Jamie
A book cycle! A book cycle after the website has been a disaster area for like a year! What a mistake. We’ll see how long I actually am able to keep up with the reading of the books. Krippendorf’s Tribe was pretty easy. It’s a fantastically short satire of academia. I started it and I found it unpleasant. Mostly because the main character kind of sucked. But guess what? That was kind of the point. So as the book went on and got darker and darker I started to surprise myself by actually digging it. By the time the family is committing cannibalism and our “hero” is fleeing the country with his kids-turned-savages to presumably live out their days in the Amazonian jungle, I understood how it was that someone, somewhere felt like it would make a great movie. Why that movie had to be a heart warming tale starring Richard Dreyfuss? Not sure I understand that part yet.
To recap, James Krippendorf is a respected anthropologist and member of an all-star husband-wife team who have integrated the lives of their three kids into their explorations. After his wife dies, though, Krippendorf is lost. So lost that he spends the rest of their grant money on just keeping his family afloat. When the chickens come home to roost and he is expected to present the work he never completed on a lost tribe of New Guinea he never found, he does what any self respecting academic would do: make it all up. The showman to his wife’s brilliant researcher, he soon has everyone enraptured. Unfortunately they are too enraptured, as he gets roped into more lectures and a rising faculty member (and unabashed fan of his), Veronica, gets him tied up with a science-as-entertainment TV producer. So he finds himself having to produce more and more fake tribe content, including dressing his kids up in brownface and (hold onto your hats) having sex with Veronica on video to show off the mating rituals of the tribe… eeeeesh. Meanwhile a colleague of his sets out to expose the lie. This all culminates in his appearance on a TV dressed as the Chief of the Shelmikedmu and his subsequent winning of a large grant where both he and the Chief will appear. Veronica, peeved by the sex video, nonetheless agrees to help in exchange for half of the grant and helps keep up the ruse long enough for Krippendorf’s colleague to excitedly fax from New Guinea that there is no tribe. Everything falls apart… that is, until the colleague calls back and acknowledges that in fact she did find the Shelmikedmu. This was of course set up by Krippendorf’s daughter who pulled some favors with a nearby tribe who she had close ties to. THE END.
I feel like my opinion of this is painted a little by my unexpected love of the book. It’s just so much darker and I kind of wish that they went that way with it. You can even see it a little in other Dreyfuss performances. What About Bob? is a great example of Dreyfuss as insane person. I think he could have played that great. Chaos all around him while he pedantically explains it all away and people lap it up. But this is a pretty broad comedy that ended up kind of making a joke of the original satire. Is that why it got bad reviews? Because reviewers were angry that it didn’t live up to the biting satire of the source material. No. They didn’t like that it was racist mostly. And they seemed upset that Dreyfuss would do it. I will say that the fact that Elfman and Dreyfuss said yes to this insanity certainly elevated it. Dreyfuss is pretty physical as a comedian in this and so maybe that’s what attracted him to it. He got to act wild. Surprisingly middling for a film I presumed would be horrific.
Patrick?
Patrick
‘Ello everyone! *gif of me dancing around in blackface in a major motion picture in 1998* Let’s go!
The Good? The film is a little more heartwarming and the characters a little more quirky that one would initially give it credit for I think. Specifically, the whole family dynamic I think is quite nicely underplayed but also fairly nice how things get worked through in the end. And Elfman’s character in particular is just the right level of weird anthropologist groupie (?) / kind of game for the hoax and a publicity hungry crazy person that the romance works a lot better than you could ever think it could. These days she’d definitely be a buttoned-up person who only lets loose in the end.
The Bad? Uh … the blackface. I mentioned it in my intro. Five separate people dress in blackface. There is a whole section which is deeply offensive. It is only slightly saved by also having a real New Guinea tribe they are friends with that they are mostly just riffing on. Still though, hard to get past. Oh, and the rape scene. We’ll get to that in a second.
The BMT? I mean, yeah, one of the weirdest films ever made. And obviously deeply problematic and not funny. There isn’t really any other way to describe it but as an ultra weird film I watched as a kid. What do you think our parents thought watching this film? I wonder. I bet they have zero recollection of watching this film.
The Rewatchables? Might as well steal from the best. What’s aged the worst? The rape scene duh! They have a whole scene where Dreyfuss gets a woman drunk and then secretly films having sex with her. Whooooooops! The “That Guy” Award for Mac’s mother from It’s Always Sunny. Also Happy Gilmore’s grandmother as well. The Overacting Award goes to Elfman for the scene where she is pretending to be drunk (rough). And we get a wild Needle Drop in the middle of the film and over the credits for the Mighty Mighty Bosstones.
I took an extended break from my AI explorations, but I’m going to get back to it soon. The current key will probably focus on embeddings. In particular, there are a few huggingface models (models–google–vit-base-patch16-224 and models–openai–clip-vit-base-patch32 in particular) which I think I can get working a bit to try and see what I can see as far as one of my main goals in this cycle: Embed a bunch of movie posters and then try and find ones that match a specific but hard-to-articulate concept. Namely, can I find posters that utilize the same conceit as the For Your Eyes Only poster: you are looking through a woman’s legs. This one would be close, for example. Stay tuned.
Let’s go Early Role (Who?) for Mila Kunis who pops up as a girl at the science fair who is participating in the son’s tribal demonstration. Best Product Placement (What?) THERE IS AN ENTIRE SCENE IN McDONALD’S AAAAAND AN ENTIRE SCENE IN BEST BUY. Stop the presses. This is an unprecedented level of product placement. This film must have made bank. Setting as a Character (Where?) I’m pretty sure they are supposed to be in New York based on a few flags that are around, a choice I’m guessing was solely based on Natasha Lyonne’s crazy thick New York accent. We have an Exact Date (When?) of April 7, 1997 when the film starts. And Worst Twist (How?) for the inevitable conclusion that the daughter got the tribe they are friends with to pretend to be the Shelmikedmu Tribe to save them in the end. The film is BMT through and through, just wild and crazy stuff.
Cheerios,
The Sklogs
Bad Movie Twins 