrill. Braden King. 2005.

So this is a … documentary from Thrill Jockey? (That’s a record label.) I’ve had it for what seems like decades, but I’ve never watched it.

This is basically a bunch of people talking at the camera about music with choppy glitchy editing. It’s kinda charming.

The concept is… talking about the first or the most important music experience they had?

Some of the stories are fun and some er not. It’s generally enjoyable, but kinda messy.

A complication is that the DVD ripped in a weird way: It ended up like a gazillion five-to-ten minute scenes, some repeating, so I may not have seen all the scenes.

The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Her. Ned Benson. 2013.

So this is the second (or perhaps the other) movie in this diptych.

This is a very different movie than Colon Him. It’s got, like, better actors. I mean, Isabelle Huppert, Viola Davis, William Hurt… It’s also got a different look, with more reds instead of blues, and… basically a storyline that would be somewhat incomprehensible if you hadn’t seen Colon Him first.

I like it!

Anyway! This movie reminded me of one of the saddest thing about small budget movies: They can’t afford to use real music, so when they have a key scene that requires music, they use a track from Now That’s Kinda Something That Sounds Like An 80s Hit But Totally Isn’t, So It’s Cheap vol 97. But I love that they found the money to do the Cat Powers cover song at least. It was a perfect moment.

I think this movie started off really strong. We don’t quite know what’s going on and it’s all very fresh and it’s all orange instead of blue as in the Colon Him movie and I kinda liked this more than that movie.

But then it flounders. It’s like they don’t quite know what to do with it. I can totally see why Weinstein wanted to cut together the interesting bits (and the better performances) from this movie with the more straightforward storyline from Colon Him.

The Rashomon scenes are fun but aren’t really that interesting.