Category Archives: 2023 Movies
Alternate Opinion: Lady Ballers Guest Essay
My friend and writing partner Ben Bailey asked me to host an extensive essay he was compelled to write after watching Ben Shapiro’s deeply disingenuous and presumably laugh-free sports comedy, Lady Ballers, a movie built upon not just transphobia but also misogyny. I plan on watching this movie as well because of course it will be one of the worst movies of the year and thus I’ll need to analyze these things for you to spare you, dear reader. In the mean time, enjoy Ben’s monumental take-down on the movie, its terms and goals, and the disingenuous nature of the toxic conservative media ecosystem.
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“Trigger Warning: A Woke Soy Cuck is About to Talk About Lady Ballers“
By Ben Bailey
So, Lady Ballers is a thing. If you haven’t heard of it, or of Ben Shapiro’s right wing Daily Wire production company, I envy your life and your ability to avoid psychic pain. For the rest of you, maybe you’ve seen the trailer or some reaction videos on YouTube, and then you likely did what most rational people would do and casually dismissed it as something you will never have any reason to watch. At least I assume most people will never watch Lady Ballers because most people don’t have a subscription to Daily Wire+ or the wherewithal to actively seek it out through other quasi-legal means, but I watched it, and if only to justify the effort of doing so, I decided to commandeer my good friend’s blog for a bit to talk about it. You should know that I insisted he watch it, because even though I cited him as a friend just now, I secretly hate him and only want bad things for him.
Lady Ballers is the story of the whitest basketball team you’ve ever seen in your life deciding to take advantage of our modern “woke obsession” with regarding trans people as human beings with basic dignity by pretending to identify as women so that they can compete in women’s sports, where they will obviously dominate due to their manly testosterone being the natural kryptonite to weak lady estrogen. If you are as exhausted reading that synopsis as I became writing it, rest assured that the rest of this isn’t actually going to be much of a traditional review of the film on its cinematic merits, because that would be completely pointless. If you’ve seen the trailer and know anything about the people who made it, you already know it’s bad. It’s not funny, its amateurish and just generally poorly made, because it was made by unfunny amateurs who don’t know how to make anything good. I will touch on quality issues here and there, but mostly I want to focus on what the film represents in the larger cultural and political context in which it is being presented. What is the point of Lady Ballers, and what does its form and function say about the bigots behind it and the zeitgeist they so desperately wish to influence?
I also want to stress at the outset that the level of critical analysis I am about to apply to Lady Ballers should not be seen as any attempt to elevate it to the level of art worth engaging with or expanding any intellectual strain to deconstruct. Just by talking about this movie, or even calling this loose assortment of tired hate-filled nonsense a movie, might leave the erroneous impression that Lady Ballers is, in any way, inherently interesting. It is not. It is in fact, beyond the novelty of its miserably cynical polemic, a very boring thing that I would defy most people not already tuned into its disgusting message to even sit through (and frankly I bet most of its target audience would find it difficult as well).
Let’s start with Ben Shapiro, the public face of the Daily Wire brand, who appears briefly in a cameo as a referee at one of the games to deliver a line that unintentionally reveals more about him and this movie than anything else in it, flatly stating that he’s just getting paid to be here and doesn’t actually care about anything going on. Ben Shapiro is a grifter, and almost certainly a bad person who probably believes a lot of terrible things about people, but I say probably because you can never be sure with someone like Ben if he actually believes anything he says or is just saying what he needs to say to appeal to an audience of people as bad as he is presenting himself to be. The science is not yet in on whether he is biologically a piece of shit, but he clearly identifies as one, and just as he seems to regard trans identification according to his film, he’s only doing it for the clout and the money. Whether or not Shapiro actually believes any of his own hate-filled rhetoric is immaterial to his main goal, which is raking in money from the suckers in his audience who very much do believe it, and the reason we know this for sure, is because he just made a movie called Lady Ballers.
You see, in a recent interview about the movie on his website, Shapiro revealed that the original intention for Lady Ballers was not creating a kind of dumb, raunchy, shocking for its own sake comedy that he would almost certainly hate if he hadn’t made it himself, but rather, a hard-hitting documentary focusing on his favorite fake culture war controversy. The plan was to have cis-gendered men actually pretend to identify as women in order to infiltrate women’s sports for real and prove that all the so-called trans-women currently doing it were just liars like them trying to get a hairy leg up on the competition. The problem apparently became immediately obvious when they found that the standards for applying to women’s sports as trans-women were much higher than any of their stooges were willing to meet, as they weren’t ready to undergo the hormone treatments, surgeries, and other little details required to prove that they weren’t just a bunch of assholes trying to co-opt something they don’t care about in order to score political points with MAGA douchebags. You get it, right? It’s the one legitimately fascinating thing about Lady Ballers, that its very existence in its current form invalidates its entire thematic premise. They had to make a fictional “comedy” version of the story they wanted to tell because it was impossible to present the thing they claim to believe is actually true in any way that could qualify as a documentary even by their incredibly low standards. As Shapiro is fond of saying, facts don’t care about feelings, and in this case, that appears to be true.
But of course, that didn’t stop them, so they went ahead and made Lady Ballers, and I could go on for quite a while listing off all the transphobia and misogyny and racism awash in it, as well as all the stuff that wasn’t deliberately objectionable but still offensively unfunny, but again, what would be the point? More interesting to me is what this movie says about the people who made it and the audience it is targeting and what the perceived existence and marketability of that audience says about us as a country and a species. I always felt that the rise of Donald Trump was less about him than it was about us, that whether he won or lost, or wins again or loses again in 2024, it would be a test of our own moral character for us to pass or fail. Do we accept that this is who we are, or do we actually try to live up to what we all want to believe are our better selves? The vitriol intrinsic to Lady Ballers and the Daily Wire and this whole movement of stoking anti-trans hatred to rile up bigots, ultimately in the hope of pushing them to the polls to support a fascist overthrow of our democracy, just seems to me to be another facet of that test, and how close we are to passing or failing it is the only question worth thinking about.
For a movie supposedly about the topic of trans-people in sports, it is a bit surprising that this movie doesn’t actually feature any depictions of real trans-people in it. Obviously, I wasn’t expecting any portrayal to be positive, but I at least expected there to be a trans-character, if only to take the role of a villain or antagonist representing the thing the movie is railing against. We have the aforementioned cis-men pretending to be trans but otherwise no one who genuinely considers themselves to be trans. Even if you dismiss the authenticity of trans identification and say they just wrongly believe something about their gender, you’d think they would show someone like that in their own movie, right? There’s a brief bit at the end where a character suggests they might be, but only as a quick throwaway ball-kicking joke. If trans people are the bad guys in real life, why are they not the bad guys in this movie that wants you to come away thinking that they are so bad?
More to the point, why are there no trans conservatives in the movie? I know there aren’t that many, but off the top of my head I can think of at least two public examples. Maybe Caitlin Jenner was too big a get for this and just saying that the vaunted star of Can’t Stop The Music, Jack and Jill, and literally no other movies is too good for this is saying something, but what about Blair White? Pretty sure she’s been on the Daily Wire a couple of times, but apparently, they couldn’t get her to show up to provide any kind of cover for the transphobic message. That’s literally what she does for a living, being the trans person willing to sell out her own people for conservative clout, and either they didn’t want her in this for some reason, or even she turned them down. Blair White agreed to appear in a Tom MacDonald music video but turned down Lady Ballers?
That can’t be it. It’s not possible that they even asked them, or ever considered including any trans-people, even as imaginary straw-women to make fun of them, because that would require acknowledging that they are actual people who exist. As the film’s mid-credit stinger suggests, depicting one of the main characters attending Jordan Peterson’s reparative therapy to cure their trans-delusions, for this movie and the ideology behind it to make any sense, trans-people can’t exist, and anyone claiming to be trans is either mentally ill or pulling the same scam as the film’s protagonists. If Jenner had shown up, sure she may have parroted the talking points about keeping sports segregated by the gender binary, but she would have presumably done so with the confidence of a person who clearly believes that they have the right to exist as they are without being accused of being crazy or a liar, which would go against the movie’s larger message that trans-people aren’t just illegitimate as players in sport but illegitimate as people in general. The people behind Lady Ballers are grifters who don’t believe anything, so naturally they assume that everyone else is too, and that includes trans-people, who don’t actually believe what they say about themselves, and are merely grifting a gullible public, just like the Daily Wire is doing.
Designed to work in tandem with freak-outs about Drag Queen Story Hours grooming your kids and doctors prescribing hormone blockers to babies without their consent, the faux controversy about trans-people in sports has always been a thinly-veiled cover for the larger goal of trans erasure, a way to launder openly genocidal rhetoric designed to inspire the very kind of deadly violence against trans-people we’ve seen increase in the last few years as if it were just some completely legitimate concern for the integrity of women’s sports. But Lady Ballers is so blunt and bad at its own messaging that it fails to hide what it needs to hide, giving away the game, no pun intended. Obviously, these people don’t genuinely care about women’s sports; a major running gag in the movie is about how literally no one cares about women’s sports, and the central premise of the movie assumes that any man, regardless of skill, is inherently physically superior to every woman and could beat any women at any sport at any time purely by virtue of being a man.
And I know that sounds like a joke, to the point where you might question my criticizing it in the context of a movie at least intended to be a comedy, but that’s not a joke in this movie. You as the audience are not meant to take the idea that any man is better than all women at all sports as an exaggerated, farcical concept. That is the actual thing you are meant to unironically accept so that the other jokes in the movie work, the underlying rational assumption upon which the other jokes are made relatable. You aren’t meant to laugh at the idea that these men are trouncing these women at the sports the women trained for and the men didn’t, you are meant to laugh at the absurdity that any woman would ever think they could try to go up against any man. A few years ago, there was a poll that found that 1-in-8 men genuinely believed that they could beat Serena Williams in tennis, and this movie was written for them.
If you know who this person is in the picture, I’m sorry.
The virulent misogyny dripping from every corner of Lady Ballers would seem to preclude any genuine regard for the integrity of women’s sports or women in general. The most prominent female character in the film is a conniving reporter colluding with the team’s head coach to cynically milk the “stunning and brave” human interest story for viewers, who casually references her regular abortions as the annoying minor consequence of aggressive promiscuity, you know, the way all women who get abortions do? At one point, one of our “heroes” stares off into the middle distance while spitting out a creepy incel screed sarcastically defining women as just like men but better because they shave their legs, brag about bravery for things that aren’t brave, and aren’t afraid to cry at work, and the next shot is the reporter shrugging and nodding in agreement, as if it was the truest thing ever said and, despite her prior demonstration of assertive hostile feminism, she has absolutely no way to refute it.
Again, you might be saying, these are just jokes. Bad taste jokes, maybe even jokes based on faulty premises that could only be enjoyed by the terrible people who accept those premises, sure, but still, only jokes. But that’s the weird thing about a movie like Lady Ballers that is more preoccupied with its political and cultural message than its service as a functional comedy. The message is not in the service of the comedy, the comedy, such as it is, is in the service of the message. Comedy is about subverting expectations, while cultural polemics are about reaffirming expectations. For instance, if you start your movie with a bunch of characters assuming that simply being men would allow them to dominate women’s sports, one would think the next scene would be them realizing that this was not the case, in a montage of them getting taken down a peg for their sexist hubris. Or you might have an actual trans character presented as a contrast for the absurdity of their fake trans grift. But this movie can’t do any of those things, because to subvert the expectations of its audience of bigoted right-wing morons would defeat the whole point, which is to validate their bigotry and to keep the cash flow coming. The needs of a comedy and the needs of whatever this movie is are diametrically opposed to one another.
Fairly early on in Lady Ballers, before the film’s gender-bending twist, the head coach delivers one of his famously rousing motivational speeches to his team, getting them to chant a motto that will return in the third act: “Winners are just losers who win.” Credit where its due, unlike most of what passes for comedy in the movie, this line at least structurally conforms to be a recognizable joke. It’s not particularly funny or clever, just a superficial rhetorical absurdity, but it also serves as another one of those accidental confessions on the part of the producers. Because if you think about it, losers who win basically describes the Rightwing Influencer Pipeline to which the Daily Wire crew belong.
Also, Ted Cruz cameo.
To the extent that they have won anything, or rather succeeded financially as a grift or culturally as propaganda for a noxious worldview, it has always been with the distinct stench of loser-dom. C.H.U.D.s like Matt Walsh or Michael Knowles speak with all the confidence of people with an actual point, but there’s always this underlying sense that beyond the choir to which they are preaching, the cringe and bluster are obvious to anyone else. When Ben Shapiro tries to own Cardi B and Megan The Stallion’s W.A.P. by questioning whether the titular wetness is a disturbing medical condition, unintentionally revealing to the world that he’s apparently never made his own wife sexually aroused, the self-own, while hilarious, is not even a little surprising. In short, contrary to the utter gob-smacking dearth of actual jokes in their movie, these guys are themselves complete jokes.
And the more important point is that the joke isn’t landing anymore, if it ever did. One need only look to the spectacular failure of Moms For Liberty, a group that tried to ride the wave of transphobia to take local school board elections by storm, only to lose almost every seat they ran for in 2023. If there is any saving grace to Lady Ballers, it is that it decidedly does not feel like the work of people who are or even think they are winning anything. This doesn’t feel like a triumphant victory lap of the Anti-Trans Right, but rather the sad last desperate gasp of a dying movement that was never even a real movement to begin with, the fizzled fart of stale air escaping a punctured basketball, or if you prefer, a balloon used to approximate a fake boob by someone who’s never done drag and didn’t bother to research anything about how to do it right. And that’s good. Not the lack of research but the larger failure of the mission that this movie represents. You still shouldn’t watch it because it sucks.
The thing I’ve always found interesting about Shapiro is that in spite of his horrible takes on everything, he strikes me as someone at least smart and self-aware enough to feel some measure of secret disdain for how his career is dependent upon debasing himself to the kinds of people who boycott M&Ms because the green one isn’t sexy enough anymore. If you didn’t know, he got into the right-wing commentary business after a failed attempt at making it as a screenwriter, and it would seem that the Daily Wire getting into its own film production is at least on some level a way for him to live out the dreams that were robbed of him by his crippling lack of creative talent. I like to think that knowing Lady Ballers is the closest he’s come to the achievement of his lifelong aspirations, and that the actual career he did build for himself is an active impediment to those aspirations trapping him in a cage of his own bullshit from which he can never escape to a land where he is regarded as a legitimate creative person, is the funniest joke of all.
(Addendum: I didn’t have any other place for this, but I did feel I would be disingenuous if I did not mention the one actual good idea in the movie. At one point, the head coach goes to a Hooter’s-esque sports bar but one staffed entirely by men in drag. Of course, in the context of the film this is yet another joke about how men dressed as women are silly and should be dehumanized and presumably executed by the state in the next Trump administration, but out of that context, it’s just a solid concept for a restaurant and I would patronize the hell out of a place like that. Not sure if anyone has ever tried something like it in real life, but if not, they should.)
[Editor’s Note: At the film’s premier, one of the actors was arrested by the FBI and charged with four crimes relating to the January 6 insurrection because of course.]
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Napoleon (2023)
I may be completely in the wrong, but I feel the only way to view Ridley Scott’s latest historical epic, a 158-minute account of the life of Napoleon Bonaparte, is as a comedy with the full intention of not retelling history but of de-mythologizing the grandiosity of its star. Otherwise, these 158 minutes feel like an accelerated Wikipedia summary of the man’s many famous deeds as he rose from general to Emperor and swept his armies across the continent conquering much of Europe. Rather, I choose to think of the movie as a strange comedy that shows how this fearsome military genius might also have been just a strange little guy with a temper.
The Revolution in France is burning out of bodies and the people are growing restless at the lack of meaningful democratic progress. Enter Napoleon Bonaparte (Joaquin Phoenix) as a successful general who will eventually crown himself as Emperor of France. He will wage war across the continent, lead to the deaths of three million by his final defeat 1815, and reshape and revolutionize the military of its days. He will also die alone, exiled, and without the love of his life, his wife, Josephine (Vanessa Kirby).
This all has to be a comedy, right? Ridley Scott (Gladiator, The Last Duel) went to elaborate lengths to make fun of the little general, right? How else to read scenes where Napoleon and Josephine argue at the dinner table where he accuses her of being infertile, she accuses him of being fat, and he agrees that he heartily likes his food and says, “Fate has brought this lamb chop to me.” How else to read a scene where he throws a hilarious hissy fit before the English ambassador, who Napoleon feels has been rude and less than deferential, and he screams, “You think you’re so great because you have boats!” How else do you read a montage of Napoleon seizing power with the military pushing out the old figures of power and one of them, aghast, shouting, “This cannot be. I am enjoying a succulent breakfast!” How else to interpret the scene where Napoleon is going to achieve his coup from the French parliament and he’s run out of the chamber, falling and scampering out like a child caught playing tyrant. It’s moments like these, as well as the acting choices, that push me in the direction of interpreting this movie less as another handsomely mounted biopic of The Great Men of History and more tearing down the lockstep reverence for this figure glorified through centuries of back-patting. I’m reminded of Josh Trank’s relatively unloved Capone movie from 2020, and while imperfect, I appreciated that Trank spent the entire movie tearing down the legend and myth of this bad man and showed him for what he was late in life, a pathetic, decrepit loser riddled with syphilis losing his mind and crapping his pants. I think we need more biopics that have a less reverent approach to their subject because then it provides a public service of inviting viewers to be more critical of history rather than blindly accepting.
I think this is also showcased by the fact that Scott and screenwriter David Scarpa (All the Money in the World) are choosing to tackle the legends rather than the history. Take for instance the acclaimed Battle of Austerlitz, one of the film’s high-points. Napoleon surprises the combined Russian and Austrian troops by firing cannons at the frozen lake, causing it to shatter and entomb thousands of men to their watery graves. It’s a stunning visual sequence that blends the beauty and terror of the events and of course little of it happened in real life. In reality, the lake was really more a series of small ponds and reportedly very few enemy soldiers drowned. In reality, Napoleon never rode into battle as part of his cavalry. The generals stayed behind with orders. Or take for instance Napoleon’s ill-fated march into Russia, and when he arrives he’s so bored and thoroughly depressed as he sits on the empty throne in Moscow, acting like a little kid who is eager to go home already. That’s the difference between history as it happens and history as it is remembered, and that’s the myth-making that Scott is attempting to work through and re-contextualize for the many people who aren’t fanatical acolytes of the historical record. This is Scott saying he’s going to take all the myths and legends and make you critically reconsider.
Then there’s the relationship with Josephine which defines much of the movie, so much so that it provides explanations for why Napoleon left his first exile, because, apparently, he was upset his wife was seeing other people. The relationship plays out like one more of political maneuvering than romance, with some eyebrow-raising bedroom kinks to modernize the tale. Much of their conflict is on Napoleon’s inability to sire a male heir, which is put through the steps of the scientific method by his concerned and opportunistic mother as he attempts to father bastards with other women. This is the storyline that suffers the most from the accelerated pacing and editing, so consumed with moving from place to place and fitting in all the historical checkpoints. The larger nuance of this relationship, and Josephine as a character, is taken out by simplifying it as a tale of two people who realize that gender-specific baby-making is their top priority. In reality, Napoleon absolutely adored his wife and wrote lengthy love letters that you can read today, with lines such as, “I hope before long to crush you in my arms and cover you with a million kisses burning as though beneath the equator,” and, “Without his Josephine, without the assurance of her love, what is left him upon earth? What can he do?” It’s a shame so much of this is reduced to heir-production anxiety.
Phoenix (Beau is Afraid) plays the titular role like he’s sleepwalking, slumped and grumpy and rarely providing much energy except around plates of food. It’s a curious performance and one that helps me to further see the depiction as one through the lens of a critical offbeat comedy. He’s certainly not playing the man like he’s one of the great inspirational figures, and he’s certainly not playing the man like he’s tearing through a multitude of doubts and inner demons. He’s playing Napoleon like a grumpy weird little guy who would rather be dining than conquering. Kirby’s (Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning) more an accessory in her character’s limited scope but she does have a few moments that reflect Josephine’s moxy.
I would be remiss to pass up this chance to sing the praises of my former high school AP history teacher, Mr. Jerry Anglim, who had been teaching history and government for over 26 years before I stepped foot in his classroom. The man brought history alive for me and really crystalized my love for the subject, seeing how it’s all just one big canvas of storytelling. And this man loved teaching the Napoleonic Wars in great detail, and I loved scribbling down those notes every day. I even thought about getting a Napoleon poster to hang in my room, which would have been quite the odd teenage decorating choice. We watched the 1970s Waterloo movie starring Rod Steiger as Napoleon in class on a tiny TV attached to the corner, and yet I was spellbound because of what this teacher had done for me with the subject. So, wherever you are Mr. Anglim, thank you, and I’m sure you have your complaints with this new movie and I would love to hear them.
As a long movie still barely chronicling the major events of its subject, Napoleon feels lacking unless viewed through the lens as a critical comedy tackling his legends and myths. Then the abrupt nature of the plotting becomes more an addition than a subtraction. However, Scott has gone on record that he has a four-hour director’s cut that Apple plans to make available on its streaming platform in the near future, so perhaps my entire interpretation could be blown up. To be fair, the real Napoleon was a military genius and did revolutionize and modernize the French military, and while he didn’t “conquer everything,” especially Great Britain and Russia, the man and his ambitions and good fortune dominated the first fifteen years of the nineteenth century. Human beings will always be drawn to the stories of conquerors, but it’s important to also see them as people, quite often terrible people, but human beings with failings and complexities that are often left behind from decades if not centuries of propaganda and historical whitewashing. As a biopic, Napoleon the movie feels too short and shrift. As a comedy, it’s a lamb chop served up by fate.
Nate’s Grade: C+
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Beau is Afraid (2023)
Beau is Afraid is a ramshackle mess of a movie, and that is both the highest compliment and an indictment on its tremendous excess and lack of focus. It’s Ari Aster’s big swing after his modest successes in elevated horror (Hereditary, Midsommar), so the indie maven studio A24 gave him a thirty-million budget and three hours and full artistic reign to do whatever he wanted, and love it or hate it, one has to objectively admit, Aster really went for something all right. I’m still deliberating where that final something falls on the artistic merit equation. There’s undeniable ambition and artistry here, but there’s also so many ideas and moments and bloat, it genuinely reminded me of 2007’s Southland Tales (did your stomach just drop, dear reader?). It’s because both movies are stuffed to the brim with their director’s assorted odd ideas and concepts, as if either man was afraid they were never going to make another movie again and had to awkwardly squeeze in everything they ever wanted into one overburdened project (in Richard Kelly’s case his suspicion might have been correct, as he did only direct one more feature -so far). While I certainly enjoyed -if that is the right word- Aster’s movie more, Beau is Afraid is not an easy movie to love, or enjoy, or even simply sit through, and not just because of its bloated time.
If I had to boil down this sprawling movie into one easy-to-digest concept, it’s about Jewish guilt. If you’re not a fan of feeling uncomfortable or anxious from the intensity of a movie, I would skip this one entirely. Beau (Joaquin Phoenix) might as well be a stand-in for the biblical figure of Job for all the cruel punishments and indignities he endures. Just when you think, “Well, it can’t get any worse,” Aster rolls up his sleeves and rises to the challenge and makes things even worse for his pathetic put-upon plebeian. This is a movie of escalating discomfort, chiefly meant to convey the constant state of anxiety that is Beau’s daily existence, and for the first hour or so, Aster works marvelously at making you squirm. It’s a movie less meant to reflect our objective reality and more a projection of one man’s anxious feelings and paranoia, the unsettling urge that everyone secretly hates you and something bad is always ready to lethally strike.
Beau is Afraid is an absurdist comedy of heightened almost screwball proportions, with Beau becoming increasingly frazzled and muttering “Oh no” hundreds of times as fate has it out for him. Small worries become all-consuming, like the simple task of trying to get water to swallow his new prescription medication, and how this eventually spirals to the ransacking of his apartment building, which is also all Beau’s fault, inadvertently, though that won’t mitigate the guilt. There are numerous fears and worries amplified to breaking points, inviting morbid chuckles and nervous titters. Beau sits in his bathtub to stare at an unknown man squeezed against the walls of his ceiling and about to slip and fall. Why is this man there? Why does Beau not immediately leap out of the tub? Why do both men remain fixed in their positions until the inevitable? It’s because it’s a ridiculous paranoid fear manifested into a ridiculous scenario made even more ridiculous. It’s the same with ignoring his mother’s calls only to have a stranger answer her phone to inform Beau that she has been killed and happens to be without a head now. It’s a realistic fear, avoiding phone calls and the draining emotional energy required to answer, and following it up with a consequence of darkly absurdist proportions to make him feel even worse. The movie leaps from one squirm-inducing, grueling sequence to the next, testing your limits and patience. There’s a post-coital revelation debunking, and then confirming, an outlandish worry that made me laugh out loud with tremendous auditory force. What else could I do? It certainly feels like Aster is inviting the audience to laugh at Beau’s pain and tragedy because what other human response can there be but to laugh in the face of unrelenting torment?
Where the movie loses momentum is about halfway through, after Aster has established the drive of the movie, Beau’s attempts to get to his mother’s funeral so they can finally bury her. Every hour he is delayed, Beau is reminded that his mother’s body is rapidly decaying and only furthering her “humiliation” at the hands of Beau’s inaction. The second part of the movie involves Beau recovering from injuries in an upper class family’s home, the same family (Nathan Lane, Amy Ryan) that accidentally ran him over and is now kind of holding him hostage against his weakened will. We have an urgent goal, we have obstacles keeping him from that goal, and this is where the movie continues to work, as each new attempt to escape only confirms how much stranger and dangerous this family unit is. This dynamic plays into the established heightened fears and absurdist complications. It’s keeping him from his goal. But when he does eventually free himself from this hostage scenario, he literally wanders into the woods and discovers a troupe of thespians that refer to themselves as the Orphans of the Forest, and then a theatrical production may or may not present the rest of Beau’s natural life. This was where the movie’s momentum, which had steadily been ratcheting up along with the dark comedy, began to flag, and when I started to worry, then suspect, then confirm my sinking feeling that this all isn’t going to add up to something more cohesive and thought-provoking. It’s really more a movie of sustained memorable moments and unpredictable, tone-shattering twists and turns. Beau is Afraid is unpredictable, and that both works as an asset and eventually as a handicap. That’s because every scene is hammering the same overall thematic point just with a different stylistic arrangement of fears and anxiety. Following this redundant framework, a 130-minute version of this movie world would feasibly have the same thematic impact as the 180-minute version, merely eliminating some of the many detours.
Another nagging aspect of the movie that failed to add up to much more for me was how little Beau seems to matter in his own story. He’s more intended to be the universe’s lone fall guy rather than a person, a victim whose chief characterization is his ongoing victimization. He suffers and that is his identity. Considering the movie is more a loose fable, this can work since Beau is essentially a stand-in for all of humanity, but there are more personal aspects of him worth exploring in finer detail. The toxic relationship with his mother is worthy of further examination, especially the decades of emotional manipulation to ensure Beau would never replace her with another woman. I wish Aster had devoted more of his 180-minute run time to exploring Beau as a person rather than pitting him against a proverbial assembly line of pies to the face. Phoenix (Joker) has so little to do here except stare wide-eyed, helpless, and mumble as the world constantly befuddles and antagonizes him. It’s a performance purely of pained reaction.
Can I recommend Beau is Afraid? For most viewers, probably not. It’s too long, too sporadic, and doesn’t come to anything cohesive or cumulative or even meaningful beyond a mean-spirited sense of pessimism directed at our titular human punching bag. It’s wildly ambitious and off-putting and bloated and outlandish and the kind of big artistic swing that artists usually only get so rarely in their careers. And yet I have to admire the sheer gusto of Aster making a movie this strange and alienating, a movie that’s constantly altering its very landscape of possibilities, usually to the detriment of Beau’s physical and mental well-being. It is an exhausting experience, so that when the end finally arrives, we, much like Beau, are simply ready to accept the finality we’ve been waiting for after so much abuse. There are moments throughout these ungainly 180 minutes that are sheer brilliance, and sequences that are sheer torture, some of which are on purpose. There’s also just way too much of everything, and without variance or finer exploration of its themes and specific characterization, it becomes a cosmic game of whack-a-mole where you might be the one actually getting hit over the head, and after so long I can’t blame anyone for not enjoying the prolonged experience.
Nate’s Grade: B-
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Are You There God? It’s Me, Margret (2023)
When is it not weird for a 41-year-old man to cry about a young woman getting her first period? When you’re watching the film adaptation of Judy Blume’s long-celebrated coming-of-age novel, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. Blume waited almost fifty years before signing over the rights to writer/director Kelly Fremon Craig, whose 2016 movie Edge of Seventeen showed a downright Blume-esque combination of authenticity, good humor, and grace. That trusted vision is evident with how natural and deeply felt the movie comes across. We’ve had numerous coming-of-age tales since Blume’s influence, so I worried that maybe it would feel outdated or surpassed, but the movie taps into a great reservoir of empathy, bringing to relatable light the uncertainty of puberty, of fitting in, and trying to navigate the ever-approaching adult world. Usually these kinds of movies invite the viewer to reflect back upon their own young adult experiences, which I did even though I was never a teenage girl, but I had my own awkward and vulnerable moments too. I really enjoyed that Craig’s movie makes ample time for the adults too, which is where my relatability was prioritized. Watching Rachel McAdams try and explain why her parents disowned her for marrying a Jewish man is a powerfully affecting moment of an adult trying to explain a very hard truth to their child. The movie is affectionate and uplifting and earnest without being too cloying. It’s a pleasant and wholesome movie that showcases Craig as an agile filmmaker who deserves more opportunities and that even fifty years later, being an adolescent girl is still the same old awkward agony.
Nate’s Grade: B+
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Saltburn (2023)
Promising Young Woman was easily one of my favorite films of 2020. It used the structure of a rape-revenge genre movie to tell a hard-hitting drama and pitch-black comedy. Writer/director Emerald Fennell was nominated for Best Director and won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, so I wasn’t alone in singing her praises (my critics group declared it the top film of 2020, huzzah). It was, in short, pastiche elevated into something jarring and relevant and daring. With her follow-up Saltburn, she has taken the British class drama of an outsider trying to fake their way in the world of the rich and powerful, a Vanity Fair or Brideshead Revisited if you will, and attached a whole lot of salacious campy nonsense. If Promising Young Woman was elevating a trashy genre movie with vision and daring, then Saltburn is taking the soapy costume drama and degrading it with cheap shock, and “degrade” is quite the appropriate term.
Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan) is a young Oxford student who doesn’t quite fit in with his peers. He doesn’t come from money and instead from a broken home, but he’s set his sights on success, and that includes winning over the handsome Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi). He’s popular and athletic and from a rich family, and Felix takes a liking to Oliver, even defending him against his posh peers. Oliver is infatuated with Felix and convinced that he’s in love. After a personal tragedy, Felix invites Oliver to summer at Saltburn, his family’s enormous private estate in the country. Oliver amuses Felix’s parents (Richard E. Grant, Rosamund Pike) and sister (Alison Oliver) and settles into the black-tie dinners and racchous parties. He might not ever want to leave, and he might not be able to leave, and he might not ever want to be able to leave.
Saltburn is like if The Talented Mr. Ripley was made by the auteur of tawdry trash Larry Clark (Kids, Bully). It’s trashy nouveau camp that works as a sour class comedy until it becomes too sour and most definitely doesn’t work as any sort of engaging character piece or legitimate thriller. I don’t really know what Fernell was going for here and it doesn’t feel like she does either. I think back on the similar tale of Mr. Ripley as an advantageous upstart who got a taste of the good life and didn’t want to give it up. Like Saltburn, we know about our lead’s duplicitous and untrustworthy nature early, but with that movie we could see why others could be charmed by Tom Ripley, and we understood why he would want to stay in this privileged life. With Saltburn, when the rich are treated as shallow twits practically bored with one another from their opulence, the question remains what exactly is the appeal beyond simply attaining more? Also, the appeal of watching con artists slip into a world not their own includes seeing how they will get away with everything, how they’ll cleverly avoid all the traps that materialize. With Saltburn, there is no thrill of clever escapes because the insidious force is obvious and the other characters are too stupid to recognize because they’re meant to be satirical send-ups. It’s a would-be thriller that has gutted all its thrills by eliminating a foreboding sense of consequences.
However, the movie cannot work because all of the surprises were alleviated through poor character development of Oliver and in the performance of Keoghan. I don’t think anyone who ever watches this movie will be even the slightest surprised that Oliver isn’t quite the noble and honest young coed that he may have appeared to be. Except after maybe a couple of early scenes of nerdy awkwardness, Oliver has been depicted as an obvious predator. From the beginning, as he’s sharing his sad family back-story, I was already shaking my head in skepticism and predicting that the truth would be something ordinary and boring that he would choose to cover-up. It’s just too obvious where this scheming, covetous character is going, and Fennell doesn’t do anything to counter this overwhelming and, again, transparent assessment. If you have a character acting all weird and shifty and literally slurping up spent bathwater belonging to the target of his obsession, you shouldn’t then make the later machinations a big reveal. I wanted to laugh that Fennell thought the audience would need flashbacks to better clarify Oliver’s scheming nature behind a series of tragic events. I always assumed it was him because who else would it be? It’s an obsessive young man with oblique and yet obvious motivation to have what he desires from the privileged. We get it. The problem is that the movie never really better examines this desire from his outsider status. We already know he’s the malignant force.
Keoghan is a great actor but “naif” is not a comfortable role for the man. By his casting alone, you’re already looking at Oliver with measured distance and scrutiny. He’s already got a leer that will set people ill at ease. The way the character is written only further confirms this judgment. If Tom Ripley was acting this outlandishly bizarre and creepy from the get-go then he would have been arrested immediately. It’s not even a lack of nuance that hurts Oliver. Not all villains and screen psychos require a full three dimensions, but the characterization is just so lazy and unexplored. He’s just a font of unchecked lust. At least in 2017’s Killing of a Sacred Deer, where Keoghan also played a malevolent young man tearing apart a family unit, his character was meant to have a mythic quality of inescapable retribution, like the Greek tragedy its title was in reference to. With Saltburn, he’s just a creepy perv, but he’s also a boring and redundant creepy perv by the ongoing refusal to provide other context. He’s less a character than a proverbial set of hands to prod characters and poke the viewer in the eye. He’s a recycled program of tedious provocation.
Given how masterfully Fennell utilized and subverted salacious elements in Promising Young Woman, I’m shocked there wasn’t much more than empty shock value. Whatever intended satirical value of this movie is glancing and fleeting. Did you know rich people can be, wait for this, superficial? Saltburn becomes a gross-out game of how far this daft creeper will go with his deadly obsessions, and on that front it all feels too annoyingly flimsy, constructed merely to be transgressive for its own provocative sake. Watching the lengths Oliver will go to prove his disturbing bonafides, it overwhelms the movie and simply becomes the movie’s purpose itself, a measurement between how far Fennell can repulse you before you reach a breaking point. It’s not merely that the characters are easy jokes, it’s that they’re bad jokes. I will say though that the ending shot is so joyously performed that I wish the rest of the movie had this kind of entertainment.
I do think there is an audience for Saltburn, the kind of people who celebrate Harmony Korine’s art-trash movies (Gummo, Spring Breakers), the kind of people who love candy-colored stylistic excess and tongue-in-cheek provocations, and people that seek out twisted love stories and dark romances. Satburn styles itself as a romance, at least early, but it’s clear that there’s nothing romantic about watching a predator set his sights on his prey and work through the family. Sadly, there’s also nothing truly entertaining here either, other than wondering when the next extreme yet desperate attempt at shock value would appear. The characters are too thin and unexplored to support this movie, and the antagonist is too obvious, as are his machinations, though his motivation remains cloudy and also undeveloped. This movie would be akin to watching a bad flu work its way through a family for all the personality Oliver offers. Fennell is a talented storyteller and exceptional at spinning genre pastiche into something so much more, so it’s quite disappointing that Saltburn is so much less than even the sum of its sundry parts.
Nate’s Grade: C
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The Holdovers (2023)
Oscar-winning director Alexander Payne and Paul Giamatti re-team for a poignant and crowd-pleasing holiday movie about outcasts sharing their vulnerabilities with one another over the last week of 1970. Giamatti stars as Paul Hunham, a rigid history teacher at an all-boys academy who just happens to be liked by nobody including his colleagues. He gets the unfortunate duty of staying on campus during the Christmas break and watching over any students who cannot return home for the holidays. Angus (Dominic Sessa) is the last student remaining, a 15-year-old with a history of lying, defiance, and on the verge of expulsion. The other holdover member is Mary (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) as the kitchen staff forced to feed them, a woman whose own adult son recently died in Vietnam. The teacher and student butt heads as they try and co-exist without other supervision, eventually connecting once they lower their defenses and attempt to see one another as flawed human beings with real hurts and disappointments. It’s a simple movie about three different characters from very different experiences pushing against one another and finding common ground. It’s a relationship movie that has plenty of wry humor and strong character beats from debut screenwriter David Hemingson. There may not be a larger theme or thesis that emerges, but being a buddy dramedy about hurt people building their friendships is still a winning formula with excellent writing, directing, and acting working in tandem, which is what we have with The Holdovers. It’s a slice of-life movie that makes you want bigger slices, especially for Mary’s character who thought having her son attend the same prep school would set him up for a promising future (he was denied college admission and thus deferral from the draft). It’s a beguiling movie because it’s about sad and lonely people over the holidays, each experiencing their own level of grief, and the overall feel is warm and fuzzy, like a feel-good movie about people feeling bad. That’s the Alexander Payne effect, finding an ironic edge to nostalgia while exploring hard-won truths with down-on-their-luck characters. The Holdovers is an enjoyable holiday comedy with shades of bitterness to go along with the feel-good uplift. It’s Payne’s Christmas movie and that is is own gift to moviegoers.
Nate’s Grade: B+
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Past Lives (2023)
The world of cinema is rife with romantic tales of two people from the past reconnecting and rekindling a passion, learning to love again as older adults now presumably wiser. The Hallmark Christmas industry is practically built from this plot structure, as the man or woman, usually the woman, goes back home to rediscover that their old friend or former flame is still living a humble life and ready to teach him or her about the small pleasures of a simple life. It’s also human nature to think about paths not taken and wonder what may have been. That’s where Past Lives starts and that’s also where it differs. The small-scale indie drama getting some of the best reviews of 2023 follows Nora (Greta Lee) as a thirty-something writer who immigrated to the United States when she was twelve. One of the friends she left behind in South Korea was Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), the boy she was crushing on who she finds again as an adult. In their early twenties, Nora and Hae Sung reconnect online and grow close again, though she requests they take time apart as their lives will not allow them to physically meet again until at least a year later. He agrees. Cut to another twelve years later, and Hae Sung seeks out his old friend, except now Nora is married to another writer, Arthur (John Magaro). What will happen with their 24-years-in-the-making reunion actually takes place?
Past Lives is a very gentle and sparse movie, and it’s remarkable that this is the debut film from writer/director Celine Song (TV’s Wheel of Time). She has the patience of an artist who knows exactly the vibe they are going for. It’s so confident with those long takes, prolonged pauses, and visual metaphors. Even the plot structure is reflective of her patience, with the adult reunion not even occurring until 50 minutes in and all three parties not meeting until 80 minutes. The opening scene spies all three of our main characters at the bar while two off-screen eavesdroppers provide their own speculative interpretation of the relationship of the three; are they lovers, are they family, who is who? It’s such a smart yet playful way to open her movie, presenting the three main players and then having unseen spectators theorize who they are, providing voice to the audience as we begin to question who might feel closer to whom. It’s also a scene that left me immediately confident that Song was going to be an assured storyteller from here on out.
A soapier and more melodramatic version of this story would center on whether Nora is going to have an affair with her childhood sweetheart; even Arthur recognizes in the “Hollywood movie” version of these events that he would be the white American villain standing in the way of true love. Except it’s not that at all. Past Lives is about two former friends and possibly romantic partners reconnecting but it’s not about whether there are still old feelings that will be rekindled. It’s not likely that after a dozen years these two would so quickly fall in love and run away together, so please don’t pretend like this is some kind of spoiler. Instead, the meeting of someone who was once important in their lives allows for a pause point to reflect not what could have been, as Hae Sung is wont to do as he imagines a life where he and Nora were linked, but as the person they used to be and how they have changed into the person they now are. This is how Nora sees their encounter, an opportunity through her childhood friend who stayed to serve as her own “what if.” Not what if she had ever gotten romantically involved with this man but what if she had stayed in Korea rather than immigrating to a new life in the West. There’s also a rosy presumption at play here, where people assume the road not taken would have led to an unmet present happiness. There’s just as much if not more a likelihood that had Nora stayed, and had she dated Hae Sung, that they could have eventually broken up on bad terms and want nothing to do with one another. By leaving young, and by never fulfilling that initial spark, they are both eternally preserved as meaningful people without regret coming into their (past) lives. Granted, every viewer can surmise their own interpretation, especially with a movie so powerfully understated, but my assessment of the movie was less romantic revisionism and more personal accounting.
The movie hinges on three characters, so it’s a good thing that all three actors are compelling to watch. The nuance each of these three performers displays is amazing. They have to communicate much through gestures and glances, where a simple smile allowing oneself to acknowledge the significance of a hug a dozen years in the making are the tools of communication. This is the kind of movie where you can watch the characters processing their thoughts in real time. Lee (The Morning Show, Russian Doll) has the difficult job of navigating as the woman in between past and present, between her husband and this other man from her old life, and she does so with uncommon grace. Yoo (Decision to Leave) is the most reserved as the interloper who doesn’t know what is safe to reveal about himself and his interior life. He confides that he and his ex-girlfriend are on a break because he feels like he’s weighing her down, that he’s too ordinary and thus inferior for her. Then there’s Magaro (The Many Saints of Newark) who might just be the most understanding husband of all time. He’s not going to make a big stink and encourages his wife to see this old friend. There’s a nice moment where Arthur reveals one reason he learned Korean was because Nora would talk in her sleep in Korean. He wanted to learn more about a hidden part of her life. “It’s like there’s a whole place inside you I can’t go,” he says, and rather than seem like jealousy, it’s an admission of wanting to empathize with as many facets of the person you love. No wonder Hae Sung, despite himself, liked Arthur.
And yet the curmudgeon in me, the yin to my foolishly romantic self’s yang, has some qualms about what holds Past Lives back from being the emotional tour de force it could have been. This is because the characters are understated to the point that they feel less fully formed as people so that a larger selection of viewers will recognize themselves and their own questions and relatability. In making the film more universal, the movie has also made the characters feel less defined, more informed by key details of difference that the characters list like employee evaluations. Nora thinks like an American woman and Hae Sung thinks like a Korean man. In some ways, they’re meant to be stand-ins for Eastern and Western cultural differences. Understatement is grand but it can also leave less specifics. Think about how remarkable the characters are in Richard Linklater’s Before series, their mellifluous conversations so natural and pleasant to behold. It’s the same key aspect with many of the mumblecore indies, dropping you in on lives and characters that you want to observe for 100-or-so minutes of investment. They leave an impression because of who they are, whereas much of Past Lives is leaving an impression of reflection of who they could have been and how they might have changed over time. It’s not quite the same, and so this is why my emotional and intellectual investment were not as steadily satisfied by the full film.
Aching to the point of being painful, Past Lives is a beautifully tender drama about characters taking stock of their lives both past and present. It’s like somebody mixed Before Sunset with a French New Wave romance. A key theme throughout is the concept of fate, known as “In Yun” in Korea. It’s about the many actions and ripples through years and years to bring people into contact with one another and recognizing that every connection is the result of thousands of these actions pushing us to that singular point. It’s a way to say be appreciative of what you have but also who you’ve been allowed to become. Past Lives is an appealing story that might be a bit too understated to break through higher levels of emotional engagement, but even at its current level, it’s still one of the finer films of the year.
Nate’s Grade: B+
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The Marvels (2023)
No Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) movie has had a bigger trail of negative buzz than The Marvels, the supposed sequel to not just 2019’s Captain Marvel but also an extension of two Marvel television series from the Disney streaming service. The film has had its release delayed three times, rumors abound that heavy portions were re-shot, and its own director, Nia DeCosta (2021’s Candyman), had already moved on to starting her next project while her last movie was still being finished in post-production (to her defense, the movie was delayed three times). The opening weekend wasn’t kind, setting an all-time low for the MCU, and the critical and fan reception was rather dismal, with many calling the movie proof that Marvel was in trouble. There is a lot going against this movie, and yet when I actually sat and watched The Marvels, I found it a flawed but fun B-movie that doesn’t deserve its intense pile-on. Although, caution dear reader, as I’m also one of the seemingly few critics who enjoyed Black Widow and most of Eternals as well.
Carol Danvers a.k.a. Captain Marvel (Brie Larson) has been absent for most of the past 30 years, trying to do right by the universe’s many alien civilizations in need. The people of Earth also feel a little left behind, notably Monica Lambeau (Teyonah Parris), who knew Carol as a child in the 1990s and is now acclimating to her own light-based superpowers (see: WandaVision). A power-hungry Kree warrior, Dar-Benn (Zawe Ashton, Tom Hiddelston’s wife in real life), is seeking a way to restore a home world for her people. She finds one super-powerful weapon, a bangle she wears on her arm that opens interstellar portals. The other bangle happens to belong to a New Jersey teenager, Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani), a first generation Pakistani-American who also moonlights as the bangled-powered hero, Ms. Marvel (see: Ms. Marvel). Through strange circumstances, Kamala, Monica, and Carol are all linked by their powers, so if one of them uses said powers they happen to swap places in space, teleporting from three different points. It makes it really hard when you’re supposed to save the day and work together to defeat the bad guy.
The core dynamic of the movie is this trio of powerful women learning to work together, and while that might sound trite for the thirty-third movie in a colossal franchise, it’s a serviceable arc for a movie that only runs 100 minutes, the shortest in MCU history. The swift running time is both a help and a hindrance, but it allows the film not to overstay its welcome while juggling three lead characters and multiple space-time-hopping action set pieces. I wish Marvel could return to an era of telling smaller stories that don’t have to feel so grandiose, with personal stakes tied more to their characters than saving the planet yet again (2017’s Spider-Man: Homecoming is a great example). Even though this too falls into the trap of world-destroying-energy-hole, it still feels lighter and breezier, and I think that is a result of its pacing and lowered ambitions. That’s not an insult to the filmmakers, more a recognition that The Marvels doesn’t have to compete with the likes of Endgame or the Guardians for emotional stakes. It can just be fun, and simply being a fun and well-paced action movie is fine. That’s what the MCU diet can use more of, especially considering the Ant-Man movies have transformed from palate cleansers to same-old bombast.
On the flip side, the speedy running time is also a very real indication of its troubled production and the attempt to salvage multiple versions into one acceptable blockbuster. There are signs of heavy editing and re-shoots throughout, from lots of ADR dialogue hiding actors visibly mouthing these patchwork lines, to world-building problems and solutions that can seem hazy. The rationale for why these three women become linked is so contrived that even Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) bemoans Carol not to touch a strange unknown space light because it’s shiny. The concept of the three heroes being linked by their powers offers plenty of fun moments, of which I’ll go into more detail soon, but the execution left me questioning. Which superpower use qualified and which did not? It seems a little arbitrary which powers using light trigger the switcheroo. I don’t think the movie even knows. There’s also a late solution that feels so obvious that characters could have been like, “Oh yeah, we could have tried that this whole time.” A reasonable excuse was right within reach, blaming the inability to attempt the solution on not having sufficient power before assembling both of the bangle MacGuffins. It also, curiously, allows the villain to win in spite of her vengeful indiscriminate killing, but don’t think too much about that or its possible real-world parallels as that will only make you feel dramatically uncomfortable.
There are remnants of what must have been a fuller movie of Marvels’ past, as each character has an intriguing element that goes relatively under-developed. Monica was gone thanks to Thanos while her mother died and is also trying to square her feelings of resentment for Carol, a woman she felt so close to as a child who flew away and didn’t return for decades. So we have attachment issues and issues of closure. Carol is likewise trying to rebuild her relationship with this little girl she let down, and she has to also consider the unintended consequences of being a superhero. The Kree worlds refer to Carol as “The Annihilator,” a powerful being that doomed their civilization. She’s become a culture’s nightmare. That re-framing of heroism and perspective, as well as the larger collateral damage of the innocents from defeating villains makes for an interesting psychological stew of guilt and doubt and moral indecision. Then there’s Kamala, who worships Captain Marvel as her personal hero and wants nothing more than to join the ranks of superheroes. Her rosy version of the duties of being a hero could be seriously challenged by the harsher reality, like when Carol has to determine that saving “some lives” is more important than losing all life to save more. She could become disillusioned with her heroes and re-examine her concepts of right and wrong. And there are elements of all these storylines with our trio but they’re only shading at best. There’s just not enough time to delve into this drama when the movie needs to keep moving.
However, the fun of the body-swapping concept leads to some of the more enjoyable and creative action sequences in the MCU. DeCosta really taps into the fun comedy but also the ingenuity of characters jumping places rapidly. It begins in a disorienting and goofy way, as characters jump in and out of different fights and have to adapt. It makes for a fun sequence where at any moment the action can be shaken up, as well as forcing there to be enough action going on for three people. This also leads to some interesting dangers, as Kamala gets zapped high above her neighborhood and plummets to the ground, as these are the dangers when your two other linked superheroes can fly. The use of the powers into the action feels well thought through, and the combination of the women working together and strategizing when and where to swap places makes for creatively satisfying resolutions. The action sequences are also very clearly staged and edited without the use of jarring and confusing edits. You can clearly see what is happening and what is important, and the choreography is imaginatively spry.
There are some asides to this movie that had me smiling and laughing and just plain happy. The Marvels visit a planet where the only way to communicate with the locals is through song, and it starts out like a big old school Hollywood musical with some Bollywood flourishes. I wish the movie had done even more with this wonderfully goofy rule, possibly even setting a fight sequence that also plays into the musical quality of the weird setting. Oh well, but it was pure fun and forced the characters outside of a comfort zone (though this too had some hazy rules application). There’s also a montage involving alien cats and a life-saving and space-saving solution that had me giggling like crazy (my extra appreciation for the ironic use of “Memory”). It’s because of these sequences, the delightful exuberance of Vellani, and the above-average action sequences that make it impossible for me to dismiss the movie as a waste.
The Marvels has problems, sure, with its lackluster villain, some hazy rule-setting and application, not to mention an overstuffed plot that feels a bit jumbled from the likes of twenty other stories trying to appear as one semi-unified whole. But it’s also fun, light, and entertaining in its best moments, and even the good moments outweigh the bad in my view. I would gladly re-watch this movie over the likes of Multiverse of Madness, Love and Thunder, and Quantumania. While it can seem initially overwhelming to approach, the movie does a workable job to catch up its audience on who the other Marvels happen to be just in case you didn’t watch 17 episodes of two different TV shows. It’s mid-tier Marvel but refreshingly comfortable as such, only aiming for popcorn antics and goofy humor with some colorful visuals. It all feels like a special event from a Saturday morning cartoon, which again might be faint praise to many. Blame it on my lowered expectations, blame it on my superhero fandom, or simply call me a contrarian lashing out against what seems a very ugly strain of vitriol for this movie to fail, but I found The Marvels to be a perfectly enjoyable 100 minutes of super team-up tomfoolery.
Nate’s Grade: B-
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The Killer (2023)
Were you even aware that David Fincher had a new movie? The celebrated director has been very mercurial since 2014’s Gone Girl, only helming one other movie. His partnership with Netflix has afforded the notoriously perfectionist director a lot of creative latitude, though sadly not a third season of Mindhunter. But even the artistic cache of a new Fincher movie isn’t enough for Netflix to change its business model. The Killer only played in theaters for two weeks before beaming into millions of homes. You would think this streaming giant would want to leverage its big names and their new projects, but I’m reminded of how much money Netflix likely left aside forgoing Glass Onion’s theatrical run. Alas, The Killer is an intriguing if cold and unsatisfying thriller that epitomizes the limits of surface-level living.
Our titular killer (Michael Fassbender) is hired to kill a Parisian businessman and botches the job. He’s on the run and fears for his well-being from his employers wanting to eliminate any loose ends. His girlfriend in the Dominican Republic is beaten and threatened, and the lead killer realizes he’s going to have to out-kill all the other killers after him if his loved ones don’t get killed. Through five chapters, each ending in a death, the killer works his way up the food chain.
Fincher is attempting to strip out the movie-cool mythos of the world of hired assassins, to subvert the entertainment value that can come with expert murderers leading to blood and death. The Killer is Fincher’s stubborn subversion of what a trained assassin movie should be, and his main takeaway, beyond stripping the misplaced glamor from the profession, is how tedious it would all be in real life. In the movie world, being a trained killer involves all sorts of exciting derring-do and acrobatics and the like. In the possible real world, being a trained killer is more like a paid security guard; it’s a lot of protracted sitting and waiting and watching, and it’s easy to understand just how overwhelmingly boring all this would be. The opening twenty minutes quite convincingly strips the cool factor away from this profession. It doesn’t make you feel the weight of the culpability, like 2018’s You Were Never Really Here (more on that later), but what it makes you feel is just how maddening and boring this whole job must be and what kind of dedicated people would succeed. It’s like Fincher is making a bet with a mainstream audience that he can find a way to make a boring assassin movie, and while doing so can be seen as subversive to some degree, bleeding much of the thrills out of the picture, it also feels like a bet gone wrong. You made the main character boring on purpose to prove a point, but regardless of intent, your protagonist is still boring. Victory?
As physically inactive as Act One proves, watching our title killer sit and wait and watch, it is conversely hyperactive in narration. This is wall-to-wall narration as our lead character expounds upon his regiment to keep his mind and body ready when his eventual window materializes. It reminded me of the narration of Patrick Bateman from American Psycho, about his methodical lifestyle routines. Except that character was being satirized from their first moments, whereas the emptiness of our killer here is the larger point, that he’s fashioned himself into an unfeeling weapon. Here is a character that feels he is only effective if he strips everything human away, if he only focuses on the job regardless of politics or consequences, and lives his spartan existence. I’m sure he envisions himself as some noble modern-day samurai, living a code others cannot keep. Except the movie reveals throughout that he might not be the best killer in the phone book. First off, he misses shooting his target, which sets everything into motion. All his narration about focus and yoga and dedication and even I know you shouldn’t fire while someone else is in front of your target. There’s a jarring scene where he fires nails into the lungs of a character and theorizes the man has six or seven minutes left to live before his lungs fill up. Nope. The man dies within one minute max. For all his resourcefulness, which is benefited by the long reach of capitalism, the man also doesn’t live up to his self-image. His paranoia keeps him from returning to his home on time and allows the attack on his girlfriend to happen in his absence. There might be an even deeper commentary on how even the lead is confusing his life for a movie.
My favorite scene is a sit down with a competing hired hitman played by Tilda Swinton (Three Thousand Years of Longing). She’s one of the two competing assassins responsible for targeting his girlfriend, so she presents a threat. He meets her at a fancy restaurant and she already accepts that she will not be making it to dessert. She is the exact opposite of our main character, a woman who has found a way to live a normal life in the suburbs, marry a man, and enjoy the luxuries of a life afforded by her wealth. She’s not living out of storage units or purposely dressing like a German tourist to stay under the radar. In some ways, this has allowed our more single-minded assassin to get the jump on her, to take advantage of her complacency. However, it’s also an indictment on the stripped-down, isolationist life our lead killer has prioritized. Here is a woman who has embraced allowing herself to enjoy things. She’s not eating McDonald’s breakfast sandwiches minus the slimy egg patty. She’s not slumming it for her “art.” She sees no value in abstinence. This stark contrast, as well as a sustained conversation between two foes, is the highlight of the film. It’s also interesting to watch Swinton’s character go through her own mini-grieving process accepting the likelihood that this will be her final meal, and so she savors it without fear.
Being a David Fincher movie, you can rightly assume that the technical elements are nearly flawless. The visual arrangements are beautiful, the cinematography is chilly and atmospheric, and the editing is precise and smooth. The first attempted kill has a nice degree of tension simply from shifting audio levels, going from diegetic to narration, never allowing the viewer to properly adjust during such a heightened point of paying attention. It’s naturally unsettling and effectively raises the tension of a moment we’ve been waiting over twenty minutes to arrive. There is an extended hand-to-hand fight sequence that’s exceptionally well choreographed and carries on from room to room, transforming with each new location and utilizing the geography of each space nicely (the John Wick folks would approve). The overall movie feels more in keeping with the likes of Fincher’s Panic Room or The Game, a more straightforward thriller that lacks simply extra levels and commentary, like Zodiac or Gone Girl. There’s nothing wrong with a well-executed and developed thriller purely designed to be a good time. It’s just at this stage of Fincher’s career, the expectations are raised, fairly or unfairly, with every new release. The Killer is a polished thriller meant to be pared down to its essential parts and can be enjoyed as such.
There is little to hold onto here emotionally though, so we’re left with the intellectual curiosity of watching a so-called professional go about their business and see how he gets around obstacles. Very often it’s dressing up in a delivery outfit and simply waiting on other polite strangers to open doors for his unassuming facade. One could argue that the character arc is about a man who rejects empathy, argues that it is weakness, comes around to accept empathy, and embraces it on his way out. I can see some of this, as the motivation for his trail of vengeance is to protect his loved one from being harmed again. There’s even a moment where he demonstrates a sliver of sympathy to a victim, albeit still utilizing gruesome violence. Except I don’t believe that easy assessment of this being a journey of embracing empathy. This doesn’t come across as a character changing who they are but instead as a character cleaning up their own mess. The main character keeps reiterating to “stick to the plan, don’t improvise,” but I don’t think he’s reflecting at any point on his actions beyond a clinical cause-effect relationship. He’s stripped all the complexities of humanity out from himself but recognizing fault isn’t the same as building and maintaining a sense of empathy. I also think the reading that many critics are making of Fincher standing in for the main character, a dedicated tactician who tries to do it all, is a little too cute and desperate for meta-narratives to derive a better lens to analyze the overall vacancy of the lead character.
This is very different from Lynn Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here, a film that also subverted the same hitman sub-genre and made the audience re-examine its own bloodlust. As I wrote in 2018: “The focus of the movie is on the man committing the acts of violence rather than how stylish and cool and cinematic those acts of violence can be. …Ramsay offers discorded images and brief flashes and asks the audience to put together the pieces to better understand Joe as a man propelled and haunted by his bloody past…. It’s not all tragedy and inescapable dread. Amidst Joe’s tortured past and troubled future, there’s a necessary sense of hope. You don’t know what will happen next but you’re not resigned to retrograde nihilism.” This is not the feeling I took from The Killer, and I recommend everyone watch Ramsay’s movie too.
The problem with making a boring assassination thriller on purpose is that, at the end of the day, you still have a boring assassination thriller. Fassbender (who hasn’t been on screen since 2019’s Dark Phoenix killed the X-Men franchise) can be compelling for two hours doing just about anything, and a performance that is minimal in spoken dialogue does not mean a minimal performance. He’s great to sit and watch, the running commentary of his narration serving as a starting point to assess all the concentrated, nuanced acting under the surface. The Killer has sheen and skill, much like its title character, but it too also misses the mark where it counts.
Nate’s Grade: B-
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Five Nights at Freddy’s (2023)
I’ve learned so much more about pre-teen horror video games in the years since I’ve become a parent. There is no shortage of horror-themed games, many of them available through Roblox, that act as gradual entry points for burgeoning new horror fans that might not be emotionally ready for more intense horror (for my money, the creepy smiley creatures with dozens of teeth are more frightening than Michael Myers on any day). This brings me to the Five Nights at Freddy’s movie based on the insanely popular video game series that essentially said, “What if Chuck E. Cheese was, like, evil?” The game involved shifting between security cameras to keep watch on some frisky animatronics that have a hard time staying put, and of course jump scares and bloodless deaths. It’s a game about alternating camera feeds and waiting, and so the big screen version is also a movie very much about waiting for the creatures to stir. That’s probably why a quarter of the feature is watching Josh Hutcherson (The Hunger Games) travel into a dream-space to try and communicate with mysterious children to figure out what must be some of the more obvious plot revelations that he just can’t seem to grasp about this sleepy town and its history of missing kids. Why are we spending this much time on the human character’s back-story when we have killer robots to maim dumb teenagers? There are more scenes with the ghost kids than the animatronics of fame. The protagonist’s motivation seems wishy-washy since he’s putting his life on the line to keep his little sister and then makes an ill-advised bargain with the robots to get rid of her because… we need a moment for him to realize what really matters most? Huh? The scenes of horror rely much more on impressions, favoring shadows and implied violence than featuring anything too overt. I found the revelation of the ultimate villain to be laughable, no matter if it matches up with whatever the convoluted lore is for a game that, again, is flipping through TV channels and trying not to get eaten. There just isn’t a whole lot going on here, and the human drama of Hutcherson trying to win custody of his little sister feels a bit too dramatic and real for something this silly. He can’t get any other job than guarding an abandoned pizza parlor? Why does anyone just not enter the restaurant? He keeps returning to the job even after he realizes the danger. Unless you’re a diehard fan thrilled to just see live-action versions of your favorite furry friends, Five Nights at Freddy’s fees like four nights too many.
Nate’s Grade: C
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