Hendog's Movie Kennel: 'The Kid Detective', 'Love and Monsters', and 'The Climb'

Forget #whiteboysummer, it's all about #whiteboyamericaninflightentertainment

I flew the other day, in an airplane. Also two weeks before that. In lieu of a 5000 word “private island all tested negative multiple times ❤️⛱" disclaimer I’ll merely say the trip involved two vaccinated parents, masks, and extensive social distancing, because any place with more than three people constitutes “crowded” to my mom.

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.

1. I swear this newsletter is not sponsored by American Airlines OR the OneWorld Alliance, but we are open to it

2. Listen, it’s possible that other carriers are bringing the goods, too (probably not Spirit Air, everyone’s favorite crosstown bus with wings), but as Shania Twain sang, “you gotta dance with the one who brought ya”

3. …which is to say they did, seven years ago

4. The world’s greatest flyers fly American™️

5. We’re adults here, right? We can tell the truth? Mumblecore, on its own, is a wet napkin movie genre that hoodwinked people into thinking “boring” was somehow “real” and that Joe Swanberg shouldn’t be held accountable for the actual quality of his movies if he was making seventeen of them a year. Good things came out of Mumblecore, like Greta Gerwig! But so did ‘Jeff, Who Lives At Home’, a refund for which I’m still waiting on ten years later.