It may feel like a Hieronymus Bosch painting in America right now but it’s a… Sanrio collage (strained metaphor) at your local AMC as Hoka-wearing cinephiles everywhere line up for a new Paul Thomas Anderson movie. The buzz on this thing is deafening, at least in the film circles I swim in. IndieWire critic and noted hater David Ehrlich LOVED it, and I for one can’t wait. I’m almost embarrassed to admit how much I have riding on its quality, emotionally.

What is it about Anderson (“PTA” from here on in) that inspires this kind of fervor?

…actually, that’s not even an interesting question. He makes good movies. He has for thirty years. That’s the secret! If you want to know why LA movie-lovers are waiting weeks, months to catch a VistaVision print of ‘Battle’ at Quentin Tarantino’s Vista theater, it’s because PTA makes good movies1.

And what better time to revisit (and of course rank) all of them than just before the release of his latest? Prepare to travel the width of the San Fernando Valley (with some detours) and the span of the 20th century, sampling an array of genres — screwball romance, WWII drama, paranoid detective mystery, Aimee Mann narrative music video — alongside one of the most curious, funny, and mercurial filmmakers in our American pantheon.

NOTE: for anyone else doing a PTA rewatch and/or just interested in exploring his work in greater depth, I highly recommend Adam Nayman’s 2020 monograph. Brilliant analysis, super-readable; as essential a filmmaker supplement as Matt Zoller Seitz’s popular “Wes Anderson Collection.”

9. ‘Hard Eight’ (1996)

More like Hard LAST. In fairness, PTA’s debut (arriving on the scene the same year as Wes Anderson’s ‘Bottle Rocket’, which I find 1000% more compelling) remains my least-watched of his movies, begrudgingly tackled just once — one week before the first COVID lockdowns, maybe in psychic anticipation of the hardships ahead. It’s possible I wasn’t in the right headspace: not charitable enough, unable to see the seeds of greatness that would bloom one year later in ‘Boogie Nights’ (which, if you’ve scanned ahead, you already know is my #1).

As with every single PTA entry, the performances hold up, especially Philip Baker Hall’s world-weary gambler. I find the other Philip (Seymour Hoffman)’s craps scene deeply annoying, but there’s also no denying his electricity as an actor even at that early stage of his career.

I don’t know, the movie’s fine? Lifting Fog reader/friend Eric Bilitch hates me forever for calling it “for completionists only” on Letterboxd, but five years later, I still stand by this assessment!

Fun Fact:

Pretend I’m cornering you at a Bushwick house party in 2010, Grizzly Bear playing in the background, when I tell you the original title of ‘Hard Eight’ was ‘Sydney’ (the main character’s name), and to this day PTA still refuses to call it anything else.

Lodged in my psyche forever:

8. ‘Licorice Pizza’ (2021)

Please take this as a direct assault on PT Anderson’s brother Wes when I say that the older I get, the more drawn I am to filmmakers who aren’t so tethered to one particular style. In my primacy, sure, all I wanted was for PTA to keep remaking ‘Boogie Nights’ forever (‘Magnolia’, next up, is not not a stylistic cousin), but now… give me variety, man! Give me something new2. Put some friggin’ licorice on that pizza.

I don’t think there’s any disputing ‘Pizza’ as the overall warmest movie in this bunch, sort of a cross between ‘Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’ and ‘Rushmore’, with a Max Fischer-ish Cooper Hoffman at the center of it. He’s plucky! He’s got moxie! So does Alana Haim, also perfectly cast, and their back-and-forth propels nearly two and a half hours of shaggy dog adventure. It’s a wavelength movie, one you’re either on or off, and you’ll know by the end of the first scene where you stand.

There are of course shades of ‘Punch-Drunk Love’ here (love makes us crazy/strong), of ‘Phantom Thread’ (love is fueled by ever-shifting power dynamics). Hell, even ‘The Master’ feels relevant, and not just because of shared Hoffman lineage. Still ‘Pizza’ feels completely different than any of them — (seemingly) ramshackle filmmaking for a ramshackle little story, emotion guiding its form and not the other way around, which is precisely how I felt about the other Anderson’s 2021 effort, ‘The French Dispatch’. Let those motherfuckers out of the dollhouse, Wes!

Fun Fact:

Cooper Hoffman is hardly the only Nepo Baby to appear in ‘Pizza’! You’ve got Sasha Spielberg (father: Steven), Griff Giacchino (father: Michael), George DiCaprio (son: Leonardo, so technically he’s a Nepo Daddy), and a litany of Anderson’s children with Maya Rudolph. Every one of them gets a pass because I like the movie.

Lodged in my psyche forever:

“This is Chumash territory!” - John Peters (Bradley Cooper), half-Cherokee, trying to cut in line at the pump against the backdrop of the 1973 oil crisis

7. ‘Magnolia’ (1999)

‘Magnolia’ loomed large over my collegiate film education (2004-ish) as something difficult to parse, the ultimate “challenging” contemporary indie whose entire meaning may or may not revolve around the Book of Genesis, or be explained in a rap delivered by one of the movie’s three Black characters.

At the same time, it’s also a pretty simple ensemble story about a bunch of Angelenos who deny their feelings, then feel them, then act on and maybe even learn from them. These kinds of things happen all the time! ‘Magnolia’ works not because it’s beating you over the head with artfulness, but because it knows when to properly deploy it. For all the talk of the cocaine energy that powered this movie, what stands out most are its many long, slow zooms that give an all-time roster of actors (Cruise never better outside ‘Jerry Maguire’) the space to just ACT, dammit.

Hard to watch and not be jealous: of PTA’s talent, his confidence, his ability to marry consistent drug usage and filmmaking. And of a movie world that gave money to people like him, to just do whatever free of any IP constrictions. Maybe we’re getting back there with Jordan Peele and Ari Aster and Zach Cregger and Ryan Coogler? Call me cautiously optimistic.

Fun Fact:

Almost nothing has ever made me feel more in the know than watching season two episode three of ‘Flight of the Conchords’ and realizing within seconds that they were doing a ‘Magnolia’ parody, specifically the Aimee Mann “Wise Up” scene. It would be another ten years before the Leo Pointing meme was born, but that’s precisely how I experienced this moment.

Lodged in my psyche forever:

6. ‘The Master’ (2012)

I think I must have been 13 and reading that year’s “Hollywood” issue of Vanity Fair3 when I saw a photo of PT Anderson with the caption “enfant terrible.” Because I had a normal suburban childhood, I had little clue who this guy was, but knew I was captivated, and something about the whole “enfant terrible” thing seemed deliciously mature/French. Loosely it means “unorthodox or terrifyingly candid child.” The photo and caption have stuck with me for decades.

That’s sort of who Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix) is, right? An unorthodox and terribly candid child, in the body of a man, stunted and explosive and seemingly incapable of finding his place in society, until he stumbles onto a boat that very much scans Sea Org, “commanded” by someone who very much resembles L. Ron Hubbard…

I remember how controversial the Scientology angle was, prior to release, though the finished film doesn’t take a hard line; it’s not about Scientology any more than ‘Barbie’ is about plastic doll production. It’s about, in no particular order:

• male friendship

• master-servant dynamics

• post-war malaise

• hucksterism

• bathtub hooch

I think I respect ‘The Master’ more than I actually enjoy it? Don’t SHOOT me. Top to bottom stellar performances (“PIG FUCK!”), but coming off the comparatively sober ‘Phantom Thread’4, it all just feels very BIG to me, a PTA entry regularly announcing itself as an Actors’ Showcase and Tapestry of Themes — with all the shattered prison toilets and dispassionate HJs that entails. Let me be very clear that I’m still describing a 4.5⭐️ movie, and on another day this could just as easily be #5 or even #4 on the list. The list doesn’t matter! It never did!

Fun Fact:

This one’s also less a “fact” than “personal memory,” but I caught ‘The Master’ at the long-gone (and dearly missed) Landmark Westwood, situated right next to a Barnes & Noble I worked at from August 2011 to its closing in December 2011. The place was always lousy with senior citizens, and watching this one with them I couldn’t help but think… well, that many of them had lived through WWII, had been young people navigating the same confusion and depression as Freddie, hopefully with less incest/problem drinking. We tend to think of the past as frozen, its concerns antiquated, when the truth is it’s always closer to us than we think, in this case the blue hairs sitting next to me at a matinee.

Lodged in my psyche forever:

“You can’t take this life straight, can you?” - Peggy Dodd (Amy Adams) rendering one final, withering assessment of Freddie Quell’s alcoholism and general unfitness for society that doubles as homoerotic subtext

5. ‘Phantom Thread’ (2017)

Here’s a common PTA experience: the revelation that something you’d assumed would be dry, austere, turns out in fact to be much weirder, more unpredictable than that. Maybe even… funny?

Every one of the movies on this list is laced with humor (including ‘There Will Be Blood!’) but I find it most unexpected, and therefore most refreshing, in ‘Phantom Thread’: a movie that when you get under the hood is effectively a screwball comedy about an anal-retentive fashionista who might just need to submit to some light gastrointestinal torture, in the name of love.

‘Thread’ carries itself, much like Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis), with a superficially highbrow comportment — swooning orchestration, delicate camerawork, fussy attention to detail — that belies another of PTA’s enfant terribles, a fussy little mama’s boy who’s scared of losing his dress-making edge and blows a gasket if the china clanks too much. His name is also WOODCOCK. This movie is, to put it Britishly, taking the piss.

At the same time, I find the sort of lived-in, aching romance here that I do something like ‘Before Midnight’ — not the one where Jesse and Celine meet, or rediscover each other, but the one where they’re years into a long-term partnership, reminding each other once more what makes their relationship work, and their love sustainable. For some couples that’s swinging, for others it’s poisonous mushrooms.

Fun Fact:

PTA’s wife, Maya Rudolph, was a longtime cast member on ‘SNL’. In 2016, that show ran the first of several “Totino’s” sketches in which Vanessa Bayer microwaved pizza rolls for her “hungry guys.” One year later, in ‘Phantom Thread’, Alma would deliver an exorbitant breakfast platter (albeit sans pizza rolls) to Reynolds Woodcock — the “hungry boy.”

What I’m saying is PTA and his family watch ‘SNL’ clips on YouTube every Sunday morning just like you and me.

Lodged in my psyche forever:

4. ‘Inherent Vice’ (2014)

I understand the plot of ‘Inherent Vice’ no better in 2025 than I did ten years ago, but much like ‘The Big Lebowski’ or ‘The Long Goodbye’ before it — or hell, ‘Tenet’ after/before — I suspect plot doesn’t matter much, is really just an excuse to put Joaquin Phoenix in a lot of wacky situations and outfits and hide the real story: end of an era, loss of innocence, a sense of something gone forever gnawing at a character too stoned to do anything but feel his way through it.

This thing runs for 2.5 hours but always feels like 90 minutes to me. Is it cheating to say the music is perfect? “Journey Through the Past,” “Any Day Now” -- maybe these are easy cues, but they so effortlessly conjure the nostalgia that lingers over the entire movie. One track of Jonny Greenwood’s, “Amethyst,” takes us through the final few minutes and is just so sweet and graceful, like a tide rolling in and washing out all the gunk so Doc and Shasta can stroll on the sand. “Under the paving stones, the beach.”

Unrelated you can really SMELL this movie.

Fun Fact:

too stoned

Lodged in my psyche forever:

3. ‘Punch-Drunk Love’ (2002)

Canonically the first PTA I ever saw, definitely rented from the Cherry Hill, NJ Blockbuster sometime in 2003. At the time I had zero romantic experience under my belt save crushes on [redacted] and [redacted], both of whom I was too scared to communicate those feelings to. I probably felt at the time like the feeling was its own reward.

It’s not! Action is! When Barry Egan (Adam Sandler) took a crowbar to that one dude’s dome — fueled by a love that makes him “stronger than anything you can imagine” — you might as well have been showing me a 30+ Avengers Thanos beatdown. Love brings us to life.

In the decades since, I think it’s become somewhat popular to consider ‘Punch-Drunk’ lesser PTA, or lump it in with the early aughts “manic pixie dream girl” canon. It’s not that those elements aren’t there, and you could make a broader case, for a while, that PTA just wasn’t all that adept at writing women. But also just

Fun Fact:

Barry’s Healthy Choice quest was based on the story of David Phillips, who really did accumulate 1.2 million frequent flyer miles through pudding purchases (12,000 cups!), which he then donated to local food banks as a tax deduction.

Lodged in my psyche forever:

2. ‘There Will Be Blood’ (2007)

…I mean it’s just goddamn great, what else is there to really say? I’m losing steam.

Fun Fact:

Actually, here’s the real Fun Fact:

Both ‘Blood’ and the Coen Brothers’ ‘No Country for Old Men’ were shooting at the same time in Marfa, TX. The oil derrick explosion scene resulted in a plume of black smoke so massive it drifted into the background of a ‘Men’ setup not far away, forcing them to delay production until the smoke cleared. Both would go on to receive eight Academy Award nominations each, with ‘Men’ beating out ‘Blood’ for Best Picture and Director.

Lodged in my psyche forever:

1. ‘Boogie Nights’ (1997)

It was only ever gonna be ‘Boogie Nights’. Maybe this makes me basic, kissing cousins with ‘Goodfellas’ as someone’s favorite Scorsese or ‘The Royal Tenenbaums’ as their favorite Wes Anderson5 but… well, who cares? We established our FREE SPEECH bona fides earlier in the week and will be sticking to them when it comes to our taste in American cinema.

I cannot overstate the impact this film made on me, seeing it for the first time at 19. I was aware of it when it came out eight years earlier; I saw the poster with the jeans and the star emerging from the spot where a penis might and knew I was being tempted by something provocative, something I wasn’t supposed to see. Even in high school, I think it would have been premature to make the attempt. To this day I regret watching ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ when my family first got HBO. I just wanted to see boobs! And here I am, 15, wallowing in the psycho-sexual drama of a marriage on the rocks.

But tail-end of my freshman year of college, one semester into a Film Studies education that had already introduced me to ‘Beau Travail’ and ‘Close-Up’… I felt ready. So on a sunny spring afternoon, I marched my ass over to Kim’s Mediapolis (RIP), plunkered down $19.99 of my parents’ money, and hours later was watching Paul Thomas Anderson’s masterpiece on my 13” (just as big as Dirk Diggler’s dick) 2004 MacBook Pro, a computer wildly overpowered for word processing but perfect for region 1 DVDs.

Maybe it’s youth, and maybe you only get a few of these moments in your life, anyway — usually connected to love, whatever form it’s taking — but what I felt that afternoon was something firmly shifting in my brain, a cinematic point of no return. I’d never taken drugs at this point, or had sex 🤓, but assumed this covered both sensations. Movies can make you feel THIS? Electrified, horny, uncomfortable, tickled, hungry (I hadn’t had dinner yet), depressed, and hopeful? I never want to not feel this way. I want my relationships to feel like this6; I want everything I ever read, watch, do, and say to carry exactly this charge.

PTA was all of 26 goddamn years old when he made ‘Boogie Nights’. First off, fuck you. But second… to have not only the raw talent, but also the chutzpah to pull off this kaleidoscopic paean to ambition and hubris and pain and — all together now — found family… I mean, that’s a once-in-a-generation thing. Even if every subsequent film of his sucked ass, ‘Boogie Nights’ nails it so hard that I’d still be writing this list today.

Everything I love about the movie is encapsulated in the “God Only Knows” montage toward the end, which I wrote about in a tribute to Brian Wilson:

PTA’s characters are defined by their pornographic work, and either desperately trying to escape it, or make their peace with it. Roller Girl tries to get her GED. The Colonel gets the shit slapped out of him in prison. Reed embraces his love of magic. Buck and Jessie produce a child. It’s funny, sad, pathetic, and hopeful — every flavor of the human experience in one three minute montage, narrated by Carl’s voice and Brian’s words. There is grace and beauty in the mundane.

I’m not saying it’s the best movie ever — nor am I convinced it’s even PTA’s best movie! — but pound for pound, ‘Boogie Nights’ is probably my favorite movie of all time.

Fun Fact:

Much like Wes Anderson struggling to rein in Gene Hackman on ‘Tenenbaums’, PTA got into it a few times with Burt Reynolds, as detailed in this 2015 GQ interview.

Lodged in my psyche forever:

“What are you looking at?” “I’m looking at you.” “You’re staring.” “You know what I’m staring at? I am staring at the foxiest bitch in the whole world.” - Amber Waves (Julianne Moore) and Jack Horner (Burt Reynolds), the mother and father of this demented family unit, and possibly all of us

Close your eyes, pretend you don’t already know this post is about ‘The Brutalist’, and tell me what comes to mind when I tell you the following story:

A plucky immigrant disembarks in America, Land of the Free, greeted on arrival by his cousin, a portrait of assimilative success. The cousin gives him a… let’s say “modest” place to stay as he tries to find work, any shitty job that will have him. He makes friends. He makes enemies. He falls prey to various temptations as he slowly but surely works his way up a ladder that may in fact be leading nowhere except his own damnation. In the end, was it even worth it to get off the boat in the first place?

Of course we’re talking about GRAND THEFT AUTO IV, the PS3 era open world masterpiece that sure, has a lot more gunplay than ‘The Brutalist’ (albeit an equivalent number of handjobs) but — and this is important to where I’m going today — the same rare ability to balance Importance with accessibility. This ain’t your grandma’s Holocaust survivor drama!

You’d be forgiven for, hearing about ‘The Brutalist’ for the first time, assuming it would be exactly that. Hell, the trailer gave me immediate flashbacks to the same headspace I’d found myself in two years earlier, preparing for ‘Tár’ (plug in “Brady Corbet,” “Adrien Brody,” and “2025” below and it’s nearly a one to one):

I wrote 'Tár' off the moment I heard the title. And the poster wasn’t helping, suffused with Oscar Movie™️ self-importance that might as well be written in neon. Todd Field, a venerated filmmaker emerging from sixteen years of cinematic hibernation! Cate Blanchett, a great actor whose assured greatness is frankly boring to talk about at this point! I was fully prepared to watch this a week before the 2023 Academy Awards, post a 3.5 star review on Letterboxd, and move on with my movie-loving life.

‘Tar’ may actually be ‘The Brutalist’’s closest cinematic analogue, and not just because they’re both harder to categorize than their marketing would have implied1. These are films that suggest utter self-seriousness, while delivering characters and stories far more messily alive than that. I told you about the handjobs. But this movie has [Stefon voice] EVERYTHING:

• architecture porn

• heroin addiction

• Joe Alwyn’s punch-worthy mid-Atlantic diction

• four perfect notes in a score that makes me want to dox the nearest ICE officer

• a star turn for frequently overlooked Doylestown, PA

• discourse-generating scenes in Italian marble quarries

Over the course of three hours that don’t actually feel that long (more on that later), Corbet and Brody chisel what feels like an entire history of László Toth, to the point you wind up convinced — Lydia Tár-style — that the character you just followed is real, and the movie about them a biopic.

And why not! “Biopic” as a movie genre has, over the past ten years, buckled under the weight of brand management. You know exactly what I’m talking about: ‘Straight Outta Compton’, ‘Rocketman’, ‘King Richard’, ‘A Complete Unknown’. Subject-friendly — often subject-worshipping — movies that, in order to secure their subjects’ permission (and frequently music rights!) wind up telling a sanded-down version of their story. Why depict the true messiness of human life when instead you can depict yourself, played by your son, laughing at your own script for the movie ‘Friday’?2

Unmoored from any legal obligations to their subjects, ‘Tár’ and ‘The Brutalist’ are free to do and say whatever they want — something that’s frankly liberating, ironic enough for a movie about an artist who because of his specific patronage (and heritage) is not free to do and say whatever he wants, at least not with his voice.

If anything, I could’ve watched another two hours of this already 3+ hour movie3, filling in the gaps of László’s real-feeling fictional history. Even projected in epic VistaVision, what’s depicted here feels like just a sliver of life Corbet and his co-writer, Mona Fastvold, have elected to carve out for us to look at. I won’t get into spoilers here, but there’s SO MUCH more I want to know about László. Hardly a ding on the movie! If anything another testament to its richness, how one angle suggests a hundred more just offscreen.

If I haven’t mentioned Adrien Brody much, it’s because he’s that fucking good in this role as to almost disappear entirely. That’s just László! I don’t know who rapper, pop artist, and motivational walker Adrien Brody even IS. You watch László bend metal, dance, bathe, shoot heroin, and you retroactively lose your mind at the idea that Timothée Chalamet was ever a serious contender for Best Actor this winter. “Vat, are you fucking DENSE?” László screams, strung out, bleeding into a cement mixer. From minute one, you are watching a very real Hungarian Holocaust survivor and architect, a man who’s already lived six lives by the time you meet him wearily making his way through the passage hold of a ship and into the blinding sunlight of AMERICA, silhouetted by an upside-down Statue of Liberty.

There are a million more things to unpack about ‘The Brutalist’, from its across-the-board staggering performances (Alessandro Nicola kills it, especially in the realm of “medium-assimilated” accents) to its impressive budget (how do you shoot what looks like a $100 million movie for ten?) to its timely discussion of Zionism/making Aliyah to its second half narrative swings to its concluding statement I’m not sure I totally agree with (and I’m not sure the movie does either!). I could talk about ‘The Brutalist’ forever4, an instant classic that you owe it to yourself to see, however long the journey.

The world is once again on fire, and I have very little to offer by means of putting it out. This makes me feel stupid, and small, but I suppose in times of crisis we should lean into the ways we can be of any kind of service. For me, and I’m not being sarcastic, that might have something to do with telling you

1. which movies to see and

2. which ones to avoid

Individually we may not be able to stem the tides of authoritarianism, genocide, or war, but we can stop ourselves from going to see ‘The Life of Chuck’. On that note!

‘The Life of Chuck’

In times of crisis, there’s no point mincing words: ‘Chuck’ is the worst movie I’ve seen all year, and possibly the worst movie I’ve seen in a good long while. Did I suspect this would be the case the moment I saw the trailer, proudly announcing a film from Stephen King

Yes. Dyed-in-the-wool hater though I may be, vanity plates for any director who’s not Martin Scorsese level is tacky as shit! You are setting yourself up for failure, loudly announcing your tonal intentions and demanding — before I even set foot in the AMC Americana, or Century City — that I feel about your movie the way you do. Then again, ‘Chuck’ did win the People’s Choice award at TIFF last fall. Maybe 250 critics and movie-loving Canadians knew something I didn’t?

Brother, there must have been a GAS LEAK in that theater because I cannot for the life of me understand how you sit through this 90 minute Live Laugh Love poster and delude yourself into thinking you’ve seen something profound, let alone human. Not a moment of this thing rings with anything less than synthetic sentimentality. Oh, should we remember that everyone is fighting their own battle? That every person is a universe unto themselves? It’s the same gripes I have with ‘Ted Lasso’ (I know, I know): I disagree with none of its messages, just wish they weren’t delivered to me with all the edge of an after-school special.

At least ‘Lasso’ has memorable characters! ‘Chuck’ has… well, Chuck, whose entire personality seems to revolve around “being nice” and “dancing.” My Chucko loves to dance, which is — I say this quite literally — all Tom Hiddleston gets to do before the persona, nay concept of “Chuck” gets passed off to Benjamin Pajak and eventually Jacob Tremblay, saddled with the most unmemorable coming-of-age story you’ve ever seen that makes all the time in the world for Mark Hamill to deliver monologues about accounting, or neighborhood kids who died.

“Aw, Henning, be more gentle, this just isn’t your kind of movie, and that’s okay!” NO. ‘Chuck’ trades on ideas I have found powerful in no shortage of other work (‘Cloud Atlas’ springs immediately to mind) and mashes them into a kind of… HomeGoods slurry, devoid of any narrative nutrition. Who is Chuck? Why deploy the twist so early, rendering everything we just saw worthless and everything to follow obvious? How come, in a movie ostensibly meant to celebrate the boundless beauty of human imagination, Chuck seems unable to imagine anything outside his hometown? Yes, I’m tiptoeing around the “events” of the movie, but to even call it a movie is generous. I was genuinely surprised to learn this wasn’t an Angel Studios Christian recruitment effort.

‘The Phoenician Scheme’

Wes 🤪. Wes, Wes, Wes, Wes, Wes. What exactly is there to say about Wes Anderson in 2025? The man has been making movies for nearly thirty years. Some of them are stone cold masterpieces. Some of them are fine. He’s sort of like ‘The Simpsons’ in that I don’t believe he’s ever made anything bad. Even his worst film still buries ‘The Life of Chuck’, and no shortage of Oscar winners.

So like ranking ‘SNL’ eras, or James Bonds, we arrive at a matter of personal taste. Where you place any given Wes Anderson movie is entirely a product of your own history, your own evolving interests, and to pretend like there’s been a definitive list since ‘Royal Tenenbaums’ (in which the correct order was ‘Tenenbaums’, then ‘Rushmore’, then ‘Bottle Rocket’) is to be like, well, a character in a Wes Anderson movie: desperate for logic and control in a world that eschews both!

As you can see, ‘The Phoenician Scheme’ falls somewhere toward the bottom of the pack for me. I hardly disliked it!1 There’s a refreshing straightforwardness to this very mission-oriented story, one with a clear main character (Benicio del Toro) slowly realizing he’d like to be less of an asshole — to his daughter (Mia Threapleton, solid) and, well, the world. Production design is typically exquisite. Alexandre Desplat’s score lends the proceedings a real sense of danger, and mortality.

But there’s a moment not far into the movie where you understand that the next hour is going to be a series of quick episodes checking in on all the Wes Anderson Players (Tom Hanks, ScarJo, Jeffrey Wright, etc.) and seeing who they’re playing in this one, what funny accents they’re using, how intricate their costuming. It’s not unenjoyable — nor is it even new for Wes — but the check-listing feels especially check-listy in a movie that lacks the depth of something like ‘Asteroid City’ or ‘The Grand Budapest Hotel’.

This one works best when it forgets about Marseille Bob and just leans into the father-daughter dynamic of Del Toro and Threapleton, channeling Royal and Margot Tenenbaum by way of madcap industrial espionage. They’re both more than capable of holding ‘Phoenician’ together, emotionally! You just wish Wes would let them.

‘Materialists’

Contrary to what A24 marketing would have you believe… ‘Materialists’ is not a rom-com. I offer this not as editorial but as categorical fact! Do not expect to laugh; do not expect anything zippy here, any tonal continuity with Ephron or Meyers. This is a romantic DRAMA2. And a mostly good one, with some caveats.

Elephant in the room: does Dakota Johnson come to play? I’ve always considered her if not misunderstood (I think she makes her acting intentions very clear, always), then misused. She’s not an energetic performer. She doesn’t convey great emotion. I know this sounds like a ding, but in the right project — say ‘Cha Cha Real Smooth’, or here — that looks more like controlled calculation, which absolutely works for a character who spends the whole movie doing romantic math.

If I was worried about Pedro Pascal’s… I’ll just say it, believability as a heterosexual romantic partner, I shouldn’t have been, because Song weaponizes that, too. He’s impossibly handsome, impossibly charming, impossibly put-together. Simply put he’s not real, and it’s to the character’s (and actor’s credit) that I don’t fully believe his chemistry with Johnson, that it always feels like he’s trying to prove something to himself, and her. I’m sorry to hitch so much of this analysis to an actor’s rumored sexual orientation but, idk, public perception has always informed our connection to romantic avatars. Not saying Pascal can’t play straight (he has, obviously! And will do so again next month), just that it works to ‘Materialists’’ advantage that there’s even a question.

Chris Evans is fine! The fact I didn’t think about Captain America once means he was doing something right.

If there’s a true standout, however divisive I know her plot function in the movie has already become, it’s Logan Roy’s secretary aka Zoë Winters.

Winters delivers a knockout performance in a challenging role — in two big scenes, she has to epitomize the movie’s thesis, and undermine it entirely. She is to ‘Materialists’ as that guy monologuing about self-worth through refrigerator condiments (and finally breaking Don in two) is to the ‘Mad Men’ finale. She’s got it!

Once I stopped thinking of ‘Materialists’ as a crowd-pleaser and more as a thoughtful, frequently cold rumination on modern dating/relationships, I was able to appreciate its rhythms a lot more. As in her previous film, ‘Past Lives’, Celine Song plays with restraint so effectively, edging you for 90+ minutes until finally hitting you with a moment of emotional release. It worked for me, and I have to imagine it worked for the third member of her throuple with Justin Kuritzkes!

Thirty-six movies. As of May 2nd, 2025, that’s the Marvel Studios count. Start rolling now on ‘Iron Man’ (2008) and continue all the way through their latest, ‘Thunderbolts*’, and you’ll have watched something like three straight days’ worth of superhero shenanigans. Even absorbing these movies not over 72 unhealthy hours1, but seventeen years — well, it’s a lot! All the characters to remember, all the motivations, all the friggin’ phases. (‘Thunderbolts'*’ rounds out Phase 5, allegedly.) Even the staunchest MCU acolyte could be forgiven for begging off at a certain point, and maybe finding a less scholarship-intensive hobby, like Catholicism.

At this point I’d describe my own relationship to the MCU as one of cautious curiosity. I’m a red-blooded American fan of The Postal Service who was 22-years-old when Tony Stark built that suit in a cave with a box of scraps — of COURSE I’ll always maintain some baseline investment in these movies2, which have backdropped my journey into middle age the same way ‘Harry Potter’ backdropped my journey into adolescence. Millennials! We only understand the world around us through billion-dollar entertainment properties.

**FYI: We’re going spoiler-heavy today, not just in unpacking the title’s asterisk (which isn’t a spoiler anymore when the movie has been officially retitled) but the full events of the movie. If you’re planning to see it, and want to go in cold, stop reading now!**

Walking into ‘Thunderbolts*’ the other day, I couldn’t easily remember the last “Marvel” (-Tim Robinson) I’d seen in theaters. Probably ‘Guardians 3’, two years ago? I skipped ‘The Marvels’; skipped ‘Cap 4’. Before that I’d ignored ‘Doctor Strange 2’ and ‘Ant-Man 3’, all of whose subtitles I’m also ignoring in an act of disrespect. Point is: I was out of the goddamn loop, nominally aware of where the overarching Marvel “story” is/is going but arguably more interested in the one taking place behind-the-scenes, where a once invincible company — I believe the most successful film studio in history — was beginning to face the challenges and inevitabilities of middle age. Just like me! I’m ashamed to admit their “guys, this is basically an A24 movie” also probably worked on me.

To some extent, I don’t begrudge the MCU its interconnectivity. That’s the point, right? It’s the most essential part of its design, the killer hook that everyone else tried (and failed) to replicate. To say I’d love these movies “if only they were standalone” is like saying I’d love men if only I “weren’t straight.” I’m asking for elemental, impossible change. Even the best Marvels (say, ‘Black Panther’, or ‘Guardians 2’) buckle a little under the weight of the larger franchise demands placed on them.

By now you're aware that the asterisk after 'Thunderbolts*' is actually for *'The New Avengers', which that ragtag group on the poster up there will transform into (or more accurately, just be called) by the end of the movie. It’s not a spoiler! Log into the movie theater account of your choosing right now and you will see that this is now ‘Thunderbolts*’’ official title, as canon as ‘A New Hope’ became to the original ‘Star Wars’. On the one hand, it’s a marketing gimmick — since ‘Avengers’ movies dominate the list of Marvel’s highest-grossers, well, why not give this one a little titular acceleration? On the other hand, it’s something of an albatross around the neck of a movie that’s otherwise pretty good when it doesn’t have to dance on Kevin Feige’s strings.

When Joss Whedon3 directed the first ‘Avengers’ back in 2012, he did so with the benefit of:

1. three main characters hot off their own feature-length introductions (and a fourth, Bruce Banner/The Hulk, who’d merely been recast)

2. another character (Natasha Romanoff/Black Widow) previously introduced in ‘Iron Man 2’

3. and a guy who shoots arrows, which doesn’t require much explanation

By comparison, ‘Thunderbolts*’’ math is… well, it’s complicated! Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), Red Guardian (David Harbour), and Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko) were all introduced in 2021’s ‘Black Widow’, released simultaneously to Disney+ and theaters. Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen) showed up in ‘Ant-Man and The Wasp’ all the way back in 2018. John Walker (Wyatt Russell), he’s from a TV show, 2021’s ‘The Falcon and The Winter Soldier’. Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) was one of the 3000 supporting characters established in ‘Black Panther 2’. Bob (Lewis Pullman), he’s new. Bucky (Sebastian Stan), he’s Bucky.

That ‘Thunderbolts*’ works at all is frankly a miracle, given the tributaries it draws from. You’re talking about setup movies that are now four- and seven-years-old, characters no one cares about (I’m sorry, Ghost! Honesty is healing), and — as we talked about — the expectations inherent to any ‘Avengers’ movie, especially the first one since ‘Endgame’ back in 2019. It’s like asking your girlfriend to be your partner, mother, and legal counsel all in one.

And somehow… that relationship largely works here, if only because ‘Thunderbolts*’ remembers another crucial bit of Marvel’s original magic: casting magnetic performers and letting them do their thing. It’s not damning anyone else in the cast4 to say that this is thoroughly Florence Pugh’s movie. You feel it from the jump — the literal jump, in fact, as her stunt double5 she dives off a building in pure (practical!) ‘Mission: Impossible’ fashion — and all the way through, whether Yelena is depression-fighting waves of bad guys or delivering a casually devastating monologue about the way her life has flattened into one endless cycle of assassination, doomscrolling, and DoorDash. There’s a real human here, and it’s a testament to Pugh’s skills that me never having seen ‘Black Widow’ doesn’t even fucking matter.

Also worthy of Lifting Fog commendation: Lewis Pullman, who not only introduces the concept of METH to the MCU, but manages to play the superhuman manifestation of mental illness in a way that juuuuuuust sidesteps cringe. Again, it boils down to performance. “Depression is the real enemy!” has been done to death already, most recently in ‘Inside Out 2’ and ‘Everything Everywhere All At Once’ (which ‘Thunderbolts*’ shares more than a few very deliberate moves with, including its composer). But I don’t know — if I believe the guy bringing that trope to life, well, it doesn’t matter! Pullman’s got the goods. He passes the Lifting Fog Nepo Test®️.

I could quibble with ‘Thunderbolts*’’ jokes (I would have happily fast-forwarded through most of the “funny” sections), its pacing (especially an overlong third act whose time could have been up-cycled into character arcs for at least two more of these New Avengers), and its mediocre use of 3D (okay, this was on me for accidentally purchasing IMAX with Laser 3D©️ instead of just Filmed for IMAX©️ tickets). But instead, I’m choosing today to practice gratitude, and celebrate the fact that in 2025… I largely enjoyed a Marvel. The bar may be low! But we have nowhere to go but up*.

*’The Fantastic Four: First Steps’ flies into theaters July 25th, 2025!

~~Follow me on Letterboxd~~

(Full disclosure: most of what follows is cribbed directly from my Letterboxd, so if you’ve already read these capsule reviews, I apologize. If you haven’t, SMASH THAT SUBSCRIBE BUTTON, FAM.)

Hendog's Letterboxd

Anora

It’s become de rigueur in certain film circles to lambast Sean Baker for telling sex workers’ stories that “aren’t his to tell” — which maybe to some extent I get? I wouldn’t mind him moving off the subject after five straight movies. But filmmakers have themes, even obsessions, and especially when they’re able to mine them for work that 1) resonates and 2) thoroughly entertains, who are we to tell them where to focus their attention, or if they’re allowed to in the first place?

Thank god ‘Anora’ is as funny as it is, because if it weren’t funny it would (just) be deliriously sad — an impossible world, the deck absolutely stacked against strivers, however pugnacious they might be. Anora will always exist on the fringes, Anora will never know real comfort or ease, and the Ivans of the world will never need to even consider their role in this, let alone apologize.

Joker: Folie a Deux

Listen. I'm not going to defend this movie's shortcomings, which are legion:

• boring courtroom scenes

• boring jailhouse scenes

• musical numbers afraid to actually be musical numbers2

• omitting that one trailer shot of Lady Gaga air-humping on the stairs

• overall *wasting the triple-threat talents of one Ms. Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta*

I'd hesitate to call 'Joker: Folie a Deux' *good*, or even altogether coherent! I want that on record. And yet I'm in awe of its fuck-you energy, honed into a literal shiv to the gut that assures I'll remember it far longer than I will any "better" MCU movie released since at least 'Black Panther' (2018). This movie is taking SWINGS and I for one applaud them.

Oh god am I an incel

Babygirl

Was expecting utter chilliness, detached cynicism wrapped in Discourse™️. Would you believe that ‘Babygirl’ is… tender? Funny?? It’s easy to sleep on Nicole Kidman but she consistently challenges herself to go deeper, bare more, and if that’s easy sexual imagery it’s because sex and self are so entwined in a way that ‘Babygirl’ fully embodies. Finally saw ‘Nightbitch’ the other week but even with that movie literalizing the human-canine transformation, this still has 2024’s best scene of a woman acting like a dog.

Nosferatu

Premiering on Christmas alongside ‘Babygirl’ was just a coincidence of distribution but they do make a compelling double feature: two stories about women hiding their base desires under a veneer of respectability (girlbossing; bodices), desperate for someone to match their freak, whether an intern in yellow Adidas Gazelles or an ageless Romanian demon.

‘Babygirl’’s is the more hopeful ending, suggesting that whatever wacky shit calls to you doesn’t have to define you. You can be a businesswoman, a wife, mother, and yes — also a Babygirl. In ‘Nosferatu’, you have to (SPOILERS for an adaptation of a 1922 film, based on a novel from 1897) die. Unfortunately! But maybe, surrounded by lilacs and crushed beneath the weight of your now dead but formerly undead lover’s sun-baked chicken legs, you’ve also made some level of peace with your own insatiable desires. On the whole, your widowed husband seems to get it?

A Complete Unknown

Perfectly fine performance by Timmy C here that could very well win an Oscar (and honestly that’s fine for an industry desperately in need of a generational handoff), just wish it was in service of a character I knew any better by the end of the movie than I did at the beginning. You could power a car with the number of “Bob, you’re a genius” and/or “Bob, you’ve just broken my heart” reaction shots this movie deploys in lieu of actual drama. It’s sort of like Cocomelon for Boomers.

The Brutalist

This one deserves — and will get, probably 7-9 months from now — a more comprehensive review from me but for now let’s just say ‘The Brutalist’ IS 100% that bitch, does deserve the hype, and alongside ‘Nickel Boys’ and ‘Dune: Part Two’ represents arguably the best in pure cinematic achievement this year. If this makes me sound like a filmbro3, that’s fine! Broken clocks, etc.

But the “power of cinema” angle also undercuts a movie that, like ‘Tar’ before it, suggests utter self-seriousness while delivering something that’s far more messily alive than that. This movie has everything:

• handjobs

• heroin addiction

• Joe Alwyn’s perfect mid-Atlantic diction

• discourse-generating scenes in Italian marble quarries

“I heard it’s too long.” Will you be at the theater for four total hours? Yes. I can’t dispute this. But 1) every A-Lister knows you can safely arrive 25 minutes into your screening, skipping previews and 2) you’re probably going to watch the Super Bowl this afternoon for just as long, and that won’t have this score:

Saturday Night

hagiography: (noun) biography of saints or venerated persons

It’s like they stretched the “Ice Cube laughing at his own ‘Friday’ script” scene from ‘Straight Outta Compton’ to 110 minutes. Not that ‘Saturday Night’ isn’t entertaining! Jason Reitman knows how to stage and shoot and pace a movie, and many of these performers find compelling layers under the parody assignment, especially Lamorne Morris (‘New Girl’) and Cory Michael Smith (‘May December’). If only the movie were interested in anything more than, you know, itself.

Anyway, let’s take a quick sponsor break:

A Different Man

Near-perfect indie movie. Sensitive to the subject of facial deformity without contorting itself to make a morality play about it; far more interested in the lengths we go to try and kill our best selves. (To that end — great double feature with ‘The Substance’.)

I’ve been largely ambivalent on Sebastian Stan for… god, ten years, but this finally solidifies him for me as one of our top-flight current actors. There’s no vanity here, there’s no posturing — just a guy weaponizing his talents (and looks) to fully embody the deforming effects of self-hatred. Maybe that’s something everyone learns to absorb in the MCU? Discuss.

Emilia Perez

Everybody talking about how “bad” this movie is when what we should be talking about is how it “makes no sense.” Thank you, Karla Sofia Gascon, for kneecapping this movie’s Best Picture chances so we never have to talk about either again!

What, to you, defines a perfect day? Is it lounging somewhere relaxing with your lover person, completely removed from the outside world? Is it notching some long-aspired to accomplishment, proving to your high school guidance counselor that you are, in fact, a winner? Does it involve the best meal ever? The best sex ever? The best [TK] ever?

Or maybe it’s just getting up, doing your job, taking some photos, grabbing a beer, and reading a few pages of some old Faulkner book before hitting the hay. And then, woken up the next day by the clockwork sound of your neighbor’s sweeping , doing it all over again?

WELL, if you’ve ever read an intro paragraph before then you know the movie we’re about to discuss, aptly named ‘Perfect Days’, very much embodies the latter!

Co-written (alongside Takuma Takasaki) and directed by German filmmaker Wim Wenders (‘Paris, Texas’, ‘Wings of Desire’), ‘Days’ chronicles — and that might already be too strong a verb — the daily routine of Hirayama (Koji Yakusho), a middle aged Tokyo resident who lives by himself, does janitorial work, and seems largely content with an existence I think most of us would, on the surface, not necessarily aspire to.

Now, before you say “how dare you, Hendog, taking potshots at blue collar work,” know that:

1. My primary form of income right now — outside my ‘Stack — is Lyft driving, a genuine gig economy gig that marries the thrills of ‘Grand Theft Auto’ to real vehicular danger and

2. There has never been a kindergartner in human history, I don’t care how progressive the Silver Lake elementary school, who has dreamed of cleaning toilets when they grow up

All I’m saying is, you know, we live in a world that undervalues those not actively scrambling for golden rings. We’re speaking the same language here! I don’t know who I’m arguing with1. Anyway, if ‘Days’ truly were just a janitor sim, I’d have already filed this review to Letterboxd with three point five stars and the caption “more like perfect toilets.”2 Luckily for your inboxes, toilets only tell half the story.

File ‘Days’ under “movies that teach you how to watch them.” I’ve undoubtedly weaponized this expression in prior reviews, meant to justify everything from ‘The Tree of Life’ to, like, ‘Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist’ — you’re not BORED, man, you’re just learning how to absorb a movie’s particular energies. But I think there’s a lot of merit to the idea here, not just because the pace of this thing is so un-American3 (blame my domestic ignorance) but because the very life it follows — and the decisions that animate that life — buck so much prevailing social wisdom as to seem almost alien.

The first ten, maybe fifteen minutes of ‘Days’ are literally just Hirayama’s weekday routine. He…

wakes up, folds his bed, brushes his teeth, trims his mustache, water his plants, puts on his uniform, grabs his keys and some change from the foyer, smells the morning air, grabs some canned coffee from a nearby vending machine, drinks it, starts his car, loads a cassette

drives into Shibuya, cleans some toilets, enjoys his lunch break in the park, take some photos of trees, cleans up at a local spa, grabs some food at a nearby restaurant, stops in to a nearby bar afterwards, goes home, checks on his plants, reads for a bit, then puts his head down to, well, do every single one of those things again the next day.

The fact that I can list all this out even a week month after seeing the movie and what I’m describing is, let’s be real, objectively boring actually speaks to the spell this movie casts. We’re conditioned as American audiences to always be… scanning for plot, actively looking out for stuff like “inciting incidents” and “refusals of the call” whether we’ve had the pleasure of reading Blake Snyder’s ‘Save the Cat’ or not. And I assumed as much about ‘Days’, for a while, waiting for the moment that propelled it in a more conventional (read: more Hollywood) narrative direction. You know, “let’s watch some new stimuli upend this guy’s sad, lonely life for the better.” A new stimuli does arrive, eventually, does temporarily upend things… but when it doesn’t change Hirayama, at least not in the ways we expect, that’s when you think, well shit — was I the asshole for wanting the janitor to re-align himself with the virtues of neoliberal capitalism??

I’m talking around the movie, I know — this is just my style — but only to preserve for you the experience of soaking it up yourself, whether in theaters or at home in mid-July, when it enters the physical Criterion Collection. ‘Days’ is largely un-spoilable!4 What resonates aren’t plot points but the slow reconceptualization of the title. Perfect days? How could a dude who lives like a better-adjusted Unabomber be having perfect days? Something’s wrong here, maybe he’s even hiding out from something — no one could possibly want ONE of his days, let alone a lifetime of them. And yet that life’s obvious beauty becomes more and more apparent as ‘Days’ wears on and, having been taught to watch, you start to think damn… maybe dude knows something we don’t. Maybe there’s no wrong way to eat a Reese’s after all.

Like I wrote above, I find myself in a bit of a rough occupational patch at the moment. It’s been three years, a whole presidency, since I last worked in television and in that time, I’ve watched the industry I (think I) love careen into what can only be described as “system failure.” Writer friends of mine who are working know how rare those jobs are; the rest of us contemplate what it might take to land them once again, if OpenAI doesn’t beat us to the punch. It’s bleak! Read enough Hollywood Reporter essays about it and you, too, might start to identify with the Unabomber.

All of which is to say, ‘Days’ really spoke to me at a moment where I find myself unmoored from more traditional measures of success, of livelihood, and struggling to find moments of calm (let alone beauty) as I traverse the entirety of LA County as a Lyft driver. I don’t have Hirayama’s uniform, but I do have his music collection. We both keep playing this one:

“Sometimes I feel so happy,

sometimes I feel so sad,

sometimes I feel so happy,

but mostly you just make me mad.

Baby, you just make me mad.”

I can’t hear those notes or those lyrics — truly some of the simplest lyrics ever committed to paper, outside of “baby shark do do do do do do” — and not start to cry at least a little, for reasons I only sort of understand (or anyway want to think about). It’s the simplest stuff that’s usually the truest. Sometimes you’re happy; sometimes you’re sad; other times, get this, you’re mad. It’s the eternal emotional roundabout of life, as common for a billionaire or a sometimes TV writer or a janitor, all of us just trying to navigate each day as it comes, with a modicum of gratitude and awareness.

…Good movie!

‘Tenet’ is many things. A Christopher Nolan blockbuster released smack-dab in the middle of our first Pandemic summer. The bridge between, for all intents and purposes, two of his World War II movies. A heady sci-fi action-thriller. A feast for the eyes. A soup of auditory confusion for the ears. A name. A palindrome.

I HATED ‘Tenet’ when it was first released, truly hated it. Here’s what I posted on Letterboxd.com:

So when friend of the ‘Stack Darren Franich (also fellow ‘Stacker himself, who you can all follow at The Draftland Scene) asked if I’d care to see the recent ‘Tenet’ re-release on 70mm IMAX… it was not an immediate yes. Actively re-expose myself to trauma? That can’t be to anyone’s mental health benefit.

Still, I’m a longtime advocate of revisiting shit that annoys the living hell out of you. Whatever’s gotten under your skin… I mean that’s worth examining, right? It moved you in some way1. It is not without some artistic thought that you arrived at the experience you had, however unpleasant! And so, much like John David Washington’s Protagonist, I agreed to something I couldn’t possibly know in the moment might change my perspective forever.

You’ve already seen my barn-burning, two-likes Letterboxd review but it feels instructive to tell you more of what I didn’t like about ‘Tenet’ the first time I saw it. To wit:

• The sound design

• The performances

• The hypocrisy of a movie telling me to “just feel it” when in fact I definitely needed to think it

• The way it retroactively made ‘Westworld’ seem human by comparison, which in the battle of the Nolan brothers for “least access to human emotion” is truly an impressive feat

That first ding, I’m forced to admit, was amplified by the fact that I was watching ‘Tenet’ at a (COVID-friendly) drive-in movie theater through the radio of a 2010 Honda Fit. Nolan’s already wonky sound engineering never stood a chance! The rest are opinions I arrived at honestly, though years of filmmaker canonization probably had my H8r engine roaring at full-tilt. I wanted to dislike ‘Tenet’, it’s true, and I did.

CUT TO: a rainy afternoon at the famed Grauman’s Chinese Theater, nearly four years later. Robert Pattinson and John David Washington are sharing their time-displaced, kinda homoerotic ‘Casablanca’ ending. I’m sitting in my seat smiling. I no longer hate ‘Tenet’.

Love would be a strong word for a movie that, charitably, only just attempts to depict the chemical process we call “emotional response.” But I think I finally get ‘Tenet’, a movie that is ultimately way dumber than I thought it was, and for the better.

Here’s the main thing you need to understand about ‘Tenet’: it’s a whole movie built around how cool it would be to see shit go backwards. That’s it. Every set piece, every character, every line of dialogue either works in service of that idea or takes a backseat to it. I’m possibly taking something I once heard on a podcast as sacrosanct here, but I believe Nolan’s gone on record as saying he first had the idea for this movie when he was a kid. Viewed through that lens, EVERYTHING in ‘Tenet’ makes more sense. Little boys love smashing cars together (✅), they love making up nonsense words (✅), they love pretending they’re into girls when in fact all they want to do is bro down (✅✅✅). This is not a movie for quantum physicists; this is a movie for five-year-olds rough-housing in a sandbox.

Actually, let’s go even further: ‘Tenet’ is just classier ‘Kingsman’. HEAR ME OUT! A well-funded multi-national organization, spiritually if not actually based in the UK, enlists a non-traditional young agent to join their ranks and foil a possibly world-ending plot. They get him a well-tailored suit. Crucially, they talk about how important the quality of one’s suit is. Michael Caine enjoys some sort of senior role in the organization; he doesn’t leave his chair. Our young agent learns the ins and outs of spycraft in a world more complicated than he or we could have understood, eventually facing off against a villain with a silly accent and averting global disaster.

I’m being glib. But I’m also trying to make a point, I think, namely that Nolan is just as capable of fellow Brit Matthew Vaughn2 at going big and goofy, however little we reverent directorial devotees care to admit he can, or does. Have we forgotten ‘The Prestige’, and Hugh Jackman using Tesla magick to clone himself before every performance, all so he could best his life-long magic rival? Have we forgotten Leo screaming “MAAAALLLLL JESUS CHRIST!!” at his just-suicided wife (Mal) in ‘Inception’? Have we forgotten, like, BANE?

Nolan may look like the most self-serious oarsman on the Eton crew team, but really he’s just a mischievous scamp who wants to impress you with his cool new movie trick. Bullet go backwards! Darren echoes as much as in his own review:

Reverse bullets are splendid nonsense. I adore the plane crash, the hijacked cargo freighter sloooooowly meandering toward a building. Catamarans do look better in IMAX. Aaron-Taylor Johnson, sometimes my kryptonite, makes the phrase “Temporal Pincer” sound boss. Branagh threatens to fill a man’s cut throat with amputated testicles. Pattinson says one building is “bungee jumpable.” Forget the heady reputation. Tenet is a goof.

Another movie this unexpectedly draws to mind (and also one I struggled with on first watch): ‘Inherent Vice’. The main critique of PT Anderson’s 2014 Pynchon adaptation was… it didn’t make any sense. The mystery, I mean. Clues amounted to nothing. Doc Sportello meandered through a hazy post- Summer of Love Los Angeles with little intention, a Yogi Bear stoner led by his nose to the next high. What was it all for? Call this a cop-out but… vibes, man. Once you accept the actual plot of the movie as just a vibes delivery system, that’s when you know the shit is hitting.

Read every Reddit thread, every Vox explainer for ‘Tenet’ and not only will none of them actually make sense, none of them will uncover some deeper truth about the movie which, again, is a 150 minute meditation on how cool it is to watch shit go backwards. That doctor in that one scene who’s ultimately not important was right — you DO just have to “feel it,” all of it. Asking why Kenneth Branagh wants to end the world (an explanation garbled through sound design that, even in 70mm IMAX, still might as well be radio static), or why fire creates ice under inverted conditions, but not every time — you might as well be asking why Elizabeth Debicki is so tall. She just is!

Maybe it’s getting older3, maybe it’s too many years spent in the MCU trenches, but more than ever these days I find myself drawn to — Harry Styles voice — myoovies, ones that for whatever their flaws (and rest assured ‘Tenet’ has many! Like, I’m sorry, “I need to save my son” here is a stakes non-starter), maintain a steadfast devotion to justifying their projection onto a screen. They don’t even have to be big (though ‘Tenet’, and of course ‘Oppenheimer’, are), just… excited to exist? Eager to share something? It’s what I think I’ve gotten wrong about Nolan in the past, but won’t let his tailored suits distract me from in the future. Or maybe I will, only to invert time and try again.

I didn’t want to like ‘Bottoms’. We’ve been over this so many times, most recently last week, but I am a Type 1 Contrarian who zigs when everyone zags but will get into zagging the moment everyone starts zigging. This is my gift; my curse. Who am I? I’m Henning, man.

New York Magazine blessed ‘Bottoms’ with a whole-ass COVER story last month, a well-reported piece that nevertheless annoyed the shit out of me for preemptively canonizing a movie opening in like four theaters its opening weekend. “Finally, the horny, bloody lesbian incel comedy we’ve been waiting for” the cover touted, first cousin to “the [blank] we need right now.” ‘Bottoms’ wouldn’t just be funny; ‘Bottoms’ would be TIMELY and TRANSGRESSIVE and NECESSARY.

Which — listen, I wasn’t born yesterday, or even the day before yesterday. It’s not lost on me that, especially in these apocalyptic media End Times, entertainment journalism is as much a form of entertainment marketing. Sometimes you just gotta say shit for clicks! (A click that worked, by the way, considering it got me to one of those four theaters opening weekend to see the movie.)

‘Bottoms’ is transgressive, but less for what it depicts on screen than what it says about a culture of moviemaking that’s grown so timid, we think “gay female ‘Fight Club’” might as well be a premise for Gaspar Noe. The story’s ultimately pretty simple: two high school seniors, desperate to hook up with their crushes before they all graduate, start a “female empowerment” group (read: fight club) to win their affections. Things, as you might imagine, get out of control from there.

If you read that setup and thought “sounds a little like ‘Super Bad’ — you’re right! Think of Rachel Sennott (‘Shiva Baby’) as the wild n’ crazy Jonah Hill-type, with Ayo Edebiri (‘The Bear’) carrying Michael Cera’s anxiety mantle. These broads will stop at nothing to get some! ‘Bottoms’’ DNA also includes a bit of ‘The Breakfast Club’1, ‘American Pie’, early Apatow. No one’s really breaking the teen — or teen-adjacent — comedy mold here. But that’s also the movie’s primary strength, is the way it trades in archetypes with which we’re all already familiar and then, you know, gays ‘em up2. The most radical thing about ‘Bottoms’ is just that it allows itself to be fucking funny.

For too often this past… let’s say decade, we’ve been subjected to “comedies” that barely crack a joke, that seem skittish to even be making them in the first place, whose characters serve mostly as vessels for some larger sociopolitical ideology. Ideologies I usually agree with, but still!

SIDEBAR: If I really wanted to get into it here, I’d tell you how the national decline in both religious practice and governmental confidence has resulted in Americans now looking toward entertainment as a form of moral instruction, re-casting TV/film characters as teachers we should be following, and not fallible dramatic creations (YES, I’m talking about ‘Ted Lasso’. I’m always talking about ‘Ted Lasso’). But I wont!

If ‘Bottoms’ slots neatly into a queer Gen-Z neoliberal framework, it’s only as a matter of fact. That’s the world these characters inhabit. That’s the world director Emma Seligman (‘Shiva Baby’) inhabits. Beyond that, I’m not so sure the movie cares? Any statements it might be making about The World Today™️ are mediated through character and story, and not the other way around. It’s sort of like — and I say this with love for both the movie AND the moment, in a vacuum — the anti-”it’s impossible to be a woman” speech from ‘Barbie’. Roast me in the comments if you must but ‘Barbie’ grinds to a halt as America Ferrera, an underdeveloped character, unloads a beautifully written list of very true things that, while relevant to the movie, also seems to exist entirely outside of it. The characters in ‘Bottoms’ would have listened to that speech and kept interrupting it with fart noises, and a broken nose or two, in their own equally valid examination of modern feminism.

Most of my favorite comedies aren’t actually about anything. ‘Step Brothers’ — that’s just two guys goofing around, basically improv battling each other. ‘Dumb & Dumber’ is a series of physical comedy vignettes disguised as a road trip movie. I suppose ‘South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut’ is about censorship, but it’s probably more about Satan’s toxic romantic relationship with Saddam Hussein.

‘Bottoms’, a worthy successor to this great comedy lineage, seems proud to be dumb, to revel in the weirdness and myopia of its characters, each of whom is allowed to be as flawed — even terrible — as we’ve allowed male comedy characters to be, you know, forever.

My personal hope is that we’re finally turning the corner on… let’s call it over-sensitivity in comedy, returning the reins to writers and performers and filmmakers who are actually funny, and not just using the concept of humor to teach us how to Be Better. We undermine comedy when we demand it also validate and/or promote a particular worldview! And we also make it harder for me and Clay to — post-strike — sell our hard-R Christmas comedy, ‘Sleigh Queen’. There’s a Santa sex scene in there that really demands a certain cultural chillness.

Last summer saw Tom Cruise almost single-handedly save the American theater-going experience, with wingmen like ‘Elvis’, ‘Nope’, and of course ‘Minions: The Rise of Gru’ flanking him as they target-bombed the Enemy (premature declarations of cinema’s death). THIS summer has something like 97 new releases between now and Labor Day, titans clashing every weekend. Where will you be on July 23rd, when centuries of gender division climax with the twin premieres of ‘Oppenheimer’ and ‘Barbie’? Whoever wins… we win.

But we’re not here today, six weeks into the ongoing Writer’s Strike and one week into Pride Month, to talk about the future. We’re here to talk about the present, which for the purposes of this Lifting Fog post1 includes two movies that I recently saw — one of them in theaters, doing my part to keep an art form alive that I kinda sorta believe in!

‘You Hurt My Feelings’

Last we saw Julia Louis-Dreyfus, she was making ‘Black Panther: Wakanda Forever’ twenty minutes longer than it needed to be with a go-nowhere subplot designed to kick off some Disney+ show in Q1 2024 or whatever. But she is, of course, a far more dynamic screen presence than her character “Lady with Purple Hair” would suggest — one of the most rightly celebrated comic actresses of her time and, as her second outing with Nicole Holofcener proves, just as adept at human-scale drama, too.

The movie itself is, and I mean this less as a diss than a category designation, “mid.” Mid-budget. Mid-stakes. Mid-lives. In the early aughts, independent theaters were bursting with this brand of low-key, coulda-been-a-stage-play adult relationship dramedies. Eventually they made their way to Netflix, where all their edges were sanded off to appeal to either South Korea or adult YA enthusiasts, so in that sense it’s refreshing to see something like this 1) in a theater2 and 2) targeted to an actual adult audience (AAA, indeed). I’m cheering at the A24 logo like I’m cheering on a sports underdog.

‘You Hurt My Feelings’’ premise is simultaneously universal and niche: what if you, a memoirist-turned-novelist, overheard your otherwise very supportive therapist husband say they didn’t love your writing? This may in fact be the most Upper West Side of New York premise of all time. But within this hyper-regional specificity, Louis-Dreyfus and the rest of the main quartet (Tobias Menzies, Michaela Watkins, and Arian “Kendall Roy’s fan-fic boyfriend Stewy Hosseini” Moayed) get a lot of real stuff to play. ‘Feelings’ isn’t a movie of big moves: divorce isn’t threatened, declarations aren’t made in the rain. But you feel like you’re watching something real unfold; just four thoughtful, flawed people contending with the small but stinging moments of their relationships and professional lives.

…okay, maybe it’s not mid, that was just me going for some easy literary punch. We are all characters in a Nicole Holofcener movie.

‘Air’

It’s maybe not the worst social media development of these past ten years, but it’s one of them: brands acting like people. You know exactly what I’m talking about. The Arby’s Facebook account pretending to be horny for Heinz ketchup. “New Jersey” getting into a Twitter meme war with “New York.” Kitchen-Aid products commenting “yasss, get that bag, girlie” on an Instagram post from Jenna Ortega. It almost makes you want to kill yourself before our planet is wiped away by some combination of AI and ultra-flooding! 🤷🏼

All of which is to say… I’m not surprised there are now multiple “hey, ‘member that product you love?” movies in rotation. I count three right now:

• ‘Flamin’ Hot’, which you might have guessed is the movie about the invention of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos (and also apparently a huge lie!), directed by Eva Longoria and premiering on Hulu this weekend

• ‘Unfrosted: The Pop-Tarts Story’, directed by Jerry Seinfeld (?!) and somehow long-since completed, which I guess means they’re waiting to drop this on Netflix Q4 alongside some fresh new Pop-Tart flavor

• ‘Air’, now on Amazon, detailing the creation of sneakers’ Holy Grail, the Nike Air Jordan

Listen: it’s not that I think this… I guess we have to say genre at this point is inherently devoid of artistic merit. ‘The Social Network’, about the invention — and litigation — of Facebook, remains a stone-cold masterpiece, each year a more cogent, painful indictment of the House Zuck Built. But it’s the “indictment” part of that sentence that gives that Oscar-losing movie artistic life. Absent that, it’s just advertisement. Which, for the most part, is why ‘Air’ never truly soars. (Sorry.)

‘Air’ chronicles the mid-80s moment when Nike, long second-fiddle to both Adidas and Converse in the athlete footwear game, successfully partnered with NBA rookie Michael Jordan and birthed arguably the most popular shoe of all time. Like ‘The Social Network’, or ‘Moneyball’, it’s a process movie: guys in rooms debating the ins and outs of some thing, making outlandish bets and testing their resolve. Lots of talking. Dramatic score for what, on the surface, isn’t that dramatic an undertaking.

It’s super-watchable! You could imagine catching snippets of it on TNT over the course of months, years, eventually piecing individual scenes into a coherent movie. Like ‘You Hurt My Feelings’, the performances are fun and lived-in. Matt Damon is SCHLUBBY. Chris Messina is MAD. Chris Tucker is CHATTY. Jason Bateman is DIVORCED.

I suspect that Matt and Ben (we’re friends) figured this story, nominally about athlete equity, would make for the best first movie out of their new production company, Artists Equity. This is from their website:

“…reimagining the relationship between talent, studio, and distributor via an innovative model that prioritizes creators and leverages a proprietary, data-driven approach to distribution.”

The story of Air Jordan provides a great ideological mirror. Before, athletes helped sell brands, with little financial return past the initial sale; now, athletes were brands, making real money for these companies, finally forced to concede what was really driving sales. I am currently on strike with 10,000 other TV and movie writers over a not dissimilar argument! I agree with the core sentiments of both Artists Equity and ‘Air’!

And yet… it’s still a movie about a fucking shoe.

The “where are they now?” cards at the end are what give it away — fact after fact about how much money someone made, or how much they sold their business for. The words “passive income” are meant to be some fist-pumping celebratory moment. I’m not not a capitalist; my grievance here is on a storytelling level, where you’re asking us to care less about these individual characters — who they are, what their hang-ups are, what they care about — than the literal value they provide a billion dollar company. Compare that to the end of ‘Moneyball’, perennial baseball loser Billy Beane sticking around Oakland to keep being a loser, and you’ll feel exactly what’s missing from ‘Air’.

I was also planning to write about ‘Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3’ (just like ‘You Hurt My Feelings’ and ‘Air’, another solid B/B+) but spent too much time generating fake promo material for the Aviation Gin movie, so I’ll save that for another day. More reviews soon.

In the meantime, follow me on Letterboxd! It’s basically Pokemon Go for cinephiles, an endless dopamine drip of movie musings. Which is to say: the same thing I do on Lifting Fog. But if I write like Robert Caro here (overlong), I’m practically Mae West over there (pithy).

CORRECTION: The subhead previously identified it as ‘Blade Runner 2149’ when the post-apocalyptic world the movie depicts is actually ‘Blade Runner 2049’, a mere quarter-century away!

Like Judd Apatow, my natural instinct is to go long and never say in 200 words what I could say in 1500-3000. But as we’ve discussed, there are simply too many GD movies this fall — too many good ones, at that — and if I’m/we’re to have any hope of getting out alive, we’ve got to be light on our analytical feet. With that, here’s everything you need to know about four movies with very little connective thematic tissue between them.

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‘Black Panther: Wakanda Forever’

Ryan Coogler and Co. were saddled with the almost impossible burden of 1) following up one of (if not the) best standalone Marvel films 2) dealing with, on both a cinematic and emotional level, the death of Chadwick Boseman (aka the titular character, Black Panther) and 3) the increasingly byzantine demands of the MCU, which now includes continuing and/or setting up episodes of television. Crunch the numbers yourself: in sheer math terms, there was never a world in which this movie was going to meet — let alone exceed — the standards of its predecessor.

And still it brings me NO pleasure to tell you ‘Wakanda Forever’ is the ‘Iron Man 2’ of the ‘Black Panther’ series: plotted like Charlie Kelly’s Pepe Silvia map

and wildly overstuffed with unnecessary subplots1, most of which are there just to tease future MCU properties. This movie’s a mess! There are pockets of greatness, including a graceful, almost fourth-wall-breaking tribute to Chadwick Boseman that kicks off the movie. But ten minutes later it feels like a Disney shareholder PowerPoint masquerading as a meditation on grief2. This thing wouldn’t be so disappointing if ‘Black Panther’ hadn’t been so good!

‘Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery’

Is it worthless discussing a movie that played in select theaters for just one week before being shelved until a December 23rd Netflix premiere? That very obviously should have just been a wide release from the jump, where it would continue to benefit from its bona fide THEATER EXPERIENCE qualities for weeks on end, at least until ‘Avatar: The Way of Water’ grabs the baton? Probably! But “worthless discussion” is of course on the masthead of Lifting Fog, which means we’d be shirking our duty completely to let this window pass. So, because you demanded it, here’s our definitive review of ‘Glass Onion’:

…it’s a fun movie you’ll definitely enjoy this holiday season!

‘Armageddon Time’

There are two and only two universal truths of filmmaking:

1. Eventually, everyone makes a movie set in space

2. Eventually, everyone makes a movie about why they make movies

James Gray has done both, first with the underrated ‘Ad Astra’ (aka Brad Pitt cries in space) and now with ‘Armageddon Time’, his “hold my beer” rebuke to the likes of ‘Roma’, ‘Belfast’, ‘Bardo’, ‘Hand of God’, ‘The Fabelmans’, ‘Clerks III’3, and the upcoming ‘Empire of Light’. It’s Hollywood (and/or the foreign equivalent), baby! Burnishing your own legend is what this town is MADE of.

To be fair, Gray paints his own “filmmaker coming of age” entry with a lot more — I’m sorry — gray, which is honestly refreshing when you consider how easily this genre can tilt into hagiography. His family stand-ins, the Graffs, are second-gen liberal Brooklyn Jews, removed enough from the Holocaust that they’re not thinking about it but tethered to it through grandparents who still very much feel its reverberations. Gray’s stand-in, Paul Graff, is largely disinterested in either the Jewish or liberal part of his family identity, content to nurture his talent for drawing and goof around with his Black friend, Johnny. The two of them get into trouble… except just how much trouble is dictated by their respective ethnic backgrounds.

That’s the most interesting thread in here, and one that ‘Wakanda Forever’ tries to unpack, too: the way one oppressed group can, in attempting to protect itself, inadvertently dismiss — or worse, fuck over — another oppressed group. Is a bid for assimilation a zero-sum game? ‘Armageddon Time’ posits that maybe there’s enough room for everybody, something Anthony Hopkins espouses in a speech that has “Best Supporting Actor nomination clip” written all over it.

The movie’s heart is in the right place, full of sentiments any good liberal can agree with, but they’re always just that: sentiments. Paul never has to actually stand for anything in a meaningful way, simply absorb lessons from other people to the point we can say “okay, good, he’s on the right path.” Johnny, meanwhile, is revealed to be less a character than a faraway symbol; the lesson Paul Graff/James Gray needed to learn and subsequently commit to film forty years later. It’s basically ‘The Blind Side, Jr.’ In the end, you’re not so much witnessing a creative awakening; you’re witnessing the birth of an ally.

‘The Menu’

Wherever you live/work/play, by now you’ve at least heard about ‘The Menu’, a mid-budget comedy-horror-satire-whatever that asks the question “what if Voldemort were a Michelin star chef?” To say any more about the plot, or the characters, or even what the characters eat would be to deprive you of a true theater-going experience4 you should absolutely hop to if you have the appetite. So instead I'll just leave you with these three random thoughts:

• I enjoyed the movie even when I'm not sure it totally hit its targets

• Hong Chau remains an undervalued acting treasure (and yes, that includes the movie ‘Downsizing’)

• You just know Hollywood is desperate to make her boring but I implore Anya Taylor-Joy to Keep Austin Anya Weird and continue taking offbeat roles like this, ‘Last Night in Soho’, ‘The Northman’, etc. Follow your Furiosa forebear, Charlize Theron! Do not go gentle into that Jennifer Lawrence night.

I will never front on this Substack for clout, you guys know that, so I’m forced to tell you — much like ‘Tár’, I probably wouldn’t have seen ‘Aftersun’ without the benefit of LA’s free screening ecosystem. Sure, like a dutiful son of A24, I’d read about this one, seen the trailer, but I don’t know — it seemed like some forced attempt to Make Paul Mescal (‘Normal People’) Happen, with a huge dollop of ‘Waves’-esque saturated-synthy sadness to taste.

Presumably skippable! But 96 efficient minutes later I thought, “well, that was sort of lovely. A trifle of a ‘story’, sure, but lovely.” A week later I thought, “you know, maybe that shit was deeper, in its own meandering way, than I gave it credit for.” A month later I thought, “no joke this is one of the best movies of 2022. The people need to hear it.” And so here we are.

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Literally all you need to know about ‘Aftersun’ is that it’s about a possibly alcoholic, Depressed Divorced Dad (D^3) and his 11-year-old daughter on holiday1 in Turkey; him trying to better connect with her, her tip-toeing into womanhood, and much of it caught on MiniDV film.

Oh right, it’s sort of a period piece! Not that it matters to anyone outside the Millennial orbit, but this is a MID-90s MOVIE (not to be confused with the movie ‘Mid90s’) that takes full, painful advantage of the era. We’re talkin’ long jean shorts. We’re talkin’ tweens getting their hair beaded on the beach. We’re talkin’ Chumbawumba.

(Which, if you’re a true student of history, you know places ‘Aftersun’ at minimum in the year 19972.) Much of this could be considered a gloss, no different than ‘Stranger Things’ baiting you with 80s references until you want to track down and burn every last copy of ‘The NeverEnding Story’ ever printed. But the digital camcorder footage — which is inter-spliced throughout the movie, and even acts as a sort of framing device — carries thematic and emotional weight. What’s it like to (literally) look back on your childhood as you yourself expect a child? How do we reconcile our memory of an event with the truth of it, as captured on film?

It almost doesn’t matter if you can’t track ‘Aftersun’’s “timelines,” if you can even call them that, and what bearing they have on the holiday at its center. This is a ~VIBES~ movie, baby, almost Guadagnino-ish in its impressionistic use of POV, minimal plotting, and endless shots of the Mediterranean. Writer-director Charlotte Wells just wants us to soak in a feeling.

Which is not to say that feeling doesn’t go anywhere. If anything, the languid holiday pacing is deceptive — putting us off the trail of a devastating climax ‘Aftersun’ has been building to the whole time. To spoil it would be deeply un-chill! So instead I’m going to talk around it by spoiling the end of Claire Denis’ 1999 film ‘Beau Travail’.

🚨 SPOILERS FOR THE 1999 FRENCH INDIE DARLING ‘BEAU TRAVAIL’! 🚨

It’s possible you didn’t earn a Film Studies degree from an accredited institution in the mid-aughts and might be out of the loop on, say, movies of the slightly earlier late-90s that were used as teaching tools. In which case: ‘Beau Travail’ is a retelling of Herman Melville’s ‘Billy Budd’, set against the backdrop of the French Foreign Legion. A commander (Denis Lavant) becomes obsessed with a young seaman (😝), struggling to reconcile his clear sexual desires with his station and, you know, the dictates of toxic heterosexuality. He kills himself in the end, which leads to this absolutely breathtaking credits sequence:

After a life marked by repression and self-hatred… dude’s free. He lives on in this metaphysical dance studio, finally moving — in every conceivable sense — the way he wants. It’s a riveting example of one of my favorite movie tropes, which is people breaking into dance at the end to express everything they weren’t able to for the previous 90 minutes. ‘Another Round’ does it. You could argue ‘The 40-Year-Old Virgin’ does it. I’ll say nothing more about ‘Aftersun’ except to say it trades on, if not the same sexual unburdening, the possibilities of dancing in unreality.

🚨 ‘BEAU TRAVAIL’ SPOILERS OVER! 🚨

For the absolute teensiest of movies, there’s so much more to discuss — from its (mercifully) understated depiction of mental health issues to the specifics of all-inclusive Turkish resorts — but I’ll leave it to my favorite critic David Ehrlich, who zeroes in especially on the subject of memory in his IndieWire review. How much of our memories is real? How much is fabricated, by us, almost as a form of protection? Does the distinction even matter?

Go see the movie! I’ll be waiting here with a MiniDV camcorder to record your reaction when you get back.

The Substack We Need Right Now

What does it mean to be the “[blank] we need right now”? You’ve definitely read this phrase at some point in the past six years, pegged to a movie or song or TV show of some uplifting virtue, an optimistic balm in pessimistic times. Often, the entertainment in question proffers some moral or spiritual guidance. ‘Paddington 2’ says “if you’re kind and polite, the world will be right.” ‘Ted Lasso’ (gently, the gentleness is crucial) asks us to be “curious, not judgmental.” In a world sometimes literally catching on fire, these sorts of huggable, argument-proof messages are — say it with me! — what we need right now.

Broadly speaking, you might call this movement “nicecore,” a term coined by Indiewire critic David Ehrlich back in 2018. At its (nice) core, nicecore stories are:

…humane and optimistic — short on discord, long on warmth, and explicitly about the goodness in people… that subvert the idea that we have to tear each other down to prop ourselves up, or the idea that success is a naturally a zero-sum game.

‘Queer Eye’ is nicecore. ‘The Great British Bake Off’ is nicecore. I suppose ‘The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power’ could be considered nicecore, too, though I hesitate to include character-free screensavers in the list.

You will not be surprised to learn I find the whole concept somewhat lacking! In a reality show or kids’ entertainment (which ‘Paddington’, for instance, very much is), sure, go with god; I think there’s room in either, maybe even necessity sometimes, for a kind of easy-going moralism. Where… I guess we’ve got to call it scripted adult nicecore misses me, though, is the way in which that moralism so frequently ignores the realities of the world, or worse serves as a cudgel against criticism. You happen to think ‘Ted Lasso’ is an overrated sitcom that’s about as comedically sharp as a 30-year-old ‘Family Circus’ comic? Well, brother, I know a guy who might be able to help you turn that frown upside-down. And no, his name’s not Jesus Christ.

If I’m going hard on ‘Lasso’’s nuclear positivity it’s not because I disagree with it — we SHOULD be kind to each other, you dipshit — but because it so frequently feels unearned. There’s a Christmas episode in season two so cloying I’ll never forget it as long as I live, the primary conflicts of which are a kid bullying Roy Kent’s niece over her bad breath (I thought this show was about soccer1) and making sure a holiday dinner for London-stuck players has enough tables. Riveting stuff! In the first story, the girl out-nices her bully, convincing him to change his ways; in the latter, would you believe it, they find enough tables. (It is implied this happens due to kindness.) This show has won the Emmy for Best Comedy two years in a row.

I swear we’re getting to the movie, guys

Anyway I damn ‘Lasso’ — a show I watch every episode of the morning it arrives — to praise ‘Marcel the Shell with Shoes On’, which trades the former’s black and white (like on a soccer ball! Theme) moralizing for shades of gray2. It’s as nicecore as anything you could ever possibly see but, and I'm saying this about a movie starring an anthropomorphized talking shell (with shoes on), it doesn't treat you like a GD child.

Let’s rewind to October 2010. ‘The Social Network’ has just MAAARRRRKKKed its way to box office glory, Obama & Co. are weeks away from being handed a sizable midterm election rebuke, and a cute lil’ YouTube video with the viral randomness of I Can Has Cheezburger? and the quirk of an Aardman Animations short is melting America’s heart. Meet, in his digital debut, Marcel.

I can only speak for myself, but it’s the alchemy of joyful, detail-rich animation (c/o director Dean Fleischer-Camp) and Jenny Slate’s first team hall of fame voice work that turns what could have remained some late aughts web curio (see “I Can Has Cheezburger?”) into… dare I say art? Even in 3 minutes, 22 seconds, there’s character here, there’s comedy, there’s pathos. And there’s the sense of a much, much bigger world outside Marcel’s understandably minuscule home.

Twelve years later, Marcel’s feature-length movie of the same name takes that idea and runs with it, giving our friend a grandmother (Isabella Rossellini, beyond perfectly cast), a long-lost family (they were accidentally swept up in a rush cleaning job), and an obsession with Lesley Stahl of ‘60 Minutes’.

This is all, on the surface, impossibly twee; almost concentrated nicecore. That A24 sold — and sold out of! — Marcel action figures does nothing to help this charge. But just like the short, an undercurrent of hard-won sincerity offsets moments that, in someone else’s hands, might have given audiences nice-poisoning.

It’s not going out on a limb to say the reason for this is Slate and director Dean Fleischer-Camp, who recapture all ‘Marcel’s original magic while also credibly building on it.3 But there’s an important offscreen detail that — and now I AM going out on a limb — I think informs the “hard-won” part of the equation, and might be the movie’s real secret weapon.

Divorce, Mollusk Style

Slate and Fleischer-Camp were married from 2012 to 2016. They divorced. She went on to date Captain America, twice, before marrying an artist named Ben Shattuck and relocating part-time to Massachusetts. (This is all internet-searchable! I’m not WEIRD.) There’s less biographical information on Fleischer-Camp because, you know, he’s not Jenny Slate. But it would not be inaccurate to call this movie at least an artistic reunion between exes.

The movie’s not about divorce! But it is about regret, and fear, and the fact there’s no joy without risk. Fleischer-Camp plays himself in the movie — a documentarian also named Fleischer-Camp4 — AirBnBing the house Marcel and Nana Connie live in after a break-up. They've all lost something (Marcel's family; Dean's wife), and they're all trying to get it back, to re-forge connection as best they can. But they're also scared, pre-emptively heartbroken to put themselves out there — especially if it means winding up lonelier than they were before.

So when their respective journeys come to an end and Marcel (Slate) tells Fleischer-Camp (Fleischer-Camp), “you’re always welcome over here”… well, I can’t help but read it as a sweet, earned sentiment between former partners, in multiple senses. Obviously I can’t know how it plays for those of you who for whatever reason might be out of the loop on alt comedy relationship gossip. But I think you can feel it — genuine loss and genuine warmth — regardless.

‘Marcel’ is about striking up the courage to try something new, whether searching for your long-lost family or transforming romantic love into creative collaboration. It’s scary! But you do it anyway, the many ills and challenges of the world notwithstanding. THAT, more than Ted Lasso baking fucking biscuits, is what feels

I wrote 'Tár' off the moment I heard the title. And the poster wasn’t helping, suffused with Oscar Movie™️ self-importance that might as well be written in neon. Todd Field, a venerated filmmaker emerging from sixteen years of cinematic hibernation! Cate Blanchett, a great actor whose assured greatness is frankly boring to talk about at this point! I was fully prepared to watch this a week before the 2023 Academy Awards, post a 3.5 star review on Letterboxd, and move on with my movie-loving life.

There is of course a big BUT coming. Wait for it…

Wait for it…

STRINGS!

'Tár' knows you assume it’s a self-important film, when in fact it’s the opposite: a skewering of self-importance, and pomposity, that’s ultimately way weirder and funner than you may have expected. It’s maybe even… a comedy?

We’ll cycle back to that. On the surface, 'Tár' scans, at first, as what you’ve probably read: “the movie where the female conductor gets cancelled.” Which, yes — that definitely happens. But I’d say the movie’s much more interested in imperiousness, and process; about losing yourself in your own bullshit, your own legend, to the point that of COURSE you’d think you were above any sort of recrimination, legal or otherwise.

Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett, of course) is sort of Leonard Bernstein and Gustavo Dudamel and Lin-Manuel Miranda all rolled into one: a celebrity conductor at the absolute APEX of her field, technically and culturally, and about to conduct a very important Mahler piece my friends with orchestral backgrounds assure me is a good, authentic detail. She dabbles in work-based adultery. She dismisses her students’ frailties. Like Olivia Wilde, she enjoys a very specific salad. Most importantly, Tár stands in total control of her world and all its movements, on and off stage.

She’s an asshole! Not to the point you could have ever called this movie, like, ‘Bad Conductor’,1 but from the jump the movie is aware of how difficult -- and flat-out annoying -- this woman can be. It’s almost like the movie wants you to be annoyed, too. Director Todd Fields plays the below-the-line credits up-front, aping movies of old, and... I have no proof, but it almost feels like a troll? Lydia Tár is a serious person, starring in the serious movie 'Tár', and serious movies go out of their way to honor tradition. And then to follow it up with a near-real time New Yorker interview (with real New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik)? And the implication that Lydia Tár has guested on Alec Baldwin’s very real “Here’s the Thing” podcast? Don’t tell me this movie doesn’t know exactly what it’s doing. Hell, it ends on a punchline so good it feels like an episode of ‘Succession’ — that tonally aware, and in control.2

Without giving anything away3, I’ll say that much later in the film, we learn that “Lydia Tár” was not exactly born into this world of bon mots and canapés, that she comes from… less sophisticated stock, stock that wasn’t exactly getting suits tailored to exacting measure, let alone owning multiple Berlin apartments. Her life is one long act of politics and performance — knowing how to conduct (lol) herself and the way she moves through these spaces she’s chosen to inhabit.

‘Tár’ knows that Tár is full of shit. The movie knows that, to some extent, her whole ecosystem is full of shit. Their pithy exchanges, their restaurant orders (you have to try the cucumber salad, it’s really the only vegetarian option), the names they bestow on their charitable organizations all betray the degree to which this cloistered world is exactly that, an act of willed sophistication for all parties involved. But especially Tár, whose actions threaten to tear the whole goddamn thing down.

None of which is to dismiss Tár’s abject, borderline criminal abuses of power! It’s merely to say that — I think we could all imagine the bone-dry #MeToo/“cancel culture” (a term I can only put in quotes, less I normalize it) movie, full of important, necessary messages we can all clap and feel good about, but absent… I don’t know, a propensity toward entertainment? Or equally important, dimensionality?

‘Tár’ (the movie, not the person) demonstrates that you can be About Something and sharply funny at the same time. I can’t wait — and Lydia “Tár on Tár” Tár would have loved this — for it to absolutely clean up at the Oscars.

Also, and I couldn’t find a way to organically fold this into my “‘Tár’ is a comedy!” thesis: 🎵 sound 🎶 is so fucking essential to this movie. Not a surprise given that it’s about a conductor — whose whole job is navigating sound — but ‘Tar’ hits ‘Sound of Metal’ levels of sonic inventiveness. We hear what she hears: the faint beeping of a phone, house sounds in the night, a far-off scream (?) while out on a run. Impeccable sound design goes a long, long way to placing us in this complicated woman’s aural headspace. You feel the sort of musical anxiety with which she moves through the world, this almost tell-tale heart following her wherever she goes.

Billy on the Tweets

This story begins, as all great stories do, on Twitter. Many of you are, like, ADULT-adults who rarely if ever dip your toes there, but it’s a fascinating place: the most up-to-date news and gossip source imaginable, but also it’s in Hell and written entirely by knife-tip on (again, Hell’s) bathroom stalls. Twitter is where the pre-release mania surrounding ‘Don’t Worry Darling’ took root; it’s also where, last week, Billy Eichner chalked the relative financial failure of his movie ‘Bros’ up to “straight people, especially in certain parts of the country” and “homophobic weirdos.”

On the surface, he’s probably not all wrong. I may live in the bastion of cultural sophistication you know as “Los Angeles” — and saw this movie in WeHo, a gay Mecca! — but I’m cognizant that what seems normal, maybe even boring here, might not strike that same chord in other parts of the country. I could absolutely see someone being turned off by the simple fact of boys wanting to touch each other’s butts.

But lost in Eichner’s (since-deleted) Twitter rant is a broader understanding of what motivates anyone to see a movie in the first place; the complicated calculus that’s been behind any ticket purchase in the history of ticket-purchasing. This includes:

• the sheer cost, especially as people consider “what’s worth it” these days

• adverse weather, in this case a hurricane, affecting swaths of the country

• how much they like the trailer

• **how much they like the people starring in it**

It’s that last one that initially turned me off from some pressing desire to see ‘Bros’. Not any latent homophobia on my part, the peak of which was probably me saying “damn, Prince of Persia just got effed in the a” watching ‘Brokeback Mountain’ for the first time at age 19. No — the thing Eichner probably doesn’t want to acknowledge, and it’s totally understandable… is a lot of people just think he’s fucking annoying!

Boy Meets Boy

In all likelihood you know Eichner from either ‘Difficult' People’ or ‘Billy on the Street’, a show in which he yells at people on the street. He’s always the loud guy, the obnoxious guy, the guy seemingly incapable of shutting the fuck up. Whether he’s playing a “character” or not, this has been Eichner’s dominant public face for the past decade. Not who you might traditionally gravitate toward as one half of a romantic comedy pairing, whatever the sexual orientation!

And within the context of the movie ‘Bros’ — not to be confused with the cultural dust-up of the same name — he doesn’t exactly do much to change this perception? Here he plays “Bobby,” a mega-popular podcaster (and board member of the world’s first, soon-to-open, LGBTQ+ museum) who regularly proclaims his contentedness with single life which, if you’ve seen a rom-com before, you know definitely isn’t true. Enter: Aaron (Luke McFarlane), a sweet, crazy-hot meat-head who Bobby will learn, as Shrek did with onions, contains layers.

It’s a perfectly sound rom-com setup! Two unlikely singles meet, fall in love, break apart, come back together. But script architecture can only carry you so far in a genre almost completely dependent on believability. Do you buy this couple? Are you rooting for them? You can do pretty much whatever the hell you want outside of that, from making them neighborhood-destroying book moguls (Tom Hanks in ‘You’ve Got Mail’) to cartoon-level dementia patients (Drew Barrymore in ‘Fifty First Dates’). If the chemistry between the leads is there, the rest is just gravy.

But even at a noticeably subdued level compared to the likes of ‘Difficult People’ or ‘Billy on the Street’, Bobby is just… a tough pill to swallow, and more importantly to buy Aaron swallowing1. Later in the movie, Aaron -- who doesn't love his job and wishes he were pursuing a childhood dream that's too delightful to spoil here -- tells Bobby how attractive he finds his "confidence." I guess, at face value, I understand the compliment: to Aaron, Bobby's bullishness isn't a mask for bone-deep anxiety, it's something to aspire to; something that got him where he is2. But it just feels, as a character moment, so broad. Already an hour-plus into 'Bros', we know little about Bobby (or Aaron) beyond this Meghan Markle Archetypes™️ level, robbing us of the kind of small moments that help us fall in love with rom-com characters -- or the couples they might become.

A Thankless Task

So we’ve reached the point where we must once more jump outside ‘Bros’: “The Movie” and into ‘Bros’: “The Conversation.” Some complicated, seemingly contradictory truths to acknowledge:

1. Creative accounting aside (including the near-erasure of ‘Fire Island’, a movie that premiered on Hulu but did premiere five months ago), ‘Bros’ is probably the first ever mainstream gay rom-com — which is huge

2. The marketing campaign played this fact up to the point it made the movie feel like, as Gawker aptly describes, “homework for straight people.” This was probably not a great angle!

3. Moviegoing is not an act of advocacy BUT

4. Box office tallies do matter and do dictate the decision-making of fearful studio executives (if you’re reading this, I’m talking about all the other executives, not you) who might take weak revenue as a sign to green-light fewer of “these types” (read: 🏳️‍🌈) of movies in the future

Why bring any of this up, all of which is extrinsic to the movie itself? Because you can feel ‘Bros’ grappling with it, trying to reconcile historical significance and narrative necessity at the same time, and it’s frequently too heavy a burden for the movie to carry. Much of this ‘Bros’ never asked for! It’s not Eichner’s fault that, our moviegoing culture still so un-evolved in 2022, “gay rom-com” constitutes a revolutionary concept. At the same time, the movie goes meta so often it might as well be Mark Zuckerberg; you never forget you’re watching the First Mainstream Gay Rom-Com™️, because ‘Bros’ never wants you to forget it.

What sucks is: ‘Bros’ might actually be the funniest studio comedy I’ve seen all year! More jokes land than don’t (I howled at someone calling Caitlyn Jenner a “trans terrorist”), and the specificity of Bobby and Aaron’s world shines through in, among other things, cold Grindr messaging (“need ass pic”) and awkward foursomes with guys named “Steve.” When the movie just lets itself breathe, build actual scenes instead of statements, it truly comes alive. It’s just that so much of 'Bros' feels like... the essay about 'Bros' you'd find in a future (important) Criterion release.

In a perfect world, we’d have three ‘Bros’ a year and they’d be of varying quality and you might like one and not the other two and it wouldn’t matter at all because the future of gay cinema doesn’t hang in the balance. They could just be movies, free to do their own thing just as decades, a whole century’s worth of straight dramas and straight comedies and straight musicals3 have been before. This is the sexually fluid multiplex I see in my dreams! And if it turns out, looking back, that ‘Bros’ was the cinematic equivalent of the first brick at Stonewall? Billy Eichner will never, ever shut up about it on Twitter.

After two years of COVID-inflected cinematic drought, our first full-bodied fall movie season is underway. There are, to put this in quantitative terms, a shit-ton of movies coming out these next few months. Spooky movies! Quirky movies! Awards-y movies! Even for someone like me, a Substacker and AMC Stubs Premiere™ member1 with no children to tend to, it’s a grueling release calendar.

So here, rather than go on and on and on about one specific film — in reactions I wind up publishing two months past any point of relevance — I’m challenging myself to digest this fall’s celluloid smorgasbord at a faster clip, keeping up with the Kardashians conversation and then, you know, moving on to the next one. With any luck you’ll have seen some of these films, disagree with me, and we can really put the comments section to work 🤞🏽.

‘Don’t Worry Darling’

Is ‘Don’t Worry2 Darling’ even, like… a movie at this point? Harry Styles famously said yes, it is, maybe the most movie a movie can be, at the movies. But my gut tells me that anyone paying money to see this in theaters (your only option right now) is doing so less as an independent viewing experience than, well, the culminating act of months of behind-the-scenes drama/gossip we’ve all followed like a schadenfreude-coated sporting event. You want to see if all that stuff made its way on-screen.

Spoiler alert: it doesn’t! What does make its way on screen is a well-intentioned, visually sumptuous story that is both very watchable and also way dumber than it thinks it is. Do you have some idea in your head as to the movie’s “twist”? I can almost guarantee you’re right. ‘DWD’ unpacks lots of big ideas about gender and agency but seems only sporadically interested in really playing with them. Hell, the final fifteen minutes turn into narrative whack-a-mole, every answer yielding ten more questions, and this hard-to-shake-sense that director Olivia Wilde and writer Katie Silberman just… didn’t think a lot of it through? I feel almost misogynist to say as much — feeding into a system that demands female directors hit home runs when we ask no more than singles from their male counterparts — but taking the movie as a Harry Styles-endorsed movie… it’s lacking.

‘Barbarian’

The things that make this movie so much fun also make it impossible to discuss in too much detail. What can I tell you? A young woman checks into her AirBnB only to find the place double-booked. The man staying there gives off vaguely creepy, possibly red-flag vibes. But without local hotel options, she rolls the dice and takes up his offer to share the rental. It’s a horror movie, obviously, and this set-up is part of that… until it isn’t, and the movie becomes something much different — crazier, funnier, scarier, sadder. A cornucopia3 of thrills and chills!

‘Barbarian’ is, more than anything, a horror movie excited to be a horror movie, an antidote to the much-ballyhooed “elevated horror” genre popularized by A24 (who turned writer-director Zach Cregger down!) where scares tend to take a backseat to social commentary. There’s plenty of zeitgeisty stuff to chew on here, too — identifying the “barbarian” of the title, for one — you’ll just taste it more as pleasing after-notes, and not the refreshingly weird, bloody main course.

‘Do Revenge’

“That ain’t it, chief,” I thought to myself for the very annoying opening fifteen minutes of this Gen-Z ‘Strangers on a Train’ update. “Say less,” I said to these Tik Tok caricatures brought to life by a fellow Millennial (cringe!) trying to ape the speech patterns of the generation below. “I don’t love this for us,” I wrote on a Post-It note that I then BeRealed 52 minutes late.

But then the movie became — cue H. Styles — a movie, and a really sharp one about masks and performance and the ways both can ruin our lives whether we’re currently in high school or just mentally stuck there! I’m not gonna sit here and tell you this is some Gen-Z ‘Clueless’ but it’s smarter and funnier than that poster would have you think it is, thanks to punchy filmmaking (writer/director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson) and genuine star turns from Camila Mendes ('Riverdale’, ‘Palm Springs’) and Maya Hawke (‘Stranger Things’), both of whom I’m confident will be around for some time to come. Netflix has spent the last five years turning the very concept of YA into cynical Happy Meal mush but ‘Do Revenge’ gives it fresh new life. I stan.

‘Blonde’

Uhhhhhh….

Speaking as a literary non-hottie, I’m honestly not sure I’m qualified to offer a critique on a movie that has, to put it mildly, made people lose their fucking minds. I am neither a 1) woman nor 2) Monroe scholar, and I do believe in this instance the first carries some crucial weight. If I’m struggling with the now-infamous “vagina shot,”4 I can't imagine what it's like to watch that as, you know, a person with a vagina. You're familiar with the term "torture porn"? There are times where 'Blonde' is practically torture SNUFF, borderline-reveling in the misery Monroe faced on set, in the bedroom, in surgery.

Some criticisms do “miss me”5 with their focus on historical inaccuracy. 'Blonde', based on a novel of the same name by Joyce Carol Oates, doesn't purport to be any sort of Monroe biopic. But that also doesn’t validate the dramatic decisions Andrew Dominik (‘Killing Them Softly’) makes, whether a made-up threesome with the sons of Charlie Chaplin and Edward G. Robinson or its world record for use of the word “daddy.” Is the movie good? It’s interesting and occasionally boring. Is it immoral?

Uhhhh…….

Bottom line: much like ‘Don’t Worry Darling’, you sort of already know what you’re getting with this one, and I encourage you to adjust your viewing accordingly!

On October 11th, Simon & Schuester will publish ‘Down and Out in Paradise: The Life of Anthony Bourdain’, a new, unauthorized biography that would be un-notable but for its salacious selling point: personal exchanges, specifically texts, from Bourdain to his girlfriend (Asia Argento), ex-wife (Ottavia Busia-Bourdain) and others in the days prior to his suicide in June of 2018.

The New York Times ran a piece on it yesterday that… well, it’s upsetting! Read only if you’re comfortable1, but the book excerpts highlighted only reinforce the sense that Bourdain was utterly desperate in the end; someone who just couldn’t see a way out. Friends and family of the guy are understandably peeved by this book’s publication, not just for what it says about them — the exchanges with Argento are brutal — but the ways it seems to chip at Bourdain’s image, especially in his final years. He’s not just our favorite rough-around-the-edges cultural saint, connecting the world with perfect bon mots. He’s also an ex-junkie who lost his way, alienated his loved ones, then killed himself2.

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Anyway, it’s with all these very complicated feelings now resurfaced that I decided to revisit Morgan Neville’s 2021 documentary, ‘Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain’.

Even casual fans of Bourdain (I fall somewhere north of casual, south of super-fan) know the basics of his life, and ‘Roadrunner’ smartly elides them. There’s no extended childhood biography, and very little from the pre-‘Kitchen Confidential’ era. Even that book — and its explosive popularity — serves mostly as a jump-off point to what, arguably, is the most significant part of Bourdain’s epitaph: cultural ambassador. I feel silly calling him that, especially when the man in question would probably laugh it off, but there’s maybe no better way to describe him. He shed light on parts of the world, on cultures that even his erudite CNN-watching, New Yorker-subscribing audience (🙋🏼‍♀️) were probably unfamiliar with. And he did it in a way that always radiated enthusiasm, curiosity, and connection — three things in decreasing supply here in America.

But you know all that. And the documentary knows you know that. Hell, half its footage seems directly lifted from the shows and documentaries Bourdain himself produced! How much more is there to say about a guy whose last twenty years of life were documented as well as any Instagram influencer?

‘Roadrunner’ delves into Bourdain’s suicide — how could it not? — to mixed results. Hampering any sort of involved discussion is the fact that his friend Eric Ripert, who was there with him in France when it happened, politely declines to talk about it. And Neville went out of his way to exclude Argento from the doc, which IMO was a short-sighted, maybe even childish decision3. But then there’s probably not much more she could tell us about Bourdain than his friends are able to. Or the man himself, who wasn’t exactly cryptic talking about mortality, depression, or addiction.

Whether ‘Roadrunner’ states it outright or not, it’s that last one — addiction — that serves as the backbone of the film, and a crucial part of Bourdain’s story. I mean, he was a heroin addict who effectively just…quit, sometime before the ‘Kitchen Confidential’ era. He’s written about it, talked about it; none of it is a secret. But what’s interesting, and you see it at any spin class, is the many forms addiction can take. It’s not just hard drugs or booze! It’s cooking; it’s Brazilian jiu-jitsu; it’s ROMANCE, in all its exciting possibility. It’s travel! The Bourdain exhumed by Neville is a Bourdain who never kicked his addiction — he just found new ones. And I think you could argue, as the documentary does, that the same thing(s) that brought Bourdain international renown and made all of us feel so connected to this guy…may have also been to his physical and psychological detriment.

‘Roadrunner’ never says “this is what killed Tony.” I doubt this new biography will, either (or anyway, I really hope it doesn’t). It’s an impossible question to answer, and also beside the point. What makes the documentary special — and what made Anthony Bourdain special — is the way it highlights the inextricable link between good and bad, hero and villain, life and death. One can’t exist without the other! We want to pretend that Bourdain kicked his habit, that addiction was part of his BACKstory, and not the one we started building with him, together, after he became a cultural figure. But those same impulses that lead you down this or that path, they rarely just disappear. Nope! They transform into other things, of variable charge: a brilliant memoir, a beef with Emeril Lagasse, a thoughtful travel-ogue, a doomed romance.

My guess is that, for a guy whose vices were almost inextricable from his virtues, Bourdain's story was always going to end the same way. That he killed himself? It’s somehow both cruel and predictable. I wish he were still around. I loved him — I bet you did, too — and feel his absence in a world that seems duller, more distant without him in it. Like his books and shows, ‘Roadrunner’ keeps him at least a little alive.

'Down and Out in Paradise' isn't out yet. And who knows -- it may prove, in the end4, to be a cynical cash grab with nothing to offer except a few shitty text messages. I sure hope not! But I also think we risk the very connection Bourdain stood for to sanitize parts of someone’s life for the sake of legacy. Biographies should be like that episode of 'No Reservations' where an Inuit tribe serves Bourdain a freshly-killed seal: you've gotta eat the whole thing.

It’s Miller Time

From the jump, Lifting Fog’s mission has been to sidestep any subjects you might actually want to read about (‘House of the Dragon’, ‘Don’t Worry Darling’’s press tour) in favor of stuff you might charitably describe as “niche,” and less charitably “shit I’ve never heard of and would not seek out.” And it’s in that spirit that we today open a discussion of George Miller’s latest movie, ‘Three Thousand Years of Longing’!

I’ve gotta say, I feel a kinship with Miller. He’s got great hair, first of all, which I’m self-confident enough to proclaim I also possess. In his interviews, he undercuts deep cultural aptitude with refreshing Australian cheekiness. (I’m not Australian, but if I were, would hope to be considered “cheeky.”) Oh, and the dude seems almost clinically incapable of doing what you want him to for any sustained amount of time.

Miller’s filmography is positively festooned with amazing, genre-defining work, from ‘Babe’ (which he wrote and produced) to ‘Mad Max’ and ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’ — the kind of movies any sane studio head/career consultant would just encourage him to keep making, ad nauseam, with slight Marvel-style tweaks along the way. But Miller can’t leave well enough alone! Bored of pastoral sweetness, he channels urban depression in ‘Babe: Pig in the City’. What was just the right amount of penguins in ‘Happy Feet’ becomes way, way too many penguins in ‘Happy Feet 2’. Miller has never met a successful movie he didn’t want to then follow up with something seemingly random. It’s not Soderbergh’s “one for them, one for me” moviemaking ethos; it’s the shrugging guy emoji.

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And so, seven years after the runaway, Oscar-winning success of ‘Fury Road’, Miller has followed up that high-octane tale of survival and redemption in the orange-scorched wastelands for… a quiet lil’ movie about Tilda Swinton falling in love with a genie.

You gotta rub me the right way

Idris Elba plays the djinn, let’s use proper terminology here, who prior to being unknowingly released by lonely British narratologist (!) Alithea Binnie (!!), had spent hundreds of years trapped in a glass bottle. Actually thousands of years, in various bottles, imprisoned out of jealousy or regret or even sheer forgetfulness. Does Djinn want to be free? Maybe. Mostly he just wants to do his damn job, i.e. grant three wishes, which the wish-averse Alithea is making impossible. So to inspire her, Djinn regales her (and US) with a plethora of ‘Arabian Nights’-style stories — sad, sexy, and everywhere in-between. Eventually, Alithea decides she does wish for something after all: that d(jinn).

It’s a strange film! On the one hand, it wants to unpack1 these big ideas about LONGING and STORY and AGENCY, which it does largely through Djinn's tales: grand set-pieces taking us from the courts of the Queen of Sheba and Suleiman the Magnificent to the last days of the Ottoman Empire. It's epic stuff, beautifully shot, conjuring 'Time Bandits' or even budget-'Cleopatra'.

But when we’re not in those tales (which account for half the runtime) and it’s just Djinn and Alithea politely conversing in the Agatha Christie Room of Istanbul’s Pera Palace Hotel—

—some part of you wonders if, idk, maybe you could wish for the version of this movie that starred Cameron Diaz as the harried professional and Will Smith as the genie2 (she’ll hide his identity by calling him “Gene”) who teaches her how to love and maybe even rap, released by Miramax into a semi-crowded Thanksgiving ‘97 weekend.

Not that Idris Elba and Tilda Swinton (I’m so tempted to call her “Tidris,” for symmetry) don’t harness a certain middle-aged sexual charge! They DO, and you may find yourself desirous of one or both of them in this movie’s 108 minutes. But for all we’re told the magic of Djinn’s stories has stirred something in Alithea, breathed life into previously inert parts of her heart… I can’t say I ever felt it. ‘Three Thousand Years’ fairy-tells when it needs to fairy-show3.

And for my final wish…

Movie reviews are a story. I mean yeah, they’re a story about another story (and inherently less culturally valuable than the latter), but they themselves weave a tale4. Sometimes it’s about expectation versus reality; other times it’s about the love triangle between art, artist, and spectator. Hell, I'm pretty sure Ain't It Cool News' Harry Knowles once described a heart attack he was having mid-screening, which far eclipsed whatever he had to say about 'Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within'.

I inhale movie reviews the way I would any good movie, sometimes to the point they -- much like a genie!! -- actually trick me. Did I like the movie ‘Frost/Nixon’ in 2009? No, not at all, I thought it was somehow overcooked and plodding at the same time. But then I got my A.O. Scott on, my David Edelstein on, my Stephanie Zacharek on (it’s 2009, these references all check out) — and hours later I’ve now read enough beautifully composed reviews to convince myself otherwise.

The other day, my ‘Three Thousand Years’ post-mortem took me to Joshua Rivera’s Polygon review:

There are films that change the nature of the air you breathe after you watch them, as a motif from its score loops in one’s mind and the color of the world outside the theater doesn’t quite live up to what was seen on screen. Three Thousand Years of Longing is one of those films, a story about stories — a fraught genre prone to self-importance — that isn’t solely interested in their magic as a cloying, unifying force. They are more powerful than that. More dangerous than that. And it turns out that there are few more satisfying ways to explore this than by watching two people who believe they know all there is to know about stories trying to guess how this one ends.

I felt NONE of that shit watching the movie but, the way he describes it… I kind of wish I did? Hell, maybe I did? The themes he’s describing so well are there, uh-huh, and maybe I misread the hotel scenes a bit. After all, there’s power in their mundanity, relative as it is to the Djinn’s stories. And, like, you need that juxtaposition to sell the transformative powers of love. Right?

Okay, fine, so maybe the movie’s better than I thought. Maybe I liked it. Maybe I loved it?

Behold… the power of storytelling

Two other high-concept but low-key movies to read about!

• After Yang: Colin Firth’s mustache processes death of family robot

• A Ghost Story: Casey Affleck (who DIES, if you don’t like him) hurtles through time and space in a bedsheet ghost costume

One hop this time

Once upon a time I was the kind of person to religiously scour Entertainment Weekly’s seasonal movie previews (Fall basically the movie equivalent of Vogue’s September issue), highlighting everything I wanted to see and then, to really drive things home, marking release dates down on my computer calendar, with trailer links if I could find them. All of this tracks, of course, with someone who lost his virginity at 20.

I bring this up not to brag about having sex (🙏🏽) but to highlight how involved this process was for a movie super-fan in the mid-aughts, pre-streaming, with one central hub from which to plan your attack. For the average sexually active person today to keep on top of any non-Axis power (read: Disney/Marvel/Star Wars) releases, let alone leave their house to see them? Fuggedaboutit.

So when I ask if you’ve seen the movie ‘Cha Cha Real Smooth’, I don’t mean it to sound condescending; that’s a genuine question! It premiered mid-June on Apple TV+, and my guess is unless you follow Sundance coverage (🙋🏼‍♀️) or pay attention to Apple’s internal banner ads, you might have gone your entire life assuming ‘Cha Cha Real Smooth’1 is just a lyric from the early aughts hit “Cha Cha Slide.” I mean it is, this will always be true, but now it’s also a gentle coming-of-age dramedy whose quality and cultural reach I’m finding… frankly impossible to gauge.

Following in the post-grad “what IS life?” movie footsteps of ‘The Graduate’, ‘Garden State’, ‘Adventureland’, and so many more, ‘CCRS’ centers a sensitive young white kid (writer-director Cooper Raiff) figuring his shit out against a backdrop of suburban malaise (New Jersey, it’s always Jersey), enchanted by an older and/or wiser woman (Dakota Johnson) who knows he just needs one magic song and/or cathartic scream to unlock his true potential. Will our guy figure said shit out? Will he leave those stultified suburban streets behind? Will Simon & Garfunkel,

The Shins,

and Rostam

collect the music royalties owed them??

In a declaration that will shock absolutely no one, I’ve loved this kind of movie forever. I too am a sensitive ha-white boy from the suburbs, almost always figuring his shit out, who is enchanted by both damaged women AND song. (Representation matters.) You could make this movie a hundred times with slightly different soundtracks and I’d buy a brand-new ticket to each one. As increasingly lame as I find MCU fanbois2, I'm cut from the same brainwashed cloth. If there were a Comic-Con for coming-of-age indie dramedies, I'd go every year.

And yup — I liked this movie just as predicted! The needle drops hit, the moments of catharsis landed. It did exactly what I wanted, the same way I assume any time I order a Big Mac that I am going to like that Big Mac3. But as I sit here days later thinking about it — or rather not thinking about it — I’m forced to ask myself: in the year of our Lord 2022, does a movie like ‘CCRS’ still need to be made? Do we… need this movie?

Take it back now, y’all

I joke about “representation” in these lily-white coming-of-age movies because, you know, I’ve never NOT been represented. Yes, it’s true that sometimes the protagonists hail from places outside New Jersey, like Connecticut, and I think “that’s a new spin”… but no, it’s largely a) the same white story with b) the same white characters having c) the same white conversations. For going on sixty years! Maybe a hundred! (I’m not familiar with the entirety of the Lumiere Brothers’ filmography.)

Even a few years ago I’m not sure I would have considered ‘Cha Cha Real Smooth’ a “white” movie; I would have just considered it… a movie, as though a story about a North Jersey bar mitzvah party starter falling in love with Dakota Johnson constitutes some universal human experience. (Umm, who hasn’t been there?) But as we all grow a little, finally, and expand our sense of the world and who’s telling what stories… I mean, come on, this is a white-ass movie.

Right about now is where I should be very clear — I don’t highlight “white” as a pejorative, or a designation of lameness, or a comment on the movie’s spice tolerance. I simply mean… this is a movie about white people, chronicling a very white experience, and to pretend otherwise feels like the phrase “I don’t see color” brought to vivid, blinding life.

Consider some of the other hot indie releases of the moment. ‘Fire Island’ (Hulu) is a gay, Asian-American-focused rom-com. ‘Emergency’ (Amazon) is a dark comedy about two Black friends contending with the realities of policing after stumbling on a passed-out white girl. These are movies that, perhaps by necessity, don’t shy away from their characters’ identities or what that means for their stories. They’re richer and more interesting because of it, to say nothing of the fact we’ve rarely seen them before. So if, as ‘CCRS’’s very existence suggests, there will always be movies about sensitive young straight white dudes figuring their shit out… maybe it’s time they start acknowledging these dudes are white4?

Right foot, let’s stomp (a Dakota Johnson interlude)

Quick sidebar to ask a challenging bordering on uncouth question I know you’ve thought yourself at some point, so let’s just be adults and admit it’s on our minds: is Dakota Johnson a good actor or is she just an incredibly hot person who picks interesting roles?

She’s bounced from sitcom work (‘Ben & Kate’) to the ‘50 Shades’ movies to, more recently, a litany of bona fide indies like ‘A Bigger Splash’, ‘Suspiria’, and ‘The Lost Daughter’. Her taste is exquisite. She shut down Ellen that one time, which was cool. But whereas I can see the ways her spiritual sister Kristen Stewart mines a very similar performance volume/speed for unexpected pathos, with Johnson it’s always just felt… distant? Too cool for school?

‘CCRS’ is the first time I felt like I got her, or anyway felt as though she were delivering a performance and not, I don’t know, using her eyes to suggest I not take that seat next to her on the plane, even though I paid for it. Any good performance really just boils down to believability (“did I believe Hugo Weaving as Megatron? …Yes”) and, playing an old-before-her-time hot Jersey mom with garden-variety depression… I believe her! I’ve met this person before, with a name even dumber than “Domino,” and for 90 minutes, felt that person brought to life. All of which is to say, I guess… maybe Dakota’s more talented than I’ve given her credit for.

Everybody clap your hands

“Did this movie need to be made?” is ultimately a facile question. ‘CCRS’ got made! It won a Sundance Audience Award. It’s on Apple TV+ now whether you watch it or not — this sweet, easy-going coming-of-age story directed with a surprising level of empathy for a 25-year-old (whose youthful success absolutely does not make the white hairs on my chin tingle with impotent jealousy, I don’t know who told you that). “Someone wanted to make it” is, in the end, really the only celluloid justification a movie needs. This includes Dinesh D’Souza’s whole filmography, as well as the ‘Air Bud’ franchise.

At the same time, it doesn’t feel unreasonable, in 2022, to demand more of the white coming-of-age genre than “sweet and easygoing.” This is hardly a political call-to-arms; I don’t think ‘CCRS’ would have benefited from, like, a Critical Race Theory subplot. But given a world with infinite stories to tell, and perspectives to share, it’s beyond time we cast away the feigned universality these kinds of movies have enjoyed to this point and just, like, wear their whiteness.

…Oh god that really does sound white power-y ABORT ABORT.

Back on Lifting Fog (the blog, not the substack, keep up) I started all of my reviews with a haiku. None of these were exemplary models of the form and in most cases I was stretching to accommodate an arbitrary writing conceit, but it was an easy way to kick things off, especially in the early aughts.

It is now 2022, though, and I’m reviewing a movie by a Korean-American director, Kogonada1, about a Chinese-coded robot. Suffice it to say “here’s my haiku about it!” feels like the wrong way to approach the task. So let’s just skip that part!

Some necessary cinematic pre-reading

Before we get to ‘After Yang’ (I’m barely getting started with the temporal wordplay, buckle up), it feels important to discuss Kogonada’s previous film, 2017’s ‘Columbus’. Read my Haiku Review here! It is neither a biopic of explorer Christopher Columbus nor a biopic of director Chris Columbus but rather a super-gentle coming-of-age movie in which two very attractive people look at and talk about buildings for 90 minutes. I’m being glib but also not — the movie is literally about architecture.

And here’s the thing: what sounds boring as shit on paper is actually sort of…cinematically thrilling? Hear me out: buildings — maybe you know this, maybe you don’t — can’t move. They’re static. People, on the other hand, can move. So does film, in the sense it takes something static (photography) and, by focusing light through it at twenty four frames per second, renders movement. (My Film Studies degree was never for nothing, guys.)

It’s this obvious contradiction between stasis and movement that lends ‘Columbus’ something like profundity: using buildings, often filmed in wide, fixed shots, to tell a simple but powerful story about growth and change. You could probably turn the sound off, watch the movie as a silent screensaver, and it would be just as good. I mean this as a genuine compliment!

And now the movie in question

‘After Yang’ aims for the same reflective calm of its predecessor but falters, IMO2, by trying to bite off way more than it can chew in the story department.

“Okay pump the brakes, Henning, I don’t even know what in the hell ‘After Yang’ is,” some of you non-LA types are saying and okay, let’s pump the brakes. Some plot: Yang (Justin H. Min) is a domestic robot — “techno-sapien,” he’s called — living with a “mom” (Jodie Turner-Smith), “dad” (Colin Farrell), and “sister” (Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja). When Yang goes on the fritz, as techno-sapiens are wont to do, Farrell’s efforts to repair him lead to some big questions about what it means to be human, how much any of our identities is a construct, and whether Mitski, not Bill and Ted, will be the official Music of the Future™️.

If ‘Yang’ has a central problem, it’s that it wants to do too many things without ever committing to one of them. Is this a Colin Farrell ASMR video? Is it a less horny (but more future-pants-heavy) ‘Her’? Is it — as some frankly reaching critics have suggested — a revolutionary meditation on Asian identity? ‘Yang’’s aims change with each new scene: sometimes it’s an overly plotty tone poem, other times an undercooked sci-fi movie, but rarely does it feel like it’s hitting whatever its intended target.

At the Q&A screening I attended3, Kogonada talked at length about the backstory he’d envisioned for ‘Yang’, everything from environmental cataclysm to war with China to the return of handlebar mustaches, and the ways that backstory subtly informs everything we see on-screen. Which is fine! I like subtlety. ‘Licorice Pizza’ is all the better for not including a scene where Alana Haim literally eats licorice-topped pizza.

But sometimes subtlety can be SO subtle as to be non-existent. Take the environmental question: ‘Yang’ suggests an aesthetic future that’s more Anthropologie than Apple, all wood-grain and moss and soft lighting. It’s visually rich, and an absolute balm for years of future-scapes seemingly designed exclusively by Jony4 Ive. But… it doesn’t mean anything, to these characters or their relationships. It seems to inform nothing outside of the greenery budget. Not that I want characters walking around saying “man, life is so different ever since climate change completely reoriented our relationship to nature and also clothing choices,” but… maybe a little of that? It wouldn’t matter to me, except that Kogonada says it does, and if we’re meant to derive any sort of specifics from this family’s story, then points like this need to be made more bluntly.

The stuff with China falls into the same category. Colin Farrell and Jodie Turner-Smith purchased Yang for the express purpose of connecting their adopted daughter to her Chinese roots. He’s a robot. Can robots have an ethnic identity? Interesting question! And yet just like with the environmental hand-waving (see above)… we’re given little to nothing about this world’s history, its political climate, its relationship to race — none of the things that would have made this a specific story as opposed to (see further above) an overly plotty tone poem.

Friend of the ‘Stack Bobby Kessler raised a pretty damning point to me, chewing on all this like so much future-protein in the streets of Los Feliz after ‘Yang’ (sorry, after ‘After Yang’) a few weeks ago. Would this movie have been that different if, scrapping the “techno-sapien” conceit entirely, it had just been about a family coming to grips with the death of their human son?

In the last two weeks I’ve read no shortage of breathless reviews proclaiming stuff like '“‘Yang’ isn’t just a great sci-fi movie, it’s the movie we need right now” or “Kogonada obliterates our preconceived notions of stillness” or

Listen. It’s a hell of a lot more interesting than ‘Uncharted’ or ‘Death on the Nile’ or ‘Marry Me’ (but not ‘Jackass Forever’ which I’ll go to my grave defending), so any criticisms I’ve leveled about this very pretty movie should be taken with a grain of salt. Stylistically, visually — ‘Yang’ is an absolutely worthwhile moviegoing experience. But experience isn’t a story, and I’m hoping Kogonada’s next movie appreciates the difference!

This post is not about that trip. It’s about the trip back from the trip, wherein I sat for six (6) non-consecutive hours on two (2) American Airlines flights and watched three (3) movies. Did you know that AA1 offers a shockingly robust array of inflight entertainment options? Once upon a time your only choices were a months-old Liam Neeson revenge thriller or the latest ‘Ice Age’ installment, but today you’ve got modern classics (‘The Social Network’) mixed with buzzy foreign films (‘Les Miserables’) mixed with… well, another Liam Neeson thriller (‘Cold Pursuit’). But still, the range!2

Like… pretty much everyone, it’s been a year+ since I’ve been in a movie theater (an indoor one; ‘Bill & Ted Face the Music’ was MEANT to be seen at a drive-in 60 miles east of Los Angeles) and what I miss most isn’t the MCU, or even other blockbusters attempting to architect their own MCU. Nope — what your boy misses more than anything is that sweet, sweet little film pocket called Sundance-style mid-budget indie.

Like porn, you know it when you see it: quirky, usually hyper-verbal, stylish but not TOO stylish; the kind of movie small enough that you’re delighted to find out someone else has also seen. It’s not as though we haven’t had options this past year. If anything, the pandemic has probably bolstered the reputation (and eyeball possibilities) of stuff like ‘Palm Springs’, ‘Happiest Season’, ‘The 40-Year-Old Version’, and others. But I’m just so tired of watching these movies — all of which I would have paid $15 to see at 2:30pm on a Wednesday afternoon at the Landmark West LA — from the same boring couch I’ve spent the past year eating/reading/gaming/living/laughing/loving on.

What a thrill, then, to catch three new movies from a decidedly NON-boring airplane seat, which one year into a pandemic may as well have been the balcony of the Ziegfeld! In discussion today: ‘The Kid Detective’, ‘Love and Monsters’, and ‘The Climb’, all of them SSMBIs your mileage may vary on but that filled me, the writer of this newsletter, with excitement for the return of regular movie-going.

NOTE: none of these are available for free (well, subscription) streaming at the moment but for probably $4.99 you can catch any of them at the VOD service of your choosing

The Kid Detective

It will probably not shock you to learn that the 34-year-old cis white hetero author of this newsletter feels a certain attachment to the character of Seth Cohen, and his human counterpart Adam Brody. The quips. The taste in music. The nano-puff vests. Seth was a nerd with a girlfriend who managed to earn the respect of a street tough like Ryan Atwood, who drank 7&7s (underage!) at holiday benefits. Seth Cohen made upper middle-class suburban kids like me believe that anything was possible. Representation matters.

Everybody likes to talk about the “McConnaissance”3 when really we should be talking about the BRODYSSANCE that’s been quietly unfolding these past two years. Look at this run:

…I mean, scratch ‘Jay and Silent Bob Reboot’, and also ‘The Last Blockbuster’ (which I’m pretty sure is just a documentary), but the rest? Twelve years after the demise of ‘The OC’, Adam Brody has figured out a way to convert that old Chrismukkah charm into something new and disarming. And I am, as they say, Here For It.

Anyway, ‘The Kid Detective’: it’s a movie about a former kid detective, now in his thirties, tasked with solving an honest-to-god murder. Shades of Derrick Comedy’s ‘Mystery Team’, no doubt, but played less for laughs here than pathos. As a pint-size gumshoe, Abe Applebaum (Brody) was loved if not respected; twenty years later, what once seemed cute now seems sad, and he knows it. What happens when you peaked as a teen? What happens when you peaked playing a teen on a teen soap opera??

It’s not like ‘Detective’ asks that question outright but it’s so clearly THERE, and it’s been there in movies like ‘Ready or Not’ or ‘Promising Young Woman’, both of which harnessed the aura of his ‘OC’ character to, IMHO, brilliant effect. Barring radical facial reconstructive surgery, he’ll always be Seth Cohen, with all the Nice Guy baggage that entails. Brody seems to understand this, and guys… all I can say is get on the bandwagon now. McConaughey won an Oscar for grappling with his on-screen persona and there is absolutely no reason to think the ‘Death Cab’-spinning prince of Newport won’t do the same.

(NOTE: I didn’t *start* this review thinking it would end with an FYC ad for Seth Cohen. But I stand by it.)

Love and Monsters

Let’s get this out of the way upfront: ‘Love & Monsters’ is a total ‘Zombieland’ re-skin. The walking dead are now mutated insects, Jesse Eisenberg is now Dylan O’Brien, and pump-action shotguns are now bows and arrows. You’d think such blatant copy-cattery would spell disaster for this little CGI-heavy rom-com. But you’d be wrong!

Here’s why:

• The monsters are dope. That’s both a testament to the CGI and the creature design, which takes ubiquitous snails, crabs, and cockroaches and blows them up to gargantuan proportions. They’re somehow schlocky and real-feeling at the same time, which adds to the tension as O’Brien attempts to survive a 95-mile trek to the coast. ‘Superman’ (1978) told us “you will believe a man can fly”; ‘Monsters’ says “you will believe an irradiated giant ant can pierce steel.”

• As I mentioned in the ‘Kid Detective’ segment — and maybe you just sniffed out from my writing cadence, or the way I use italics — I am a MILLENNIAL whose frame of cultural reference ended circa Fall 2015. Before ‘Monsters’, I didn’t really know Dylan O’Brien. Maybe he was one of the kids from Sway House? IDK. Reader: this kid is a star, a genuine talent who — like Eisenberg before him, and John Cusack before him — manages to wring insecure comedy from every straight line, and make something like “talking to a dog” a genuinely charming bit. He’ll win his Oscar the year after Seth Cohen does, for a biopic about Martin Shkreli.

• An early montage makes exquisite use of the 2007 Arcade Fire song “Keep the Car Running,” a moment which may as well have been designed in a lab (with lots of houseplants) for Millennials fans of ‘The OC’.

• What made ‘Zombieland’ work so well, in the end, wasn’t its hyper-stylization or even the Bill Murray cameo: it was the fact it took its characters seriously even as they navigated ridiculous situations. ‘Monsters’ understands this and never undermines character for the sake of a cheap joke, or Cool Moment (the aforementioned “Keep The Car Running montage” notwithstanding, so cool). You simply trust the story — and by extension the screenwriters, Brian Duffield and Matthew Robinson — which to me is an increasingly rare phenomenon in mainstream entertainment. You can be high concept and high quality at the same time!

(Might tweet “You can be High Concept and High Quality at the same time.”)

The Climb

Maybe the least purely enjoyable of my American Airlines4 movie-going triptych, but that’s less a ding than an affirmation of ‘The Climb’’s cringey power. The movie’s pretty simple: Kyle (Kyle Marvin) is a doughy punching-bag sort of guy and Mike (Michael Angelo Covino) is his toxic childhood friend, the kind you’ve somehow held onto well past the point you know you should. In vignettes that track their relationship over months, then years, we watch Mike keep fucking over Kyle, again and again, to hilarious and — eventually — strangely moving results. It’s a Hollywood bromance (remember that moment in time? #Millennial) as filtered through a Force Majeure lens, which is to say behavioral patterns we might consider funny in another context put under the microscope here, blown up into something that’s hilarious and uncomfortable at the same time, and at least a little French in spirit.

The movie also kept reminding me — in form if not in tone — of ‘Boyhood’, the way each new vignette in Mason’s life was almost as interesting for what it didn’t reveal, and the developments you had to catch up on. ‘The Climb’ is not explicitly about growing up the way ‘Boyhood’ was, but it’s about an evolving relationship: weight loss (and gain!), boundary-testing, increased alcohol consumption. Mike tries, in his own fucked-up way, to save Kyle from himself while Kyle yields to the knowledge he’ll never get rid of Mike. It’s beautiful, is what I’m saying.

In addition to being ultra-chatty, ‘The Climb’ brings an unexpected directorial flair to the table. Even in 2021, movie comedies are so frequently static in their visual quality. (We got the joke? Moving on!) This one isn’t afraid to harness a moving camera, or blocking, and it’s funnier as a result. Did you pick up on some Mumblecore vibes in the trailer? I’m here to tell you there is nothing to worry about, that ‘The Climb’ was made with a lot of love and care by people who value the art of cinema (read this great interview with Marvin and Covino, who also directed), and that precision keeps the movie from ever going Full Mumblecore5.

FAR too uncomfortable to ever watch again, but I eagerly await whatever these guys do next.