→ November 13, 2023
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Asteroid City.

I’m not a huge Wes Anderson fan, which I think is a key disclaimer if you’re going to talk about any of his films. I loved both his animated features and felt pretty close to that about Grand Budapest Hotel, but Bottle Rocket annoyed me throughout, and I turned off Rushmore after 20 minutes because I wanted to punch the television. He’s got a style, and clearly actors will go well out of their way to work with him, but you have to get on his wavelength and stay there for the length of a film, which doesn’t always work for me given his stilted dialogue and idiosyncratic ways of framing shots.

Asteroid City might have his most impressive cast ever, with at least three Oscar winners and twice that many more nominees, almost to the point where the value of a star cameo is diminished because you stop being tickled by the time Hong Chau (nominated last year for The Whale) shows up for five minutes. At the same time, the film requires so much of its actors because most of them get relatively little time on screen – and everyone talks so quickly, par for the Anderson course – and because, unfortunately, the story here kind of stinks. (It’s streaming on Peacock or available to rent on Amazon.)

The conceit behind Asteroid City is that we are watching a televised play within the movie, although the play itself shows up on our screens as a movie (rather than taking place on a stage, where we get some interstitial moments instead). The playwright (Ed Norton) and the host of the television series (Bryan Cranston) introduce the setting and, very briefly, some of the main characters, after which we are thrust into Asteroid City, population 78, a desert town in the American Southwest whose only claim to anything is that a very small meteorite hit the town and left a “crater” maybe slightly larger than a divot left by John Daly. In this town, there’s a convention for the Junior Stargazers science competition, and we meet several families, most of whom arrive with one parent and anywhere from one to four children in tow. The convention is hosted by Dr. Hickenlooper (a surprisingly normal Tilda Swinton) and General Griff Gibson (Jeffrey Wright), and after they give out the awards for the best projects, there’s a viewing using pinhole cameras, during which an alien shows up and takes the meteorite. Hilarity ensues. There’s also a group of grade schoolers led by teacher June (Maya Hawke), a weird country band led by Montana (Rupert Friend), and the hotel proprietor and the only resident of Asteroid City we meet (Steve Carell). Outside of the play, we get black-and-white shots of the playwright, the play’s director (Adrien Brody, so underutilized here), an acting teacher (Willem Dafoe), and an actress whose part in the play was cut (Margot Robbie).

Almost all of those folks do the best they can in very limited roles, with Wright and Hawke the real standouts, but the core of the movie is the relationship that forms between Augie (Jason Schwartzman) and the actress Midge (Scarlett Johanssen, made up to look a lot like Annette Bening), and the one that develops between Augie’s son (Jake Ryan) and Midge’s daughter (Grace Edwards). Schwartzman is one of Anderson’s most frequent partners in crime, but he has dialed it way back here in the most likeable performance I’ve ever seen him give, even though Augie himself isn’t all that likeable – it’s Schwartzman giving depth to a father who’s, well, out of his depth on multiple levels. He’s also able to provide a strong foil for Johanssen’s performance as a troubled film star, one that could have overwhelmed a lesser actor in the opposite role. Schwartzman also appears as the actor playing Augie in the play in several black-and-white segments showing us the actor and Norton’s playwright or the actor discussing the play with Robbie’s character.

The script requires a lot of tolerance for Anderson’s stilted dialogue, and he pushes that too far at many points, including most of the interactions among the various prize-winning teens – other than the memory game they play while they’re all quarantined in Asteroid City by the military, which is one of the best scenes in the movie – and some of the dialogue from the side characters. It’s also just overstuffed with ideas, so that quirky bits like Hawke’s nervous, I-didn’t-sign-up-for-this teacher trying to teach astronomy to a bunch of elementary schoolers who just saw an alien, wash over the audience too quickly. It is coherent, but it is not cohesive, and by the time the last tourists pack up and leave Asteroid City, the lack of a real through-line to connect most, let alone all, of the characters overshadowed the many funny or clever bits scattered through the film.

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→ October 24, 2023
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Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves.

I’m a bit of an oddball for my age bracket when it comes to Dungeons & Dragons. I’ve played the pen and paper game, while in middle school, and liked it but found the actual process kind of slow, and of course when you put a bunch of teenaged boys together in a room, they will begin to act like idiots at some point and the game becomes secondary. (They didn’t stay idiots, though; that group now has two successful lawyers, one of whom has defended death-row inmates; a senior VP at a big insurance company; and whatever I am.) I loved some parts of it, including the character creation, and thought others were slow. I did get very into video role-playing games, both within the D&D universe, such as the Pool of Radiance (which I never completed – I couldn’t beat the final boss, even when I tried to play the game again in my 20s), and without, like the Bard’s Tale and some Ultima Games. Regular readers know I became obsessed with the original Baldur’s Gate trilogy about twenty years ago, and I won’t try the newest game because I’m afraid I’ll disappear into it for days or weeks. So I have some nostalgia for the game, but it’s limited, and when people ask if I was a D&D player I generally answer with something like “not really,” because I don’t know the lore or the rules anywhere near like dedicated players do.

Thus I approached the Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves movie (free on Amazon Prime) without any particular bias towards or against the film; I don’t think I was predisposed to like or dislike it, or to criticize it for any lack of fidelity to source material. I did worry it would be too fan-servicey, or corny, or maybe just boring because plenty of video-game stories lack the depth required for a two-hour film. D&D: Honor Among turned out to be a lot of fun, witty, fast-moving, a little too silly at times, but very enjoyable, and the rare film that left me hoping we’ll get a sequel.

Chris Pine plays Edgin Darvis, a bard who begins the film in prison with his comrade Holga (Michelle Rodriguez), a barbarian fighter, after the two were part of a large robbery gone very wrong, which also led to Edgin’s daughter Kira going with one of the members of their crew who escaped the authorities, the thief Forge Fitzwilliam (Hugh Grant). We see their parole hearing, where Edgin dissembles at length, waiting for one particular judge to arrive, allowing the script to give us Edgin’s and Holga’s back stories – he was part of the peacekeeper group the Harpers until a Red Wizard they’d arrested killed his wife, after which he teamed up with Holga, who became a sort of surrogate mother to Kira, and later Forge and the elf Simon (Justice Smith), a young mage who, like low-level magic users in D&D, isn’t good for much because he’s so inexperienced. When Edgin and Holga finally get out of prison, they find out that Forge is now Lord of Neverwinter, and perhaps not the welcoming old friend they expected to find. They reunite with Simon and draft the tiefling druid Doric (Sophia Lillis), a shapeshifter who, we find out quickly, Simon is rather sweet on. Hijinks, magic, and combat ensue as they try to find the missing magic item they were after in the busted burglary that landed the two in prison, while also rescuing Kira and uncovering whatever Forge’s game is.

The story’s fine, although you can see in general where things are heading and the film doesn’t rely too heavily on big twists and plot surprises. It’s the characters and the actors who make this so much fun, notably Pine, who wisecracks like Michael Bluth with a bit more savoir-faire and less befuddlement at what people around him are doing. Pine sets the tone from the rambling monologues he gives to stall for time at the pardon hearing, making it clear that the script is going to lean heavily on humor and his personality, and less so on the lore of the source material – which is good, because I don’t think anyone needs a film about the 5e core rules set or lengthy soliloquies about critical hits and saving throws. His interplay with Rodriguez is very strong, as she’s doing a sort of Rosa Díaz/Cara Dune mashup that contrasts nicely with his “I’ve got this under control” smartass vibe. Smith has his moments as a supporting character whose importance increases as the story moves along – again, thematically consistent with the rules of the game – and it seems like the script sets his character and Lillis’s up for bigger roles in any future installments. Grant is a complete ham, but it works, and having some knowledge of his behavior over the years, including on the set of this movie, well, perhaps it wasn’t that big of a stretch for him.

Combat in role-playing games can be a slog for players, and even in the best of circumstances it’s still driven by probabilities whether through dice or cards or some other similar mechanism, which would not translate very well to screen or page. The combat sequences in Honor Among Thieves dispense with all of that – the characters just fight, mostly Holga, who can take out a whole army, although Simon plays more of a role as the party gains experience. It’s a subtle nod to the way the game is played without ever slowing down the overall story; the fights are entertaining, well choreographed, and, most importantly, quick. (There’s also very little blood or actual on-screen violence – it’s all cartoonish or out of sight, less violent than a typical Marvel movie.)

There are some clear plot conveniences here and a visit to the Underdark that raises all sorts of questions about architectural stability and sanity. I also wouldn’t call any of the character development or overall themes “deep,” as the script is happy to give us these four adventurers and allow their chemistry to keep things light and fun, which is this film’s greatest strength. I laughed quite a bit, and I was reasonably invested in the plot, even though I think anyone can guess the general outline of the conclusion. It’s a great, not too serious adventure film in a genre that doesn’t often get this treatment.

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→ August 17, 2023
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Barbie.

Barbie had already crossed the billion-dollar mark before I got to see it on Saturday, on top of weeks of positive reviews, hype, and discourse, which combined to both set a very high bar in terms of expectations while also likely predisposing me towards the movie a little bit because everyone seemed to like it – especially film critics and fans I know and respect. So bear all of that in mind when I tell you I pretty much loved this movie from start to superb-last-line finish.

Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach’s script takes existing IP but does something wildly ambitious with it, turning a kids’ doll with very little lore or mythology other than the series of toys in the line’s history into a wide-ranging social commentary and satire on patriarchy, feminism, toxic masculinity, and consumerism, among other things. It’s also a visual feast, at least when the movie is in Barbie’s world, and packed with allusions, references, and entendres that appear to be double. (I was most partial to the Zack Snyder reference, although the Proust and Stephen Malkmus ones were close.) Aside from a slight slowing near the end of the film as the script grapples with how best to get the main characters to the finish line, it maintained its pace with quick wit and snappy dialogue that never talked down to the adults in the audience and provided plenty to keep the kids interested as well.

Barbie starts out with its titular character (Margot Robbie) in Barbieland, driving her tiny car, saying hi to all of the other Barbies, while an obnoxiously catchy song (“Pink”) by Lizzo plays. We also meet several Kens, including Beach Ken (Ryan Gosling), and discover that in Barbieland, girls run everything, and the guys are just various flavors of eye candy, competing for the Barbies’ attention. Beach Ken is obviously in love with Robbie’s Barbie, who we find out later is Stereotypical Barbie, but she doesn’t really need him – he needs her far more. Everything is perfect, every day, in every way, until Barbie is plagued by a sudden existential dread and things suddenly aren’t so perfect any more, which leads to the actual plot of the story, where she ends up going to the Real World to find the kid who’s playing with her and putting all of these thoughts and problems into Barbieland. This leads to a rather rude awakening for Barbie; a massive epiphany for Ken, who sneaks into her car as she’s leaving Barbieland and then discovers the glories of patriarchy; and a problem for the executives at Mattel, who would really rather not have a repeat of the time Skipper showed up in Key West.

I cannot praise this script enough; other than the set design, it’s the strongest part of a very strong movie. Gerwig and Baumbach had to satisfy so many stakeholders and, I presume, mandates: make it funny, make it smart, make it appeal to kids and adults, make it look great, make it authentic to the limited source material, don’t denigrate the doll or the line or its history, and so on. It is often laugh-out-loud funny, with Gosling actually delivering many of the better lines, and when it’s not, it’s mining humor from satire, or just from wry observations.

The pace is also superb, as we’re barely into the movie, with about ten minutes of worldbuilding in Barbieland, before Barbie utters the out-of-character line that kicks the plot in motion. So many movies, whether prestige films or films built off outside IP, are 150 minutes or more; Barbie didn’t need to be, and it isn’t, coming in at about 114 including the credits. The result is a movie that’s packed without feeling dense, and that only slackens a little towards the end as the movie has to focus entirely on resolving the main storyline.

Gosling does kind of steal Robbie’s thunder, though, which is a little ironic for a movie that’s not just about her character but about feminism and the absurdity of patriarchy. He’s just so good as Himbo Ken – well, it seems like all of the Kens are himbos, but he’s especially dim – and the script provides him with more chances to flex. Barbie is dismayed and annoyed in the real world, but Ken thinks it’s the best thing he’s ever seen, and his reactions to little things like someone asking him for the time are priceless. The remainder of the cast is probably more impressive on paper than in the movie because there’s barely enough for anyone else to do. About half of the cast of the Netflix series Sex Education is in this movie, including Emma Mackey (Physicist Barbie), who is the best actor on that series and seems destined for superstardom, and Ncuti Gatwa (Artist Ken), who’s taking over as the Doctor in the next season of Doctor Who. Both stand out when they’re on screen here, but neither gets much definition. Simu Liu is very, very funny as Tourist Ken, Beach Ken’s main rival, playing an obnoxious dudebro version of the character, although it’s also a pretty two-dimensional role. Michael Cera might have the best supporting performance here as Allan, Ken’s best friend, whom Cera plays as every character Michael Cera has ever played on TV or in film – and it’s hilarious. If it’s not him, it’s Rhea Perlman, who is also quite wonderful but in a character that gives the film its most saccharine moments. Bonus points if you spot Lucy Boynton’s cameo; I missed it until the credits, and jumped when I saw the Sing Street actress’s name – and that of her character, which completes a great joke from within the movie.

Given the critical acclaim and commercial performance, Barbie seems likely to earn a slew of awards nominations this cycle … and win very few of them. It might be the best lock for any set or production design awards, followed by costume design, but this could be the sort of movie that has to be happy with the honor of being nominated. The dark horse category here would be the screenplay, where Gerwig – who I really, really hope gets a director nomination now after she was snubbed for Lady Bird and especially for Little Women – and Baumbach get points both for technical merit and artistic integrity. They chose a high level of difficulty and still succeeded, while also slipping in plenty of inside-Hollywood jokes to please that crowd. I’ll go on a limb and predict it gets eight Oscar nods: Picture, Director, Song, Original Screenplay, Production Design, Film Editing, Makeup/Hairstyling, and Costume Design. That’s not what I’m saying it will deserve – I haven’t seen any other contenders yet, with most of them still unreleased to the public – but a wild guess on what it will end up getting. I wouldn’t be the least bit upset to see Robbie or Gosling get a nod, although my gut says that enough voters will decide that the movie isn’t serious enough, the same way actors in genre films have had a hard time breaking through for nominations. Barbie totally captured me once the 2001 homage ended, and I’ll be surprised if this doesn’t end up among my ten favorite movies of the year.

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→ May 26, 2023
→ By

The Show.

The Show was doomed before it ever hit streaming. Scheduled for release in the fall of 2020, when theaters were closed, it has one of the least search-friendly titles you’ll find. The sort-of sequel to a little-seen collection of short films called Show Pieces, this full-length film was written by Alan Moore (Watchmen, V for Vendetta) and stars Tom Burke as a mysterious man on a mysterious quest that turns out to be far, far more mysterious than he or any of us expected. It’s weird and unbalanced and doesn’t tie everything up in a neat little bow, but it is a blast. You can rent it on Amazon, iTunes, etc.

Burke plays Fletcher Dennis, a man who travels under many pseudonyms and arrives in Northampton in search of a man named James Mitchum who, it turns out, died the night before Dennis’s arrival. Dennis is far more interested in an item that Mitchum was wearing than in the dead man himself, but his search for answers leads him to chat up a woman, Faith, who nearly died in the same hospital where Mitchum kicked it; hire a pair of preteen private investigators; talk to an amiably stupid bouncer from the nightclub where Mitchum was last seen; and eventually learn about a pair of long-dead comics who were one of the most popular acts in the UK for decades. While all this is happening, something is going on in his dreams and Faith’s, where both of them appear to be going to the same nightclub, and Dennis learns more about the item he’s searching for and the duplicitous man who’s hired him to do it.

The Show is wonderfully weird, trippy and madcap and clearly the work of a man unafraid to abide by normal plot conventions. It’s a movie better experienced than pondered, especially since several things don’t quite add up in the end – literally the end of the movie, for one – and others might make more sense if you’ve seen some of the related shorts in Show Pieces, which I have not. The film bounces gleefully across genres; when Dennis is talking to the two child detectives, the film goes black and white, and one of them narrates the action, out loud, to Dennis, as if he’s not there and it’s a noir film with a voice-over. (The two kids have the film’s best sight gag as well.) Fletcher himself is a nod to the British comic strip character Dennis the Menace, wearing the latter’s trademark jumper even though it’s an anachronism, with Burke playing the character with a perfect combination of guile and bemusement.

It’s also consistently funny, from great one-liners (“I see dead people.” Pause. “You work in a hospital.”) to running gags to visual humors and more. The dimwitted bouncer, Elton Carnaby, is the film’s best running joke; he can never seem to make up his mind – if his first answer to a question is “yes,” you can be fairly sure the actual answer is “no,” and he’ll get there eventually. Becky Cornelius (played by Ellie Bamber, who I think is going to be a huge star) lets a room to Dennis, and is about the most hilariously inept flirt you’ll ever come across. The gags don’t all land – the musician known as Herbert Sherbert, who dresses as a young Hitler, feels too obvious – but the sheer quantity of them and their placement all over the film, even in graphics and background shots (like the nod to Monty Python) make up for it. I’m pretty sure I’d catch even more of them if I watched the film a second time and paused to examine some of the flyers and newspaper headlines I didn’t see the first time through.

It’s not going to be everyone’s cup of tea, and I could see a criticism that The Show isn’t really about anything – but that’s the nature of noir, or neo-noir, or perhaps we should just call this “hysterical noir” and stop with the labels? It’s just a fun story from a fertile, peripatetic mind. And I didn’t even mention Alan Moore’s own absolutely wonderful appearance in the second half of the film, with an utterly memorable hairstyle and a whole song and dance (okay, mostly song) number. I was hooked early on when it just seemed like a neo-noir film, but the sheer imagination of it all kept me on board till the ambiguous ending. Here’s hoping Moore gets to create the follow-up series he wants to make.

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→ May 9, 2023
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Return to Seoul.

Every year, I scan the list of films submitted by various countries for the Best International Feature Film award, looking for entries that are already available online when the list is complete around December, and then tracking the 15 films that make the annual shortlist. Some of those don’t become available until well after the Oscars, something I will never really understand since it seems like films like those lose the opportunity to cash in on the brief moment of added publicity. Cambodia’s submission this year, Return to Seoul, became available to rent digitally in mid-April, allowing me to catch up with it after it never played in a theater near me. The film, which is in French and Korean, made several critics’ lists of the ten best movies of 2022, and would have made my top ten as well. It’s an exceptionally well-done and moving look at a woman’s attempts to connect with her biological parents in South Korea, only to find that everything involved in the journey is more complicated than she anticipated. (You can rent it on Amazon, iTunes, etc.)

We meet Freddie (Park Ji-Min, a first-time actor) at four different points over about ten years, on separate trips she’s taken from France, where she went as an infant with her adoptive parents, to South Korea to try to locate and meet her biological parents. The first trip is an “accident,” or so she tells her parents, as her flight to Tokyo was cancelled, and she ends up connecting with some locals, one of whom speaks French. They go out on the town and eventually she learns from the French speaker that her only way to get information on her biological parents is go back to the Hammond Adoption Center, which arranged her adoption 25 years earlier. Her father is very interested in reconnecting with her, while her mother declines multiple requests from the adoption agency until she relents several years later. At first her father and his family want her to join them as if nothing happened, even suggesting she move to Korea to live with them, but even that relationship, where Freddie’s disinterest seems so clearcut, evolves in subtle and surprising ways.

Those two stories intertwine with Freddie’s own personal one, as we see her interacting with friends and struggling to find her own identity as someone who was visibly different from her adoptive family, yet doesn’t speak Korean and has no natural affinity to the place or culture of her birth. The script touches on themes of nature versus nurture, cultural alienation, and identity, without resorting to preaching or overly simplistic connections (such as blaming any of Freddie’s behavior on the fact that she’s adopted). It avoids easy explanations or pat resolutions, and neither parental storyline ends happily or unhappily – much is left ambiguous and it’s clear that there would be quite a bit left to both stories if the film had continued.

This is the second film by writer-director Davy Chou, after 2016’s Diamond Island, and he has said in interviews that he based this story on the life of a friend who was adopted from South Korea by French parents, as well as his own experiences as the child of a couple who fled Cambodia for France during the former’s civil war in the 1970s. He cast Park after meeting her through a friend, and she is a revelation here – it’s hard to believe this is her first professional acting role, as Freddie displays a gamut of emotions that all paper over a fundamental loneliness that defines her character. The emotional impact of the film, especially the scenes where Freddie meets her mother and some of her interactions with her father, depend almost entirely on Park’s portrayal, and she delivers with the right amount of emotion and expression. It’s a moving experience that leaves you wanting just a little bit more about Freddie, even as it ends on what seems like exactly the right note.

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→ April 27, 2023
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Living.

Living was the last English-language Oscar nominee on my list of movies to see, since I’m not interested in seeing Avatar and the only other nominees of note I haven’t seen are three of the International Feature picks. Scoring nominations this year for Best Actor (for Bill Nighy, his first) and Best Adapted Screenplay (for Nobel Prize-winning author Kazuo Ishiguro), this adaptation of Akira Kurosawa’s famed Ikiru is a quiet gem of a film, with a tour de force performance from its star and some lovely dialogue supporting him. It’s available to rent on amazon, iTunes, etc. (Full disclosure: I have never seen Ikiru.)

Nighy plays Mr. Williams, a widower and an aging bureaucrat in in the London County Council in the 1950s whose job seems to consist primarily of pushing paper around, especially when it can be pushed to another department on another floor. He never declines a request, merely passing the buck (or quid, I suppose) to someone else. His staff includes the young Miss Harris (Aimee Lee Wood), the lone woman in the group; the eager, brand-new employee Mr. Wakeling (Alex Sharp); and a few other replacement-level men who show no desire whatsoever to challenge the existing system.

This is all upended when Mr. Williams receives a terminal cancer diagnosis, with just months left to live, and finds himself terribly dissatisfied with his life. His son and daughter-in-law show little interest in him as a person, and he doesn’t seem to have any friends. He has no legacy to leave, no one who will truly miss him, so after vanishing from work for several days, he decides to take on one particular project that has been presented to his department and kicked around the building that he can see to fruition: turning a bombed-out building into a playground. His attempts to live a little also bring Miss Harris into the picture, as he takes her to lunch once or twice, and to a film, in an entirely chaste relationship that she can’t understand and that his daughter-in-law, with help from the neighborhood gossip, assumes is something more prurient. The film jumps ahead around the midpoint to show his funeral, after which we see flashbacks to the last few months of his life and the way his family and co-workers respond to his death. Their words and their behavior don’t exactly line up, although this might be the most authentic part of the entire script.

This is Bill Nighy’s film. I’ve always enjoyed his work, and argue just about every year that his story is the only remotely acceptable one in Love Actually, in large part because he treats the film with the reverence it deserves – none. He was outstanding in the British mini-series State of Play, and even charming in the ridiculous The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. This is the role of a lifetime, and he gives a performance to match it. His Mr. Williams is restrained, so constipated in speech that he’s hard to understand, but it makes the moments of actual emotion so much more powerful, even though he’s still actually kind of hard to understand. (Turn the volume up. Just a tip.) Nighy is often at his best in patrician roles, even though that’s not his upbringing, but here he gets a more consequential role in which to deploy that high-born air.

The script takes its time hitting its points, which appear to mirror those of the original film (based, I admit, on my reading of the latter’s Wikipedia entry), including a long, slow buildup to the doctor’s visit that defines the whole movie. That works because the dialogue is so precise – every word seems placed there for a specific purpose, especially those that come out of the mouth of Mr. Williams, yet these words never come across as forced, or out of character. Ishiguro is one of the greatest living prose writers, yet even across his novels, his voice changes to suit the style and genre of the work. Living is his work without sounding like his work, and the result is that Mr. Williams’ grief and revelations and enthusiasm for his one last project come through as genuine.

Nighy became an Oscar nominee at age 72, which Collider says puts him in the top ten for oldest such first-timers, forty-two years after his first credited film role. This is too un-showy of a role to win the honor – I’m surprised he even got the nomination, given how quiet and unpretentious he is as Mr. Williams – but he was certainly better than the fat-suit guy and the Elvis impersonator. Aimee Lee Wood, who is one of the stars of Sex Education, also gives a lovely turn in a smaller role as Miss Harris, serving as the unwitting confidante and comforter to Mr. Williams, while Alex Sharp, who bears more than a small resemblance to Matthew Murphy of the Wombats, is perfect as the wide-eyed innocent who hasn’t yet been ground down by the do-nothing mentality of the office. I’m not sorry to see Ishiguro lose out to Sarah Polley for her adapted screenplay of Women Talking, but both were quite deserving.

For those who are still curious about such things, I’ve got this in my revised top ten for 2022, at #9, just behind Tár and ahead of La Caja and Nope. I still have to see EO, Close, The Quiet Girl, and Return to Seoul, all of which are at least now out as rentals.

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→ 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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→ April 10, 2023
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Holy Spider.

In 2000-01, a seemingly ordinary man in the Iranian holy city of Mashhad began killing sex workers, claiming he was doing his religious duty to “cleanse” the streets of “corrupt women,” with 16 victims before he was caught and executed. Holy Spider takes the story of Saeed Hanaei, a builder, Iran-Iraq war veteran, husband, and father of three who was also a serial killer, and retells it via a fictional journalist character, Arezoo Rahimi, who comes to Mashhad to write about the killings, only to find the authorities disinterested in solving it because they tacitly support what he’s doing. (It’s on Netflix, or you can rent it on Amazon, iTunes, etc..)

Holy Spider is entirely in Farsi, and was Denmark’s submission for this past year’s Academy Award for Best International Film, as the Iranian filmmaker, Ali Abbasi, lives in Copenhagen. Much of what happens with Hanaei is drawn from reality – he lured sex workers, many of whom were drug addicts as well, back to his apartment, gave them a little money, and then would strangle them with their own headscarves. The Iranian press at the time nicknamed him the “Spider Killer,” and some even questioned whether his murders were even a crime, given the victims; wasn’t Hanaei just cleaning up the streets?

Rahimi arrives in Mashhad and immediately finds that the men are being … well, men. The best among them, such as the local reporter whom Hanaei calls sometimes to tell him where he left his latest victim’s body, is benevolently sexist towards her, trying to deter her from investigating the killings at all and constantly telling her not to go to certain areas or run down certain leads because it’s all so dangerous for a lady person. Others interfere more directly, or lie to her, or threaten her, or in one case assault her. As Hanaei keeps killing and the police seem to do nothing, Rahimi begins to investigate more directly, putting herself in Hanaei’s sights, but also creating the best chance for the police to catch him.

Holy Spider tries to be both a thriller and an exploration of cultural misogyny, but isn’t quite deft enough to do both, so once the thriller part is largely resolved with Hanaei’s arrest, the film finally gets to be one thing, and does it well. There’s no real mystery to Holy Spider – even if you didn’t know the original story, the first thing we see is Hanaei committing one of the murders. The film gains some tension from the knowledge that the longer it takes for anyone to figure out what’s going on, the more women will die, and from the unspoken conflict between Rahimi and pretty much everyone she encounters as she tries to cover the story or find the killer herself. Once he’s arrested, after the film’s most intense scene, the focus can be entirely on the way Iranian society, from the police and the religious authorities down to the people they’ve indoctrinated, devalues women. Hanaei even becomes a sort of folk hero to some Iranians. One victim had a child; another was pregnant when killed. Rahimi and her reporter ally even interview one victim’s parents, only to find the mother say she’s glad her daughter is dead rather than still engaging in sex work and using opiates. A woman’s life is simply not worth as much as a man’s to this society. Or this one, for that matter.

The unevenness of Holy Spider crosses into some of the direction and editing as well. The film lingers too long on the murders, coming across as lurid rather than shocking – it does nothing to humanize the victims, each of whom gets a sliver of a character before their on-screen deaths. Focusing on his face during a killing ends up giving him more screen time than the character deserves, time that could have gone to exploring more about the women he was murdering. The ending, after Saeed’s execution, is also very on-the-nose and could have gotten its point, that Saeed’s internalized misogyny and religious zealotry are cultural phenomena rather than just his individual madness, across in less than half the time.

Holy Spider still works, with flaws. It’s buoyed by a great lead performance by the exiled Iranian actress Zahra Amir Ebrahimi (profiled here last fall), who lost her career to the entrenched misogyny of Iranian society; and a strong supporting performance by Mehdi Bajestani as Saeed. Ebrahimi’s performance successfully threads the needle between making Rahimi seem to weak and making her seem implausibly strong or confident; an early scene, where she’s checking into a hotel and they try to turn her away because she’s a woman traveling alone, establishes her toughness while also setting the scene for the various indignities to come. Had the film chosen just to focus on her character, even though she’s entirely fictional, it might have been even stronger in the end.

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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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→ March 17, 2023
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RRR.

RRR was a worldwide sensation last year, the biggest crossover in Tollywood history and now the third-highest grossing film to ever come from India. If you haven’t seen it, you probably know the Oscar-winning song “Naatu Naatu” from its viral dance sequence, which is certainly the highlight of the film. It’s a whole lot of movie, running three hours and bouncing across genres, including action, bromance, musical, and more, much of which doesn’t work, but at its heart it’s a revisionist revenge fantasy (like Django Unchained or Inglourious Basterds) that tries to have fun, and that’s when it works the best. (It’s streaming on Netflix.)

The core plot of RRR is pretty simple – an English colonial governor visits a Gondi village with his wife, and she takes a shine to a girl of about eight or nine, so she and her husband kidnap the kid, paying a few coins to the mother as compensation. Eventually, we meet Bheem (Tarak, also credited as NT Rama Rao Jr.), the tribe’s guardian, who swears to get the girl back, posing as a Muslim man in Delhi to try to infiltrate the governor’s house. Meanwhile, Raju (Ram Charan) is a soldier in the Raj’s employ who shows incredible courage and fighting skills, even against his own people, and is tasked with finding Bheem before he can pose a danger to the governor. Raju and Bheem meet without knowing the other’s identity and become best friends, but we know this can’t last and the two find themselves in conflict multiple times during the film before coming together near the conclusion. Everything else is ornamentation – this is a bromance driven by the kidnapping and rescue plot.

RRR is extremely entertaining, especially given its length (although it could have been a half hour shorter, if not more), but you have to accept it on its own terms. The action sequences are hilariously over the top, and these two men should be dead fifty times over by the time it ends – it’s like a Marvel movie in that way. Raju is impaled on a tree branch at one point, both men are stabbed more than once, both are bludgeoned, Bheem is severely flogged, and both go flying through the air high enough to break a few ribs at the last on impact. This is just how RRR rolls, and I laughed along with the absurdity of it. There’s even a bit of the horror-movie gambit where you are invited to enjoy a good kill here and there, usually when the victim is a colonial soldier or authority figure who’s been openly racist earlier in the film, and I have to admit a couple of those even worked for me. (When Edward finally gets what’s coming to him, it’s extremely well done – the reveal there is quite clever.)

That suspension of disbelief starts to crumble outside of the action sequences. I have no issue with the film’s depiction of almost every English person (save one) as a moronic asshole, given the Crown’s racist and repressive policies towards people who had existed without the white man’s help for millennia, but it does function as a plot convenience too often – it’s less fun to see your heroes outwit a group of simpering idiots than to see them defeat more worthy foes. There are smaller details that also seem unnecessary, such as when one of the heroes is held in solitary confinement and nearly starved, but somehow manages to exercise and become more muscular in the process. I understand the desire to turn these two into supermen, but this feels like an LCD Soundsystem album, where every song with a good hook goes on twice as long as it needs to.

There’s an extended flashback in the middle of the film that explains Raju’s character and arc at great length, a conceit that Amsterdam used and that tanked that film’s story. It’s more effective here, and far more necessary, but again goes on way too long, and the way the story jumps to the past, back to the present, and then a good while later returns to that flashback to finish the story is sloppy. That could have been much tighter while still providing the essential back story.

The two lead actors are pretty great, though – both can command the screen when they’re on it, both exude charisma, and the way they work together on screen whether their characters are friends are foes is the movie’s strongest asset. I’d watch a whole series of movies where these two solve crimes or take out petty English tyrants, especially with a well-choreographed dance number or two. Both men are already stars in India, and I can see why. There isn’t much room for anyone else, although it’s worth mentioning that the governor’s wife is played by Irish actress Alison Doody, who played the villainous Elsa Schneider in the third Indiana Jones film.

RRR won one Oscar this past week for “Naatu Naatu,” although the performance during the awards ceremony didn’t include any actual South Asian dancers, which seems like an unforced error for the Academy. India submitted another movie for the Best International Feature Film honor, The Last Film Show, a movie about how great the movies are, which meant RRR was ineligible for that award. I know many critics and fans felt that RRR deserved a Best Picture nomination, but I can’t get over that line. This is a fun movie, and an entertaining one, but I don’t think it passes that higher level of scrutiny – it’s sprawling and disorganized, often ridiculous, and engages in a lot of trickery to make the plot work. I still ranked it higher on my own list than than All Quiet on the Western Front, Elvis, or Triangle of Sadness, but I can name ten other films I would have put in the BP category over this.

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