Wrapped Up in "The Roses"

Danny DeVito's "The War of the Roses" dark comedy was one of my favorites when I was a kid.  I didn't really understand the dynamics of the doomed relationship between the feuding couple in the film, but I loved watching Kathleeen Turner and Michael Douglas's performances.  I was a little wary when I heard that there was a remake in the works, but the right people seemed to be involved in "The Roses" - director Jay Roach, screenwriter Tony McNamara, who worked on "The Great" and "The Favourite," and stars Benedict Cumberbatch and Olivia Colman as Theo and Ivy Rose. 

"The Roses" is not what I expected.  It is very different from the 1989 "War of the Roses" and is definitely not the broad comedy that the trailers have made it out to be.  I know both of the film versions are based on a novel that I haven't read, and I wouldn't be surprised if "The Roses" hews much closer to it than the first adaptation.  Where "The War of the Roses" focused on the end of the Roses' marriage, "The Roses" spends much more time documenting the whole relationship.  And the relationship starts out very supportive, loving, and healthy, which makes its eventual downward spiral rather sad and unfortunate.  However, this means that the emotional stakes are definitely better laid out, and it's easier to feel sympathetic towards both parties when the hostilities finally commence.

Theo is an architect and Ivy is a chef.  They're Brits who meet in London but move to the San Francisco area to seek their fortunes.  They have two children, Hattie (Delaney Quinn and Hala Finley) and Roy (Ollie Robinson and Wells Rappaport), and a circle of friends including lawyer Barry (Andy Samberg), his wife Amy (Kate McKinnon), rival architect Rory (Jamie Demetriou), and his wife Sally (Zoe Chao).  Everything is going fine for the first decade of the marriage, with Theo working and Ivy as the stay at home parent, until circumstances change unexpectedly, forcing their roles to switch.  We watch them adjust to the new status quo fairly well, but resentments start to build.  And they just keep getting worse and worse over time, until things fall apart spectacularly.  

So, I was invested enough in the relationship by the end of the film that I was rooting for Ivy and Theo to stay together, as opposed to the couples in most of the similar movies I've seen, like the '89 "War of the Roses" and "Marriage Story," where I was rooting for the breakup.  McNamara has added some interesting nuances, such as swapping the traditional gender roles and making parenting styles a bigger point of contention.  Colman and Cumberbatch don't engage in the same kind of grandiose scenery chewing as Turner and Douglas, but I like them together onscreen, and I bought them as a couple.  Their comedic sensibilities are strong enough that the shift to more physical farce in the last act mostly worked, but not without a lot of bumps and setbacks along the way. 

Jay Roach is better known for straight comedies, and it's curious that the comedy is probably the least effective part of this movie.  I love Kate McKinnon, but she sticks out like a sore thumb here.  Sandberg gets by, mostly by playing it straight.  I think part of the issue might be that the British leads are so much drier than the usual comics that Roach has worked with, and it's tough at times for the audience to know when they should be laughing.  Some of the tonal shifts are rough, and it's not until very, very late in the movie that it feels like we're finally watching a comedy.  I ended up enjoying "The Roses" more for the poignant drama than the laughs, and I expect that anyone looking for more humor will have their patience tested by the first two thirds of the film.     

But all that said, I like "The Roses."  I like its ambition and its willingness to get uncomfortably blunt about the difficulties of marriage.  I like the pains that were taken to update the material, and the character work that keeps Theo and Ivy from coming across like caricatures when they start behaving badly.  I'm sure you could have made a much simpler, sillier film just covering the divorce portions of "The Roses."  It certainly would have been cheaper.  However, it wouldn't have been as interesting or as memorable.    

 

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A Look at "Lazarus"

I admit that I was only interested in watching the newest anime from Shinichiro Watanabe, "Lazarus," because it's so obviously trying to evoke the look and feel of "Cowboy Bebop," one of the best animated series ever made.  The opening sequence in particular uses the same visual style and a similarly bombastic opening instrumental.  Several of the primary "Bebop"  voice actors also pop up here and there in smaller roles.  Another selling point is the participation of Chad Stahelski, best known as one of the directors behind "John Wick," as a consultant for the show's fight choreography.  The "Lazarus" premiere features a jaw-dropping prison escape sequence that is tremendously fun.

"Lazarus" was a joint production with Adult Swim, and it's clear they wanted another "Cowboy Bebop."  In fact, it often feels like Watanabe had an entirely different show in mind and just grafted all the "Bebop" aesthetics on it in order to get the thing made, down to every episode taking its title from a song or album, and ending with a white text fragment on a black background.  "Lazarus" takes place in the near-future, where a wonder drug called Hapuna has been created by Dr. Deniz Skinner (Koichi Yamadera).  Hapuna eradicates pain and quickly becomes popular recreationally.  However, it turns out to be a Trojan Horse, and everyone who took Hapuna will die three years later unless Skinner and his antidote can be found.  Who can get the job done?  If you guessed a ragtag group of criminals coerced into becoming a superteam team by a shady governmental figure with access to way too many resources, you're right.

So meet Axel Gilberto (Mamoru Miyano), a petty criminal and escape artist, Chris Blake (Maaya Uchida) a sexy mercenary, Leland Astor (Yuma Uchida) a teenage drone pilot, Elena (Manaka Iwami) a hacker prodigy, Doug Hadine (Makoto Furukawa), the guy in charge of keeping them all on track, and finally Hersch Lindemann (Megumi Hayashibara), the aforementioned shady governmental figure.  One of them is a former Russian spy, one of them is a former secret test subject, one is a former cult member, one is a double agent, and one is secretly filthy rich.  They have thirty days to find Skinner before people start dying, and somehow every place they look results in the team getting involved in gunfights, chases, and improbable action sequences.  Axel, a parkour expert, is positioned as our lead character and gets all the showiest scenes.  

For the most part, "Lazarus" looks pretty good.  There's a predictable drop in the animation quality after the first episode, and the character designs are incredibly derivative, but if all you're after is a slick piece of entertainment, "Lazarus" fits the bill just fine.  After the introductory episodes lay out the science-fiction premise, the show mostly falls into the pattern of a mission-of-the-week action show.  I kept wanting to compare it to "The A-team" or "Mission: Impossible" television programs, where the gang ends up in all sorts of improbable situations.  This is the kind of show where an insecure male character ends up in drag trying to suss out a drug dealer's potential connection to Skinner.  Axel eventually gains an evil psychopathic stalker, because we have to have an evil psychopathic stalker, don't we?   

The premise is a good one, but largely goes to waste.  I assumed that "Lazarus" was going to lean into its dystopian vibes, showing how the world would react to an apocalypse on the horizon.  They could have targeted the pharma industry like "Common Side Effects" or the culture of distraction, like "Paranoia Agent."  Instead, anything too serious is only addressed obliquely.  A handful of episodes have one of the main characters explain why they took Hapuna via somber opening narration, but this has little to do with the plot itself.  There's almost no attempt to have the main characters grapple with the morality of any of their actions, and the mood is always very light.  There's some material showing how Skinner gradually lost faith in humanity, but it's always kept peripheral.   

What's more disappointing is that Axel and the rest of his team stay pretty flat characters.  We eventually learn more about everyone's backgrounds, and there are a few tragic backstories, but there's never a sense of much character growth.  The characters bond as a team, but they never feel like they form individual relationships with each other.  For instance, when Elena makes a friend it's with a fellow hacker.  And when Chris gets into trouble with ex-employers, the rest of the team decide to use up precious time to rescue her, but there's next to no discussion of why.   

As a result, "Lazarus" ends up feeling generic and disposable.  There were clearly a lot of resources poured into this project, but I don't think I can recommend more than the first episode or two, and really that's just for the fancy animation.  Everything else here has been done better by other series, including the "Cowboy Bebop" homages.  

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"The Librarians" and "Mr. Nobody Against Putin"

More spotlights of recent documentaries today, this time focusing on films about the politicization of education systems.

"The Librarians," directed by Kim A. Snyder, profiles several librarians and former librarians from Texas and Florida, who were at the center of the book banning controversies in their states in the post-COVID years.  From the opening frames, it is a film that had my blood boiling, because of the subject matter.  The bans are documented in great detail, shown to be based on the flimsiest pretexts and being pushed by bad faith actors from the very beginning.  Eventually, they are revealed to be the result of a concerted campaign by a handful of extremist Christian Nationalist groups to try and demonize the LGBT community by spearheading a witch hunt of inclusive educators and librarians.  

When we look back on this period in American history, "The Librarians" will provide one of the clearest examples of how the culture war was propagated through fearmongering and misinformation, and the deleterious effects on some of our most vital educational and informational systems.  The film is structured around the interviews with the librarians, who make it very clear that the losers in this fight are always the children who lose vital access to books.  While a portion of the film is spent tracing where the money is coming from that is funding the hate campaigns, I appreciate that little time is wasted on the aims of the Christian Nationalists, whose viewpoint is based entirely in ignorance and intolerance.  Instead, the focus stays on the heroic efforts of the librarians, who do their best to resist not only against their single-minded harassers, but against the complacency of the administrators who often try to appease the mob.  Some of the most uplifting moments I've seen in any film all year are the clips of the students who are inspired to speak out against the bans.

A very stark example of what happens when you don't push back against this kind of politicization of education comes in "Mr Nobody Against Putin," a documentary largely put together by Pavel Talankin.  Talankin is the former videographer and events coordinator of a primary school in the Russian industrial town of Karabash.  Due to his position, he was able to document what happened to his school and its students after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, when the government made drastic changes to the curriculum and instituted new measures to spread propaganda and nationalist fervor.  Talankin narrates and provides context to his footage, which is very rough and piecemeal, but does a good job of capturing a very personal view of Russia's propaganda tactics in a very specific context.

"Mr. Nobody" benefits from the POV of Talankin, who is exactly the kind of energetic, optimistic personality you'd expect to be working as part of the staff of a primary school.  He spends the early part of the film situating us in Karabash and showing us the ins and outs of school life before the government's disruptive edicts start coming in.  The propaganda itself is fascinating, progressing from heavy-handed justifications for the war being delivered by the teachers, to showy demonstrations of loyalty to the state, and lessons where both the teachers and the students have scripted parts.  Significant efforts are expended on looking the part of Russian patriots, and performing for the cameras, as video documentation of their efforts has to be regularly uploaded to a government website.  It's a fascinating, sobering look at the way old totalitarian tactics and new technology have intersected.

I wish we'd gotten a better look at the lives of some of the individual students, but Talankin is only able to include a very few glimpses of young men bound for the front lines and the families they leave behind.  Considering that Talankin was forced to flee Russia by mid-2024, however, I'm not inclined to look a gift horse in the mouth.  

   

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"The Alabama Solution" and "Perfect Neighbor"

All the better documentaries I've watched lately are about social issues that are deeply infuriating, and require more emotional bandwidth to process than I normally have.  It's taken me a while to work up to writing about them, but I definitely want to spotlight these films.  I've got several that I want to talk about, so I'm grouping them by subject matter.  Today, we're going to look at two recent docs that look at the state of the American justice system.

First up, "The Alabama Solution," directed by Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman.  This is an examination of the Alabama prison system, which is in such a horrific state that it prompted a federal investigation in 2016.  Much of the footage of the appalling conditions inside the prisons was captured by the inmates themselves on smuggled cell-phones.  The film follows the lives of multiple incarcerated men, including activists Robert Earl Council and Melvin Ray.  We also see the progression of the investigations over multiple years, and an inmate strike that took place in 2022.  Most damningly, the directors also dig into the financial incentives for the terrible treatment of the prisoners, who are exploited as a labor force and fuel the lucrative incarceration industry.    

What is so effective about "The Alabama Solution" is that it is giving a rare voice and platform to the inmates.  The cell-phone footage in particular is acutely disturbing because it shows the world as the inmates view it, unvarnished and uninhibited.  Some of the same subject matter was covered in Ava Duvernay's excellent documentary "The 13th," but "The Alabama Solution" is far more direct and visceral, because we see the abuses up close.  Probably the most important thing that "The Alabama Solution" accomplishes is humanizing its subjects, providing a portrait of the prisoners that stands in direct opposition to the political narrative being used to justify the indefensible actions of those in power.  As with all documentaries about the American justice system, race may not explicitly be a central theme, but the divide between the predominantly black and brown inmates and the almost all-white Alabama politicians is obvious.

A smaller scale, but no less engrossing film is "The Perfect Neighbor," from director Geeta Gandbhir.  In 2023 Ajike Owens, an African-American mother of four, was murdered by her white neighbor Susan Lorincz, in a case that became a subject of debate related to Florida's "stand your ground" laws.  The majority of the film is composed of bodycam and other law enforcement footage, along with audio from 911 calls, documenting the two years worth of incidents involving Lorincz that led up to the killing.  We learn that Lorincz was isolated and paranoid, constantly calling the cops on the neighborhood kids who played on her street.  We learn that she and Owens had had confrontations before, leading Lorincz to claim she felt fearful and persecuted.  From her interactions with law enforcement, we see that she's manipulative, selfish, and holds grudges.    

Susan Lorincz makes for an infuriating subject, who seems to live in her own, miserable closed-off bubble where everyone is out to get her.  However, what's more interesting is how she's treated by the police, especially in the final round of interrogations, which the director includes lengthy, uninterrupted portions of.  The authorities seem to have endless patience with her in every interaction, always polite and giving her the benefit of the doubt, even when her claims are ridiculous.  It's clear that this deference is a tactic in the interrogation scenes, which do not end well for her.  However, it's still striking to compare the treatment of Lorincz to the prevalent image of overzealous policing we see with African-Americans and other racial minority groups.  Director Gandbhir offers little commentary, allowing the footage to speak for itself.  However, an exception comes at the very end of the film, where it is stated plainly that "stand your ground laws" are disproportionately used by white perpetrators against black victims.

Next time, we're going to look at two films about education.  Stay tuned.

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On "Task"

The latest crime miniseries from Brad Inglesby, best known for "Mare of Easttown," is "Task," about a law enforcement task force investigating a series of violent robberies in rural Pennsylvania.  The narrative is split about evenly between the two men who embody the two sides of the investigation.  FBI Agent Tom Brandis (Mark Ruffalo) is charged with heading up the task force by his superior Kathleen McGinty (Marth Plimpton).  This is a ragtag group that includes a city cop, Aleah Clinton (Thuso Mbedu), a state trooper, Lizzie Stover (Alison Oliver), and a county detective, Anthony Grasso (Fabien Frankel).  Brandis is a widower, and we also look in on his complicated home life, involving his grown daughters, Emily (Silvia Dionicio) and Sara (Phoebe Fox).

Then there's Robbie Prendergast (Tom Pelphrey), who has been committing the robberies with his friend Cliff (Raul Castillo), specifically targeting trap houses run by a local motorcycle gang, the Dark Hearts.  Robbie has a grudge against Dark Hearts leader Jayson Wilkes (Sam Keeley) and his mentor Perry Dorazo (Jamie McShane), who don't take kindly to their drug running operations being disrupted.  Robbie's home life is also complicated, as he's currently living with his adult niece Maeve (Emilia Jones), who is looking after Robbie's young kids for him, but wants out as soon as possible.  For most of the series, the law enforcement and criminal characters don't interact, each pursuing separate goals and dealing with several smaller subplots.  Robbie's past and grudge against Jayson is dissected over multiple episodes.  Meanwhile, the task force soon discovers they have a mole in their midst.

Directed by Jeremiah Zagar and Salli Richardson Whitfield, "Task" is one of the best crime miniseries I've seen in a while.  It doesn't particularly strive for authenticity regarding law enforcement procedures, but rather it's aiming for a more genuine picture of the wider community.  This is a fairly rare thing in mainstream media.  Like "Mare of Easttown," most of the characters speak with Delco accents, nobody is very well off, and broken families are a major theme.  The cast is full of familiar names, and it's no wonder, because the material is fantastic and the characters are unusually nuanced and well written.  Tom Pelphrey and Mark Ruffalo give excellent performances as struggling fathers, but Emilia Jones is the one who really impressed me.  I've seen her in several other projects before this, including as the lead in "CODA," but "Task" is where she really got my attention, playing a young woman trying to hold her disintegrating family together, to her own detriment. 

What I value most about "Task" from a more meta standpoint is that it's not afraid to be a character drama about real people, and specifically real people who are not good at what they're supposed to be doing.  Robbie is a terrible criminal who botches a robbery so badly in the first episode that he instigates a manhunt.  Tom isn't a very good FBI agent either, and two of his team are downright incompetent at times.  However, these are all interesting, realistic people whose actions  do follow a sound internal logic when you get to know them.  Several of the storylines unfold like Greek tragedies or episodes of "The Wire," where wider systemic issues or personal flaws are what doom the characters.  I'll warn here that "Task" is a bleak story, featuring many deeply damaged people, and several of the deaths that occur are upsetting.  However, the ending is a hopeful one.  

I was initially hesitant about watching "Task," because I haven't had much interest in terrible stories about terrible people lately.  And that's not what "Task" is at all.  Yes, it's about crime and criminals, and there are scenes of violence.  However, its outlook is very humane and sympathetic to nearly everyone involved in the story on both sides.  And I find that a very valuable thing.  

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At Last, "The Long Walk"

An adaptation of Stephen King's "The Long Walk" likely would have been more effective a few decades ago, when the spectres of past wars loomed larger in the American collective memory.  However, the film that finally did get made is one that could have only been made now, by director Francis Lawrence, after helming four "Hunger Games" movies that proved that there was an audience for movies about dystopian death games featuring children.  However, none of the "Hunger Games" movies are anything close to as dark and violent and emotionally wrenching as "The Long Walk."  

Set in a dystopian United States suffering deep poverty in the wake of a major war, we watch fifty young men and older teenagers participate in a yearly endurance contest where they walk until only one is left.  If they fall below the speed of three miles per hour too many times, they are eliminated permanently.  Contestants include Ray Garraty (Cooper Hoffman), our major protagonist, Pete McVries (David Jonsson), who he becomes friends with, the troublemaker Gary Barkovitch (Charlie Plummer), unflappable Billy Stebbins (Garrett Wareing), and others played by Tut Nyot, Joshua Odjick, Ben Wang, and Jordan Gonzalez.  Overseeing their progress and providing encouragement via megaphone is the Major (Mark Hamill), a grizzled representative of the totalitarian government.

This audience for this kind of movie is  limited, naturally, so "The Long Walk" is a fairly low budget affair.  There are no particularly showy effects sequences and the crowds of onlookers from the Stephen King story are largely absent.  However, this allows "The Long Walk" a rare amount of freedom to be as graphic and vulgar and as unapologetically existential as it should be.  The deaths are very explicit and realistically brutal.  The walkers interact the way we expect a group of teenage boys to interact, conversing with constant profanity, crude humor, and slights against each other's masculinity.  We watch them deal with every physical challenge, including how to urinate and defecate during the contest.  But perhaps what's most surprising is that much of the movie is built on conversations that Ray and Pete have about their lives, the state of the world, and how to survive their ordeal both mentally and spiritually.  The pace of the film is never slow, but it is very deliberate, with a lot of long, lingering shots, and resulting in a mood that is often more meditative than I was expecting.      

It's strange to have to point out that "The Long Walk" is as much of a character drama as it is an action or horror picture, but this is probably the best major film about male camaraderie we've had in years.  Despite being competitors, most of the kids in "The Long Walk" almost immediately band together to help and support each other, with only a few outliers.  The deaths are horrible every time, and we see the boys risk their lives again and again to save each other, or try to stave off the inevitable.  There's a particular timelessness to this version of the story, where the characters don't talk like modern American teenagers, but the behavior feels universal and very immediate.  There are echoes of older war movies, naturally, since Stephen King originally wrote "The Long Walk" in the Vietnam War era, but the messages about young men dealing with violence and resistance and futility are still painfully relevant right now.      

Those familiar with the original King story will notice that there are some changes, some small and some large.  Some are just to make the story more filmable - slowing down the pace of the walkers, cutting down on the body horror, and reducing the number of participants.  Some are far more substantive.  Ray Garraty is given much more material, including a new character arc that might raise some eyebrows.  However, as someone who has been waiting for this adaptation for a couple of decades now, I'm happy to report that none of the changes in any way tone down the content of the original story, and the adaptation is ultimately true to King's work in all the ways that matter.    

Finally, the cast is excellent and the best reason to see the film.  Hoffman and Jonsson are fantastic as the leads, but many of the most memorable kids are the ones in the minor roles.  Judy Greer appears briefly as Garraty's mother, and adds so much.  The earnestness of the characters  and relative lack of satirical elements may feel old fashioned at times, but the performances are anything but.  "The Long Walk" joins that very short list of projects that escaped development hell after far too long, and it turns out that it was worth the wait.

  

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Digging Into "The Lowdown"

From FX and Sterlin Harjo, the co-creator of "Reservation Dogs," comes "The Lowdown," a comedic crime series about a Tulsa investigative reporter loosely based on Lee Roy Chapman.  It is highly entertaining, and easily the best new show I've seen all year.

Ethan Hawke plays our hero, a scruffy writer and bookstore proprietor named Lee Raybon, who is always low on funds and habitually pushing his luck.  However, his most defining trait is that he styles himself a "Truthstorian," who is doggedly committed to uncovering the truth.  His latest article, about the powerful and influential Washberg family, appears to have led to the suicide of Dale Washberg (Tim Blake Nelson), but Lee thinks it was murder.  Suspects include Dale's widow Betty Jo (Jeanne Tripplehorn), his brother and gubernatorial candidate Donald Washberg (Kyle McLachlan), and some other suspicious characters played by Tracy Letts, Paul Sparks, and Scott Shepherd.  Among Lee's allies are a sympathetic private investigator named Marty (Keith David), an antiquities dealer named Ray (Michael Hitchcock), a reliable employee, Samantha (Kaniehtiio Horn), an unreliable employee, Waylon (Cody Lightning), and Lee's thirteen year-old daughter Francis (Ryan Kiera Arnstrong).

"The Lowdown" has the air of a throwback for a lot of reasons, as it belongs in both the neo-western and crime fiction genres, and centers around a man with the nearly extinct profession of independent writer for a long-form print publication.  More than that, it's about a self-aggrandizing, barely functional dreamer with a lofty moral code, who seems to be patterning himself off of the pulp heroes of the Jim Thompson paperbacks that he cherishes.  Ethan Hawke plays Lee Raybon with relish, a charming scarecrow of a man who is always sticking his nose where it doesn't belong, and always making excuses for his utter inability to be a reliable father, employer, friend, or partner.  He consorts with a parade of eccentrics, who all grumble about his flightiness, but clearly enjoy his company.  As someone who avoided Ethan Hawk movies in my youth after finding him insufferable in "Reality Bites," Lee Rayburn strikes me as a natural extension of the pretentious young slacker he played in that movie, if he were from Oklahoma and got a lot funnier and more undignified with time.

And "The Lowdown" being set in and around Tulsa is a big part of the show's appeal.  The city is portrayed as an eclectic melting pot with major Native-American and African-American populations.  As Lee digs into the death of Dale Washberg, he keeps coming across old issues of stolen land, ugly bigotry, and those in power having too many secrets.  Eventually a Native street artist named Chutto (Mato Wayuhi) and his grandfather Arthur (Graham Greene) are caught up in the mystery, and Lee has to acknowledge his own privilege as a white man carelessly blundering into other people's business more than once.  The culture clashes are often played for laughs, but the show does quietly make a point of keeping several minority characters at the forefront, and forcing the hero to weigh his own need to tell the truth against what is best for the community he values and depends on.  

I like that "The Lowdown" isn't in a big hurry to solve its central mystery.  Several episodes have an appealing hangout vibe, where a guest star or two drops in for some shenanigans.  Peter Dinklage's episode is a fun one, for instance.  I especially appreciate the looseness of the show's format, where there's room for humorous digressions, a romance or two, and even opportunities for Lee to learn to be a better father. Lee's life is complicated, and keeping on top of everything means constantly switching gears from one situation to the next.  We're constantly hearing snippets of people telling stories and enjoying stories that we'll never have the full context for.  It's a good sign when minor characters keep surprising you with new dimensions every time they reappear, and you wish that there was time to get to know all of them better.  Even some of the villains come off as surprisingly well-rounded and relatable.  

It's interesting timing that "The Lowdown" premiered pretty close to the release of "One Battle After Another," which doesn't really share much in the way of genre or subject matter, but has a very  similar vibe.  You have a constantly floundering white guy, playing at being much cooler than he actually is, chasing after a romanticized ideal of heroism.  Both ultimately discover that they are at their best when they're part of a multi-racial community fighting against a common enemy, and supporting the next generation.  "The Lowdown" may not have the feature film fireworks of "One Battle After Another," but I'd argue it gets its points across just as well, and is definitely just as entertaining.  

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