Clue (part deux)

I had two clean, easy uploads, and now technology is back giving me nonsense. I type this up as my computer chugs, trying to handle the nightmare processing challenge of rendering and uploading a two hour podcast episode. It's just been a bad technology luck year for me so far. Here's to better luck on the back half.

Anyway, Clue. I feel like Lisa was the perfect GM for this movie. It's a movie I don't really know what I would do with. Which is often the case, and generally I just trust my instincts and move forward and it works out ok, but in this case it's more than just not having a take on the movie. It's like, I don't even really know what happens in this movie. It has multiple endings and the explanations go so fast that as a viewer I don't even really process them fully, I just kind of take them as patter, as a sort of comedic texture, not meant to be understood, just meant to be enjoyed. And above all else when I run a movie I need to know what exactly the ground is I'm standing on, what's the whatwhenwherewhy, so that I can riff off it. And you just don't really have that in Clue. And you can't even just invent it, the way I often have to. The movie defies definition, it's a sort of optical illusion that changes depending on how you look at it.

But Lisa made it look easy. She has a great combination of diligence and flexibility. She just attacked the problem of Clue and untangled it. But didn't try to force the movie into a specific shape. She built something solid enough to stand on but, not so rigid that it lost the character of the original. I've generally stayed away from movies that are parodies, because of the very problem of needing an objective reality. But maybe there's a way to do them. Clue is just on the cusp of parody, sort of half way between something like Princess Bride, which is a genre parody but stays invested in its characters stakes, and something like airplane, which prioritizes its gags over the structure of its story. I may never actually attempt a proper parody myself, but I'm glad someone on the team did because it's nice to have a wider world of movies in our portfolio.

Anyway, that's it for today. One more Clue after this. See y'all soon!