by Quentin Lewis

Weeknotes: 10/15/23-10/21/23

weeknotes movies indigenous museum teaching family

This Week:

  • MUST252: North American Material Culture to 1700 is finished. Students turned in their take-home exams and I submitted grades. I also spent some time compiling my thoughts about how the class went, and writing notes to myself for when I teach it next year.
  • I did some work on Indigenous consultation around objects that may be subject to repatriation under NAGPRA.
  • I wished a very happy birthday to my brother, who turned 36.
  • CliffordI finished watching Clifford, a movie that is, to put it mildly, polarizing. Long seen as a comedic failure (and certainly, its Rotten Tomatoes score bears this out, it has its extreme partisans who champion it as a lost classic. Watching the movie today, I can see why. The uneasy tension of the film is that the audience is left confused about whether Martin Short is a 44 year old actor playing a 10 year old boy, a 44 year old man playing a 44 year old man whom everyone in the world of the movie simply regards as a 10 year old boy, or some other bizarre mutable arrangement. Key to this is Charles Grodin’s enthusiastic performance as an alternatively lazy and violent patriarch, whose subtle emotional rises escalate the dark drama of the film. Rather than being a slightly dark “Dennis the Menace”-esque comedy, it made more sense to me as almost a horror movie or a thriller with comedic moments. I am not sure I’ll watch it again, but I definitely think it’s more interesting than it had any right to be.
  • I also watched Kill List, the opening salvo of Ben Wheatley’s truimphant march of understated and humanistic English folk horror. It was more unnerving than scary, which is exactly the sweet spot for me. Definitely recommended.
  • I finalized plans and advertising for The Horror in the Museum, our Halloween storytelling event.