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Garden State (2004) [Review Re-View]
Originally released July 28, 2004:
Zack Braff is best known to most as the lead doc on NBC’s hilarious Scrubs. He has razor-sharp comic timing, a goofy charisma, and a deft gift for physical comedy. So who knew that behind those bushy eyebrows and bushier hair was an aspiring writer/director? Furthermore, who would have known that there was such a talented writer/director? Garden State, Braff’s ode to his home, boasts a big name cast, deafening buzz, and perhaps, the first great steps outward for a new Hollywood voice.
Andrew Large Largeman (Braff) is an out-of-work actor living in an anti-depressant haze in LA. He heads back to his old stomping grounds in New Jersey when he learns that his mother has recently died. Andrew has to reface his psychiatrist father (Ian Holm), the source of his guilt and prescribed numbness. He has forgotten his lithium for his trip, and the consequences allow Andrew to begin to awaken as a human being once more. He meets old friends, including Mark (Peter Sarsgaard), who now digs graves for a living and robs them when he can. He parties at the mansion of a friend made rich by the invention of silent Velcro. Things really get moving when Andrew meets Sam (Natalie Portman), a free spirit who has trouble telling the truth and staying still. Their budding relationship coalesces with Andrews re-connection to friends, family, and the joys life can offer.
Braff has a natural director’s eye for visuals and how to properly use them to convey his characters’ feelings. A scene where Andrew wears a shirt and blends into the wall is a perfect visual note on the character’s sleep-walk through life. Braff’s writing is also familiar but satisfyingly unusual, like a repackaging of old stories told with a confident voice. His characters are interesting and memorable, but don’t feel uselessly quirky, unlike the creations of other first-time indie writers. The melancholy coming-out of Andrew from disconnected schlub to post-pharmaceutical hero really grabs the audience and gives them a rooting point. At times, though, it seems as though Braff may be caught up trying to craft a movie that speaks to a generation, and some will see Garden State as a generation’s voice of a yearning to feel connected.
Braff deserves a medal for finally coaxing out the actress in Portman. She herself has looked like an overly medicated, numb being in several of her recent films (Star Wars prequels, I’m looking in your direction), but with her plucky, whimsical role in Garden State, Portman proves that her careers acting apex wasn’t in 1994’s The Professional when she was 12. Her winsome performance gives Garden State its spark, and the sincere romance between Sam and Andrew gives it its heart.
Sarsgaard is fast becoming one of the best young character actors out there. After solid efforts in Boys Don’t Cry and Shattered Glass, he shines as a coarse but affectionate grave robber that serves as Andrew’s motivational elbow-in-the-ribs. Only the great Holm seems to disappoint with a rare stilted and vacant performance. This can be mostly blamed on Braff’s underdevelopment of the father role. Even Method Man pops up in a very amusing cameo.
The humor in Garden State truly blossoms. There are several outrageous moments and wonderfully peculiar characters, but their interaction and friction are what provide the biggest laughs. So while Braff may shoehorn in a frisky seeing-eye canine, a knight of the breakfast table, and a keeper of an ark, the audience gets its real chuckles from the characters and not the bizarre scenarios. Garden State has several wonderfully hilarious moments, and its sharp sense of humor directly attributes to its high entertainment value. The film also has some insightful looks at family life, guilt, romance, human connection, and acceptance. Garden State can cut close like a surgeon but it’s the surprisingly elegant tenderness that will resonate most with a crowd.
Braff’s film has a careful selection of low-key, highly emotional tunes by artists like The Shins, Coldplay, Zero 7, and Paul Simon. The closing song, the airy Let Go by Frou Frou, has been a staple on my playlist after I heard it used in the commercials.
Garden State is not a flawless first entry for Braff. It really is more a string of amusing anecdotes than an actual plot. The film’s aloof charm seems to be intended to cover over the cracks in its narrative. Braff’s film never ceases to be amusing, and it does have a warm likeability to it; nevertheless, it also loses some of its visual and emotional insights by the second half. Braff spends too much time on less essential moments, like the all-day trip by Mark that ends in a heavy-handed metaphor with an abyss. The emotional confrontation between father and son feels more like a baby step than a climax. Braff’s characters also talk in a manner that less resembles reality and more resembles snappy, glib movie dialogue. It’s still fun and often funny, but the characters speak more like they’ve been saving up witty one-liners just for the occasion.
Garden State is a movie thats richly comic, sweetly post-adolescent, and defiantly different. Braff reveals himself to be a talent both behind the camera and in front of it, and possesses an every-man quality of humility, observation, and warmth that could soon shoot him to Hollywood’s A-list. His film will speak to many, and its message about experiencing lifes pleasures and pains, as long as you are experiencing life, is uplifting enough that you may leave the theater floating on air. Garden State is a breezy, heartwarming look at New York’s armpit and the spirited inhabitants that call it home. Braff delivers a blast of fresh air during the summer blahs.
Nate’s Grade: B
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WRITER REFLECTIONS 20 YEARS LATER
In the summer of 2024, there were two indie movies that defined the next years of your existence. If you were under 18, it was Napoleon Dynamite. If you were between 18 and 30, it was Garden State. Zack Braff’s debut as writer/director became a Millennial staple on DVD shelves, and I think at one time it might have been the law that everyone had to own the popular Grammy-winning soundtrack. It wasn’t just an indie hit, earning $35 million on a minimal budget of $2.5 million; it was a Real Big Deal, with big-hearted young people finding solace in its tale of self-discovery and shaking loose from jaded emotional malaise. If you had to determine a list of the most vital Millennial films, not necessarily on quality but on popularity and connection to the zeitgeist, then Garden State must be included. Twenty years later, it’s another artifact of its time, hard to fully square outside of that influential period. It’s a coming-of-age tale wrapped up in about every quirky indie trope of its era, including a chief example of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, even though that term was first coined from the AV Club review of 2005’s Elizabethtown. Twenty years later, Garden State still has some warm fuzzies but loses its feels.
Andrew Largeman (Braff) is a struggling actor in L.A. who returns to his hometown in New Jersey to attend the funeral of his mother. Right there we have the prodigal son formula mixed with the return-to-your-roots formula, wherein the cynical figure needs to learn about the important things they’ve forgotten from the good people they left behind for supposed bigger and better things in the big city. There’s a lot of familiarity with Garden State, both intentionally and unintentionally. It’s meant to evoke the loose, rougher-edged romantic comedies of Hal Ashby and older Woody Allen. It certainly feels more like a series of scenes than a united whole, and that can work in Braff’s favor. His character has gone off his meds for the first time since he was a child, and he’s experiencing a personal reawakening. He’s opening himself up more to the people and possibility of the world, so the movie works more on a thematic level to unify itself rather than strictly from a foundational plot with key turns. If you can connect on that relatable level, then you will likely be able to experience the same whimsy and enchantment that so many felt back in 2004. However, with twenty years of distance, I now see more seams than when I was but a wide-eyed 22-year-old romantic. Andrew is more a reactive symbol, more personified by his hardships or inability to chart a path for himself than by a personality. He’s easily eclipsed by the quirky characters dancing all around him, with Braff smiling ever so wryly at the sweet mysteries of life. This stop-and-smell-the-roses approach was also explored in 2014’s Wish I Was Here, Braff’s directing follow-up that placed him as a family man questioning himself amidst marital malaise. This movie was far less celebrated, I think, because of the thematic redundancy but also because Braff was playing an older character that needed to, kind of, grow up. It was more tolerable when Braff was playing a mid-20s melancholic experiencing his first brush with romantic love. Less so ten years later.
Natalie Portman had been an actress that I was more cool over until 2004 with the double-whammy of Garden State and her Oscar-nominated turn in Closer. She’s since become one of the most exciting actors who goes for broke in her performances whether they might work or not. In 2004, I thought her performance in Garden State was an awakening for her, and in 2024 it now feels so starkly pastiche. Bless her heart, but Portman is just calibrated for the wrong kind of movie. Her energy level is two to three times that of the rest of the movie, and while you can say she’s the spark plug of the film, the jolt meant to shake Andrew awake, her character comes across more as an overwritten cry for help. Sam is even more prototypical Manic Pixie Dream Girl (MPDG) than Kirsten Dunst’s bouncy character in Elizabethtown. Her entire existence is meant to provoke change upon our male character. This in itself is not an unreasonable fault; many characters in numerous stories are meant to represent a character’s emotional state. It’s just that there isn’t much to Sam besides a grab-bag of quirky characteristics: she’s a compulsive liar, though nothing is ever really done with this being a challenge to building lasting bonds; she’s incapable of keeping pets alive, and Andrew could be just another pet; she’s consumed with being unique to the point of having to stand up and blurt out nonsense words to convince herself that nobody in human history has duplicated her recent combination of sounds and body gestures, but she’s all archetype. She exists to push Andrew along on his reawakening, including introducing him and us to The Shins (“This song will change your life”). She’s entertaining, and Portman is charming, but it’s an example of trying so hard. I thought her cheeks must have hurt from holding a smile so long. I’m sure Braff would compare Sam to Annie Hall, as Diane Keaton was perhaps the mold for the MPDG, except she more than stood on her own and didn’t need a nebbish man to complete her.
There are some enjoyable moments. It’s funny to watch a young Jim Parsons in a suit of armor eating breakfast cereal and expounding the romance language of Klingon. It’s funny to have a meet-cute in a doctor’s office while Andrew is repeatedly humped by a dog with personal boundary issues. It’s fun to go on a madcap journey around town with your former high school friend-turned-gravedigger that ends up in a sinkhole in a quarry, where characters can literally scream into the void. It’s darkly funny to run into a former classmate who became a cop who is still a screw-up except now he has authority. It’s poignant to listen to Andrew’s story about accidentally paralyzing his mother when he was an angry young child who, in a fit of rage, pushed her, and she hit her head on a faulty dishwasher latch. Given all these elements an overview, it feels like Garden State was Braff’s very loose collection of ideas and stories, jokes and bits collected over the years. It’s entertaining and quirky and silly and occasionally poignant, but it’s never more than the sum of its parts. Garden State wants to be about a man changing his life and perspective, but it’s really more a Wizard of Oz-style journey through the quirky indie backlot of kooky Jersey characters. The scenes with Andrew’s distant father (Ian Holm) feel too removed to have the catharsis desired. He feels like an absent character from the movie, so why should we overly value this father-son reconciliation?
Admittedly, that soundtrack is still a banger. It soars when it needs to, like Imogen Heep’s “Let Go” over the race-back-to-the-girl finale, and it’s deftly somber when it needs to, like Iron and Wine’s cover of “Such Great Heights” and “The Only Living Boy in New York” paired with our big movie kiss. It’s such a cohesive, thematic whole that lathers over the exposed seams of the movie’s scenic hodgepodge. Braff tried to find similar magic with his musical choices for 2006’s The Last Kiss, a movie he starred in but did not direct (he also provided un-credited rewrites to Paul Haggis’ adapted screenplay). That soundtrack is likewise packed with eclectic artists (he even snags Aimee Mann) but failed to resonate like Garden State. It’s probably because nobody saw the movie and Braff’s character was, as I described in my 2006 review, an overgrown man-child afraid his life lacks “surprises” now that he was going to be a father. Sheesh.
Garden State is a movie that is winsome and amusing but also emblematic of its early 2000s era, of young people yearning to feel something in an era where we were afraid of feeling too much because of how painful the real world stood to be as an adult. Rejecting pain is rejecting the full human experience, which we even learned in Inside Out. There could have been a richer examination on parental desire to protect children from experiencing pain but creating more harm than good (kind of the theme of 2018’s God of War reboot). It’s just not there. My original review was far more smitten with the movie, doubled over by Portman’s performance and the effectiveness of Braff as a writer and a director. My criticisms at the end of my 2004 review are all shared with my present-day self, especially the dialogue: “Characters also talk in a manner that less resembles reality and more resembles snappy, glib movie dialogue. It’s still fun and often funny, but the characters speak more like they’ve been saving up witty one-liners just for the occasion.” I’d downgrade the movie ever so slightly, though there is still enough charm and whimsy to separate it from its twee indie brethren. In 2004, Garden State felt like a seminal movie for a breakthrough filmmaker. Now it feels like a fitfully amusing rom-com with slipshod plotting and a supporting character that needed re-calibration.
Re-View Grade: C+
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IF (2024)/ The Imaginary (2024)/ Imaginary (2024)
Every so often, I find myself drawn to reviewing movies in pairs, whether it’s because of the same source material (the 2022 Pinoochios), similar perspectives (2018’s BlackkKlansman and Sorry to Bother You), or even diametrically opposed artistic responses to a similar theme (2016’s Manchester by the Sea and Collateral Beauty). However, in my twenty-five years as a fledgling film critic, I don’t think I’ve ever reviewed three movies at the same time for whatever relevancy, yet that is what I find most appropriate for this trio of exceedingly similar films about imaginary friends. Earlier in the year, Blumhouse released Imaginary, their horror-thriller take on an imaginary friend refusing to go away. At the start of the summer, writer/director John Krasinski gave us IF, a live-action fantasy/comedy about imaginary friends finding their former children as adults. And recently, Netflix released an anime movie The Imaginary, a Studio Ghibli-esque fantasy about forgotten imaginary friends trying to find new kids and new homes. I’ve elected to review all three at once and, much like the Pinnochios, declare a winner through different categories.
Begin the critical gauntlet! Bring on the (imaginary) bloodshed!
- PREMISE
Two of these movies went in a sweetly sentimental direction and the other went in the horror direction, so let’s tackle that one first. Imaginary gets at a rarely spoken truth: children can be super creepy. Watch a child hold an involved conversation with some entity that isn’t there, or just stare into the dark and say, so plainly, “That’s where the eyes are watching me,” or any number of personal anecdotes to make you shudder, and you’ll understand the significant horror potential with a malevolent creature that the child can communicate with that adults cannot see. This also lends itself to a low-budget film production as so much of the wicked entity is implicit and unseen. It’s a cost-saving genius when you can just use your, wait for it, imagination. Now Imaginary isn’t the first horror version of this premise, but it deserves points for taking a childhood concept and thinking of an effective way to transform it into a diseased and malignant antagonist, haunting its adult child Jessica (DeWanda Wise) and seeking a new child, likely her youngest step-daughter Alice (Pyper Braun). It then presents its conflict like a curse that the past generation is trying to spare the next generation from suffering through. Of course this also includes getting adults to recognize the threat as they are often dismissing it. Nobody wants to believe that Chauncey the teddy bear is the one urging you to self-harm.
The other two movies take a far more family-friendly approach to their imaginary premises. There’s a lot of shared real estate between The Imaginary and IF. Both are about outdated imaginary friends finding refuge together in a sort of halfway house, a… foster home for imaginary friends (someone should make a cartoon series about that). Both of the movies follow imaginary friends trying to find new children who will accept them and give them a new life. IF briefly follows the possibility of reuniting the forgotten imaginary friends (a.k.a. IFs) with their former owners now grown up into adulthood. This is actually the movie at its best, as the creatures find a renewed sense of purpose and reconnect with a person they cherished but had to let go. For a strange reason, Krasinski only dabbles with this poignant story direction, switching gears to find them new homes with new kids, which serves as another story direction that is also quickly ditched. IF seems to be trying on so many different versions of its premise and then discarding them like the IFs themselves. The Imaginary has more focus on its central predicament, finding new homes before these characters fade away, or worse, get eaten by a cannibalistic imaginary fiend looking to gain more years of his own existence by consuming the life force of his imaginary peers. It also has the urgency of its main character, an imaginary boy named Rudger, hoping that his child wakes up from a car accident, and if so, that she’ll still need him. The other characters are trying to set Rudger up for a life after his child, since they’ve all experienced the same fate and are trying to help him adjust to not just letting go but also being open to a new child. It’s simplified but has plenty to still explore, plus a creepy super villain.
Winner: The Imaginary
2. WORLD-BUILDING
This is what really separates IF from The Imaginary. The world of imaginary figures populated in Kransinski’s movie are cute but their larger world context is unfortunately underdeveloped. This is likely because much of the movie is connected to the personal journey of one twelve-year-old girl, Bea (Cailley Fleming), trying to keep herself busy while her father (Krasinski) undergoes vague “heart surgery.” The IF Coney Island respite feels like a secret nursing home where the discarded friends just kind of hang out. There’s even swimming and painting lessons. There’s no further examination on whether these are only the IFs from this zip code, though Bradley Cooper voices a talking glass of ice water whose child originated in Arizona, so that’s undetermined. I was also hoping for an imaginary friend from decades back, like Franklin Roosevelt or Alexander Hamilton’s imaginary friend, or from other countries. Each character design can say something inherently about their past child creator, what they regarded as fulfilling or lacking from their present. Alas, the world-building is mostly one little girl’s discovery of her new friends and then how they ultimately support her with her family predicament looming over every scene. Seriously, for a father going through major surgery, the family in IF is pretty blase about Bea’s whereabouts. Her grandmother (Fiona Shaw) doesn’t seem too pressed about letting an unattended adolescent run around New York City for hours. Bea’s experience with helping the IFs are reflections of her optimism and hope. It all comes back to her, so the movie chooses to ignore the larger possibilities of its magical unseen world.
The Imaginary feels modeled after the Studio Ghibli movies that have delighted children and adults for generations. Its main character is Rudger, an imaginary friend, and not the child who birthed the imaginary friend, Amanda. That creates a different sense of discovery, as Rudger also learns about the hidden library housing other imaginary friends and the rules. He’s to stare at a bulletin board and await a prospective child he feels a connection to, then holds onto a picture of them to transport into the child’s imaginative play where they can contribute to the creative adventure. However, there are dangers like if you die in the imaginary world, you can die for real, which is never fully explored as a real threat. The imaginary characters are told to stay indoors at night, as they don’t want to run into Mr. Bunting, the cannibalistic antagonist. I got a little lost with the different rules, some of which seemed to be emphasized more or canceling out previous rules, but I appreciated the level of thought given to making its world alive.
This is also where Imaginary begins to get lost in its own hazy imagination. Imagine the bedroom door-hopping mechanic from Monsters Inc. but with the narrative formula of Insidious, and there you have Imaginary. The world of imagination is treated very similarly to a hellish dimensional getaway, much like what happens in Insidious where dad had to retrieve his son in the demon’s phantasmagorical realm. Because the spooky imaginary world relates back to the main character’s childhood, we have a few other characters that have history with this trauma. Jessica’s father Ben has been committed to a hospital and seemed mentally ill, until you realize he rescued his little girl from evil Chauncey and lost his mind in the process. He’s not some lost cause, he’s a hero. Also, there’s a former neighbor and babysitter (Betty Buckely, always welcomed) who is obsessed with childhood psychology and willing to do some extreme things to continue her obsession with Chauncey. It’s at least widening the scope to look at how these traumatic events have impacted other people, not just the little girl bottling up those nightmares. However, beyond the simple explanation of Chauncey existing as a parasite feasting on the imaginative power of children, little else is established about the creature or its own world. At one point, a character relishes the possibility of imagination as a wish-fulfillment service, but why would this evil creature delegate its power? It reminds me of all sorts of other movies where characters side with some apocalyptic power thinking they’ll somehow be the lucky exception.
Winner: The Imaginary
3. CHARACTERS
This is where IF shined the brightest. The little girl is cute and optimistic, a fitting tonal foil to Ryan Reynolds being such a loquaciously sardonic naysayer. She wants to be so helpful, though keeping herself so busy might just be her coping mechanism to try and stop her dreadful encroaching thoughts about the possibility of losing her second parent. Her taking the lead to help the IFs then allows for little episodic asides for the different characters to share their stories and their former creators. Having a protagonist be so driven at being empathetic is a natural conduit for championing the feelings and triumphs of others. It works. Reynolds is still doing his fast-talking cynical schtick, so your mileage will vary how well it continues to appeal. Curiously, I don’t think the character of Blue (voiced by Steve Carell) is fully utilized. He’s a more childlike exaggeration of the character features already provided by Bea’s involvement. Blue resembles the McDonalds’ Grimace, and is outwardly friendly, unafraid of big emotions, and a bit silly, but his elevation in the script as being the primary IF sidekick is arbitrary. The same story could have afforded tapping, say, the excitable unicorn (voiced by Emily Blunt) as the primary sidekick and produce similar results. Again, I think there’s so much that could have been further explored as to the existential requirement of the different imaginary characters, how they represented what their former kids felt they needed. Their exact existence was what a child yearned for (the strong IF to protect the child who is afraid, the squishy lovable IF to comfort a lonely child, etc.).
The characters from The Imaginary fall into general archetypes that any Miyazaki fan will be familiar with. There’s the bossy know-it-all, the excitable goof, the silent contemplative, the wise and warm-hearted authority figure, the dangerous rogue. They all work but it’s the larger themes that resonate more than any specific individual character. Mostly, the conflict is whether Rudger decides to move on from his creator and find a new child/home. He has loyalty and emotional attachment to little Amanda but the reality is that, at some point, she will grow up and he’ll be left behind. Whether that happens now, because she passes away, or years later through becoming an adult, there will be a parting and he will need to consider a new life. The loneliness and melancholy of this existence is ignored through the kooky characters, strange worlds, and pressing points of danger, so the reality of Rudger’s eventual loss is thematically sidelined.
With the Blumhouse Imaginary, the characters are relatively stock types for a supernatural horror mystery. There’s some effort to make it about Jessica trying to ingratiate herself with her new step-children, the oldest who looks at the new mom with great suspicion and resentment. At one point, the old mom serves as a jump scare, hiding in the house; the old mom is mentally ill but the stepdaughter thought, erroneously, that mom was “getting better.” Jessica is trying her best to rise to the challenges of being a parent, but it’s hard when there’s a sneaky ghost trying to emotionally manipulate your youngest to hurt herself. I don’t know why Jessica decided to move her new family back into her childhood home, the source of her trauma, except if you looked at the real estate market, it might have been by far the best deal she could swing. What’s some reawakened childhood trauma when it comes to skipping ballooning mortgage payments? Have you seen interest rates and the price of houses post-pandemic? That’s the real terror for adults.
Winner: IF
4. EMOTIONAL INVOLVEMENT/CONCLUSIONS
Despite what Pixar may have set in stone, it’s not a requirement for a children’s movie to make you cry. I did end up tearing up from two of these movies, and it should likely be obvious which of the three was the outlier. Krasinski’s movie is designed as a big warm hug, complete with soothing, milky light pouring in from every setting. I thought it looked very similar to how Steven Spielberg’s preferred cinematographer, Janusz Kaminski, shoots natural light, and lo and behold Kaminski was the cinematographer for IF (excuse my pat on the back here). Bea’s big emotional moment where she tells her story of adventure to her unconscious father in his hospital bed pulled some heartstrings, but what I felt even more emotionally cathartic were the asides where Bea helps the IFs reunite with their former kids. When an IF is being thought about, they start to glow from within, like happiness radiating out. It was these little moments, like Blossom (voiced by Phoebe Waller-Bridge) getting to dance with Bea’s grandmother like they used to, or the simple act of Blue wishing good feelings to his nervous former-child with a silent shoulder touch and world-clarifying exhale. It was the acknowledgement that these friends, while gone, are still fondly remembered, and that they will always have that connection even if their exact relationship has changed through the years. The Imaginary operates on a similar emotional wave of adults reuniting with their former childhood friends, and it’s that sweet acknowledgement of appreciation and love that hits hardest. It reminded me a little bit of 2001’s Amelie where she’s on a mission to help strangers remember beloved items from the past. The overarching worry about losing her father seems unnecessary as a complication, especially how “heart surgery” is kept so purposely vague and seemingly uneventful until that bedside chat. There is a difference between wanting to protect your kid from the possible trauma and downplaying it to the point where it becomes a strangely superfluous plot device.
I won’t pretend there’s much to get emotional over with the Blumhouse Imaginary, though there is one Act Two twist I thought was simply astounding, but in order to explain I will need to go into spoilers, so you have been warned, dear reader. For a solid hour, we watch Alice play with a teddy bear that she calls Chauncey, the embodiment of her imaginary friend. So far so good. Then after a disturbing session with a child psychologist, the professional shows Jessica her recorded session. This is where we discover that Chauncey the bear… has never been there. Alice has been talking to the unseen entity of Chauncey and Jessica has been the only person who was seeing a teddy bear. That’s right, the twist is that the bear was never there. Bam.
Winner: IF
Three imaginary friend movies and the exploration of the meaning these figures have to children and adults after years removed. I had my quibbles with each movie, but with adjusted expectations, each movie can supply a degree of entertainment. The animation in The Imaginary is gorgeously fluid, so that alone will prove a draw to hand-drawn animation fans such as myself. Krasinski’s family film is gooey at its well-meaning core though it has underdeveloped avenues I wish had been given more articulation and exploration. The Blumhouse Imaginary movie is fairly formulaic but has a couple enjoyable twists and turns, even if they’re ridiculous. There is a potent storytelling reservoir with imaginary friends, both benevolent and malevolent, so I imagine (no pun intended) this won’t be the end of these stories making their way to the big screen.
Nate’s Grades:
Imaginary: C
IF: B
The Imaginary: B
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Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1 (2024)
I admire Kevin Costner throwing out all the stops to achieve his passion, a four-part, twelve-hour film series to showcase a sprawling Western epic. The man put a hundred million of his own money into the first two parts of Horizon: An American Saga, and the time devoted to this project was so all-consuming that Costner quit the Yellowstone series, a cable TV juggernaut getting bigger ratings every season. It’s ballsy all right, to abandon a monumentally successful series at the height of its zeitgeist popularity so he can direct not just one but four throwback Westerns that will ultimately be as long as the Lord of the Rings trilogy. It’s rare to see this level of sheer chutzpah in Hollywood. Horizon’s first part was released in June, with its completed second part intended to be released a mere two months later in August. After the poor box-office of Part One, the studio decided to pull Part Two from the release schedule, ostensibly to give people more time to catch the first movie. Will we ever see Part Two in theaters? Will we ever see Part Three, which Costner is currently filming, or Part Four, which Costner is currently raising money for? Costner intended to release the whole saga as a miniseries upon completion, and this might be the best case scenario. As a movie, albeit one quarter of an intended whole, Horizon Part One feels far more structured as an incomplete and rather prosaic TV series.
Upon the completion of the 170 minutes, I was left wondering what was here that would make someone want to come back for a lengthy second part, let alone a third and a fourth. It doesn’t feel like a complete movie or even a completed chapter, and again let me cite Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings series. Released over the course of three years, each movie had its own form of a beginning, middle, and end, with each climaxing around some event that left one satisfied by its conclusion. They didn’t just feel like chapters linking to the next; they felt like completed stories that pushed forward a larger overall story. Now, with Horizon Part One, it doesn’t feel like a three-hour movie, rather like three one-hour episodes of a TV series. Each of those hours feels too separate from the other. I’m reminded of television in the streaming era, where producers anticipate viewers binging through multiple episodes in speedy succession. This tacit assumption lends itself toward the general pacing issues I find with too many streaming series, where the filmmakers take far too long to get things moving in a significant manner. I’m reminded of a joke by Topher Florence that back in the day a show like Surf Dracula would feature its lead character surfing in weekly adventures, but the streaming age version would take its entire first season showing how he got his surfboard and then spend five minutes surfing in the finale. When you’re pacing out only one quarter of your possible intended story, calling it slow and lacking development and payoffs is an obvious hazard, which is why every movie needs to be its own thing, to provide a sense of conclusion even if it’s not the final conclusion.
Part One is divided into three parts: 1) the early settlers of Horizon, in the San Pedro Valley, being massacred by the Apache, 2) an old gunslinger (Kevin Costner) tasked with protecting a woman and child on the run from vengeful gunmen, 3) a wagon train of settlers headed to Horizon. Now, from that very streamlined synopsis, which of those storylines sounds the most exciting? Which of those storylines sounds like it can lend itself toward having an in-movie climax? Which of these storylines feels the most fraught with danger and intrigue? It’s the one starring Costner himself, of course, fitting naturally into the role of a tough curmudgeon.
I’m confused why the entire first hour of this movie is devoted to following the frontier town when we’re only going to get two survivors total that go forward. As far as its narrative importance, this entire section could have been condensed to a terrifying flashback from Frances Kittredge (Sienna Miller) and her daughter after the fact. The majority of this hour is spent watching the fine Christian folk of the early days of Horizon die horribly. We’re confined inside the battered Kittredge home that serves as the foundation of a siege thriller, with the band of various townspeople trapped and trying to fight off their indigenous intruders. The attack is prolonged and unsparing in its violence, eliminating all these nice, smiling faces from before. What does it add up to? It’s the tragic back-story for Frances, but it also makes her conveniently romantically unattached so that the nice cavalryman, Trent Gephart (Sam Worthington), can swoon and she can Learn to Love Again. It also sets up a young Apache warrior, Pionsenay (Owen Crow Shoe), making aggressive moves that his elders disagree with in their continued efforts to find some balance with the American settlers grabbing their territory. It also sets up what serves as the only possible character arc completion, with young Russell (Etienne Kellici) escaping the massacre in the beginning to then witness a massacre of Apache, and as he observes the scalping butchery, it galls him, not providing the relief of vengeance he had sought. Now that’s a conceivably emotional storyline, but Russell isn’t the primary character, or even one of the most essential supporting characters. You might genuinely forget about him like I did.
Something else I forgot an hour in was that Part One opens with Ellen Harvey (Jena Malone) shooting her abusive husband and running out. This prologue eventually comes back to setting up the present-day conflicts of the second hour, where Ellen has started a new life as Lucy with her young son. She lives in the Wyoming territory with a prostitute, Marigold (Abbey Lee). This storyline picks up significantly with new characters coming into the mix and disrupting the status quo. The first is Hayes Ellison (Costner) who finds himself attracted to Marigold, perhaps recognizing a woman in over her head. The second are the Sykes brothers (Jamie Campebell Bower, Jon Beavers) who have come looking to retrieve Lucy and her child, the son of their dearly departed pa who was slain in the opening. I am astounded that Costner decided to make the audience wait an hour for this segment because it feels like a much better fit to open Part One. There’s an immediacy to the looming danger and the consequences of actions, and what would serve as the Act One break is when Hayes has to intervene at great risk. This is, by far, the best segment of Horizon Part One. The ensuing on-the-run segment doesn’t get much further, setting up ongoing antagonism between the two sides that presumably will come to blows again. It’s not exactly reinventing the wagon wheel here: drifter reluctantly becoming protector for the vulnerable and reckoning with his shady past and trying to make amends. However, for this first movie, at least this storyline provides a sustained level of engagement with needed urgency.
The weakest portion is the wagon train led by Matthew Van Weyden (Luke Wilson). The most significant conflict during this section isn’t even the protection of the wagon train, it’s whether or not the hoity-toity British couple (Tom Payne, Anna and the Apocalypse‘s Ella Hunt) will assimilate to life on the prairie. They’re privileged, though at least he seems to recognize this. She bathes in the drinking water supply in an extended sponge bath sequence that feels so oddly gratuitous and leery. Two scouts are caught eagerly peeping and this seems like the most significant conflict of this whole section. They’re headed for Horizon, the setting of tragedy and indigenous conflict we know, but the entire wagon train lacks any feeling of dread or even the opposite, a feeling of yearning for a new life. It’s just a literal pileup of underwritten characters in movement without giving us a reason to care.
Costner’s Western eschews the trappings of modern revisionism, deconstructing the heroism and Manifest Destiny mythology of popular Wild West media. This isn’t a deconstruction but a full blown romantic classical Western, embracing the tropes with stone-faced gusto. In some ways it feels like Costner’s version of a Taylor Sheridan show (1883, Yellowstone). He left a Sheridan show to make his own Sheridan show. It’s more measured in its portrayal of the Native Americans even as it shows them massacring men, women, and children as our first impression. I wager Costner is showing that the evils of violent tendencies pervade both sides of the conflict, with a troop of American scalp-hunters that don’t really care where those scalps come from. It’s hard to fully articulate the themes given this is only one-fourth of the overall intended picture. The expansive settings are stunning and gorgeously filmed. I can understand why Costner would want people to watch this movie on the big screen with scenery this beautiful from cinematographer J. Michael Muro, who served as Costner’s DP on 2003’s Open Range, another muscular Western. Fun fact: Muro also served as a Steadicam operator on Costner’s Best Picture-winning Dances with Wolves, so their professional relationship goes back thirty-five years and covers Costner’s love affair with Westerns.
During its conclusion, Horizon: An American Saga runs through a wordless montage of clips that serves as a trailer for the forthcoming Part Two. It’s not edited like a trailer, more so a very leisurely preview with clips that look good but, absent context, can be shrug-worthy. Oh look, a character looking out a window pensively. Oh look, a character walking along a trail. Oh look, a character dismounting from a horse. Oh look, another character looking out a window pensively. It’s hard for me to fathom this truncated preview getting too many people excited for what Part Two has to offer, but then I think that’s the same problem with Part One. It doesn’t serve as a grabber, with characters we really care about, with conflicts that keep us glued, and with revelations and character turns that can keep us intrigued and desperately wanting more. It’s hard for me to think of that many people walking out of Part One and being ravenous for nine more hours. I accept that stories might feel incomplete and characters might feel disjointed, but Horizon is perhaps a Western best left in the distance, at least until you can binge it in its completed form, whatever that may be, though I doubt we’re going to get four full movies. Ultimately, Costner’s opus will need to be judged as a whole rather than as consecutive parts.
Nate’s Grade: C
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I Saw the TV Glow (2024)/ The Watchers (2024)
I Saw the TV Glow is a strange experience by design, a hallucinatory ode to early 1990s television, coming of age sagas, feeling out of place in one’s own body and mind, and on a Lynchian dream logic wavelength that few filmmakers occupy. From a plot standpoint, Owen (Justice Smith) is a shy kid who looks up to an older girl at school, Maddy (Bridget Lundy-Paine), and they share a love for the TV show The Pink Opaque, a tween-aimed horror series in the vein of Goosebumps or Are You Afraid of the Dark?, which ultimately might be real after all. This movie exists more on a slippery emotional plane than on its story sense. Writer/director Jane Schoenbrun (We’re All Going to the World’s Fair) has created an allegory for self-actualization and self-acceptance through a love of 90s nostalgia and that transitional time of being young and just seeing the cusp of what adulthood promises for the good, the bad, and the mundane. The recreation of the SNICK-era television is perfect, and I loved the little glimpses of these horror monsters taking on new nightmarish incarnations. I wanted the movie to explore its premise more, that this old TV show might be real and posing a danger that only they would uncover. It’s really more a pathway for the characters to explore their selves, what animates them, what confuses them, what provides a sense of community. It’s a movie about the perils of loneliness and finding an outlet, a life raft, whatever that may be, and for Owen it’s this TV show. He connects more with this world than the real one, and when he revisits it later as an adult, it doesn’t live up to his memory. It’s a weird movie but it’s designed for weird kids, or weird adults who used to be weird kids, who found kinship through weird media. It’s a slow and provocative experience that asks you to give yourself over to its vision, but Schoenbrun also makes that engagement quite accessible. While existing as a clear trans allegory, I Saw the TV Glow is open to any outsider who felt unsure of themself and their body and their place in the universe. It’s about obsession and the price of holding onto said childhood obsessions, even if they prove disappointing in your adulthood. It doesn’t offer any general answers or catharsis and is kept on the slowest of slow burns. I began daydreaming of the less arty version of its spooky premise, but that’s simply not going to be this movie. I Saw the TV Glow is impressively personal and surreal and obtuse, but by the end I was hoping for a little more of a foundation to hold onto and its ideas to be fully realized.
Nate’s Grade: B
The expansion of the M. Night Shyamalan creative dynasty has begun. While based on a 2022 novel by A.M. Shine, The Watchers is brought to us primarily by Ishana Shyamalan, who makes her feature directing debut and adapted the screenplay. It has a buzzy premise that feels at home in a Shyamalan movie, namely a young woman (Dakota Fanning) who stumbles into a strange location with captive people telling her she cannot leave or her life will be in danger from monsters. The group of survivors have to “perform” for their unseen watchers, staring into a two-way mirror inside a closed room. There are certain rules that are hazy and unevenly applied: don’t go out after dark, never turn your back to the mirror, don’t go into the creatures’ subterranean dwelling. This poses an intriguing mystery for a while as the movie unpacks and reveals more about this world and the creatures. However, The Watchers ultimately cannot help feeling like an over-extended episode of a sci-fi anthology TV series like Black Mirror or maybe even Shyamalan’s own Apple Plus series Servant (Ishana wrote and directed several episodes). There just isn’t enough here. The revelations do not sustain our emotional and intellectual investment. Once it’s revealed what the monsters are, I kept waiting for extra levels of twists and turns, and there really aren’t any. Once we settle into Act Three, the movie becomes more or less about housekeeping and gaining acceptance. The whole reason the protagonist is on her journey is to deliver a bird in a cage, and every time this thing keeps appearing even so late into the movie, while she’s running for her life but cannot forget about the caged bird, I felt like laughing. It’s a case of inelegantly finding a way for the visual metaphor (the bird is her!) to continue being tied to the plot after it long stopped making sense. Likewise, there are cutaways to the captives watching a Love Island/Big Brother-stye reality TV show, but little is made as far as commentary on communal voyeurism, so they just come across as little odd comic asides. The movie loses some serious momentum once we get to the convenient info dump sequence (a Shyamalan family favorite: scientist vlogs) and you realize there are no more tricks to deliver. It’s disappointing that a movie with such potent folklore atmosphere becomes a lackluster variation on The Village.
Nate’s Grade: C
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Back to Black (2024)
What do you remember about Amy Winehouse? The tragic singer with the booming voice that was mercilessly picked apart by a rabid tabloid media, as well as rampant online speculation, over every step of her addiction to drugs and alcohol? If that’s the extent of your memory, as well as some of her more notable songs like “Rehab” or “Back to Black,” then this musical biopic directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson (Fifty Shades of Grey, Nowhere Boy) is going to feel like a shallow exercise in piling on a troubled and talented performer gone far too soon.
Back to Black, the film, literally has Amy Winehouse (Marisa Abela) vocalize what she wants to be remembered for, not the drugs and alcohol, and the movie then erases Amy as a vibrant, complicated human being into a blurred statistic on the dangers of unchecked addiction. You can’t tell her story without documenting her demons, and yet the movie also seems exceptionally forgiving to the men who contributed to her downfall, her doting father Mitch (Eddie Marsan) who enabled her and her bad boy boyfriend Blake (Jack O’Connell) who introduced her to hard drug abuse. We spend so much emphasis on the bad times and her downfall and yet the movie is strangely reticent to cast much judgment on her bad influences, which makes it seem like the movie is further blaming Amy. At the same time, her downfall is focused on being rejected by a man, which is really insulting and limiting for her as an artist as well as a person capable of independent thought. It’s an even stranger decision given that these two influences, her father and ex, were given withering condemnation in the 2015 Oscar-nominated documentary on Winehouse. Apparently, Mitch Winehouse was furious with the documentary’s portrayal of him and Amy. His secondary complaint was that the documentary focused too much on the negative aspects of her life story, which is comical considering the skewed balance that Back to Black dwells upon. We speed through the good times to wallow in the bad, and without a stronger and more complex portrayal of Amy as a character, it all feels trashy and degrading. It’s harder to feel the heartbreak when the movie is only defining her by our foreknowledge of her death.
Amy never feels like her own person in this movie, which is a shame since she was a dominant presence. We never get into her creative process or her inspirations. We never get to see the person behind the omnipresent tabloid headlines. The formulaic rise-and-fall structure is so rushed and uninterested in fleshing out Amy as a person, so we get simplistic impressions like she sure loved her “nan” (Leslie Manville) and never recovered from her death. The movie sets a midpoint montage where her grandma’s funeral pushes her to get a signature tattoo and beehive hairdo, and it plays like a superhero finally donning their cape and cowl (At last, she has become… Batman, I mean… the Amy We Remember). It’s played so dramatically that it might even unleash a titter or two. There is such scant insight into this woman and her demons that I doubt anyone will come away with a better understanding of Amy and her place in music history, as well as who she was as a person. The movie omits other struggles that might take the focus off its specific topic of drugs and alcohol. Her bulimia gets nary a mention except for maybe one scene where her inconsiderate roommate asks Amy to please vomit into the toilet a little less loudly. While skipping judgment over her enablers, the movie also avoids being too judgemental on the social impulses and rubbernecking that fed upon the harassment and mockery of Winehouse and her struggles. Again, by omission this is placing further blame onto Amy herself.
For each viewer, Back to Black is going to sink or swim depending upon your reaction to Abela’s (Industry) performance. She does her own singing and learned to imitate Winehouse’s signature soaring vocals, so that’s generally impressive. However, I felt her greatest moments of acting were the scenes where she wasn’t in song. Her over-extended enunciation and head bobs made me consistently cringe, like watching an overzealous Vegas impersonator. In the few instances where the movie slows down, that is where Abela is best, being distraught over the loss of her nan, infuriated by her ex, incredulous at music producers that want to market Amy like the Spice Girls, and charmingly innocent confiding to a young fan in a checkout line. If the movie had cut all of her vocal performances and given me more time with this Amy Winehouse, I would have gotten more insight and entertainment. Abela isn’t given the material to really bring Amy to life.
Back to Black isn’t so much Amy’s movie as it is her father Mitch’s response to earlier portrayals. He’s portrayed here as a doting and loving father who only wanted what was best for her. You see, his initial refusal to the demands to send his daughter to rehab was because he wanted her to kick this whole addiction thing on her own. She didn’t want it so he wasn’t going to push her. If anything, he’s the hero of this movie, the proud papa who was let down by his daughter’s duplicitous boyfriend-turned-husband, the man who took his little girl away and turned her to the dark side of drugs. When you analyze the approach, it all comes across as a little insidious, a little icky, and unworthy of recreating this woman’s life experiences to better glorify her father. Abela gives it her all, it’s just too little to be had with Back to Black, a shallow biopic treading upon distaste. I’d recommend skipping this movie entirely, unless you’re irreversibly curious, and watch the 2015 documentary Amy instead. You’ll get a much better sense of Amy Winehouse the singer, the star, the addict, and most importantly, the complicated person.
Nate’s Grade: C
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Robot Dreams (2023)
What a delightfully tender little movie Robot Dreams proves to be. It’s based on a picture book and its story is mostly about a lonely Dog who orders a build-your-own-robot for companionship and their friendship. Much of the movie hinges on the Robot being trapped on a Long Island beach closed for the season, so our intrepid Dog must go on living in his New York City apartment through the seasons while he waits to rescue his friend. The movie is wordless and based upon a picture book, but that doesn’t mean this is chiefly kid’s stuff. It touches upon the profound with such elegance and efficiency, brilliantly relatable and recognizably human. It’s all about our need for connections, and even when they are separated, both the Dog and Robot find other connections with other characters, and then it comes back to our worry that they won’t actually reunite after being apart for the majority of the movie. I was reading some gay coding between the two as well but maybe that was my own projection. My nine-year-old son was quite taken with the movie and could easily follow along, though he was also very much not a fan of the bittersweet ending, his first taste of providing the whole “what you need, not what you want” conclusion. Robot Dreams is lovingly realized, its animation so clean and crisp with wonderful characters populating an alternative 1980s NYC. It’s simple and sweet and irresistible.
Nate’s Grade: A-
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The Strangers: Chapter 1 (2024)
The most terrifying part of The Strangers: Chapter 1 is during its closing seconds, as text appears to inform all of us woeful viewers: “To be continued.” Oh no. Chapter 1 is intended to be the first in a new trilogy bringing back the essential concept of the 2008 home invasion thriller, that the masked attackers have no agenda, no motivation, and are being sadistic silent tormentors just because. The explanation, “Because you were home,” was a key revelation to the original, and here this famous line gets re-worked and has the same clumsy impact as Madame Web trying to reword that Spider-Man oath (“When you take on the responsibility, great power will come“). Not that the dialogue is the strong point of this thriller, with clunky expositional lines as nakedly transparent like, “Today is the third day of our three-day road trip around the country,” followed by, “Or our five-year anniversary.” It’s in the annoying, “Yeah I work here too” kind of lazy exposition. But you’re here for the scares, of which Chapter 1 has precious few because I think these are the most unimpressive and lackadaisical home invaders I’ve ever seen. I think the Wet Bandits might give these goons a run for their money (I’d watch Kevin take on The Strangers). Much of the movie is spent waiting, or checking places around the cabin, sometimes while one intruder plays the piano for ambience. One could make an argument they’re toying with their prey, but I would counter that I just don’t think they’re good at their whole enterprise. It doesn’t help that the main couple are so boring and undeveloped and I found it hard to fear for their well-being. As far as memorable scares or set-pieces or ingenious obstacles or overcoming said obstacles, it’s a big miss on all counts. A home invasion scenario can be exciting and terrifying, and it can be delicious fun to turn the tables on the attackers. This movie has so little that even the core ideas feel stretched beyond their breaking point. It’s hard to even feel much reverence for the original here, as The Strangers: Chapter 1 feels more like the steady, unrelenting squeezing of all IP for any possible drops of renewed audience interest. If this is what Chapter 1 has to offer, please spare us the rest. Fun fact: if you want to know what director Renny Harlin (Die Hard 2, Cliffhanger) has been doing lately, well here’s your underwhelming answer.
Nate’s Grade: D+
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Hit Man (2024)
Hit Man is a movie that is wonderfully hard to describe. The premise has an easy-to-grasp hook that promises fun and hijinks, but where it goes from there takes on as many transformations as its protagonist, Gary Johnson (Glen Powell). It transforms from a fun game of undercover conning with wigs and silly accents into an unexpected rom-com hinging upon mistaken identity, maintaining assumed appearances, and secrets that then transforms into full film noir without losing its unique identity and the stakes of the character relationships. If you’d expect any filmmaker to pull off that trick, writer/director Richard Linklater has to be one of the best to keep things running smoothly, and that he does, as Hit Man is a crowd-pleasing comedy with some unexpected directions to keep everyone guessing until it lands on its own morally gray terms.
The movie is also, chiefly, a showcase of star and co-writer Powell, a handsome young actor hitting a new ascent of his career with last year’s Anyone But You and the upcoming Twisters. Powell is probably best known as the smirking guy you loved to hate in Top Gun: Maverick, but he’s also played memorable supporting roles in Scream Queens and three other Linklater film projects, notably 2016’s Everybody Wants Some!!, a pseudo-spiritual sequel to the seminal Dazed and Confused. This is Powell’s acting showcase and he’s utterly terrific. He has great infectious fun getting into the various hitman characters, which mostly exist in montages, and trying on different personas and voices. I cackled when he was doing his impression of Christian Bale’s Patrick Bateman, and I smiled throughout most of the other personas. It’s easy to see the network TV version of this premise, where every week Gary adopts a new persona and disguise to bust the next possible criminal from hiring a hitman, like an edgier Quantum Leap). The culprits are played like nitwits but then again the police are also played as nitwits (are there THIS many attempted hitman hirings in one city for the police to have a full-time unit?).
But before this acting experiment can get too broad or too redundant, Linklater and Powell switch things up. Around the Act One break is where Gary meets Madison (Adria Arjona), and that’s when everything changes for him and the audience. Now we have emotional stakes, because Gary intervenes to save Madison. While the circumstances of their first meeting involve her wanting to kill her husband and believing Gary as the professional to do such a job, the scene plays as a disarming first date you’d find in another charming romantic comedy, where it’s clear to anyone with a pulse that these two have something together. Instead of busting her for the solicitation, he pushes her to change her mind, take the money and leave her no-good husband rather than finding a questionable man to eliminate him. From there, they form a romantic relationship that fluctuates wildly. She thinks Gary is “Ron,” the suave and confidant persona Gary adopted for their sit-down. So the nerdy tech nerd who teaches philosophy must pretend to be the daring and dangerous man of mystery he wishes he could be. The script doesn’t get carried away with its farcical elements in play, juggling multiple identities for multiple specific audiences, but it asks the question, “Why can’t the milquetoast Gary simply be Ron? Is this an unexpected means of self-actualization for the nerd to win the girl?” Through this extreme exercise, Gary can mold himself into the man he would like to be. The rom-com is flirty, funny, and just as enjoyable as the earlier wacky comedy of being a versatile master of disguise.
It also really helps things when your two lead actors have such strong chemistry. Powell and Arjona (Father of the Bride, Andor) are smoldering together, like full on “get a room already” territory. This lends even more credence when Hit Man makes its next transformation into film noir thriller. I won’t divulge the specific plot elements but it all works with what Linklater has already established. There’s trouble for the both of them, and the question becomes how far is each participant willing to go to stay above the fray. The transition from silly costume comedy to sundry noir thriller is handled so naturally, as if the characters, already existing under such unique circumstances, found themselves in the elevated movie-movie version of their crazy relationship. Rather than feel contrived, Linklater and Powell have put in the work to make these twists and turns credible and exciting. The shifting nature of the movie is a wonderful reflection of its fake hitman hero. There’s a scene late in the film, where all of our principal players have come together, and you have characters saying one thing, intimating another, for different versions of different audiences, and it’s such a masterful tonal dance that feels satisfying as a climactic turning point as well as genuinely impressive for all the myriad subtext in play.
This is a clear-cut case of a movie being “inspired by” a true story rather than being “based on” a true story. Generally, we expect the “based on” stories to have some voracity to reality. We accept that there will be alterations for dramatic purposes, externalizing the internal, condensing timelines and characters into a more accessible structure, etc. If you go to a movie about Jackie Robinson, you don’t expect to see the famous baseball slugger fighting space monsters (“Racism was the real giant monster all along”). Hit Man is based upon a 2001 long-form news article by Texas Monthly journalist Skip Hollandsworth, the same author of the source material for Linklater’s fascinating true crime dark comedy gem, 2011’s Bernie, which I highly recommend (a career-best Jack Black). The real Gary Johnson really did pose as a fake hitman for the purposes of catching real criminals, but the rest of the movie exists in its own fictional universe of dramatic complications. Usually we want our film stories to have more fidelity with the truth and reality, but I’m glad Linklater and Powell recognized the sheer storytelling potential of this quirky premise. Sticking to the facts could have told an amusing story, but feeling confident to take bold leaps with well-worn genre motifs, when called for, is the right call for making the most of this tale.
The shame of Hit Man is how quickly it will likely be subsumed by Netflix’s suffocating tidal waves of content. Here is a fun, likable, and surprising indie comedy with definite mass appeal buoyed by great performances, clever writing, and a tonally shifting narrative to keep things fresh. Powell gets the breakout showcase he deserves and we get one of the most unexpected and amusing rom-coms of recent years. Hit Man is a movie that deserves to be seen, to be enjoyed with a crowd, but I worry it will get lost in the shuffle of streaming titles. I suppose this might just be the current reality for fans of mid-level adult dramas and comedies. At least they have a home on the streaming networks even if these movies would have been theatrical breakouts years ago. Regardless, Hit Man is a good time with good people pretending to be bad, or is it bad people pretending to be good, but whatever pretense, it’s a charming winner worth your two hours.
Nate’s Grade: B+
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The Last Stop in Yuma County (2024)
As a general rule of thumb, if some movie is described as “Coen-esque,” I must watch it. The Last Stop in Yuma County is a blend of Coen darkly comic malevolence, as well as Tarantino’s knack for the menace of dramatic irony and boiling tension waiting to explode, and it’s a firecracker of a debut for writer/director Francis Gallupi. It’s a relatively contained tale, sticking mostly to one rustic roadside diner and gas station along the dusty Arizona byways. On this day, two of its patrons happen to be recent bank robbers on the run, and they’re holding the other diner patrons captive until the gas pumps get fixed to fuel up and escape. The first hour then becomes a dread-filled game of waiting for things to go very badly. Our two main characters, a traveling knife salesman (Jim Cummings) and a waitress (Joceline Donahue) who happens to be the wife of the town sheriff, are working together to try and elicit help without endangering their lives, all the time more people keep entering the diner and inadvertently joining the simmering hostage situation. The way Gallupi writes his different characters is sharp and efficient, and the dread compounds in such organic complications, showing how fiendishly well-developed he’s made his potboiler. It also has a clear eye for style. Around the Act Two break, the movie becomes something else, which it intimated through a very specific film reference in conjunction with a specific character reference. It still proves compelling, but the overall sense of darkness and tragedy wore me down a little by the end. By the conclusion of its 90 minutes, I was hearing the saintly voice of Marge Gunderson in my head, shaking her head at the preventable body count and bad choices (“And all for a little bit of money. There’s more to life than money, don’cha know?”). The Last Stop in Yuma County is a twisty and twisted little macabre morality play in the guise of familiar Coen-esque capers. Welcome to the big leagues, Gallupi.
Nate’s Grade: B+
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Atlas (2024)
In the world of Netflix releases, it’s hard to judge what is gauged as a success. Take for instance their new sci-fi action movie Atlas. It cost the streaming giant $100 million and they now tout it as being the top movie across the globe on their platform. This could very well be true, though Netflix has long been cagey about sharing their viewing numbers, instead preferring to go with the, “Hey, just trust us, okay?” defense, which hasn’t exactly been reassuring in an era where bonuses are linked to number hits. With the ever-expanding catalog of titles, being a reported hit on Netflix can sometimes feel like being, say, Homecoming Queen from 1989, an accomplishment soon eclipsed and forgotten. What was the last big Netflix action movie that had cultural staying power, that caused people to continue to discuss weeks or months later? Netflix swears their most-watched movie is 2021’s Red Notice, a star-laden breezy adventure caper that I challenge anyone to remember much about besides its stars. This is the challenge of gaining traction in a world of near endless content choices. Atlas is an above average film benefiting from a strong character dynamic at its core even if the rest of its story elements feel forgettably disposable.
Atlas (Jennifer Lopez) is a data analyst who has also helped develop Earth’s orbital security system. An A.I. program/robot named Harlan (Simu Liu) was born from Atlas’ mother, and then Harlan went and murdered millions of humans. The killer robot fled Earth with his robotic followers and Earth has been awaiting his return for decades. Atlas joins a mission to land on a distant planet where they think Harlan has operated as his base. However, Atlas must work with an A.I. program inside her mech suit that calls itself Smith. In order for them both to survive in this new world, they must work together.
I found everything within the mech suit of Atlas to be engaging and dynamic, and everything that happens outside that giant suit to be underdeveloped and mediocre. I was genuinely surprised how Atlas essentially becomes a buddy survival movie. It’s the human who is distrustful of accepting help from others and especially from advanced technology with a mind of its own, and an A.I. program that is trying to improve its capabilities by getting to know its user and learning how to grow from her. They need each other to survive and that requires a trust and relationship to be fostered, and it’s a surefire enjoyable plot to watch two enemies become allies and maybe even friends over the course of their united struggles. The growth between them also feels relatively organic, coming at a natural progression with personal insights and offerings without clunky leading dialogue lines, like, “So why don’t you trust robots, huh?” This dynamic reminded me a bit of 2004’s I, Robot where Will Smith played a detective who hates robots who has to work with a robot and the two of them form a bond (there are other similarities I’ll get to later). Much of the movie takes place within a three-foot window from the capsule inside this mech suit, and the shared struggle between Atlas and Smith is the heart of the movie, and it’s actually quite good. Both of these characters find ways to surprise one another, both of them shed preconceptions, and both of them will discover the lengths they go to protect the other even if it puts their own existence in question. As a story about a woman and her robot, Atlas is a fun and fairly involving sci-fi buddy movie adventure.
Now, the world building and story that gets Atlas to this alien world, and the escalating stakes of world destruction are where the movie dissipates into an amorphous cloud of sci-fi action keywords. I don’t know why it had to be killer terrorist robots that brought out Atlas and her team of mech-suited warriors to this foreign planet. The reason why the characters are stranded on this unknown planet is unimportant. It could just as likely be a science team exploring a potential new habitable world for an Earth burning through its natural resources too quickly. It could be exploring the remnants of a possible alien civilization. It could even simply be the closest planet available during a distress from their spaceship going down for whatever mechanical or orbital obstruction. The story is about the relationship between the human being and the robot/A.I. working together to survive in an unfamiliar and hostile land.
The robot insurrection feels like an acceptable plot device but it’s so under-explored until the movie needs to dramatically escalate the stakes into an apocalyptic cataclysmic scale. The fact that Harlan, which let’s agree is a terrible name for the villain of your movie, determines that the best way to save humanity is to annihilate humanity is already a tragically familiar refrain we’ve heard from numerous sci-fi villains, from The Hunger Games to Infinity War to The Day the Earth Stood Still to even I, Robot. In that last movie, the A.I. system determines the only way to protect humanity is through controlling and ultimately eliminating them, and this same motivation comes to Harlan. This character is introduced as our Big Bad through an opening montage, he disappears, and then only comes back at the end to be a force to threaten Earth. The entire robot uprising is so tremendously underwritten that the movie doesn’t even do the barest whiff of ambiguity to question whether humanity has been mistreating its robot servant class. Instead, Harlan is introduced right away as a terrorist figure and stays true to this characterization. I thought that Act Three would be upending for Atlas, where she learns the robots were framed or at least the conflict is more nuanced and her “side” might be more culpable than the military’s cover story. Nope. Evil Robot King is simply Evil Robot King. Fine, he’s a boring killbot, but then why go to such lengths to provide a personal connection for Atlas and Harlan. It’s unnecessary when she has to stop the killer robot from killing the Earth; we don’t need a personal connection for this to work. The level of personal guilt attached to Atlas is ridiculous, including multiple levels of tragedy that feel far too overwrought. Atlas didn’t need to feel guilty over her involvement in developing Evil Robot King as a child; she could have been simply the daughter to the woman who unintentionally brought this killer tech forward, or she could have simply been a woman who experienced a tragedy linked to the robot uprising without having a mom who developed the technology. She could just be a victim. She doesn’t have to be the first victim.
Atlas is really a one woman show, so your feelings of Lopez (Hustlers) as an actress will dominate how you feel about the overall experience. I don’t know if Atlas is made substantially better with her as the lead actress but she certainly performs ably and doesn’t seem left unmoored by the fact that she’s talking to a voice in an empty space for most of her months filming. Lopez has a determination that gives her action novice character an underlying strength to tap into upon the call of action.
As a sci-fi action spectacle, the blockbuster aspects are sufficient for our casual entertainment fulfillment. The special effects and action are pretty solid under director Brad Peyton (San Andreas, Rampage) who knows his way assuredly around effects-heavy spectacle (he was also co-creator of the delightfully daffy 2019 Netflix apocalyptic series Daybreak). Much of the movie takes place within one mech suit, but I never felt a sense of visual claustrophobia thanks to the buddy dynamic and Peyton’s use of space. The big action sequences at the end have their share of impressive cool moments, but they also benefit from coming at the end of a character relationship that has helped to make the action more satisfying. I do lament the modern trend of filming on such large green screens or LED stages that lighting is always the same bright overhead setting without significant variance with shadows and other light sources.
If you’re looking for a Netflix action movie to divert your attention, or even barely pay attention to, then you could do far worse than Atlas. It might even hold your attention and keep you engaged thanks to the fun buddy film dynamic that serves as its foundation. There are plenty of elements that feel tacked on, underdeveloped, or blandly familiar, but the core works and Atlas is worth a couple hours of escapism.
Nate’s Grade: B
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