Fun With "The Fall Guy"

At the time of writing, "The Fall Guy" is underperforming at the box office, and nobody is really sure why.  The movie seems to have all the boxes ticked.  It's an action comedy about a stuntman, played by Ryan Gosling, with Emily Blunt as the love interest, and directed by former stuntman David Leitch.  It's technically based on a 1980s Lee Majors action show that nobody remembers, but "The Fall Guy" movie pings as an original in every way that matters.  And it's a fun one.

Gosling plays Colt Seavers, a stunt man who usually doubles for pompous movie star Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson).  After a stunt goes wrong and puts Colt in the hospital, he quits performing.  However, he's reeled back in for the production of "Metalstorm," the directing debut of his ex-girlfriend Jody Moreno (Blunt).  As Colt tries to win Jody back, Tom Ryder goes missing.  The film's producer Gail (Hannah Waddingham) wants Colt to track him down, which leads to murder, mayhem, drugs, a dog named Jean Claude, and lots, and lots of fight and chase scenes.  

The script by Drew Pearce leans hard into the meta, and "The Fall Guy" is really a paean to the underappreciated stunt community.  Cole takes multi-story falls, rolls cars, gets set on fire, and flung around like a rag doll while the actor gets all the credit.  At the same time, the movie is a spoof on the Hollywood moviemaking process, where all of these talented people are putting all their efforts toward making a movie that is, frankly, completely ridiculous.  "Metalstorm" is some sort of space opera B-movie that Jody insists on using mostly practical stunts and costumes to realize.  I also enjoy some of the shots the script takes at celebrities, with Aaron Taylor-Johnson gamely playing a thin-skinned, pampered moron, and Hannah Waddingham embodying the fast-talking, Type-A talent wrangler who is constantly in crisis mode.

I found the movie less interesting when it was trying to be clever.  Some of the jokes and gags work, but Blunt and Gosling's banter isn't as fun as the movie thinks it is, and some of the meta commentary is way too on the nose.  It's fun to get an insider look at what's actually happening on a film set, but that mostly goes away after the opening sequence.  David Leitch is great when it comes to action, but not so good at humor, and on the iffy side when it comes to exposition.  And there is way too much exposition here.  Fortunately, "The Fall Guy" is constructed to give plenty of excuses for crazy action sequences of every possible kind.  You will see stunts involving cars, helicopters, speedboats, and motorcycles.  You will see gunfights, hand to hand combat, and people dangling over very steep drops.  The finale where the movie set turns into a free-for-all of mayhem is a blast.

Gosling continues to make a case for himself as an A-lister, though "The Fall Guy" marks yet another of his projects that has underperformed.  He's dryly funny, charismatic as anything, and has just enough everyman weariness that you have to root for him.  I love that he's allowed to be an idiot in this role, mixing up his movie references and coming up with plans that always end in beating people up.  I could have used more of that for Emily Blunt's character, who should be way more stressed out as a first time film director.  She's too often an afterthought here, which is a shame.  I also don't think we got enough of the supporting cast, which includes Winston Duke as a stunt coordinator, Teresa Palmer as Tom Ryder's girlfriend, and Stephanie Hsu, who drops in briefly as a frazzled PA.  

But let's be clear.  The stunt and action scenes are the main event, and everything else is secondary.  Oh, and it is absolutely not optional to sit through the closing credits, which feature plenty of behind-the-scenes footage of how many of the movie's stunts were accomplished, and closer looks at the many brave stunt workers involved.  Its nice to find a movie so invested in recognizing the team effort.

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"Interview With the Vampire," Year Two

Spoilers for the first season ahead.

This season of "Interview WIth the Vampire" is based on the second half of the Anne Rice novel of the same name.  After the death of Lestat, Louis and Claudia go to Europe, and meet a new group of vampire characters, including the ancient writer Armand (Assad Zaman) and thespian Santiago (Ben Daniels) at Paris's Théâtre des Vampires.  These events are not as exciting as the first season, because the thrill of discovery has been tempered considerably, and Lestat doesn't get nearly as much screen time (he's still hanging around in Louis's head as a projection of his guilt), but this is an excellent adaptation of the source material - and a big improvement from the Neil Jordan film. 

The story has been expanded to fill eight hour-long episodes, so we get to see Louis and Claudia adjusting to life in Paris, their relationships with various members of the Paris coven, and quite a bit more character development for everyone involved, especially Claudia.  She's played by Delainey Hayles this season,  who does an admirable job as a more mature, more thoughtful Claudia, whose yearning for connection with other vampires leads her to some very dark places.  I don't quite buy Hayles as a teenager, but Claudia's frustration and longing are portrayed beautifully.  Also, a brief notice at the beginning of the first episode of the season, announcing the actor substitution, is the best handling of this kind of situation I've ever seen.  We also learn more about Armand much more quickly, and the vampire fledgling Madeleine (Roxane Duran) actually has a personality and some agency in her relationship with Claudia.  

Additional material is also created for the characters in the framing story.  Daniel continues his interview, but is contacted by an outside party who offers information about his first encounter with Louis in the 70s.  This leads to my favorite episode of the entire season, a flashback to young Daniel (Luke Brandon Field) in the immediate aftermath of the original interview that questions Louis' trustworthiness as a narrator, and Louis' whole relationship with Armand.  Louis and Armand's relationship suffers a bit from not being as fun to watch as Louis and Lestat's relationship, but the characters are so fascinating that I was very invested in the twists and turns of the pairing pretty much immediately.  The ending of this season also plays out a little differently from either the book or the film versions, creating a much less gloomy and much more satisfying conclusion for the hopeless romantics like me.  It's a little indulgent, and I don't know if Anne Rice would approve, but for this adaptation it feels well earned.

The production values continue to be excellent. I adore the show's version of the Théâtre des Vampires, and their macabre productions.  Having the actors share the stage with projected film clips is a fun conceit, and Ben Daniels has such a wonderful presence as the Théâtre's stylish leading man and master of ceremonies.  The violence and gore don't feel quite up to the same level of intensity as the first season, probably because there is less intimate partner violence.  However, there are some pretty spectacular fights and showpieces this year, including a harrowing show trial.  I continue to enjoy all the historical revisionism and allusions to other artists.  A fun addition is Louis deciding to take up photography as a hobby in Paris, and becoming frustrated that he turns out to be a pretty mediocre one.  Jacob Anderson continues to be the show's best performer, and his final line in the last episode sent a wonderful chill up my spine.      

With "Interview" nicely wrapped up, and a third season announced, I look forward to more Lestat-centric stories moving forward.  However, I never liked any of the subsequent books in this series nearly as much as I liked "Interview," and the show's creators will have their work cut out for them, trying to match the quality of these first two seasons.  But then again, if anyone should try, it's this team.  And I wish them the best of luck.     

"Challengers" is a Champ

I wasn't looking forward to "Challengers."  I've watched a few tennis matches over the years, but I've never been a fan of the sport, and thought that Luca Guadagnino had his work cut out for him trying to make the game compelling onscreen.  I can't think of the last great tennis movie, and I suspect that there may not be one.  However, I'm happy to report that I underestimated Guadagnino, because the movie is great.  "Challengers" is not only the best tennis movie I've ever seen, it's in the running for the best sports film I've ever seen.

It helps that "Challengers" is simultaneously a movie about tennis and a movie about an intense love triangle.  We first see Art (Mike Faist) and his wife Tashi (Zendaya) in 2019.  He's a decorated professional tennis star, she's his coach, and together they're rich, successful, and seemingly a perfect couple.  However, Art has hit a slump in his latest attempt at a Grand Slam.  Tashi puts him in a smaller tournament to get some confidence back, and Art unexpectedly finds himself playing against his old doubles partner Patrick (Josh O'Connor).  We learn that Art and Patrick first met Tashi when they were all up-and-coming teenage tennis players in 2006, and both young men were rivals for her affections.  

The reunion stirs up a lot of old feelings and a lot of unresolved tensions.  As the three characters reconnect and reevaluate what they want, flashbacks fill in what happened to them in the past.  Tashi emerges as the lynchpin character, who manipulates the other two in order to get what she wants.  She chose Art over Patrick in the past, but Patrick's the one who understands her better - especially her obsession with tennis and winning.  She faces the same decision again in the present day, as everything comes down to Patrick and Art playing an epic tennis match in the film's final act.  I'm thrilled that "Challengers" is an adult romance that actually feels like an adult romance in a way that no movie has in far too long.  The relationship dynamics are complex, rich, and endlessly entertaining to watch.  The maneuverings of the three players are messy and difficult, and all of them transgress at one point or another.     

I can't express enough appreciation for Luca Guadagnino making sexy movies for audiences that seem to be so oddly resistant to them.  He's made a ridiculously hot feature about a contentious menage-a-trois, and gets away with it because we don't actually see any sex.  There's brief non-sexual nudity and a few scenes of foreplay, but all the real physicality is reserved for the tennis scenes (which deliver everything you'd want from sex scenes anyway).  The score by Atticus Ross and Trent Reznor is mostly techno and electronica dance beats, injecting energy and intrigue into the quieter moments where it looks like nothing is happening, but of course everything is happening.  

The performances of the three leads are all very strong, but I think Josh O'Connor comes off the best.  Patrick is in a much rougher place than the others when we first meet him, and O'Connor makes a meal out of being a walking disaster.  Mike Faist as Art is less showy, but no less complicated, and has no trouble going toe to toe with O'Connor in every scene.  I'm hopeful that the success of "Challengers" will raise the profiles of both actors.  As for Zendaya, she's always been a little difficult for me to buy playing grown women, but she's completely convincing as the ex-prodigy who never lost her need to win at all costs.  She was fine in "Dune 2" earlier this year, but in "Challengers" she's the main event.

And then there's the tennis, which does everything right technically, and looks great to the untrained eye, but the final match is on another level.  Guadagnino holds back on cinematic tricks until this scene, where suddenly there's slow motion, overhead shots, shots designed to look like the POV of the ball, incredible sweaty close-ups, all lovingly edited.  And it all worked exactly as intended and had me on the edge of my seat.  I never thought that I'd say this, but I'm ready for more tennis films, especially if Luca Guadagnino is involved.

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"Halt and Catch Fire," Year One

I didn't realize how much I missed "Mad Men" until I saw "Halt and Catch Fire," created by Christopher Cantwell and Christopher C. Rogers, try to do its own version in the 1980s tech industry.  After years of hearing the critical praises, I'd like to say that I finally made the time to watch this series for its prestige TV bona fides.  However, the truth is that I sought out the show specifically for Mackenzie Davis and Lee Pace, who play one of the couples "Halt and Catch Fire" is built around.  Davis is a brilliant young coder named Cameron Howe, and Pace is the corporate shark, Joe McMillan, who recruits her to work on the new personal computer project he's putting together at the fictional Cardiff Electric.  Joe has also hired Gordon Clark (Scoot McNairy) to put together the hardware.  Gordon and his wife Donna (Kerry Bishé) are both engineers, with a marriage already under strain from Gordon's prior ambitions.  

For the computer literate, watching an alternate history of the early days of computing, where the Cardiff team comes up with so many innovations, and problem solves their way out of so many crises, should provide plenty of nerdy, nostalgic joy.  For the technologically clueless like me, "Halt and Catch Fire" is still a great watch for the endless drama of a bunch of volatile, mismatched personalities constantly at each other's throats in the pursuit of creating something great.  The corporate antics are often very similar to "Mad Men," with Joe as the ruthless salesman who can talk his way out of anything, Cameron as the rising ingénue, and the Clarks trying to balance home and work lives.  The ensemble is much smaller, the writing more plot-driven, and the characters more broadly drawn.  Soap opera style dramatic twists come fast and furious in the second half of the season.  However, I like that the storytelling is very balanced, with none of the four lead characters really dominating the narrative.  Donna might have been the nagging wife archetype on another show, but here there's so much time spent on her perspective, and Kerry Bishé's performance is so strong, Donna easily won me over.

There's a sense that "Halt and Catch Fire" is still finding its feet, and the show's sterling reputation is definitely a factor in why I'm giving this first season more slack.  Characters that are underwritten now are on track to improve as the show goes on.  The relationship dynamics are going to change as we move on to different projects and different stages of everyone's lives.  The performances are all very strong, and the four leads all have interesting arcs set up for them that I'm looking forward to seeing play out.  Cameron is probably the weakest link at this point, never showing much beyond her rebel exterior, but Mackenzie Davis is so striking onscreen that I'm invested in her story anyway.  And I love that the writers tipped their hand in the last episode to suggest that she's based on the woman from Apple's famous "1984" Superbowl ad.   

  

I wish the rest of the cast was a little better filled out.  The only major supporting character sticking around for the long term is John Bosworth (Toby Huss), Joe's boss at Cardiff, who simply is not given enough to do and didn't leave much of an impression on me.  Probably the weakest episode is the ham-handed, one-episode appearance of Joe's ex - who happens to be  the only African-American character of any importance in the entire season - to throw another temporary wrench in the works.  

Right now, my favorite aspect of the show is the music, composed by Paul Haslinger, formerly of Tangerine Dream.  The period-appropriate electronica tracks are absolutely perfect.  I think I could watch another three seasons of "Halt and Catch" fire just for the end credits music.  

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My Favorite George Stevens Film

George Stevens is the last of the "Five Came Back" WWII directors who I haven't written a "Great Directors" entry for yet.  I was on the fence for a long time about whether he should have an entry or not.  Despite winning the Academy's Thalberg Award, two Oscars, and a ton of other accolades, I never liked any of his films much.  His socially conscious epics like "Giant" and "Shane" bored me.  They looked great, but the stories were ponderous and self-important.  It was only when I started digging into films from the 1930s and 1940s that I found Stevens' pre-War output of comedies, musicals, and lighthearted adventure films.  It turns out that Stevens started out as a cinematographer and gag man for the Laurel and Hardy films.  And it was his early career efforts that won me over.

"Penny Serenade" is an oddball film no matter how you look at it.  Telling the story of a tumultuous marriage, most of the time it's a domestic comedy, but the second half grows more and more melodramatic, finally ending in tragedy with a little last-second uplift.  Episodes from the couple's life are told in flashback from a point in time when the two are about to separate.  There are several terrible plot twists that only work because the actors are good enough to pull it off, and because Stevens keeps the proceedings moving along swiftly.  And even so, I don't know if I would have liked "Penny Serenade" as much if I weren't lucky enough to have seen it at the right time in my life, when I was primed to be the most sympathetic to its main characters.    

Irene Dunne and Cary Grant play a young couple who decide to adopt a child after suffering a miscarriage.  Over the years, we watch them struggle through the adoption process, common parenting woes, and unexpected tragedy.  The film is absolutely manipulative, getting all the mileage it can out of the cute baby, but also very charming.  I knew it had me when we came to the scene where a family friend  - an ink-stained printing worker named Applejack - has to patiently demonstrate to the clueless new parents how to bathe and diaper a baby.  And I realized I was completely head over heels when Cary Grant had his big speech to a judge in the third act, pleading that love should matter more than a family's temporary money problems.  The Academy took notice too, giving Grant his first Best Actor nomination.

The narrative skips backwards and forwards in time, taking us from the couple's first meeting through the present day.  The use of music is key, tying the flashbacks to a record collection, where each transition to a different period is paired with a new song.  The visual storytelling is wonderful, dispensing with dialogue when fortune cookies, a montage of nurseries, or newspaper headlines will do.  Upon a recent rewatch, I was surprised at how long it took to set up the characters and their relationship, and I'd forgotten some of the early scenes, like the entire period the couple spent living in Japan.  No one even brings up adoption until halfway through the movie, but once the baby shows up it feels like everything snaps into focus.  It's amazing how little comic scenes of walking up a squeaky staircase, or fumbling an uncooperative alarm clock feel so much more impactful than the literal earthquake that happens in the first act.    

One thing that's confounded me about "Penny Serenade" is that the most dire and upsetting tragic turn in the story isn't depicted at all, despite being critical to the plot.  We only learn about it through a letter read by one of the supporting characters some time later.  Was this kind of tragedy  considered  too much for 1940s audiences to take?  I don't know if the filmmakers made the right choice, but at least the execution is tactful and sensitive, focusing on the terrible impact of the family's loss instead, and making more of a point of their resiliency.  The balance was the important part - if "Penny Serenade" had been all melodrama, without the romance or the comedy, I doubt I'd have responded to it nearly so well.  

George Stevens famously stopped making comedies after returning from WWII, focusing instead on humanist dramas and prestige pictures.  I consider it a terrible loss.  He was certainly no stranger to melodrama before the war, but he was also one of the romantic comedy greats, and never got enough credit for it.    

What I've Seen - George Stevens

Alice Adams (1935)

Swing Time (1936)

Vivacious Lady (1938)

Gunga Din (1939)

Penny Serenade (1941)

Woman of the Year (1942)

The Talk of the Town (1942)

The More the Merrier (1943)

I Remember Mama (1948)

A Place in the Sun (1951)

Shane (1953)

Giant (1956)

The Diary of Anne Frank (1959)

The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965)

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"Hit Man" Makes His Case

This was supposed to be the summer of Glen Powell, and his most notable play for the A-list is the film he stars in and co-wrote with Richard Linklater, "Hit Man."  It's loosely based on the life of Gary Johnson, an unassuming college professor who was secretly helping out law enforcement by playing a fake hit man in undercover operations.  Powell gets to dress up in fun disguises and put on different personas.  He transforms from a nerdy academic to a confident stud over the course of the story, helped out by his romance with a desperate woman, Madison, played by Adria Arjona.  He's in practically every scene, and uses the time to make the case that he's ready to be America's new favorite leading man.  

And Powell mostly won me over, though with a few misgivings.  Similarly, "Hit Man" won me over, though the too-tidy resolution left me a little shell-shocked.   I give Linklater and Powell all due credit for setting up a fun, watchable romance, and the two leads certainly have chemistry.   "Hit Man" mostly follows the usual template of a caper movie, playing with mistaken identity and secret relationship tropes in a very lighthearted way.  However, when it comes to the film shifting gears to something more serious in the last act, I didn't quite buy the big twists.  Some of this is due to the performances - Adria Arjona is fine up to the point where she has to be potentially threatening, which doesn't really work.  Powell's better about getting Gary's thought processes across, except in that crucial final moment, where we find out if the hit man is really just a part he's playing.  I'm not sure if the resulting tonal clashes were deliberate or if I'm overthinking things.  

Spoilers ahead in this paragraph.  Gary and Madison getting a picture perfect happy ending in spite of doing some awful things is meant to be dissonant to an extent, but probably not to the extent that I found it.  On the one hand the story is a fictionalized account of a real person's life, and we know that the final act was completely made up to inject some sensationalism.  The credits even point this out!  On the other hand, this feels like a very odd way for Linkater to be doing any kind of self-reflective commentary on the artifice required for happy endings in this kind of crime-based rom-com.  There are definitely better ways to get this idea across, and I wonder if "Hit Man" would have been better as a Steven Soderbergh project instead of a Richard Linklater one.  Or did I just not get the joke about Gary embracing a role that we know from the outset is a fantasy?  

In any case, "Hit Man" is a solid piece of filmmaking.  It's very low budget and lacks a lot of the niceties you'd expect from studio productions, but I hardly noticed their absence.  Because Gary is a fake hit man, violence is only alluded to and mostly happens offscreen.  However, Linklater is good at keeping the momentum going and the tension high.  The high point of the film is a fantastic scene involving Powell, Arjona, and the iPhone Notes app, as they try to keep their stories straight during a staged confrontation.  The timing is perfect, the camerawork and editing are on point, and the actors seem to be having a blast.    

Linklater films are dependably well populated with interesting character actors, and the MVP of the cast is definitely Austin Amelio.  He plays Jasper, a scummy cop who becomes the chief antagonist, but the performance is so entertaining that I was internally cheering whenever he showed up.  Retta and Sanjay Rao play Gary's snarky handlers while he's working undercover.  They often feel like they stepped out of a network sitcom, but I suspect they're closer to what real cops are like than most of the ones we see onscreen.   

I admit that I got overhyped for "Hit Man," one of the few bright spots in a fairly lackluster summer.  And I probably got overhyped for Glen Powell too, who is doing a perfectly good job of being a leading man here, while making progress toward being a movie star.  I don't think he's quite there yet, but he's definitely gaining speed.  

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They Broke Google (A Rant)

2024 seems to be the year when everyone figured out that the Internet is terrible now.  The big tech companies have all stopped innovating now that the investment money has dried up, and are now busy trying to suck every last cent of profit that they can from their users.  Now that Google, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and all the rest have gotten everyone dependent on their ubiquitous services, they don't have to care about the customer experience anymore.  Elon Musk can let Twitter turn to absolute garbage, and people are still using it because they have to - the livelihoods of many creators hinge on it.  Youtube is waging war against ad-blockers instead of trying to make their site more usable without them.  Amazon has inserted so many ads into Prime, it feels downright hostile.

But the worst - and perhaps the most emblematic example of this attitude - is the once vaunted Google internet search engine.  Advertisements, SEO optimization, and the prioritization of product searches have made searching far more difficult than it used to be.  More obscure sources have been buried or deindexed, frustrating research efforts.  Recent "algorithm updates" to address spam and AI-generated content don't appear to have helped much.  And this isn't a new phenomenon, with complaints about the erosion of search quality going back several years.  It just took a while for everyone to notice, the same way it took a while to realize that Amazon largely turned into a dropshipping business for low quality Chinese knockoffs, and Craigslist turned into scam central.    

In short, capitalism has caught up.  The free trial has finished and now we have to pay the subscription fees, or deal with a worse and worse online experience.  Paywalls limit access to real journalism while misinformation runs rampant.  There aren't real kid-friendly online spaces anymore, because moderation costs too much, so you have to be a helicopter parent or keep your kid off the internet until they're in high school.  Everybody wants you to download an app.  Everybody wants permission to access your data and feed it to an AI.  The algorithm determines everything you see, and gaming the algorithm is now a necessary skill set to actually get anything done or find sources that aren't awful.  The worst scams and abuses aren't being cracked down on because legislators still don't understand how anything works on the internet, despite most of us now spending way too much time online. 

I find myself nervously eyeing the parts of the internet that are still in relatively good shape.  Social media site Reddit recently had an IPO, and can't seem to keep futzing with its algorithms, but its user base remains as ornery as ever.  Programming site Stack Overflow is in the middle of a war with its users over a partnership deal with OpenAI.  The New York Times published a concerning article on the future of Wikipedia last year, Wikipedia’s Moment of Truth, which is doing nothing for my peace of mind.  I tried using Microsoft's Bing search engine for a while, but their Copilot AI assistant (based on OpenAI again) was so intrusive that I eventually quit.  

Now in the far distant past, when an online service started behaving badly, the users would jump ship for a competitor.  My early internet history led me through tons of defunct online communities like Usenet, Livejournal, MySpace, Vine, and Digg.  I've been feeling for a while that it's time to start searching for greener pastures, so I've been quietly spending more time on Bluesky and Metafilter, and developing other fallback options in case things start to fall apart.  However, not everybody knows how to do this, especially the younger folks.  Some services like Youtube and Google Search are so entrenched and so dominant, you have users who would be unable to function online without them.   

Then again, users have a history of adapting quickly in a pinch.  Remember when Zoom exploded during COVID lockdown, when it turned out other options like Skype and Google Meet just weren't going to cut it?  Or before that, remember how fast Blackberry went down when the Iphone made its debut?  If someone figures out a search algorithm that can reliably outperform Google Search, it'll catch on quickly.  You can kill TikTok - and hopefully they will, because the app is straight trash - but an alternative is probably just around the corner.  Let's just hope that Elon Musk doesn't end up running it.    

Anyway, it's probably a good thing that the honeymoon phase of the Internet's takeover of the planet is done.  Now we can get started on finally fixing it.

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"The Idea of You" and "Hundreds of Beavers"

Well, this is the weirdest pairing I've done in a while, but I don't want to wait any longer to put down some thoughts on these two movies.

I've tried to write more about romantic comedies, because the genre needs all the attention it can get these days.  After a pretty dry spring, the only major romantic comedy of any real note from the last few months is Amazon Prime exclusive "The Idea of You."  It's a fun bit of wish fulfillment for women in their forties, and as the intended target audience, if I don't talk about this movie, who will?  At first glance, it seems pretty disposable - Anne Hathaway stars as Solène, a divorced mother of a teenager, Izzy (Ella Rubin), who has a chance meeting with a 24 year-old pop star, Hayes Campbell (Nicholas Galitzine), and decides to pursue a relationship with him, despite knowing better.   

Co-written and directed by Michael Showalter, everything about this movie is unlikely from the start.  Solène runs an art gallery in the Los Angeles area, her ex-husband Daniel (Reid Scott) is a workaholic who can afford tickets to Coachella for his daughter and her friends, and Annie Mumolo is popping by Solène's house every so often for convenient girl talk.  Then there's Hayes, the remarkable un-bro-ey pop star who falls so head over heels in love with Solène at first sight that he's dedicating songs to her and buying up every piece at her gallery.  And isn't it convenient that Izzy (clearly played by an actress in her 20s) is going to be away at camp all summer, so Solène can jet-set around Europe with Hayes on the European leg of his boy band's current tour?

However, I like the Showalter and his co-writer Jennifer Westfeldt use the opportunity to dig into the hypocrisy around "cougar" relationships, and events unfold pretty realistically once the public finds out.  This is not "Notting Hill," and the media attention quickly proves to be too much for Solène and Izzy to handle.  And there's something very admirable about the movie choosing to face that reality instead of perpetuating the fantasy, and choosing a rather quaint, old-fashioned ending.  "The Idea of You" is still fluff, but it's not overly mindless fluff, which is always a nice surprise.  Anne Hathaway hasn't made something this light and Nora Ephron-esque in a while, and frankly that's a shame.  She's still terribly charming and watchable doing this kind of material, and the movie goes down pretty easy, even if I wasn't much of a fan of the poppy musical interludes.  Galitzine's fine, but boy bands were never my thing.  

On to "Hundreds of Beavers," which is quickly becoming the cult film of the year.  Directed by Mike Cheslik, starring Ryland Brickson Cole Tews, and written by them both, this is a low budget labor of love, with some truly demented intentions.  "Hundreds of Beavers" feels like some nostalgic Wisconsinite filmmakers decided to recreate some of the violent cartoons of their youth, but nobody could draw, so they decided to just put people in ludicrous mascot costumes to play the animals, use video game assets for anything they couldn't build themselves, and have a live action guy as the main character, running amok.

So, this is the tale of 19th century fur trapper Jean Kayak (Tews), who traverses a snowy forest in search of bunnies, beavers, raccoons, and other animals to annihilate.  It takes a while for Jean Kayak to build up his skills and his inventory from zero, trading furs to the Merchant (Doug Mancheski) for tools and weapons.  He also flirts with the Merchant's daughter (Olivia Graves) and works toward the seemingly impossible goal of trapping hundreds of beavers to buy her a diamond engagement ring.  "Hundreds of Beavers" is in black and white, there is no audible dialogue, and all the visual effects shots were created with Adobe After Effects.  It plays a bit like an old Buster Keaton short, except that it's an hour and 48 minutes long, and the visual language is a lot more cartoonish and surreal.  For instance, every time Jean succeeds in killing one of the animals, its eyes are X'd out with big black crosses.     

It takes a long time for "Hundreds of Beavers" to establish how the universe works, show the mechanics of how all the animals and weaponry function, and set up the stakes and goals for our hero - maybe too long.  The film's major flaw is its pacing.  There's a point where we get a video game map mechanic showing all the different locations where Jean travels, and we just watch him make his rounds, gathering supplies and checking traps, incrementally building up to the big, wild finale where everything snowballs into chaos.  Small gags are repeated over and over with new variations, and tend to get funnier each time, but there's a significant chunk of the movie that just feels like a slog.  It didn't help that for a good amount of "Hundreds of Beavers," the gags and slapstick didn't strike me as particularly funny.   

However, the movie is absolutely fascinating for what it manages to accomplish on such limited resources, and its particular blend of influences, from old cartoon tropes to giant monster battles in the finale.  It reminds me a lot of "Molli and Max in the Future," but even more of a shoestring production, relying on a lot of passion and ingenuity.  Comedies are very hit or miss for me, and I know that "Hundreds of Beavers" has won over a lot of fervent fans.  And for their sakes, I'm thrilled this movie exists.

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"Baby Reindeer" Scares Me

I watched "Baby Reindeer" because of the impressive level of hype around it when it premiered.  I normally would have steered clear of  a semi-autobiographical show about a stalker, especially one that keeps getting compared to "I May Destroy You."  I'm not great with anxiety-inducing media, and stalkers definitely qualify as anxiety-inducing.  However, "Baby Reindeer" isn't just about a case of stalking.  It turns out to be a very dark and disturbing character drama, where the stalking is just the jumping off point for a lot of other issues the main character is facing.  

Donny Dunn (Richard Gadd) is an aspiring comedian who works in a London pub.  One day, a woman named Martha Scott (Jessica Gunning) comes in, upset, so Donny gives her a free drink.  This innocuous act of kindness sparks Martha's obsession with Donny, and years of escalating stalking incidents.  She sends him dozens of E-mails a day, often sexually explicit and very intense.  She calls him nicknames, including Baby Reindeer.  She's clearly mentally ill, but Donny can't seem to just cut her off.  Eventually Martha is affecting Donny's relationships and comedy career, and forcing him to face some uncomfortable truths about himself.  Other characters include Donny's ex Keeley (Shalom Brune-Franklin), her mother Liz (Nina Sosanya), Donny's old mentor Darrien (Tom Goodman-Hill), and a new potential love interest, Teri (Nava Mau).

Victim blaming is generally discouraged when talking about  stalking situations, but Richard Gadd purposely turns the spotlight on himself, highlighting all the ways that he made the situation with his stalker worse, before digging into the emotional and psychological traumas behind his behavior.  It's both impressive and maybe a little worrying that Gadd chose to play Donny himself, and reenact some very dark and disturbing incidents in his life - not just the stalking, but prior instances of drug use and sexual assault.  There's an unnerving authenticity and rawness to Gadd's performance, and the content warnings aren't just there for show.  And I suspect it's only by being so personal that Gadd is able to talk about some of the more complicated aspects of abusive relationships we don't usually see in stalker stories, along with his own addiction and identity struggles. 

And then there's Jessica Gunning.  "Baby Reindeer" was originally a one-man performance piece, but I can't imagine that it could have possibly been as affecting as the dramatization, because of the incredible presence of Gunning as Martha Scott.  The depiction of this poor, sad, desperate woman rings so true to life, it's no wonder Martha has become instantly iconic.  We all know sad sacks like her who are down on their luck, lonely, and ready to latch on to the first person they meet who displays the smallest amount of interest.  And as Donny makes it clear, Martha is far from all bad.  He's initially nice to her because he genuinely enjoys her company and the emotional validation she gives him.  However, Martha has no boundaries.  And Martha isn't afraid of causing a scene in public.  And Martha only hears what she wants to.  And Martha is a bigot, horrible to other women, and dangerous when threatened.  And Martha will not go away.  Gunning wonderfully balances all of these sides of the character, including her unnerving ability to change her moods instantaneously.  

There's a lot of emphasis on the use of social media and online communication as part of Martha's stalking behavior.  Reportedly, many of the messages we see in the show from Martha were sent by Gadd's real stalker, complete with constant misspellings, baby talk, and increasingly wild fantasizing.  While Martha can control herself to some extent when meeting Donny face to face, she's totally unhinged in text, and the sheer amount of E-mails she sends is staggering.  It also establishes "Baby Reindeer" in a very particular point in time, in the 2010s, when texts hadn't yet supplanted E-mails as the primary form of mobile communication.  As we get deeper and deeper into Donny's head, and follow him through extended tangents with other relationships and long flashbacks, the E-mails become an important anchoring device, reminding us that Martha is still out there, and still a looming threat.           

Despite the title of this post, I never found "Baby Reindeer" or any of its characters frightening.  The show is not set up as a thriller or horror piece, but instead a serious, sobering piece of self-examination that is remarkably honest about very uncomfortable subject matter.  What scared me about it was how I saw parts of my own psyche reflected by Donny and Martha, and where their worst impulses took them.  I've got plenty of my own obsessions, and it's not hard to imagine that in other circumstances, without the support system that I'm lucky to have, I might find myself in the shoes of either character.   

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"Love Lies Bleeding" Will Pump You Up

I love it when a promising actor gets a breakout role, and Katy O'Brien has a fantastic one in "Love Lies Bleeding," a crime thriller featuring a lesbian couple.  O'Brien plays Jackie, a female bodybuilder who shows up one day at the gym managed by Lou (Kristen Stewart), with big dreams of winning a bodybuilding competition in Las Vegas and moving to the coast.  The two start a relationship and move in together, but their troubles soon begin to pile up.  Lou's sister Beth (Jena Malone) is married to an abusive lout named JJ (Dave Franco), who is on the verge of going too far.  Jackie unwittingly becomes addicted to steroids.  An overeager admirer of Lou's named Daisy (Anna Baryshnikov) refuses to go away.  Then there's the looming presence of Lou's criminal father Lou Sr. (Ed Harris), who runs the shooting range where Jackie works, and starts pointing her down a dark path.

"Love Lies Bleeding" takes place in 1989, and oozes '80s body worship.  The neo noir plotting may follow the Coen brothers' example, but there's an intense physicality to all the depictions of the characters, especially in the sex and bodybuilding scenes, that's much more of the school of Paul Verhoven and Adrian Lyne.  Jackie is a rare female film character who is incredibly buff, and depicted as attractive and desirable because of this.  And because we're in a dead end town somewhere in New Mexico, nearly everyone else looks a little scummy , perpetually strung-out, and half of the cast sport mullets.  Everyone keeps falling in love with the wrong people and resorting to violence.  Director Rose Glass is not afraid to show gore, and is not afraid to get surreal, though the imagery is considerably less horrific than what appeared in her last feature, the horror movie "Saint Maud."

I enjoyed "Saint Maud," but "Love Lies Bleeding" is a significant step up.  The characters and their moral quandaries are far more complex, and the performances are fantastic all around.  I love that we're in the middle of a minor wave of lesbian crime films, but this time around the lesbian characters are so much richer and more interesting than we got in the past.  Katy O'Brien as Jackie is so magnetic onscreen, it's easy to see why Lou ignores all the warning signs about Jackie's troubled background to pursue a relationship with her.  Likewise, Kristen Stewart's screen persona is a great match for the dissatisfied, impulsive Lou.  Her family situation is much more thorny than it seems at first glance, and there's some real ambiguity as to how much of Lou's rift with her father is due to fear of him, and how much is from fear of her own dark impulses.   

More than anything, I love the way that Rose Glass juggles different tones here, how Jackie's bodybuilding scenes go from joyous to horror-tinged as her addiction takes hold, and how Lou's intense confrontations scenes with her sister and father will frequently have notes of humor.  Dave Franco, as awful as his character is, can't not be funny.  And then there's the romance, which is as steamy and erotic as you could possibly want, while still being awfully sweet at times, and occasionally a train wreck you can't look away from.  I've seen a few negative reactions to the ending, which features a moment of Lynchian surrealism that was a step too far for some viewers.  I thought it was perfect, a glimpse of shared fantasy and madness that creates a fantastic metaphor for the characters' destructive mutual attraction. 

It's incredibly satisfying to watch a genre film like this that takes some big chances - on subject matter, on talent, on aesthetics - and to see it all pay off.  Before "Love Lies Bleeding," I saw Katy O'Brien pop up in several other pretty high profile projects, including recent MCU and "Star Wars" titles.  She never got to do anything nearly as interesting onscreen as she did here.  I left the movie absolutely enthused for whatever she wants to do next.  And if Rose Glass stays on this trajectory, I'll happily watch everything she ever makes.    

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The 2023-2024 Television I Didn't Watch

In advance of my 2023-2024 television top ten list (I use the Emmy eligibility calendar), I want to talk about some of the shows I didn't watch this year, for various reasons.  There are far, far more shows being produced there than anyone can possibly keep up with, so this is not an exhaustive list.  The titles discussed below are only the most high profile ones that I want to talk about why I skipped. 

I reserve the right to revisit these choices in the future, because I did eventually cave and watch a few episodes of "Succession."

A Small Light - A holocaust drama starring Bel Powley as Miep Gies, the woman who helped hide Anne Frank's family during WWII.  This is the series I feel the worst about skipping, but it came out back in May of 2023, when I was completely overwhelmed trying to keep up with other prestige titles, and I never got back to it.  I've also been pretty burned out on WWII media lately, and have skipped anything that looked like an obvious WWII tearjerker, including "All the Light We Cannot See."  Maybe one day.

The Traitors - "The Traitors" didn't make much of a splash when it started in 2022, but this year, the second season of the UK version blew up in the US, and even I heard about it.  I'm not in the habit of watching reality shows, and Peacock hasn't been in my streaming service rotation in a while.  However, I want to acknowledge that "The Traitors" has definitely been having a pop culture moment, and I'm aware of it.  This just won't ever be something that I'm interested in watching. 

The Curse - To date, I haven't watched any of Nathan Fielder's shows, and I don't think I ever will.  Even the participation of Emma Stone and a Safdie brother wasn't enough to grab my interest.  While I like the idea of Fielder's work in theory, after reading a couple of breakdowns of what he's actually doing in his shows, none of this actually sounds entertaining to watch.  I like to think that I'm pretty aware of how media works already, and don't need to see it deconstructed in the way that he's doing it.  

Gen V - I'm glad the show is getting good notices, and the truly tragic death of one of the lead actors is terrible, but I made the decision pretty early not to watch "Gen V."  Frankly, the blame goes to "The Boys," which I've now watched through three seasons, and have completely lost interest in.  I've seen enough of this dystopian superhero world, thank you, and it's not interesting enough for me to want to try out a spinoff with different characters.  Best of luck, but no thanks.  

Shrinking - Harrison Ford playing a therapist in an Apple TV+ dramedy?  Okay, that sounds fun.  Jessica Williams is in this too?  Great.  Oh, but the actual main character is played by Jason Segel, who is grief stricken over the loss of his wife?  That's a lot less appealing.  And the whole thing hinges on Segel's therapist character losing his cool and telling his patients what he really thinks of them?  Uh, this is starting to sound cringy.  Maybe I'll wait a few seasons and check back in with you guys.

Expats - Nicole Kidman stars in Lulu Wang's miniseries about an American expat community in Hong Kong during the recent social upheaval.  I've been waiting for more from Lulu Wang, but Kidman being the lead here gives me pause.  Frankly, I haven't seen her in anything I've really liked in a few years, and her work in "Expats" has gotten a very mixed response from critics.  Maybe I'll circle back around at some point, but I probably won't.

Star Wars: Ahsoka - I made a point of skipping several of the recent MCU and "Star Wars" series on Disney+ after "Loki" ended.  "Ahsoka" holds almost no appeal for me, because it follows characters from the "Star Wars" animated series that I never watched.  Several actors I like, including Rosario Dawson and Mary Elizabeth Winstead, are in the cast, but "Star Wars" has wasted too many other good actors on bad material.  

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Sleuthing With the "Dead Boy Detectives"

"Dead Boy Detectives" is part of the "Sandman" universe, specifically based on a pair of ghost characters who were introduced in one of my least favorite issues of the comic.  I didn't have any particular beef with the characters, but the story itself was bleak and unpleasant, and it was a digression from a really interesting main storyline that I was anxious to get back to.  Fortunately the ghosts, Edwin and Charles, went on to have more adventures in other comics, eventually becoming the self-proclaimed Dead Boy Detectives, who help other ghosts with their unfinished business.  

Because I never read anything about these two beyond that introductory comic, I'm not sure how faithful the new show is.  There seem to be a lot of liberties taken.  Charles (Jayden Revri) and Edwin (George Rexstrew) are supposed to be teenagers, but are played by actors in their mid-20s who clearly don't pass.  The actors also look oddly alike, which is initially very distracting.  Their detective agency is based out of London in the first episode, but after an amnesiac psychic, Crystal Palace (Kassius Nelson), ends up in their care, they pursue a case to Port Townsend, Washington, and get stuck there for the rest of the season.  Lots of interesting characters come into their orbit, including a manga-loving shut-in named Niko (Yuyu Kitamura), their Goth landlord Jenny (Briana Cuoco), and a troublesome Cat King (Lukas Gage) who likes to take human form to hit on Edwin.  Antagonists include a local witch, Esther (Jenn Lyon), her crow Monty (Joshua Colley), Crystal's demon ex-boyfriend David (David Iacono), and the Night Nurse (Ruth Connell), an agent of the Afterlife's Lost and Found Department.

Created by Steve Yockey and Beth Schwartz, and produced by Greg Berlanti's outfit, it's no surprise that this feels like one of the CW's DC shows, albeit with better production values than most.  "Dead Boy Detectives" is aimed at the young adult crowd, with all the main characters juggling crushes and traumatic pasts, and a lot of showy supernatural powers.  The nice thing here is that the pace is very quick and the mood is very light.  Nothing ever feels dragged out, with every episode closing out its own individual mystery, and the whole season wrapping up the bigger storylines nicely by the end of the last episode.  The characters are also appealing, though the quality of the writing has some significant ups and downs.  This is the kind of show where people have a bad habit of shouting exposition at each other in a crisis, and you're expected to just accept ridiculous things like giant killer mushrooms and an Indian guy living in the stomach of a sea monster.  Because of the high degree of comic book absurdity, the show I kept wanting to compare "Dead Boy Detectives" to was "Legion," though they have almost nothing in common.  

If you're a "Sandman" fan, there are minimal ties between the two shows aside from a couple of cameos.  I don't think some of the rules for supernatural business quite match up either.  If you're not a "Sandman" fan, and not familiar with the universe, "Dead Boy Detectives" sticks close enough to well-worn detective tropes that most viewers shouldn't have too much trouble keeping up.  The young cast is very talented, and able to compensate for some of the iffier dialogue.  Kassius Nelson and Jenn Lyon get my votes for MVPs, because they both manage to add some shadings to characters who are built out of very stale tropes.  Briana Cuoco and Yuyu Kitamura also help make a good case for why this show would probably do just fine without its title characters.  That said, these versions of Charles and Edwin did grow on me eventually, and I was able to appreciate Jayden Revri's and George Rexstrew's efforts.  They still look way too much alike for a ghost boy from the Edwardian era and his best friend from the 1980s, but maybe that can be fixed if "Dead Boy Detectives" gets a second season.        

I say "if," because the show is very niche, and I'm not sure it would have become a series at all if it weren't part of the "Sandman" universe.  The humor is very specific and the romantic sensibilities are aimed at a young, LGBT-friendly, probably more female audience.  It also takes a few episodes to get through some bumpy introductory material, and for the show to find a pleasant working status quo for its characters.  Edwin's initial hostility toward Crystal, for instance, takes some patience to see him through.  However, the back half of the series is legitimately a great watch, and all the payoffs are worth waiting for.  

And I just can't help rooting for the weird ones.    

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Up With "Late Night With the Devil"

It's strange watching a film on the big screen that was obviously intended to be watched on the small one.  "Late Night With the Devil," written and directed by the Cairnes brothers, is a found footage feature, designed to look like a lost episode of an old '70s late night talk show, "Night Owls with Jack Delroy."  The show and its guests are fictional, but loosely based on real figures from the era.  The budget was clearly low, but the filmmakers succeeded in capturing the feeling of watching a piece of live television from the '70s, back when late night was a little weirder, the public was more easily fooled, and you could imagine a guy might really kill to be the next Johnny Carson.

The footage is preceded by a brief introductory biography of Jack Delroy (David Dastmalchian), who at the time of the taping has suffered the recent loss of his lovely wife Madeline (Georgina Haig) to cancer.  "Night Owls" is in its sixth season and declining in ratings, but Delroy is hopeful that his Halloween show and its very special guests will be able to turn things around.  These guests include the psychic Christou (Fayssal Bazzi), a skeptic named Carmichael (Ian Bliss) who debunks claims of supernatural powers, and a parapsychologist, Dr. June Ross-Mitchell (Laura Gordon), with her teenage patient Lilly (Ingrid Torelli).  Lilly is the only survivor of a demon-worshiping cult that committed mass suicide, and Dr. Ross-Mitchell claims that she is possessed by the demon Abraxas.  The footage from the show is intercut with behind the scenes material that reveal what's taking place during the commercial breaks.  

And it was the first behind the scenes segment where I knew the movie wasn't going to work for me as intended.  Up until that point the movie had kept up the found footage gimmick pretty well, but there's no attempt to explain why someone was filming the behind the scenes interactions, and why the results didn't look like footage from the '70s.  There's more format-breaking near the end of the movie, which took me out of the "Late Night" reality in a way that I thought was completely unnecessary.  The "Night Owls" episode itself is put together so well, I'm curious to see if a cut of the film that removes everything else might work better.  Because despite my nitpicking about the structure, there's plenty here to like.     

The whole movie is one big buildup to a grand finale, and leans heavily on the performers.  This is one of David Dastmachian's first significant lead roles, and he's great.  He has the talk show patter down, and keeps the audience's sympathies despite continuously making bad calls all night.  A lot of the work of generating tension is done by Rhys Auteri, who plays Jack Delroy's schlubby sidekick Gus, the most visibly nervous person onscreen throughout the show.  I think the MVP, however, may be Ian Bliss as the skeptic Carmichael, loosely based on magician/skeptic James Randi. Carmichael's a little too mean as he goes about debunking the other guests, and is nicely set up as a secondary antagonist.  Then there's Ingrid Torelli as Lilly, who's a sweet kid excited to be on television one minute, and something far more sinister the next.  Her habit of staring into the cameras might be the most unnerving thing in the picture. 

There's been a little controversy around the filmmakers' use of generative AI for some of the artwork in the film, specifically interstitials and intro graphics.  I doubt most people would notice, but the corner cutting points to how low budget "Late Night With the Devil" is.  You can tell the vast majority of the effects money was used up in two big scenes, and the rest are barely scraping by with a lot of old school trickery and misdirection.  It's been a while since I've seen a production with this many of the seams showing, and I wish I could say that it didn't impact my enjoyment of the movie, but it did.  I applaud the filmmakers for their ambitiousness, but some of the ideas flat out don't work. Enough of them did that I still found "Late Night With the Devil" a fun watch, but I can't help wishing that more experienced hands were involved.

If you're an aficionado of horror films, however, there are far worse viewing choices.  "Late Night With the Devil" is novel, it's nostalgic, and it's perfect Halloween viewing.  I consider it entirely my own fault that I'm too nitpicky to enjoy its kitschy charms as much as I'd hoped. 

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How Did "Rebel Moon" Happen?

Having subjected myself to both of the "Rebel Moon" movies, written and directed by Zack Snyder, I'm left aghast that these movies got made.  These are Snyder's tenth and eleventh films, and display all of his worst filmmaking habits - bad use of slow motion, stiff acting, dull characters, and self-serious narratives.  In addition to co-writing and directing the films, he replaced longtime cinematographer Larry Fong with himself when he started working for Netflix, which did not help anything.  Both "Rebel Moon - Part One: A Child of Fire" and "Rebel Moon - Part Two: The Scargiver" are terrible, and made by a filmmaker we've known makes terrible films for at least a decade.  

I don't intend to spend much time here actually reviewing these two movies, because there's not much to say.  "Rebel Moon"is transparently "Seven Samurai" set in a "Star Wars" style universe.  Snyder reportedly even pitched it to Lucasfilm as a "Star Wars" project first, but the focus on original characters put them off.  Snyder then took the project to Netflix, where it was split up into two parts.  The split was totally unnecessary, but because Snyder didn't want to cut anything, the climactic third act was turned into its own feature.  In the end it took Snyder over four hours and $166 million to tell the same story that it took Roger Corman, Jimmy Murakami, and John Sayles 105 minutes to tell in 1980 with a fraction of the budget, in "Battle Beyond the Stars."  And Snyder's version is worse.

It's hard to stomach how much worse it really is.  The actors are decent, and the production design and effects work manage to create a reasonable facsimile of a sector of the "Star Wars" galaxy we haven't stumbled across yet.  However, the storytelling choices and the internal logic of the characters and their actions is incredibly poor.  The tone is somber and humorless, exposition and backstory are shoehorned in willy-nilly, and every time an interesting character shows up, they're almost immediately sent off to do something else.  The leads played by Sofia Boutella and Michael Huisman are painfully bland, angst-ridden, and pretty miserable to watch.  There are some spiffy images, and a few good action beats, but too much is undercut by the crummy cinematography and leaden pacing.  There's a lot of ambition and vision here, and an utter lack of ability to execute it.  

Zack Snyder really has one of the most fascinating directorial careers.  He's made two good zombie films.  He's made some decent films based on comic books, including the one that kicked off the DCEU.  He got an unlikely boost in visibility and goodwill when he was allowed to make the "Snyder Cut" of the troubled "Justice League" movie that he originally had to abandon mid-production due to a family tragedy.  Of course the "Snyder Cut" was better than the theatrical version of "Justice League," because it couldn't have gotten any worse.  Zack Snyder is also responsible for some truly terrible movies, including both versions of "Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice," and his first wholly original feature, "Sucker Punch," which I had the misfortune of seeing in theaters back in 2011.  The more control and input Snyder has on his features, the worse they tend to come out. 

That doesn't seem to phase Snyder, however.  He's already announced his intentions to turn "Rebel Moon" into a franchise, with plans for four more films.  He's also hoping to release R-rated versions of the two existing films, though I can't imagine that there's any demand for them.  Snyder sounds an awful lot like "Kingsman" director Matthew Vaughn earlier this year, when he was promoting his action film "Argylle."  Vaughn was also trying to kick off a big franchise, with lots of plans for "Argylle" sequels and crossovers, but the movie was a bust.  I have no reason to believe that either "Argylle" or "Rebel Moon" were negatively affected by expectations to turn them into franchises, but I do question why either of these directors, with their very mixed track records, were put in a position to make such wretched attempts.       

The "Rebel Moon" movies are only the latest of Netflix's sorry collection of disposable action films, along with "Red Notice," "The Gray Man," and "6 Underground," which tend to feature big names and deliver very little actual entertainment.  Zack Snyder is responsible for creating "Rebel Moon," but Netflix paid for its creation, so I hold them equally guilty.  Whatever algorithmic nonsense gets films greenlit over there these days, it's clearly gone very wrong, enabling movies that are so incompetent, it almost defies belief.  We don't have very good viewing figures for Netflix, but clearly "Rebel Moon" has made less of a cultural splash than they were hoping for.     

If a third rate nobody blogger like me could tell you that "Rebel Moon" was a terrible bet from the outset, why couldn't Netflix figure it out?

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And What Didn't Make My Top Ten List of 2023

As a companion piece to my Top Ten list, every year I write a post to discuss some of the other major films that got a lot of positive attention. I find this exercise helpful in proving some context for my own choices and how I feel about the year in film as a whole. It's also a lot of fun. Please note that I will not be writing about films listed among my honorable mentions, including Killers of the Flower Moon.

So, let's get down to business.  Right off, what happened with Barbenheimer?  I enjoyed parts of both "Barbie" and "Oppenheimer," but they just weren't as good as I was hoping they would be.  I found "Barbie" too beholden to its corporate interests to be as subversive as I wanted.  Meanwhile, "Oppenheimer" was so self-serious and so concerned with narrative complications that it was a struggle to stay invested in the film.  I know my expectations were off with both of these titles - "Oppenheimer" is far more about the politics of war than scientific discovery, for instance - which probably contributed to my inability to connect.

Looking at the other award season contenders, I continue to maintain that "Maestro" didn't do enough to make its Leonard Bernstein recognizably Leonard Bernstein, and Bradley Cooper seemed to have no interest in his subject as a composer or conductor.  "Past Lives" is another of those quiet, low stakes melodramas that went over my head, like "Aftersun" and "Drive My Car."  I had a terrible time trying to reconcile the tragic epiphanies and stylistic conceits of "May, December," and frankly the performances of both lead actresses didn't do anything for me.  "The Color Purple" was a noble effort, but didn't get anywhere close to matching the Steven Spielberg version.  "American Fiction" was daring, but a bit of a mess.  I think I actually liked "Rustin" and "Nyad" more than most, but the performances were all that really stood out.     

Among the smaller films, I was a little mystified at the response to "Are You There God?  It's Me Margaret."  It's a fine adaptation, but not nearly as interesting as a lot of similar recent coming-of-age films that made this version possible.  Honesty, besides McAdams' and Safdie's performances, I found it a little bland.  "Showing Up" with Kelly Reichardt didn't disappoint, but it's also the most conventional of her projects in a long while.  Conversely, "All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt" was a beautiful film but featured an experimental narrative that left me cold.  "Eileen" had a great setup and whiffed with the ending.  "A Thousand and One" had a great performance by Teyana Taylor, but I don't feel the rest of the film lived up to her.  "How to Blow Up a Pipeline" was compelling, but at the same time weirdly anodyne and apolitical for a film that should be all about provocation.  Finally, "Passages" was fascinating and Franz Rogowski's performance made me squirm, which isn't quite the same as being good.

Foreign films are my Achilles heel again.  "The Taste of Things" was absolutely captivating whenever it was in the kitchen, but the sensibilities of the romance lost me.  Alice Rohrwacher's "La Chimera" had some interesting things in it, but I couldn't follow the narrative.  Ditto "The Eight Mountains," which does a great job of conveying the beauty of the natural world, but left me unmoved when it came to its interpersonal relationships.  There were a lot of films about teachers facing moral dilemmas this year - "About Dry Grasses," "Monster," and "The Teachers' Lounge" among them.  The first two are far from their directors' better efforts, while "The Teachers' Lounge" was great but felt unfinished.  Finally, I've never been much of an Aki Kaurismaki fan, and "Fallen Leaves" didn't do anything to change that.  

Animated films had a great year.  I've disqualified "Spider-man: Across the Spiderverse" for being a Part One film that literally ends on a cliffhanger.  I loved a lot of its parts, especially Spider-Punk, but I don't feel right handing out the kudos until I see how things resolve.  "Mutant Mayhem" gets full marks for being the best piece of Ninja Turtles media I've ever seen, with a great visual style.  It's just a little too slight.  "Elemental" is a legitimately solid romantic comedy and immigrant narrative wrapped up in Ghibli-inspired visuals.  However, it was rightly called out for being very derivative.  

Among the blockbusters, "The Super Mario Bros." movie is the one I've watched the most times so far, because that film's hold on small children is a little terrifying.  No complaints, but it doesn't deserve much praise either.  I give "Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 3" and "John Wick Chapter 4" all due credit for landing their franchise finales, but only up to a point.  Oh, and I respect the very hardworking Taylor Swift, but her music - and her epic concert film - are not for me.  

Films that got squeezed out of the honorable mentions include "Priscilla," "BlackBerry," "Pinball: the Man Who Saved the Game," "Perfect Days," "Landscape With Invisible Hand," "Robot Dreams," "Dungeons and Dragons," and "You Hurt My Feelings." 

And that's my 2023 in film.

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