various updates

as many of you know by now, I've moved to the Bay Area; as many of you also know by now, I am watching every movie Keanu Reeves has ever made. I am far from the first person to do this and I'm certainly not alone in having devoted a not-insignificant chunk of 2019 to the endeavor. (and I mean 2019 specifically: I did not want to use the neologism variously spelled "Keanussance" or "Keanaissance" in this post, but it's unavoidable as what the Internet's termed this summer. incidentally, I did find "Reevesnaissance" in a semi-obscure 2017 listicle — used in reference to 2014 onwards, and then again in a couple of tweets referring to 2019 — but it never really caught on, I guess.)

what's refreshing about Keanu, and what's made this whole undertaking rather rewarding so far (despite the number of almost-but-not-quite-good movies I've made myself sit through) is that he's always, you know, very Keanu. what I mean by that is: there's a little bit of almost every Keanu character in almost every other Keanu character. even when he's playing about as against type as he's ever played in My Own Private Idaho (1991), as (what Gus Van Sant meant to be) the Prince Hal of the Pacific Northwest — the very rich, occasionally cruel, and aptly named Scott Favor — he finds it in his character to shove a bunch of sandwiches in a groggy River Phoenix's face, and it works. "look, Mike!" he says, far more cheerfully than any other character says any other line of dialogue in this film. "SANDWICHES!"

(sadly, I can't find a clip of this, so you'll just have to watch the whole movie — the real star of which is not Keanu but River Phoenix. here's the most heartbreaking scene.)

"SANDWICHES!" you can hear Ted Logan (Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, 1989) saying it, you can hear Neo (The Matrix, duh, 1999) saying it, you can hear Matt (River's Edge, 1986) saying it. you can hear Bob Arctor (A Scanner Darkly, 2004) saying it, although maybe he's not referring to actual sandwiches. you can even hear Donaka (Man of Tai Chi, 2013) saying it with a more sinister inflection. we might imagine that John Wick (uh, John Wick, 2014) said it before his wife died. Julian (Something's Gotta Give, 2003) probably said it to Diane Keaton's character, just as Chris (The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, 2009) probably said it to Robin Wright's character. if you ask me, Johnny Utah's "I AM AN EFF BEE EYE AGENT" line (Point Break, 1991) is contained somewhere in there, too, and of course the "I WANT ROOM SERVICE!" speech (Johnny Mnemonic, 1995) has the same energy — or the same lack of energy, really, the weirdly disarming stoner simplicity. perhaps this is why people have always said that Keanu's a bad actor; although it should be said that of late these "people" have disappeared into the woodworks or maybe they've just changed their minds. I was one of them when I first watched The Matrix, nearly a decade ago. a quick Facebook Messenger search for the film has me telling a friend that it's "such a good movie BUT Keanu's a bad actor." I wonder how much of my own opinion — and everyone else's opinion — of Keanu's acting was shaped by other people saying he was a bad actor, like, as a meme? because of his awful English accent (Bram Stoker's Dracula, 1994), because of his nearly-as-bad Southern accent (The Devil's Advocate, 1997)? because of whatever on Earth was going on with his character in Much Ado About Nothing (1993)? my Messenger search unfortunately turns up nothing that might either prove or disprove any of this; all I know is that I had no idea what "good acting" meant when I was 13.

I leave you with this scene from Johnny Mnemonic, in which Keanu (as the titular Johnny) accesses THE INTERNET in 2021!!!

here lies harry potter (1997-2016)

(his creator killed him)

Let's get this out of the way: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them isn't a particularly good film. It's like J.K. Rowling tried to combine the childlike whimsy of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone with the rather grown-up plots and characters of her Cormoran Strike novels. If that sounds like it wouldn't work -- well, it didn't work. Fantastic Beasts doesn't have a cohesive "feel": it never quite decides whether it wants to embody the spirit of its namesake book or be, uh, vaguely American Gothic? (Who knows, honestly?) Rowling also seems to have attempted to write a novel instead of a screenplay: Fantastic Beasts is full of throwaway dialogue that works beautifully as character development in her later, 800-page Harry Potter books, but that sort of thing doesn't work so beautifully in a two-hour film whose most interesting character is a Niffler.

Now, if you ask the Harry Potter fanbase, many of the eight Harry Potter movies aren't particularly good films either -- but the books they're based on are wonderful. After all, that's why Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone became a film in the first place. Fantastic Beasts is a blatant attempt to cash in on the franchise's enduring popularity, and its inspiration isn't a beloved children's story, but a spin-off book that was itself a blatant attempt to cash in on the franchise's popularity (for charity, so I won't complain too much). Like most mistakes, the Fantastic Beasts film would be forgivable if Rowling and Yates promised to never do anything like it again, but --

2015 in film, with blinders on

Yours truly was truly bad at watching Great Films outside of my preferred genres this year. That aside, these are the five films of 2015 which I enjoyed the most and which I am very invested in all of you watching and talking about with me. (I guarantee you I did watch more than five -- more than ten -- films that came out this year, and that not all of them prominently featured the letter 'M' in the title. I'm not scrounging for films to fill up this list. These are the cream of the crop, y'all.)

consumed, lately

by forces within and without: me. i've been at college for one-point-five weeks, in class for point-five. the bullet journal has kept me out of trouble. by "out of trouble," i mean that i've taken my multivitamin every day, i haven't been late to anything (yet), and i did my laundry before i ran out of clothes. two small victories! and one big one! yes, that last is really an accomplishment, considering that i didn't pack enough clothes.

by me: a few books, more films (rare!), some good food. even more not-so-good food.