A movie should be about something. I don’t mean this in a particularly philosophical way – a filmmaker should just be able to explain at any given moment why the thing that is currently happening on the screen is currently happening on the screen. Like, logically. This may come across as an embarrassingly low bar to clear, but more and more movies genuinely struggle to present a coherent series of events that are both causally related to one another and which unfold on a plane of existence recognizable to a human. It’s hard to enjoy your popcorn when objective reality is collapsing around you. The insanity makes the butter taste weird.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

We’re pretty clearly at the end of an epoch in Hollywood. It’s not even the first time we’ve been at the end of this particular epoch, which is kind of neat if you dig on ouroboros. But the mechanics behind the studio system’s latest headlong plunge into a woodchipper isn’t my focus here – I’m more interested in how the films themselves are affected by that most treasured of all corporate responses to conflict: frothy, diaper-shitting panic. The rich are truly the best of us.

Listen: you don’t have to be smart to make money. If anything, you should probably be stupid. This is because the best way to produce anything at scale is to find a formula that seems to have worked for someone else and shamelessly mash the copy + paste buttons until your fingers are bloody stumps and there’s an airport named after you and you have more mistresses than seems either necessary or practical.

The Hollywood version of this system is well-understood: watershed film leads to avalanche of imitators leads to losing sight of what made the original film work leads to compensating for lack of ideas by cranking up the superficial aspects of the original film leads to entries so bloated they barely qualify as movies leads to audience fatigue leads to plummeting profits leads to a private equity firm scooping up the studio on the cheap leads to everybody’s fired leads to once-proud corporate executives reduced to hobo knife fights over who gets to sleep in the big dumpster tonight. Capitalism, baby. The system works. 

This is what’s currently happening in the world of franchise films. Studios have been smashing the Cinematic Universe button for so long and to such diminishing returns that now whenever they hit that sweet, sweet money button instead of being showered in easy Benjamins they’re mostly treated to a low, long, mournful fart. See those budgets? A simple way to tell when a cinematic bubble is about to go Krakatoa is when the amount of money pumped into the production of a picture keeps going up even as market stability keeps going down. It seems counter-intuitive to increase financial exposure during turbulent times but, remember, we’re dealing with dumb people here, and dumb people only have two settings: grift, and panic. And it’s in that panicked state that these nimrods convince themselves to spend $350 million on an Indiana Jones movie, or to buy the rights to two entries in the Knives Out franchise for half a billion.

And the inability to come up with any plan besides The Thing We Are Currently Doing, Except Larger weighs in on the actual construction of these movies, too. When studio executives panic and start pumping such ungodly amounts on money into a production it becomes nearly impossible to make a movie in any traditional sense. On the scale we’re talking about movies are more assembled, pre-fabricated parts snapped into sorta-kinda alignment by different teams who have all been working in isolation from one another and don’t even know what the final product is supposed to look like. If this sounds unsustainable, it’s because it is.

The End

There’s no point in issuing a clarion call against this system because the system is a product of human nature – everybody only ever learns their lesson for as long as it takes them to work up the necessary momentum to run into the same fucking wall again. Way more fun is to think about what interesting new cinematic flora will grow out of the composted remains of the studio system’s latest collapse. The next Scorsese is out there, somewhere, waiting for their chance, and they just need a few more studios to somehow think spending $400 million on a Gem and the Holograms reboot is a good idea. They probably won’t have to wait long.

(Oops, I forgot to say something about Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny! It’s three fucking hours long! That’s a sick joke! I wish Archimedes would send me back in time to before I watched this movie so I could tell myself not to watch this movie!)

Bridge Troll Wishes People Would Just Hear Him Out Before Screaming And Running Away

Dumbass Tries To Fend Off Zombies With Garlic

Turtle Wishes Family Goodbye, Goes To Get Mail

Influencer Wishes He Had Spent More Time Influencing His Family

Report: Global Economy Propped Up Entirely By Tech Jargon

Cat Didn’t Get Sufficient Tummy Scratches This Morning, Will Be Collecting Souls Tonight

David Cronenberg Settles In For Night Of Thinking The Darkest Thoughts Ever To Cross A Human Mind

Unattractive Man Also Has Pretty Shitty Personality

Local Kindergartener Doesn’t Know What Will Happen When He Puts Mom’s Cellphone In The Microwave, But Sure Is Excited To Find Out

Martin Scorsese Considering Trying His Hand At The Mobster Genre

Both Sides Pointing In Opposite Directions After Draw Play On Fourth-And-One; Referees Not Sure Who To Trust

Alcoholic Boldly Decides To Quit Drinking After This One Last Beer

Man Declines Invitation To 25-Year High-School Reunion, Prefers To Assume They’re All Dead

Extremely Comfortable Man Notices Smoke Alarm Has Gone From Flashing Yellow To Flashing Red, Is Going To Assume That’s Fine

Rabbit Suddenly Realizes Something Really Important Halfway Through Crossing The Street

Bari Weiss Pledges To Get Hitler’s Side Of The Story

Local Man Knows Ceiling Fan Won’t Decapitate Him, But He’s Not Taking Any Chances, Either

Kash Patel Pledges Investigation Into How Kash Patel Became FBI Director

Bob Dylan Tries To Blow Everyone’s Mind By Going Electric, Is Informed He Already Did That Once

Point-Counterpoint:

Following This Ghoulish Specter Into The Dark Attic Is A Terrible Idea And Will Almost Certainly Lead To My Death

vs.

Eh, It’ll Be Fine

 

We all have our kinks. Mine is grim whimsy – grimsy. Give me a deadpan asshole in a fanciful mess and I’ll give you loins so moist you’d think you were eating cantaloupe.

The Phoenician Scheme

Wes Anderson movies are divisive. They should not be. Here is my case:

Idiotic Point / Handsome Counterpoint

In this dialogue I will be playing the role of Socrates, and you will be playing the role of burping doofus. We commence:

You, a moist diaper of a man, meager at all things, weeping eternally: The dialogue in a Wes Anderson movie is insufferably formal! It stifles characterization!

Me, flawlessly alive, zesty with passion: You fool, you dolt, you absolute clown! How facile your mind, how weak your constitution! Wes Anderson’s use of contrived dialogue is a form of characterization! By denying his characters the complexity of language necessary to adequately express themselves he stresses their emotional isolation, the stultifying consequences of imperiousness! We see how difficult connection can be in an impersonal world! You wretched toilet goblin, a taint could see this!

You, at the grocery store, trying to work up the nerve to buy the spicy mayonnaise: The direction in a Wes Anderson movie is too much, too precious! I feel like I am watching a life-sized diorama, not a believable world!

Me, in a voice not unlike that of God: You ass! You turd! You absolute donkey! How can you not see, you fully-nude butt jockey, that mise-en-scène in a Wes Anderson film is merely prelude to the fall, the false hope of safety under the guise of something beautiful?! And how it is in these moments of visual upheaval that characters are rendered raw, relatable, real?! Torn so violently from the womb of their superficial splendor, cast out of their arrogant Eden, they become human to us, forever cut off from the warmth of their delusions! How can you not see, you inveterate chud, that there is nothing more vulnerable than being made expatriate to your own dreams? My grandmother understands this perfectly, and she’s dead! It was your rancid movie opinions that killed her!

You, waiting in line for Nickelback tickets: Nothing in a Wes Anderson movie resembles reality!

Me, teaching myself differential geometry while preparing a flawless consommé: If I wanted reality I’d open a fucking window! You salty dumpster-monkey, the thrill of a tale is in the displacement, the invitation to another realm in which the only common factor is the universality of emotion! Only a dildo could fail to notice this!

Lord of the Rings is a pretty jaunty romp, wouldn’t you say? An imaginative journey? But no eyebrows are raised when smelly half-humans bump uglies with ancient wizard-queens! Because the emotions are the same! Can you not hold the Andersonian oeuvre to that same standard? Is your mind so closed to experience, so incompatible with growth, that it will deny the validity of a story, any story, simply because that story asks you to rely on the shared passions of the human heart? Open your mind to experience, you cinnamon queef!

You: Can’t we at least agree to disagree?

Me: No.

The End

Wes Anderson movies are good. Don’t be weird about it.

 

Murdered Within Seconds of Acting Like That

1. The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou

2. Ghostbusters 

3. What About Bob?

4. Scrooged

5. Quick Change

Murdered Fairly Quickly, Though With Some Doubt

6. Groundhog Day

7. Where the Buffalo Roam

8. Ghostbusters II

9. On the Rocks

10. Rushmore

11. Kingpin

Not Threatening Enough to Murder, Though Probably Deserves It

12. Meatballs

13. Lost in Translation

14. Moonrise Kingdom

15. Stripes

16. The Royal Tenenbaums

He’s Just Trying His Best, Man

17. Charlie’s Angels

18. Broken Flowers

19. Space Jam

20. Ed Wood

Great news! A screenplay doesn’t have to be written by a computer program to feel like it was written by a computer program.

Death on the Nile (2022)

There’s plenty of good stuff in Death on the Nile (2022). Kenneth Branagh’s take on Hercule Poirot continues to be fun and elastic. Annette Bening plays a rich lady who is also a painter who is also an asshole. Someone shoots Armie Hammer. But it’s really the movie’s problems that make for the more interesting read, because while this movie’s problems are not many, they are incandescently fucking weird.

There’s too much movie in this movie! It makes me suspicious, there is so much movie in this movie. I feel like this movie is hiding something, deep inside of all that movie. If one day your friend told you that he was definitely not the serial killer known as the Bone Bandit, and he in no way coveted your bones, certainly not to construct some kind of large and terrible bone temple, you would immediately and justifiably think, “my friend is probably the Bone Bandit. My bones are in grave danger.”

Listen: someone reviewed the script to Death on the Nile and thought to themselves, “this is an absolute clunker, this fucker right here,” which is correct. Unfortunately, this person continued thinking, arriving at the significantly less correct, “we can fix this movie by inserting into it every idea ever birthed by the mind of man.”

It is in the marriage of these two thoughts and their wildly differing correctnesses that we are given a Nile that’s about as uncanny as the valley gets:

We’ve got a picture shot on 65-millimeter, but with nearly every frame soiled by unnecessary digital effects. All the compositional resplendence and rich visual palette of Old Hollywood, and when Emma Mackey sashays up the ship’s deck at sundown it looks like there’s a level from Crash Bandicoot playing behind her. I want Dr. Cortex to be stopped as much as the next guy, and much respect to anyone who can 100% a single game in that fucking series, but my eyes deserve better; my soul deserves more.

And there’s the digital de-aging, whose every appearance in a movie makes me fear that I might have accidentally solved the LeMarchand Configuration and been sent to a highly specific corner of the Cenobite dimension where the highest form of pleasure is making people frown. Branagh is made computer-young in a World War I flashback, one that serves no narrative purpose other than to show that Poirot was also clever when he was a sprat. This seems like meager recompense for having to gaze upon an impossibly smooth Young Branagh, one seemingly sculpted entirely from a grim, unspeakable wax.

Anyhoo, around the time you manage to purge Uncanny Branagh from your mind’s eye, you’ll start to notice that this movie about impossibly wealthy white people doing extremely douchey things has a blues soundtrack. Backing away from this one, not feeling bad about it.

The inciting incident for this movie happens halfway through this movie, which seems like a strange place to begin the events of a movie.

There’s also a Mexican standoff. At least I think there is a Mexican standoff. A bunch of characters point guns at each other during the film’s climax, a decision whose hilarious randomness is only topped by their collective decision, moments later, to stop having a Mexican standoff. We all make mistakes, I guess.

The End

I like this movie. That’s a lie. This movie sucks. But I appreciate it, because Death on the Nile fails in the interesting ways movies used to fail in back when things like effort and creativity were considered givens, and not special storytelling treats that the audience should be grateful for.

Yes, the holes in the script are many, and haphazardly plugged with scraps of paper from a box labeled Things That Sometimes Happen in a Movie, but at least someone involved in whipping up this grim honker of a turkey was engaged enough to realize something was wrong, and sincere enough to try and fix it. Seriously, if the greatest contribution that Death on the Nile can make to The Discourse is to show us that the best computer program will only ever be as smart as the weirdest human, then I can at least be grateful for the movie’s existence. You might not be my friend, Nile, but you’re the enemy of my enemy, and that’s close enough.

 

The Toxic Avenger (2023)

Every movie should have Peter Dinklage in it, and a mop, and be 25% shorter. For my entire adult life I never thought these three pillars of storytelling (brevity, Dinklage, mop) would align. But sometimes the universe tosses you an atheist miracle, which is when Providence, which doesn’t exist, has better things to do than be mean to you.

So, let’s discuss The Toxic Avenger (2023).

Time, etc.

Quick, how long is the movie you’re currently working on, in minutes? That’s a terrible number! You should feel bad about that number, it is so large. Listen: every time someone asks you to explain a choice you made in making your film and you are able to answer with “because it made the movie shorter,” somewhere in the world a drunk driver decides to pull over. One more person leaves Scientology. A Cybertruck crashes into a pile of toilets. You’re doing the Lord’s work, is what I’m saying. And The Toxic Avenger is a masterclass in this kind of narrative efficiency.

The nefarious lab where evil science is being done is located directly below the villain’s mansion. Why would a nefarious lab be in such an odd location? Because placing Science Room directly below Evil Lair means one less establishing shot for the audience to endure, which is the exact amount of establishing shots every movie should aspire to have. Every story needs a unifying internal logic – Lord of the Rings has thousands of pages of world-building, the Mission: Impossible franchise has the relentless evangelizing of Ethan Hunt’s total infallibility, and this movie has “let’s not waste each other’s fucking time,” as its structural backbone. This is magical, and the springboard from which all of the film’s other considerations leap directly into your heart. Technical considerations are just as valid a unifying principle as emotional or thematic ones.

And speaking of emotions: this movie doesn’t waste a single goddamn syllable in establishing its tone. Grim Yet Earnest Buffoonery is blasted out from all feasible points of attack, starting with the film’s opening sequence, in which a crass but passionate reporter stares death in the face and flips the bird at his would-be killers. The whole of the film’s tone, values, and style are conveyed in this moment. There is more said in it than in the entirety of the Bible.

Seriously, the oppressive insanity of The Toxic Avenger’s tone is dialed in so perfectly that there’s a steady background noise of offscreen characters declaring insane, violent, and depressing things – there is such clarity of vision to this movie’s world that it is bursting at the seams with it. When you’re watching a scene in which a father tries to connect with his son and some random, unseen voice declares “I got my dick stuck in a trash compactor again! It fucking hurts! My dick looks like a broken slinky now!” it is impossible to misapprehend what kind of movie you’re watching.

And here is my favorite thing about a movie so unambiguous in its aims, style, and focus: that glorious sense of community! A highly-specific tone requires every actor to be in on the joke. No one is, like, gunning for a fucking Oscar or something. Everybody subordinates themselves to The Cause, and seeing that flawless synergy is what watching the 1960s Packers run the Lombardi sweep must have felt like. 

The End

You should have to get a permission slip to make a movie more than ninety minutes long, and that permission slip should have to be signed by God. The iceberg in Titanic should be in the opening shot of the film, rubbing its hands together menacingly. Every cinematic depiction of the Nativity should pan away from baby Jesus and slowly push in on a cross with an evil mustache. 

Listen: Martin Scorsese perfected filmmaking in 1990 with the “keep stirring the sauce” sequence in Goodfellas. Art as a concept has been treading water since then – you can only aspire to approximate the flawless energy captured in that scene, never surpass it. But you can come close! The more you simplify your movie the faster it will go, the more capacity it will have for lateral movement. So keep those budgets low, those scripts lean, those actors in on the joke, and that fucking sauce stirred. Seriously, it will stick if you don’t.

 

Every movie should either be about a haunted trampoline or a dog who is also a detective. However, sometimes movies insist on being about other things. Why anyone would want to explore the intricacies of the human condition instead of watching a dog solve mysteries will forever escape me, but if I can’t stop these films from happening, I can at least hold them to standards.

So here is a tier list for the types of social commentary seen in both TV and film. From lowest to highest:

• The Saturday Night Live Tier

Never be in the Saturday Night Live Tier. Retire from writing and join Greenpeace before you allow yourself to be in the Saturday Night Live Tier. Move to the Netherlands and make clogs for farmers before allowing yourself to take up residence in the Saturday Night Live Tier, which is the Sacramento of tiers.

The SNL Tier does not actually include comment in its commentary, which is impressive because 70% of the word commentary is the word comment. An SNL sketch about the news consists mostly of reminding the audience that the news exists. This is not commentary. If I tell you that there is a tree outside my window, I have not commented on the tree outside my window – I have just pointed out that there is a tree outside my window. A baby can do this.

Do not be in the SNL tier of commentary. Become a barista instead. People will always need coffee.

• The Mountainhead Tier

The Mountainhead Tier is better than the SNL Tier because falling asleep behind the wheel of your car and driving directly into the Grand Canyon and landing on top of a bighorn sheep who was just minding his own fucking business and blasting the both of you straight to hell in a gruesome fireball of iron chaos and noise is still somehow better than the SNL Tier.

Here is what characterizes the Mountainhead Tier, which means well and does a lot right, but is still slightly off the mark:

Character is lost in the commentary. The writer clearly has opinions, and knows how to convey those opinions, but in their eagerness to be heard has crafted too precise a portrait; dialogue doesn’t sound like humans conversing so much as robots reciting information from a Wikipedia page.

While the writer deserves a lot of credit for doing some really good stuff – actually having an opinion on something, for starters, but also crafting characters that represent different aspects of the topic in question, and placing those characters in disparate situations so as to highlight the various grim realities of the subject matter – it’s hard to get any more emotionally invested in the story beyond, “these fucking guys, am I right?”

• The Superman (2025) Tier

In this tier you have an extremely moist David Corenswet delivering a speech about how adhering to values in an imperfect world is agonizingly difficult but also noble and necessary. The upside to this tier is that it is awesome. The downside is that you have to be Superman (2025) for it to work.

• The Network Tier

I hope you weren’t expecting this list to conclude in a plot twist, because fuck me if Network isn’t at the top of the commentary food-chain for a reason. It understands that the best commentary is like makeup, in that you’re not supposed to consciously notice it. Good commentary informs rather than displaces the role of the human condition in storytelling. It paints the edges of perception and quietly influences your appreciation of what you’re watching, which allows social insight to be laundered into your brain so effectively that things like a Communist terrorist group negotiating a television contract or Ned Beatty ranting about God feel completely natural. The specifics of the plot can get as far afield as you want but you’ll still be along for the journey because the emotions are real.

Network is the best. Always try to be like Network.

Oops, I forgot to put a joke in this segment. SNL is like if your brain could get kidney stones.

Here are my notes from watching Borderline. Please have Werner Herzog read this at my funeral.

What.

Why.

No.

Why is anybody doing anything.

That’s not where that goes, movie.

Why is this scene four hours long.

That’s not where that goes either, movie.

Also wrong.

Getting colder.

Antarctica, you’re in Antarctica.

The security guard is the main character.

The security guard has stopped being the main character.

You’re supposed to introduce the characters before having them do things.

Is anybody else going to take a crack at being the main character or

The movie forgot to have a first act.

Not feeling great about there being a second one, either.

How are we in the third act. The first two acts haven’t happened yet.

Time is your mind failing to comprehend the horror of its own creation.

Ray Nicholson’s character is incidental to a movie that is about him.

This entire movie is incidental to this entire movie.

The security guard is the main character again. Does he even have a name.

This movie was written by the Zodiac Killer.

The script has forgotten that Samara Weaving is in the movie. She is on the poster.

The Monkey

The importance of unities in storytelling is one of those weird non-issues that the professional worrying class has invented so they’ll always have something to hand-wring about, like whether or not eggs are good for you, or the male loneliness epidemic. Their concerns are not my concerns. Bring on the omelets.

In fact, the people whose job it is to be right about these things are so wrong that they’re anti-right, a special kind of wrong in which the sheer doofiness of an opinion is actually instructive in understanding the correct side of the argument, which in our case is as follows:

It’s good when a story’s structural elements don’t fit together perfectly.

This assertion, which is so obvious I once saw a baby teach it to a potato, who then taught it to Art Laffer, who then fell down a flight of stairs, which was weird because we were on the first floor, can be confirmed through many avenues, but there is one in particular that is close to my heart:

Weird structural inconsistencies lean into, rather than try to control, the fact that we are all smelly dumbasses who have no idea what we’re doing. It’s good when things don’t fit good. A movie has to be real on some level, and ain’t nothin’ more real than being a mess – it’s the imperfect way in which you try to make sense of all of the horrifying shit that constitutes your psyche that offers up the best possible picture of you. Your central disfunction is the canon around which all of your other traits are written, and needing the mental mortar of friends and collaborators to hold together the maddening stones of your deeply unwell mind into something resembling logical orientation is why you invite other people in in the first place. It’s a leap you’ll never take if you’re spending all your time deluding yourself into thinking it’s possible to maintain the high and perfect walls of a false self.

We would never have movies like The Monkey, Bottoms, the first half of Snack Shack, and so many others if people allowed their behavior to be reined in by silly concerns such as “the thing that I’m writing technically does not make any sense, and actually might be terrible.” Making imperfect things is the best way to find the company of deeply stupid fellow travelers, which is basically the entire point of life.

“But, oh, no,” says the moist diaper-baby, tiny baby hands balled up into laughably non-threatening baby fists, all while pacing back and forth in their Bluey-themed crib. “It doesn’t make any logical sense – might even be narratively irresponsible – to conflate grief and difficult family dynamics with a grim mayhem-monkey whose silly drum-drums cause people to explode!”. Listen, man, I’m glad you grew up on the set of Full House, but for those of us whose parents are on a watchlist somewhere that shit hits so close to home I had to google Oz Perkins to make sure he isn’t actually my dad. When you come from weird, nasty stock, only weird, nasty stories have any kind of effect on you.

You want a story that’s honed to thematic and tonal perfection? One unimpeachably aligned with respect to every structural consideration? OK, I’ve got you:

Enjoy your fucking cube, weirdo. If you need me I’ll be watching a movie.

The End

It’s not weird when janky shit happens. It’s weird when janky shit doesn’t happen. When was the last time that anything in your life made any kind of logical sense for any sustained period of time? The implication that the entire universe aligns itself thematically to your life’s current condition is weird, and actually kind of vain. The universe doesn’t care about you, or me! You might get diarrhea on the same day that the love of your life dies in a car accident! The universe’s only concern is attaining a state of maximum entropy, an endeavor under the auspices of which “the feelings of this lump of simian-shaped protein, who is usually mad about something” presumably does not factor heavily. When you lean into the dumb instead of demanding any kind of rigid moral attention you are rewarded with rich company: crass child gamblers, exploding real-estate agents, lesbians beating the fucking shit out of each other, whatever the fuck Tetsuo: The Iron Man is supposed to be about, and more. That’s not just art, baby. That’s life.