Happy October, everyone!
Just three months left in 2020?
Fall is for many things, though it’s usually only for crazy people like me that spend much of the season indoors at film festivals. A major upside to the pandemic is that the lack of theatrical exhibition has forced festivals to get democratic with their access. There are a number of pretty major movies working the festival circuit that will be available to watch from home in an à la carte fashion during the month of October, and Moveable Fest rounded up all those opportunities in this nifty post. Seriously, some major Oscar contenders are available soon and fairly inexpensively.
(Though if you just want to watch something for free on your subscription services, the recently recommended Almost Famous is now streaming on Amazon Prime!)
Some other good news for my public transit fam: a new study cited by Gothamist shows that there is no direct link between the subway and COVID-19 spread!
Also, if anyone wants to feel old, The Social Network came out 10 years ago today. I recommended it here *gulp* exactly six months ago, and if you want to follow me down a tangential rabbit-hole, I went long on how the movie’s trailer changed the nature of movie marketing in the past decade.
I’ve boosted this organization before, but now that Election Day is fast approaching, I wanted to once again highlight the great work of Pizza to the Polls. This ingenious group has set up a system for reporting long lines and sending them pizza to help incentivize voters to stay at their polling location to cast a vote. Make sure they’re well funded for early voting and November 3, folks!
Now, what you came for…
DAY 203: The Addams Family (1991) (available on Netflix and Amazon Prime)
October means spooky season for many (the 31 Days of Halloween is already underway on Freeform, formerly ABC Family, tonight — don’t worry, you have multiple chances to watch Hocus Pocus if you missed it). I’m not the biggest Halloween fan, nor do I particularly love scary movies for the sake of just being scared. But to mark the season, I suppose I can give a little love to the 1991 live-action The Addams Family movie. Through this household’s morbid obsession with death, they can teach us a little bit about family life.
What stuck out upon watching the film again was, of course, the humor. You can actually see a lot of Coen Brothers-inspired mania à la Raising Arizona from their collaborator Barry Sonnenfeld. As director, he’s capable of executing a long physical gag or a macabre verbal joke with equal panache. (It certainly helps when you can be buoyed by genius comedic performances from the likes of Angelica Huston, Christina Ricci and Christopher Lloyd.) The Addams’ mania is truly inspired, cartoonishly fun without ever resorting to childish silliness. It’s perhaps a touch mordant and dark for the youngest of audiences, but the film is fun for the whole family.
Something that was a little newer on this visit, however, was the film’s satirical send-up of domestic virtues. Spending so long thinking about ‘80s culture for my big piece on Easy A has me seeing that decade’s influence everywhere, and I think there’s definitely an element of The Addams Family cutting against the grain of the dominant “family values” paradigm of the era. (I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the sequel was titled Addams Family Values, after all.) Sure, the Addams are bizarre and odd aristocrats with misanthropic tendencies. But all the other prim pencil-pushers are … normal? Is that really what we should aspire to be? Though they express it strange ways, the Addams family does possess the kind of affectionate ties that bind people beyond blood. Though they’d probably like the latter more.
Be good to yourselves and to each other,
Marshall