#and jeong jeong talking about how fire is dangerous because it’s so unpredictable

[ljesaw]

can’t stop thinking about somebody saying that zuko is constantly going against his very nature in order to be evil and i will be crying about it forever frankly

#do you ever think about little baby zuko loving and adoring his mother #like that mama’s boy is gentle…..underneath…….All That #the complex relationship between zuko and literally every member of his family makes me actually lose my shit #zuko and ozai make me foam at the mouth ozai should rot but i also just love complex crunchy family dynamics #but i also think about at the end of book 1 #and jeong jeong talking about how fire is dangerous because it’s so unpredictable #which also speaks to the way firebenders wield their fire #the typical form that’s used in that they exert a lot of force and power on their opponent #probably largely because there’s truly only so much they can control with their own element #and only really gifted firebenders can master such a fickle element well enough to exert that kind of effort and focus #do you ever think about zuko learning and understanding all 4 elements to better his own mastery and form(s) #this post was supposed to be about zuko’s complexity and the fact that i went on an entirely unrelated tangent #that’s actually somewhat related too #just speaks for itself. one day ill make sense i swear #anyway if this doesn’t make sense. i’ll fix it later. maybe

[ryanscoolnesschronicles]

WEEK 2: ALL OVER THE MAP – The Deuce

While the structure of these journals has basically taken shape as of the last entry, my viewing habits certainly didn’t truly form a spine until the very end of Week 2. Films were chosen in the morning completely at random and the order in which they were viewed even more so. Let’s get into it.

WATCHED IN WEEK 2: “It’s a Very Merry Muppet Christmas Movie” (2002), d. Kirk Thatcher; “The Hustler” (1961), d. Robert Rossen; “Grand Prix” (1966), d. John Frankenheimer; “Wait Until Dark” (1967), d. Terence Young; “Phantom of the Opera” (1943), d. Arthur Lubin; “The Natural” (1984), d. Barry Levinson; “A League of Their Own” (1992), d. Penny Marshall; “Razorback” (1984), d. Russell Mulcahy; “CB4” (1993), d. Tamra Davis; “Just Mercy” (2019), d. Destin Daniel Cretton; “Foul Play” (1978), d. Colin Higgins; “Lady and the Tramp” (2019), d. Charlie Bean; “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” (1954), d. Richard Fleischer; “The Black Hole” (1979), d. Gary Nelson; “Frank and Ollie” (1995), d. Theodore Thomas; “Summer of ’42” (1971), d. Robert Mulligan; “To Be or Not to Be” (1942), d. Ernst Lubitsch; “The Wages of Fear” (1953), d. Henri-Georges Clouzot; “Sorcerer” (1977), d. William Friedkin; “9 to 5” (1980), d. Colin Higgins; “1917” (2019), d. Sam Mendes; “Crawl” (2019), d. Alexandre Aja; “Five Fingers of Death” (1972), d. Jeong Chang-Hwa; “The Reluctant Dragon” (1941), d. Ub Iwerks, Hamilton Luske, Jack Kinney, Alfred L. Werker, and Jack Cutting; “Waking Sleeping Beauty” (2009), d. Don Hahn; and…

–THE PICK OF THE WEEK–

“Freebie and the Bean” (1974), d. Richard Rush.

I could debate the relative merits of the Buddy Cop sub genre until I am bereft of air. It’s the same formula done ad nauseam. It relies on tiresome cliches. It’s the same formula of tiresome cliches, et cetera. White guy mismatched with black guy on an action-oriented mission, at least one of them a cop, they don’t get along but they respect each other by the time the credits roll. But there was indeed a time when it was actually fresh and original, and that’s because the people who made it accidentally invented the tropes that now define it. 

No, I’m not talking about Walter Hill’s “48 Hours”, although that film is more directly influential because people were consciously trying to recreate its comic alchemy. I’m talking about a film eight years its senior: “Freebie and the Bean”, starring Alan Arkin and James Caan.

You (the royal you, not anyone in particular) may ask how that duo is mismatched. There both white, you’re thinking. That thought is correct, although Arkin is regrettably playing a Latino gentleman and Valerie Harper (Rhoda herself) is his similarly Latina wife (who may very well be getting away with cheating on him constantly). You may ask how the duo respects each other in the end. Well, they technically don’t. In fact, they are liable to kill each other at any minute, but they also can’t function with anyone else in the opposing role. They’re a symbiotic platonically married couple, one organism with two heads trying to liberate the other from the body with force.

So how is this the first Buddy Cop movie? Before this film, mismatched duos were screwball comedies (Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant are the first that come to mind) or stagy character pieces (see Lemmon, Jack and Matthau, Walter). There was no possibility that one might stab the other in their sleep. That feeling permeates every inch of “Freebie and the Bean”. The tone of earlier mismatched duos was hilarity with some dramatic interludes or silly with a dash of pathos. But in “Freebie and the Bean”, not only are Arkin and Caan bad cops, they’re corrupt cops. Both men open fire without warning when chasing a subject on the crowded streets of San Francisco, which was shocking but also darkly funny. In the middle of a car chase, Caan’s character plows through a marching band in the middle of a parade and it’s not funny, but the pace doesn’t skip a beat.

The action in this film feels legitimately violent and dangerous, like you’re going to see footage of someone accidentally mutilated at any minute. Stunts appear unrehearsed and potentially damaging. In lesser hands these moments would overpower the comedy or mute it, and that is not remotely the case here. Richard Rush somehow executed an unheralded balancing act of tones, with an overwhelming sense of unpredictability. There’s no way to know from scene to scene what kind of movie you’ll be watching, but not in a disjointed way, a quality that his next directorial effort, “The Stunt Man”, also possessed. 

If you told me before I started this project that Richard Rush would have directed the first two Picks of the Week, I would have two follow-up questions:

1. Are you insane?

2. Who the hell is Richard Rush?

Now that I’m starting to grasp the answer to the second with clarity (the jury’s still out on the first), I’m ready to dive backwards with relish.