The only thing stopping a department store manager from being the next Hitler is circumstance.

The Death of Stalin

It sucks that there isn’t a plan, but fatalism’s great strength has always lain in having reasonable goals. It’s those pro-plan weirdos you have to look out for – but for them, life wouldn’t be a series of opportunistic dildos passing themselves off as god-kings. Stop looking for comfort in sad places, dude; just bite the existential bullet and join the rest of us on team Everything Is A Pleasant Accident, Now Try Not To Kill Anybody. The music’s better. We have snacks. Paul Rudd is here.

The Death of Stalin succeeds on pretty much every level, but it’s especially successful in reminding us that world-historic figures are really just dipshit sociopaths stumbling around in the halls of their ill-begotten power. There is no plan, and anytime you think you can make one out it’s just your mind projecting reason onto madness, like when someone is convinced they can see the Virgin Mary in a coffee stain, or when everybody thought Lost was going somewhere. Goons steal when the stealing’s good, and panic when it isn’t. There is no third thing.

This grimness is more than just a premise for really good jokes (God, the jokes are so good) – it’s a reminder that buffoonishness is not a break from cruelty, but merely another form that cruelty can take. Killing people through incompetence and apathy is just as monstrous as killing them with passion and purpose. It’s the reason why black comedy will always freak me out more than horror – it’s closer to reality.

Iannucci even denies us any sense of ultimate morality – not only does the material world lack a plan, the spiritual one can’t be counted on to smooth things out in the end, either. Beria has the advantage, and then he doesn’t. That he’s the most sociopathic of the group means nothing – he just has a bad hand at the exact moment he could really use a good one. It’ll be someone else’s turn next time, and the fact that that person will be less evil than him is only a neat detail. 

The End

State-sanctioned violence and incredibly stupid sociopaths presuppose each other – the levers of human suffering are most reliably pulled by panicked monsters, and it takes Galaxy-class dipshits to even consider pulling those levers in the first place. There’s no magic here, then, or even a plan – just rats, constantly on the lookout for something to gnaw on, because gnawing on things is all they know how to do.

Ain’t nothing sadder than someone never cries.

Shell (2012)

In between bouts of anger and indignancy I occasionally feel other, less propitious emotions. I would rather not feel them, of course, because in the American Gladiator-esque arena that we call a global economy such indulgences only get you killed, usually by a hot tub salesman named Tony Speedboat, the Hot Tub King of the Greater Jacksonville Area, who owns two Cybertrucks and has extremely strong opinions on Somalia. But I digress.

The moments between the moments are where all the miserable shit happens, and God bless anyone dumb enough to endure that silence with a smile. Take Shell, for instance. She’s too smart for her life. Too good for it, too. But she’ll keep on keeping on, sustained by an air of pleasant hopelessness, until circumstance demands otherwise. Her life is less a choice than a space she has spontaneously filled.

And therein lies one of the many structural and tonal choices that make Shell so endearingly depressing – all of its characters are so fucking responsible about their misery. This ain’t a weepy picture, or a monologue safari. Everyone knows they’re living in the company of ghosts, but they also appreciate how intimate that company can be. Life in a liminal space isn’t something a lot of people get to experience, and no one in Shell is sure they want to leave it behind.

They have to, of course, but it’s the moments they spend couched on the edge of living that expand this movie’s scope past coming-of-age and into goddamned existentialism. Shell’s life is so preposterously small that it can’t escape the orbit of countless other stories – she and her father are at turns brother and sister, husband and wife, nurse and patient, survivors of traumas mentioned and unmentioned, and a dozen other things I’m sure I missed. Absence is as much a character in Shell as the people who occasionally fill it.

And here’s something else that tickles me miserable: unless I’m mistaken, this movie’s soundtrack is entirely diegetic until its final shot. That’s perfect. You can’t score a life that hasn’t started yet, and trying to do so would only saddle both Shell and the audience with unearned meaning – girl needs to pick a direction before the movie can decide how best to follow her. So when Shell does make her choice and starts walking you can forgive the song that plays for being so fucking depressing – at least she finally has one.

The End

This is usually the part where I ask if it’s really so hard to make a fucking movie, but in this case… yeah, actually, we really do seem to be watching a masterclass in threading a series of impossible needles. There’s such a light touch to every aspect of Shell that it’s a miracle Scott Graham’s hand doesn’t tense up even once, or that every actor rides their vibe so flawlessly. Misery will never be beautiful, but in Shell at least it’s meaningful.

Oh, good, everybody in Europe is a sociopath, too.

A Balcony in Limoges

If the first thing a person does when you enter their home is confirm that you’ve recently washed your hands you’re either a successful child or a failed adult. It’s a grim reality with which to be confronted, but you have options. One thing you could do is start washing your hands. Another is murder and dismember everyone who has ever wronged you.

A Balcony in Limoges is fascinating because it doesn’t just posit that both parties in the above scenario can be equally insufferable; it also argues that both responses merit consideration. In fact, unless I’m projecting, here, the movie seems to be leaning towards the murder-and-dismemberment end of the conflict resolution spectrum. France, you dirty, dirty girl, I never knew.

Eugénie and Gladys are our two leads. One is a good person. The other is not. Actually, they’re both awful. Or maybe it depends on your perspective. Or cultural context. Or whether the Quaaludes have hit yet. I’ve seen this fucking movie twice and I’m still not sure where its moral compass is pointing. It might not even have one. Stop making me think for myself, world cinema! Movies are supposed to be either the Avengers punching things or Tom Cruise holding onto the outside of airplanes. It’s like you never even went to film school.

I know a flick is spicy when it won’t let me play one of my favorite movie games, the one where I write a stupid version of a film in my head and then see if the real one follows suit. For example, here are some stupid versions of this movie:

• Eugénie and Gladys reconnect as adults; one has lived too irresponsible a life, the other too predictable. Each learns from the other; moderation reigns supreme.
• Gladys, the irresponsible one, seems like she will be the lunatic/criminal out of the two, but strait-laced Eugénie is the real monster. The banality of evil, social commentary, etc.
• The two start off jealous of one another and then slowly switch roles over the course of the movie, only to end up with the same resentments the other one started the film with. Grass is always greener, etc.

But fucking nope! This movie won’t even grant me the smug glory of an accurate prediction. Limoges doesn’t just zig where it’s supposed to zag – it marches ineluctably forward, powered by the kind of confidence that comes from either knowing exactly what people are going to take away from your story or not giving a shit what people are going to take away from your story.

The End

The sparseness of the commentary in Limoges doesn’t just allow but demands audience participation – this movie is filthy with intellectual space. Remember space? It’s the best. It’s where thinking used to happen.

Listen: the only thing I learned in school about the French is that you can scare them away by making yourself really big and banging empty pots together (we may have been talking about bears). But if this is the kind of stuff they’re cooking up over there in Gaul (our textbooks were also extremely old) then I need more French cinema in my diet. Shit, maybe this movie is supposed to have an obvious moral, and something got lost in translation. But even if that’s the case I’m not complaining, because an excuse to think is an excuse to think.

I’m sure Esteban is fine.

 

Sirāt

The idea that it’s possible to make sense of pain is something we tell ourselves in order to feel like we have any control over pain. Placed in a coherent context, even suffering can appear natural, a cruel but necessary color without which the human tapestry would be incomplete. It’s all bullshit, of course – we’re all just scrambling through the day, trying really hard to keep any number of grim oopsies from turning our insides into our outsides, but are you really going to face that sad reality without the help of a good lie? It’s bullshit or booze, baby.

Sirāt isn’t telling a story that lends itself to traditional structure, so it doesn’t bother with one. It also feels no obligation to provide redemption or hope, so don’t go in expecting those, either. It’s mostly a descent from one purgatory to another, during which time the characters experience a third, slightly less awful – but still extremely fucked up! – purgatory. It’s a film rich in displacements and feeling no urgency to provide meaning.

That doesn’t mean there isn’t any, of course. I’m just saying you gotta earn that shit. Every sequence in Sirāt would be the final sequence of the movie this movie could be if it had any interest in being that movie, which it does not. Not only are we routinely denied catharsis, we’re not even given a dramatic build-up to catharsis. We’re sent on a journey defined by a decaying orbit of vibes, with characters only realizing they passed a point of no return long after they already passed it.  

This film rides the line between absurdism, quietism, and human darkness so well that you never get the chance to settle into any one, a masterful manipulation of tone that keeps you perpetually off-balance. Sirāt’s events are random and cruel and deliberately stupid, but the way in which they hit the characters is always played completely straight, which makes the payoff to each grim situation even harder to watch. The movie itself eventually collapses around the characters, which in any other film would be a criticism, but here it’s all part of the journey.

The End

It’s really hard to tell a story that is defined by absurd things but is itself not absurd – I Think You Should Leave is a comedy for a reason. The secret is in the sincerity – events can be as strange and as singular and as detached from obvious meaning as you want as long as the human impact is played straight. Do that, and things will hit just as hard – maybe even harder – than they would in a more traditional film. 

 

It was around this time Penrose noticed that a utility worker was looking at him – high up on a telephone pole, acting like he was repairing a line, but obviously keeping tabs on our man ‘rose, here.

Penrose looked away, then back again. Mr. Pole, caught staring, quickly returned to his supposed work. He then slowly rotated back to see if Penrose was looking at him, saw that he was, and, cover blown, dropped even the illusion that this was all a big misunderstanding, instead took out a walkie-talkie and started barking orders into it.

Huh.

Penrose returned his gaze to ground level.

A police officer was watching him, also had a walkie-talkie out, and was listening very intently.

Huh.

Now, hold on, hold on – let’s not get paranoid, here, Penrose. When was the last time you met a friendly police officer? A-And, maybe that utility worker was calling in something completely unrelated to your currently being on the esplanade. Y-Yeah, yeah! Relax, Roger – not everything is about you.

He turned to a little old lady who had paused in the shade of a nearby curtain fig to blow some heat off of her café con leche. They caught each other’s eye. She lost interest in him almost immediately, and went back to her coffee.

See? Just the fine people of Puerto Rico, going about their business.

Maybe one more look, though, back at the ol’ utility worker up there…

H-Hey, where did he go?

No one was working on the line anymore. How could you even get down that quickly?

Penrose scanned the esplanade again.

The utility worker and the police officer were making their way towards him. Yellow-hat and blue-hat, working together, sweeping the street and not being particularly subtle about it.

Penrose looked back at the old lady, hoping his plight might ignite some kind of maternal instinct in her, but now she was frowning wickedly and inching towards him.

She was talking into a walkie-talkie of her own.

“What the fuck…?”

Penrose turned in the opposite direction of this growing goon squad, and as he did noticed a sailor and a biker emerging from the shadow of a basement café. They tried to hustle into position and cut off his escape route, but Penrose danced around them, broke into a jog and, not wanting to see who else was about to join this goddamned navy, turned that jog into a run, taking off towards Escambrón Beach, and whatever haven might remain.

–

Andrés, Penrose’s surf-buddy/drug-dealer/life-coach/drug-dealer, was opening up his kiosco when he noticed who else but his favorite customer barreling down the street in his direction.

“Hey, hey, Penrose! What’s up, man?”

“AHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!”

Penrose blasted on by.

“Uh, need anything to take that edge off?” Andrés called after him. “I can see if I’ve got any – holy fuck!”

Reliable Andrés, seeing the growing team of macho men charging in hard from the same direction Penrose had come from, dropped what he was doing, got into gear, and caught up with his friend.

“Holy shit! What kind of trouble you in, blanquito?”

“Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck! I don’t fucking know! Stay away, man! They’ll get you, too!”

“Bah, you’re talking to someone who loses pigs for a living, Penrose! Just follow me!”

Andrés took the lead, and headed towards the water.

“That’s the fucking ocean, Andrés!”

“Damn straight it is! Only natural highway left! Just have to know how to navigate it!

“Alright, boys, it’s showtime!”

That last part was for the benefit of the dozen-plus Boricua surfers milling about on the beach, all of whom answered the call by yanking their boards from the sand and lining up, military-style.

“What’s the play, Andrés? We taking Penrose out for a lesson?”

“Sure are, but not the usual kind!”

Knowing nods all around.

“And I’ll just be taking this.”

Andrés yanking off Penrose’s bomber jacket and putting it on himself, mussing up his hair so it looked Penrose-adjacent, and then peeling off towards the pier to draw the heat away.

“Andrés, man, you can’t get pinched on account of me!” Penrose screaming after him. “Come with us!”

“Me, getting pinched? That’s a good one!” Andrés calling back over his shoulder. “I’ve been doing this too long to get caught by some rent-a-thugs! See you on the other side, ‘rosie!”

The locals now lifting Penrose towards the water, placing him on a surfboard, and shoving out to sea together in an impromptu flotilla.

–

Out past the usual breaks, things starts to move in ways you wouldn’t expect. Water and air become indigenous to nothing, and directionality as a concept sort of breaks down. This rakishness is great for making an escape, less great for knowing where you’ll end up. But that’s the price of leaving no tracks – no way back, no way to even prove where you’re from.

Penrose chose not to focus on this. He instead limited his sight to the patch of water directly in front of him. This was a good idea, because even if he wanted to take a long view on the matters at hand, sea fog had descended all around, made everything impenetrably primordial.

“Almost there,” a voice said.

“Got it,” Penrose called back.

“We didn’t say that,” the surfers informed him.

They came to a halt.

“Someone’ll pick you up from here, ‘rose,” one of the surfers said.

“I really owe you guys,” Penrose, actually getting a little worked up. “You’re all going to be in all kinds of shit when you get back. They’re going to find out you know me, and – ”

“Just worry about yourself right now,” another surfer said, gently. “We’ve been doing this a lot longer than you. We’ll be fine.”

All of them gone, now, before Penrose could even ask who he was waiting for.

“Remember, Penrose: if they get you chasing something that can never be caught, they never have to worry about what you’ll do when you get it.”

None of the surfers said that, either, but that didn’t mean it was wrong.

–

Being sent by your employer to an island that means nothing to you in order to help set up an operation whose purpose or even basic operating mechanics have not been adequately explained and might not even exist in any tangible sense sounds like a horizontal career move at best, but he was trying to stay positive.

Puerto Rico had nice weather, and pretty girls, and everybody seemed pretty happy to be there, at least that’s what it looked like in the brochure they gave him on the plane. And, besides, he was the person who discovered the Mock-Invertible Variant/Invariant Matrix, the only known matrix whose singularity could actually change depending on whether or not it recognized itself, a side-stepping of the limitations of 3 + 1 dimensional spacetime that was already powering rapid advancements in the physics of pulling virtual and imaginary coördinates onto the traversable plane… would they really thank him for crafting such a nifty critter by sending him down to the Caribbean to sit behind a desk?

He needed a Panama hat. Those were so cool.

They put him up in a hotel near the esplanade. He had no idea if the entire places was being rented out, or if he was the only member of the team being kept there. The suite wasn’t bad, though, and they even got him a Cushman motor scooter, currently out front and shiny-new, another gift from on high, gassed up and ready to go, its purpose, like so many things, to be revealed only at a later date…

As of now his only company was the teletypewriter. They had hooked it up before he even got there, waiting on a table in the sitting room when he first came in, incongruous with everything else, a lump of coal for his karmic Christmas.

He needed a lady. Or at least something besides a haunted typewriter to talk to.

Well, hey, speak of the devil: ol’ Mr. Teletype was starting to crank out another message:

Penrose.

At the promenade.

Go.

Observe.

Collect.

–

Penrose bobbed there for a while.

He wasn’t sure what to do.

He thought about his brother.

Hieronymus Penrose was not a striving man. The times he lived in provided more occasions for death than any sane person could possibly want, so Hiero P’s charge in life wasn’t finding danger, but rather remaining solid, stolid, happy and pure even as a sea of gruesome interests conspired to make him anything but – because whether the powers-that-be realized it or not, they had passed – and dragged everyone else along! – into a new phase of history, one in which moments were mistakes, and the larger body always emerged unscathed. The goal, of course, was to prove that everything is fungible – that nature and its goodies are nothing more than a bottomless repository of Useful Parts from which more stock can always be pulled, whenever The Firm is hurting or hungry, or otherwise feels it isn’t getting the respect it deserves.

Hieronymus survived all this, more or less – passed through a series of rooms and concerns that were more collections of codified neuroses than what could reasonably be called ideas, each time forced to perform – not so much as a rite of entry but of exit – a task he rather would not have done, oftentimes simply because The Firm wanted to see if They could make him do it, curious as They tend to be as to just how far a process can be taken, if a person can be made the incubator of their own replacement – because if it were possible, it would finally prove The Firm’s ultimate argument, that even the soul is just another unit of account…

That’s how the eldest Penrose brother passed the first few decades of his life, which also ended up being the last few – worked on, Ship-of-Theseus-style, by a series of increasingly faceless interests, swapped out with so many aftermarket parts that his own family was forced to confront the possibility that the Hieronymus before them was no longer the real Hieronymus Penrose, but rather a convincing simulacrum, well-meaning but clearly working for someone else, sending information somewhere else, to people who didn’t give a shit about him, but to who he was now forever attached…

(… s-sometimes Penrose even thought that he and Hieronymus were originally the same person, bifurcated like light in some grim experiment – Hieronymus, the control, made to come out clean on the other side, while Penrose, the experiment, was a refraction sent out at a deliberately nonsensical angle, just to see how a geodesic behaves when it goes off the map, and whether it resembles its original form – or anything at all – when it comes back…

… a-and how many more constituent parts could this Penrose afford to lose before it happened to him, too…? before his model year simply… expired? what would that even feel like? would he know it when it happened, or would only others be able to tell he was gone…?)

“Ahoy, there!”

Out of the dream and into the drink now sailed the Bearded Baby, a rusty bucket of a shrimp trawler that probably wasn’t up to code on anything pertaining to health or physical safety but still might as well have been a unicorn pulling a rainbow for all the hope it instilled in Penrose.

“Let’s get you somewhere safe, lad!”

–

Penrose finished drying himself off while the Bearded Baby‘s captain, a huge motherfucker named Tāne, waited patiently.

“I really owe you guys.”

Tāne shrugged.

“Never pass up an opportunity to inconvenience The Man. And we would’ve felt bad if you’d drowned.”

Penrose tried to ignore the order in which Tāne had listed his priorities.

“So, uh, where’re we headed?”

“Panama. We should be able to keep you ahead of it until then, but you’d be better served getting yourself a new ride once you’re there. Misdirection, misdirection. These people pretend they deal in subterfuge, but they can’t stand it.”

These people? Ahead of it?

Penrose was too tired to think, but had just enough juice left to be grateful.

“Can I pay my way with work? Only thing I had of value on me was that surfboard, and – oh, fuck!”

That surfboard he had been lent was still somewhere out in the Atlantic.

“… maybe focus on more primary concerns, son. And we have plenty for you to do.”

“Thanks. It was a really nice surfboard.”

“I’m sure it was.”

Tāne with one more curious once-over on the Baby‘s latest catch, as if comparing what he was observing to something he had been told to expect, before heading towards the bow.

Penrose stood there for a minute, happy to have nothing to do.

He had no idea what the plan was, both with respect to the people trying to catch him and the people trying to keep him away from the people trying to catch him, and something told him that by the time he found out what anybody was up to it would be well passed the time to do anything about it.

Get your jokes out of my comedy.

Wild Things

Nothing is funnier than cataclysmic failure. If someone stepping on a landmine during a volleyball match and only leaving behind a pair of smoking leg stumps and someone on the other team starting to laugh until they step on a landmine and then a third person starting to play a slide whistle to mock the whole grim affair but it turns out that slide whistle is also a landmine doesn’t make you laugh then there’s something about the human condition that you’re failing to grasp on a foundational level. You need to meet more people; you need to open your heart to chance.

Wild Things works as a comedy. Whether or not it’s supposed to work as a comedy is a second, chin scratch-ier consideration, but for now let’s focus on the sassy stuff:

Sleaze is the main character in this movie, and I will hear no arguments against it. We are impelled to root for wet, greasy garbage, and well we should – unctuousness has the most consistent motivations in Wild Things, is both the most likable and most relatable thing on screen at any time, and offers up non-zero amounts of thematic depth. You know how sometimes a location is a character, like Chicago in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, or the uncanny valley in Marvel movies? That’s the role that sticky awfulness plays in Wild Things.

Which leads to my favorite type of comedy! There aren’t any “jokes” in this film, at least not any traditional ones – no setups and payoffs, no straight-man character; only vibes, sweet, sweet vibes, and gleefully dumb anti-logic. In watching this movie we are transported to a world complete unto itself and subject to its own rigorously-maintained rules, among which the following reigns supreme: everyone is brain-dead stupid and endlessly horny. They have no third quality.

This movie’s tone is so pure that its humor doesn’t even need a straight-man to punctuate its jokes, because the world is the joke, and just by watching you are cast into the role of straight-man. The Spanish Inquisition didn’t have this much audience participation.

But now we come to the big question: is this all on purpose?

I have no fucking idea! It also doesn’t matter. But, for science, let us consider:

• The participation of Bill Murray means that, even if we’re not dealing with a planned comedy, at least one person is going to be winking. He even plays a sleazy lawyer who wears an unnecessary neck brace. This one seems unambiguous.
• I refuse to believe anyone thought that this movie’s audio cues would work as anything other than punchlines. There’s a sudden trilling of piano keys whenever a character learns new information, which is not how drama works.
• Theresa Russell is in this movie. Theresa Russell knows what a real movie is, having been in many of them herself. There are multiple scenes in this movie in which Theresa Russell is trying not to laugh. Theresa Russell understands what kind of movie Theresa Russell is in.

The End

Jokes are fine, I guess. But you know what’s even funnier than jokes? A character getting harpooned multiple times, still apparently confused after the first harpoon enters his body as to what, exactly, is happening (he is being harpooned); another character being handed a drink, being told that the drink isn’t poisoned, and then immediately drinking the poisoned drink, trusting that the person who has just reassured him of the non-poisoned status of the drink – who only moments earlier just killed someone, directly in front of him! – would never do him harm.

You can have your knock-knock jokes, society. I’ll stick with dumb people continuously falling over themselves on an existential Slip ‘N Slide lubricated exclusively by filth and pointing directly to hell. This movie is a comedy, and you’ll never convince me otherwise. I don’t care if they meant to make one – I laughed, and that’s all that matters.

Our problems will still be there tomorrow. Today, we jazzerskate.

Xanadu

After my ill-advised Sinatra safari, I felt compelled to both cleanse my mind and prove a point. The thing to be cleansed was obvious: Sinatra’s grim, lusterless eyes, owl-wide yet full of nothing. The point to be proven was less obvious: that, in spite of what Ol’ Blue Eyes would have you believe, making a movie that is basically watchable requires nothing more than fucking trying.

I would need a certain type of movie to aid me in this quest – one rife with weirdness, filthy with basic storytelling mistakes, special effects that make you look up the definition of the word “special” to see if it means something different than what you thought it meant, and yet… still a genuinely good watch, simply because the people involved are fucking trying.

Many films fit this description, but to the best of my knowledge only one features Olivia Newton-John and Gene Kelly surfing oceans of blow: Xanadu.

Xanadu is not what you would call a “good” film. I’d even entertain arguments that it’s not a film at all, assuming we’re defining “film” as some kind of visual entity utilizing one or more structural through-lines towards the ultimate goal of generating an emotional response from its audience. I’d describe it more as a gesture, a feeling that passed by at the precise moment a camera crew happened to be in the vicinity to film it. A spontaneous disco-documentary, if you will.

It’s also fucking stupid – every actor is either thoroughly baffled as to what they’re supposed to be doing (Michael Beck), thoroughly baffled as to what they’re supposed to be doing but dancing through it all (Gene Kelly, Olivia Newton-John), or completely confident in what they’re supposed to be doing because all they’re supposed to be doing is juggling bowling pins (various mimes).

But unlike the human manifestation of apathy that is Frank Sinatra, Xanadu is endlessly watchable! Everybody in this faceplant of a film is willing to embarrass themselves for the assignment, and the energy is infectious. Maybe there were just mountains of cocaine on the craft services table, but it’s always a pleasure when no one involved seems concerned with what the final product will look like, because they’re too busy jamming the fuck out.

God save me, I liked this dumb fucking movie, even though if given the chance I’d travel back in time and warn them not to make it.

That’s the power of trying, baby.

The End

There’s a scene late in Xanadu in which the character who would be our hero if this movie was competent enough to know that stories typically have a hero is at what would be the narrative low point if this film were competent enough to know that stories typically have a narrative low point. He receives an uplifting speech from Gene Kelly about the importance of never giving up on love. The speech sucks, both men are dressed like assholes, and nothing about anything works, but damned if Kelly isn’t calling on every ounce of his charisma to try and sell it.

And he doesn’t even have to sell it, because moments later there is a dance number so insane it appears to transcend the physical laws of the universe as they are currently understood. With that much energy on display, being good is almost besides the point.

My goal in life is to become so famous that the mere suggestion I should or even could try harder would be like donkey-punching God.

Some Came Running, Can-Can, Ocean’s 11

There are many ways to give your audience a good performance. Trying, for instance. You could try. That usually works. But what if you don’t want to try? Furthermore, what if – and we’re purely in the realm of speculation, here – you also happen to be Frank Sinatra? It’s a grim situation, but one we must confront.

Movie stars coast all the time. That’s fine. If I could act like Al Pacino or Parker Posey I’d set it to autopilot occasionally, too, secure in the knowledge that even when I’m taking a breather the audience is still in for a good time. But Frank Sinatra doesn’t just coast – he decomposes, shits himself like a bored toddler. It’s upsetting.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone so annoyed to be in a movie. Sinatra’s the cinematic equivalent of the old money crowd, appalled at the very notion someone would do something in order to remain famous. Those filthy hogs shouldn’t have to be reminded of who I am. They should just know.

This philosophical opposition to effort as a concept seems to take a toll on Sinatra’s supporting cast, too, in the same way that being forced to drag an extremely lazy member of your team up the side of Mount Everest is bound to make everyone a bit snippy. The other actors are all going harder than they’d probably like because they have to compensate for the fact that they’re acting opposite a corpse. Ol’ Blue Eyes isn’t here in any meaningful sense, gang. He’s thinking about whiskey and yearning for death.

The End

About halfway through Can-Can, Frank Sinatra tries to pull a single grape from a cluster. He accidentally yanks the entire thing off the table, and it lands on the floor with a thud. Sinatra notices this mistake, pauses for a moment, realizes he doesn’t care, and then continues with the scene.

Jesus Christ, Frank.

Pick up the fucking grapes.

My brain ignores the beauty inherent to our shared human experience so it can instead search for things to be mad about.

 

Project Hail Mary

“How popular should popular entertainment be?” is a strange question to ask. If the word is in the name, you should probably be maximizing it. Imagine if a waiter brought you a filet mignon that was neither a cut of beef nor particularly cute. You would feel betrayed.

But can this logic be applied to movies? It’s not exactly like the filet mignon situation. At a restaurant, you’re trying to give the customer exactly what they asked for. Are you trying to give the audience exactly what they asked for? What did they ask for? Do they even know? Do you? Are there unspoken expectations between you and your viewers? How would they even know if they wanted something they’ve never seen before, unless they were first shown that thing? If you were this existential about your Bloomin’ Onion, people would worry.

I present this deeply stupid and poorly structured argument because I just watched Project Hail Mary, a movie that is neither deeply stupid nor poorly structured. It is, in fact, dialed the fuck in. It’s so dialed the fuck in, actually, that my brain started going to weird places as I watched it.

Hear me out:

Lord and Miller have basically perfected the art of being insiders and outsiders at the same time, right? This feels like the consensus – those two make bangers that send up the very notion of banging while actually harvesting that same bangification energy/anti-energy dynamic to maximize their Added Bang Over Expectation (ABOE) without ever pushing it too far and accidentally de-bangerizing themselves. Their mastery of the culture has fucked with my brain so badly that I actually considered writing that last sentence to be a good idea.

But, “this movie is so well-made that it loops back around to being poorly-made,” isn’t what I’m saying, because that is both stupid and objectively not true. Project Hail Mary isn’t so good it’s bad, it’s so good it’s really fucking good.

So what am I getting at?

I think it’s this: can you perfect popular entertainment? Unlike, say, avant-garde stuff, popular entertainment has a fairly knowable gauge: how many people it appeals to. So if you have a style that appeals to essentially every human alive, did you just, uh, win at entertainment? And even if you could win at entertainment, would you want to? Can Lord and Miller push awesome, big movies further by continuing their fine-tuned approach, or can new avenues only be discovered by making something weird and shitty on purpose, just to test the waters? Why is a movie about Ryan Gosling doing science with a dancing rock challenging my very notion of reality? I’ve never even had a Bloomin’ Onion before.

The End

Here’s a compromise: whether or not perfection is an admirable goal depends entirely upon the field in which you operate. You wouldn’t want to be the world’s best toilet salesman, and Keith Richards’ favorite drug dealer probably never has a moment to himself.

But it feels like there should be more to the argument – it’s just that I’m not sure more what. I’m going to chew on this for a while longer, which is more effort than I put in for most blockbusters. That’s a feather Lord and Miller’s cap, even if it’s a weird feather, and an even stranger cap.

Hello, and welcome to the first entry in my one-part series, Let’s Start to Redeem a Movie but Then Actually Watch That Movie and Be Like, No, Wait, My Mistake, the Critics Were Right the First Time.

30 Days of Night

“There’s a good movie in here,” can be said about a lot of movies, but not all of them. Attack of the Clones isn’t one edit away from being coherent, and you can chop up Mad Foxes as much as you want, but you’re still getting a story about the world’s least likeable boyfriend and his best friend, a bathtub full of piss (please do not watch Mad Foxes).

But 30 Days of Night really is a couple of tweaks and rewrites away from, if not greatness, then at least having the confidence to make fuck-me eyes at greatness from the other end of the bar. It’s actually annoying how close the film comes to achieving something fascinating, only to falter again and again, and often for the same reason.

First, let’s appreciate what works:

• Assault on Precinct 13, Also Vampires is a great premise for a film. Aside from just being awesome, “What if a Grim Situation Was Steeped in Something Fundamentally Unknowable?” opens up endless narrative and tonal pathways to explore. Just ask Sinners!
• There are moments of strikingly efficient visual storytelling – that opening shot of the Stranger’s face, the subsequent shot of the tanker in the distance, the overhead tracking shot during the first night of feasting – all present a harrowing, cruel world in which the vampires are more like a disease than a traditional enemy that can be repelled by traditional methods.
• The fact that Eben kind of sucks actually works to the movie’s advantage. We can’t just rely on an Extremely Virile Protagonist (Heaving Abdominals Division) to save the day. Having our hero’s focus be survival shifts the scope and tone of the film from Shooty-Shooty Blam-Blam to something darker, sadder, and more personal. High Noon, baby!

But while the premise has oodles of good shit going on, they fumble the goddamn ball in the execution:

• All that tonal build-up deflates at the exact moment the film should be cashing in its ominous chips – our haunting, stark opening gives way to shaky-cam whenever the vampires attack, and the whole notion of a siege is undone as characters just go outside whenever they feel like it.
• The idea of the town being a character unto itself is wasted. Giving our lovably murderous hillbillies the sole advantage of knowing how to survive could have turned this movie into an awesome, grim game of cat-and-mouse, with the roles of hunter and hunted constantly flipping. Instead we get a different game, one called Oh No, The Second Act Just Started And We’re Already Out of Ideas – Quick, Have Them Argue About Things in an Attic.
• There are Movie Things in places in which Movie Things are not needed. Eben and Stella being an estranged married couple adds nothing to the movie except for a few throwaway lines, and is clearly only in the film because Estranged Couple Reconnects During Events of Film is a thing that happens in movies.
• The mostly random insertion of Movie Things also leads to a baffling climax, in which our hero chugs some action juice and just… dukes it out with the head vampire, which makes no sense given the tone and scope of the film.
• Nobody seems to be on the same page, performance-wise. Josh Hartnett goes small, Ben Foster goes big, Mark Boone Junior is in an action movie, Melissa George is making a series of mental notes to fire her agent – not great! Even the vampires play it differently –  some are haunting, some are primal. I don’t know if it was the direction, or what, but everybody seems to be in a slightly different movie.

There is a trend, here! The things that work are all working in concert to facilitate the narrative, whereas the things that don’t work are just generic Movie Things that seem to have been placed in the film to paper over moments where the filmmakers weren’t sure what else to do. A smaller, focused movie will always be better than a larger one under any circumstance, but especially when the larger one has only achieved that size by pumping itself full of stuff that doesn’t really have anything to do with anything.

The End

Just because something works in a movie doesn’t mean it’ll work in your movie. Any given entry in the list of Things That Sometimes Happen in a Movie doesn’t automatically pair with every other entry just because they both happen to be on the same list. Do you get every single thing at the buffet? I fucking hope not! Do that, and one day you’ll head back to your table with crab legs and gelato on the same plate. People would rather sit next to Genghis Khan than some guy who has crab legs and gelato on the same plate.

Don’t be the crab legs and gelato guy.