Author Archives: natezoebl
Daddio (2024)
A lengthy conversation playing out in real-time between two strangers who open up to one another over the course of one taxi drive from the airport. If it feels Richard Linklater-adjacent, that’s because writer/director Christy Hall (I Am Not Okay With This) has certainly been influenced by the chatty likes of Linklater, as she sticks us in the cab for the entire duration of that 90-minute ride and movie. We have Dakota Johnson as the fare, a woman returning home after visiting family with secrets and shame that she’ll reveal over the course of this cab ride. We have Sean Penn as the cab driver, a seen-it-all cynic who keeps pushing for more answers and conversation from his passenger. The problem with movies based solely around conversations is that the conversation has to be mesmerizing, exhibiting great care to impart artful and authentic character details that make us reconsider these people, and hopefully provide challenges to preconceived norms and ingrained perspectives that can foster reflective growth. Nobody wants to watch a movie about a trivial conversation over 90 minutes. The problem with Daddio is that it’s not really a two-way conversation; Penn acts more as an interrogator, slowly chipping away at the layers that Johnson’s young woman feels comfortable presenting publicly. The dialogue is fine but unremarkable, eschewing overly stylized verbosity for something more natural, but even with that choice the details we are granted are clumsy and minimal. Get ready for lots of protracted pauses awaiting texting replies. The acting is fairly solid throughout, especially Johnson since it is a whole showcase for her in that backseat. If we’re going to be riding shotgun on a 90-minute conversation, I guess I’m just looking for far more scintillating details, whether it’s from the characters, their conflicts, or just their gregarious dialogue. If we’re stuck with two people, let’s be stuck with two people we actually might want to share a cab with.
Nate’s Grade: C+
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Didi (2024)
It feels slightly strange when you acknowledge that coming-of-age movies have long-surpassed your own age of adolescent personal discovery. With Sundance indie Didi, we’ve now brought that time frame up to 2008, where we follow the 13-year-old Chris (Izac Wang), a first-generation Taiwanese-American kid trying to flirt with his junior high crush, get better at skateboarding, edit YouTube videos that people might actually want to see, and perhaps make some new friends during the summer before high school begins. This is one of those movies that lives or dies by its slice-of-life details and sense of authenticity. Writer/director Sean Wang does an excellent job placing the audience in the position of his biographical avatar, Chris. We feel his discomfort trying to navigate the different cultural expectations of home life and school life, the perils of trying to step outside your comfort zone and be rewarded rather than embarrassed. This is compounded by Chris having to endure and brush aside the stereotypes his peers project onto him for being Asian-American. The problem with the movie is that our main character is kind of a twit. He’s so harsh and unfair to his long-suffering mother (Lust, Caution‘s Joan Chen) that his own friends eventually complain about his rude behavior. In a moment of awkward discomfort, he calls his friend’s crush “a whore,” and then describes how he and his friend messed around with the corpse of a squirrel once. He also pees in his older sister’s lotion bottle. The whole “befriending cool skateboarders” storyline goes nowhere, nor does it open up some deeper understanding of our character and his wants, talents, or capabilities. Didi’s real distinct angle could have been growing up in the Internet age, and there it too feels lacking. It all feels a little like we’re spending too much time with the wrong family member. The put-upon mother would have been an even more intriguing person to explore, especially as she yearns to be an artist, deals with her bratty kids, an overbearing mother-in-law living with them without a kind word to say, and a husband half the world away busy working. Getting stuck with the angsty kid feels disappointing.
Nate’s Grade: B-
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Harold and the Purple Crayon (2024)
As an elder Millennial, I’ll try and ignore my rising bile for what they did to my boy Harold here, and I’ll simply ask who was this movie for? The big screen adaptation of the classic 1955 children’s book by Crockett Johnson that celebrates the power of imagination is a mishmash of mawkish feel-good family nonsense, fantasy power wish-fulfillment, and grating fish-out-of-water comedic antics. Increasingly missable actor Zachery Levi (Shazam!) plays yet another glorified man-baby, this time as an “adult” Harold who ventures into the Real World to search for his narrator, essentially the god of his purple-hued universe. He befriends a lonely boy with a big imagination and the kid’s single mom (poor Zooey Desceanel) and life lessons are learned while “adult” Harold makes a mess of just about everything as he leaves behind chaos and disaster. Eventually Harold has a full-on wizard duel against a villainous librarian and wannabe published fantasy author played by Jermaine Clement. That’s right, Harold and the Purple Crayon transforms into a magic battle over the fate of the all-powerful ring, I mean crayon. Making matters worse is Levi’s hyperactive schtick that has been growing stale for years and is tiresome and annoying throughout the movie. It’s also quite ironic, and phony, that a movie expressly proclaiming the power of individuality and imagination is so thoroughly and depressingly generic. This should have been animated or left alone, period.
Nate’s Grade: D+
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Trap (2024)
At this point, there is a certain expectation with any M. Night Shyamalan movie that reality will be heightened, that people will never talk like actual human beings, and that his brand of unreality can become part of the unique selling point, nestling into a campy charm when it all coalesces. Such is the case with Trap, the ludicrous thriller that plays much more pleasingly as a wacky comedy of errors and incompetence as an entire city’s police force is looking for a notorious serial killer, The Butcher a.k.a. Cooper (Josh Hartnett), at a concert for a pop star (Syamalan’s own daughter, Saleka). It’s a silly premise that essentially endangers thousands of innocent concert-goers where the plan is to, I guess, grab any middle-aged white guy in attendance and question them? It’s absurd, but it becomes a fun game of watching our trapped killer try and work out different escape options and adapt on the fly, while also being that supportive girl dad for his starstruck little tween. There’s an appealing “how is he gonna get outta this jam?” conflict resolution, though our deadly dad also acts so supremely weird, from buddying up with the merch guy, pushing ladies down stairs completely unbeknownst to observers, and trying to convince his daughter they should ditch this fancy concert to go explore what’s beneath a trap door. The hilarity is that Cooper is not really good at hiding his tracks, or his peculiarities, but everyone else in this universe is just that dim. It’s grand entertainment but definitely loses something once it leaves the central location for its final act, shifting the protagonist onto a new face that can’t quite carry the movie(reminded me of 2013’s The Call once it abandoned its premise for the final act). Given the heightened atmosphere, this is also the kind of movie that would have benefited from another twist or two, perhaps with Cooper’s family. Hartnett is playing a very specific tone and manages to make his character creepy, daffy, intense, and thoroughly watchable. If you’re in doubt what Shyamalan was going for, look no further than casting Parent Trap(!)-actress Hayley Mills as the older criminal psychologist trying to ensnare our killer with this outlandish ruse. Imagine Hitchcock by way of Peter Sellers, and you have Trap.
Nate’s Grade: B-
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Kinds of Kindness (2024)
Yorgos Lanthimos might be one of the strangest filmmakers ever to fall into favor with the Oscars. Hot off the critical and commercial success of 2023’s Poor Things, we have a new Lanthimos joint not even six months later. This is a collaboration between his Greek co-writer from The Lobster and The Killing of a Sacred Deer, arguably the less “mainstream” Lanthimos movies. This movie is an anthology of three stories with the same actors playing different roles in each story. The problem is that I didn’t engage with any of the stories and found them long, meandering, and poorly paced. That Lanthimos specialty is a cracked-mirror version of the world, mixing the bizarre as if it were mundane, and it’s a trying tonal tightrope for most thespians to excel within that space. There just isn’t enough here, and each new story feels like starting over rather than fulfilling a conclusion. The prior Lanthimos movies had an interesting premise or turn of events that could sustain a whole movie; Kinds of Kindness doesn’t have stories that can sustain three vignettes. I can take weird, alienating, and challenging Lanthimos, as I’ve been a fan ever since his Dogtooth debut, but this is easily his weakest movie yet. The actors all do credible work having distaff conversations in, what appears like, people’s palatial homes and doctor offices. It’s hard to glean a larger theme, point of view, or even general entertainment value with this dull entry. It feels like Lanthimos and his collaborators had a couple free weekends, the use of some rich friends’ homes, and said, “Well, we’ll make it an anthology because then we don’t have to compose a full movie.” Instead of one disappointing movie, now you get three. Kinds of Kindness is, worst of all, mostly forgettable, and given Lanthimos’ track record, that really is the biggest sin possible.
Nate’s Grade: C
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Woman of the Hour (2024)
I never knew there was an actual serial killer that appeared on a 1978 episode of The Dating Game, and that he actually won. That’s a killer hook. The problem with Woman of the Hour, Anna Kendrick’s debut as a director, is that there isn’t really a movie here as presented. Because the game show segment can only last so long, we get the creepy first date, that never happened in real life, and watch Kendrick playing our lucky lady with mounting dread. A moment where the killer requests that she re-read the phone number she hastily gave him by memory, because she should know her number, is terrifically tense, as is the scene of him following her to her car. The problem is that this first date can only last so long, just as the cheesy TV game show segment can only last so long, so the movie has to provide extra back-story to fill the time. We get several past encounters with the killer’s unfortunate victims, all played quite unnervingly and seriously. The woman of the hour is less Kendrick getting her fleeting spotlight on TV, and an anecdote to impress people at parties for the rest of her life, than the survivor who eventually leads to the killer’s arrest. Amazingly, at the time of his TV appearance, he was on the FBI’s Most Wanted List but there wasn’t a searchable database, so he clumsily got to keep committing murders, including while out on bail. It’s a harrowing story, but is it one best told through the gimmick structure of the game show appearance? If you were going this route, perhaps best to treat the material like a slow-burn stage play, starting with the first date, and watch in real time as it gets awkward and our heroine begins to have her suspicions that this man does not mean her well. Instead, the game show segments are goofy and broad and the least important moments in the stretched-thin film. There might be a movie with this subject, but I’m not sure that Woman of the Hour is it.
Nate’s Grade: C+
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The Wild Robot (2024)
There must be something personally appealing when it concerns movies about hopeful robots that serve as change agents to new communities. WALL-E and The Iron Giant are two of my favorite films of all time, and while The Wild Robot won’t quite enter that all-hallowed echelon, it’s still a heartfelt and lovely movie that can appeal to anyone. We follow Roz (voiced by Lupita Nyong’o), a discarded robot looking for tasks to complete on an island. Fortunately, the robot learns how to communicate with the local wildlife, including a baby goose that our robot feels responsible to train how exactly to be a goose, including how to fly before the advent of winter and the larger flock migrates. The characters are kept pretty simple but that doesn’t mean their emotions are. The movie, based upon a popular children’s book series by Peter Brown, is refreshingly mature about nature’s life cycle, not treating death like a taboo subject too dark for children. The themes of parenting, being different, and finding an accepting home through compassion and courage are all resonant no matter your age, and I’m happy to report that I teared up at several points. The parent-child relationship between the damaged robot and orphaned gosling extends beyond them, inspiring other members of the island’s food chain to work together for common goals and sustainability. There’s a late antagonist thrown in to up the stakes and provide a bit more explosive action, including a magnetic magenta-colored forest fire. The movie doesn’t quite close as strongly as it opens, but writer/director Chris Sanders (Lilo & Stitch, How to Train Your Dragon) knows innately how to execute at such a high level where even simple characters and familiar themes have fully developed stories with soaring emotions that arrive fully earned.
Nate’s Grade: B+
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Primer (2004) [Review Re-View]
Originally released October 8, 2004:
I was intrigued about Primer because I had been told it was classy, smart sci-fi that’s so often missing in today’s entertainment line-up (see: Sci-Fi channel’s Mansquito). It won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival and the critical reviews had been generally very positive. So my expectations were high for a well wrought, high brow film analyzing time travel. What I got was one long, pretentious, incomprehensible, poorly paced and shot techno lecture. Oh it got bad. Oh did it get bad.
Aaron (Shane Carruth) and Abe (David Sullivan) run a team of inventors out of their garage. Their newest invention seems promising but they’re still confused about what it does. Aaron and Abe’s more commercially minded partners want to patent it and sell it. Aaron and Abe inspect their invention further and discover it has the ability to distort time. They invent larger versions and time travel themselves and thus create all kinds of paradoxes and loops and confusion for themselves and a viewing audience.
Watching Primer is like reading an instruction manual. The movie is practically crushed to death by techno terminology and all kinds of geek speak. The only people that will be able to follow along are those well-versed in quantum physics and engineering. Indeed, Primer has been called an attempt to make a “realistic time-travel movie,” which means no cars that can go 88 miles per hour. That’s fine and dandy but it makes for one awfully boring movie.
Primer would rather confound an audience than entertain them. There is a distinct difference between being complicated and being hard to follow. You’d need a couple volumes of Cliff Notes just to follow along Primer‘s talky and convoluted plot. I was so monumentally bored by Primer that I had to eject the DVD after 30 minutes. I have never in my life started a film at home and then turned it off, especially one I paid good money to rent, but after so many minutes of watching people talk above my head in a different language (techno jargon) I had reached my breaking point. Primer will frustrate most viewers because most will not be able to follow what is going on, and a normal human being can reasonably only sit for so long in the dark.
I did restart Primer and watched it to its completion, a scant 75 minutes long. The last 20 minutes is easier to grasp because it does finally deal with time travel and re-staging events. It’s a very long time to get to anything comprehensible. I probably should watch Primer again in all fairness but I have the suspicion that if I did my body would completely shut down on me in defense. Some people will love this and call it visionary, but those will be a very select group. It’s not just that Primer is incomprehensible but the film is also horrifically paced. When you don’t know what’s being said and what’s going on then scenes tend to drag because there is no connection. This movie is soooooo slow and it’s made all the worse by characters that are merely figureheads, dialogue that’s confusing and wooden, and a story that would rather spew ideas than a plot.
Writer/director/star Shane Carruth seems to have high ambitions but he has no empathy for an audience. Films can be dense and thought-provoking but they need to be accessible. Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko is a sci-fi mind bender but it’s also an accessible, relatable, enjoyable movie that’s become a cult favorite. Carruth also seems to think that shooting half the movie out of focus is a good idea.
I’m not against a smart movie, nor am I against science fiction that attempts to explore profound concepts and ideals. What I am against, however, is wasting my time with a tech lecture disguised as quality entertainment. Primer is obtuse, slow, convoluted, frustrating and pretentiously impenetrable. After finally finishing Primer, I scanned the DVD spine and noticed it said, “Thriller.” I laughed so hard I almost fell over. The only way Primer could be a thriller is because you’ll be racing the clock for it to finish.
Nate’s Grade: C-
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WRITER REFLECTIONS 20 YEARS LATER
I tried, dear reader. I had every intention of giving 2004’s Primer another chance, wanting to allow the distance of time to perhaps make the movie more palatable for my present-day self than it was when I was in my early twenties and irritated by this low-budget, high-concept Sundance DIY time travel indie. I thought with two decades of hindsight, I’d be able to find the brilliance that people cited back in 2004 where instead I only found maddening frustration. I consider myself a relatively intelligent individual, so I felt like I would be able to unpack what has been dubbed the most complex and realistic time travel movie ever created, let alone on a shoestring budget of only $7000, where the showcase was writer/director/star/editor/composer Shane Caruth’s intricate plotting. The whole intention with my re-watches is to give movies another chance and to honestly reflect upon why my feelings might have changed over time, for better or worse. That’s my intent, and while this day may have always been a matter of time for arriving, but I tried valiantly to watch Primer again and I quit. Yes, my apologies, but I tapped out.
I gave the movie twenty minutes before I came to the conclusion that I just wanted to do anything else with my time. I even tried watching a YouTube explanation video to give me a better summation, and even five minutes into that I came to the same conclusion that I wanted to do anything else with my fleeting sense of time. I think this is a case of accessibility and engagement.
Ultimately, this is the tale of two would-be inventors who keep reliving the same day to make money and win over a girl at a party. Reliving this day several times, with several iterations, and literally requiring a flowchart to keep it all together, is a lot of work for something that seemingly offers so little entertainment value beyond the academic pat on the back for being able to keep up with the inscrutable plotting. Look, I love time travel movies. I love the possibilities, the playfulness, the emphasis on ideas and casualty and imagination. I love the questions they raise and the dangers and, above all, the sheer fun. A time travel movie shouldn’t feel like you’re reading a book on arcane tax law. It needs to be, at the very least, interesting. Watching these two guys live out their lives, while on the peripheral more exciting things are happening with doubles, and we’re stuck with watching them migrate to this same party, or this same storage lockers and garages. It’s all so resoundingly low-stakes, even though betrayal and murder appear. I found this drama so powerfully uninteresting, and then structured and skewered and stacked to be an inscrutable, unknowable puzzle that makes you want to give up rather than engage. For me, there isn’t enough investment or intrigue to try and unpack this movie’s homework.
This is a lesson for me, as I have a newborn baby in my house, and sleep deprivation and fatigue are more a presence in my life, that I’m going to be more selective with what I choose to spend those moments of free time. Do I want to invest my time watching a movie I am not engaging with, that gives me so little to hold onto? When my friend Liz Dollard had her first child, she talked about not watching downer movies like 2016’s Manchester by the Sea, only having the emotional space for stories that wouldn’t be draining to her mental well-being. This meant low-stakes, uplifting, generally happy or familiar tales. I remember at the time thinking that she was willfully shuttling so many potential movies from her viewership, great films that could be challenging or depressing and deserving of being seen. Now, I completely get it, because after you’ve woken up several times during that night to feed a small child who has no means of communicating with you other than volcanic screaming, watching a long movie about human suffering can feel like a tall order. While Primer isn’t overwhelming as some kind of miserable dirge, it is too hard for me to access and gives me too little to hold onto.
As a film critic for over twenty-five years of my life, I try my best to thoughtfully analyze every movie I sit down to write about, and I try to think about potential audiences and the artistic intentions for them, and whether choices help or hinder those intentions. Not every movie is going to be for me just like any other work of media; there are countless musical artists that I will never willfully listen to but have their respective fan bases. I know there are people that love Primer, as hard as it is for me to fathom. I know there are people out there that leap to the challenge of keeping the nine iterations and timelines together as time confusingly folds upon itself. I know there are sci-fi enthusiasts that respect and appreciate the stripped-down, more “realistic” application of time travel. I know there are people who celebrate this movie, but I am not one of them. Primer is simply not for me, and that’s okay. Not every work of art will be for every person. I doubt I’ll ever come back to Primer again for the rest of my life, but there’s so many more movies to watch every day, so why spend precious time on a movie you’re just not clicking with?
Adios, Primer. To someone else, you’re a wonderful movie. To me, you’re, as I wrote in 2004, a “techno lecture” disguised as an impenetrable film exercise.
Re-View Grade: Undetermined
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Tarot (2024)
In the long line of horror movies about dumb teenagers stumbling onto curses, Tarot might be one of the most ineffective and ridiculous. First off, tarot readings are so detailed and specific, while also being vague to most of us unfamiliar with what you can find on the playing cards. This means the movie must constantly remind the viewer what the fateful readings were as well as the spooky imagery. Also, being a PG-13 movie, means that the terror is kept more on a psychological bullying level, where the teens have to “face their fears” but they’re not terribly personalized. One girl finds herself in a magician’s performance for ghouls and literally hides in a box only to be sawed in half. What was the personal fear there? Stage magicians? One guy is in a subway station and comes across a newspaper with his face on it and the headline, “You Die Today” (who says print media is dead…. wait a second). This is one of those movies that suffers because the rules of the curse are sketchy at best. We don’t know the escalation or how the teens might beat it. However, I wanted to almost applaud in amazement when the script practically plays an Uno Reverse card on its angry spirit (“If she’s killing everyone because they got their horoscope read, what if WE read HER horoscope to HER, huh?!”). The entire enterprise feels transparently like some studio exec optioned the concept of a tarot deck and said, “You know, make it haunted or whatever.” Unless you’re desperate for some derisive entertainment chuckles, skip Tarot.
Nate’s Grade: D+
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It’s What’s Inside (2024)
This sneaky little movie is exactly what I’ve been asking for from low-budget genre cinema, where creative ingenuity and imagination are the dominant forces to offset budget limitations. It’s What’s Inside is ostensibly a body swap movie between a group of friends stuck in a mansion overnight. A device allows eight people to swap into other hosts, and it plays as a silly party game early, before writer/director Greg Jardin increases the stakes. People pretend to be someone else and then explore that freedom, which usually means having affairs and getting a little too comfortable in other people’s bodies. Then there are… complications, and watching the characters frantically debate their new challenges and limitations with growing mistrust, exasperation, and betrayal makes for a delicious 90 minutes of surprises. Because there are multiple rounds of body-swapping, and eight starting characters, Jardin takes particular points to better clarify identities, from characters wearing Polaroids to a red-tinted sort of x-ray showing the real characters underneath the confusing physical surface. All of it helps, though I still had to ask who was really who quite often. I think watching it a second time would make it more coherent but also give me even more appreciation for Jardin’s slippery, shifting screenwriting. Here is a movie with rampant intrigue and imagination to spare, that maximizes its creativity to tap the body swap as an illuminating and destructive device to explore secret insecurities, desires, jealousies, and dissatisfaction in a friends group. It’s a wild trip, elevated by energetic and helpful editing, where the ideas are the main feature. It might not be much more than a bad overnight stay with bad people but It’s What’s Inside is top-notch genre filmmaking. It’s what’s inside the movie that matters most, its big imagination and fulfilling execution. Greg Jardin, you have my full attention with whatever movies you want to make from here on out.
Nate’s Grade: A-
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