"The Afterparty," Year Two

"The Afterparty" is back with a new murder mystery and a new group of suspicious suspects.  This season isn't as straightforward as the first, having a more difficult mystery to puzzle out, but it keeps the gimmick of having every potential murderer recount their version of events in the style of a different movie genre.  With the more obvious genres out of the way, this season offers some more oddball choices, like a "Bridgerton" style period romance, a Wes Anderson indie comedy, and a found footage documentary.

Aniq and Zoë from the first season are back, now a happy couple, and attending the wedding of Zoë's sister Grace (Poppy Liu) to a rich eccentric named Edgar (Zach Woods).  Edgar is found dead the next morning with Grace being the prime suspect.  So Aniq enlists old friend Detective Danner to help, and they quickly start interviewing suspects before the police show up - Zoë's parents Feng (Ken Jeong) and Vivian (Vivian Wu), her uncle Ulysses (John Cho), Grace's ex Travis (Paul Walter Hauser), Edgar's sister Hannah (Anna Konkle), his mother Isabel (Elizabeth Perkins), and the best man, Edgar's childhood friend Sebastian (Jack Whitehall).

The cast is a fun mix of actors getting to play over-the-top characters, some against type.  John Cho is great as the adventurous globetrotter who arrives at the wedding on horseback, and relays his personal history as an epic romance.  Paul Walter Houser is a walking pratfall, who seems to really enjoy getting a chance to wear a fedora and do physical comedy.  Conversely, Ken Jeong gets a few surprisingly dramatic scenes to sink his teeth into.  It helps that Sam Richardson and Zoë Chao are playing more level-headed, well-rounded versions of their characters this year, and not obliged to be in rom-com mode most of the time.  And Tiffany Haddish is back in fine form, filling us in on what Detective Danner has been up to via a steamy '80s erotic thriller version of recent events.  

The movie genre spoofs are the least successful part of "The Afterparty."  It's more apparent than ever that the show just doesn't have the resources to pull off some of the more complicated conceits.  We've all seen Wes Anderson parodies, and the one featured in "The Afterparty" looks worse than many amateur attempts.  There's a very half-hearted feel to some of the spoofs, especially the shorter ones where it feels like the creators ran out of ideas.  The last two for Zoe and Vivian, are literally just one scene apiece in the finale episode, and very close to spoofs we've already seen before.  Fortunately, the comedic murder mystery formula is sturdy enough by itself that I still found this season very watchable.

Continuing the audience interactivity from the first year, there are secret messages and puzzles all over the place, with hidden clues aimed at helping the viewer solve the bigger mystery.  I didn't participate in this part of the show this time, though I think that those who did probably had more fun with the season overall.  I didn't figure out the identity of the killer at all, while I thought the answer in the first season was pretty obvious around episode three.  Instead, I was mostly watching for the cast, who are all gamely playing along with some very ridiculous scenarios.  I want to single out Zach Woods for making Edgar into a fascinating weirdo, and I'm a little disappointed we didn't get to learn more about him.  

There's a big tease for a third season in the finale, but I don't know if "The Afterparty" can sustain another round if it sticks with its current formula.  There have been a lot of whodunits lately, and all I could think during many episodes was that Rian Johnson's "Glass Onion" did a lot of the same material better last year, with a much more high profile group of performers.  I'll keep watching regardless because "The Afterparty" offers some easy mystery thrills and diverting humor, but it's not at the level of quality I wish it was, and it's not a show I'll be going out of my way to see.  

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Visiting "Asteroid City"

I had a harder time with "Asteroid City" than I was expecting, and I'm still working out why.  Wes Anderson has used nesting narrative structures in his films many times before, but this is the first time that so much of the action has taken place in one of the framing stories.  Bryan Cranston presents a vintage black and white television program dramatizing the creation of the play "Asteroid City," and the relationships of some of principle talent behind it - the playwright (Edward Norton), the director (Adrien Brody), the leading lady (Scarlett Johanssen), and the leading man (Jason Schwartzman).  We also see the play itself in dazzling widescreen and full color, about a photographer named Augie (Schwartzman), who has brought his children to the remote Southwestern desert town of Asteroid City for its yearly Stargazer convention.  His son Woodrow (Jake Ryan) is set to be one of the honorees for scientific invention.

The two parallel stories share some themes, mostly about grief, soldiering on in the face of uncertainty, and fleeting connections.  The film is generally very light and playful, spending most of its time with a large cast of Anderson regulars in the gorgeously designed Asteroid City, which is taking its cues from retrofuturism, '50s B-movies, and Wile E. Coyote cartoons.  All the visual trademarks of an Anderson film are here in force - extreme artifice, meticulous shot composition, bright colors, whip pans, animation, and a ton of visual gags.  Newcomers to the Anderson universe include Tom Hanks, who shows up as Augie's father-in-law, and Maya Hawke, who plays a teacher in charge of a busload of youngsters on an overnight trip.  I especially love the kids who play the Stargazer honorees - Ryan, Sophia Lillis, Ethan Josh Lee, Grace Edwards, and Aristou Meehan.  I wish the entire film had been about the five of them, connecting through their nerdiness, playing memory games, and eventually banding together to take down the system.

Instead, the film is mostly about Augie, whose wife has just died, leaving him in an existential crisis.  He's drawn to Midge (Johanssen), an actress who has rented the bungalow across from his own, and the two have odd but thoughtful conversations from their windows.  And we keep cutting away from the play "Asteroid City" to the drearier black and white world of the television show, where the actors are sadder, darker versions of the characters they play.  There are plenty of hijinks and humor - including some priceless deadpan line readings and meta jokes - but Anderson never seemed keen on letting me enjoy "Asteroid City" as entertainment.  In fact, he deliberately cuts away from the play's exciting climax to tie things up in the television special.  I respect why he did this, but it makes "Asteroid City" a little frustrating at times, and I can't count it among my favorite Anderson films, no matter how much I like some of the things in it.  

Boy, do I like some of the things in this movie.  I've always admired how Wes Anderson is able to create these fantastic little character portraits through only a scene or two.  There are so many colorful folks here I'd love to spend more time with - Tilda Swinton as a devoted scientist, Jeffrey Wright as the loquacious general hosting the convention, with Tony Revolori as his aide-de-camp, Steve Carrell as a soft-spoken motel manager, Matt Dillon as a puzzled mechanic, Liev Schrieber, Hope Davis, and Stephen Park as assorted parents of the honorees, and Jeff Goldblum as a spoiler that got the biggest laugh out of me when it was revealed.  Anderson's writing is as good as ever - so quick that it takes at least two watches to catch some of the wordplay.  However, he's not above a good pratfull, a surprise song number, and there is literally a stop-motion roadrunner who flits around in the background of some scenes, saying "meep-meep."        

In short, this is well worth a watch if you're a Wes Anderson fan, but I found it too deliberately obtuse to recommend without reservations.  I continue to prefer Anderson's more recent films to his older output - I'd put "Asteroid City" above "The Life Aquatic" and "Darjeeling Limited," for example, for the filmmaking alone.  It's just not quite at the heights of "Grand Budapest Hotel" or "The French Dispatch," though made very much in the same spirit.   

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Barbenheimer and The Summer Movie Wrap Up

I did very badly in the Summer Movie Wager this year, but so did just about everybody else.

So here's the actual domestic box office rankings for this summer:

1. Barbie

2. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

3. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3

4. Oppenheimer

5. The Little Mermaid

6. Sound of Freedom

7. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

8. Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning - Part I 

9. Transformers: Rise of the Beasts

10. Elemental

And here's what I predicted back in April:

1. Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning - Part I 

2. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 

3. Fast X 

4. The Flash 

5. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse 

6. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny 

7. The Little Mermaid

8. Transformers: Rise of the Beasts

9. Oppenheimer 

10. Barbie

I didn't manage to get a single film in the right position, but I got three pretty close ("Guardians," "Indiana Jones," and "Transformers"), "Mermaid" in the right ballpark, and nothing else remotely right.  Frankly, like most people I did not see the Barbenheimer behemoth coming.  I did not expect "Fast X" and "The Flash" to bomb so badly they didn't make the top ten.  And nobody saw "Sound of Freedom," an action film that was independently produced by some incredibly shady people, breaking into the mainstream.  This is the most fun I've had watching the box office in a long time, and honestly I'm delighted that art seems to have kinda won out over commerce this year.  The movies at the top of the chart are mostly very well reviewed, and display more ambition and originality than the bombs.  Of course, that's not the whole story.

The summer of 2023 is going to be one we're talking about for a long time.  Ticket sales are finally back to pre-pandemic levels.  There's a historic strike going on, though It's hard to say how much of an effect it had on any specific marketing campaigns.  The lack of talk show appearances certainly didn't seem to hurt the more popular films.  I had a post earlier about the disastrous underperformance of many major franchise titles that were released in June, but then came July and the incredible success of "Barbie" and "Oppenheimer."  Superhero fatigue has been pointed to as a potential reason for the failure of films like "The Flash," but after "Indiana Jones" and "Mission: Impossible" both stumbled, I think the issue may be broader.  

My pet theory is that the current crop of action-adventure films aimed at the young male demographic have just gotten too safe and repetitive.  A few superhero films did great, like "Guardians" and "Spider-Verse," which had strong reviews and really felt like proper event films.    However, it proved much harder to drum up excitement for the fifth "Indiana Jones" adventure, the seventh "Mission: Impossible" and "Transformer" bouts, the tenth "Fast" cameo-fest, and however you want to count "The Flash."  This isn't an issue with their quality - "Mission: Impossible" got fantastic notices and I adored the stupid fun of "Fast X."  It's an issue with their familiarity.   

And Barbenheimer?  The memes helped with the hype, and the "Barbie" marketing campaign was fantastic, but what really sealed the deal was that both "Barbie" and "Oppenheimer" pinged as different enough from the fantasy-action slurry that they came across like something new and interesting.  They got lots of people who hadn't been in a theater since before the pandemic to come out and have a good time.  Though "Barbie" is based on a toy brand, it felt like an auteur-driven project with genuine artistic credibility thanks to Greta Gerwig.  Though "Oppenheimer" is a three hour biopic, Christopher Nolan's reputation for quality filmmaking got people in seats.    

What I find the most exciting about Barbenheimer is that audiences were clearly ready for this.  They wanted to be in theaters with big crowds.  The studios have been so fixated on catering to the action audience, it feels like they just forgot about everyone else over the past few years.  All the metrics for success have been based off of the performance of superheroes and endless franchises.  And this summer, that all had to be thrown out the window, because things have changed.  "Barbie" is the biggest film in Warners' entire hundred year history.  Jim Caviezel is completely off his rocker and a bona fide leading man again.  A PIXAR movie turned out to be a minor sleeper hit.  

Alas, the strike makes capitalizing on this new box office momentum difficult, but that's a post for another day…      

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My Favorite Keisuke Kinoshita Film

I waited to write about Keisuke Kinoshita's 1958 film,"The Ballad of Narayama" until I'd seen the more acclaimed 1983 version of the same story, directed by Shohei Imamura.  The two films are radically different, and I like Kinoshita's version better.  This is entirely a matter of taste, as both films are very strong.  Imamura's is more brutal and more crudely naturalistic, almost certainly meant to distinguish itself from the more stylized visuals in the Kinoshita film, released twenty-five years earlier.  I, however, have always been a sucker for pretty colors, and love Kinoshita's kabuki-inspired production design, the lyricism of the idealized nature elements, and the elegant cinematography.

Kinoshita's visuals are purposefully designed to look dreamlike and artificial, setting the scene for a story with roots in myth and legend.  It's introduced by a black-clad narrator, who draws back a literal curtain to usher us into the film.  The environments were almost all constructed on soundstages, including the terrain for the final trek up an imposing mountain.  The approach reminds me of the roughly contemporaneous MGM musicals like "Brigadoon," with their hyperreal recreations of the picturesque locales.  The village in "The Ballad of Narayama," however, is very remote and poor.  Life there is so hard that families have a cruel custom of abandoning their elderly on the mountaintop when they reach the age of seventy.  "The Ballad of Narayama" revolves around the mother and son pair of Orin and Tatsuhei, who carry on this tradition out of love, despite neither wanting to part from the other.  Orin is still healthy and contributes to her community, but food is scarce, and everyone is on the brink of starvation with winter approaching.

For such a beautiful film, the story is often brutal.  A subplot involves a neighbor who is already over seventy, and comes to a truly terrible end because he bitterly resists his fate, until his son resorts to violent measures.  In another, a food thief is discovered, leading to awful reprisals against his entire family.  The Imamura version is more visceral in portraying these incidents, drawing parallels between the actions of the villagers and wild animals.  Kinoshita's more idealized, more stylized approach allows the viewer more narrative distance, creating space to consider the story in more allegorical terms.  However, the emotional power of the performances and the mise en scene is not diminished.  I especially enjoy the performance of Kinuyo Tanaka as Orin, the self-sacrificing maternal ideal, committed to making the most of her final days.  Amazingly, she was only in her late forties at the time the film was made.                    

Keisuke Kinoshita was a contemporary of Akira Kurosawa and produced a very eclectic variety of titles, but was best known for sentimental romances and stirring melodramas, like the wartime memoir, "Twenty Four Eyes."  However, he was also an important innovator in Japanese cinema, directing the first Japanese film in color, "Carmen Comes Home," in 1951.  Other Kinoshita films feature fanciful attempts to recreate the aesthetics of classical Japanese artworks.   Examples include the masking effects to denote flashbacks in "She Was Like a Wild Chrysanthemum," and the spot color and woodblock print designs in "The River Fuefuki."  These experiments were often not very successful or poorly received, and many have aged badly.  However, I still find them admirable, as rough as they are. 

 

"The Ballad of Narayama" stands out from Keisuke Kinoshita's filmography, for being one of the boldest films he ever made, combining theatrical traditions with cinematic forms in a way that's still impressive to this day.  You can see its influence all over Japanese cinema, especially in the later period films from Kurosawa and Masaki Kobayashi.  Kinoshita's "Narayama" didn't get the warm international response that Imamura's did upon release, but both are held in equally high regard today, partly thanks to an excellent Criterion release and some overdue reevaluation.  And it has become very difficult to talk about one version of "Narayama" without the other.    

What I've Seen - Keisuke Kinoshita

Port of Flowers (1943)

The Living Magoroku (1943)

Jubilation Street (1944)

Army (1944)

Morning for the Osone Family (1946)

Carmen Comes Home (1951)

Twenty Four Eyes (1954)

She Was Like a Wild Chrysanthemum (1955)

The Ballad of Narayama (1958)

The River Fuefuki (1960)

Immortal Love (1961)

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Inching Into "The Crowded Room"

Major spoilers ahead.

There have been attempts to turn "The Minds of Billy Milligan" novel by Daniel Keyes, and the court case it was based on, into a movie since the 1980s.  That's probably why the eventual miniseries adaptation, "The Crowded Room," feels like such a throwback, not just to older media about dissociative identity disorder (DID), but to older media about court cases.  The first half of the show is essentially a counselor/patient interrogation, where a psychiatrist, Rya Goodwin (Amanda Seyfried), interrogates a young man named Danny Sullivan (Tom Holland) about a shooting he committed with a girl named Ariana (Sasha Lane).  The second half transitions into a court case, leading up to the big climax where Danny takes the witness stand to bolster an insanity defense.

I'm spoiling the fact that the show is about DID because, frankly, it's pretty obvious that this is the case from very early on, though it takes "The Crowded Room" fully seven episodes to get around to admitting it.  Frankly, this is a massive blunder, and negatively impacts the entire series.  Danny's backstory and account of the crime should have taken up two or three episodes at most, before we learned the truth.  Instead, series creator Akiva Goldsmith spends way too long on the build up and insists on playing the existence of Danny's "alters" like a twist, despite Danny's narrative being so ridiculous that clearly something is up long before the reveal.  It's so frustrating to see play out, because the cast is good, the production values are high, and there's a lot of strong material here.  The penultimate episode is an outstanding hour of television, featuring Emmy Rossum as Danny's troubled mother Candy.  Unfortunately, it requires way, way too much slogging through the early episodes to get there.    

A lot depends on the performance of Tom Holland, who plays Danny.  Holland has now had a string of these ambitious, but very flawed projects, and I respect that he just keeps throwing himself at them.  Danny is a demanding part, not just because of the alters, but because it requires a lot physically.  There are violent altercations, chase sequences, and simulated drug use, in addition to the heavy emotional material.  There's also a terrible wig that is very distracting.  Holland is okay here - not very interesting, but perfectly competent.  It helps that he's surrounded by strong supporting performers like Seyfried, Christopher Abbot as Danny's lawyer Stan Camisa, Will Chase as Danny's stepfather Marlin, and Jason Isaacs as a mystery man named Jack.

There's so much to like about "The Crowded Room," and so much effort was clearly expended on its creation, but the approach to this story was fundamentally wrongheaded.  Putting aside the terrible execution of this premise, I have to question why you'd want to tell this story in 2023, and tell it in such a straightforward, familiar manner.  Oh, it was smart to use a fictionalized version of Billy Milligan, since there's a lot about the real Milligan and the outcome of his court case  that are deeply troubling.  And the depiction of DID is more nuanced than what we see in other media about the subject like "Sybil," and far more responsible than modern genre stories with DID protagonists like "Mr. Robot" and "Moon Knight."  However, it still leans into the sensationalization and treats the audience like DID is somehow a new concept that hasn't been overused in media for decades.

One part of "The Crowded Room" I can recommend without reservations is the animated opening title sequence, one of the best I've seen all year.  And I've already singled out the ninth episode for praise, which does a fantastic job of addressing domestic violence issues.  If "The Crowded Room" had been done as a movie or a much shorter miniseries or framed its story differently, I'd probably be more inclined to give it a pass.  However, I find myself very short on patience these days when it comes to media that wants to play dumb.  If it weren't for the efforts of the cast, especially Amanda Seyfried, and my initial misconception that this was a six-episode miniseries instead of a ten-episode miniseries, I'd probably have ditched this after the first week.     

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Scaling "Silo"

The great thing about "Silo" is that it's a post-apocalyptic science-fiction puzzle box story with excellent worldbuilding.  You learn about the massive Silo, housing thousands of people underground, how their society functions, how they lost their history in some past power struggle, and how they believe that it's not safe to go outside.  Just enough information is trickled to the audience, little by little, to keep the mystery compelling.  The trouble with "Silo" is that it starts out very strong with two episodes starring Rashida Jones and David Oyelowo trying to resolve their existential questions about the Silo, but the following eight episodes are about an entirely different character, played by Rebecca Ferguson, trying to solve a murder mystery.  We eventually do get to the big picture questions, but it takes an awfully long time to loop back. 

The story is kicked off with a hard drive, a forbidden "relic" that is discovered by a tinkerer named George (Ferdinand Kingsley), who recruits an IT worker, Allison (Jones) to help him access it.  This leads to several deaths. Mayor Jahns (Geraldine James) decides to appoint a new sheriff - not Paul Billings (Chinaza Uche), the candidate being pushed by the Silo's enforcement organization, Judicial, but a generator engineer named Juliette Nichols (Ferguson), who is the choice of the previous sheriff, Holston (Oyelowo).  Juliette is George's ex, and convinced that he was murdered rather than dead by suicide.  She decides to investigate, despite the concerns of Paul, now her new deputy, and opposition by the Silo's glowering head of security, Robert Sims (Common), who may actually be running everything in the Silo.  Other characters include Juliette's fellow engineer Martha (Harriet Walker), the head of IT, Bernard (Tim Robbins), a stargazer named Lukas (Avi Nash), Juliette's father (Iain Glen), and another deputy, Marnes (Will Patton).  

I've never read the "Silo" books or stories, but I am familiar with the franchise's history.  It was originally expanded from a group of short stories into a full novel, and from there into a series.  This accounts for some of the wild POV switches in the first part of the show.  I like that we get to explore the Silo from different POVs, and see everyone's different ways of coping with living in such an oppressive world.  The show's sci-fi concepts will be very familiar to anyone who has read or watched any dystopian media, but the familiar murder mystery framing goes a long way in helping "Silo" to feel  more grounded in reality than similar stories like "Snowpiercer."  The characters are stronger than what you usually get in puzzle box media, their stories are more relatable, and this is the first show I've seen in a while where it feels like anyone is truly expendable.  This is absolutely necessary, because the pace of the series is fairly slow, and we're not going to be getting answers to the big questions for a while.

The production quality, however, is very high, and the talent involved is excellent.  Created by "Justified" showrunner Graham Yost, with a ton of high profile actors and directors, this was clearly meant to be a prestige project from the outset.  "Silo" often involves environments like the generator, cafeteria, and stairwells that are massive - and from what I can tell they were often practical sets.  It feels very much like an Apple TV+ series in the same vein as "Foundation" and "Extrapolation," willing to be a little more ambitious and trust the audience to keep up.  The ideas here are very compelling, and the performances are strong, but I do think that the show should have cut an episode or two for pacing.  Alternately, it could have committed to the anthology structure and actually let each episode be told from a different character's POV - there are certainly enough strong talents in the ensemble that this could have been feasible.     

In any case, it's nice to have one of these dystopian series that is so thoroughly committed to its premise.  I like that it's very straightforward, with very little by way of twists and turns, and plays fair when it comes to the mystery.   It barely even seems interested in much social allegory at this point, though that may change.  No, we don't get very many answers, but the ones that we do get are satisfying and well considered.  I look forward to seeing more.      

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"Schmigadoon!" Year Two

Spoilers for the first episode ahead.

I'm much better acquainted with the musicals of the '60s and '70s than I am with their Golden Age counterparts, so "Schmicago" had more of my interest from the outset.  Josh and Melissa return, now married and seeking their way back to Schmigadoon on purpose, after hitting a rut in their real lives.  However, they end up in Schmicago, which parodies darker, more transgressive musicals like "Chicago," "A Chorus Line," "Sweeney Todd," and "Sweet Charity."  Many of the actors from the first season are back, but in different roles.  Dove Cameron is playing Jenny, a burlesque dancer, Alan Cumming is Dooley, a vengeful butcher, and Kristin Chenoweth is running the orphanage from "Annie." 

There are a couple of new faces in the cast, including Patrick Page as this year's big villain, the evil tycoon Octavius Kratt, and Tituss Burgess is the new narrator, who becomes more and more fed up with his job as the season goes on.  We also get a lot more Jane Krakowski, now playing a hotshot lawyer, Bobby Flanagan, with thrilling results.  She gets one of the big highlights of the season, the "Bells and Whistles" number, patterned after "Razzle Dazzle" from "Chicago," that has her on roller skates and a trapeze in the courtroom.  The musical numbers are bigger and wilder this year, and there are a lot more of them.  Melissa is maneuvered into becoming a cabaret performer as part of her character arc this year, so Cecily Strong gets to sing more too.       

"Schmicago" is a lot looser and more free-form than "Schmigadoon!" with a less formulaic plot.  The magic leprechaun simply charges Melissa and Josh with finding a "happy ending," and leaves them to muddle through a murder mystery that almost immediately gets cast aside so we can get to know a bunch of other colorful characters.  This season is trying to mash some very different, incongruous influences together, and not even trying to make them all feel consistent.  The hippies led by Aaron Tviet's Topher, a spoof on the leads of "Godspell" and "Hair," aren't remotely from the same era as the flappers of "Chicago," and the music is constantly swinging from Stephen Sondheim to Stephen Schwartz to Paul Williams, and somehow it all works.  There are opportunities for delightful mashups like "Good Enough to Eat," which is an unholy combination of "Sweeney Todd" and "Annie," and room carved out to pay tribute to "A Chorus Line," because you've got pay tribute to  "A Chorus Line," don't you?

The material this season also feels more accessible, probably because its much more recent.  Everyone's still playing wild caricatures, and Melissa and Josh are still pointing out their tropeyness, but the world feels bigger and everyone's worldviews are broader and more complex.  Seeking self-fulfillment is in many ways more relatable than seeking romantic love, and I'm not surprised that Josh and Melissa take more of a shine to "Schmicago" faster.  I like the humor this season better too.  There are still the silly running gags, like a sloshed Karin Konoval continuously popping up with a martini glass to shout "I'll drink to that!" but also a lot of darker bits and meta humor.  There are some great surprises and payoffs in the second half of the season.  The references for fans of musicals have also been ramped way up, to the point where I was even catching little things in the orchestrations.

I really want "Schmigadoon!" to continue into the Andrew Lloyd Weber era, and I'm already mentally working out who should play the Phantom analog, and who should play Rum Tum Tugger.  And could they get away with calling it "Schmanadu"?  I mean, it's less of a mouthful than "Les Schmiserables."     

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