→ March 22, 2022
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Don’t Look Up.

If you enjoyed Vice for its sledgehammer-to-the-forehead approach to its subject matter, Don’t Look Up, the latest film from director Adam McKay and his co-writer David Sirota, might be right up your alley. It is as unsubtle and unfunny as any soi-disant satire can get, lacking both the humor and the power of the genre in its rush just to tell you how smart it is, and in the process, it wastes an epic cast that includes five Academy Award winners.

The premise of Don’t Look Up isn’t actually that bad: Two astronomers (Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence) discover that a comet 6 kilometers wide is on course to make a direct impact with earth, just off the coast of Chile, an extinction-level event that will wipe out all of humanity. They go to the feds, and end up talking to the President (Meryl Streep), who doesn’t take them seriously until she needs to distract everyone from a scandal. But when the CEO of an Apple-like tech company called BASH (Mark Rylance) who is also a major donor to the President points out that the comet holds over $100 trillion in rare metals critical to the technology industry, the plan to destroy the comet shifts to a plan to try to break it apart and mine it, much to the chagrin of the science community that believes destroying the comet is the planet’s only hope. (Cate Blanchett is the fifth Oscar winner in the movie, playing a vapid morning show host as a sort of Megyn Kelly clone.)

There is one funny joke in all of Don’t Look Up, and it has to do with snacks. Nothing in the actual plot, which is so thinly veiled a metaphor for climate change that it might as well be covered with Saran wrap, is handled in a humorous way. This isn’t actual satire. You don’t just move the chairs around and claim you refurnished the house. The writers here just changed a few details and then made everyone a genius or a moron, with nothing in between. The closest thing this film has to a real character is DiCaprio’s Dr. Mindy, who gets to evolve after his appearance on Blanchett’s morning show results in him becoming a heartthrob, both to viewers and to Blanchett’s character, with whom he cheats on his wife (Melanie Lynskey), another thinly-veiled commentary, this one on the corrupting power of fame and the conflict between telling people the truth and telling them what they want to hear. Even that seems to give this script more credit than it deserves, and it takes well over two hours to get to its eventual, obvious ending.

What’s most appalling is how McKay manages to get such awful work from otherwise capable, acclaimed actors. Rylance appears to have botoxed his upper cheeks into oblivion and affects a fey, high-pitched voice, while his character also has the social skills of a sea cucumber. Jonah Hill, playing Donald Trump Jr. by another name (the President’s son and also her chief of staff), is in full douchebro mode, and serves no purpose whatsoever except as a way to mock his real-life counterpart as an insipid misogynist. Blanchett’s co-host, played by Tyler Perry, is every bland TV personality who laughs too much and makes tasteless jokes about ex-wives.

And perhaps worst of all is Meryl Streep, who mailed this one in and had it returned for insufficient postage. She’s supposed to be as corrupt as Trump, but manages to make the character less interesting, somehow. She’s venal in the most boring way, and while, yes, there’s a comeuppance coming that you will see an hour away, it’s not even that satisfying because the character is such a cipher, and Streep, who has certainly had fun playing offbeat or even unlikeable characters before, seems disinterested.

As for the film’s so-called point, whether it’s just about climate change or a broader argument about humans’ inherent tendency to avoid short-term pain even for long-term gain, this isn’t going to convince anyone of anything. It’s preaching to – or just yelling at – the choir, while talking down to anyone else who might be willing to hear an argument on the matter. The writers would rather tell you how smart they are and take your compliments than do anything that might make a difference. When the protagonist also turns into a rhinoceros, you’ve taken the farce too far.

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This is easily the worst film nominated for Best Picture this year, of which I have now seen all ten. My personal top ten for 2021, which could still change a little depending on some movies I haven’t seen and a few that aren’t available yet, looks like this:

1. Drive My Car
2. Dune
3. The Lost Daughter
4. Licorice Pizza
5. Parallel Mothers
6. Summer of Soul
7. The Power of the Dog
8. Passing
9. Red Rocket
10. C’mon C’mon

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→ March 15, 2022
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The Worst Person in the World.

Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person in the World earned two Oscar nominations this year, for Best International Feature Film and Best Original Screenplay, and should have gotten a third for Renate Reinsve as Best Actress. It’s a blast to watch, particularly because Reinsve is so charming and so convincing as the main character, but there’s a superficiality to the story that made the movie less satisfying than it could have been in a different writer’s hands.

Reinsve plays Julie, a woman about to turn 30 who is trying to figure out her life, dropping out of med school as the film begins to become a photographer, where she meets Aksel, an author of underground comic books who is about 14 years her senior. They begin a relationship despite his warning to her that she still needs to find herself, that he’s too old for her, and that they’ll want different things – which, of course, eventually turns out to be true, as they meet his friends, discuss having children, and, of course, meet other people. The movie unfolds in twelve ‘chapters,’ as well as a prologue and epilogue, each showing a small anecdote or slice of Julie’s life, ranging from funny to tragic, as she navigates her love life, her family, and more.

This film succeeds because of Reinsve, who looks younger than Julie’s age despite being about 32 when the movie was filmed. She’s so compelling from the moment we first see her, with a smile that fills the screen, yet over the course of the twelve episodes that constitute the film, she not only gives the character depth but makes it clear why she is the center of this particular universe. Julie is flawed but full of life, so that we can see her make mistakes, or at least what might be mistakes, and still be completely invested in her story. She’s the prototypical character who you just believe will come out all right in the end, without becoming hackneyed or unlikeable.

The script, however, is another matter. The plot is a bit beside the point, but it depends on two very fortunate twists that seem awfully convenient for the purposes of Julie’s story, getting her to the right people and places at those moments in the film. It serves to underscore how shallow the story is: this is a woman’s late 20s as seen through the eyes of a man. Julie doesn’t seem to have any friends of her own, and never has a conversation with another woman in the film without a man there – even then, those conversations are nearly always about a man, often Julie’s father, who lives with her stepmom and their daughter and takes no interest in Julie’s life at all. The movie views the life of a woman turning 30 primarily through the question of whether she wants children, and how that affects her relationships with men. Her career is an afterthought – we barely see her pick up a camera for about 10 chapters, and when she’s working at all, it’s in a chain bookstore, with no mention of photography or another career. Even the essay she writes that goes viral is about her relationship to men. Julie does have agency, and shows it in romantic relationships, so it’s puzzling to see her portrayed as lacking initiative or authority in other aspects of her life.

The Worst Person in the World has some gorgeous shots in and around Oslo, including a running scene – every great film this year had to have a running scene, it’s in the rules – that might be the most memorable sequence of 2021 for me. There are many fantastic shots, and Kasper Tuxen’s cinematography makes this a film in which you want to just exist. It’s also funny and bittersweet and often heartwarming, but in the end, I found it all a bit exasperating, not least because Trier ends the film with an improbable epilogue drowned out by the pretentious “Waters of March” by Art Garfunkel. Reinsve is so incredible that I’d still recommend the film – and can’t get over the nominations of three women doing impersonations for Best Actress over her – but wish that the two men who wrote it had considered getting a woman’s perspective on it.

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→ December 31, 2021
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Licorice Pizza.

Licorice Pizza, the latest film from Paul Thomas Anderson, feels like the work of an entirely different writer than PTA’s last film, Phantom Thread. Where that movie was tense, quiet, often creepy, Licorice Pizza never stops moving – in one sense, almost literally, as the two main characters spend a substantial portion of the film running, often in less-than-sensible shoes. It’s a beautiful, quirky, and funny coming-of-age story. I just wish so much of its greatness wasn’t undone by a pointless racist gag that PTA could have excised without losing anything.

Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman, son of Phillip Seymour Hoffman) is a precocious almost-16-year-old actor and would-be entrepreneur who spots Alana Kane (Alana Haim) when the photography company she works for comes to his school for picture day. He tries to flirt with her, despite the ten-year age gap, and somehow coaxes her into meeting him for a not-date date at the absurdly named but extremely ’70s restaurant Tail o’ the Cock, where he’s on a first-name basis with the staff and is treated like a VIP. Gary tries to get Alana some movie and TV work, while she tags along with his venture to sell waterbeds, and the two continue to move along as if they don’t actually have feelings for each other, even though we know by the time the movie ends, they have to get together somehow.

Hoffman and Haim carry this movie, Hoffman in particular, with his effortless charm and a self-aplomb way beyond his years. The age gap between them – which is larger than the one that had certain folks upset in Call Me By Your Name, although that criticism was probably about something other than their ages – is less evident on the screen, because Gary is developmentally advanced for his age, while Alana is still quite immature. The latter point especially shows up in scenes at Alana’s home, where she still lives with her parents and two older sisters, all played by Alana’s actual family (quite well, in fact – her father is a riot), and she’s very clearly the baby of the bunch, twenty-five but aimless. She hangs around with Gary and his friends, even though she knows it’s “weird,” in part because they give her a way to stave off adulthood. Because Hoffman plays Gary as this worldly teenager who understands more of adult ways than just about any teenager I know, which is built into the character’s story (and that of the real-life actor, Gary Goetzman, on whom PTA based Valentine), the love story between the two comes off as more innocent than it might otherwise.

The unsung hero of Licorice Pizza might be the costume department. Films set in the 1970s often shove that decade’s regrettable fashion choices in the viewer’s face, but Licorice Pizza instead leans into the better side of ’70s fashion. Haim is a fashion plate, wearing some gorgeous prints across a series of short dresses that wouldn’t be out of place today aside from the oversized collars. Valentine doesn’t have quite as much fun, but the white suit and fuchsia shirt he dons near the end of the film couldn’t come from any other decade.

PTA also populates the film with many real-life characters from Hollywood of the time, including Sean Penn as the legendary actor William Holden (thinly disguised as “Jack Holden”), and Bradley Cooper in an absolutely ridiculous (and very fun) turn as producer Jon Peters, with whom Cooper worked on the remake of A Star is Born. Benny Safdie appears as city councilman Joel Wachs, on whose campaign Alana works near the end of the film. If you listen carefully, you’ll catch the voice of John C. Reilly in an uncredited role as another real person. Most of this works to add color to the film, accentuating its sense of time and place, although the Holden segment goes on longer than it needs to.

That racist gag, though. John Michael Higgins plays a real person, Jerome Frick, who owned a Japanese restaurant in the LA area called Mikado. In the film, he appears once with his Japanese wife, and speaks to her in slow, exaggerated English with a mock-Asian accent. He appears again, later, with a different Japanese wife, and pulls the same shit. There is a punchline there, at Frick’s expense (turns out he’s just an ignorant asshole), but I’m not sure any punchline could justify that lead-up. It appears that Jerome Frick’s second wife, Hiroko, was a fluent English speaker, yet PTA only has the two women speak Japanese in the film. Perhaps this was some complicated way to mock the real-life Frick – and, for what it’s worth, the punchline itself is funny – but few if any viewers will be in on the joke, and the whole thread adds precisely nothing to the film. It’s a shame that either nobody called PTA out on it, or, more likely, that he just ignored them. The Hollywood Reporter just published a longer piece on the controversy this morning, which links to a November interview with PTA where he tries to defend it as true to the time period.

If that bit were cut from the movie, Licorice Pizza would be just about perfect; it’s still my favorite of the movies I’ve seen so far, even with the bitter taste of that failed gag. The chemistry between the leads is so strong – both should be in the running for Oscar nominations, and both scored Golden Globe nods already – that almost everything around the two of them melts away. Maybe there will be a director’s cut that spares us those objectionable scenes, because the rest of this movie is wonderful.

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→ November 29, 2021
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King Richard.

Will Smith is already receiving Oscar buzz for his performance as Richard Williams in King Richard, currently streaming on HBO Max, in which he gives Venus and Serena Williams’ father a more three-dimensional depiction than he’s received in extensive media coverage before this. It’s the kind of performance – playing a real person while convincingly mimicking their voice and mannerisms – that tends to win awards, but the film itself is far more well-rounded and nuanced than recent Oscar bait like Judy or Bohemian Rhapsody were.

Richard Williams (Smith) is the father of Venus and Serena Williams, and decided before the girls were even born that he would raise them to become world-class tennis players, writing out a plan with the help of his wife, Oracene (Aunjanue Ellis), who also worked extensively with them to help them improve as players. They lived in Compton, and as Black players in the extremely white tennis world, faced racial and socioeconomic discrimination, with coach after coach declining to work with the girls or hear Richard’s (possibly crazy) requests for funding for a tennis academy. He does eventually coax Paul Cohen (Tony Goldwyn) into taking them on, but Richard’s plans for his girls – including emphasizing their development as people, not just athletes – clash first with Cohen’s plans and later those of legendary coach Rick Macci (Jon Bernthal), who pays for the entire family to move to Florida as part of the deal to train both Venus and Serena. Richard pulls them from the junior circuit, against the advise and wishes of Macci, driving him towards a conflict with Venus, who sees this as a sign that her father doesn’t believe in her, which gives the film its one real story arc and allows for the resolution when she re-enters the competitive sphere by turning pro.

The film, with a script written by Wilmington native Zach Baylin, starts when the girls are preteens and Richard is trying to find a coach willing to train them, and takes us up through a 14-year-old Venus Williams facing then-#1 ranked Arantxa Sanchez-Vicario (who is probably going to jail soon for fraud and tax evasion). That allows Baylin to show us Williams’ persona as more than just the stage dad from hell, hinting at his actual flaws while centering his love and concern for his daughters, and still leaving room for Oracene, whose role is often diminished or erased from the Williams sisters’ legend. We’re seldom without Richard on screen, but he is also counterbalanced by other strong personalities – Oracene, Cohen, Macci – who at least prove different perspectives and often push back against his monomania, once or twice giving him the shadow of a doubt about his plans.

King Richard is still a showcase for Smith, though, and he answers the challenge with something more than just an impersonation. The voice, lisp, and slight hunch are all true to the actual Richard Williams, but Smith gives Richard an emotional depth that is beyond mere mimicry. The movie can’t work if you don’t buy him as a loving father who’s wildly overconfident in himself and his plans, rather than the crazy, overbearing father of the media narrative when Venus and Serena first emerged on the national scene. He also has to show weakness when his plans don’t quite work – although that’s infrequent in this script – and when his wife confronts him multiple times, including an argument about his infidelities, which only scratch the surface of some of his worst behaviors. Smith maintains the veneer of confidence while hinting at some inner vulnerabilities, which Oracene exposes in that argument scene, which also gives Ellis one of her strongest moments in the script. Indeed, one of this film’s greatest strengths is the room it gives Ellis to make Oracene a three-dimensional character who is a major part of the girls’ personal and professional growth. The two young actresses who play the Williams sisters themselves, Demi Singleton and Saniyaa Sydney, both had to learn to play tennis for their roles, and the hours of work paid off, as they look more than passable in numerous scenes on the court, helping the film avoid the common pitfall of sports movies that get the sports stuff wrong.

It’s a crowd-pleaser of a film, but does so without becoming saccharin, or excessively revising history – we could hear more of the more unsavory parts of Richard’s history, certainly, but at least his infidelities made the cut – and the choice to end the film with a match Venus lost was a sharp one, because one thing the film lacks is much drama on the court. The sisters crush all opposition on their way to Venus turning pro, which doesn’t make for great cinema on its own, and including that loss – which still rankles her – at least allows the narrative to turn on a different point than the obvious point that they were just better than everyone they played. Smith deserves the awards buzz he’s getting, but Baylin’s choices, from adhering to the true story to not pandering to the audience, made this film work for me.

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