Watched Journal: September 2024
I was thinking about this phenomena while watching the fascinating new documentary 'Seeking Mavis Beacon' about two women of color who came of age as digital natives attempting to track down the model behind the Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing software program from the halcyon computer age of the late '80s and '90s.
Long before Siri, Alexa and even Clippy, Mavis Beacon was one of the first AI assistants introduced to millions of schoolchildren and novice typists across the country. Although many believed she was a real person, Mavis Beacon was a fictional character . The original software program featured the likeness of Renée L'Espérance, a beautiful Haitian woman discovered at a perfume counter at the Saks Fifth Avenue in Beverly Hills who was paid $500 by The Software Toolworks company to lend her likeness to Mavis Beacon.
'Seeking Mavis Beacon' explores the software's Mandela effect and dives into the digital rabbit hole in attempts to solve the mystery of L'Espérance, who vanished from public life in the '90s after a lawsuit with Software Toolworks, who subsequently replaced her as the model. Filmmaker Jazmin Jones explores issues such as AI bias, cyber doulas and digital footprints as she and producer Olivia McKayla Ross narrate their personal history and relationship with technology as a microcosm of the Mavis Beacon phenomenon. On their quest to find L'Espérance, they interview their family, friends, technology theorists and even two Software Toolworks' founders, one of which went on to be an early investor in MySpace, only to arrive at more questions than answers.
In an age of social media oversharing, the contrast of L'Espérance, an original influencer of sorts, going off the grid rather than exploit her cache is unsettling. When the documentary crew approach her son, radio silence is the response to an interview request, as he repeatedly explains that his mother is a very private person. Perhaps scarred by the exploitation of Mavis Beacon, L'Espérance has erased herself from the matrix of surveillance capitalism.
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I watched two films from Francis Ford Coppola this month, his newly released in theaters wine funded project 'Megalopolis' and 'One from the Heart: Reprise', which had a 4K restoration release this year. Like the other final cuts, redux and codas across his filmography, the reprise of 'One from the Heart' attempts to reboot the film's legacy, a bomb during its theatrical release in 1982.
'One from the Heart,' is a musical romance starring Terri Garr and Federic Forrest as two lovers struggling to make ends meet in Las Vegas. The film is a visual delight, oozing with lush Vegas neon and a dazzling proto-'La La Land' dance scene, yet it falls flat with characters and story. On the opposite spectrum is 'Megalopolis,' a decadent mess that is partly a thinly veiled Coppola bio-pic as well as a parable of the America's decline vis-à-vis the fall of Rome. Unlike 'One from the Heart,' what 'Megalopolis' has going for it is some truly unforgettable performances, sequences and a visual opulence unlike anything I've witnessed in cinemas in some time. That 'Megalopolis,' perhaps Coppola's swan song, is his most mindbogglingly self-indulgent, extravagant film assures it will be examined as a cinematic curiosity for years to come.
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The boutique Blu-ray label Fun City Editions has recently launched an eponymous podcast dedicated to discussing their releases and a segment covering films that are, for the most part, only available to stream. FCE's m.o. is releasing films that haven't had proper Blu-ray or even DVD releases, therefore highlighting films with nascent physical media presence is within dedicated film revivalist and FCE founder Jonathan Hertzberg's expertise. Thanks to Hertzberg, I discovered lost gems like 'Heartbreakers', 'Natural Enemies' and one of my top blu-ray releases of 2024, 'Strangers Kiss'.
Tracking down films with rare, hard to find VHS-only releases is one of my favorite aspects of movie collecting. After months of searching, this past August I finally found a decently priced VHS (compared to another listed on eBay for $179) of the nearly impossible to see 1980 Elliot Gould comedy 'Dirty Tricks', a film lacking a quality release be it digital or physical. Outside of the incredibly rare VHS or bootleg stream, there's little record of films like 'Dirty Tricks' having ever existed.
Then there's the case of streaming which produces a film from the past out of thin air. On the second episode of the FCE podcast, they delved into an obscure, largely unseen Farrah Fawcett and Jeff Bridges romantic comedy whodunit from 1978, 'Somebody Killed Her Husband'. On Plex, I was able to stream an HD version of 'Somebody.', and was delighted by this New York set late '70s time capsule that heavily features the flagship Macy's department store in Herald Square, as well as the famous Thanksgiving Day Parade and a plot line analogous to Watergate.
Fawcett and Bridges are quite good together in the film as a slapstick romantic pairing. Contained in the nebula of streaming, discovering 'Somebody Killer Her Husband', which has never had an American physical media release of any sort, was like filling in a blank memory from the past.
9-8: All That is Sacred [Delta], China Girl [Criterion]
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