Noo! I hate the Decameron! But perhaps this’ll be a savage takedown!

Hm… still not sure…

Hey, it’s her!

I think it’s most of Baena’s troupe — so I guess he just got all his friends together and they went to Italy and made a little movie?

It’s pretty funny, and I have no idea where any of this is going. Which I like.

So… was this made by riffing on a few of the stories from the Decameron? It seems pretty improvised — that is, it has jokes, and they’re amusing, but they’re the kind any reasonably amusing group of people could come up with on the spot.

I’m so smart SMRT:

The screenplay is based on the first and second tales of the third day in The Decameron, a collection of novellas by Giovanni Boccaccio; however, the dialogue was improvised.

And it’s one of those films that the critics liked, but audiences loathed, I guess.

Yeah, I dunno. Perhaps you have to be Catholic to feel the sacrilisciousness of it all? It’s not that there aren’t fun bits, but… I’m also just kinda bored? I mean, it’s a goofy unpretentious little movie, but it could have had more zip. More and better jokes.

I almost feel guilty that I didn’t like this movie more, because it seems like everybody had a good time, and it’s got a lot of cute ideas. But nope — I was mostly bored. Sorry! I think it’d totally be a better movie if you were stoned.

The Little Hours. Jeff Baena. 2017. ⚂

The visuals are original and interesting, but this is basically one of those “two lines from that guy and then one guy from this guy” type of documentary (which I loathe). But Haynes manages to make it work — it’s pretty interesting without being fawning.

Velvet Underground. Todd Haynes. 2021. ⚄

The reason I got this movie is that I read an interview with the Pet Shop Boys, and they were so fascinated by this movie that they watched it multiple times. But they didn’t really say whether it was… good, I guess?

It’s not, really. I mean, it’s kinda interesting in that they allow themselves to come off as blithering morons, spouting stuff about “two rectangles coming together and forming a square” (right), but as someone who didn’t like Bros back then, this didn’t make me like them now.

But I guess it’s pretty well-made in many ways?

Bros: When The Screaming Stops. Joe Pearlman, David Soutar, Rupert Smith. 2018. ⚂