Am I too late to the party for Ally McBeal analysis?

I just watched 4 episodes of Ally McBeal last night. Here are some quick takes:

My take is that the show's appeal is that Ally is the unapproachable hot girl in high school and the show gives you a chance to live in her world.

This is reinforced by the fact that Ally acts like an adolescent: she has cutesy/girly mannerisms, she is pouty and has low self-esteem, she one of the most outwardly emotional people I’ve ever seen on screen or in real life, she escapes through fantasies, and she is overruled by her hormones. Although she tries to maintain that she is doing fine in life (she is) and that finding the right guy is just the last piece of the puzzle in her life goals, sometimes she’s overwhelmed with frustration.

What’s ironic is that this show is simultaneously really progressive in that Ally is highly capable, highly compassionate, and does very well in managing in what can only be described even by the standards of 20 years ago as a hostile work environment.

More than anything else, the show is just a really sexually charged one with really beautiful people on it (perhaps, Peter MacNichol won an Emmy because he’s not conventionally attractive and somehow managed to feel like he belonged). Nearly every time Ally meets a guy, I’m instantly put into will-they-or-won’t-they mode with guest star of the week. In one of the episodes I saw, a homeless guy derides her when she passes by (they do), in another episode, an obese man goes up against her in court (they don’t but he wants to), in another episode, a high school student is her client and she engineers a plan to boost his confidence by being his prom date. I was seriously wondering considering shows wouldn’t be cancelled back then for that, if she and the prom date would (thankfully they don’t).

Ally is a prime example of the Hollywood homely trope, wherein a star is so conventionally attractive that it's difficult to buy that her character wouldn't get dates. The in-universe excuse is that Ally is too busy to have anyone outside of fellow lawyers outside of her circle. That might make sense, but in the same way that Seinfeld feels dated because a number of their scenarios would have played out differently had the internet existed, I wonder if online dating might have cured her man problem. Ally's problem (from the sample that I saw) wasn't retainng or developing relationships. It was meeting guys. Sure, she would have had to sort out the losers from the winners from the hundreds of messages she would have received, BUT on the show she seemed willing to go out with losers because it was too much of a time investment to find the winners.

Dirty Dancing (1987) Review

So many prominent films from the 1980s are coming-of-age stories that for someone with a blind spot for this decade, it’s not easy to differentiate: Which of the John Hughes films are must-watch (answer: probably none, if the overrated film The Breakfast Club is any indication) and where do they stack up against Stand by Me, Heathers, Lean on Me, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Outsiders or Risky Business? This even spread to the decade’s landmark films in other genres: The Oscar-winning melodrama Ordinary People was told through a teenager’s perspective; one of the greatest romcoms involved a boy in a man’s body (Big); the 80s-50s nostalgia connection involves teenage protagonists in Back to the Future and Peggy Sue Got Married; the great rock biopic La Bamba involved a 17-year-old, and the sports/coming-of-age hybrid Karate Kid also fits in here.

Somewhere in here are some true gems that might get overlooked in the classic film cannon were they not engulfed in this trend. If there’s any justice, Dirty Dancing is one of them (and don’t forget, it also has to compete with Footloose, and Flashdance among musical teen entries from the 80s).

In the 1950s and 1960s, Jewish families from the Northeast would create their own little summer Eden in the Catskills where Borscht belt humor (think Rodney Daingerfield and Billy Crystal) was created among other cultural inventions. It’s in this exclusive subculture, that Dirty Dancing is set and the film gets the little details of Jewish family life down to a T (as someone who has lived among many Jewish subcultures, I would know).

Our heroine, Frances “Baby” Houseman (Jennifer Grey), is the typical Jewish-American princess: Sheltered, ambitious, and a little too motivated daddy’s approval (Jerry Orbauch). Naturally, it’s a fantasy of a Jewish girl to be attracted by the shiksah, and the camera isn’t particularly subtle that when the burly Johnny Castle (Patrick Swayzee) first emerges in Baby’s eyesight, she’s entranced.

The story has a Romeo-and-Juliet set-up with a strong classist angle. Beyond the servants and campers dichotomy, there’s an extra division between the Ivy League waiters and the dance instructors without that educational pedigree. Considering these quasi-Jews would only be one generation removed at most from being barred from the Ivy Leagues which were selective to WASPs. It’s a strange plot contrivance. Besides, aren’t the dancers the lives of the party? Couldn’t the campers have chalked up their lack of Ivy League education to a choice: Why attend school when you have showbiz in your veins? The most famous thing about these camps in the Catskills was that they berthed Borscht Belt comedians and Jews counted among their ranks the Gershwins and Flo Ziegfeld, so they surely had a respect for the entertainment industry

Even Baby’s saint of a father has some black-and-white views about what seems like a pretty arbitrary division through our modern lens. But, hey, it’s the 80s and we need clear-cut heroes and villains. Further down the villain end is womanizing waiter Robbie who not only impregnates the head dancer (Penny, Cynthia Rhodes), but is pretty amoral about his responsibility for it. He catalyzes much of the plot.

In order to get her money for an abortion, Baby has to take over Penny’s shift which slowly transforms a begrudging co-existence between Johnny and to a full-on romance for the ages. Whatever stage of their relationship this is, the passion is evident and Jennifer Grey has a knack for physical comedy: The montage of her reveling in her new dance moves on the bridge connecting the counselors and campers (how symbolic) is precious. More so, Grey’s Baby is a dynamic character in all the little ways that matter. Near the begging of the movie, she’s bold and outspoken towards someone who threatens her sister, but as she’s dragged further into class conflict, she’s less sure of when to use her words and it shows up in subtle inflections in Grey’s voice.

A lot of the coming-of-age movies are surface-deep. This is one that is grounded in a specific place and time, with characters who are iconic of those places. Plus, the emotion is simply overwhelming. “All the feels” as the young kids say.

Movies Named After Place Names

I’m currently in Atlanta, and something that popped up on my TV was a show named after the city.

I don't love the show for reasons I'll discuss in the post-script*, but I can't help but be bothered by the
sheer brazenness in thinking that your little narrative defines an entire sitcom. The story is about a young man trying to break into hip-hop culture, and because Atlantans consider themselves the capital of hip-hop, it makes some degree of sense, to call a show Atlanta. It is also filmed in Atlanta, so there are recognizable landmarks.

Still, it’s kind of obnoxious to think that your TV show or movie speaks to an entire city. I’ve talked to a couple of locals who say that it’s more of the hip-hop experience than the Atlanta hip-hop experience. Why would a show even want the pressure of appealing to millions of residents of a city, each with their own idea of what Atlanta is?

This is an interesting subgenre of TV shows and films that have tenuous relationships to their place name titles.

Films have varying degrees to how much they use settings as character.

The serialized TV show Ozark has the location baked into the plot. A money launderer is held at gun point by a mobster and improvises a scheme in self-preservation to use the Ozarks as a base of operation. The Ozarks is a stand-in for a shady underworld, but the show goes beyond that. The degree to which the audience surrogates (Jason Bateman and Laura Linney) succeed in their new environment is based on the degree to which they understand the social complexities of this underworld.

In contrast, the 2020 film Arkansas is a dark comedy about two drug pushers on the bottom of the ladder who are forced to wait out the orders of drug kingpin. It takes place in the vague back country South. It’s in the category of films that could take place in the eponymous title, but could also take place anywhere.

Garden State (2004) and (although I'll probably get some fights here) Nebraska (2013) are two films that also fall in the “can happen anywhere” category, but they likely have place name titles because of what is says about their creators

Alexander Payne’s Nebraska, this can be a point of identity for the film maker more than the film. Alexander Payne is from Omaha and it is enough of a source of pride for him that he set his first three films in Nebraska. The film isn’t any sort of socio-economic essay on Nebraska. It’s not even set in Nebraska as it is a road trip through multiple states. But, it represents a director returning to his roots, which parallels a character returning to his roots.

Garden State, a breakthrough indie by then-Scrubs star Zach Braff, has little that can physically place the film in New Jersey. The film revolves around a marginally succesful actor returning from L.A.. to his hometown to reconnect with his friends, father, and fall in love with a manic pixie dream girl. If L.A. Is the big city that people go to to discover their dreams (case study: La La Land), New Jersey can be seen as the anti-LA. It's the densest state in the country, but it's almost entirely dominated by suburbs. In other, the kinds of boring white-bread ho-hum lives where people originate from before making a big move. The character finds enlightenment from returning to his roots.

Does it work? Largely, because Braff made it well-known through his publicity tour and an SNL monologue (in which cast members danced as landmarks of Newark) that it's a love letter to his home state. Still, it's more a symbolic relationship than a real one.

On the other end of the spectrum, Fargo (1996), is a film that represents the Coen Brothers obfuscation of identity. For those that have read interviews with the brothers, they are trolling creators who like to poke fun at any psychoanalysis of their work. The film largely takes place in Minnesota and plays on Minnesota’s geographical tropes but the film’s identity is named Fargo almost as if it is a prank.

On this end, the epic 1973 film Chinatown has nothing to do with Chinatown. The title represents a bad memory and psychological block for the protagonist. It has little to do with the actual neighborhood in Los Angeles. This is a blessing in disguise because if they actually did show the Chinese population of the city as part of a villainous scheme to usurp city control, it wouldn’t be anything but racist.

The more I like into this, the more I find that films like Jim Jarmusch's Mystery Train (1989); the Coen Brothers' O Brother Where Art Thou (2000), Burn After Reading (2008), and A Serious Man (2009); and John Sayles Matewan (1987) and Sunshine State (2002) have the most to do with their settings. And they don't even have manipulative titles.

*I have a largely positive opinion of Donald Glover but the show turns me off in multiple ways. The characters are misogynistic, depressing, and don’t even treat each other well. I view it more as not my cup of tea, than problematic. My problem is more that the critics tend to rain hard on shows of White comedians under the “problematic” banner, whereas they view Black sitcoms as authentic cultural celebrations. In reality, they are both cultural artifacts to be played with and analyzed: Nothing more, nothing less.

Critiquing Some of RogerEbert's More Woke Reviews

 This is a cursory listing of ways in which the website RogerEbert.com primarily preaches one school of thought through their reviews. That school of thought, whether pejoratively described as woke or generously described as championing identity politics, is not something that many readers and movie fans subscribe to as seen by the comment sections of some of these articles or the differences in Rotten Tomato user scores and critic scores in films where identity politics is an issue.

I am one of those users. I am a lifelong democrat who campaigned on the ground in swing states last year to get Democrats elected to office in the presidential , gubernatorial and senator races but I differ from the reviewers in their point of view. I believe that race, gender, and sexual orientation have significant impacts socio-economically but they can be dangerously overused in explaining and proscribing solutions to the world and this is rapidly pervading the entirely critical sphere to the point where we skip steps in critical thought nowadays.

Here is a list of some reviews that I remembered off the top of my head. I will note that when I tried to find more examples from these ones that came from memory, I found many more even-keeled reviews to the credit of the site

Shang Chi and the Legend of the Seven Rings (2021)-Nick Allen takes a Marvel exec’s comment out of context to frame him as cancel-worthy and gets called out for it in the comments.

Uncle Frank (2020)-Odie Henderson condemns the movie because he prefers films to preach hatred towards anyone who has ever had evolving views towards homophobic people, by refusing to sanction a film in which characters are redeemable (to the site’s credit, two separate reviewers defended against the highly publicized criticism of making a racist redeemable in “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri).”

These people are perfectly in character for the year 1969 — hell, I know gay people who had reasonable family members be as baffled by their life choices as recently as the mid-2000s — and there’s little evidence that anyone but Stephen Root’s character was abusive to the protagonist. Henderson’s scorched Earth policy to anyone who might have ever been homophobic is one school of thought but the review doesn’t really speak to an audience who might prefer other ways of dealing with homophobia.

Isle of Dogs (2018)-Odie Henderson finds Wes Anderson’s cultural appropriation enough of a taboo to keep him from recommending the movie. Henderson is a number of critics that subscribes to cultural appropriation as largely a negative act and Wes Anderson as a guilty culprit. I happen to think cultural appropriation is rarely a sinful act and some popular feminist critics such as Lindsey Ellis agree that it’s been a neutral act and many have pointed out cultural appropriation has been a necessary ingredient of cultural development that has rarely discriminated between oppressor or oppressed.

Ironically, a film like Slumdog Millionaire released before woke thought became mainstream did not face legitimate criticism at all and many including Spike Lee noted that the cultural appropriation goal posts had significantly shifted when Kathryn Bigelow made Detroit in 2017 and was bombarded with (in my opinion, unfounded) criticism for her skin color.

Set It Up (2018)-The review largely stays away from identity politics but Matt Zoller Seitz either implies the film is at fault for failing to note that Lucy Liu and Taye Diggs’ characters faced more obstacles than white characters in climbing the corporate ladder or simply wants to enlighten us about what he believes to be this inequality in society. My school of thought is that race is a macroscopic socio-economic measure rather than a one-size-fits-all measure. Therefore, I would say that it is likely those two met more obstacles than white people, but not a definite and it doesn’t have to be a defining aspect of their character.

Val (2021)-Matt Zoller Seitz continues to display a lionization of POC, women, and LGBT populations and uses straightness, whiteness, and maleness as defining attributes often negatively.

Only MZS can answer this (and I have briefly discussed it with him, to his credit) but I wonder whether MZS would not come down nearly as hard on Tracy Morgan or NBA players of the 90s-00s who blatantly disregarded coaches and made their lives hell. My point of view is that any difficult black actors or NBA players deserve empathy as much as someone like Val Kilmer)

What I don’t understand is what MZS isn’t expecting if he clearly wasn’t a fan of Kilmer and my reaction is if the point of writing a review is to speak to your audience, isn’t the audience for a review on a documentary on Val Kilmer, a group of people who don’t have anywhere near the same level of beef with the guy.

As for the specific beef, Kilmer is clearly showing his ability to be professionally difficult by even putting the Frankenheimer tape in the movie and he lets Oprah have the last word rather than film his response to it. Was MZS expecting him to spend the whole movie talking about what a piece of trash he is? He got throat cancer so he’s not in a great state anyway.

With regard to his marriage, an article as recently as 2019 reported Whalley didn’t allege abuse but rather abandonment of his two kids leaving them homeless. I’d hate to not take her at her word, but it’s clear in the video that his two kids are still talking to him unless everything is staged. It should also be noted that if this is a hatchet job on Whaley, it’s a poor one as he says nothing negative about his ex-wife in the entire film.

If Zoller Seitz were to look at life from Val Kilmer’s shoes (which is the point of this film), he would not define himself as a privileged straight, male. Not all people think of life in an oversimplified dichotomy. He would simply think about his life in its regrets and nostalgia. In a mirror accusation of the manic pixie dream girl character or the magic negro tropes, Val Kilmer is a complete person and doesn’t exist to highlight socioeconomic disparities between minority communities.

Tag (2018)-Glenn Kenny essentially argues that white people are not allowed to have fun unless they signal to the audience that they’re thinking about black oppression while having fun. I had trouble believing this was an actual published review when I read it.

Mr. Corman (2020)-I’d argue that reviewer Roxana Hadadi’s insistence on reading the work through a black-and-white (forgive the pun) lens misses the point of the work.

To me, “Mr. Corman” isn’t a work centered around examining white male privilege. Instead, it’s about a white, male character in a funk whose journey towards being a happier person involves being a more selfless person. In the character’s moral orientation, being a better feminist and ally to people of color is important. I agree with the Hadadi that the show is bland but the “finger wagging” is done by Hadadi herself in explaining how the show should be rather than what the show is.

Powerpoint Presentation: Films of the 1980s

 

For Power Point DC, I pulled together a Power Point of the 1980s on film to promote my film of the month club (you would have to click on following me).

 

These were the films I picked and what I riffed off of:

Any Which Way You Can-Clint Eastwood gets into random fist fights, loses Sondra Locke, gains a monkey. It’s better than it looks

Cannonball Run-Is there anything about this film that isn’t fun to talk about? Based on a series of no-holds-barred cross-country races in the 1970s in which cars drove some 150 miles per hour. Roger Moore plays a man who got practical surgery to look like Roger Moore; Jamie Farr plays a shiekh who falls in love with a car hop in 30 seconds minutes; Tony Danza gets paired with a monkey; Terry Bradshaw is in the film; Farrah Fawcett givesboring lectures about how much she loves trees and the men still want her because she’s Farrah Fawcett; and there’s a frankenstein-like doctor who’s sole qualification is that he has a syringe with a mystery substance in it.

A View to a Kill-This James Bond film certainly has some humorously jarring elements: Christopher Walken plays a villain with Christopher Walkenish speech affectations; James Bond escapes death by disrobing into bed with Grace Jones and expecting her to sleep with him; there’s a cheesy California Girls sequence, etc. However, I wouldn’t call this the worst James Bond film because it’s not boring. It’s zany, but boring is the cardinal sin (looking at you “For Your Eyes Only”). 

Cocktail-This film is among the most Tom Cruisiest of Cruise films. It will also make you hate bartenders

Bronco Billy-This movie is on my top films of all time as it embodies the found family trope among a group of misfits who pose as cowboys in a send-off to Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show. It’s Clint Eastwood at his hammiest

Cocoon-One of a number of 1980s with aliens who are just there (The Abyss is another example). They’re not particularly violent, they’re arrival is greeted with total indifference, and they’re net effect is curing erectile dysfunction in old people. I also talked about how Wilford Brimley is best known for inappropriate commercials, and Don Ameche earned a paper-thin makeup Oscar here.

Passage to India-There wasn’t as much to riff off here, except the abstract concept of discovering the real India. It’s a long film with a capital “L” as it was directed by David Lean of epics such as Lawrence of Arabia and Dr. Zhivago. It’s an excellent period piece with an Oscar-winning performance from Peggy Ashcroft. I reviewed it here: Passage to India

Short Circuit-The inspiration to Wake, Rattle, and Roll. Both Passage to India and Short Circuit have some amusing (though others might consider offensive) brownface

Giving a Second Chance to Shows That Lost My Attention

 Upon learning that my friend’s trepidations about watching films over two hours was that his attention span usually couldn’t handle it, I found myself in similar territory. Blame the advent of cell phones and YouTube but I’m pretty heavily aware that over the past 15 years, I’m significantly dumber than before.

Because it’s not good to have a brain that turns into mush if it has to pay attention to something longer than a half hour, I try to actively train my brain. I try to read books and if I can ever finish one, it feels like compling a marathon. I also think that there are a number of serialized hour-long shows that can be a slog, even if they tell a good story. Sure, we can all jump at the Americans, Homelands, or Breaking Bads, but we’re looking at it the wrong way. The joy of watching TV isn’t to latch onto the most adrenaline-producing high and ride it out; it’s to find a challenging show like Florida Project or The Resort and stick it out through the exposition, to an even greater reward.

I traditionally do a list of top 12 shows with 10 runners-up, and there’s always enough shows (dramas, comedies) to fill up that list. However, looking over my list last year, there’s a ton of shows I gave up on like Mrs. Davis, Big Door Prize, Cleopatra, Transatlantic, and I hobbled to the finish line with The Diplomat.

On the other hand, some of the dramas I did finish like “Locke and Key”, “One Piece,” or “Fubar.” These are pretty flawed works.

I cannot logistically afford to watch all the good art there is produced on a yearly basis. There’s not enough time. As a serious (or whatever word you want to use) consumer of TV, I owe it to myself to watch a substantial amount of challenging output.

For years, I have understood that serialized television can have a slow burn at the beginning as you sift. The big question I ask myself is whether I am challenging myself by what I watch. It’s far easier to watch “Office” or “Futurama” reruns than it is to dive into a new show. In that spirit, I’ve tried to revisit a few shows and see if I can make it through the full season (what I consider to the measure of completism):

In this tradition, I’m giving a second look to a few seasons of shows that didn’t hit me off the bat:

Mrs. Davis (S1, Peacock)-This is a bizarre show about a nun battling against some form of A.I. that has taken over the entire planet. It leans really hard on style and jagged storytelling. For instance, the nun character’s relationship with Jesus, is presented as a story of a couple with a chaste partner who doesn’t want to copulate until marriage. It’s not immediately apparent but reading a recap will tell you that he’s supposed to a version of Jesus that only she can see- a move that deliberately opens more doors than it closes. It’s often a cardinal sin of a reviewer to admit they don’t get something, but let’s face it: These metaphors and other literary tricks push the story too far into confusion, and I had to stop again after four episodes lest I dig myself deeper into plot holes I’m not invested in.

Never Have I Ever (S3, Netflix)­-This show made my top 12 list in previous years, but with the long breaks between seasons, I tend to treat each season like a brand new show. In the third season, I initially shied away because it seemed like a lot of the drama was becoming circular: Paxton, Ben, Dev, and the other characters were rotating romantic partners like musical chairs. I also have to admit, I felt like it was shoehorning in another lesbian plot with Eleanor and Aneesa. Upon second viewing, I’m appreciating genuine care to detail in Paxton’s character: He’s legitimately stepping out of the castes of popularity that define him and finding his own way, which is accurate to the high school experience.

Cruel Summer (S2, Netflix)-The first season of this time-jumping team show made my honorable mention, for it’s interesting take on today’s cyberbullying climate on how lightning quick status can change between two high school doppelgangers. The second one dragged a bit and lowered the stakes from an abduction and abuse of a teenager over several months, to the leak of a sex tape. The characters are decent (in particular, that of an exchange student who integrates well within a family) and the Pacific Northwest has a decent sex of place, but it’s mostly basic teenage drama. Unlike its predecessor, the timescapes hardly mesh with each other to form a rich tapestry: The characters just get more jaded and goth. About six episodes in, I’m considering giving up.

Sunny (S1, Apple)-Set in a near alternate future in Japan, the great Rashida Jones plays an American (Suzy). She’s a bitter and pragmatic ex-pat who plans to go to Japan to live a life of solitude (a cultural practice known as “hikikomori”), until she accidentally falls in love with a programming genius named Masa (Hidetoshi Nishijima). The series revolves around Suzy tracking her husband’s disappearance and uncovering the secrets of his past. There’s a mysterious pollyanish AI robot (the titular Sunny) that also figures into the plot.

Rashida does a great job playing against type as a kill joy, but dour characters don’t always make for engaging television, and she tows the line. This is particularly the case where the expectation of a show set in in Japan — a land of endless fascination and hyperstimulation to our Western eyes –sets up our hopes in a certain direction that doesn’t involve the protagonist moping in a pool of ennui.

There aren’t a lot of positive characters to balance out Sunny and cancel out the net dreariness. The optimistic robot Sunny is meant to be a foil but AI characters don’t float my boat. Half the reason I wouldn’t call Star Trek: The Next Generation great TV is because I never bought Data’s struggle “to be human.” After a lull in episode three, the show started picking up for me once again.

Russian Doll (S2, Netflix)-I didn’t initially begin this season because I figured “why would a show about breaking out of a closed time loop need a second season?” Would Groundhog Day have been improved with a sequel? This season’s existence is a stretch: There’s little reason for Allen to still be in the picture, but the show at least acknowledges it (re: Nadia’s best friend (Greta Lee) getting jealous) and the show mostly exists because TV deserves more Natasha Lyonne in odd situations. The second series is an absurdist, quasi-comic time travel saga in which Lyonne is trying to correct mistakes in her family’s past (she inhabits the bodies of her mother and grandmother) to recover the family treasures: Gold bullion that her Eastern European family invested in when the tragedy of the Holocaust created a distrust in banks. There is some major early-on-set confusion in the pilot if you’re consuming this in a vacuum. Once you catch up on the internet, episode five hits a major speed bump when our heroine jumps from her mother to her grandmother’s body.

My Lady Jane (S1, Amazon)-A whimsical period piece set in Tudor-era England centering around a spunky heroine who wants more from life than being in the idle rich. She’s the live personification of every Disney Princess, only she’s semi-historically based on a woman who briefly became Queen for nine days. The interesting angle should be Jane’s personality and her interest as an amateur scientist in an era in which science was batshit insane conjecture. Instead, the series takes a turn towards a trite will-they-or-won’t-they art and fantasy (her paramour is an on-again-off-again centaur seeking a cure). Four episodes in, this isn’t on the top of my priority list, but it might be worth another chance if The Decameron (another satiric period piece that recently came out on streaming) doesn’t work out.

Introducing Sunshine State

 The Quintessential Florida film: Sunshine State

When I first saw this film, I was not yet a film person but had likely just declared my major in geography: the study of humanity through looking at regional characteristics, definitions and groupings; the flow of people; the shaping of landscapes; and the flow of people.

One rule of geographic landscape reading is that no inhabited place is uninteresting. There’s something of value in studying the landscape of Allentown, Pennsylvania, even if you’re brain would be stimulated into overdrive trying to figure out how the hell Las Vegas ended up the way it did.

Still, Florida is more like a swampy Las Vegas with much richer news stories and even the non-geographically minded can get fascinated by it. It has spurned the Seth Meyers segment "Fake or Florida" and, in the age of the meme, the popular website Florida Man.

So where does it all begin?

Due to a combination of lack of valuable gems, inhospitable weather, and difficulty of developing on top of swampland (improbably turned into tourism), Florida was settled after the West.

However, air conditioning was invented and people like Henry Flagler provided the infrastructure, Florida paved the way for some of the early trends of vacationing, retirement, and winter snowbirds started appearing here.

Florida was heavily sold to tourists in the same manner of the first European to lay eyes on it: The Fountain of Youth. But every group that used Florida as its dream seemingly ran over the other: The Russian mob, the Quebecois, the Black population, New York snowbirds, and the Hispanic migrants.

National Geographic once described Miami as the modern-day Venice: Where art, wealth, and vice meet and sometimes produce spectacular results. One interesting factoid: When Joel Gurreau published the Nine Nations of North America in the 1980s, he divided North America into nine formal and functional regions, suggesting that state boundaries isn't really how things work. He suggested that South Florida was a unique Latin American bastion that wasn't really operated like America. At the time he wrote the book, Gareau noted nine deposed Latin American dictators were all living in South Florida. Indeed, a small group of Cuban ex-pats in South Florida wanting to save the cigar industry had enough lobbying power to persuade the US to get involved in the Bay of Pigs.

Florida has been mythologized a lot more through writing with the books of Dave Barry, Carl Hiassen, and Elmore Leonard who have ripped their stories from the headlines (the predecessor to Florida Man). Part of this is because Florida has the most lenient FOIA laws with regard to crimes, so crazy headlines are much more likely to make it to the front pages.

There are a lot of great examples of Florida films covering all those different views of Floridian life: Off the top of my head, there's the dysfunctional urban landscape of Miami in Barry Sonnenfeld's adaptation of the Dave Barry book "Big Trouble," the mob film "Scarface" (few know that Al Capone ran much of his Chicago mob operations from Florida), the portrait of Florida as an lavish 50's vacation spot for snowboards in "Some Like it Hot" and "Palm Beach Story," Miami as a happening singles scene in "Hitch," and the more backwater view of Florida as a small-town haven of eccentric characters in "Because of Winn Dixie."

"Sunshine State", mostly somber in tone, stands out to me as the quintessential Florida film, because it is the intersection of multiple Floridian versions in one Altmanesque whirlwind.

The underrated gem by John Sayles flew under the radar when it was released in 2002 (it grossed but it's worth a second look. Starring an ensemble that includes Mary Steenburgen, Edie Falco, Angela Bassett, Timothy Hutton, Alan King, James McDaniel, and Jane Alexander, the film centers around seaside town whose tranquil existence is threatened by an encroaching real estate developer.

Florida is largely a state where real estate development is the rule of the land. The city of Miami, for example, is no longer home to the Miami Dolphins, Miami Beach, University of Miami, Key Biscayne, or even Miami airport. As seen below, all those places broke off from the main city proper as the municipalities became dominated by gated communities and developments that encouraged voters to need the city less. Miami, in fact, survived a vote to dissolve the city entirely in 1997.

Steenburgen stars as a chamber of commerce head and overanxious real estate developer who is trying so hard to sell her latest development she doesn't even notice that her husband (King) is suicidal. In my years of local reporting, I have come across these Chamber of Commerce types and these jobs typically require very perky people who speak about wherever they live like it's shangri-la.


Bassett stars as former town pariah Desiree Perry who got pregnant by the local football star (McDaniel) before he made it big and is now returning to her hometown. She's deciding on behalf of her family whether to sell the land or preserve the special piece of her town. The theme here is Florida being a dream for so many conflicting groups of people is represented here.

For Bassett's character and her neighbors, the town represented the opportunity for blacks to have their little piece of the beach. The town also highlights the pockets of poverty found in many a Florida coastal town. or most traditional tourist traps.

Lastly, we have Edie Falco as Marley Temple who represents the state's evolving tourist industry. Temple, a sixth generation Floridian, used to be a mermaid in one of the seaside attractions that lined the highways before the corporate megaliths of Sea World and Disney World took over. What Temple is referencing, when she talks about her past life as a mermaid, is a real tourist attraction: The mermaids at Weeki Wachi Springs.

 
This is also a Florida thing, as the mermaid shows or the alligator shows that still populate the land today pose all sorts of questions as to how to promote nature, myth, and how not to step on past or future waves of progress in the tourist industry.  Falco is now an owner of the family motel who's sick of where she's living. Her tryst with a landscape architect hired (Timothy Hutton) by the prospective land developer. It's a metaphor for the past Florida going the way of the future.

As a tapestry of intersecting lives, Sunshine State works as a great scene piece that has aged well and will likely continue to be relevant.

It has a running time of 2:20 but it's a film that moves at a great pace. It can be found on Tubi.

The event can be found here. If you need, I can get you a code to reduce the price:
Film Talk and Discussion: John Sayles and Sunshine State (2002) Tickets, Tue, Jul 16, 2024 at 9:00 PM | Eventbrite

The Abyss (1989): A Movie About Brock From Titanic?

The Abyss can be seen as a spiritual predecessor to the Titanic in that it marks Cameron’s love affair with the ocean and his desire to push the furthest limits of special effects in its discovery. It’s even been rumored that Cameron took on the assignment of Titanic as an excuse to indulge his zeal for undersea exploration. In addition to being one of the few people to dive to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, he holds the record for having spent the most time on board the Titanic (with the caveat that he never spent an hour with the ship when it was above board).

Among the things that fascinate me about this film is that he created an entire film for Brock.

Brock is the deep see gem miner played by Bill Paxton, who can be seen as an avatar for Cameron (considering a certain 2009 film, I’ll have to add a “no pun intended”). Both pride themselves on their adeptness, both feel comfortable in command, and both are capable of being moved by a story. 

In an alternate ending, Brock actually catches Rose in the act of throwing it in the ocean. Rather than do everything in his power to stop her, he holds it for a moment, lets Rose throw it over and laughs. It's as if he learned a (very improbable) lesson on the true power of wealth.

James Cameron has been known as a controlling man on set and he has likely made enemies from the studios for overspending their money. If Titanic didn’t hit that lightning in a bottle and win big at the box office, it would have gone down as cinema’s biggest failures. Maybe Brock was a way to justify Cameron himself.

Whereas the final cut doesn’t give Brock the satisfaction of moral agency (he’s in the dark), it’s indicative of the way Cameron wants to see himself as a man who values wonder and exploration above everything. As an auteur, the way he (some might say carelessly) drives up the budget of his films reinforces this.

The Abyss is one of the most ambitious underwater films ever filmed this side of The Poseidon Adventure.

As part of the 1980s, it’s heavy on heroes and action. At its center is Bud Brigman. Played by Ed Harris, he might not look like a Sylvester Stallone or Harrison Ford; but he has the chip on his shoulder and the confidence in his own vision that is requisite of a frustrated auteur like another James Cameron stand-in. There’s also a quasi-military element which matches other films of the era like Hunt for Red October and Top Gun.

As Brock is potentially implied to be powered by greed (if we go by canon), Bud’s faults are presented by his soon-to-be-ex-wife and professional foil in Lindsey (Mary Elizbeth Mastrantonio).

But here’s the thing: We only see the competent version of Bud. The only negative things we hear of him are in flashback through Lindsey. It’s as if the flashbacks are a way for Cameron to address rumors or his internal doubts, while the man he wishfully presents to the world is an ordinary-looking man who becomes a hero.

Without giving too much away, Bud’s transcendent journey comes from curiosity and appreciating wonder. He also gets the girl back, just as Titanic and Avatar have non-romantic issues resolved through a cathartic love story.