Monthly Archives: September 2021
Everybody’s Talking About Jamie (2021)
What a jubilant, heartwarming, and celebratory musical to lift up your spirits and evoke a few happy tears, especially in the wake of trying to comprehend the mystifying ongoing appeal of another high-profile musical, Dear Evan Hansen. I wish every person chose to watch this Amazon Prime original movie versus that other musical that made me deeply uncomfortable and angry. This is based on the London stage show, and adapted and directed by the original creators, we follow the true-story of a 16-year-old Jamie (Max Harwood) who dreams of embracing his inner drag queen. His conservative father (Ralph Ineson) doesn’t approve and has left him and his working-class mum (Sarah Lancashire) behind to start a new family. Jamie is working on finding his voice and confidence. He comes under the tutelage of an aging former drag queen (Richard E. Grant) who encouraged and educates Jamie in the ways of showbiz and style (“A boy in a dress is someone that can be laughed at, but a drag queen is someone to be feared!”). Right away, I felt like this was what The Prom was aiming for, a big LGBTQ+ musical bursting with empathetic feeling and anthemic empowerment. The musical numbers are fun and frothy when they want to be, taking playful advantage of the expanded visual space of film. However, when the film wants you to feel emotions, it can hit you hard, and I was tearing up as Grant’s character poignantly sings about the heyday of 80/90s drag scene with the AIDS crisis taking its tragic toll. I don’t mean to keep harping on this, but I felt more genuine emotion in that one moment than throughout the entirety of Dear Evan Hansen. The movie is more considerate with its supporting players and finds moments of grace and compassion for just about every player, and with thrumming harmonies and feel-good lyrics. It’s a charming, funny, and definitely worth remembering. Everybody should be talking about Everybody’s Talking About Jamie.
Nate’s Grade: B+
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Dear Evan Hansen (2021)
If you’re unfamiliar with Dear Evan Hansen or do not consider yourself among the fandom of the Tony-wining Broadway musical, then I would highly recommend watching a 2009 movie called World’s Greatest Dad, a film I will be referring to later in this review. It’s a smaller indie starring Robin Williams and written and directed by actor-turned-director Bobcat Goldthwait. It also has a very similar premise of a character exploiting the grief of others to try and better their own personal standing by fabricating an introspective life for a high school student who recently took their own life. The exception is that World’s Greatest Dad played its heavy content for dark comedy and stinging satire and it never excused the behavior of its lead character as he manipulated the collective sympathies of others for personal gain. As I kept watching Dear Evan Hansen, I kept feeling like someone had attempted to make World’s Greatest Dad but played straight and absent the satire, and that was a very bad decision.
Evan Hansen (Ben Platt) is a high school senior and has more anxiety disorders than friends. He starts the school year with cast on his arm, the result of “falling” from a tree. Evan writes motivational letters to himself as a therapeutic exercise for his counselor, but Conner (Colton Ryan) steals the paper at school and freaks out when Evan expresses interest in Conner’s younger sister, Zoe (Kaitlyn Dever). Conner’s only two appearances on screen both involve him shoving, yelling, and threatening Evan. Days later, Conner has taken his life and the only letter his family has found was the “Dear Evan Hansen” paper he snatched away. Conner’s parents (Amy Adams, Danny Pino) are eager to know anything about their emotionally troubled and secretive son. They didn’t know he had any friends let alone one he would compose his suicide note for. Evan doesn’t come clean and instead plays along, happy to provide a false version of their son, one who was bristling with thoughts and compassion he could never properly express. Evan spends more and more time with Zoe, trying to share his own romantic feelings, and getting deeper into his lies.
This was a deeply uncomfortable experience for me, and I don’t quite understand how fans of the theater show were so moved and uplifted and, frankly, entertained. Maybe all this drama plays better on the stage, though I think many of the same issues I would have with the story would be evidently present for the stage productions as well. The main character is presented as lonely and anxious and depressed and longing to make connections, and this is meant to serve as the emotional explanation for why he leaps at a chance to insert himself into another family and manufacture a false identity about their dead son to score with the girl he’s been crushing on from afar for an indeterminate amount of time. Evan Hansen is, quite simply, a monster of a human being. Through tortured coincidence, he is believed to be Connor’s only friend, and Evan can at any point clarify this mistake and explain the truth. But he chooses instead to supply a fictional version of Connor that he feels every member of his family needs to hear to feel better about themselves. Evan justifies his actions as kind lies, as helping those in mourning by telling them what they want to hear, what he feels like they need. It’s not his place to decide what people need to better grieve, and Evan uses his newly favored position as the rare Rosetta Stone to Conner, the keeper of his secret internal life, to manipulate everyone to like him more.
I felt increasingly uncomfortable and upset the longer Dear Evan Hansen progressed with its treacly story, especially as Evan sets his sights on Zoe. It’s not as if over the course of his mounting lies that he organically grew closer to this woman who had been a stranger; he has been crushing on her and uses fake emails written by her brother to express his unrequited feelings for her in a song that DEFINITELY does not feel like it was written from a brother to a sister unless we’re talking like Game of Thrones territory (“There’s nothing like your smile / Sort of subtle and perfect and real”). Both of those scenarios are bad, but one of them is so much worse, and that’s the route Dear Evan Hansen goes. The romance is gross, and I knew that the movie was going to let Evan off the hook by the end. Once the truth, the real truth comes out, no one should want anything to do with this person. He says he meant well but he’s also the kind of guy who literally uses the fake suicide note, which all the characters believe to be legit, as an emotional cudgel to quiet and shame his biggest doubter as she starts to pick apart his lies. When that moment happened, I wanted to strongly yell at the screen, “Dear Evan Hansen, you dearly suck.”
There’s a worthy message buried somewhere in this movie about reaching out to people who are struggling in the shadows, that mental illness can affect anyone, and that often those who look like they live perfect lives on the surface might just be better at hiding their pain. This is best exemplified in the supporting character of Alana (Amandla Stenberg), the school president who has a raft of anxieties that she keeps to herself. Her moments of vulnerability feel the most honest in the entire movie, and she’s trying to allow Conner’s death to reach others who might also be struggling, to inspire and save lives through their fledgling organization, The Conner Project. She’s the one who is putting in the actual work, both physical and emotional labor, and she’s the one who Evan shames with the mistaken suicide note toward the end of the movie. The tone of this movie is amiss from early on, and there’s a jaunty musical number where Evan and his one friend comically write fake emails between Evan and Conner. It’s played so light and breezy that you’ll have to recall this is Evan manufacturing the evidence of his fabrications. Why is this played so flippantly and like we’re in on the goofy gag? It’s mishandled. The good intentions Evan Hansen the movie, much like the potential good intentions of Evan Hansen the character, are clouded and ultimately sabotaged by its misguided solipsistic approach to grief.
And it’s taken me this long to talk about another key hindrance and that’s the casting of Platt in the title role. Platt originated the role on Broadway in 2015, and yes he wouldn’t be the first actor in history playing a high schooler who was clearly older, but they have made a gigantic miscalculation in trying to make Platt appear as a youthful 18-year-old (for the record, he was playing a college student almost a decade ago in 2012’s Pitch Perfect). It hit me immediately that Platt does not look right for this role. Immediately. In the awkward attempts to make him more youthful, they have made him look like a shifty undercover cop at a school (“Are you a cop, dear Evan Hansen? You have to tell me if you’re a cop.”). His pasty skin is so smoothed out as to appear like a shiny mask. His hair is oily, stringy, and looks like a terrible wig, except I have read that it is unfortunately real. Evan Hansen looks like he’s wearing a bad hair piece. Platt’s performance also left me cold. His mannered, affectless delivery gave me the impression of a sterile serial killer with every fifth line. This may sound overly harsh, but the presence of Platt and his performance dooms this movie’s bid for believability. I understand wanting to reach out to the man who left his mark on the role early, but there is a reason that Lin-Manuel Miranda played an older supporting role and not the headstrong young lead for the In the Heights movie adaptation earlier this year. Let the movie be its own thing from the stage show. Then again, there’s a rubbernecking fascination with Platt in place, magnifying all the other sins. If there was going to be a bad movie for Dear Evan Hansen, and I question if a good movie was at all possible, then why not go for broke with misapplied creative decisions that make it worse?
A lone saving grace for this movie is that the music is actually pretty solid. Justin Paul and Benj Pasek, the Oscar-winning team behind La La Land and The Greatest Showman, can craft some catchy melodies with soaring choruses. If you only listen to the music you might come away with a different opinion of this show and movie. However, the context of what these songs are meant to serve in the larger story besmirches the good feelings you may derive from them. I suggest casually listening to the soundtrack and forgetting the icky context of every tune. Julianne Moore, as Evan’s overworked, stressed-out mother, has a nice song toward the very end that feels more honest and pared down than much of the drama allows.
I was re-reading my review of World’s Greatest Dad, an underrated movie that managed to make my top ten of that year. It reads so closely to this movie but also how this story needs to be told: “The movie satirizes grief culture with sharp acuity… Suddenly their fallen peer has transformed from the kid nobody liked into the wounded soul that touched all their lives. Bullies reexamine their behavior, girls that never would have given him the time of day now immortalize Kyle, and the faculty that wanted to expel him now wishes to rename the library in his lasting memory. This warm, fuzzy gauze of grief is Goldthwait’s target. He is satirizing how people turn tragedy into hypocritical attitude shifts. He ridicules the easy revision of history under the guise of collective sympathy. Not every youth is necessarily taken before their time. Not everyone was going to grow up to contribute selflessly to society, making the world a better place to live. Not every youth is deserving of canonization. Some people are just jerks from beginning to end, and Goldthwait proposes we do a disservice when we whitewash reality in the name of kindness and good taste.” That sounds like the better version of Dear Evan Hansen to me, except that’s not exactly the kind of musical that people hug over and buy a T-shirt or hat to adorn on the drive home.
If you’re among the fandom for Dear Evan Hansen, I’m sure you’ll find enough to enjoy with director Stephen Chbosky’s big screen adaptation. I don’t want this to sound condescending, but you’ve likely already built the excuses for the characters and the story and made peace with whatever ethical foibles persist, so whether it’s on the stage or on the screen matters little. For those unfamiliar with the popular stage show, I don’t know what your takeaway will be but I’m positive this is not the best introduction. Again, Dear Evan Hansen is not the first musical to deal with complicated ethical scenarios and with morally compromised characters trying to do their best with the hands that fate has dealt them. Empathy is a powerful tool for storytelling, and that’s what Evan Hansen weaponizes for his own personal gain. I found this movie to be uncomfortable, misguided, and emotionally exploitative just like its hero. If the movie was critical of Evan’s bad behavior, then maybe this would be a different matter. It wants you to understand that Evan is hurting and therefore complicated. Well, Evan Hansen, there’s a lot of people in this world that are struggling with mental health issues, and suicide ideation, but they don’t manipulate and exploit those they deem are most important to them. Sorry Evan, and sorry Dear Evan Hansen, but you can stay waving behind a window for all that I care.
Nate’s Grade: D+
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Malignant (2021)
Thank goodness for James Wan. The horror hit-maker has earned enough creative cache in the industry after fostering three separate horror franchises (totaling near two billion dollars), plus two other high-profile action superhero blockbusters, that he can do whatever he wants and thankfully what Wan wants to do is make really weird movies that take tremendous risks. Malignant is a movie that starts slow, appearing to be another in the line of horror thrillers about a psychic connection between a troubled soul and the imaginary friend that seems to be coming back. The movie begins feeling like high-end camp in a flashback, takes a very serious and uncomfortable turn into domestic violence and miscarriages, and then builds into a psychic serial killer investigation where our main character (Annabelle Wallis) is having creepy visions of the killer exacting bloody revenge. For the first half of the movie, there’s a lot to keep up with and it’s easy to get confused with bland characters, their often baffling actions and decisions, and then it plops you down for heavy exposition via asylum VHS tapes. However, from that point forward, Wan lays out all his cards and it’s so absurd, so entrancingly weird, and so enthusiastic about all of it, that you may burst out laughing in the best possible way. Before its drunken rampage of schlocky delight, Malignant is a horror mystery and stylishly directed with some bravura shots and angles. It’s worth your time, but everything is in service to setting up the final act where it gets so much bigger, more bonkers, and deliriously more entertaining. Wan is clearly going for messy giallo horror camp and gives the audience permission to laugh along with the insanity. It acknowledges how goofy looking and bizarre its eventual monster looks, let alone the logistics and circumstances involved, and it all veers into that. Whereas Old felt like M. Night Shyamalan was trying to escape camp and kept falling back into its morass, Malignant feels expressly like the movie James Wan wishes to make. There’s even a spooky abandoned child experiment-heavy hospital on a cliff, and rather than have something spooky happen, the character then safely arrives back home with an armload of incriminating medical VHS tapes. The deliberate asides, misdirects, and eventual revelations feel so purposeful to yank around the audience and deliver a frantic and unpredictable ride of a movie that leaves the audience screaming and howling with laughter. I can understand people hating Malignant. I can understand people loving Malignant. I can understand people having trouble even making sense of Malignant. However, you cannot watch this movie and have a passive response. I wish I could have seen this in a packed theater pre-COVID. I think I figured out my inexpensive Halloween costume for 2021.
Nate’s Grade: B+
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Misha and the Wolves (2021)
The Sundance documentary Misha and the Wolves, now available on Netflix streaming, is a movie about trauma, lies, and ultimately proves to be unfulfilling due to the circumstances of its own narrative limitations, both in subject and approach. It’s worth watching at only 90 interview-packed minutes, but it’s also a case of a movie that could have gone much deeper into a troubled subject that demanded more scrutiny and psychological examination than what the film has to offer.
Misha Defonseca was an elderly Belgian immigrant living in a small Pennsylvania town when she decided to share her personal story of survival one day at her community synagogue. When she was seven years old, her parents were taken by Nazis during the Holocaust. She was living with a Catholic family and hiding her real identity but she wanted to be with her parents, so she set out on foot across the country to find them, and in the process stumbled upon a pack of wolves who grew to accept her as one of their own. Misha’s story was immediately engaging, and a local publisher snapped up the rights to sell her story. Oprah’s talk show wanted to make Misha’s story their next book club selection. Disney wanted to buy the film rights. This story was going to be huge, but then Misha backed down from both media suitors. It picked up in Europe where Misha traveled and gave lectures on her spellbinding experience and they made it into a French movie in 2008. It is a truly remarkable story. The problem is that her unbelievable true story wasn’t actually true.
It’s a story that even one interview subject admits sounded “too fantastic to be true,” and in hindsight it’s one of those stories that I’m sure many would feel foolish for believing – a little girl at the age of seven trekking hundreds of miles, on her own, through the war, in enemy territory, and then accepted by a friendly wolf pack. It definitely beggars belief but nobody wants to think skeptically of someone who claims to be a Holocaust survivor. I wouldn’t want to assume the worst of anyone’s personal experiences during such a hellish time. The primary interview subject is Misha’s first publisher she sued who is the one that first started investigating the voracity of this amazing tale. She relates how disgusted she felt doing what she did, suspecting the worst in someone who had experienced her own set of traumas. She says she felt like a villain in a story that she didn’t sign up for. Admittedly, she could have researched Misha’s claims early on to verify her account but chose not to because she was thinking of how much money she could make. However, there have been so many amazing tales of survival from the atrocities of the Holocaust so maybe Misha could have been accepted by a pack of wolves and offered protection. Maybe she did stab and kill a Nazi as a child like she said. Maybe. That need to believe survivors and the fear of calling out the storyteller for their accompanying proof is what Misha exploited to continue spinning her phony story. She exploited the good will of being a survivor and the communal sympathies of others. Why she did what she did is another matter that frustratingly goes unexplored.
There is one big narrative twist that I was predicting early on and that I think most viewers will be able to anticipate once they start asking their own questions, but for the sake of spoilers I’ll caution that this paragraph is going to talk about this gambit because I don’t know how to discuss the implications and how it dulls the movie without being specific. With that being said, early in the movie we have Misha being interviewed but there are limits to what she is responding to, limits that become more notable as her story continues at points that you’re positive a documentary filmmaker would want their subject’s direct personal input rather than having others speak for them. That’s when I began suspecting that the Misha on camera was going to be revealed to be an actor, and two-thirds of the way through the film that is exactly what happens. Our fake Misha pulls off a wig and peels off the elaborate makeup. Aha, a story about a phony Holocaust survivor has itself made use of fictitious representations. I can understand some viewers feeling hoodwinked and perhaps a little angry from this deception. I can also understand why the filmmakers elected to go this route thematically so that they could replicate the feel of what Misha’s friends and neighbors and supporters may have felt. There’s also the very pragmatic issue of not having access to the subject of your documentary. It’s a missing hole that seriously hobbles the impact and reach of the movie, and that’s where Misha and the Wolves starts to disappoint. It’s understandable to supply your own stand-in version of Misha to respond to the claims and accusations. It’s a necessary perspective. Once the jig is up, and you know for certain that Misha will not be available to explain anything, then you realize the movie is a whodunnit where it would have been far more engrossing as a whytheydunnit. There are questions we want answered for such a heinous fabrication, and I wish the film had been structured not in the details of uncovering Misha’s false identity but in trying to explain why someone would do such a thing. The movie is lacking psychological insight and without that it becomes any other well-made but disposable episode of ordinary true crime television.
It begs the question that I wish the documentary would have gone much deeper into, namely why would anyone fashion a Holocaust story for themselves? Defonseca is far from the only person who fabricated a story about their Holocaust history. Rosemarie Kocz was an artist who said she escaped from two concentration camps and whose art hung in museums around the world including Yad Vashem in Israel. She was a fraud. Herman Rosenblat embellished his own Holocaust survival with a love story of reconnecting with the young girl who gave him apples in the camp and that was completely made up. Joseph Hirt said he met Dr. Mengele and then, upon confrontation, said he had lied to “keep the memories alive” about Holocaust history. That justification offends me and likely should offend you too, dear reader. The numerous dead do not need the stories of phony victims to keep their memories alive. When people greedily co-opt another human’s tragedy as their own, they are knowingly diminishing it by trying to transform this horror into something appealing about their own life story and experiences. If anything, these stories are making it more likely for pernicious Holocaust denial to spread, with deniers pointing to these phony personal accounts and saying, “See.” It dishonors the dead and their memory.
The story behind Misha and the Wolves is interesting and inflammatory but also very surface-level in substance ultimately, about uncovering the truth behind a liar’s lies. There is a certain level of interest in watching how the investigation picks up momentum and makes the necessary connections to finally reveal the disappointing truth, but then the movie doesn’t go a step further. It’s about how a liar’s story fell apart but there seems more potential with exploring why people falsify such stories of real-life trauma. For Misha, her own personal experiences involved tragedy at the hands of Nazis, so why was that not enough? Misha said that her story might not be reality but it is her reality. I don’t fully understand her position, but I will likely never understand why someone like Misha Defonseca does what they do. I suppose there’s an inherent attention-seeking intent. Maybe a projection of pretending to be someone else, a person who has survived amazing ordeals and come out the other side. One of the film’s subjects, Evelyn Haendel, a Holocaust survivor and investigator, declares Misha both a victim and a villain, but she dismisses the idea of these fabrications as acceptable outlets for troubled souls. In an era of increasing Holocaust denialism, these phony accounts are unfortunate fuel and are even more incendiary. Misha and the Wolves is an okay documentary on a topic that demands more attention.
Nate’s Grade: B-
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Old (2021)
Old, M. Night Shyamalan’s latest thriller, seems ripe for parody, perhaps even upon delivery in theaters. The “can’t even” bizarre energy of this movie is off the charts and bounces back and forth between hilarious camp and head-scratching seriousness with several frustrating and absurd artistic decisions by Shyamalan. If you viewed this movie as a strange comedy, then you would be right. If you viewed it as an existential horror movie, then you would be right. If you viewed it as a heightened satire on high-concept Twilight Zone parables, then you would be right.
We follow a family on a vacation to a Caribbean resort. Guy (Gael Garcia Bernal) and Prisca (Vicky Krieps) are keeping secrets from their two children, six-year-old Trent (Nolan River) and eleven-year-old Maddox (Alexa Swinton). The parents are planning on separating and Prisca has a tumor, though benign for the time being. The hotel manager offers an exclusive secluded beach for those who would really enjoy this special experience. Guy, Prisca, and their kids join another family with a six-year-old daughter, a married couple, and an old lady with her dog, and they drive off into the jungle. Except this beach is not what it appears to be. There are strange artifacts of past visitors, and every time people try and pass back through the path to leave, they pass out. Also, everyone is aging rapidly, about one year for every 30 minutes elapsed. The children become adults, the elderly succumb first, and everyone worries they may not ever leave.
Old is not one of Shyamalan’s worst movies but it’s hard to classify it as good without attaching conditional modifiers. It might be good, if you enjoy movies that are campy and schlocky. It might be good, if you enjoy movies that throw anything and everything out there just because. It might be good, if you enjoy movies that produce a supernatural concept, drop rules established whenever convenient, and then try to wrap everything up neatly with an absurdly thorough explanation for everything. It might be good, if you think Shyamalan peaked with 2006’s Lady in the Water. This is going to be a polarizing experience. I think Shyamalan doesn’t fully understand what tone he’s going for and how best to develop his crazy storyline in a way that makes it meaningful beyond the general WTF curiosity. Even when it goes off the rails, Old is entertaining but some of that is unintentional. There are points where it feels like Shyamalan is trying for camp and other points where it feels like he is aiming for something higher and just can’t help but stumble, Sisyphean-style, back again into the pit of camp absurdity.
The premise is a grabber and takes the contained thriller conceit that Hollywood loves for its cheap cost and applies a supernatural sheen. It’s based upon a French graphic novel, Sandcastle by Pierre-Oscar Levy and Frederik Peeters, though Shyamalan has taken several creative liberties. It’s an intriguing idea of rapid aging being the real trap, and it forces many characters to confront their own fears of mortality and aging but also parental failures. Every parent likely thinks with some degree of regret about how quickly their little ones grow up. These adults have to watch their children rapidly age in only hours and not have any way to stop the relentless speed of time. The extra level of fear is produced by the fact that mentally the children are still where they began that morning. Even as Trent ages into the body of a teenager, he still has the mind of a six-year-old, and that is a horror unto itself. As his body rapidly changes, his parents are helpless to stop this terrifying jolt into adulthood and unable to shield their child from the terror of physical maturation but being trapped in the mindset of a child who cannot keep up with their mutating body. There are definite body horror and existential dread potential here, though Shyamalan veers too often into lesser schlocky thriller territory. For him, it’s more the mystery or the foiled escape attempts than actually dwelling on the emotional anxiety of the unique predicament. There’s enough born from this premise that it keeps you watching to the end, even as you might be questioning the actions of the characters, their ability to somehow miraculously guess the right answers as a group about what is happening, and the inconsistency of the rules about what can and cannot happen on this accursed beach.
There is one sequence that deserves its own detailed analysis for just how truly bizarre and avoidable it could have been, and to do so I will need to invoke the warning of spoilers for this paragraph. One of the other six-year-olds, Kara, gets a whole traumatic experience all her own that is morally and artistically questionable. Midway through the movie, Kara (Eliza Scanlan) and Trent (Alex Wolff) come back from a jaunt off screen together and they’re older and Kara is clearly pregnant. Given the rules that were established, that means that these six-year-old children experimented with their newly adult bodies to the point of fertilization (oh God, writing this makes me wince). I must reiterate that these characters are still six-years-old. Before you start realizing the gross implications, Kara is quickly entering labor and within seconds the baby is suddenly born and within seconds the baby just as suddenly dies silently from, what we’re told, was a lack of attention. What he hell, Shyamalan? Did you have to throw a dead baby into your movie to make us feel the visceral horror of the situation? It feels tacky and needlessly triggering for some moviegoers. This entire sequence doesn’t impact the plot in any meaningful way. Kara could have died in childbirth because of the circumstances of the beach. That would be tragic but matter. Just having her get suddenly pregnant and then suddenly the recipient of a deceased child seems needlessly cruel and misguided. And then, in the aftereffect of this trauma, Kara’s mom tearfully recounts her first love, a man she still thinks about to this day but doesn’t understand why. What does this have to do with anything? Re-read this entire scenario and let it sink in how truly uncomfortable and gross it comes across. It could have been avoided, it could have even been better applied to the characters and themes of the story, but it’s empty, callous shock value.
Another hindrance of Old is that the characters lack significant development and nobody ever talks like a recognizable human being. As Shyamalan has embraced being more and more an unabashedly genre filmmaker, he’s lost sight on how to write realistic people. You see this throughout 2008’s The Happening with its curious line readings and clunky, inauthentic dialogue being legendary and unintentionally hilarious (“You should be more interested in science, Jake. You know why? Because your face is perfect.”). I feel like Old is the most reminiscent of The Happening, the last time Shyamalan went for broke with ecological horror. The way these characters talk, it sounds like their dialogue was generated by an A.I. instead. “You have a beautiful voice. I can’t wait to hear it when you’re older,” Prisca says, which is a strange way for a parent to say, “I like what you have but wishing it was better.” She also has the line to her husband, “When you talk about the future, I don’t feel seen.” There’s also a running theme of characters just blurting out their occupations as introductions, “I’m a doctor,” followed by, “I’m a nurse,” like it’s career day on the beach. Frustratingly, all the characterization ends once the people wind up on this fated beach. Many of these characters are simply defined by their maladies and professions. This character has seizures. This character has a blood disorder. This character has a tumor. This character has MS. Noticing a pattern? You would expect that with such a unique and challenging conflict that it would better reveal these people, push them to make changes, especially as change is thrust upon them whether they like it or not. Imagine your uncle being cursed with rapid aging but all he does is still complain about his lousy neighbor. That limited tunnel vision is what Old struggles with. And one of the characters is a famous rapper named Mid-Sized Sedan but without a hint or irony or showbiz satire. Mid-Sized Sedan!
The way Shyamalan shoots this movie also greatly increases its camp appeal. This movie is coursing with energy and contrarianism. Shyamalan is often moving his camera in swooping pans and finding visual arrangements that can be frustrating and obtuse. Sometimes it works, like when we have the child characters with their backs to the camera and we’re anticipating how they have changed and what they might look like. Too often, it feels like Shyamalan trying to interject something more into a scene like he’s unsure that the dramatic tension of the writing is enough. There are scenes where what’s important almost seems incidental to the visual arrangement of the shot. Some of the sudden push-ins and arrangements made me laugh because it took me out of the moment by making the moment feel even more ridiculous. This heightened mood to the point of hilarity is the essence of camp and that’s why it feels like Shyamalan can’t help himself. If he’s trying to dig for something deeper and more profound, it’s not happening with his exaggerated and mannered stylistic choices being a distraction.
The ending, which I will not spoil, tries to do too much in clearing up the central mysteries. It feels overburdened to the point of self-parody, having characters pout expository explanations for all that came before and supplying motivation as to what was happening. Still, Shyamalan cannot keep things alone, and he keeps extending his conclusion with more and more false endings to complicate matters; the more he attempts to tidy up the less interesting the movie becomes. I would have been happy to accept no explanation whatsoever for why the beach behaves as it does. The best Twilight Zone episodes succeed from the mystery and development rather than the eventual explanation (“Oh, it was all a social experiment/nightmare/whatever”). Once you begin to pick apart the explanation with pesky questions, the illusion of its believability melts away. I had the same issue with 2019’s Us. The more Jordan Peele tried to find a way to explain his underground doppelganger plot, the more incredulous and sillier it became.
Old is a Shyamalan movie for all good and bad. It’s got a strong central premise and some memorable moments but those memorable moments are also both good and bad. Some of the moments have to be seen to be believed, and some of those moments are simply the odd choices that Shyamalan makes as a filmmaker as well as a screenwriter. It’s hard to say whether the movie’s weirdness will be appealing or revolting to the individual viewer. It feels like camp without intentionally going for camp. Rather, Shyamalan seems to be going for B-movie schlock whereas his older movies took B-movie premises and attempted to elevate them with themes, well-rounded characters, and moving conclusions (don’t forget the requisite twist endings). The worst sin a movie can commit is being boring, and Old is rarely that. I can’t say it’s good for the entire duration of its overextended 100 minutes but it does not prove boring.
Nate’s Grade: C-
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Glitter (2001) [Review Re-View]
Originally released September 21, 2001:
It must be seen to be believed. A new college crap-fest drinking game has begun. Begin the Glitter midnight shows! A new age is upon us! Here are a few handful of Glitter‘s bon-mots it serves up to its audience:
-Mariah Carey is shown leaving her real mom at age 8 with her kitten. Somewhere through Glitter she has a fight with her boyfriend and takes her cat (yes the very same immortal cat that must have been pushing 20) and leaves.
-She has a fight with said boyfriend and they both try and write a love song to show their remorse. Except they BOTH come up with the EXACT same song word for word, note for note, and NO ONE thinks this is the creepiest thing ever.
-The movie freakin’ ends with Carey’s boyfriend getting shot and killed. Yes, this is truly how the thing ends. Oh, like any of you cared about plot spoilers anyway.
-Da Brat is in it for “comic relief.”
-The movie is inexplicably set in the 1980s for no reason.
Anyone would have to be crazy thinking Glitter ever remotely resembled art. It’s so bad it’s awesome to watch. Bring some friends over, open up some alcohol, and let the fun times begin.
Nate’s Grade: F, like it matters though
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WRITER REFLECTIONS 20 YEARS LATER
Apologies to Mariah Carey, but it’s impossible for me to think about Glitter without thinking about 9/11. I’m not intending to make some snide, crass joke about Carey’s film debut/vanity project bombing so spectacularly considering the tragic terrorist attack that changed everything occurred the week prior to its release. 9/11 was the seminal event of the twenty-first century and a “where were you on that day?” question for Millennials and older generations. As we approach twenty years since that fateful day, it’s hard not to reminisce and pontificate about tragedy, art, and possible catharsis, and yes, eventually Glitter will factor into this prosaic essay too.
Every person has a story. I was a sophomore in college, walking to the campus center to collect a copy of The New York Times, a subscription had been a requirement of my Political Science 101 class. I grabbed my day’s edition and another student said, “Hey, did you hear? Planes hit the World Trade Center.” I remember it not really processing for me and wondering what he was talking about. I went back to my dorm, turned on the news, and was quickly dumbstruck. I eventually wandered into my friend Amanda Hickey’s dorm and we stared glued at the TV as the towers fell and I remember the news people trying to square what was happening. It wasn’t just the south wall coming down, it was the entire building. As the day continued, and more attacks commenced, I remember one girl shaking saying she had just been to the Trade Center (over six months ago, so not exactly like a near miss), and another girl scared that our Jewish-heavy suburb could be the next target. To be fair, it was an alarming time, and nobody quite knew how many more potential planes were to be hijacked next. Nobody quite knew how many potential targets there would be. The federal buildings across the country were shut down. Parents pulled their kids out of school. We all felt vulnerable. Some of us more than others. I had a friend at school, Gavin, who was from New York and whose mother worked in the Trade Center. He was wrecked trying to get a hold of her, and fortunately she did make it out of the second tower and survived. I remember the numbness and feeling like you were watching a movie, like it wasn’t really happening, it was only special effects. It couldn’t possibly be real.
In the weeks and months to come from 9/11, America was looking for an outlet, looking for some kind of unifying force to heal, and that reluctant recipient ended up being Glitter. The movie was clearly intended to be a vehicle for Carey to stretch herself as an actress. It didn’t turn out that way for her though Carey did a more measured (and less glamorous! they always wanted us to know for publicity) supporting turn later in 2009’s Precious. Glitter was a project Carey had been working towards for years. At the start of 2001, Carey signed a $100-million-dollar contract for five albums for Virgin Records. She left her first husband, the controlling music exec Tommy Mottola, in 1998, left Columbia Records, and felt the pressure to deliver. She was one of the best-selling, most successful artists of the 1990s and was declared Billboard’s Artist of the Decade. From July 2001, Carey began behaving erratically. In promotion on MTV’s Total Request Live, she appeared with an ice cream cart, performed an awkward strip tease, and was shortly after hospitalized for a breakdown. On her website she posted: “I’m trying to understand things in life right now and so I really don’t feel that I should be doing music right now… All I really want is [to] just be me and that’s what I should have done in the first place … I don’t say this much but guess what, I don’t take care of myself.” She did not promote Glitter. The soundtrack was released on… September 11 and was also Carey’s lowest-selling album of her career. The movie was released on September 21 and grossed only four million. In 2002, Virgin bought out her $100-million contract for only $28 million.
With the wounds of 9/11 so fresh, it was easy to pile onto Glitter, the first new Hollywood release, as the bad movie that the nation needed right now to hate watch to feel better about itself. The New York Times said it was “an unintentionally hilarious compendium of time-tested cinematic cliches.” Variety said, “as phony a vehicle as one could concoct for a wannabe movie star.” The Village Voice said, “A heart-wrenching debacle from the start of the gun.” The Miami Herald said, “The kind of movie only 11-year-old girls who dot their I’s with hearts would find bearable.” Roger Ebert said the film lacked joy. The New York Daily News said it was “the worst performance by a pop star in a dramatic role since Madonna suited up for Shanghai Surprise.” The Washington Post said the movie was more a showcase for Carey’s breasts. The film appeared on numerous Worst of the Year lists and was nominated for 6 Razzies including Worst Film, with Carey winning the ignoble Worst Actress Award (over fellow nominees, and future Academy nominees, Penelope Cruz, Charlize Theron, and Angelina Jolie).
My review was among that throng so eager to find an outlet for our pain, a needed distraction from the harsh reality of wall-to-wall news. I gave the movie a failing grade and declared, “It must be seen to be believed. A new college crap-fest drinking game has begun. Begin the Glitter midnight shows! A new age is upon us!” Suffice to say, Glitter never entered the holy circuit of so-bad-it’s-good movies. I’ve never watched it again in the ensuring twenty years, and upon finally coming back to Glitter in 2021, I have concluded that it’s just thoroughly mediocre and dull. It’s not a good movie. It’s a limp retelling of A Star is Born with a weak romance between Carey’s character Billie Frank and her music producer boyfriend Julian who eventually dies, killed by none other than Terrence Howard (Iron Man), playing a scornful competing music producer who demanded money for “leasing” Billie from his employ as a backup singer. It’s just so thoroughly dull. It’s filled with listless songs from Carey, tracks she had reportedly been working on for years beforehand, and the rise to stardom is absent anything engaging. There are a handful of quirks, like the fact that Billie’s cat seems to be immortal and that she and her boyfriend, separated after a fight, both pen the exact same makeup song. These are fleeting moments but only moments of bizarre fascination. The movie is just an earnest, cloying, and altogether boring retelling of a formula you’ve seen in a thousand other dull movies. It’s not even great at being bad. Everything about Glitter is dull, middling, and not worth your time. Freddy Got Fingered was clearly the worst film of 2001 and still resonates as one of the worst films.
So why did everyone delight in ripping apart this mediocre movie from a troubled pop star? Maybe some were looking for a scapegoat for derision, something to feel superior to at a time where political upheaval made many of us feel like we were plummeting and lost. Maybe it was simply a distraction at a point of feeling overwhelmed by the elevated seriousness of the world, of the news, of our post-9/11 reality and its implications. In some way, Glitter was the first step in the process of art as processing for trauma. I’m not being hyperbolic. We needed Glitter.
In the years to come, a question emerged whether American audiences would want to see movies examining 9/11 and the subsequent War in Iraq. In 2006, Paul Greengrass directed a stirring recreation of the events of Flight 93 on 9/11, the one plane that crashed before its intended target, believed to be the U.S. Capitol. It was my top film of 2006, and Greengrass was nominated for Best Director at the Academy Awards. I remember a conversation where the other person argued it was “too soon” for these kinds of movies. That was the criticism you heard repeated, “too soon,” though that determination will always be different for everyone. Some may find the act of viewership with drama as a therapeutic exercise that can help process complex feelings from trauma. Storytelling can lead people to potential catharsis, a release of heavy emotions, and maybe even a sense of clarity or closure. I remember being an emotional wreck during my 2006 screening and listening to the handful of other people in the theater openly sob. How does one eat a bucket of popcorn to such a movie? The same could be said of a movie about the Holocaust, or slavery, or any of the horrors of history depicted on screen. Storytelling is how we process, learn, and relate to history and its numerous dicey moments. With art, we can possibly achieve catharsis through recognition. Again, not everyone will follow the same therapeutic path. I can completely understand if a person declares they never need to see a movie about the Holocaust, but I would lament that they will miss out on some of cinema’s masterpieces of drama. Art allows us to better know ourselves and to heal and better ourselves under the right context.
If Glitter had come out in 2002, I doubt it would have received the intensity of the critical drubbing it did in the week after 9/11. It’s not a good movie today. It will never be a good movie, but it’s not one of the worst movies of all time, or even of 2001, and the community went overboard because we needed an escape and a collective joke that we could all be amused from amidst the grind of tragedy and tumult. I think even the scathing and sexist critiques of Carey at the time would be pulled back for sensitivity of a woman clearly going through mental health issues. The Razzies nominated Carey’s breasts for Worst Onscreen Pair, a strange and icky joke that I still don’t even know is intended to be defamatory or gross admiration. With twenty years of hindsight, as we approach the anniversary of 9/11, I’ve become less hostile to Glitter. It came out during a time of national psychological need and served a purpose, entertainment even if it was misidentified as so-bad-it’s-good in the zeal to find a powerful escape. The history of Glitter will always be tied to a national tragedy but, oddly enough, its legacy shouldn’t be about Carey’s faulty acting career, or personal troubles, but as the healing nature of art itself. Take that for what it’s worth as you’re doing the math to figure out how old Billie’s cat is.
Re-Review Grade: C-
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Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021)
After dominating the cinemas for over the last decade, Marvel took 2020 off thanks to that great menace even its own superheroes couldn’t overpower. Now in 2021, we’re eager for those big popcorn thrills of old, of a time before lockdowns and denials and vaccine misinformation. There’s a gauntlet of Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) movies coming down the chute, including The Eternals (November), Spider-Man 3 (December), Doctor Strange 2 (March), Thor 4 (May), Black Panther 2 (July), and Captain Marvel 2 (November). That’s eight movies from July 2021 to November 2022, and Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings might just be the one that has the least recognition with the general public (I had never heard of him, sorry). And yet, I entered a theater for the first time in two months to see Marvel’s latest superhero blockbuster on the big screen, and as the MCU’s first foray into the fantastical world of martial arts epics, Shang-Chi is a mostly agreeable success in the realm of expert face punching.
Shang-Chi (Simu Lei) is the son of a very dangerous and powerful man, Xu Wenwu (Tony Leung), who has lived for thousands of years thanks to the power of ten magic rings that give him tremendous power to annihilate armies. Shang-Chi ran away as a teenager, leaving his sister Xialing (Meng-er Zhang) behind. She sends word requesting her brother’s assistance; dear old dad is on the warpath, and the two siblings might be the only ones who can stop him. Shang-Chi, living as Shawn in San Francisco, is trying to avoid larger responsibility as a valet with his good pal Katy (Awkwafina). However, he cannot ignore the assassins his father has sent, and so he and Katy travel back to China to regroup with Shang-Chi’s sister and face his destiny.
This is the most fantasy-heavy movie of a universe that previously defined the magic from the Thor universe as just another advanced form of science. The entire third act looks like it’s taking place in Narnia itself; legitimately, the color palate and overly lit, CGI-assisted green landscapes reminded me so much of the 2005 adaptation of C.S. Lewis’ novel. Within the extended prologue over the history of the ten rings, the movie is acclimating you toward its larger-than-life universe that it treats with sincerity and graceful appreciation. The courtship of Shang-Chi’s parents is handled in that flirt-fight style reminiscent in classic martial arts films, and the balletic wire work and dreamy slow-motion, set to the soothing flute-heavy musical score, evokes romantic memories of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Very early on, the work goes into convincing you that Marvel is taking this assignment seriously, and I appreciated that assurance and the follow-through. From a pure filmmaking standpoint, Shang-Chi works as a martial arts action film because it’s filmed and edited like one should be. The camerawork is vividly fluid and consistently roaming around the space of battle to better showcase the choreography and effort of the performers. The editing is also likewise very smooth and patient, with lots of longer takes blending together so that we can see multiple moves and counter moves, and if there are throws, we’ll travel with the fighters to continue the fight. I enjoyed a fight taking place on multiple levels of scaffolding. It all made my girlfriend nauseated in our theater, so you might be affected as well if you have a susceptibility to cinematic motion sickness. This movie allows you in on the martial arts fun.
I wasn’t expecting this kind of leap from co-writer/director Destin Daniel Cretton. This man was responsible for one of the best films of 2013, and the 2010s-decade, Short Term 12, which starred (drumroll please) future Oscar-winner Brie Larson, future Oscar-winner Rami Malek, future Oscar-nominee LaKeith Stanfield, Kaitlyn Dever (Booksmart), Stephanie Beatriz (Brooklyn 99, In the Heights) and the best-known actor at the time of release, John Gallagher Jr. (HBO’s The Newsroom). Wow that cast is an all-timer. This is like the Millennial Outsiders with a cast of up-and-coming actors who have gone on to ascendant and award-winning careers. It’s also a hard-hitting, deeply emotional and upending movie worth your time. Cretton has stuck to adult dramas based upon real stories of people struggling through the justice system (Just Mercy) and parental dysfunction (The Glass Castle). A big-budget martial arts epic I wasn’t expecting, and perhaps the Marvel Machine makes it easy for indie auteurs to plug right in, but it feels like Cretton clearly has an affection and at least a tacit understanding of favorable stylistic genre choices. At this point I shouldn’t discount what filmmakers can make those big artistic leaps with a studio project. James Gunn can go from Super to the Guardians of the Galaxy, and so Cretton can go from Short Term 12 to helming a large-scale, CGI-heavy martial arts fantasy.
Another aspect I found pleasantly surprising was the amount of work put into its primary villain and the ensuring father/son dynamic. I’m not going to say that Xu Wenwu, a.k.a. The Real Mandarin, is one of the more complicated or nuanced villains in MCU history, but he’s given more dimension than a simple “destroy and/or conquer the world” motivation. In fact, that was the motivation for the man before he met Jiang Li (Fela Chen), Shang-Chi’s eventual mother. Real Mandarin (or RN as I’ll refer to him because I’m lazy) was going about the whole conquer and raze kingdoms thing for thousands of years, establishing another one of those all-powerful yet still clandestine and very vague shadow societies pulling the levers of power. He found a person who made him want to reform, to put his old ways of violence behind, and it’s her death that spurs him back to his views of power absolving all conflicts, so the most powerful is the one who can have the most say and protect the people close to him or her. If he had the full power of those ten rings, ordinary gangsters wouldn’t have dared to threaten or harm his loved ones. He trained his son to follow by example, and despite the fact that he sent trained killers after his son rather than a more constructive and clearer message, RN declares his love for his children. He is moving forward to return his beloved back to the land of the living. Being motivated by grief and wanting to see a departed loved one no matter the cost is a relatable struggle and one that brings degrees of nuance that Leung can imbue with his great pained, hangdog expressions. Having a father be the villain but still love his children and be primarily motivated by bringing back his dead wife and honestly assessing how she made him a better person is a breath of fresh-ish air.
Liu (Kim’s Convenience) is easily charming and demonstrates a sharp affinity for the martial arts training and choreography. With the longer takes and clean edits, it’s clear that Liu is performing many of the moves, and he moves with great skill and balance to believably crack some skulls. A fight aboard a city bus is our real intro into seeing this man as he’s avoided, as a well-trained fighting machine, the identity of his father that he’s been attempting to run away from. Liu has a self-effacing charm to him that doesn’t cross over into smug. Awkwafina (The Farewell) is her reliable comic relief asset, though too often the movie resorts to just spotlighting her for a riff or one-liner when the context doesn’t provide the opportunity. It’s rather mystifying why her supporting character, a normal human, would accompany her pal into the word of underground martial arts ninja conspiracy fantasy, let alone that she could take up a bow and arrow and becomes a valuable member of a fighting force. Leung (2046, The Grandmaster) is just movie royalty, so getting him to read the phone book would have been an acceptable start. He sits out for long periods and his absence is noted. He brings such a heaviness, a quiet yet dignified despondency to the character, and there are several instances where he undersells his character’s danger and power, which just makes him so much more intimidating. I feel like Leung is finding connections with the somber, brooding heartache of his War Kong Wai roles, and yes film nerds, I just made that connection for a Marvel movie.
Not everything quite works in this MCU outing. There are several jumps in the screenplay that feel like further revision or clarity were necessary. I don’t really know why Shang-Chi is finally able to take on his father at the end except for some abstract concept of, I guess, believing in himself more. The power of the rings feels a little too unexplored for deserving of the movie’s subtitle. The rings come almost as an afterthought for much of the movie. There are a few moments where I was trying to connect how characters understood what they were supposed to do in any given moment, and I just gave up, which is kind of what the film also feels like it’s doing. There are clear characters included with the sole decision to sell merchandise. I don’t know if the nation’s children will be screaming for a faceless winged furry ottoman but that’s the gamble Marvel execs took and by God, you’re going to get many appearances. The sister addition to the movie feels decidedly undernourished, like she’s drafting from the father/son relationship that’s getting all the narrative attention. It feels like occasionally the movie pans to her to nod and go, “Oh yeah, me too.” The visual color palate is so brightly colored for so long, and then once the big splashy Act Three battle commences between CGI good and CGI evil, the visuals become so grey and murky and definitely hard to keep track of in the scrum. I wish the fantasy rules were more streamlined and explored rather than feeling grafted on when needed and forgotten when inconvenient, but this is their first foray into this sub-genre of action and while Marvel doesn’t need a sliding scale at this point, it’s still a moderate achievement.
Look, this isn’t exactly The Raid or Ip Man or anything that will challenge the most heart-pounding, intense, acrobatic heights of the crossover martial arts epic. Consider it a solid effort at watering down a Hero or House of Flying Daggers and switching over to the typical Marvel formula final act complete with onslaught of weightless CGI. Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings is a fun action movie that does just enough right to land it in the cushy middle-of-the-middle for the annuls of the MCU (I would rank it around the level of Black Panther). The fight choreography and presentation, as well as the exploration of the father/son dynamics, are surprisingly refined, which is good considering one provides the entertainment value for the eyes and the other the emotional connection for everything to matter more than flashes of punches and kicks and fireballs. It doesn’t transcend its genre or the tried-and-true Marvel formula, but it’s packed with enough to even keep a casual fan entertained for most of its 130 minutes. It’s more of a one-off that doesn’t require extensive knowledge of the two dozen other MCU titles, so Shang-Chi might be just the right Saturday morning cartoon of a movie to introduce new people to the larger world of Marvel movies.
Nate’s Grade: B
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Cinderella (2021)
Do we need another rendition of good ole’ Cinderella, especially only a few years after the Disney live-action version? The new Cinderella starring pop star Camila Cabello is a surprise jukebox musical, and it’s irreverent where it should be and progressive where social critiques are warranted with the source and historical context. In short, it’s a fleeting but fun experience that’s a winning 100 minutes for families with young children and adults who enjoy a peppy, self-referential musical. Written and directed by Kay Cannon (Pitch Perfect), this movie is packed with singing and dancing to the point that the talking only makes up perhaps twenty percent of the movie. This choice proves to be a durable source of energy and keeps the pacing running smooth. It’s also convenient because we don’t need extra time explaining the setup and character dynamics that we’re all so familiar with at this point thanks to the umpteenth renditions. The mash-up of popular songs kept me amused and guessing what would appear next, and the original songs contributed by Cabello have a nice soaring uplift to them as well as memorable hooks. There’s a “What a Man”/”Seven Nation Army” mashup at a ball that gave me strong Moulin Rouge vibes, especially with all that chaotic sashaying petticoat editing. The movie is also funnier than I expected, with consistent wise-cracking and one-liners that had me laughing and critiques about the patriarchal system from a progressive, feminist perspective. The evil stepmother, played by Idina Menzel (Frozen), is even given her own song detailing her tragic history of being a musical prodigy who had to give it all up in a society that only valued her as marriage material. Even she gets consideration and empathy. The winking feminist criticisms won’t be new to anyone over the age of twelve, but it’s still welcomed even as the film skates over the discordant plot elements to keep things light. The film delivers some bon mots of political thought to go along with its sugary sweetness of a contemporary sing-a-long musical that is easy to digest. Cabello has a natural charisma to her and is surprisingly adept with comedy, able to turn on a dime and deliver a hilarious self-effacing remark. She’s far better at acting than you might believe. If you have no interest in another version of Cinderella, I understand the fatigue with the property. However, this Cinderella understands your fatigue, provides something light and airy, with actors who seem to be legitimately having fun, and it’s got a consistent feminist perspective that chides the prevalent problems with the source material. It works as a family film and even as a diverting jukebox musical for adults whose tastes run a little sweet and a little tart.
Nate’s Grade: B
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