The Journal of Poorly-Explained Phenomena
One Thing I Really Like About Project Hail Mary
Project Hail Mary has almost all of the stuff I love about Spielberg sci-fi with almost none of the stuff I hate. (Mildest spoilers for stuff that's in the trailers)
There’s one scene in Jurassic Park that I hate. It’s the one where Grant and Sadler first see the dinosaurs free-roaming through a field, and he’s so awestruck that he fumbles with his glasses, and then he reaches around and physically turns her head to take a look at them. Even back in the 90s, when I was much less cynical and more impressionable, it felt like they had put all of this effort into making dinosaurs that seemed as real as they could possibly make them, and then undercut the whole thing by having humans behave in a way that was cringingly fake. I think it’s a huge part of why I’ve never quite been able to really love that movie as much as everyone else seems to. And it’s perpetually frustrating, because Steven Spielberg is indisputably the master of fun, accessible, action and sci-fi movies, and an absolute genius at executing on an action sequence. But so many of his best movies are undermined with these moments that just feel saccharine, maudlin, or just full of forced awe and wonder. So the one thing that impressed me the most about Project Hail Mary was that it delivered on those heart-caught-in-your-throat moments of Spielberg’s best sci-fi — I’m not too proud to admit that it had me on the verge of sobbing at a couple of parts — but without explicitly telling you, this is awesome. You should be in awe of this. Of course, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller have established their own style by this point, which is always threatening to undermine everything. With them, it’s “flippant and quirky,” and especially early on, it feels like it’s always just on the edge of going too far. Ryan Gosling’s character1 sometimes seems like they were trying to create the male version of a manic pixie dream girl, with his cardigans and his novelty science teacher shirts. As he was digging through his belongings, I was dreading the moment he’d pull out a ukelele. I kept thinking “you’re a grown-ass adult. Either put your glasses on your face or push them on top of your head like a normal person.” But the intensely annoying thing about Ryan Gosling is that it’s all but impossible for him to be too intensely annoying. He’s just unfairly good at comedy and being relatable for somebody who looks like he does. So before he’s allowed to turn into a caricature of Quirky, Relatable Science Genius Guy, he resolves into an actual character. His whole process of trying to remember who he is — “wait, am I smart?!” — means the audience gets to figure him out as the movie goes on. Instead of, for example, the Michael Crichton approach of introducing an expert to us at the start and leaving the process of making them relatable or human as an exercise to the reader. There’s one moment in Gosling’s performance that I think is the best example of this. He’s just received a container of something of unknown origin, and we get a short montage of him trying to figure out what it’s made of and how to open it, using Science. The solution turns out to be so simple that it’s corny — because this is a movie unconcerned with being “hard” science fiction, no matter how much it may look like it is — but Grace suddenly realizes he got fixated on the puzzle when he should’ve been trying to open it in a safe environment. He shouts, “oh nooooo!” and runs it over to the standard glass-walled-box-with-built-in-gloves that may or may not actually exist outside of Hollywood; how should I know? That line delivery is just dead-on perfect. And more than that, it sells everything about his character for the rest of the movie. Smart and capable, but also practical, over-confident, and reckless. More interested in finding the solution than in going through all of the steps to find it the right way. That means the movie can lightly skip over all of the impossibly hard — and boring — parts of a real story about First Contact, and get back to its strengths, which are character development and plot. I’ve seen a few criticisms of the movie that say its tendency to go for laughs undermines all of the awe and wonder that should be present in this story. But for me, the “awe and wonder” in a story like this has already been over-mined for decades. I was six years old when Close Encounters of the Third Kind came out and demanded the audience be struck dumb with awe at the sight of a UFO over Devil’s Tower. That moment is referenced in Project Hail Mary, and it’s already so iconic that they don’t even have to explicitly say what they’re doing; he just hums the tune. Earlier in the movie, when alarms are going off all over the ship, Grace screams “Shields up!” and the ship’s computer calmly responds that the ship doesn’t have shields. He replies, “Why not?!” The characters, the audience, and the filmmakers have all been steeped in science fiction our whole lives. A movie telling us this is awesome! and demanding that we play along just isn’t going to feel realistic anymore. We need a way in besides spectacle, something that’s going to make us care about the characters and what’s happening to them. Because I waited too long to get tickets, I had to go several days of hearing people online gushing about how great the movie was, giving it a thumbs-down emoji, or saying “amaze amaze amaze.” So I went in dead-set on not falling into the hype, and I sat there arms crossed, saying, “You’ve got to earn it, movie. Entertain me.” And it really did. It managed to be charming even after telling me directly how it was trying to charm me. Funny in ways that I hadn’t expected — playing scenes of two spacecraft coming into first contact for laughs instead of awe — but never so much that it felt like it wasn’t taking any of it seriously. Its moving moments and its joyful moments felt completely earned. And despite all of the modern self-awareness of its tone, it still retained that old-fashioned optimism that no matter how bad things get, there’s no problem too big for science and cooperation to fix. Finally, it’s unrelated, but there’s one detail that I noticed that I have to call out: While he’s trying to remember who he is, Grace keeps a white board list of clues and questions. One of them says “ALWAYS MUSCLES?” And I’m still completely not sure how I feel about it. On the one hand, I appreciate it as a quiet, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it acknowledgement that for their schlubby, relatable, Science Genius middle school teacher guy, they’ve cast someone with the physique of Ryan Gosling. But at the same time, this movie never shows off his physique at all, much less to Guardians of the Galaxy or Captain America extremes. It’s only because we all had a year of relentless Barbie promotion showing him with his shirt off that we had any idea what was going on underneath the novelty T-shirts and cardigans. So drawing attention to it feels not only unnecessary, but almost rubbing our noses in it? It’s not a big deal, and definitely didn’t change my overall take on the movie as being pretty great. I’ll just file it away along with Fat Thor as yet another case of Hollywood simply not knowing how to handle its actors being hot without finding a way to make it weird. 1 I haven’t read the book, but does it explicitly make the “Hail Mary, full of Grace” gag anywhere, or just leave it implied?
Tuesday Tune Two-Fer: Get the Cool Old Brown Shoeshine
Two tunes to almost kind of make a travelogue of the week's highlights
Last week we went to see the House of Kong installation in Los Angeles (which has ended by now), a collaboration between Gorillaz and Meow Wolf that was an interactive celebration/history of the band with a promotion for their new album. It was pretty neat, although as someone who’s a mid-tier fan of Gorillaz at most, I think it would have had a bigger impact on fans of the band than fans of location-based entertainment. There were a few guys in our group who seemed to recognize everything and were really into it; for me, they had already played the only three songs I know within the first 10 minutes. One of those songs is “19-2000”, and I wish that the superior Soulchild remix version had been the one to get the animated video.1 If it sounds like I’m underselling it, I don’t mean to. It was a pretty ingenious way to not only satisfy fans, but pull newcomers into the elaborate, years-long art project they’ve built up around the music. In particular: at exactly the point where it feels like an overblown hagiography of the band, overstating the depth of its character- and world-building, that’s when the immersive part takes over. It didn’t turn me into a super-fan, but I did think it was a perfectly-balanced combination of promotion/hype-building and interesting experience on its own merits. (I especially liked my husband’s main take-away, though: “I knew living in London was expensive, but how can you be in Blur and make Tank Girl and still need to share an apartment?”) Yesterday, I saw Project Hail Mary, which has surprisingly effective music throughout, and uses The Beatles’ “Two of Us” really well. It’s been stuck in my head ever since, because it’s I’m-not-researching-it-but-I’m-99.9%-sure-is by Paul McCartney, who’s cranked out so many unforgettable melodies over his lifetime that even his lesser-known songs2 would be career-defining for other songwriters. But in my brain it’s always quantum-entangled3 with a song I like even better, which is George Harrison’s “Old Brown Shoe.” The opening combination of bass line and honky tonk-sounding piano was unlike anything else I associated with the band, almost as distinct as “Helter Skelter” and “Tomorrow Never Knows” as making me believe these guys could do everything! I always wondered why “Old Brown Shoe” never seemed to get the same kind of attention and same level of prominence as the band’s other songs. After reading a little bit about it, it sounds like it was mostly yet another case of John Lennon being a jerk. 1 For the record: the other two songs I know are, of course, “Feel Good, Inc” and “Clint Eastwood.” 2 For however much “lesser known” even makes sense when talking about The Beatles 3 Probably because I got Let it Be and Past Masters at the same time
The Wretched, or, Good Salt Circles Make Good Neighbors
The Wretched is a pretty fun indie horror movie that's most notable for its point of view (Spoilers after a warning)
The Wretched is the kind of movie you’d stumble onto when channel surfing late at night, watch for a few minutes, and then get engrossed enough to watch until the end. It’s an unrated independent movie with a modest budget1 that feels like it punches above its weight and ends up being pretty fun. It’s about a teenage boy whose parents are going through a divorce, so he travels to stay with his dad in a small resort town on the water. He deals with teen stuff like having to get a job, trying to make friends with the local kids, having a crush on a co-worker, struggling with the divorce and his dad’s new girlfriend, and also he suspects something evil is going on with the family next door. I didn’t stumble onto it; I kept hearing the title casually mentioned along with other horror movies, so I finally decided to go in blind without hearing anything else about it.2 The piece of trivia that always gets associated with it is that it beat Avatar‘s record of most weeks at first in the box office… because it was released in 2020, when nobody was releasing movies to theaters. It might have also gotten a slight bump recently because the lead actress is the voice of the main character in Hoppers. To me, it felt indie but not low budget. The effects and make-up work is pretty good, there are some surprisingly gruesome scares starting with the opening scene, and it’s darker and a little more intense than I would’ve expected. It did feel rough, though, cutting between storylines in a way that was disorienting; I found myself often asking “wait, who’s that person? Whose house are we in now? Is this a different scene?” And it’s entirely a me problem, but a few of the actors look just similar enough that you can get confused if you’re not paying close attention. (Maybe if you’re not trying to do something else while watching it, you won’t fall into the “old man thinks all dark-haired women are the same character” trap). I liked it overall, but I didn’t think I had anything that interesting to say about it. Until I read reactions online, where a lot of people seemed to be giving their most willfully uninteresting and incurious takes. To explain what I mean requires spoilers after this point. I read multiple complaints about the movie falling apart at the end, or having “huge plot holes.” And there are indeed some issues with it; in my opinion, the biggest one is having the dad show up at exactly the right place at the right time, even though he’d have no idea where the kids ran off to. Also, the ending didn’t land as well as I suspect they intended it to. It’s easy to tell what they were going for, but none of the scenes really sold it. It was more of a “well, if you say so,” than an “oh my god!” But none of that was enough to ruin the movie, because its biggest act 3 reveal — our main character has a younger brother he’d been made to forget! — was pulled off so well. And it’s irritating to be reminded of the internet’s tendency to call it a “plot hole” whenever a movie tries to do something unconventional. I hadn’t seen it coming at all. And better than that, the quick “we gave you all the clues!” flashbacks worked perfectly. (Especially right after seeing Saltburn, where its flashbacks seemed ham-fisted and unnecessary to me). So often at the end of a detective story, we get a recap of all the clues we were supposed to have picked up on, and it’s rarely satisfying. Because The Wretched isn’t a detective story, I wasn’t primed to look for clues to some mystery — other than the most immediate one of “what exactly is this thing that’s attacking this family?” — so everything else just felt like a weird non sequitur. Weird enough to stick in my mind, but not so much that I tried to make sense of it at the time. The woman on the bus saying “you’re quite the artist.” Our protagonist saying “it’s just us.” The dad saying “I love the sound of that.”3 All of it just felt like weird mood-setting for a horror movie. What’s even cooler, though, is how it’s a case of The Wretched playing with point-of-view and perspective for effect, in a way that I wouldn’t have expected from a movie like this. And I wouldn’t have thought much about it if I hadn’t read a Reddit post complaining about it. The complaint was that it didn’t make sense unless the witch had cast a spell on our protagonist before the movie had started, but how is that even possible since she couldn’t have gotten the picture until much later, and so on. And sure, if you need a movie to be literal and strictly chronological, it doesn’t make sense. I even tried a thought experiment to see if I could find the point of the “switch,” where we went from seeing his memory of events to seeing the “actual” events. Maybe his premonition of being drowned on the bus? And I could never make it all neatly line up. But of course, that’s not a “plot hole.” It’s the point. The movie’s structured to make the reveal have the same impact on the audience as it does on the protagonist at that moment. We never question whether the movie itself is being an unreliable narrator. After all, there’s already enough going on in this movie, with a shape-shifting witch going around mind-controlling men and eating children. So when we see the reveal, we feel the same disorientation that the protagonist does at the idea that we’ve completely forgotten that a person even existed. It’s a neat trick to think about, because it calls into question all of these hard fast rules of cinematic storytelling that we just take for granted. We assume that we’re either in third person omniscient mode unless we’re shown otherwise. We get clues when the movie’s shifted to a certain character’s point of view. We assume that cuts are going to skip over a reasonable and understandable amount of time and space, and we’re seeing everything chronologically unless told otherwise. Movies don’t play with that enough. And when they do, it’s usually the entire point of the movie, like Memento, or Shutter Island. I really liked seeing something that would’ve otherwise worked just fine as a straightforward take on Rear Window or Fright Night, decide to throw in a flourish to make the audience feel like they’d been under a spell themselves. 1 Just over a million dollars according to imdb, which a lot of people call “low budget,” so I guess I just don’t know how much movies cost 2 I watched it on Kanopy, but I believe it’s also available on Netflix. 3 I didn’t notice, but someone on the internet pointed it out, that there were four place settings at the dinner our protagonist missed.
Get Movies About Rich People Or Die Trying
Responding to different takes on the movies I watched yesterday, and thoughts on the whole idea of "getting it." Spoilers for Saltburn and Ready or Not 2: Here I Come
I didn’t intend to make a double feature yesterday of Ready or Not 2: Here I Come and Saltburn, but they have a few things in common. They’re both about normal people1 trying to exist in a world of clueless over-privileged people. And they both have interpretations that I’d assumed were patently obvious, but apparently weren’t. Saltburn After I complained that the plot and ideas in Saltburn were so clearly spelled out that it went beyond frustrating into insulting, I went online looking for an image for the post. And I saw multiple essays with takes on the movie that were so different from mine that it felt as if we’d been watching entirely different movies. The only thing that reassured me that we were in fact talking about the same movie was that they all mentioned drinking spoogey bath water. Seeing so many different interpretations, even ones that I completely disagree with, gave me a little bit more respect for Saltburn having more ambiguity than I’d given it credit for. And it made me think more about what it means to “get” a movie, specifically the distinction between getting the plot and coming to a conclusion about what it “means.” It didn’t save the movie for me. I still don’t like the ending, since it presented a series of quick-fire flashbacks to suggest some intricate Kaiser Soze web of deceit that was being spun the whole time and you didn’t even realize! Even though I’d already suspected as much in the first twenty minutes, and had it already confirmed by the halfway point. It’s possible that I read mention of The Talented Mr Ripley2 without remembering it, and that planted the idea in my head. But by the time Oliver was fingering a young woman he’d just been told had severe self-esteem issues, I thought it was all but explicit. Later, when he’s sexually assaulting the bitchy cousin, it was clear that the masks were off, and the movie had already given away the last of its secrets. Maybe there was supposed to be an ambiguity as to when exactly Oliver’s machinations started? The idea that his crush/obsession, and his desire to be part of the “in crowd,” had sucked him into this world of careless privilege, and it had corrupted him? If that were the case, then I think the movie would’ve been much stronger had it left all of that ambiguous. And I think it might’ve avoided the recurring complaint that Saltburn “doesn’t say much of anything,” since spelling out everything at the end reduces it to an empty-feeling thriller with a too-obvious “twist.” Every explanation puts more emphasis on the plot and takes it away from the more interesting part, the characters. That’s where there’s room for more interesting and different interpretations. I read one essay that saw Felix as an example of everything that’s wrong with the rich elite: completely self-absorbed and thoughtless, presenting himself as a friend while constantly subjecting Oliver to micro-aggressions about being poorer. I think that interpretation is directly contradicted by stuff that happens in the movie, but I also think it’s a good illustration of the ideas the movie plays with: how much of the class divide is the result of what people project onto the rich and beautiful about their own prejudices or insecurities. Another essay was all about the reveal of Oliver coming from an “upper middle class” background3, turning it into a story about how capitalism and class divides create a situation where people can never have enough. The family in Saltburn never wants for anything, but every person below that level of wealth and privilege is trapped in a society that demands that they always aspire to having more. I don’t agree with everything in that take, but I do like that it lines up with what I believe is the most interesting thing about Saltburn: it flips the story from a satire about the excessive lifestyle of the idle rich, into a satire about the people who aspire to that lifestyle. We’re so used to seeing the former — even Richard E Grant plays the patriarch of a more cartoonishly evil and fake-compassionate family in Death of a Unicorn — that it’s impossible for some people to read this movie as anything but that. But I think that the one place where the movie does preserve some ambiguity is by leaving it open to interpretation what you think of the Catton family. Do you envy them, hate them, pity them, or some combination of the three? One thing that’s probably good to keep in mind: when you’re seeing a mainstream Hollywood movie about “regular people,” you should be a little bit suspicious. “Celebrities: They’re Just Like Us!” has been an essential part of movie marketing for at least a century, even though being a recognizable part of a movie automatically bumps you up a tax bracket. No, not everyone working in movies is super-rich, but if you’re doing a press tour, you’re almost certainly living in a sphere of influence (if not wealth) that gives you more in common with the idle rich who are the targets of the satire, not the regular people who are often the protagonists. I have to wonder if that’s a key element of the personal criticisms of Emerald Fennell’s movies. For an audience that’s been trained that it’s always okay to “punch up,” then being in a social and professional circle that also contains people like Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie might seem like open season to discredit anything you have to say. Especially in a movie like Saltburn, which makes the middle-class guy the villain — or at least anti-hero, based on how much you hate the core family and rich people in general — and leaves some room for sympathy for the core family. Personally, I take the idea of having sympathy for the Cattons, and interpreting their attempts at kindness as genuine, as kind of a take on the serenity prayer. It doesn’t excuse them or the system that keeps them rich or powerful; it just asks what part of that is something you can control? Dismantling a system vs sticking it to the rich guys are really two separate questions, and ones that are especially relevant now. The part that you actually have immediate control over is simpler: they’re so far out of your sphere that they don’t even think about the lives of regular people in anything but the most abstract terms. Shaking your tiny fist at them isn’t going to accomplish much of anything, and it certainly won’t ever be seen by them. So what does being envious of them, or hating them, do to you? Ready or Not: Here I Come That makes it an unintentional double feature with Ready or Not 2, another movie about regular people getting pulled into the world of the cluelessly corrupt rich and powerful. These movies are not multi-layered or particularly nuanced. Even deliberately so. At the core of both of the Ready or Not movies is the visceral satisfaction of seeing a relatable person4 murdering a bunch of rich assholes. The bulk of the comedy of the movie comes from the fact that they are so evil, so powerful, and so clueless. Both movies have multiple gags about how these characters are so pampered and yet so ruthless that they’re perfectly willing to murder someone, but have no idea how to actually use the weapons. Ready or Not 2 cleverly sets the tone at the beginning, with David Cronenberg as a ludicrously rich patriarch so powerful that he can instantly stop a ceaseless conflict with a single phone call. This is a movie where the bad guys are literally murderous, back-stabbing Satan worshippers; it’s simply unconcerned with nuance. But I think that there is an idea at the core of the sequel that keeps it from floating completely away into silly action-horror-comedy. For their review of Ready or Not 2 on the Breakfast All Day channel, Christy Lemire and Alonso Duralde put their disappointed faces in the thumbnail, which made me assume that they hated it. But watching the review, I actually agreed with most of their points. The sequel doesn’t need to exist, it’s basically just an excuse to make more Ready or Not, and there’s a severe tonal whiplash between scenes brutally beating the hell out of Kathryn Newton’s character being intercut with a slapstick fight between two women in wedding dresses in a different room. I agree with all of that; I just would’ve given it a higher score and put my smiley face in the video review thumbnail. The point where I disagree, mostly: they called out the scenes between Grace and Faith throughout the movie, rebuilding their relationship from estranged to accusatory to loving, as being another example of that tonal inconsistency. They drag the movie down, it’s the same note repeated over and over, and it seems trite and maudlin for a movie that is otherwise not interested in being either. I was initially inclined to agree. Especially in the middle, as they keep repeating the same “You abandoned me!” “I had to!” back-and-forth in between action sequences, it felt weird and shallow. Something done more out of obligation than actual effort: look, character development! And especially since the movie goes so hard establishing that these are regular people (they work as a waitress and a hostess, and they came from a foster home), it feels like the filmmakers were afraid they wouldn’t read as relatable enough, even though they’re contrasted against characters so cartoonishly over-privileged that it includes a kid who’s always on his Switch 2 and a guy who’s never seen without a silk bathrobe and a martini. But I think it’s part of a through-line introduced in the sequel that wasn’t present in the original, and it works in conjunction with a few other moments. One is the young woman presented as the key rival. She’s from one of the rich houses and was the fiancee of Grace’s husband, before he ditched her, tried to leave his family, and ran off with Grace. She comes in screaming that Grace ruined her life. Grace just responds with “I don’t know who you are!“5 I think it’s a neat twist on how regular Joes vs rich assholes stories typically work, since it’s pretty much always the case — in fiction and in real life — that rich people have so little awareness or consideration for anyone outside their circle that they can absolutely ruin the lives of people they’ve never met. Essentially, as that Mad Men meme says, there’s power in being able to say “I don’t think about you at all.” Later in the movie, Grace is tempted twice by one of the rich women playing the game. First, she’s told of a secret clause in the game’s rules, where she can be free of the game by marrying into one of the competing families. Faith encourages her to take the deal, but she refuses, eventually explaining that she’d rather die than sell her soul. Then, after Grace has finally agreed to marry the Supreme Bad Guy Titus in order to save her sister, she’s approached by Sarah Michelle Gellar’s Ursula, who also tries to present herself as a sympathetic ally. She insists that she had no idea just how psychotic Titus was, but by working together, they can control him or at least keep him in check. It’s kind of Screenwriting 101 to say that Titus and Ursula are presented as a counter-point to Grace and Faith; here’s what a really dysfunctional sibling relationship looks like, and you guys don’t have it nearly that bad. I think it’s a little more interesting that the rich characters are practically incapable of interacting with each other as human beings. The somewhat sympathetic characters in Ready or Not (the brother-in-law and the new husband) were both presented as if they genuinely wanted to get out of the system, but they just lacked the will to actually do it. All of the villains in the sequel are either murderous or trying to find some kind of leverage that gives them more power. They put themselves forward as allies, but only when they have something to gain from it. Finally, most if not all of the conversations between the sisters are about money as much as family. The main conflict is pretty absurd; no, an 18 year old wouldn’t have been able to take care of a 15 year old, and that practically should have been the end of the argument. But it does emphasize how much the problems of the rich characters are self-created from their own greed, and how many problems just disappear once you have enough money to be comfortable. And here, framed as a question of what you’re willing to give up (your relationship to your family) in order to live comfortably. Before I go too far making it sound like this is some richly complex and nuanced story, I have to mention that in one scene, Faith says that she saw Grace in a Whole Foods in New York, but didn’t say anything. It’s hard to think of a clearer give-away that a wealthy-enough-not-to-care screenwriter is trying to write about poor people, than describing two struggling young women both shopping in a Whole Foods.6 In any case, I think it all works together to introduce an idea that wasn’t present in the first movie’s more general-purpose “rich people are just the worst” message: how much would you be willing to give up to be super-rich and powerful? Is it worth selling your soul? Because the Ready or Not movies are both basically clever and stylish cartoons, it’s a question of literally selling your soul. With everything else going on in the sequel, I think that the otherwise-clunky character development between the sisters is part of the through line that makes it figurative as well. Not just rejecting a deal with the devil, because that’s unlikely to happen to most of us. Instead, rejecting all of the ways that envy, greed, and the pursuit of money or power can chip away at your soul in the real world. Basically, expanding the “I have defeated the rich bastards!” of the first movie into a stronger victory, “I don’t have to even give a damn about the rich bastards, because I have everything I need.” 1 Or at least seemingly normal 2 Which I’ve never read, and have only seen the adaptation with Matt Damon and Jude Law 3 It read to me more as suburban middle class “comfortable,” but the essay stridently asserted that “comfortable” means “rich,” which is weird and unconvincing to me 4 Even if she is movie-star beautiful 5 Or similar. I’m paraphrasing, because the idea is more significant than the exact wording. 6 For non-Americans or the otherwise confused: Whole Foods is a notoriously expensive supermarket.
Saltburn, or, I Am Stretched On Your Grave
I might have enjoyed the 90 minute long, modern take on British classics that's buried somewhere inside Saltburn
Since I liked Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” so much, I was pretty geared up to finally watch Saltburn. Somehow I’ve managed to stay almost completely unspoiled over the last few years, apart from the scene referenced in my title, and that it had Jacob Elordi and Rosamund Pike. Oh, and also that it was either a bold and absolutely shocking take on English period dramas, or it was an inept and overrated piece of garbage that should haunt its writer and director for the rest of her career. One of those two. As it turns out, I don’t think either of those are true. It’s not for me, but even as someone completely unfamiliar with the classics that inspired it (I’ve heard Brideshead Revisited mentioned multiple times, along with another title that would be a spoiler even to mention), I could see and appreciate what it was doing. It’s a darkly comic and horny take on stories about the British aristocracy, and people of lower classes longing for that life of wealth and privilege even after seeing all of its gross excesses. In fact, that’s probably the biggest reason I didn’t like the movie: I could see what it was doing after about an hour in, but then I saw that there was still well over an hour to go. And even once the movie had explicitly established what it was doing, it just kept going on piling on one more ending after another, as if it were Return of the King or something. Even after all that, I was eager to give it a begrudging pass, but then it added yet another ending that explicitly spelled out everything that I’d thought had been abundantly clear already. It’s one thing to overstay your welcome; it’s worse when you spend the entire time saying, “Get it? Did you see what we did? No, seriously, did you get it?” It’s too bad, because there were plenty of elements that I thought were clever and perfectly under-played. Anything with Rosamund Pike’s character, to start with. She’s got the more obvious comedic moments, like when she casually confides that she was a lesbian for a while, but it was “too wet.” But more than that, the character and the performance were perfectly in sync, suggesting layers to a shallow person that might’ve otherwise come across as a cartoon. There’s a real sense of tragedy and even sympathy to her character, someone who’s not evil and not necessarily good, but has simply lived in a kind of Plato’s cave of privilege her entire life, both because of her wealth and presumably, her beauty. It’s not that she lacks sympathy for less advantaged people; it’s just such an alien concept to her that she can’t even relate. There’s a similar kind of sympathetic nuance with Jacob Elordi’s character Felix. Everyone projects onto him — not just Oliver, but everyone — a version of who he must be, because of his wealth and his looks. That means that everyone, including the audience, projects their own insecurities and desires onto him as well. People are eager, desperate, to be inside his “light,” but also afraid of when they’re inevitably going to be discarded or cast outside of it. So there are hints throughout that he’s careless and thoughtless, putting all of his attention onto a person before growing bored and moving onto someone else. We in the audience are waiting for the other shoe to drop, for everything to fall apart. All without considering that these hints are all coming from unreliable people, and seem to be more about their insecurities over falling out of favor with Felix, more than anything about Felix himself. And there’s another interesting angle to that, which I thought was described really well by Daniel Kibblesmith: “hot people [are] usually pretty nice to you because most of their daily interactions go well.” The cliche of the cruel and stuck-up hot person rarely lines up with reality, because in reality, hot people rarely have any need to be cruel. It’s just that people’s insecurities cause indifference to be interpreted as cruelty. So we spend a lot of the first part of the movie wondering why a character like Felix seemed to be showing such outsized kindness to Oliver, and constantly questioning whether their friendship was genuine. There are interesting ideas about class, wealth, and privilege inside Saltburn, and especially how much has changed and how much has stayed the same into the modern era, where the aristocracy is largely vestigial and the lines between classes are blurrier. And the movie does interesting things with those ideas, in a way that I haven’t seen before, using a classic and familiar story format to raise questions about how much of class structure is imposed on us vs how much we insist on imposing on ourselves. I just think that it’s got maybe ninety minutes worth of those ideas stretched out over two hours, and I wish it had been less languid in its pacing, and more confident that the audience was going to be able to understand exactly what was happening.
Ready or Not absolutely did not need a sequel, which is something the filmmakers seemed to take as a challenge
To be clear: it’s not just that Ready or Not didn’t need a sequel; the thing that I liked most about it was that it seemed so defiantly anti-sequel. It was this weird, completely self-contained one-off, so adamantly its own thing that it felt like a relief from Hollywood’s worst tendencies to try and make everything a franchise. It had just enough lore and world-building to support this one clever story, and it gave that story an explosive finale that seemed to definitively state The End. Like a crew that spent months building an elaborate miniature just for the sake of blowing it up at the end as spectacularly as possible. Plus, like Abigail, it had a perfect ending line. The only points in favor of continuing it: the title, which practically begs for a sequel called Here I Come, and the fact that the first movie cast someone completely perfect for the lead role. Before the movie, I watched an interview with Samara Weaving on the Dead Meat podcast. There were two highlights: one was her saying that she knew she was cut out for weird genre movies when she discovered that she could “scream like a goat.” The other was describing the meticulous process the make-up, effects, and editing crew took in order to make Ready or Not 2: Here I Come pick up exactly from the final moment of the first movie. To the point that I couldn’t see exactly where the transition into new footage happened, and I would’ve otherwise just assumed that it was something they filmed as part of the original, just in case it ever went to sequel. It made me go into this movie more receptive than I would’ve been otherwise. If this had been just an obligatory sequel, there are much, much easier ways they could’ve picked up the story. They could’ve simply jumped forward in time a few hours or a day, and it would’ve worked just as well. Deliberately picking up right after the first movie feels not like a necessity but a stunt. And even a bit self-consciously a stunt. We see our protagonist Grace being carried into an ambulance, and then the EMTs giving chest compression and using a defibrillator to revive her. As if it’s slyly saying, “Yes, we know her story is over. We’re forcing her back to life and deliberately putting her through another round of this all over again.” The rest of the set-up is similarly contrived, to the point of making me laugh at how far they were going to justify it. They have to get her back into that crusty, bloody dress, and they have to get her hair and face covered in blood again as quickly as possible. In less capable hands, I would’ve been rolling my eyes. Here, it feels more like a playful “Here’s your sequel! Choke on it!” To me, it was a confident assertion that the filmmakers — Radio Silence, working with many of the team from the first movie — were working with a Scream-like awareness of the requirements of a genre movie and the sequel to a genre movie, and wanted to acknowledge that without ever being as explicitly self-referential as the Scream franchise. One of the most surprising things to me was how they used the most memorable aspect of the first movie’s explosive finale. I was convinced that they’d used up any potential to make that surprising or interesting; much like the house that was the setting for the first movie, they’d burned through it and left it destroyed. But here, they recognize that it’s no longer shocking or surprising, so they start to play with the idea of the audience expecting it to happen. So I was pretty quickly won over. If they’re going to insist on making a sequel, they made (mostly) the right choices. Pretty great casting, bringing back their favorites like Kathryn Newton and Kevin Durand, plus a mix of celebrity stunt casting and memorable character actors. It felt a little bit like Peter Jackson’s Hobbit movies, where you could tell he just really wanted to spend more time in that world with that crew and those performers. That really came through for me in a scene pretty early in the “game,” in which sisters Grace and Faith are in the process of killing one of their pursuers. Samara Weaving has a range of expressions that realistically should be impossible for any actor to get across: I’m still in shock; This is horrific; Good for us, we got ‘im; This is kind of awkward; Has it been long enough?; This is going to be gross, isn’t it? I can totally imagine having made a movie built around an actor that just seems to get it completely, and then wanting to make a sequel if only for the sake of getting to work with her again. At this point, I’ve seen four Radio Silence movies — both Ready or Nots, Abigail, and Scream — and I have the same major criticism of all of them. There’s this weird tonal whiplash, where it’s chugging along as light-hearted action horror before going into an extended slog where it’s just joylessly beating the shit out of its leads. Marketing for the first Ready or Not sold this image of Grace as a bad-ass taking the fight back to the rich assholes who put her into this situation, but that was such a small part of that movie. The bulk of it felt like heaping abuse and even torture onto her, even beyond what feels like is “standard” for a horror movie protagonist. Ready or Not 2 has a little bit of a better balance, where there’s so much abuse heaped onto Grace early on that it almost goes back around to being darkly comic. And she does get more of an opportunity for payback in this one, including a couple of fight scenes that I thought were satisfying. But as if to counter-balance that, it heaps a ton of violence onto Faith and later another woman character I won’t name in the interest of being mostly-spoiler-free. It feels like an attempt to stress how, among all of these comically reprehensible villains, one is clearly the worst, most dangerous, and least deserving of any trace of sympathy. But it goes so far that it felt kind of accusatory, as if we needed to be reminded how serious all of this is for the last act to have any stakes. How dare you think this is just nothing more than a horror comedy? It didn’t ruin the movie for me. I liked this one about as much as the first Ready or Not, and by the end, they had sufficiently made their case for why they wanted to make a sequel. Not a story that necessarily demanded to be told, but more like an opportunity to work with people they like, and a storytelling challenge to force more life into a story and characters that had a strict do not resuscitate order on them.
Tuesday Tune Two-Fer: I Have Had It With These Monkey-Fighting Snakes in This Monday to Friday Country
Two instrumental tunes in honor of St Patrick's Day
It grieves me to say it, but I’ve probably got as much of an authentic tie to Ireland as a Shamrock Shake. My mother spent some time looking into our genealogy, and you only have to go back a generation or two to land in Ireland, but I think I’m too much of a Scottish/Irish/English/German mutt, myself. That didn’t stop me from going heavy into my Irish phase in college, though. (Never underestimate the need of a southern American teen to feel like he comes from somewhere not embarrassing). I became obsessed with the Pogues and spent a lot of time driving around Athens screaming over traditional songs or songs meant to sound traditional. I didn’t and still don’t know much about Irish history, but that didn’t stop me from hating Oliver Cromwell and cursing him out at least once a day. I always liked that the Pogues would devote at least one track of each album just to showing off how many outstanding musicians were in the band; it wasn’t all just about Shane MacGowan’s lyrics. One of my favorites was “Wild Cats of Kilkenny” from Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash. For a nerdy college kid trying to get in touch with his roots, a version of the Doctor Who theme that turned into an Irish reel felt like it was speaking directly to me. My love of the Pogues eventually turned me onto the harder stuff: actual traditional Irish music. One highlight was a live album from The Chieftains, titled An Irish Evening: Live at the Grand Opera House, Belfast. There’s a track on there called “The Mason’s Apron” that goes into an extended flute solo by Matt Molloy, and it was, and still is, one of the most amazing things I’ve ever heard. Even seeing it in video, it’s kind of hard to believe it’s one person. After the applause, Paddy Moloney sums it up perfectly with “Not bad. Not bad at all. There were two flutes in there somewhere.” Happy St Patrick’s Day! Might be a perfect day to get my at-least-partly-Irish ass over to a Jewish deli and get some corned beef and cabbage.
Heebie dBs, or, The SFXorcist (One Thing I Like About undertone)
The creepy podcast movie undertone has the great sound design you'd expect, but also pairs it with just the right old-school visuals. (Spoilers after a warning)
undertone1 is about Evy, co-host of a podcast about spooky phenomena. She’s the hard-line skeptic, and her co-host Justin (who we never see) is the true believer. He’s based in London, so to account for the time zone difference, Evy has to record the podcast alone in the house, in the dark, very late at night. Also she’s the sole caregiver for her dying mother, who was a devout Catholic, and the house is full of Catholic imagery along with Evy’s ever-increasing stress and guilt. The topic for this episode is an email that Justin received, with a cryptic message from an anonymous address, and 10 audio files attached. They decide to listen to them for the podcast, Justin listening and looking for hidden messages in the audio, Evy ready to debunk every one of his theories. It’s really not hyperbole to recommend seeing this in a theater with a good sound system, since as you’d expect from the premise, the movie achieves a lot of its creeps via sound design. Just the transition when Evy puts on or takes off her noise-cancelling headphones is effective. There are lots of “did you just hear that?!” moments, and undertone is surprisingly sparing in its use of sounds that seem to move out of the screen and into the theater with you, so they never feel rote or overdone.2 If you want to see it but don’t want to go to a theater, I highly recommend watching it with headphones. (And I’d still recommend a theater if you’re at all interested, because a lot of the fun of this one was feeling the need to periodically look around the theater to see where that noise was coming from, or whether that weird shape in my peripheral vision was a ghost or just someone getting up to go to the bathroom). But even with that caveat, the thing that surprised me the most about undertone was that it didn’t rely solely on the sound design. It feels like a deliberately old-school horror movie in all the best ways. Trading all of the gore and violence for good old-fashioned creepy stuff like dark hallways just off to the side of the frame; eerie things half-seen in the background of a shot; lights turning on and off inexplicably; and a woman alone in a house at night, walking with trepidation up a staircase with a crucifix prominently placed on the wall. Yes, the majority of it does feel like Manipulative Horror Movie Tricks 101, but in combination with the premise and the sound design, it all worked for me. I kind of miss movies that just put everything into being scary, instead of deeply upsetting or shocking. Note that if you’ve ever had a terminally ill parent, it might cross the line into deeply upsetting. I imagine especially so if you were your parent’s caregiver. I was initially concerned that it was just going to be crassly manipulative with it, another horrible thing to pile onto the protagonist. So I was surprised by how much a genuine sense of empathy came through. In the end credits, there’s a message that the movie supports the Kidney Foundation and an organization for Alzheimer’s research, and there’s a personal text message from the writer and director (which scrolled by too quickly for me to read in full) that dedicates the movie to his parents and to people who’ve been in the position for caring for their parents. undertone seems very much like a movie where you get out of it what you’re willing to put into it. There are lots of suggestions of ideas about religion, what you owe your parents, guilt, motherhood, guilt, and having to suffer through trauma alone, but it doesn’t actually say that much about them so much as offer empathy for people who are going through it. I think that’s plenty, personally. I already said it on Letterboxd, but my only real criticism is how it was such a weird choice to pause the movie halfway through so that the characters could talk about Hello Fresh. And I couldn’t come up with a circumspect way to describe what I liked about my two favorite scenes, so I’ll save that for after a spoiler break. The most effective scene for me is after Evy comes back to the house after what seems like a night out. She (eventually) comes upstairs, and we just get a shot of the door to her mother’s bedroom, where we see her mother’s legs lying on the floor. That one shot is so quiet and matter-of-fact, and it suggests much more than it actually shows, but it hit me as hard as anything I’ve seen in a horror movie in months.3 You already know that something bad is going to happen, just by virtue of the fact that Evy’s allowing herself one night out after weeks. But it was so much more effective than any shots of creepy figures or shadow creatures, or even her mother sitting upright in the background later on, just because it’s laden with so much guilt. I think the best scene in the movie happens later on, as Evy puts in her Air Pods and lies down with a gentle relaxation recording. The narrator begins with a peaceful description of a tranquil lake, then calmly and seamlessly segues into describing something floating to the top of the lake. Something pale and bloated. It’s such a perfect line delivery, and such a seamless transition into Evy’s nightmare. And you get that minute or so of dread, as you realize that you’ve transitioned into a nightmare, but the really horrific stuff is still yet to come. When I was going into this movie, I was expecting to see a ton of close-up shots of the Logic interface, zooming into sound waves, scrubbing back and forth over audio clips, playing them in reverse, and so on. And there is plenty of that. But what I hadn’t anticipated was how many different ways they’d use audio to be completely disorienting. I still don’t know how many of the whispers or crackling noises that I heard were actually from the other people in the theater, or from the movie’s soundtrack. And I especially hadn’t anticipated how much of the movie would work by combining all of its sound design tricks with good old-fashioned horror movie tricks. After-images in the darkness, bizarre dutch angles, lighting changes, shots composed to have you scanning not just the empty space around Evy, but the empty space in the theater around your seat. Honestly, there’s not much in undertone that feels all that original. But it’s the combination of sound design and old-school visuals, all executed well, and with a pretty great performance from its lead actor, that makes it all work a lot better than it has any right to. 1 Sticking with the lower-case from the movie’s marketing, which is a sign of how much I liked it 2 I’m not sure whether it was intentional, or just something to do with my theater, but the frame always had big black borders inset from the screen, and I kept expecting a moment when the image would fill up the entire screen. 3 And this is a year when I’ve seen a chimpanzee rip a man’s face off, and a zombie pull a guy’s entire head and spine out of his body.
One Thing I Guess I Like About The Bride!
The Bride! is ultimately more memorable than good, but it does have an interesting take on why this movie exists at all
Fairly early on in The Bride! our title character and Frankenstein both go to Chicago’s well-known “pre-war Berlin” neighborhood for a night of dancing. Which makes sense, as it’s a safe space — or is it?! — for people that society might consider outcasts or, maybe even… monsters? You can tell it’s the queer neighborhood, because someone has meticulously written graffiti on the wall that reads “2 + 2 = 5?” There are no rules here! Question everything! That’s not the one thing I like about this movie. I just have to mention it as the clearest sign of how it works, and how it’s just not something to be taken that seriously. Later on, there’s a dance sequence set to “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” which is corny as hell but is also just almost clever enough for me to give it a pass. But over the end credits, “Monster Mash” plays. This is a movie that takes as much as it gives. I was completely won over by the teaser trailers, with shots of a black void with Jessie Buckley’s head in a bell jar, speaking to the camera, intercut with flashes of dance numbers and Bonnie and Clyde references and huge title text. This was clearly a movie that was taking a big swing, and I was going to see it no matter what. Even though early impressions weren’t great. Alonso Duralde described it as “if Moulin Rouge! were a proto-feminist horror movie,” which seemed both promising and intimidating. That movie kept trying to throw me off, by being so loud and corny and over-the-top, but it eventually won me over completely. The Bride! is similar in that there’s a lot of movie there, and it demands a lot of patience from the audience, taking all of the excess in stride. But it also doesn’t have anywhere near as much earnest sincerity. Not that it’s insincere; I have no trouble believing that the movie believes in everything it’s saying (whatever that may be, exactly), and that all the performers are fully committing to the bit. Just that it never loses the feeling of a bunch of well-known actors sinking their teeth into an acting exercise. Annette Bening never stops being Annette Bening, even while playing a mad scientist. Same for Penelope Cruz, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Peter Sarsgaard. Even the bad guy from Superman (Zlatko Buric) never fully became “menacing mob boss,” not through any fault of his own, but just because the movie feels so purposefully artificial that recognizable actors remain recognizable actors. The fact that Maggie Gyllenhaal is writer and director of this is all over the marketing, and it’s an essential part of what this movie is, but I kind of wish I hadn’t known that going in. Because I was never really able to watch it as anything other than a famous person getting a bunch of her famous friends and family together to do a very expensive piece of experimental theater. The earnestness of The Bride! is similar to the earnestness of a very personal one-act play. One that an acquaintance has invited you to come watch, and you weren’t able to come up with a sufficient excuse to bow out. I went in expecting to have a take-away like, “you’ve got to respect how it was such a big swing!” There’s no shortage of big swings — and the movie is an early front-runner for any awards in the category of Most Acting — but they rarely connect. Possibly the most obvious example is the conceit of Mary Shelley’s ghost. She opens the movie in a monologue delivered from a black void, saying essentially that Frankenstein is what became her legacy, but this is the story she really wanted to tell. She possesses the body of a gun moll in 1930s Chicago, who becomes our main character. It’s not used as a framing device, but is carried throughout the movie. Sometimes in conversations between Ida and Shelley, sometimes in passages of dialogue where Shelley takes over, and most often in the form of sudden outbursts, like a near-incessant verbal tic. It sounds like it could be interesting, but it’s off-putting more often than not. I could only make out about 60% of what was actually being said at any given moment1, but based on the parts I could make out, I don’t think I was missing that much. A lot of it is sudden outbursts of wordplay, which always felt self-consciously written by a 21st century American to sound like what a literate Victorian would find clever. The other day at CityWalk, I saw a guy with a T-shirt that read “REAL EYES REALIZE REAL LIES” in big letters, and I felt like a lot of the wordplay in The Bride! had a similar vibe. But that also leads into what I think was the best scene — or at least most effective one for me — in the movie. It’s pretty early on, where Ida/The Bride is in the middle of a dream in which she’s talking with Shelley’s ghost. We see her floating above her own body down on the operating table2, and they’re talking about identity. I can’t even remember any specific lines of dialogue, which I’m taking as a sign that it was one of the few scenes that was actually speaking to me. Conveying ideas opposed to reciting dialogue. It’s not some post-modern, 21st century invention to use the writing of Frankenstein as a framing device for a story. Neither is it to invite comparisons between The Bride and Mary Shelley herself by casting the same actor in both roles. The Bride of Frankenstein did both in 1935. But with this scene, The Bride! is demanding that you consider all the implications of that, essentially giving you a visual breakdown of all the levels of irony. It all but literally draws a straight line between Shelley’s ghost, the currently-lifeless body on the table that used to be Ida, and the essence of a different, synthesized person floating in between, still in the process of defining who she is, exactly. I think it’s an acknowledgement by Gyllenhaal of the audacity of the main conceit: she is basically reanimating the corpse of Mary Shelley for a specific purpose, to serve as her mouthpiece. It’s also a kind of defense and justification, by suggesting that every interpretation or continuation of Frankenstein — the story itself, and the story of writing it — will unavoidably be saddled with that irony. Whether you’re putting it forward as a humanist story or a specifically feminist one, you’re still taking a story with a core idea of self-identification and imposing your own identity onto it. The movie is full of constant, explicit reminders that women are defined in terms of what other people want from them, and the limited idea of what other people think they’re capable of achieving. Putting Mary Shelley forward as a feminist icon and an under-appreciated creator of the entire genre of science fiction is itself imposing your own definition of who she was. At least, that’s my interpretation. Which is, obviously, imposing my own definition of what Gyllenhaal was trying to say, which is an issue that carries on throughout the movie. The Bride! is simultaneously obtuse and unambiguous, often unclear of what it might be trying to say beyond the most patently obvious, but at the same time so direct that it doesn’t really invite you to try and come up with a more complex interpretation. But I thought this specific scene did exactly that. And the effect lasted throughout, turning the off-putting outbursts and verbal tics into a visual representation of how fraught it is to talk about feminism without descending into a self-contradicting spiral of irony.3 So I’m pretty critical of the movie, with the one scene that I think works the best actually being just a justification for the big swings that don’t really connect. Why am I interested in it at all, instead of dismissing it? Because if you’re going to make a movie that is essentially just giving recognizable actors an opportunity for over-the-top acting exercises, you couldn’t pick a better pair of actors that Jessie Buckley and Christian Bale. I don’t know if I’d go so far as to say that they make the movie work, but they absolutely make the movie memorable. Bale seems well aware of what the movie is about and who is the focus, so he doesn’t try to meet Buckley’s energy, but deliver a contrast to it. His version of Frankenstein is awkward and beaten down from living too long as a monster, always conscious of not scaring people or taking up too much space. He’s prone to violent outbursts or the occasional fit of jealousy, but the entire plot is driven by how much of a romantic he is. When you see him sitting in a theater, grinning during a musical number and imagining himself on screen, it’s just plain charming. Later in the movie, the characters are at a drive-in theater4, and a conversation between The Bride and Frankenstein plays out both in the audience and on the screen. They mention Dr Euphronious, the mad scientist that brought her to life, and Frank casually, wistfully, almost reflexively, observes, “She’s a genius.” It’s a small, weird detail, perfectly delivered, and for me it was one of the only genuine laughs in the whole movie. And it’s really difficult to imagine anybody who could’ve pulled off the title role as well as Jessie Buckley. She’s constantly having to jump between Ida, Mary Shelley, and this gradually-emerging identity of The Bride, and it never feels natural or believable — because the movie seems to have decided early on that it wasn’t shooting for believability — but it’s rarely so jarring that it feels like nothing but an affectation. There’s something oddly subtle about it, in a movie that’s otherwise completely unconcerned with subtlety, where you get the sense that every thing this character does is a performance, until the moments when a real person starts to peek through. And to be blunt: I can’t imagine anybody else playing this part without its being insufferably annoying. So the movie is a showcase for two outstanding actors, and it does have an interesting take on what it even means to make a movie like this in the first place. But ultimately I was pretty disappointed that this movie would seem to take so many big swings and having so few of them actually connect. To the point of making me wonder how many of them were actually big swings in the first place. Going back to the Moulin Rouge! comparison: whether you love that movie or hate it, you can’t deny that it has a go-for-broke energy to it. If this doesn’t work out, we are all going to look very, very silly. For all of its weirdness, I could never shake the feeling that The Bride! was a cautiously controlled experiment. 1 I had a problem with all of the dialogue apart from Sarsgaard and Bening, who seemed to be purposefully speaking the most modern, unaffected American accents possible. And Bening spends most of the movie speaking in Star Trek technobabble, which I would’ve been on board with if it hadn’t felt like such a deliberate attempt to make absolutely certain the audience understood how the science wasn’t the point. 2 And pressing uncomfortably against the glass ceiling, because I can’t stress enough how much this is not a subtle movie 3 Kind of like America Ferrera’s more on-the-nose speech in Barbie about how women can never be too this or too that. 4 What’s a drive-in?
Let It Go (One Thing I Didn’t Like About Hoppers)
Hoppers is like a louder, blunter Pom Poko, which isn't so bad unless you think too hard about its messages
My anti-Pixar theme week continues, with a scathing take-down of… well, hang on. I’m still not interested in jumping into backlashes or hot takes, or complaining about something instead of finding an interesting idea at the core of it. The whole idea of my trying to stick to the “One Thing I Like” theme isn’t at all a reminder to find something positive to say, even when I think the subject is garbage.1 I’d rather not waste time on something I don’t like, in favor of celebrating the stuff I do like. It’s only worth mentioning at all if I think there’s something interesting to be said about why exactly I don’t like it. Anyway, yesterday I saw Hoppers. And while it’s definitely not for me, I can totally see why other people are enjoying it, and I don’t want to be completely dismissive of it. But over the course of the day, I caught myself turning my main criticism of it into a grudge, and piling more and more points against it as time went on. My main criticism is that Pom Poko is one of my all-time favorite movies, and I can’t help but see all the ways that Hoppers tries to do the same thing and keeps coming up short. “Not as good as one of my favorite movies of all time” is an impossibly high bar to set, admittedly, but I will point out that Hoppers itself tries to lampshade comparisons to other movies by having a character stress that it’s nothing like Avatar. The comparison was so hard for me to shake that it undermined the one thing I liked most about Hoppers. The movie very cleverly gives a visual indication when your viewpoint is swapping between the animal world and the human world, by having the eyes change. When they have big, white, cartoony eyes, with pupils and everything, you’re in the world of the animals, able to talk to them and understand what they’re saying. When they have little black circles for eyes, they’re animals, and humans can only hear them making animal noises. But as I kept thinking throughout Hoppers, “Pom Poko did this, too, but more subtly and cleverly.” The tanuki in that movie flow freely through multiple states, depending on who’s seeing them and what their current mental/emotional state is. They go from being realistic animal versions, to their “main” cartoon-animal form, to their super-cartoony form2, to their human form, to their statue form, to whatever they’re transforming into, all throughout the movie and sometimes within a single scene. As I kept finding little things that didn’t work for me in Hoppers, it all had the cumulative effect of feeling very loud and very blunt, never letting me go for longer than a minute without telling me exactly what to think and what to feel. I have no doubt that I went in predisposed not to like it, since I’d just been thinking about Pixar in terms of authenticity vs forced universality, but it all felt like it was desperate to charm me instead of being genuinely charming. A montage sequence set to Loverboy’s “Everybody’s Working For the Weekend” didn’t help at all; it just felt like I was suddenly watching a trailer for a Dreamworks or Illumination movie. And it did something that Pixar movies almost never do: made me acutely aware that I was a 54-year-old man in a theater surrounded by children. But all of that is just another case of my not enjoying a movie, and not even in a particularly interesting way. It’s completely tied up with my biases and expectations, judging the movie based on what it’s not instead of what it is. Except for one thing about the tone and what I think is the message of the movie, which left me with a sour aftertaste from something I otherwise would’ve shrugged and said, “It’s fine.” And again I’ve got to pull out Pom Poko for comparison. That movie nails the ending in a way that makes me cry every single time I see it: it’s very sad, but highlights a moment of pure joy amidst the sadness. It’s the perfect capper to the recurring idea that these creatures aren’t cut out for war, because it goes completely against their nature. We’ve seen them anthropomorphized — both in cartoon form and literally taking the form of humans — but it makes no sense to apply human traits to them. Many of them simply can’t live as humans, and even for the ones who can, it’s exhausting. It’s urgent that we understand that our relationship with nature isn’t a battle between opposing sides, but requires us to stop ignoring our own true nature, to appreciate that we’re just as much a part of nature as any other living creature, and to maintain that balance. Which, to the credit of Hoppers, are all ideas that it touches on in one form or another. There are a couple of scenes that stress how animals live according to the natural order of things, and human concerns are weird to them. There’s a very strong emphasis on finding peace by recognizing that you’re just one part of nature, and not set apart from it. And there is a vague sense of reframing environmental issues not as a perpetual battle between opposing sides, but more as a question of long-term sustainability. And, I should stress: I don’t get any sense that this movie is all that concerned with having an impactful message about ecology. It’s first and foremost trying to be funny. But that’s kind of the problem. It ends up undercutting and undermining any sense of urgency. And worse, it turns it into a mushy “both sides” message. So much of the story is about the main character learning to get control of her anger, that it’s presented as if that anger were just as much a part of the problem as the politician deliberately lying to the public so that he can destroy the environment. The lesson, we learn, is to turn that anger into acceptance. To turn our rage into calm. To try and see the good in everyone. And to appreciate that instead of angry, unproductive activism, we need to work together to make the world a better place. Why not try to see things from the perspective of our antagonist whose hairy chest hides a heart of gold, voiced by America’s sweetheart Jon Hamm? Sure, we saw that he’d been lying to drive animals out of their habitat into a crowded one that couldn’t support them, and then we saw his actions result in the destruction of even more of that habitat. But surely he learned his lesson when that destruction threatened to almost touch the human city! Didn’t you even see him helping clean up afterwards? (And giving orders to a construction crew, suggesting that he suffered absolutely zero repercussions to even his political career?) Why hold a grudge? It all turned out okay! It’s just really tough for me to see this as a message about peace, calm, and balance; instead of one about passivity, acceptance, and moving on instead of holding people accountable. Maybe it’s because I’d been already jostled out of my enjoy-this-movie-like-a-little-kid state, and been reminded that I’m a middle-aged man, but it was very difficult for me to watch the last half of this movie without imagining a bunch of studio execs freaking out that the white guy authority figure was coming across as too much of a villain. I can’t help but picture a bunch of people scrambling to make sure the movie stressed how much our angry young hero had some growin’ up to do herself. I don’t think every movie has to be as good as Pom Poko, and I don’t think most movies even need to aspire to that. I don’t think every message about ecology and our relationship to the environment needs to be strident and self-righteous. I think it’s fine for a movie to just want to be fun and silly, with just enough depth to keep from floating away into complete irrelevance. But it does make me uncomfortable when I see movies aimed at all ages reject the message of “fight for what you believe in!” in favor of “whoa, calm down there, champ!” I don’t know how to make a message of environmentalism land with the urgency it needs to, since it’s always dismissed and ignored. And I do genuinely appreciate reframing it as a holistic question of sustainable balance instead of just one tiresome battle after another. But there has to be a better way than the paper-straws-and-carbon-offsets approach. Blandly asserting “we’re all in this together!” and absolving anyone of actual consequences means just continuing to ignore the problems for a few more years, and we’ve pretty much run out of time to keep doing that. 1 Which is why I remind you that I still haven’t written anything about seeing Scary Movie. Or even commented on the trailer for the new Scary Movie, which starts with a “joke” about people angrily correcting innocent bystanders about using the right pronouns, which is funny and relatable because it’s a totally real thing that totally happens in the real world. 2 Which is itself a reference to classic cartoons about tanuki
Re-thinking my earlier defenses of Pixar, since you can't actually be universal without first examining what you consider normal
Pixar’s new movie Hoppers is out, and not only does it seem to be a hit, it’s getting pretty much unanimous praise from critics and audiences both. So it was a brilliant PR move for Pete Docter to turn the attention back to Elio. And to do so by saying the worst thing he possibly could’ve said. Believe it or not, I’m not particularly interested in jumping onto the dog pile. I already got my zinger in: “‘We’re Making a Movie, Not Hundreds of Millions of Dollars of Therapy,’ says the writer and director of Inside Out.” [pause for approval from the internet]. If I’m being honest, I really didn’t like Elio, and I’m highly skeptical that making it more explicit that the main character was a gay kid would’ve done anything to change that. Personally, I’m more interested in the whole topic of diversity and representation in popular entertainment. The difference between just acknowledging that it’s a noble goal and something that we should all strive to achieve, and really understanding why it’s important and committing to doing it right. Because Docter’s comments put me in an awkward position. For years, I’ve been trying to defend Pixar against the criticism that the studio makes nothing but movies about the experiences and anxieties of straight, white men*. Except that they’re sold as “family movies” because the straight, white men have been represented by toys, cars, ants, monsters, fish, rats, adolescent girls, and, occasionally, straight, white men. So when critics would respond to something like Toy Story 4 with “oh, not this bullshit again,” I was always insistent that the business of the studio should be kept separate from its creative output. I believed — and still do, to some degree — that they were doing exactly the right thing with the movies themselves, it was just the studio structure that was undermining that. When I look at the “golden age” of Pixar, I think the one thing that makes the movies feel timeless and universal is that they didn’t have the overriding goal of being timeless and universal. Obviously, they aren’t scrappy independent projects; a ton of work went into modifying character designs, streamlining scripts, refining gags, choosing voice talent and music, all to make the movies as universally appealing and marketable as possible. But they hung all of this around a core idea that was very specific and personal, which keeps it from feeling like Commercial Entertainment Product.1 Finding Nemo is obviously about a father learning to be less over-protective of his son. Toy Story and Toy Story 4 are both about a man at different stages in his life, feeling anxiety over becoming irrelevant. I’ve complained a lot about The Incredibles over the years, but my biggest criticism is also my biggest compliment: underneath all the fantastic mid-century design, comic book super-hero callbacks, perfectly-executed action moments, it never loses the specific voice of a man who’s read a lot of Ayn Rand, took it all to heart, and is still holding a grudge over The Iron Giant. The distinction between the creative side and the studio structure seemed important, because it had an obvious fix: push for more diversity in the people making the movies, not just in the movies themselves. Because if you’re just trying to fix the movies, even if you have the best of intentions, it’s easy to spot as a bunch of insincere patch fixes. But it’s the thing that The Discourse always seems to focus on, making it feel like complaining about the symptoms instead of the actual problem. Like I said, giving Elio a pink bike and a boy crush wouldn’t have fixed my issues with that movie. Putting in or removing (based on who’s complaining the loudest) a lesbian relationship from Lightyear wouldn’t have made that movie feel any less like a dour slog. And Toy Story 4 would almost certainly have felt like less of a retread if it hadn’t been content to just put Bo Peep in pants, and a flashback to make her seem more kick-ass, but had gone all-in and made her the protagonist of the story. It briefly seemed like Pixar was starting to get it, with Turning Red and Coco. Inside Out was fine, I guess, but it did very much seem to be striving to be universally appealing; this is what all kids go through. The others came from a more personal, specific experience, and just as with all of the Straight White Guy entries, the specificity is what makes it universal. It’s not trying to be authentic, it’s coming from a genuinely authentic place, and audiences respond to that authenticity. I’ve never had a period and I didn’t grow up in a Mexican household, but I still feel like I get it. But for whatever reason, they quickly course-corrected and said, “Nah, we’re not into that, actually.” Making me feel stupid for defending them. And it’s just a drag. Of course, it’s always a drag when you see business and commerce intruding on art, especially when it’s a bunch of white guys stamping their feet and insisting on a return to Traditional Values while claiming it’s what The People Want and they’ve got the numbers to prove it. These movies about an adolescent white girl standing in for all children everywhere made a metric shit-ton of money, while this movie catering to the Mexican demographic only made a ton of money. The people have spoken, and they yearn for whiteness! But it’s especially a drag when you think someone has figured out exactly the right balance between art and commerce, making it a win for everyone. I really believed Pixar had cracked the code, and it stings to see them learning all the wrong lessons. And it’s a drag to see people flat-out refusing to challenge their own assumptions, like a Californian insisting “I don’t have an accent” because they can’t conceive of a world in which their accent isn’t the default. Whether it was taken out of context or not, and whether it indicates his personal views or not, Docter’s quote says that gay people are a special interest group. A girl having a crush on a boy is uncontroversial and universal; a boy having a crush on a boy requires careful and delicate handling. Whether or not a studio is willing to take on that careful and delicate handling to make people2 feel included is all but irrelevant, unfortunately. It’s already missed the sincerity cut-off, the line that separates sincere expression from focus-tested diversity. Because it ignores the obvious fact that as a gay kid, I didn’t feel like some weird special interest until people treated me like one; it was my normal. And it seems like an adamant refusal to even consider whether the exclusive coven of straight white American men that spent decades with full creative control over Pixar might’ve been the most special of special interest groups. Sharing their own specific life experiences as if they were universally relatable, never considering that they’re asking audiences to treat their own specific flavor of weirdness as if it were normal. * Edit: Re-reading this, I noticed I was casually tossing out the label “straight, white men,” which is a bad idea in general, but especially since I forgot that not all of the members of that group of most-well-known directors and writers are straight. Seems like a good reminder not to get so hung up on identity — especially in a post that’s all about finding the universal in our own unique experiences — that you treat it as an opportunity to be dismissive instead of an opportunity to bring a unique voice to a project. 1 Even Cars, although the personal touch is shallower, since as far as I’ve ever been able tell, it’s just “I love Route 66.” 2 Any people; it’s definitely not just an LGBTQ representation issue
Tuesday Tune Two-Fer: Chillin’ With Mario
Two tunes calling out the man of the day for Mar 10
It’s March 10th, which means people all over the internet are celebrating brand awareness by promoting their favorite Mario. If you were really invested, though, you wouldn’t limit it to just one day. The Beastie Boys understood this by using every chance they could get to promote their favorite Mario, Mario Caldato Jr. In “Intergalactic,” he likes to keep it clean. In “So What’cha Want?” either he can’t front on that, or the song is dedicated to him and you can’t front on that, I was never clear which. In “Three MCs and One DJ,” Norton is chillin’ with him. I’m sure there are plenty more; those are just the ones that I’ve heard so many times that my brain calls them up even more easily than my phone number. And in “The Grasshopper Unit” they’re asking him to rewind the tape and punch him in. Hello Nasty is my favorite of the Beastie Boys’ records, and I can still remember listening to it for the first time1. It was around half way through this song when I thought, “this is one of my favorite albums of all time.” It still is. 1 After getting stuck playing “Body Movin'” on repeat about a thousand times