→ April 13, 2023
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The Whale.

I don’t know what The Whale was like on stage, but Darren Aronovsky’s adaptation, which took two Oscars home last month, is excruciating on so many levels that even a strong performance from Brendan Fraser can’t salvage it. When the main character’s daughter screams at her father “Just fucking die already!” she could be speaking for all of us, because at that point there’s still nearly 40 minutes of misery porn to go. It’s manipulative, sermonizing claptrap, and I can’t believe no one saw this film before its release and saw how bad and offensive it was.

Fraser plays Charlie, a morbidly obese man who lives by teaching English and writing classes online while keeping his camera off. His eating disorder is his reaction to the trauma of the death of someone close to him, the details of which are revealed in bits over the course of the movie. The entire film takes place in or just outside of his apartment, where he’s visited by a young missionary named Thomas; Charlie’s nurse and friend Liz; Charlie’s estranged daughter Ellie, whom he hasn’t seen in nine years; and Charlie’s ex-wife Mary. As you might expect from a movie adapted from a play, the dialogue between all of these characters exposes their back stories and gives Charlie some modest depth. We discover why that particular death has sent Charlie into what is essentially suicide by binge-eating, why he and Ellie haven’t seen each other in so long, why his friendship with Liz is both profound and complicated, and some inspirational-poster advice about writing honestly.

What we don’t get, unfortunately, is any real insight into Charlie, or what it means to be capital-f Fat. Charlie’s obesity is handwaved away as the product of trauma, which is facile enough but could work in the service of a better story. Instead, the movie spends too much time pushing that angle while tying it to religion, homophobia, and a fairly naïve interpretation of both grief and eating disorders. This isn’t new, and it isn’t interesting, and if you don’t have either I’m not sure why you make this movie.

Charlie is the only remotely interesting character in the movie, which is important since he’s in almost every minute of it. (I think there are two conversations that do not involve him and take place in a different space.) Even so, there’s little exploration of who he is other than that he’s very sorry. The film isn’t laughing at Charlie, or inviting us to do so; it’s telling us to gawk at him, condescend to him, and maybe, if we’re feeling charitable, pity him. He’s pathetic, a mess, a slob, apologizing to everyone for merely existing. He’s not a bad person because he’s fat; he’s not a bad person, but he’s fat, and that is supposed to make us think less of him. Rather than spend more of the dialogue showing us who he is under all that excess weight, it embarrasses us by embarrassing him: Liz saying “beep beep” when he’s backing up, when he chokes doing routine things like eating or nearly dies laughing or masturbating (a scene the movie really, really did not need), it’s all just fat-shaming of a different sort. You can extrapolate from what we learn to see Charlie is probably an interesting person, an intellectual who loves words, whether in prose or poetry, and who has a lot more empathy for other people than they do for him. I wouldn’t mind getting to know him. The Whale won’t let us.

The ending is a huge tearjerker, ruining one of the very few real emotional moments in the entire movie with an excess of gimmickry and artifice. It got me, even though I know better, because it’s just so manipulative, especially given everything that came before. The Whale hasn’t earned the right to make the audience feel this way.

Fraser is the only saving grace in the film, and while he wouldn’t have been my pick (Colin Farrell and Paul Mescal were slightly ahead for me), he’s worthy of the various Best Actor accolades he received. If he hadn’t been good this might have been the worst movie of 2022. He manages to get somut e range of emotions into the character, and when he’s hurt, ashamed, embarrassed, and so very often sorry, you feel it, probably the only honest emotions that come out of this film. Hong Chau was also nominated for an Oscar, as Best Supporting Actress, but she’s very flat in this movie and often comes across as whiny; she was better in The Menu with a character who was only slightly more multi-dimensional. Sadie Sink gives the second-best performance as Ellie, but it’s an extremely one-note character who might as well be from Flatland. (Fun note: In a flashback scene, Sink’s sister Jacey plays a younger Ellie.) Adrien Morot, Judy Chin, and Annemarie Bradley won the Oscar for Best Makeup and Hairstyling, and I think they were the most deserving of the nominees, although I can see the argument that this was all about a single character rather than an entire cast. The transformation of Fraser into a 600-pound man is completely believable.

Lindy West (of Shrill) eviscerated this movie and its ridiculous view of fat people better than I ever could. I’ll just leave it that this movie was awful, and while I’m very happy for Fraser and love the stories of actors who go from acting in bad mainstream movies to turning in Oscar- or Emmy-worthy performances (Michael Keaton being the best example), he’s not reason enough to suffer through The Whale. I’m too much of a completist to skip it, but you should feel no compulsion to join me.

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→ March 21, 2023
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Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.

Black Panther was a tremendous action movie, a smart film with an incredible cast, an interesting concept and solid story, and brought some great action sequences that helped the film survive a story that didn’t quite hold together in its final third. The loss of its star and the actor who played the title character, Chadwick Boseman, meant that the long-awaited sequel Black Panther: Wakanda Forever was hemmed in by real-world events and would have to start its story with something acknowledging Boseman’s death.

That’s part of why Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is so long, running over two and a half hours, but for a script that was forced on some level to hit certain points, it’s smart, empathetic, and more interesting start to finish than its predecessor. It’s the action that lets this film down, not the story, as there’s something almost perfunctory about the battle sequences, both large and small. And the film doesn’t need a lot of that fighting anyway – it’s smarter and more thoughtful than a film that just resolves everything by having characters throw each other off buildings or boats.

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever opens with T’Challa dying off screen as Shuri (Letitia Wright) moves frantically to try to find a cure, only to have their mother Queen Ramonda (Angela Bassett) arrive to inform her daughter of T’Challa’s death. This leads to a brief but solemn sequence to open the film as we see the community mourn and get glimpses of the Wakandan funeral rites, which are interspersed with scenes from the outside world, where other nations are demanding access to vibranium, with one country going so far as to stage a raid on Wakanda to try to steal some. An incident aboard a mining ship that was searching for an underwater source of vibranium in the south Atlantic exposes the existence of a suboceanic culture, Talokan, that also has access to the powerful metal. A young scientist named Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne) – whom Marvel Comics fan know as Ironheart – designed the ship’s vibranium detector, putting her life in danger and setting up a conflict between Wakanda and Talokan over her fate and their relations with the rest of the world.

The reveal of Talokan and a sort of diplomatic mission to the underwater kingdom allows screenwriters Ryan Coogler and Joe Robert Cole to engage in more of the world-building that was so mesmerizing in the first Black Panther film. There’s an extended flashback that explains the origins of Talokan and how their king Namor (Tenoch Huerta Mejía) has been in power for centuries, tying them back to a Mesoamerican tribe that was threatened by white slavers and the smallpox viruses they brought to the region. Namor is the only Talokanil character we get to know, unfortunately, although the stage is set for more such characters to appear in a future movie.

There’s also further development of the Wakandan culture on screen through the death of T’Challa and a further character death partway through the film, as well as more exploration of some of the core characters from the initial movie, notably Shuri and Nakia (Lupita Nyong’o). Nakia has left Wakanda and her post in California where she was about to work at the end of the first film, a decision that the film explains in pieces right through the end credits. There’s a little more exploration of Okoye (Danai Gurira) and M’Baku (Winston Duke), but I would have loved to see more with both of those characters, as well as the new Dora Milaje fighter Aneka (Emmy winner Michaela Coel of I May Destroy You). Instead of getting more time with them, we get a couple of pointless bits with Everett Ross (Martin Freeman) and his boss/ex-wife Val de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfuss), which are throwaway scenes that don’t advance the plot and are painfully unfunny.

Indeed, there’s a lot of humor in this film, and it often feels organic as different pairs of characters are thrown together – nearly always women, by the way, because this is very, very much a film about the women of Wakanda. Serious conversations turn light with a bit of unexpected banter, and the actresses deliver it seamlessly in ways that also make the relationships between them more credible.

Eventually, two things have to happen in this movie beyond the acknowledgement and grieving that open the story. One is that we need someone else to become the new Black Panther, and the other is that that character and Namor have to fight, probably within a larger battle between Wakanda and Talokan. The former worked for me – I thought it was one of the two obvious choices, and I thought the way the script handled it was smart and insightful, especially when that character takes the herb and travels to the ancestral plane. There’s a shorter story arc there that brings that character through to the film’s (first) conclusion that is effective if a little facile and sets us up well for at least one more movie in this series. The second part, the huge battle that mostly wraps up the film, had the problem I have with most Marvel movies I’ve seen – the fighting is mostly ridiculous, because one or more characters are all but invincible, people on the screen are doing all sorts of absurd things, and people are thrown great distances into hard objects without anything worse happening than getting the wind knocked out of them. It’s good that the ultimate solution in this movie isn’t just one character beating the hell out of another, but there’s a lot of that between A and B that didn’t help the plot and that just wasn’t as exciting as the action stuff from the first movie.

As for Angela Bassett and her Oscar nomination, I think she was clearly better than Jamie Lee Curtis, who won the award for Everything Everywhere All At Once, but I would have voted for Kerry Condon (The Banshees of Inisherin) or Stephanie Hsu instead of Bassett, who isn’t in the movie all that much and whose character is not that complex here. She is regal, but it’s a bit of the Judi Dench thing – is it enough to just be the queen, even if you’re not on screen and don’t have a lot of work to do to build out the character? (Yes, I know Dench won, but that will be a controversial win forever.) The most award-worthy performance in this film, for me, was Wright’s, as she has way more to do to develop and fill out her character, who went from a fun sidekick in the first movie to the closest thing this film has to a lead. This film leans on her almost as much as the first leaned on Boseman.

Is Black Panther: Wakanda Forever better than the original Black Panther? Yes … and no. It’s less fun and ebullient. It misses Boseman in many ways. The action sequences don’t work that well and there’s too much CGI in them. But there’s also a better story here, some really interesting and worthwhile character development, and more meaning in its story and conclusion. It almost demands a third movie in the franchise, beyond the Ironheart TV series that’s coming soon (with Thorne in the title role), that goes further with the women who now lead Wakanda in almost every way. It may not be what everyone involved intended for the franchise when it first starter, but Black Panther: Wakanda Forever has the series in a good place.

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→ December 28, 2022
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The Banshees of Inisherin.

The Banshees of Inisherin is writer/director Martin McDonagh’s first film since 2017’s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, which was his most acclaimed movie to that point and took home the BAFTA for Best Film and the Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture – Drama. His latest led all films this year with eight Golden Globe nominations, and reunites the two leads from his debut film In Bruges, Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell, in a dark comedy with two distinct, serious themes lying beneath the film’s absurdist surface. (It’s streaming now on HBO Max.)

Padraig (Farrell) and Colm (Gleeson) both live on the small island of Inisherin off the west coast of Ireland, where not much of anything happens, and as far as I can tell almost nobody ever has to go to work. Padraig and Colm are drinking buddies who walk to the pub every afternoon, with Padraig stopping by Colm’s house on the way, until one day Colm completely ignores Padraig’s knock, and ignores him at the pub as well, eventually telling him he doesn’t want to be friends any more. This unprovoked severing of ties, which Padraig can’t understand and won’t accept, even in the face of Colm’s threats and rather disturbing actions, leads to an escalation of hostilities that wrecks the peace of the island and leaves nobody better off than before.

McDonagh has a gift for language and crafting witty lines, starting off early on in Banshees when everyone asks Padraig if he and Colm are “rowin’” often enough that it becomes funny just by repetition. The comic elements here are a necessary reprieve from the film’s increasingly dark elements, including the deterioration between the two main characters, the insidious gossip that poisons the island’s culture, young Dominic (Barry Keoghan) and his abusive father, and more. It’s the sort of story where its pervasive awfulness becomes even more apparent after it’s over, because the humor and absurdity mask the bleak story while you’re still watching it.

The film works on one level as an exploration of male friendship, and how fragile those bonds can be in the wrong sort of environment. It’s not so much a question of toxic masculinity, as neither character exhibits much in that vein; Padraig is probably too sensitive, at least when he’s not in his cups, and Colm’s reasons for shunning Padraig and subsequent reactions are more those of someone dealing with mental illness. One of them eventually takes their quarrel too far, pushing them past the point of no return, and a once-solid friendship, one that everyone on the island took as a given, is reduced to ashes.

It’s also a thinly-veiled metaphor for the Irish Civil War, which is often mentioned in the script, including in the final scene, and is nearing its conclusion as the movie takes place. This civil war began after the Irish War of Independence, which led to the establishment of the Irish Free State as a “dominion” within the Commonwealth, giving the island – sans Northern Island, which exercised its opt-out clause and became a free agent remained part of the United Kingdom as Northern Island – greater autonomy, leading to full independence in 1933. After the Free State was established, however, pro-independence forces who opposed this partial solution fought an armed rebellion against the new, provisional government, with former IRA members from the war of independence now split between the two forces. The Irish fought a war to kick out the English, won it, and then ended up fighting themselves, leading to nearly 2000 deaths and substantial economic losses. The conflict may have begun over a principle, but escalated into violence when a democratic solution was likely achievable. It led to decades of mistrust between the spiritual descendants of the two sides, one of which later split into the political parties Fianna Fáil and Sinn Féin. The metaphor here doesn’t map perfectly one-to-one – I don’t think Colm is one side and Padraig the other, although a scholar of Irish history may see it quite differently – but it does speak to the pointlessness of war, especially when the two sides escalate hostilities in turn.

This is the best thing I’ve ever seen Colin Farrell do, requiring more range from him than In Bruges or The Lobster, as he makes Padraig feel completely three-dimensional – you know someone like him, someone well-intentioned but unable to get out of his own way, someone who’s probably not the most interesting guy to have a beer with, let alone a beer every day, but who would likely be the first person to show up if you needed help. Gleeson is also strong, as always, but his character is just not as well-written, and his complexity is, shall we say, a little harder to understand. Keoghan is fine as Dominic, who is probably developmentally disabled, although his story feels tangential and his main function seems to be to serve as a plot point for Padraig and Padraig’s sister Siobhan (Kerry Condon), on whom Dominic has a crush. Siobhan’s life is even more stifled than Padraig’s, and an opportunity eventually arises for her to leave Inisherin, a move that completely unmoors her brother, already shaken from having Colm cast him off.

We’ve largely just begun our run through Oscar-worthy movies, so I can’t compare it to much, but I wouldn’t put this over Everything Everywhere All at Once, which is still the best movie I’ve seen from 2022, although I could take an argument for McDonagh’s script over the Daniels’ script for EEAAO. Both are outstanding, but McDonagh’s dialogue is better. The Academy has already nominated McDonagh twice before for his screenplays, which makes me strongly suspect he’ll get a nod for this one as well.

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→ August 25, 2022
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Everything Everywhere All At Once.

Everything Everywhere All At Once is a madcap adventure, a martial-arts action film, a dark comedy, a sci-fi romp, bursting at every seam with ideas and dad jokes. It’s a brilliant work of screenwriting, carried by a career performance from the always wonderful Michelle Yeoh – who nearly wasn’t even in the film. (You can rent it on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, etc.)

The film, written and directed by the Daniels (Kwan and Scheinert, who also directed the bawdy video for Lil Jon’s “Turn Down for What”), follows Evelyn (Yeoh), a harried, unhappy laundromat owner, married to the hapless Waymond (Ke Huy Quan). They have a daughter, Joy (Stephanie Hsu), and Evelyn’s estranged father, Gong Gong (James Hong, who turned 91 during filming), who is just arriving from Hong Kong. Evelyn is preparing a welcome party for her father while also staring down piles of receipts for an upcoming IRS audit (with Jamie Lee Curtis playing the tax authority’s agent). It’s clear that Evelyn is unhappy across the board in her life, but while the two are in the elevator at the IRS offices, Waymond suddenly changes and begins telling Evelyn that theirs is just one universe among many in the multiverse, and in his (the Alphaverse), people can verse-jump, gaining special skills from their parallel selves – but one person, Jobu Tupaki, has used this to accumulate immense power and is threatening to destroy all universes at once. It’s up to Evelyn, our universe’s Evelyn specifically, to save them all.

Part of the genius of this script is its combination of highbrow philosophical questions with lowbrow humor. The difference between existentialism and nihilism, with the former holding that the only meaning in life is created by the individual while the latter views life as meaningless, full-stop, is at the core of the movie; Jobu Tupaki sees and experiences all universes simultaneously, and thus believes that there is no meaning anywhere, only pain. (I don’t think there’s a Major League reference here, but I also wouldn’t say it’s impossible given some of the other allusions here, including one to a 1990s alternative song that is so perfectly integrated into the dialogue I had to pause the movie just to admire it.) Jobu is the film’s Bazarov, accumulating followers in a sort of nihilist cult, even as she seems to be speeding towards her own destruction.

The Daniels originally envisioned Jackie Chan in the main role, but rewrote the script to make the lead character a woman, with Yeoh their first choice, and the decision to re-center the film around not just a woman but a mother and an immigrant changes one of the film’s core messages. Evelyn is asked to run the family business and manage the family, to handle the finances and the relationships and organize this ridiculous party for a father who disowned her decades earlier when she chose Waymond and his dubious financial prospects against her parents’ wishes. Of course she has to save the universe: She’s a mother. If this wasn’t written as a commentary on the modern working American mother, who is expected to do it all and 20% more, it sure as hell plays like one – and Yeoh never lets us forget it, with an undercurrent of stress on her face throughout almost the entire movie. It’s a tour de force of a performance, one that lets her show tremendous range, and I’m going to hazard the opinion that it’s the best thing she’s ever done, even though I know I haven’t seen most of her performances because she’s been extensively pigeonholed since Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Look at her filmography – it’s a sad commentary on the industry’s narrow view of Asian-American actors, and I haven’t even mentioned that this is Quan’s first film role in 20 years after he retired due to the lack of interesting parts offered to him.

The movie is also highly, consistently funny, from the allusions to wordplay to some gross-out jokes to some of the bizarre parallel universes we see, like the one where people have hot dogs for fingers, or the one where there are no people, just rocks. The sheer audacity of much of the humor, often right in the middle of a huge action sequence or a big emotional scene, helps some of the goofier jokes land, and even makes what is probably the grossest gag in the film much more acceptable. It feels like a film written by two people who never said no to the other’s wackiest ideas, and in this milieu, where we’re suspending disbelief to allow for its premise of travel between parallel universes, that sort of humor is almost a requirement. I do think the Daniels missed an opportunity by not having Eels or at least Mark Oliver Everett on the soundtrack, though.

I thought the story here ended exactly where it should, and the script gets to that point in a reasonable and not too predictable fashion, although it does involve a big downshift from the intensity of the first ¾ of the film. There’s yet one more theme that comes up in the back half of the film that further informs the ending, although discussing that would involve a significant spoiler; I’ll go as far as saying that I thought that was handled perfectly and hope those of you who’ve seen it know what I’m addressing. I doubt I’m going to find ten films this year that I liked more than this, or five performances by actresses I like more than Yeoh’s. It’s just a fantastic film in almost every way.

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