I love movies about psychopaths!

Emily the Criminal

We all have our scene. Some people dig body horror movies because seeing the grotesqueries of the human form splattered across the walls with nearly artful inconsequence serves as a kind of sickly flowering catharsis for their own apprehensions and agitations about these fleshy meat-prisons we’re all doomed to spend a few miserable, decaying decades in (or maybe they’re just fucking perverts who like watching people shit out of their eye sockets – David Cronenberg movies are weird and the people who watch them are not well). Other people like romantic comedies because the romantic comedy as a genre asks nothing of you as a viewer except really, really liking Jennifer Aniston, and to be able to suspend your disbelief that anybody would voluntarily spend time with Josh Gad. Still others can’t get enough of World War II movies because they’re either history buffs or because World War II from the Allied perspective has been lionized after all these decades into basically being Lord of the Rings with tanks, and imaging yourself as an Allied soldier at this point is basically akin to pretending you’re a sexy elf bravely fighting for the Fellowship (nobody tell these people about Dresden – we found the city like that! it always smelled like charred flesh!). But, alas, I cannot judge these fucking weirdos and their terrible taste in movies too harshly (God I hate them) because I too have an inexcusably bizarre movie fetish: I love stories about nutters.

Nightcrawler, There Will Be Blood, The Wolf of Wall Street, Mary Poppins – my heart always finds itself drawn, like a wistful lover with a White Snake tattoo, towards movies in which our protagonist discovers – strangely, dumbly, through gestures rather than words, like a shark slowly grasping the terrible potential of its hunger – that the reason why they’ve long struggled to gain any kind of handhold in society, why they seem out of step with everyone around them, isn’t because they themselves are incompetent or not properly proportioned for this world but rather because everybody else is fucked up – laned in as they are by these dumb flare-ups in the tummy-space called emotions and feelings of connection to other human lives. Once our – I, uh, hesitate to say “hero”, so let’s just call them “the person the camera is usually pointing at” – comes to terms with this – and realizes that their own attempts to fit in with these people has always been performance art at best – well, it’s off to that de-luxe apartment in the sky (assuming you define de-luxe apartment as “beating Paul Dano to death with a bowling pin”). It turns out, horrifyingly, but also with the giddiness of a mid-movie Disney montage, that once you view the people around you as things rather than humans, and start to treat them as disposable as garbage, anything is possible! Life is gross!

Let’s Talk About the Movie Now, Eh?

Oh yeah all of this is about a movie. Emily the Criminal is a goddamned treat of a film, and one of the best flicks I’ve seen in a while. It’s good for a lot of reasons, some of which I’ll actually get to before hitting my word limit, but chief among the pelts hanging from this movie’s belt is its understanding, with a clarity bordering on virtuosity that’s a little unnerving in its own right, that, contrary to the romanticized folly of the tragic hero arc (which itself stems from our human urge to rationalize everything grim in our lives back towards a moral plane we can understand) monsters aren’t created by tragic circumstance so much as they finally encounter the trigger or the context that allows them to release their long-held darkness – that moment wherein they finally find themselves deposited into the proper soil from which they can flower in all the vile ways they’ve long been discouraged from flowering, like when a child vampire comes across the gang from Near Dark, or when a miserable racist discovers Fox News. And the matter-of-fact way in which the movie’s namesake collects and makes sense of those previously incoherent fragments of her true identity is a masterclass in understated detail, and also social horror.

Consider this: when Emily goes to her first ever, let’s call it crime seminar, she is told by the how-is-this-dude-a-crook-when-he’d-make-more-money-as-a-Calvin-Klein-model guy in charge of the proceedings, Youcef, that in order to work for him she will be expected to do something illegal. She, like several other people, gets up to leave, all of them presumably hightailing it out of there for the same reason: crime is bad, I will not be a part of this. But when Youcef politely asks her why she is leaving, Emily turns around and with an incisiveness that immediately blows up any lamb of God defense she could possibly put forth from here on in informs him that she thinks they’re running a slipshod operation, and that she doesn’t have enough evidence that her illegal efforts will be rewarded. She’s not leaving because her conscious is telling her that crime is bad, she’s leaving because these people strike her as fucking amateurs. Emily is already feeling the contours of her true self, finds herself effortlessly at home in committing crimes, even if she hasn’t realized it yet.

Or how about after she does relent and go through with Caper Number One, and after its success is invited to partake in Caper Number Two? She agrees to this next job and is about to take off for home when Youcef points out that she never asked him how much the next job will pay her – Emily didn’t ask because it’s not the money that has motivated her to keep climbing the Murderous Credit-Card Scam Artist career ladder but rather because she’s already so at home in this community that committing another crime is simply the logical thing to do, same way that you don’t weigh the pros and cons of eating food tomorrow, you just expect that you’ll do it because food is, well, food.

I don’t mean to intimate that I enjoyed watching what is essentially a supervillain origin story – OK, that’s a lie, I really, really enjoyed watching it. But the understated craftsmanship with which the film presents Emily’s embrace of her sociopathy is a masterful rendering in any context – if this had been the story of the world’s sweetest person opening their own cupcake and kitten-petting emporium, assuming it was all rendered as guilelessly as the narrative we see in Emily the Criminal, I’d still love the damn film. It’s the fact that the movie does all of what it does while also flawlessly weaving into its tapestry the terrifying nuances of a personality-disordered person that adds another virtuosic layer to an already fantastic character piece.

And how about those two interview scenes that bookend Emily’s attempts to be a member of mainstream society? Fuck, they’re good! One of the most brilliant threads that runs through both scenes in which Emily interviews for a “normal” job is actually the thing that is missing from both – change. In the first interview, for a file management position at some kind of a medical office, Emily freaks the fuck out at being tricked by the interviewer, tells him to go fuck himself, and storms out. In the second interview, at some trendy magazine, Emily freaks the fuck out at being offered an internship instead of a paid position, tells the interviewer to go fuck herself, and then storms out. The complete lack of an arc here, right down to repeated beats and pieces of dialogue in each scene, is deliberate: Emily doesn’t have a character arc in this movie, she has a condition, one that will simply never allow her to exist in mainstream society. To get along with either of those interviewers would require her to accept, if only momentarily, if only superficially, a position of weakness in a relationship – you know, something that we normal humans do on the daily. But because Emily is essentially an apex predator – I’m thinking shark, but feel free to make your own suggestions, just make sure it eats things good and dead – trapped in the body of a human, and she doesn’t just have an aversion but a primal, limbic fear of being in any situation in which her will is not being imposed on someone else. This goddamn treat of a film accomplishes more with the pointed lack of character development than most movies do with actual character development. Fuck your screenwriting classes! You can’t teach crazy!

Performances!

You can write the shit out of a movie but someone actually has to read them lines, and read them lines good. And goddamn does Aubrey Plaza read her lines good. Her performance won’t get the same critical praise and award shower that Daniel Day-Lewis got for There Will Be Blood but Plaza’s work as something less than entirely human is right up (uh, down?) there with Day-Lewis’s Daniel Plainview. Her Emily is perpetually unmoved, assessing, unromantic, both vulnerable and full of undirected rage, eyeing everyone with this dead-eyed ­hunger that is less bespoke than Day-Lewis’s take on the classic American sociopath and in many ways scarier for it. She always looks like she’s on the verge of screaming with rage, even when she’s smiling – perhaps even more so when she’s smiling, because you know that smile is just a thin veneer of barely-passable human flesh stretched over a personality-disordered mind that is never not suspicious or vengeful. Plaza delivers this developing palette of various rages with masterful control, never overselling that something is wrong with Emily but also never making the mistake of trying to humanize her – the balance between the quotidian and the monstrous as Emily descends into criminal virtuosity is virtuosic in its own right, and a masterclass in inculcating big ideas through an understated performance.

Plaza carries herself as Emily with this greasy sheen, even when she’s all done up for something special, like the thing inside of her that’s so wrong is constantly seeping out of her pores. That is gross! And perfect! One of the most difficult parts of conveying the offness of a sociopath is maintaining that slight imbalance in everything they do – you can’t just go big with it and be like Lex Luthor, because he’s a cartoon sociopath. A truly scary sociopath is one that in most lights can actually pass as a real human, aided as they are by our human penchant for rationalization and correction into just being a normal person currently walking with a touch of a moral limp. And again, that understated brilliance is actually something that I might prefer to Day-Lewis’ own take on the cray cray, or at least one I can appreciate as a counterpoint to his more awards-friendly performance. If Daniel Plainview is rendered on the same lofty terms as The Godfather, Emily is Sodom and Gomorrah.

Foil to our… hero Emily is Theo Rossi’s Youcef, the man who introduces her into this life but ends up being way, way worse at it than her. He’s like if Obi-Wan sucked at being a Jedi and also was a sexy Lebanese dreamboat. Rossi brings an almost child-like simplicity to Youcef, a criminal who really shouldn’t be a criminal. And it’s that very same mawkish vulnerability that he brings to even the grimmest of scenes that lets the audience know things won’t work out for him, or him and Emily – he has too many of those pesky emotions, is too grounded in reality to be able to live with a woman who is basically a shark accidentally born into the skin of a person. He’s kind of like that pole or corner that you notched your height against when you were growing up – his mostly stagnant criminal career and cheesy attempts to balance human urges and criminal ones is a benchmark against which we the audience can more appropriately gauge Emily’s virtuoso ascent into the realm of the fucking nuts. This is damn fine writing, of course, but also masterful acting by Rossi to acknowledge and excel in the role of the Pippin to Plaza’s sociopathic Jordan (ahaha, Michael Jordan, a sociopath? Certainly not! We all have held entire buses hostage before in order to make people play cards with us, or have punched Steve Kerr in the face for, fuck if I even remember, deigning to look us in the eye? Completely normal behavior from a completely normal man!). Plaza may be the unquestioned star of the show, but Rossi’s role is indispensable, both for Youcef’s benefit and Emily’s.

Perversity and Intimacy

I made some jokes about David Cronenberg when we got started, because I am a scamp. But his movies are good as hell for a lot of reasons, not least of which is his ability to find humanity in the literal deconstruction of the human form, to marry the perverse and the thoughtful and human and the humane into a collective canvas of how fucking weird life is, and not always in a bad way (it is usually in a bad way). And while Emily the Criminal doesn’t have someone playing a VHS tape by inserting it into their own chest (huge missed opportunity) it does follow in the Cronenbergian tradition of perversely dredging up sincere humanity in the weirdest possible contexts, moments of feeling that make you feel awful for being engaged with whatever is happening on screen because what’s currently happening on screen in probably fucking nuts. But this gleefully vile exercise isn’t just to fuck with you; it also serves to keep at the very least the suggestion of humanity undergirding the events on screen, to find some human throughline to events decidedly not human, and this goes a long way to help a film, especially one about a crazy person, avoid falling into the more esoteric and inaccessible un-emotions of, say, your There Will Be Blood or your Nightcrawler, movies that are so August in their portraits of madness that viewers oftentimes have a hard time knowing what, exactly, they’re supposed to grab on to.

Consider the scene in which Youcef shows Emily how to fabricate credit cards with stolen information on them – Emily’s first real step into serious, professional crime also doubles as her first fucking date with Handsome Crime Man. I mean, fuck, as Youcef shows Emily how to properly pull the lever on the device that prints the information on the credit card blanks the entire sequence is shot with the same intimacy as the pottery scene from Ghost. It’s romantic, and awful! They’re both criminals, and she’s nuts! But it’s actually kind of a touching moment! These people are actually connected in their own sociopathic detachment from real human contact (Emily is probably more attracted to the machine and its potential to make her some serious bank than she is to the handsome Lebanese bro showing her how to use it) which makes no fucking sense and renders their world even more fascinatingly perverse. This movie doesn’t need someone’s head blowing up like in Scanners to make you constantly say “what the fuck?” and that is amazing in its own right.

Or how about when Emily fucks up and reveals to one of her contacts where she lives, and is promptly robbed at knife-point by the contact and his lady? The entire robbery occurs while the camera holds on Emily’s tearful face as she’s pinned against the ground (a brilliant fucking decision by the director) which almost creates something resembling emotion between the character and the audience – we’re seeing Emily rendered physically how she probably feels during job interviews. She almost appears… human, and we feel terrible for her, and we fear for her – until the two thieves head for their truck, and Emily promptly gets her taser, follows them, fucks them both right the hell up, and repeats the same sociopathic “I know where you live” speech to them that they just delivered to her. Whatever flash of humanity we see from our protagonist is promptly swallowed back into her unleashed and ravenous hunger for retribution and pain, like the mutant cat in Uninvited that can both regurgitate and re-consume its monstrous second form (this is the only essay you’ll ever read that draws a line between Emily the Criminal and Uninvited – you’re welcome). We feel because we have to, an opening that the movie constantly takes advantage of to make sociopathy seem way more sympathetic than it should be, and to maybe make us question just how human being human really is. Fuck, this movie is good.

The End

Daniel Planview in the western oil fields, Jordan Belfort on Wall Street, Emily the Criminal in Los Angeles’ criminal underworld – sociopaths aren’t created, they just finally find themselves home again, and home is where you can really be yourself, you know?

And who’s to say, apparently, that the crazies can’t have their moments? Catharsis and return are fair game for everyone, even monsters, the process as it occurs for them being completely indistinguishable from how it’s felt by us non-damaged members of society. And that’s fucking terrifying. Scarier than any horror movie is the actual, real truth that people who view murder as an appropriate response to someone not being obedient enough to them also seek relief and community and context for the release of their true selves – and, like the rest of us, they’ll probably find it eventually if they search enough. Monsters are on eHarmony, too, and don’t they deserve love?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(Oops, I forget to do that paragraph you do at the beginning where you explain what the movie is about! Emily the Criminal, a psychological crime thriller from director John Patton Ford – oh, fuck it who cares)

 

 

 

I watched The General, knowing that Buster Keaton was cinema’s original sad clown but not realizing he was also its first RoboCop.

Intro

It’s cool experiencing people, places or things that are best known for not being some other person, place, or thing. Christopher Marlowe was a real person who existed, and was actually one of the most celebrated writers of his time, but today is known as “that Elizabethan-era playwright who wasn’t Shakespeare.” Brave New World is “that book about dystopia that isn’t 1984.” James Buchanan is known even to the most astute historians as “the President who wasn’t Abraham Lincoln,” and to laypeople as “we had a President named James Buchanan?” Digimon is basically the labor-induced diarrhea that sprayed out of society’s aspirational asscheeks while it was giving birth to Pokémon. Eli Manning will go down in history as “what if Peyton Manning was worse at football and looked 27% more like a Basset Hound?” It’s identity by subtraction, and it’s both hilarious and deeply depressing. Imagine only being seen in the space you’re not occupying.

But the suffering of these people/books/Eli Manning is also super fascinating, because by comparing Less Famous Thing to Very Similar Thing That is Much, Much More Famous and Probably Also Better at Sex if for No Other Reason Than Superior Confidence we can ask questions like why Less Famous Thing has been relegated to Ron Weasley status in the annals of history. In Ron Weasley’s case, the answer is obvious: because he’s a ginger, and God’s mistakes aren’t destined for greatness. But for other cases, such as Buster Keaton, and his identity as The Silent Movie Star Who Wasn’t Charlie Chaplin, we have to go deeper.

The General

When Charlie Chaplin was tearing through Hollywood as the world’s first movie star and also impregnating so many women you have to wonder if he was an r-selected species there were a bunch of other great comedic actors who were pretty fucking famous in their own right but not quite the white-hot supernova of “it literally makes no sense that women find this man attractive” charisma that The Tramp exuded. Harold Lloyd comes to mind, and Laurel and Hardy weren’t no fucking slouches, neither. But Buster Keaton’s approach to storytelling comes the closest to matching the unspoken sadness of a Chaplin movie, that imbued pathos that elevates an otherwise comedic work above entertainment and into the realm of the genuinely reflective. The neediness that characterizes all entertainers is toned down slightly, and a more human angle is given the space to breathe. And even though Chaplin’s efforts to do this simply resonated more with audiences then, and continue to now, there’s something so compellingly unromantic about how Keaton went about making us say “…huh,” and nowhere is this seen better than in The General, a movie that is both really fucking good and forever destined to be one step lower on the podium than the best of Chaplin’s output.

Tell Us What Happens in This Movie, You Miserable Jew

Alright, let’s get the fucking plot out of the way. You know, it would make my life a lot easier if you all would just anticipate whatever movie I’m going to watch next and then make sure to see it 24-36 hours before I post these things, and would it kill you to make me a sandwich while you’re at it. You know I hate the crust, and if you could cut the sandwich into triangles instead of squares I certainly wouldn’t complain. Oh, and apple slices. I like apple slices. Don’t even bother making the sandwich unless you’re going to throw me a big bowl of apple slices, too. Anyway:

In The General Buster Keaton plays a wax statue of Buster Keaton playing a train engineer named Johnnie Gray who desperately wants to enlist into the Confederate war effort after the outbreak of the Civil War because the producers of this movie thought that audiences in the 1920s would identify more with a Confederate protagonist than a Union one which is a charming fact that I am not even going to fucking touch but he gets rejected because he’s the Train Whisperer or whatever and the mustachioed seditionist responsible for enlisting him is told by his boss, a slightly older mustachioed seditionist, that Keaton’s character is more valuable to the Cause (which was sedition) as an engineer than a meat taco. Because the weight of a man’s life is inversely proportional to his willingness to prolong that life this sours the entire town on Johnnie, including Annabelle, the sweet southern flower that he desperately wants to bone, and who is also a seditionist.

Anyway, the war goes on, as wars do, and one day some Union soldiers (the unambiguous heroes who put down an insurrection) steal a train deep in Confederate territory, intending to go marauding with that motherfucker all the way back to Union lines, which is completely awesome and totally justified, because traitors have no souls and can be treated with the same contempt one would show an anal polyp that’s also really into Nickelback. Johnnie, who loves his train so much I would be concerned that he is on the spectrum if I wasn’t so indifferent as to his well-being because he threw in his lot with slaveowners, gives chase. What follows can best be described as an hour of train shenanigans.

Falling, Professionally

The connection to Chaplin’s work here is obvious – a physically unimposing, socially inept protagonist who half-seriously, half-farcically puts on airs of being well above his actual means and whose every gesture somehow turns into a Rube Goldberg machine of pratfalls, usually sweeping up the entire population of any given room into the swell and tide of his incompetence and inevitably leaving him farther away from social respectability than when he started. Johnnie Gray wants his trains, and his lady, and some semblance of standing in the South, but the motherfucker just keeps tripping on things.

Now, in terms of the quality of the tripping, this is some good fucking boobishness. Keaton – who, if I’m not mistaken (and fuck me if I’m going to look it up because I’m cooking right now and Googling this claim for confirmation would both interrupt my flow and add a layer of respectability to my writing that I have no interest in) actually got the nickname Buster specifically because he took a bruise like a champ – does all sorts of visceral shit. And I say visceral deliberately, and definitely not because it’s on my word-of-the-day calendar: unlike the pratfalls of Chaplin’s Tramp there is something painful about Johnnie Gray’s various and varied injuries. His pain ain’t cushioned by magical realism, and there’s no ameliorating unreality to his longing – whimsy never breaks his fall, the fucking ground does. This makes Keaton’s approach to slapstick fundamentally different than Chaplin’s, and compelling in its own right – The Tramp exists in a movie, with all the physical and emotional malleability of the landscape that claim entails, whereas Johnnie Gray falls and gets back up in a cold cast of reality, with all the depressing indifference that entails.

Take the stunts, for example: yes, yes, I know that Keaton had multiple attempts to pull off each stunt, I am aware that movies are not real life. But even on the successful maneuvers (using a wooden plank to bounce a second wooden plank of off train tracks right before plowing into it, throwing himself from one end of a train car to another like the whole thing is a jungle gym) there is a tension to affair. If Johnnie fucks up, it is going to hurt. Unlike a Chaplin movie, where his stunts always have an endearingly cartoonish quality to them (during the boxing sequence in City Lights they literally put a rope on Chaplin’s back so his Tramp could fly around the ring like the most terrifying hobo you ever refused to bum a dollar to) you get nothing but real-world physics challenging Keaton’s latest maneuver. This causes, bizarrely and also kind of awesomely, an action-adventure element to creep into the film, because the use of reality as a backdrop for the stunts makes the consequences of a failed maneuver realer and more harrowing than it otherwise would be.

And paradoxically, the objectively worse direction of The General as compared to Prime Chaplin, May His Name Be Exalted, Seriously he Banged Everyone actually elevates this effect. The softer lighting, use of different depths of field, the goddamn chiaroscuro that add so much emotional richness to Chaplin’s pathos-infused brand of comedy is replaced with a more workmanlike approach in The General. Part of this is probably because they were filming on a fucking train and you don’t have time to look up the word chiaroscuro when you’re afraid of accidentally running over an extra, or God forbid a producer, but I really think in part it’s also a reflection of Keaton’s nearly mean outlook on the world – there isn’t a hidden romance, however eternally it may taunt us from its sad remove, undergirding and softening the work here, like there is in a Chaplin movie. Shit’s filmed more like we’re seeing everything through the eyes of an indifferent God: flat lighting, flat angles, just the camera kind of showing us Johnnie Gray’s latest faceplant, the universe of Keaton’s imagination perilously unconcerned with whether or not he gets back up.

Part of the Plan

And this is the source of Chaplin’s enduring popularity, especially as contrasted with Keaton’s: as humans we like unity. Make everything part of the plan, and even if the plan is depressing as hell we’ll still take comfort in how organized the sadness is. The Tramp encounters pitfalls physical, socioeconomic, emotional, you name it, but they’re all folded into the same narrative thrust, this weird kind of reassurance that comes from the fact that, well, life might suck, but at least it sucks consistently and predictably, like Tim Duncan’s per-36 averages. It’s its own kind of world-building, really: just like Middle Earth has its own rules, as does The Simpsons, a Chaplin movie impresses upon you from the world go the standards of engagement that it will be following between any two people in its otherwise darkly surrealist depiction of the world. We are, paradoxically, always better equipped to deal with the realities of a difficult home from the reliability of that same home coherently realized.

But Keaton throws away these unities, and I don’t think it’s from ignorance or indifference. It’s not that he doesn’t understand how you’re “supposed” to unify a story, I think he just doesn’t want to. Dude was fucking punk! Instead of inculcating discomfort in the audience by building for them a coherent framework on which to render a classic depiction of pathos why not fuck with the framework itself and leave everybody completely destabilized. It’s digging a layer deeper into the notion of audience engagement. If Keaton were alive today he’d probably have a loft in Los Angeles and produce surrealist paintings by covering his naked body in paint and throwing himself at a canvas. Dude challenged the medium itself which, considering the medium was still in its fucking infancy when he did it is pretty much double points for the effort!

I mean, one of the last shots of any train in the movie is the Texas trying to cross a flaming bridge and, in a completely static shot, just fucking collapsing through the bottom of the bridge and into the river below. There’s no cinema magic here; the filmmakers just crashed a fucking train into a river, and then held on that image for an… interestingly long time. Is it funny, because Johnnie’s pursuers ate shit? is it tragic, because people died? is it action-adventure-turn-your-brain-off, because a train crashed through a flaming bridge? It’s questions like these that make it hard for the audience to settle into that intuitive appreciation of a movie, where you’re swaying to beats explicit and implicit and not even fully realizing it. Instead you’re left with this weird feeling of discomfort, like the movie is almost holding you at a remove of its own, daring you to make a judgement on what you just saw. Not a great way to invoke the unities of storytelling and take the audience on a coherent trip down Emotion Avenue, but that love of incongruity and discomfort, damning though it may have been for box office dominance, was the hallmark of Keaton’s brilliant imagination.

The End

Damn, that got all reflective towards the end. I even did that thing where I end with a STATEMENT MOST POWERFUL rather than a fart joke. I might actually, literally, have to do MacGruber next. We shall see!

Pepe, the King Prawn

Live your life with the same unwavering wetness as Pepe the King Prawn, a deeply unwell sex pest whose thirst for experience is matched only by his terrifying, unblinking eyes.

“It might be full of chocolate!”

The context: a giant space egg has just descended to Earth, shocking the assembled masses. Everybody has their theories re: egg contents, but only Pepe has the purity of vision to posit the absolutely undeniable possibility that this mysterious vessel, one that has traveled across the frozen fields of time and space, one that has seen stars willed into violent life only to flounder back into iron nothingness with the banality of the fading day, might just be full of fucking chocolate.

This is the logic of an idiot optimist, a humanist philosopher, possibly God; someone who has attained serene and unforced enlightenment, the true white light of an eternal peace shared with all possible conceptions of a moment by virtue of the fact that the thinker in question is the single dumbest motherfucker who has ever lived. Pepe’s brain, which is bad and doesn’t work right, simply can’t conceive of a reality in which the space egg contains anything else other than something that might make him happy immediately and in the moment. It’s like if a dog had solipsism. Pepe doesn’t even require that the pleasant thing inside of the egg be grandiose or otherwise unattainable enough to justify the movie-length adventure required to bring him to its oblong presence. He just wants some fucking chocolate.

Conversely, whenever I go to the doctor’s office I assume they will find a malignant tumor, even if I’m just there to update my insurance information. Whenever someone applies sunscreen to my back at the beach I assume they will find a malignant tumor. Whenever I find a benign tumor I yell, “nice try, malignant tumor!”. Whenever I find twenty dollars blowing down the street I pocket the money and think to myself, “this will go a long way towards the chemotherapy I will require, after I finally find that malignant tumor.” If someone ever presented me with a space egg whose contents were equally likely to be anything in the universe I would assume it was a letter from my parents telling me I was a mistake.

“You tell him, and I will smack you. I will smack you like a bad, bad donkey, OK?”

Rizzo and Pepe have just tricked a desperate and suggestible Gonzo into building a jacuzzi for them by pretending to be the stuntman’s long-sought family. Rizzo feels bad and wants to come clean. Pepe responds to Rizzo’s faltering by both calling his friend a donkey and threatening him with physical violence. This quote, around which entire books on psychology should be written, is notable for two reasons:

– Pepe feels everything. He lives in the moment more than a fucking clock and he forgets any previous emotion in the precise amount of time it takes him to formulate the next one. It’s been speculated that the concept of “now” can be quantified as a few tenths of a second, but Pepe has proven that all moments are happening simultaneously in a superposition of idiot gestures and experienced exclusively through a kind of tactile enormity, like God getting super high and spending a whole afternoon petting a shag carpet. He is a conduit to a purer plane of emotion, one unencumbered, undampened, by the mechanical complexities of a functioning brain.

– Pepe, like the rest of us, is desperate. He has no plan because having a plan would require having a brain. He is mostly pinballing through life under the auspices of his latest whim, only experiencing anxiety over one poor decision for as long as it takes another to ferment inside of his lukewarm brain. Like the rest of us he leaves a trail of bad decisions in his wake and has as his only guiding principle the dim realization that he must outrun the consequences of those bad decisions for as long as it takes for old age shuffles him off first. And Kermit is the deep one?

“There is a menu correction, OK. We will now be serving bologna sandwiches.”

[grumbling from his fellow Muppets]

“But no bread.”

This quote is just too fucking real. Who among us hasn’t anticipated raspberry flap-overs only to be saddled with bologna sandwiches without the bread. My entire life has been a bologna sandwich without the bread.

“Oh, she’ll be back.”

Pepe says this after striking out with Katie Holmes, a failure which is evident to everyone except Pepe. It does not cross his mind, for there is no mind to cross, that he has not succeeded in his goal of bedding a young human woman who is disgusted by his very existence. Instead he waits, patiently, possibly forever, humming tunelessly to himself, doing that weird swaying thing that… slower people tend to do to pass the time. He fully expects, with the guileless patience of a dog waiting for their long-dead owner to come home again, that the situation will reverse itself and deliver to him the outcome he wants, because he cannot fathom anything else happening.

Pepe is too dumb to be sad.

“You got to know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em…”

Technically Kenny Rogers said this, but Pepe said it after watching Rizzo’s cards burst into flames and having no commentary on the incident beyond, “I just won this round of cards because the other guy’s cards caught fire,” which makes the quote Pepe’s now.

The End

If good writing is good editing, Pepe is a goddamn Hemingway novel. He has managed to replace all the normal social currencies with “abject stupidity,” while still somehow retaining a favorable exchange rate. He’s like if God fell down a flight of stairs.

The only thing I know about anime is that it’s weird. I watched a few episodes of Dragon Ball Z when I was a kid, but I’m told that claiming you know anime because you’ve seen Dragon Ball Z is like claiming you’ve been to Italy because you threw up outside a Sbarro’s once. Close, but no panini. However, I know what I like, and I like when jagged shards of pure emotionality are thrown with accuracy if not precision at the icy black cockles of my heart, opening that grim organ to what the Oxford English Dictionary tells me is called “love.” And, brother, by that deeply upsetting metric, this movie is a success.

I Will Now Serenade You With Plot

I always forget that just because I’ve seen a movie it doesn’t mean you have, which aside from revealing a lot about my struggles with solipsism also means that nobody has any idea what the fuck I’m talking about half the time. So to make sure we’re all on the same page:

Suzu is a young woman going to school and living out in the boonies somewhere in southern Japan. Years earlier, her mom was hit by a pickup truck that had a bumper sticker on it labeled Plot Necessity so mama bear’s six-feet inaccessible and as a result the formerly effervescent Suzu is now a wall-flower in public and straight-up morose in private, and most important of all has lost both the will and the ability to sing because the activity reminds her too much of said late mother. The usual trappings follow: Suzu only has one friend at school, who conveniently is a tech genius; her former childhood buddy is now the school hunk; her dad wants to connect with her but she’s too hard-up to try and repair their relationship; she’s accumulated enough hours staring miserably into the distance to become a licensed songwriter for Adele; and the obligatory twist: Suzu can sing when she’s anonymously plugged into U, an enhanced version of the internet that you can physically move around in, The Matrix-style, in her case in the form of her avatar, Bell. A neat gambit to tell a story against, but you’ve seen this all before.

Except you haven’t, because holy fuck this narrative is like if someone who doesn’t experience time in a linear fashion tried to explain an episode of Gilmore Girls to you. The narrative components of this film are thrown together so wildly that you’ll spend a not-insignificant amount of time wondering if anything is happening on purpose or if the movie is succeeding in winning you over entirely by blind fucking luck.

In order to attempt to do justice to all this narrative madness, this fascinating incongruity of stuff, I am going to debut a segment I like to call:

Why is Sucks/Why it Doesn’t Matter That it Sucks

Why it Sucks: There are too many fucking characters! This film is filthy with people, many of whom start out filling a role you’d expect – the rival singer who doesn’t like that Bell is supplanting her as U’s most famous diva, the goofy guy at school who we all assume will be the real object of Suzu’s affection after she realizes that the generic hunk she’s been crushing on is actually a huge douchebag, her dad, whose stilted relationship with Suzu sets up so much of the film – so you understandably assume we’re setting the stage for some big and important revelations later on. But fucking nope: most of these weirdos are just introduced and then promptly wander out of the frame, like even they’re not sure what they’re supposed to be doing.

Why it Doesn’t Matter That it Sucks: This movie is a goddamn tidal wave of sincerity, and all these extra characters are here to be flotsam caught in an effervescent upthrust of child-like glee. Their real role is to be charmed by Bell and to support Suzu and to give in to the promise of U as a vessel of connection instead of toxicity. And fuck if it doesn’t work – as I watched Rival Pop Lady sing along with Bell near the end of the movie I thought to myself, “I have no fucking idea why you’re here, Rival Pop Lady – you don’t seem to serve any narrative purpose, and if I had it my way you’d be edited out of this movie harder than God edited Lilith out of The Garden of Eden, but damned if your tearful singing isn’t giving me all kinds of emotions.”

Why it Sucks: There is no internal logic to U, and as a sweaty man-child who can only derive pleasure from pettily debating nerd-lore I am offended by the flippancy with which my digital escapism platform within my digital escapism platform is presented. Some of us have wikia articles to write, movie, and we can’t do that if you don’t present us with a coherent movie-world.

Why it Doesn’t Matter That it Sucks: Nobody except hairy man-children actual cares about the internal logic of a fake internet stand-in. For instance, the Internet Police show up midway through the movie, with the Head Officer having a gun that doxes people. None of this makes the slightest bit of sense (why does only one person have access to a doxing gun? why do the Internet Police fight suspects with karate? why does the Head Officer have sponsors, and why is that talked about like it’s something we should be envious of?) but those details don’t matter because the point is that the internet will forever be the worst thing ever unless we, the people, demand better of it and are willing to work towards that betterment. The doxing gun is there because the threat of being exposed as your true and shamed self on a platform whose primary appeal is the ability to create an impossibly flawless version of yourself is everybody’s greatest fear, and it doesn’t matter that a doxing gun doesn’t make any fucking sense.

So when the Head Police Officer dude loses his sponsors at the end of the movie, even though we have no idea what the fuck that means, we understand through the unspoken Rules of Movie Logic that this is basically the scene in the movie when the school jock gets a big ol’ pile of manure dumped on his head as comeuppance for being so mean all the time.

Just appreciate a bad person being covered in poop. That’s all you need to do.

Why it Sucks: The pacing and editing and basic narrative choices are weird as shit and at times make it feel like the entire movie is an awkwardly-condensed version of an entire season of a television show. The very existence of U isn’t mentioned by anyone in this tech-dominated society until Suzu’s friend from school texts her about it, but when Suzu signs up there are already billions of users. Suzu remained completely unaware of the most groundbreaking piece of technology since the wheel until her friend told her about it? And it’s not like Suzu is some debutante; she’s on her phone more than anyone.

And then Suzu’s avatar Bell becomes the most famous figure in all of U after Suzu’s first-ever login, but shortly after this rather meteoric rise Suzu’s friend from school talks about how long the two of them have worked to cultivate Bell’s appearance and persona and build up her fanbase. This is objectively not true!

And how about the climax of the film, when Suzu needs to go to Tokyo and her newfound collection of friends – fellow students and adults alike – send her alone on a train to confront what is a, uh, fairly grim situation. That is weird! There is no reason why her small army of friends can’t come with her!

Why it Doesn’t Matter That it Sucks: Suzu’s the gat danged protagonist, and the climax of the movie has to be hers and hers alone so she can apply what she has learned and display the growth she has experienced!

“But, shouldn’t that happen in the context of logical decision making, thereby making the movie’s narrative as technically complete as it is emotionally complete?”

See, that’s what I thought, but that was before my heart grew three sizes that day. This movie is such a sugar-rush of sincerity that it simply doesn’t give a fuck that its narrative is baby-simple. We’re riding the waves of sheer emotionality here, now, and petty hand-wringing over things “not making sense” bounce off this film’s iron confidence like my fists bouncing off Chuck Liddell’s chest that time I drunkenly challenged him to a fight outside a P.F. Chang’s.

Alright, So What’s the Point, Here

If you’re gonna be dumb you gotta be tough. Each stupid thing offered up by this sugar-pop of a movie is a kind of creativity tax levied against minds trying to get by on pure empathetic storytelling, and that willingness to incur the wrath of the narrative police – or just outright make an ass of yourself – in the service of doing whatever the fuck you want is nothing if not admirable. Sure, there are times when Belle pivots away from The Formula and directly into a brick wall with NO written on it, but there are times when those otherwise graceless waltzes away from the quotidian fucking cook:

When Suzu is coming back from another miserable day at school and lamenting her lot in life, for example, she takes a tumble on the bridge leading back to her place and eats shit. At this point in, say, a Pixar movie we would segue into a bittersweet musical number about being alone, or maybe the camera would pull back into a shot from high above to quietly present our hero’s isolation, but instead Suzu just throws the fuck up over the side of the bridge and then curls up into a ball, crying hysterically. I feel weird saying that I like this moment so I’ll specify that I like the sudden left hook that is this moment: we think we’re about to get pathos expanded upon but also assuaged slightly in the form of a musical number, or a whispery montage, but instead we just get sheer fucking misery.

Or when we get the story of what happened to Suzu’s mom and you’re nodding along at the familiar beats of this particular component of the film, and then the flashback suddenly ends with voiceovers from random strangers on the internet callously offering their douchey opinions about what happened to the dead woman. Another left-hook, another hit well-earned. Moments like these aren’t many but their weight is disproportional, and if some clunkiness in the rest of the narrative is the price that must be paid for their inclusion, well, that’s money well spent.

The End

This movie is like a preschooler writing a note urging you not to commit suicide. Sure, it’s written in crayon, but the complete absence of guile blindsides your physical defenses – the warmth is just too close for you to leverage any ironic detachment against. Maybe the world isn’t as grim as you’ve come to believe. Well done, movie, you weird motherfucker.

Reader, let’s get one thing straight: you don’t like me, and I don’t like you. You don’t like me because there’s a lame, faux-edginess to my writing style that reeks of insecurity worse than a decades-too-old-to-be-here Lothario grinding up all over you on the dancefloor of what used to be your favorite club before they started letting the infirmed in, and I don’t like you because I always assumed that at this point in my life I’d have so many Pulitzers I’d be smashing them together like action figures, possibly melting some of the older ones in the oven for my own sordid amusement, pretending they’re all the people who have over the years tried to explain to me what a run-on sentence is; yes, watching those grisly totems melt away while malicious glee spreads across my features, all the while yelling things like, “if my readers really need time to breathe that badly, Mrs. Evans, then it’s not on me to throw squiggly lines all over the place like confetti on New Year’s, it’s on them to do some fucking cardio.” I’m not sure how my thing is your fault, but I have to blame someone, and I’m obviously not going to blame myself; I mean, for heaven’s sake, I’m a future Pulitzer winner. But litigating the historicity of our blood-feud is a luxury we can ill afford –  we must be swift in doing what must be done next, for we are here today for reasons bigger than either one of us but especially you, and that reason is to appreciate Michelle Williams, who is a treasure.

Take This Waltz

Watching legendary athletes try to hoist shitty teams across even the farthest boundaries of relevance is both fascinating and depressing. Of course Kobe wasn’t going to win a title with Smush-fucking-Parker at the point, or Chris Mihm at the anywhere, and chasing Shaq out of town might have been a touch on the Mad King side, but for those of us who will never have the opportunity or the hell-hard vision necessary to craft legacies out of pure air and spite the Black Mamba’s glorious mid-2000’s “I am figure-skating” phase and failure will be the closest we’ll ever come to sitting on the throne of our own rotting kingdom. I mention both this dynamic and its fascinating-if-unintentional implications because a similar effect is on display in Sarah Polley’s Take This Waltz, an indie dramedy from 2010 that you’ve heard of but never bothered to see because you were probably watching Iron Man 2 again. Take This Waltz hit me harder than any movie I’ve seen in a while, but for the life of me I can’t figure out if it’s because the film is good or if it’s because Michelle Williams wields the splinters of its broken screenplay with a causticness that, paradoxically, wouldn’t be possible were she working from more coherent material. So instead of the ensuing pages being me doing what I usually do and laying down my already-ossified opinions (peppered with dick jokes, like I know you like) I’m instead going to use the time we have left together to do what Freud used to do and think through writing, possibly while doing sarcastic amounts of blow and having sex with my patients.

Two Movies, Duking it the Fuck Out

There are essentially two different movies – or, more accurately, two different takes on the same movie – playing out in Take This Waltz, and they are of wildly different quality, especially on the back half, and the interplay between those two feuding twins adds a third layer of consideration to the offering. Luckily all of these fuckers have the same plot, so we’ll use that as both the intersection and jumping-off point between the three. Here’s the skinny:

Margot (Williams) is married to Lou (Seth Rogen) in a Toronto neighborhood so chic that there’s a 100% chance they regularly put up posters announcing their undying support for social causes they couldn’t pick out of a lineup. Lou writes cookbooks and Margot is a freelance writer, because this is an indie movie and those are the jobs you have in an indie movie. One day when on assignment in Nova Scotia Margot bumps into and shares a ride back home with Daniel, who conveniently lives across the street from Margot and Lou and who drives a rickshaw and is an outsider artist because those are the jobs you have in an indie movie. If you squint hard enough in the background of any shot in this film you can probably see Zooey Deschanel playing a ukulele.

Anyway, Margot and Daniel fall hard for each other on the ride back, and spend the trip alternating between surprising themselves with hard confessions about their deepest fears and flirting like junior high kids, with Margot only telling Daniel that she’s married at the last possible moment. Both act like this is a fatal deterrent to their mutual attraction; both know that it is not.

There, that’s all the similar stuff. Now let’s get to how the two sides of this movie are throwing haymakers at each other, Kong vs. Godzilla-style, and how this both fascinates me and makes my head hurt:

The version of this movie that is being told by its writer/director Polley is one of relatable listlessness. This is established in a masterfully-directed opening scene in which Margot, backlit and drenched in impossibly-golden light, is living a life that seems at a glance to be the kind that all of us performatively bitter edgelords secretly crave; she’s dressed down, comfortable, being rocked in and out of visibility by that sweet light, is in the kitchen cooking muffins with seemingly all the time in the world on her hands, all set to a soundtrack that sounds more like the residual heat blowing off of a dream than the work of actual instruments.

In fact, if the sheer romanticism of this scene were to strike you as deliberately belabored you’d be onto something; it’s like Margot knows she’s being watched, knows the image she should be cutting in this idyllic world of hers, one without any obvious conflict to speak of; she probably worked out long ago where to stand to maximize the golden backlight coming through the window. There’s a role she seems to feel obligated to play, and she’s playing it well. And then, when she slides the muffins into the oven and closes the door and rests there on the floor for a moment, catching her reflection in the window, we see the façade truly come down. In that uniquely-Williams capacity to suddenly carve angst-bordering-on-agony across her otherwise beatific features we see how quietly miserable Margot is. She looks at herself, and then off into the distance, like all of the easy stuff she just did was actually causing her physical pain the whole time –  and we know immediately that this pain isn’t the result of anything we haven’t seen yet, but because of all the things we have. Her life is baby-smooth and without concern, and it’s killing her.

So Polley hits it out of the park, visually at least, in this opening scene, and we have our initial condition for her take on things: our protagonist has done everything correct in life, has reached an equilibrium that most of us can only fantasize about, an equilibrium that may very well only exist in movies, but is now trapped both by that same beauty and a sense of obligation to maintain it. The conflict that we’ll be tracing down is clear: how do you justify extricating yourself from an existence about which you have no real reason to complain? is your happiness really performative, or have you just entered into a newer, less unpredictable state in your life, those wild-but-tiring younger years gone without saying goodbye? how much do you owe to the other people in this world, who ask nothing of you besides kindness and an appreciation of the quotidian? is it worth giving away a lottery ticket of a life just because it’s too easy?

A film like this is challenging, sure, but also sets up understandable parameters and orients us towards a reasonable conclusion: Margot will, we assume, open up about all of this to her husband, reassure him that none of her restlessness is his fault, and then set out on a new adventure with his bittersweet blessing.

This version is fine, until it shits itself. Don’t get me wrong, Polley’s vision absolutely cooks during the first act, and even holds strong through most of the second, but it breaks up hard on re-entry. The reason for this is because our bittersweet but ultimately life-affirming movie suddenly plunges headfirst into nihilism during its last thirty or so minutes. Only douchebags start sentences with “let me be clear,” and I’ve now technically started this sentence with something else, so let me be clear: while there’s nothing wrong with a movie orienting itself towards a conclusion you wouldn’t have expected from its intro the process as undertaken in Waltz is just so jarring and unearned that both sides of the split suffer for it. It really feels like Polley decided that the initial premise of the film wasn’t challenging enough so she tried to spice up the proceedings with some late-stage Indie Film Messiness. The inherent futility of Margot’s aspirations, intimated precisely nowhere in the early stages of the film (the conflict as originally established is whether or not Margot has it in her to turn towards her own happiness, whatever form that may take, or if she is obligated to continue her performance in the idyllic life she has with Lou) suddenly engulfs the proceedings until we conclude with a weird take on The Graduate’s famously ennui-heavy ending.

Honestly, the whole thing reminded me of the play Urinetown, where the populist heroes overthrow the evil corporate goons in the final moments of the story only for the whole thing to end with a weird and thematically incoherent montage in which the good deeds of our protagonists actually make things worse for everyone than the iron-fisted rule of their wealthy overlords ever did, and then everybody dies (spoilers). There’s no reason given as to why the heroes would be shittier stewards of the city than a bunch of suits who kill people mostly for fun; it just kind of happens because Urinetown’s obnoxiously ironic narrative decides that the audience totally won’t see it coming that good deeds do society dirtier than crime ever could, so in our dénouement we basically get someone wearing all black and a beret jumping out from behind a curtain, making scary jazz hands and yelling “DARKLY IRONIC ENDING WOOOOOOOO” like the world’s dumbest ghost. I’ve got nothing against sad endings (they’re actually my favorite thing! Happiness is a lie! Kill your neighbors!) but they need to be earned, or at the very least set up in literally any way. Having your characters celebrate winning the day only to have a hitherto unseen villain kick down the door and turn them all into extra-chunky pasta sauce with an assault rifle isn’t challenging writing, it’s bad writing.

Luckily, this is the part of the story where Michelle Williams rides in on a horse with “PROFESSIONAL FUCKING ACTOR ON BOARD, EVERYBODY CALM DOWN” drawn on its flank.

You Never Go Bovary Until You Have to, Then You Go Full Fucking Bovary

The rival approach to this material comes from the lead actor herself, with Michelle Williams practically re-editing the first half of the script through her performance to make those opening scenes jive better with the later ones. Williams’ take on the material is wholly darker than Polley’s straight from the jump, and the movie as an organic whole is better for it; she wills Margot to occasionally betray that just lurking behind her supposed guilelessness is a, if not outright sinister, then at least unattractively self-serving dimension, creating a version of our protagonist who isn’t endearingly blindsided by her sudden frustration with her current life so much as riding this existence for all the thrills it’s worth before moving onto another one. Williams’ Margot increasingly sheds the skin of the innocent ingenue and slowly reveals herself to be a kind of shapeless parasite, reconstituting herself to fit into the thrust of whatever new life she finds more exciting. In Williams’ eyes the Margot we see in the opening shots of the movie cooking those muffins is not the real Margot so much as the current Margo, one who has siphoned just about as much gratification from Lou’s world as is possible and is now suffering withdrawal symptoms until she can find a new life to fake for a while.

This isn’t to say that Williams plays Margot as a villain, either – there really aren’t any villains in either version of the story. Williams’ Margot can better be described as weak – she’s driven by a constant desire to be thrown headlong into something new, to be awash in visceral pleasures before those pleasures inevitably settle down into the predictable patterns of domesticity. She’s like a child, in many ways, needing constant material stimulation, which is a massive break from Polley’s take on the character, in which Margot’s youthful yearning is portrayed more innocently, simply a realization one morning that life doesn’t have to be as safe as she’s allowed it to become, an awakening that she can’t shake even as it increasingly creates a wedge between her and her husband. That this hunger for more takes the form of a sighing romanticism, Williams seems to argue, isn’t because of any inherent innocence but because Margot knows the world will sympathize with sighing romanticism, and because sighing romanticism prevents her from having to look too hard at her own propensity for fakeness. Polley gives us a kind of sadness we can all relate to, which is fine until the movie becomes nearly mean-spirited at the end; Williams goes full Madame Bovary with the character, which makes the descent much more logical.

Shooting Down Alternative Theories Like the Joyless Goblin That I Am

“But what if the screenplay seems to stumble on purpose?” you may be thinking. “What if Sarah Polley is deliberately using these supposed mistakes in order to call our attention to the cracks in Margot’s façade?”

See, that’s what I wanted to think, too, so you should be proud that you think like me, except slower. I wanted to think that Margot as she appears on the page and Margot as rendered through Williams’ performance were more synced-up than I originally gave credit for, but there’s just too much bleurgh in the screenplay to bridge that gap. This isn’t a Michael Showalter movie, and not everything can be chalked up to ironic self-awareness. Some examples of the screenplay simply stumbling are:

– Not just obvious audio cues, but conflicting obvious audio cues. “Video Killed the Radio Star,” a song about being doomed by getting the very thing that you want, plays multiple times in the movie. That would be evidence enough of the film’s reach exceeding its grasp, but it gets weirder. The title of the movie is taken from a Leonard Cohen song (itself inspired by a poem) about seizing love in the context of death, and this song even plays during a late-film montage. So we have the movie mocking Margot for reaching too far in life (“Video Killed the Radio Star”) while also encouraging her to reach for love because life is fleeting (“Take This Waltz”). This isn’t challenging writing, it’s thematic incoherence.

– The most classic of Indie Film Things, the scene in which the characters openly discuss the themes of the story. Indie writers tend to be proud creatures, and want everyone to know their movies are based on ideas, man. So we get Geraldine just flatly talking about how life has a void in it and it can’t be filled no matter what, Margot and Daniel (in their first ever conversation!) talking about the fear of being trapped between moments in life, that scene were Margot relays her failure to calm a crying baby and concluding that sometimes you’re just sad, and so many more scenes of cringe-worthy bluntness. I just can’t reconcile a script having this many incongruities while also trusting it to be simultaneously blowing my mind with the subtlest characterization I’ve ever seen.

– In the opening sequence of the movie Margot is invited to take part in a stunt being acted out by Medieval cosplayers. The activity she is tasked with? Whipping a man charged with adultery. Get it because she herself will soon FARTS ENDLESS FARTS.

– Lou being a cookbook author who specializes in chicken. Get it? Because chicken is plain, like Lou, but you see he can prepare it in countless ways, which shows that unlike Margot Lou can constantly derive new pleasures from the simple things in life THE ENDLESS FARTS THEY CONTINUE HOW CAN I POSSIBLY BE THIS GASSY.

All of this points to the same conclusion: Polley wants to add some unease to the proceedings but is limited by hamstrung writing, and the likable Margot we see in the initial scenes of the movie is lost in the shuffle, as are the themes that originally guided her journey.

Conversely!

But this is where Williams is in her fucking element, man. I swear, it’s like she saw the same problem that the audience was going to see so she went to work making that shit plausible. It’s not dissimilar to another film of hers where she damn-near singlehandedly saves a clunky script (My Weekend with Marilyn) by capitalizing on weak writing to grant herself the space to move the character in bold, oftentimes unabashedly unlikable, directions. Examples!

Even during the opening scenes of the movie there are moments granted to us by Williams’ performance that intimate a Margot who might not be so, well, Margot, after all – the way in which she mocks Daniel with surprisingly adept cruelty, how she visits his apartment and seems so immediately at home in assessing his life, how she rubber bands between being almost suffocatingly close to Lou and accusing him of abandoning her emotionally, how her playful moments (like when she’s dancing to distract Lou when he’s on the phone) always have this neediness to them. None of these things can fairly be attributed to the script because they’re not explicit; they’re decisions of the performer, to lace what could be the gradual exposing of an ingenue to the real world with a performative quality that indicates this might all be part of her plan, after all, that she’s simply riding one wave of emotion with Lou while also keeping an eye on the horizon for a newer, better one.

Regardless of whether or not it was by choice or necessity Williams’ approach to the material bridges the gap between where Margot starts and where she finishes far better than Polley’s (hey, I wrote my way through difficult thoughts just like Freud used to do! Let’s all do some blow and ruminate about penises to celebrate!). It’s kind of a bummer that such an on-the-fly facelift was even necessary, because I liked the conflict as originally established just fine; the notion that you aren’t shackled to whatever life you’ve fallen into, even if the pulling of the band-aid can be rough, and watching a young woman start to appreciate the beauty of the unknown for the first time all struck me as solid goddamn components for a movie. But things just get so weirdly defeatist at the end, and Margot so increasingly erratic and unlikable, that Williams’ more-or-less retconning of the material was absolutely necessary, if not ideal. Maybe she didn’t spin hay into gold (at least in terms of the movie as a whole; her performance is fucking magical), but she did manage to turn it into some fine coils of copper. And that’s not nothing. Copper is a fine conductor with many practical applications!

The End

What a fucking downer! Margot goes full Madame Bovary and is sealed away in the mausoleum of her own toxic fantasy, the success of Lou’s cookbook is undercut by the whole getting divorced thing, Geraldine is back on the sauce, there’s a 100% chance that box full of chicks is getting dumped in the trash, and where is Little Portugal going to find another rickshaw driver on such short notice? Nobody looks good in this.

But really, all those pieces I just mentioned are mostly scattered incoherently about the movie’s back half, united by little more than their shared categorization of Challenging Things That Happen in Indie Movies, Regardless of Context. It’s on the strength of the actors that things hold together at all, and that the promise of the film’s opening scenes is fulfilled at least somewhat.

But no one deserves more credit than Michelle Williams for breathing life time and time again into a rapidly deteriorating screenplay. As the conceit gets clunkier and less coherent her plumbing of the character’s psyche and weaknesses and her capacity to pass off multiplying gaps in storytelling logic as purposeful hints of darker portent become increasingly virtuosic, until we reach the point where, while it’s a bummer that we don’t get to see what happens to the Margot introduced in the beginning of the movie, the Margot that Williams pivots to instead is fascinating in her own right and destined for an even worse fall.

Perhaps this is the beginning of a series on Ms. Williams and her inimitable role as the Screenplay Whisperer? A kind of dual-purpose series in which we celebrate one of the great actors of her generation, while also asking the question what is a story, and how is it told? Actually, fuck that, every movie she’s ever been in besides Dick and The Baxter is depressing as fuck. Let’s do MacGruber next! He fucks a ghost in that one!

MacGruber! MacGruber! MacGruber!

 

My goal for this upcoming year is to abandon my contrarian prerogatives and self-consciously literary approach to film analysis and instead lift up the people with refreshingly accessible writing and a genuine, infectious joie de vivre so with that in mind here’s a deep dive into the use of editing in a movie about people striving to maintain the integrity of their personal lives against the backdrop of a Nazi occupation and failing completely in the effort, also everyone gets shot.

Rome, Open City

Reviewing – or analyzing, or whatever it is I do on this website – a classic movie is a weird and dumb idea. It’s like reviewing the Lincoln Memorial – what’re you going to do, say it’s bad? The Lincoln Memorial by definition can’t be bad because if it was we’d have turned it into a Sbarro’s by now. So there’s no point in giving your opinion in that direction. And in the other direction? Announcing to your readers that the Lincoln Memorial is, in fact, good? Thanks, Ken Burns. I feel so steeped in the subtleties of American history now. I wasn’t sure what opinion I should have on the Lincoln fucking Memorial until I watched your infinity-hours long documentary about it.

Basically, the problem is this: something like the Lincoln Memorial has become so culturally monolithic that to do anything besides point at it and say “see, there it is. Right there, is the place where it is” amounts to little more than throwing rocks at the sun. And you could never hit the sun, not with that little noodle arm of yours, you pathetic vegan. Go watch the Friends reunion again.

So just saying whether or not a Classic Thing is good or bad is a gargantuan waste of time, you see, but there is some utility to be gleaned from inspecting the mechanical components of the Thing on their own, self-contained merit. If nothing else this approach allows us to, if only momentarily, take Classic Thing from the pedestal upon which it enjoys the eternal advantage over the rest of us not-famous entities, consider it as if it were being released for the first time – without the obfuscating lionizations of time – and then release it back to artistic Valhalla, where we will have determined – empirically, with science, and protractors – it clearly belongs. So I’m going to do that.

I’m Going to Actually Start the Review Now

Rome, Open City is a classic film school movie, like Casablanca, or Lawrence of Arabia, or Ghostbusters, or The Princess Bride. You learn efficient screenwriting from Ghostbusters, proper characterization from Casablanca, literal perfection in all possible capacities from The Princess Bride, etc. And like those other heavy hitters Open City contains in its hilariously lean runtime all sorts of lessons you can apply towards making a good movie of your own. Where it stands apart from the others, however, is the type of good movie you’d be making. Those other movies – which are pretty good, I guess, if you’re into the greatest stories ever filmed – are movie movies. They are overtly cinematic, lilt along to the beats of the human experience as expressed through the large and loud prerogatives of film, and return to us a catharsis that isn’t akin to anything we will ever experience in our own lives but undeniably feels like we could. The transporting power of film, the inculcation of otherwise alien experiences grounded and made relatable by the bounding universality of human emotion, the interconnectedness of all things, etc. Movies, basically.

Open City, conversely, is a masterclass not in projecting onto its viewers the wild experiences and volatile psyches of larger-than-life celluloid figures but by encouraging us – nearly forcing us – to project our own overwhelming normality onto its characters, who themselves possess none of the inaccessible grandiosity of your typical cinematic leads. Like Gomorrah, Open City is as close as you can get to a documentary while still having a script. I mean, for fuck’s sake, its footage of ruined buildings comes from just walking around post-occupation Italy and filming actual, real, bombed-out structures. This leads to an experience that hits so hard because it’s not foreign at all, even though it literally takes place in a foreign country. The more or less banality of the characters’ non-Resistance lives constantly reminds us that we’d be the same way in that situation – not going full Indiana Jones and duking it out with mustachioed slabs of Nazi sirloin, but worrying about whether or not our wedding will go off without a hitch, or if our kid has actually been going to school when we send him off in the morning. We’re reminded of their humanity – and our own – constantly, which makes the gunfire that much more startling, the presence of the Gestapo that much more terrifying.

But first, because we need at least a little context if I am to successfully jerk off Roberto Rossellini for your amusement, some plot:

Rome, Open City takes place during the latter stages of World War II, right smack in that peculiar period when it was more-or-less obvious that the Nazis were going to lose but that revelation, paradoxically, only made things grimmer in the short-term because those rascally goose-steppers, in classic them fashion, responded to this slight hiccup in their plan for racial purity by simply Nazi-ing extra hard. Add to this the fact that the Allies were pushing onto the continent through Italy itself, and that Mussolini’s fascist regime collapsed pretty much as soon as – mamma mia! – it saw enemy troops on the horizon and, well – the Germans weren’t just occupying Rome, they were occupying the hell out of it.

Our protagonists – who are best appreciated as a collective, as the film deliberately avoids giving any one of them the Hero Role in the film – respond to this new normal as any actual, real people would: they try to fuck up the Nazis’ shit whenever they get a chance, but they also have weddings to plan, confessions to attend, personal issues to sort through, and lives to lead in general.

And that’s about it, really. And the fact that that’s it is chief among the many brilliant minimalist decisions in the movie. There’s no grandiose plot to finish the Nazis once and for all, no MacGuffin that our characters desperately search for because if they find it before the Germans they’ll be granted one wish and they can use that wish to transport Hitler back to Hell, or at least art school. “Throwing wrenches into the Nazi machine whenever the opportunity arises” is simply another unromantic obligation of adulthood that has muscled its way onto the daily to-do list, like finishing the laundry, or making sure to wave back when your neighbor waves at you in the morning, even though he’s a prick and he dumps his lawnmower bag on your side of the fence when he thinks you’re not looking. We all see you, Karl. We see you and we know.

But really, the way in which rebellion is portrayed as having become inseparably mixed with the daily banalities of life is incredible, and the way in which this cocktail of the bland and the grand is presented to the audience constitutes a masterclass in filmmaking, and nowhere is this seen more clearly than in the editing.

Those Cuts, Motherfucker! Those Cuts!

Editing is the grammar of film. This is not a new insight, but it stands to be repeated whenever you encounter a superlative example of the form. And, brother, the editing in Open City is as superlative as you get. It ain’t just good, it was in its time unprecedented in how it presented the unspoken language of cinema to audiences. Even today filmmakers can’t pull it off right. There are no establishing shots in this fucking movie. There are no sweeping vistas, or low-angle draw-ups. Scenes just kind of start, often with characters – many of whom we’ve never met before – already in mid-conversation, talking about anything from the latest insurgency against the Nazis to the quotidian affairs of life to events never even given specific form or name because they constitute the unrestrainable forward charge of life in general, into which any topic, high or low, fatal or dull, suddenly finds itself miscible within the democratizing context of a life always on the verge of being over. The guard-rails of a typical cinematic experience – here’s an establishing shot to let you know, geographically, where we are in the world, and also what tone you should expect from the events transpiring therein, and also to simply give you a moment to breathe before the next narrative beat – are stripped away and we are left with life just kind of spilling out in a way that is harrowingly organic and denied the calming protection of Plot Prerogatives.

A great example of this elevation of urgency through deliberately uncinematic editing comes from the very beginning of the film: we open on a man watching the Gestapo heading into his apartment building, at which point he calmly – but with obvious apprehension nipping at the edge of his cool – retreats to the roof, and then escapes to another building. The landladies feign ignorance when the Germans reach their floor and start asking about the man, who they believe is a leader in the underground resistance movement. We have no idea who this man is, where we even are in the city, if the Nazis are correct in their suspicion, exactly how much the landladies know, nothing. The events just kind of happen, and you get the impression that the landladies who bullshitted the Germans into going away just kind of sat back down to their tea after it was over. Just another day ending in -y, eh?

From this point we visit, with a rapid-fire approach that never condescends to us with the various commas, colons, or parentheses of film: a single, pregnant mother fretting over both her wedding and the crumbling conditions in the city, a priest who uses a small army of schoolchildren to keep tabs on the goings-on in the resistance, that very same man from the start of the film, a police officer sympathetic to the Italian resistance but too nervous to ever really stand up to the Germans in earnest, and more. All of these characters are mostly just dropped in on without fanfare, and it takes a while to even realize that most of them know each other, and that their lives as friends of the rebellion have pretty much grafted themselves onto their other lives as “people trying to survive World War II.”

And this unromantic editing just keeps hitting us again and again with its total refusal to cast these people into the sweep and freedom of heroic identities. The pregnant mother and her soon-to-be husband have a moment where the former cries and suffers a mini-breakdown in the hallway of their apartment at the sheer amount of shit happening in her life, and Italy in general. We don’t get any kind of soft-lighting closeup for her Acting Moment, Take Notes Everybody – just the opposite, in fact. Her moment of emotional collapse is simply dissolved away from by the film and we fade back in on the same two characters, presumably the next morning, as they calmly talk business again. This is not a mistake in the filmmaking – we are being shown just how insignificant personal issues are against the backdrop of war, and how quickly and coldly a person must move on from whatever thing is going on in their life. A more cinematic movie would separate the crying scene and the subsequent sober one with footage of, say, a storm rocking the exterior of the apartment complex they’re in all throughout that harrowing night, but this is war by way of Rossellini, son – all the symbolism is on backorder.

Even the closest thing the movie has to Hollywood moments are filmed in an aggressively banal fashion. When the Nazis finally say “fuck it,” and decide to storm the apartment complex where they think rebellious plots are being laid the entire approach of the Gestapo is presented like something from a newsreel. It’s shot after shot of Germans pulling up in cars, but filmed entirely from windows, dispassionately, like you’re seeing cell-phone footage sent into the local news station. Normally you’d at least orient the camera movements around the experience of one character in particular – the protagonist, anyone. But that’s a level of agency only seen in cinematic movies, where the universe of the film somehow knows to capture your reaction to each development. Not so in Open City. No sexy wide-angle shots here, no disorienting 360° rotations, no phantom-ride angles, nothing. Just this clinical, “I guess this is happening now,” approach that serves to heighten the anxiety of the moment in just how realistic and frighteningly bland it is.

Technically, “Resistance Fighter” is my LARP Character

And these constant pressures have basically separated each character into their component parts, a compartmentalization that makes them in many ways strangers to one another, and confused in their own skin. All of the characters lead such necessarily shuttered existences that even other, very closely associated acts of resistance are news to them. An army of children blow up some kind of Nazi installation halfway through the movie, and the characters we’ve met so far are just as surprised as everyone else at the development, because no one bothered to tell them it was going to happen. The bombing is not an important plot point, it’s not set up earlier in the movie, and there’s no satisfying narrative payoff from it, and none of this is a mistake on the movie’s part – it’s just a thing that happens, like breaking down and crying in the hallway of your apartment, that needs to be moved on from, if you even bother to incorporate it into your conception of yourself at all, or if it’s just something you can slough off like another layer of miserable skin. There are just too many narratives going on within the matrix of this rebellion for anyone to keep track of any of them, so the adults just need to accept that their children are violent freedom fighters now – it happened sometime, probably right under the adults’ noses, and they’re not even inadequate guardians for not noticing it, there are just too many versions of any one person to notice or account for all of them.

And the most brilliant part of the children’s bombing mission, the part that truly highlights just how many different and concurrent identities each citizen of the city has been refracted into? After their act of violent, explosive sabotage, the children return to their apartment complex and break into a fearful run as they pass in front of a doorway behind which they know a disciplinarian of a parent lurks. Yes, that’s the thing that scares our freedom fighters the most – not being executed by the Nazis, but getting yelled at by a local parent for staying out too late. Hey, they’re just still kids, after all, right? Priorities.

The End

Open City bypasses simply being good on its way to being something new. The entire visual language in which the movie communicates is a reappraisal of the way in which we talk through images, and especially the way in which we edit those images to give them further meaning on the margins. It really is a graduate course as well as a story, and something worth checking out if you’re interested in how movies are made, and how storytelling works in general, and the endless forms storytelling can take. Normally I don’t traffic in the whole One Hundred Movies to Watch Before You Die schtick, because I have no idea what you might like, I probably couldn’t name a hundred movies, anyway, and even if I tried to make a list like that I’d probably just write MacGruber down one hundred times because Will Forte has loud sex with a ghost in that movie, and I think that’s funny. But if you want to get your nerd-boner on with some film theory told through the vector of a basically flawless movie, then check out Rome, Open City. Also MacGruber.

Hollywood finally shed its pretensions and made the kind of movie I’ve always wanted to see: one in which Kyra Sedgwick stares on, horrified, while someone threatens the life of her porcelain baby, a terrifying doll-monster which you can be sure she has attempted to nurse at least once, possibly successfully. Maybe humanity’s advancement from Australopithecine to planting a flag on the moon wasn’t such a waste of time, after all.

Villains Review

Being dumb while also having a soul is a tricky barani to land. Michael Bay has never pulled it off, for instance, and Zack Snyder doesn’t even want to, apparently not just fine with but actively looking forward to swallowing a mouthful of pavement and shattered teeth with each botched (or, I guess from his nihilistic vantage point, masterfully realized) attempt. But when implemented correctly a little dumb adds a lot to the proceedings, like some booze in your morning coffee, or your afternoon coffee, or your commute home from work when the only thing keeping you from cutting the wheel and ending things right here, right now in a screaming inferno of twisted metal, aghast bystanders, and darker monsters still is the sweet allure of booze in your evening coffee. What I’m trying to say is you have a problem, and we’re all concerned.

Wait, no, that’s not what I’m trying to say (it’s probably true, though). What I’m trying to say is this: stupid as a supplement to plot, character, and tone rather than a cynical replacement of them is without question a dying art, and hats off to Villains, an otherwise obscure horror-comedy-thriller, for getting it right.

I Learned From Watching You, Dad!

(Bleh, I always forget that you’re supposed to put a plot synopsis right about here. Fine: Villains is a retelling of the Gospel of John, except Jesus is played by the Lawnmower Man, and instead of turning water into wine he just chugs that shit himself and dares anyone to stop him, messy-drunk and firing off Jesus Lightning™ with his free hand whenever someone tries to wrest the jug from him, only occasionally pulling his lips away from that sweet, sweet sin-water long enough to throw out taunts like “what’re you going to do, crucify me? Where would you even find a cross that big? It’s an impractical form of execution which I have no logical reason to fear!” There, now you both know the plot of the movie and have a newfound respect for the Bible.)

One of the best things that Villains does is bring dumb down to the character level. Instead of putting an Everyman Protagonist in an absurd situation (which is what most films do) Villains makes its heroes as unqualified as the conflict is taut. The reason why most movies choose the blander route is obvious: writers have egos, and love to practice self-insertion, so they’d much rather have a dry, sarcastic, talented-but-slacking secret-genius (aka how we all like to view ourselves) up against some crazy plot than have a doofus up against a coherent threat. After all, how can the me-character in the story spend two hours jerking himself off for the audience’s (read: my) amusement if he’s too dumb to get his fly open? Priorities, people.

But Villains embeds the dumb (and later on, the crazy) firmly into its characters and the results are glorious. We see this shit right from the jump. Mickey and Jules, our heroes, rob a gas station convenience store in the opening scene of the movie and spend most of the heist trying to figure out how to get the register open, being so proud of themselves when they realize that they need to buy something first. They then flee in their stolen car and promptly run out of gas, even though they just robbed a gas station convenience store, because they don’t think before, during, and only rarely after they do something. These two are idiots, and I want to adopt them. We’re basically watching two puppies attempt open-heart surgery every time these young lovers try to resolve a conflict, which never stops drawing awwwwsss from the audience even as the puppy-docs kill patient after patient. Our butt-dumb heroes are never not eminently likable, and I’d like to take a moment to clarify how this feat is accomplished by comparing the success of Villains’ stupidity to the dumb moo-cows seen in Army of the Dead:

The white trash morons in Villains are endearingly and depthfully dumb – they experience and exude the full panoply of human emotion, just moronically. This is fine, and wonderful. All emotion must pass through a vector before it is made external and “dumb” is just as viable a prism as anything else. You can do your Le Samurai take on emotion, or you can have the girl from It Follows blowing an evil space clown because they’re both so pumped that they managed to steal $40, money which they really should have spent on gas. In fact, to see how their dumbness doesn’t just get them in trouble but informs every part of their character, even the sentimental parts, just look at what happens in the immediate aftermath of their car running out of gas: Mickey loses his shit but Jules calms him down by playing “car-wash” with him, a game in which she sits on his chest and brushes her hair against his face. This is a game for babies, but it both straightens out their minds and gives us an intimate look at their relationship, which is sincere and heartfelt (“car-wash” even comes back later in the movie! But we’ll get to that later).

CONVERSELY

The white trash morons in Army of the Dead are just dumb – “stupid” isn’t a vector by which we see their deeper selves, it is the entirety of their selves. We’re not supposed to laugh at the feelings that Mickey and Jules have, we’re supposed to laugh at the infantile way in which they express those feelings. In Army of the Farts, on the other hand, we’re supposed to laugh at the characters for having emotions at all. This is a massive distinction that shifts dumb as a concept away from being a tool of realization for the characters and turns it into a weird and cruel cudgel against them and – in a Zack Snyder movie at least – a reason why we should be excited to see them die. Dumb in a Zack Snyder movie isn’t just another facet of the human condition, given focus in the same way that you’d prioritize the power of the human spirit in a Maya Angelou biopic, or a love for gin and bare-knuckle brawling in a Gandhi movie, but rather evidence that all people, everywhere, are defective and deserving of a cruel death. The man has issues!

Anyway, back to the review.

More Character Details!

I love me a character-driven movie, and this flick has richly-realized personality-quirks in spades, and I just want to give some love, here:

Mickey having bouts of judgmental Puritanicalism in between (and sometimes during) stretches of criminal activity is a delight. Dude’s a professional thief, but he takes time to: chide Jules for playing with her tongue stud (it might damage her enamel!); express his disbelief that someone would deadbolt closed a door that he is currently trying to pick the lock on (who deadbolts a door? this is a nice neighborhood!); get annoyed that the keys for the car he is trying to steal are not readily available (who doesn’t have a spare set of keys in the house? what if there’s an emergency!); caution Jules that the basement they’re poking around in might have mold (safety first).

Jules, for her part, is a delight as the more, I’m going to say emotionally-powered doofus of the two. Mickey has his faux-intellectualism and his constant idiot attempts to analyze a situation, and Jules has her impulsiveness. Watching her bork Mickey’s attempt to escape the house by initiating a Mexican standoff with a porcelain doll is wonderful and further illustrates the sincerity of her character mixed inexorably with the fact that she’s a moron.

And all of this comes full cinematic-goddamn-circle with how Mickey and Jules are contrasted with Gloria and George. Both men fancy themselves criminal masterminds, but only hit the mark, I’m going to say twelve percent of the time, while both women initially appear to be supporting characters to their men before revealing that when you rev their engine you really rev their fucking engine. Delicious traits, all around; I wish more movies would derive engaging character traits from the primordial ooze of sheer fucking stupidity, but we’re the species that can’t decide if food should be readily available to hungry children or if letting them starve will teach them valuable lessons in self-reliance and the intricacies of a market economy, so baby steps I guess.

That was a downer of a sentence! Let’s talk about structural shit!

The Greatest Acting in the World Wouldn’t Matter if the Camera Wasn’t Pointed in the Right Direction

Whenever you have a movie that takes place in one, small location the primary benchmark against which its direction will be judged will always be “is the movie bland as hell to watch?” – a low hurdle to clear, certainly, but one that must be addressed before things like visual creativity can be allowed to enter into our consideration. So let’s deal with first issues first: Villains is a delight to look at. This isn’t because of some Kubrickian wide-angle lens shenanigans in which the house is made to look somehow larger than it actually is; in fact, no real effort is made to hide how confined the house feels because that feeling contributes perfectly to the prison-as-run-by-late-career-Vincent-Price-as-directed-by-early-career-Vincent-Price vibe the movie is going for. Everything is folded perfectly into the story that the movie wants to tell! Lean resources are utilized with maximum efficiency! Another vertical line in the “clever, oh-so-clever” column for this gem of a film!

And now we can talk creative stuff.

Visual flourishes don’t abound in this movie, which is a great decision because when they do happen they feel well-deserved. The borderline surrealist framing from within Jules’ hair when she and Mickey play “car-wash” stands out because it’s their safe place away from the terribleness of the world, and an escape from their own stupidity (really, if they seem like different characters in a different movie during these moments it’s not because of bad writing – it’s because you are literally seeing them in a different light, one unencumbered by the whole “they’re actual, literal dumbasses” snafu that bogs them down so often in the waking world). Same goes with Jules climbing up the laundry chute (or that cartoonish sparkle on said chute when it’s pointed out to them): we get a Wes Anderson-esque framing of her climbing up the chute for practical reasons, sure (how else were they going to film it?) but also because it’s such a big moment for the couple that you bet your ass it’s going to get its own unique visual stamp.

Editing and tonal balance are tight as a drum, as well. As mentioned before there are obvious parallels between the two couples, and the way in which the movie separates each of them and edits together subsequent interactions (Mickey and Gloria edited against Jules and George, sometimes, but most notably the men edited against the women) keeps the film chugging along with nice thematic underpinnings even as the drama is escalating in the more traditional “they’ve going to cook our heroes in the oven and eat them, aren’t they. Fucking southerners” way. The highlight of this is probably during the climax, when we actually get George and Gloria’s relationship edited directly against Mickey and Jules’, with both couples achieving the final understandings that they’ll ever have time to reach before being forced to say their goodbyes (with one couple being much better at this than the other!).

(Quick note on tonal balance: the movie does such a good job of balancing its horror, comedy, and thriller tones that even a cynic like me who usually guesses plot twists several acts – and there are usually only three in a movie! That pretty much means I guess the ending to any given movie during the bit before the movie technically starts when the bucket of popcorn tells you to turn your phone off! – in advance couldn’t quite pin down what track we were on – i.e. the inevitably grim ending of a horror movie, or the peaceful resolution of a comedy, etc. Another example of superlative filmmaking, one that can be contrasted with – oh, I don’t know, just pulling a random example from the æther here – a Zack Snyder movie, in which one can always successfully predict what is going to happen next by simply yelling out, during any anticipatory moment in the movie, “a lame attempt at edginess by someone disconcertingly enamored with nihilism!”)

God Placed Me Here to Always Find Something to Complain About, and I Will Never Shy Away From My Reason for Being

OK, so no movie is perfect (except for the third Mighty Ducks movie where Disney took the bold step of stranding the kids in the Andes and forcing them to resort to cannibalism to survive. Say what you want about the inadequacy of Disney’s live-action movies but watching Charlie tearfully chant “quack, quack, quack,” while eating the fat goalie was fucking harrowing.). So here are some not-perfect things that annoyed me, a sensitive man-baby:

Intelligence scales a little bit more than I would like. I understand George becoming unwound as the events of the movie accumulate upon the nice little freakshow he has spent so many years curating, but Mickey has too many moments of clear-headedness for my liking. I don’t mind him being sincere at times and expressing his love for Jules – those are some of my favorite parts of the movie! – but he sometimes is too collected, at least as contrasted with his, uh, less-than-MENSA behavior at other points in the movie. There are some other examples of this, like Jules giving a sad monologue in the basement that seems a touch out of character, but they’re not terrible. More character depth is never a bad thing, and considering that in these moments I’ve mentioned both protagonists have recently realized that they’re not the villains of the story it kind of makes sense that they would attempt to enter hero-mode.

Something I can’t make excuses for, though, is the camcorder that just straight-up shows George and Gloria’s previous victims. Fuck that noise! You gotta build that shit up slowly, movie. The moment when Micky and Jules open the basement door and suddenly their home invasion goes from the deliciously irreverent to the harrowing and portentous is perfect – we the audience immediately know through editing alone that this place houses dark secrets, and that our heroes are about to stumble, unprepared, into said secrets. That’s the turn right there! Don’t blow your load too early with a camcorder just giving away the game! Also, why would criminals as careful as George and Gloria film their crimes?

Another bitch from me, the master of complaints: for all the skill with which the movie balances its disparate tones it kind of loses it right at the end. We get a suuuuuper fucked-up final shot of Gloria and George, and then cut almost immediately to heartfelt, almost manipulative home-movie footage of a happy ending, and then smash-cut to animated credits that are extremely PUNK ROCK FUCK YEAH. That’s… a lot to take place in the span of three or four minutes, and it felt like the movie was trying to resolve each of its tones (perverse, sincere, comedic) three different ways rather than tie them together like it had been doing earlier in the film. I was super pumped to see how the movie was going to simultaneously resolve its myriad of different storytelling styles, and equally let down when it just… didn’t.

The End

All hail stupid people! Without them it would be impossible to realize sizable gains in the stock market! Keep panicking whenever J.P. Morgan makes a slight downward correction to their yearly outlook! Your behavior in these situations has literally been termed “herding”! Like cattle! Don’t be bothered by this, and definitely don’t look up during the next rainstorm, because I can’t have you drowning on account of your own lusterless curiosity! I need you alive and moderately liquid during the next bear market so I can stay on pace to retire early!

But really, making the first layer on your cinematic canvas “abject stupidity and/or crazy” and then building from there is an absolutely viable and delightful way to go about crafting a story. It’s only really a flawed approach when you do the opposite and attempt to make an otherwise bland story like, so edgy man by drizzling nihilism-as-humor over the top of it (or, as it’s also known, Zack Snyder-ing). And there’s no rule that says unintelligent characters must be the sole purvey of dark comedies! Dumb runs strong on the respectable side of cinema, too. On the Waterfront, one of the greatest dramas ever filmed, features a protagonist whose defining characteristic is that he’s a dumb brute, and watching him awkwardly try to fit the mold of a hero when he’s clearly built to be a henchman at best constitutes the single most fascinating element of the whole damn film!

If it seems like I’m harping a lot on dumb as a storytelling convention it’s because I am, and it’s because I miss that wonderfully rubbery approach to storytelling. Like the spoof, or any movie with a budget higher than a car commercial but lower than the yearly maintenance cost of the International Space Station I’ve mostly had to accept in recent years that Dumb, But Cleverly Implemented was mostly extinct, coopted into the Zack Snyder Head Canon, in which stupid became little more than further ammunition in that man’s endlessly bizarre vision for the world. But cue the fanfare, and ideally have it played by kazoos, or at least an entire string section that is laughably out of tune, and maybe throw in a goddamn slide whistle while you’re at it, because for ninety wonderful minutes Villains reminds us all how smart dumb can be. It’s something we should all be grateful for. I know I am.

Happy Thanksgiving, you fucks!

 

Movies are awesome because they’re huge and loud and sweaty and weird, like the sun, or Jay Cutler’s arms. Even the leanest movies are still massive storytelling bodies; big buckets o’ character and plot just barreling towards the end of their runtimes with complete disinterest as to whether or not anyone is actually watching them. They’re powered more by inertia than anything else. They’re lithe because they’re huge. It’s neat.

Anyway, my initial idea was to review movie-Dune, but after listening to audiobook-Dune I became preoccupied with the differences between the two, because as it turns out every book ever written is only three edits away from being the Unabomber’s manifesto.

Observation One: Brevity vs. Conveying Every Single Thing the Character Has Ever Thought, Ever, Regardless of Context or Relevance to the Plot

The best thing about a movie is also the best thing about owning a dog, or an HP laptop: neither one lasts very long, so if you’re not digging the experience you can just kind of veg until it’s over. A movie goes for two hours, give or take, and so it only has that small window to tell its story. A book, conversely, lasts for as long as it takes someone to read it. Given these stark differences in Time Allotted To Get The Fucking Point Across, it’s not surprising that different classes of creative people gravitate towards each medium – those who prioritize leanness and swiftness of storytelling bend towards movies, whereas books are preferred by serial killers and the kind of person at a party who keeps telling you about something that happened to them once, but they keep acting like you were there, which you weren’t, and also it was a dream. These are important differences, and cast downstream effects on the rest of the narrative-crafting process.

To prove this point I will now reconstruct, to the best of my ability, a scene found in both Dune-the-movie and Dune-the-rantings-of-a-madman-who-loved-mushrooms-more-than-I-will-ever-be-able-to-love-a-human-baby.

In ze film:

• The Baron is found convalescing in a vat of bean broth after nearly being assassinated, like you do. This highlights for the audience how the dude damn near bit it a few scenes earlier, and also that we’re in a sci-fi movie, where even the science of healing is abstruse and unempirical. There’s virtually no talking in this scene, and the weirdness of the world and the tone of our villain’s agenda are presented to us through the vectors of all our other senses. It’s wonderful, lean, deliciously cinematic. I feel like I’m in the world; I can practically smell the farts escaping from the Baron’s skin folds. Fart verisimilitude. Yes.

Book:

• In the book Dune before we even get to this bean-bath part of the story there is a long internal monologue by the Baron in which he reassesses his security detail and then promotes someone else to be his head guard. If you’re wondering what bearing this has on the plot, don’t worry, the answer is none, but it’s always good to witnesses the dry managerial aspects of being a space-dictator, like that famous sequence in Empire where Vader quietly does paperwork for several minutes while occasionally humming the first few lines of “Lips are Movin.”

Advantage Dune: Movie Version. This one is easy, because if I don’t have the time to consider everything that pops into my own head then I really don’t have the time to ponder every pretendo-thought that squeaks out of the grey matter of a large man in a space-hammock.

Let us continue, respectful and with minds bent towards scholarly intrigue, to the next dumb fucking thing that makes absolutely no goddamn sense.

Movie Dune!

• The Baron’s not-so-bright nephew Rabban – played admirably by a lump of protein pushed into the crude outline of Dave Bautista – shows up and asks if he missed anything good, also where is De Vries, I love that guy. The Baron, just splashing around and living his best life in an ocean of curd, informs him that they’re going to have to make back the money they spent on the coup by pushing planet Arrakis even harder for profits. Rabban accepts this task and asks about the Fremen, the natives who still occupy wide swaths of the planet. Bean Baron’s response?                                                                                                                                                                                                                  “Kill them all.”                                                                                                                                                                                                            That’s a beautiful distillation of plot into a filmable moment, masterfully rendered as to convey the import through raw emotion and minimal exposition. If you’re not rock hard right now then maybe you should find another hobby, because this is movie-porn.

Book Dune!

• The Baron isn’t doing any bean-based rejuvenating in the book – we just find him in his room, swinging from his admittedly awesome space hammock, considering firing the same guard he promoted a few scenes earlier which, while still completely pointless from a narrative standpoint, at least wraps up the caustic and white-hot “Baron considers making another personnel decision, but then decides not to” arc. Anyway, the Baron then explains the plot of the entire book so far, oftentimes expounding on plotlines that we’ve never seen, never will see, and have no bearing whatsoever on the plot. The same guard from before just kind of nods and keeps agreeing to everything, which might make the him the most relatable character in the book.                                                                                                                                            But don’t worry! Rabban finally shows up. Now we’re getting somewhere!                                                                                                                                                                                                              Except we’re not. The Baron then explains everything he just explained to the guard to Rabban except weaving in even more commentary on characters, guilds, and the efficacy of paperwork (most of his monstrous schemes are paperwork-based. The whole Arrakis thing is probably just a feint and the Baron’s real goal is to file a false insurance claim). Oh, also, Rabban is literally never seen again and all of these machinations come to essentially nothing, because Frank Herbert had mushrooms growing in his brain.

Everyone is Ugly and Gross vs. Everyone is Beautiful and Cool and Their Only Flaws Are Those Trendy Flaws That You Like to Pretend That You Have, Like Being Too Kind or Working Too Hard, Instead of a Believable Flaw, Like Lactose Intolerance

Because books are unconstrained by time, and because authors are weirdos who have no idea what qualities are found in a likable human, characters in sci-fi novels are oftentimes more robustly-realized than their film counterparts.

Tables will support my cause:

 

Gurney Halleck

Book Gurney	Movie Gurney
Former lowlife, reformed by Duke Leto. Now exhibits unwavering loyalty to his retainer. Is also is a poet-warrior of some renown. Feels both professional and moral obligations to train Paul, while also loving the young man like a brother.	Has a goatee and runs weird. Yells more than I do when I remember that I’m going to die one day.

 

Duke Leto

Book Leto	Movie Leto
Both a towering cock and a good dad. The former is in many ways little better than the cynical heads of the other houses: sends men on suicide missions; wants to take advantage of the Fremen to build an army for his own selfish purpose. The latter loves his son and tries to balance the awful responsibilities of being a leader in the world of Dune with something vaguely resembling humanity.	Danny Tanner with a beard.  Goes full Mufasa whenever his son has doubts. Is Oscar Isaac.

The Villains

Book Villains	Movie Villains
Strongly implied to be pedophiles.	Not strongly implied to be pedophiles.

Paul

Book Paul	Movie Paul
Borderline narcissistic, yet also well-intentioned. Has Jesus powers. Is scheming against everyone in his life, including his mother and several babies, but is also genuinely concerned for others. Loves his Fremen wife, but is open to nailing the Emperor’s daughter.	Solid cheekbones.

The End

Reading the book that a science fiction film is based off of is fascinating for the same reason I assume people want to listen to Charles Manson’s recordings, or look at one of Hitler’s paintings: it’s fascinating and even a little instructive to try and locate the incipient strands of crazy contained within an otherwise unassuming work, to try to determine the exact point in the creative process where the artist lost their fucking mind. A movie is basically a filter designed to remove all this extraneous crazy, like sifting river-water for gold, or at least a precious metal that isn’t uncomfortably cool with pedophilia as a storytelling device.

But authors, who are actually insane, still deserve credit for providing the initial mass of Stuff, the giant pile of crazy from which a coherent narrative will eventually be carved. Every Harold Ramis needs a Dan Aykroyd, basically – someone to sit in a chair and say crazy shit while the half of the battery who isn’t demonstrably insane edits out the weirder strokes. That’s the tradeoff required to craft good art in a collaborative setting: you can get a Ghostbusters, but someone has to animate a sequence in which a ghost blows Dan Aykroyd. Welcome to Hollywood.

I always assumed my death – or at the very least the deaths of my enemies, who are vile, and cunning – would occur before Edgar Wright made a bad movie, but here we are.

Last Night in Soho Review

Edgar Wright perfected making an Edgar Wright movie many years ago, which makes sense because he’s Edgar Wright. The beats and gestures of his films nearly constitute their own pocket dictionary at this point, or at the very least the map of an alternate reality where giddy genre thrills, buckets of gore, Looney Tunes logic, and boyhood fantasies chased with pathos all interact uncannily but right, like particles in the weirder regions of the standard model. Really, I can’t think of anyone else I’d want to make an Edgar Wright movie. And I’m not being cute! Being the best at making your own type of movie does not go without saying. Plenty of people could make, say, a Ron Howard movie, because Ron Howard is a computer algorithm trained on a constant loop of mid-tier Spielberg movies. But if you want an Edgar Wright movie made as Edgar Wright-ingly as possible, you call in the dork himself.

But the thing about having such a honed and aggressively, almost uncompromisingly distinct cinematic voice is that you are essentially locked into telling whatever narrow kind of story that voice specializes in. You don’t let Lina Wertmüller direct an episode of Sesame Street, for instance, and you don’t call in Alejandro Jodorowsky to be your wedding videographer. Peg, hole, etc. So when Edgar Wright turned his attention – and his filmmaking preoccupations, joys, blind spots, biases, and prerogatives – towards the inclusion of wokeness in his oeuvre the appropriate response wasn’t a slow clap so much as the Homer Simpson Walking Backwards Into a Hedge meme. This isn’t any kind of commentary on Wright as a person – for all I know he’s so attuned to social issues he makes the Women’s March look like a Fox News company cookout. But a style of filmmaking that prioritizes genre thrills above all else is always going to be an awkward bedfellow with topics as raw and personal and real as sexual assault, or the extent to which the laws of an oppressive society should apply to the very people being oppressed by that society. One requires a somber reassessment of nearly all of one’s assumptions about not just public life but the very criteria by which we determine right from wrong, in addition to the ability to place yourself into situations as chillingly far from your normative experiences as might be psychologically possible; the other usual features Simon Pegg dance-fighting to a Queen song.

Unfortunately, the product on the screen confirms these fears, as Wright’s ham-fisted attempts to prove his woke bonafides meshes so awkwardly with his desire to make a classic Edgar Wright movie that the two competing impulses pull each other down into a kind of storytelling suicide pact. The social commentary is almost offensively shuttered and self-satisfied – when it’s not straight-up incoherent – and the genre trappings and Wright-ian beats feel bizarre and obnoxious because they’re constantly intruding on the seriousness and severity of the topics at hand. By the time the credits roll on this one you’re left not nodding your head in agreement with Wright’s take on society so much as feeling every molecule in your body letting out a simultaneous “what the fuck?”, a response whose singular and collective loudness constitutes a more cohesive gesture than anything in the film.

Let’s Start at the Goddamned Beginning

But for a few glorious minutes, it works. The opening to Soho is a hypnotizing synthesis of Wright’s classic style and fresh prerogatives, and it gives hope that he might actually pull this motherfucker off. The very first image we’re given, of a blindingly-lit and distant door opening against otherwise pure blackness, with our protagonist Ellie framed inside of it and blown to shadow against its mysterious depths, all before she starts to dance with unnerving marionette movements is, if you’ll allow me to drop my literary voice for a moment, creepy as fuck. And it’s perfect. There’s an innocence going on – Ellie is having a blast acting our her favorite fantasy, being carefree in Swingin’ 1960’s London – that is so innocent it fails to see its own darker undercurrents (Ellie being faceless; being a marionette; being literally draped in the culture of the time, as indicated by the custom-made newspaper dress she’s wearing; the door of golden light actually being a portal to a world of darkness) pervading her game. It reminded me of a child pretending to smoke a crayon because they saw an adult smoking a cigarette – the kid doesn’t mean anything by it, but in their endearing innocence they are propagating a life-threatening behavior. Really, as long as this glorious visual style maintains, and as long as such startling naïveté is only being introduced as Ellie’s dominant characteristic so that the events of the film may harden it out of her, then I’ll be sound as a pound, Ed.

Unfortunately, the movie makes the terrible mistake of continuing to exist beyond its darkly-fascinating opening dance number, and whatever alchemy Wright managed to whip up for that breathtaking synthesis of style and thought almost immediately denatures back into cold solution, with the scene’s two chief ingredients – the twin goals of Making an Edgar Wright Movie and Being An Ally –  never again working in concert but instead tripping over each other’s feet like a Laurel and Hardy bit, except stupider, and also everyone is a rapist. Shortly after the opener Ellie is accepted into art school and takes a cab into London to start the semester, wherein we get a taste of what will be the actual body of the film: blunt, bizarre, and pandering commentary. Her driver on the way into town obsessively talks about her legs and how badly he wants to stalk her, all before reassuring her – in a moment of completely improbable self-awareness from someone portrayed as little more than breathing libido – that she shouldn’t take any solace in escaping from him because every man she’s going to encounter in the city is also a dangerous pervert. The intention of this scene is obvious, and could work: we’re being introduced to the monstrous potentials dormant – or not-so-dormant – in all men, anywhere, regardless of how innocent they seem at first, and how they pay no price for their gleeful cruelties. But it’s all rendered so blunt and awkward – the dude pretty much announces everything I just said, like he got a look at the director’s notes, or something – that you want to roll your eyes more than fear for Ellie’s safety. It’s commentary from a director who presumably has never experienced unwanted sexual advances before, so in lieu of making an exchange between his characters more believable he makes it more cinematic, cranking up the color contrast and speeding everything up so that he might find comfort in his own storytelling milieu. It’s almost a dismissal of the very real feelings that Ellie must be feeling by a director less concerned with understanding his protagonist’s plight than he is proving that he can work said plight into the structure of one of his movies.

And Wright’s inarticulacies undercut in the opposite direction, too, with his thematic aspirations kneecapping basic storytelling structure and character agency. We don’t even need to jump to another sequence to see this. Ellie’s entire response to the cab driver’s advances is to hop out of his car and hide in a convenience store and wait for him to go away, in a moment that becomes inadvertently funny, as the camera hard cuts to nighttime, implying that she has been pretending to decide which soda to buy for, like, ten hours. This simply doesn’t work as a demonstration of her naïveté in the same way that the opening dance number does. In the opening scene Ellie has agency, and power, she’s just wielding it in the service of a conception of reality that is too shuttered for its own good. In the convenience store scene, conversely, she just kind of stares blankly for a long-ass time, like she’s waiting for the camera to cut to something else. Forget about themes and undercurrents and heady topics for a moment – it’s simply boring storytelling for our protagonist to be an empty cypher, whatever internal life she may have apparently placed on the backburner in service of a director stepping forward and pointing at something in the background and calling out to the audience, “look! I’ve made a commentary!”. And this deeply disturbing concept, of Wright essentially pushing his female protagonist out of the way, denying her any type of behavior other than pure helplessness so that he might stress the social sensitivity of his filmmaking, comes back again and again. It’s awful patriarchal for a film about the shittiness of the patriarchy, which I’m pretty sure is an irony!

But Now We Will Talk About Details

But I’ll bitch about loftier concepts later. Right now I want to bitch about petty details some more, because it’s important to stress how the movie fails as a movie just as much as it fails as a commentary, but also because you can only write “the patriarchy” a maximum of four times in any article before a weird neckbearded twenty-something riding a bomb labelled “NOT ALL MEN” lands on the roof of your house, killing you and all of your neighbors instantly. And I don’t want that. My neighbors are nice. Anywhere, here we go:

There’s a library scene in this movie! What in the fucking shit! That’s terrible, incredibly not-good, and I repudiate the notion on the strongest possible terms! I honestly never thought I’d see the day where Edgar Wright wasn’t sure where to go next with the plot of his movie so he turned to a fucking library scene to goose the juice and carry us to the finish line! But no, like a dark moon hanging over your goddamned horoscope this movie actually features the harrowing reality of our protagonist going to the library to research all of the spooky things happening to her, presumably in the Spooky Things section, which must only exist in movies because I’ve never seen one in a real library before (Nicholas Sparks books don’t count). For those of you lucky enough to have no idea what I’m talking about, a) congratulations, you’ve never seen a Blumhouse movie before, and b) I am ranting about this seemingly innocuously detail because you never put a library/research scene in your horror movie! It’s a bad thing! It’s filler! It’s visually and dramatically inert! It’s pure, clunky, uninspired exposition! It slows the pacing to a crawl! And I like libraries! Like ‘em so much that I don’t want them getting all gunked up inside the machinery of a horror movie! You put a library scene in Spotlight, not Last Night in Soho (the library scene in Spotlight is masterful, by the way, and that film as a whole is probably a more effective horror movie than Soho. Fucking Catholics, man.). So unless you happen to have a thing for steamy and salacious scenes of Person Looking at Computer Screen, Occasionally Clicking to Look at More Slides, then you will most likely be bored during this scene! Bad form, Edgar! Bad form!

It’s like so much effort was put into the (weird, ineffective) social commentary that Wright forgot to keep a steadying hand on the parts of filmmaking that he’s an all-time great at. The library sequence was an absolute clunker, sure, but the startlingly-bad structural details aren’t just limited to the plot.

This is the part where we talk about John.

What the Fuck.

I know that a lot of the failures in this movie result from Edgar Wright’s well-intentioned-but-tone-deaf feminist commentary but for the fucking life of me I can’t figure out what smiling misfire resulted in John. He is either the dumbest man alive or gripped by a thirstiness so Biblical in its scope that he could singlehandedly reseed the planet with life after an extermination-level event, assuming of course the remaining females with which he had to work were of his apparently preferred type, lunatics. From the moment he meets Ellie he is not just smitten with her he is obsequious, doing everything short of dropping to his knees in front of her, kissing her feet, and whispering, “punish me, mother, punish me for being the dumb boy that I am, so imperfect in your immaculate presence.” Like so many aspects of this film John’s weird acceptance of all things Ellie starts off innocent enough but quickly balloons to cartoonish, seemingly satirical extremes. Almost all of their encounters culminate in her freaking out and running away because of some ghost/vision/whatever that only she can see, and in every scene after one of these psychedelic freak-outs John either doesn’t acknowledge that anything strange happened or for some reason apologizes to her, as if the entire thing was his fault. This isn’t the endearingly-shuttered vision of a smitten young man; it’s like he’s on the spectrum or something, or his blindness to the incredibly obvious is supposed to be a running joke (it is a joke, just not a deliberate one).

I mean, during the library research scene (ranted about to great completion above, if you happen to be skimming!) John appears (because of course he fucking does) and basically says to Ellie, “I know that you went insane again last night for the thirtieth time in the thirty meetings we’ve had and this one ended in you accusing me of rape but I’m still willing to fail my final exams to help you research a topic that you still refuse to explain to me fully – oh, look, you’re running away again, screaming about something that only you can see. Well, I’ll just pick up your handbag for you and drive down every street in London so that I might bump into you again and return it to you, you whose happiness is my exclusive concern, even to exclusion of my own well-being.” He even gets fucking stabbed because of her incompetence (and because she is, once again, selfishly using him for her own protection) and I swear to God as he fell to the ground with what might have been a mortal wound I honestly thought he was going to reach out a bloodied hand and say, “but, Ellie, how are you doing? I’m sorry I got stabbed because you’re an idiot, Ellie – that was very rude of me. Your hair looks wonderful today. You are perfect, and I am scum.” This is the part where I’m supposed to tie this behavior, this pristine-to-the-point-of-satire behavior, into the ineffective social commentary, but I honestly have no idea what to make of it. Maybe it was Wright losing track of the character because he was too busy with The Commentary, or maybe I’m dumb and missing something, but it’s fucking weird, man.

And so many other details in Soho that are just strange, and feel like the kinds of beats that Wright should be crushing in his sleep, but for some reason just can’t integrate properly. Terrence Stamp getting run over (a bizarre attempt at concluding a red herring, because we’ve seen Ellie almost get run over multiple times, and are presumably expecting it to happen to her) the red emergency phone (another bizarre attempt at both foreshadowing and a red herring), having the entirely superfluous mean girls at school (something about women being each other’s worst enemies, sometimes? but they don’t even factor into the plot!), and so many more moments just feel off, like someone trying to make a knockoff of an Edgar Wright movie. The tightness that usually characterizes the director’s work is blown all askew by his efforts to include commentary in nearly every scene, so that nothing gels.

But probably the weirdest and worst of all of these failures is something I wrote about earlier, and will now turn my interminable complaining back upon: Ellie’s complete lack of agency. While the other mistakes in the movie are various degrees of obnoxious – that library scene, man –Ellie’s role as a cypher for Wright to maneuver as he sees fit is borderline offensive. Our protagonist is portrayed not as a neophyte setting out for the beginning of a hard-but-necessary character arc so much as a total moron, useless to such a degree that it almost feels like Wright actively dislikes her. She responds to almost every conflict by running away, usually while crying. I kept expecting this to culminate in a moment where she refuses to run away (almost like a character arc of some kind), but, uh, nope. Our hero flees tearfully from: the cab driver at the beginning of the movie (it was her first encounter with the city and the city’s monstrous inhabitants, we need to see her fail before she succeeds – I’ll allow it, previous comments notwithstanding) from the dorm because everybody is too loud (I can relate, and we’re still early on, so we can accept that running away is still her default response to conflict) and from the reality of her visions (getting a little…redundant, now), and then from basic social responsibility (seriously, she treats John like shit) and then from the haunted bedroom itself (you’d think this would be the resolution of the “run from the dorm” moment earlier in the movie, because now Ellie has the resolve to confront a, uh, bad sleeping situation, but you’d be wrong). I mean, the final confrontation in this movie happens by accident because Ellie picks totally the wrong time to try and get her deposit back. This is all evidence of poor storytelling, but also something darker: Wright is rendering his female protagonist into a non-character so that he may move her from Moment of Woke Commentary to Moment of Woke Commentary, with near contempt for the notion that she could resolve a conflict by herself. He’s making himself center-stage in a movie about how men are awful and always trying to take center stage!

This all culminates in a plot twist and a climax so calamitously strange that it’s like we’re instead being treated to less a culmination of story than all the movie’s failures. The “gotcha!” twist is borderline offensive from the standpoint of the thematic undercurrents of the movie, butt-dumb stupid with respect to what remains of the plot, and the best possible example of Wright’s filmmaking style simply not being well-fitted to a topic a delicate and horrifying as sexual violence in the context of the patriarchy (I think I’ve got one more left, but I lost count. Whatever; I’m ready to die). See, respecting the thematic concerns of this movie would require a somber reflection on the road that Sandy went down after being violated by the culture and responding by hardening herself against all the people who enabled that culture. You could even make a strong argument that she was justified in her actions, and with superior filmmaking really let that challenging argument settle, possible uncomfortably, in the audience’s mind! But the obligations of genre – thrill the audience, hit them with the unexpected! – requires a (it helps if you sing this next part, to really drive home the sarcasm) ploooooot twiiiiist. Wright tries to pull off both of these at the same time, a là the dancing sequence with which we started the movie, but it does not work at all.

(spoilers, spoilers, boo-hoo, oh no the mean man is going to tell me how the ghost movie ends, oh tragedy of tragedies)

The plot twist that the ghoulish ghost-men haunting Ellie throughout the movie were actually victims, and that Sandy is an unhinged serial killer is borderline fucking offensive. It’s like Wright knew the audience was expecting a twist – it’s a horror movie after all, a genre characterized by third-act twists – so he decided to make the film’s blunt commentary itself the twist, with the woman we’ve been nearly screamed at to have undying sympathy for (which she deserves, those men were monsters!) being revealed to be a crazed killer. Let’s be super clear: you, uh, don’t make your obsessively and panderingly-included feminist commentary the twist to your film unless you’re making an anti-feminist movie. In fact, this idea – that Sandy is the real monster – is so dumb and awful in its inclusion that the movie itself seems to know this and immediately tries to hedge. Ellie, after realizing that Sandy butchered like, a billion people, and hearing her reasoning (“they deserved it”) quickly agrees with her. This is a sudden and clunky veering away from the previous ten minutes of movie, in which Sandy is described as fucking nuts; it’s like Wright realized that maybe making the rape victim the real monster might not be the best possible idea so he backtracks almost immediately after introducing the argument and satisfying his desire for a juicy (once more, really belt it out) ploooot twiiiiist. Nothing says this is something I believe in fervently quite like immediately taking a statement back after you say it, and the double-take shows that Wright doesn’t know what he wants to say, and is compensating by just saying a lot of things, constantly. If you look closely during this scene you can actually see Wright awkwardly trying to juggle two huge objects labelled FEMINIST COMMENTARY and GENRE THRILLS and somehow managing to drop both on his own dick simultaneously.

And the attempt to play both sides, while also mixing genre thrills and weird social commentary happens again. In the final moments of the film we see Ellie sharing a smile with a young Sandy right before we cut to black. There are a few possible implications here: that Ellie and Sandy have an understanding and some closure over the road the latter went down (which, if they came to one during the film’s climax must’ve happened when I blinked, because they pretty much just ran around screaming at each other, with no real greater understanding arising from the effort), or that Ellie has adopted Sandy’s approach to combatting the patriarchy and is eager to become a serial killer herself (which would be pretty nuts and offensive and imply that any woman who wants to defend herself invariably becomes a lunatic murderer). These are both very strange possibilities! Just like the weird-ass conversation they have in the burning bedroom (Ellie supports Sandy, but actually doesn’t, but thinks the rapists needed some form of comeuppance, just not murder; actually, no, murder is fine) this is another terrible attempt to synthesize feminist commentary and a plot twist. Maybe if Ellie found out the truth about Sandy earlier in the film, and between the revelation and their shared smile in the mirror uncovered the fact that in killing those men Sandy saved several young women from grisly fates, but at the cost of her own soul, then the understanding smiles would be more coherent. But as it stands the final image of the film just doesn’t make any fucking sense. But you’re supposed to end your horror movie with that final twist before the credits roll and this is that, reproduced in all its idiotic and nearly offensive glory.

I’m Not Reading This Review in Its Entirety Because I Never Read Any of These Reviews in Their Entirety Because I’m Going to Die One Day and Want to Feel the Warmth of the Outside World on my Face Before Charon Takes Me Across the River Styx and I Cannot Do This if I Am Forced to Google Whatever the Fuck the Standard Model Is, So Just Give Me the Upshot You Indulgent and Meandering Old Bastard

This original sin in this movie is that Wright decided to point out biases in society without bothering to check his own first. He takes for granted that Ellie wants to be a fashion designer, that her greatest aspiration in life is to live the beautiful life in 60’s London and then tells her – and the audience – that, “no, ladies, there’s more to life than dying your hair to resemble your favorite actress!” I’m pretty sure they know that! If you have to reduce your characters to caricatures so that you may instruct them in the ways of Better Living – or as it’s also known, making a South Park episode – then all you’ve really done is betray your own incuriousness and condescension, your undying belief that everybody is stupid except for you. It’s a form of paternalism in a movie about paternalism, and from this blind spot in the director’s eye we get so many of the movie’s weirdest elements: Ellie’s investigation into Sandy’s apparent murder being so incompetent that she gets an innocent man run over by a car, the fact that she fails to realize that her own landlady is the killer, the bizarre and incoherent conclusion in which Sandy’s descent into murder is implied to be both commendable and inexcusable. Really, his protagonist and her frenemy are portrayed as cosmically stupid, because Wright apparently can’t conceive of them as being any way else, so when we get to our final (and extremely discombobulated) conversation in the burning bedroom we aren’t witness to a heartbreaking scene of two women commiserating across time about their shared loss of innocence against a monster – the real monster of the movie – that exists in all times, but instead are subjected to two idiots standing there, not sure what to do, basically saying, “man, we sure suck at everything.” I’m, uh, not sure it’s them who whizzed this one down their leg, Mr. Wright.

The End

“There’s a good movie buried in there, somewhere,” isn’t just a cliché, it’s a Wes Andersen-obsessed first-year French Literature major on an exchange program in Paris taking a break from working on their debut novel to punch out an ironically faux-autobiographical short story about a cliché, but I’m not smart enough to scale this particular rampart from any other direction so: yeah, there’s a good movie buried somewhere in Soho. May seem weird to say that after all the ranting, but it’s true: the film is wonderfully shot; the first few time-travel sequences are great, as is the opening dancing sequence, both edging their kitsch so masterfully with portent and ugly that even the most luscious recreations of Swingin’ London never forget to creep you the fuck out; the characters, even as they fail to come together into fully-fledged people, still feel unique, and considered, and not ripped lazily from some catalogue of stock protagonists. Edgar Wright’s specialty has always been these little details whose inclusion in the runtime serve to elevate a movie from the pleasantly forgettable to one of the jewels of your Blu-Ray collection, and although it’s done clunky as fuck here there’s at least an unmistakable craftsmanship to the weird. And the dude deserves credit for dislodging his mind from the comforts of his usual obsessions and trying instead to refract his vision through a different lens, one that has long been a blind spot in his cultural horizon.

But nothing ever comes together – falls the fuck apart, in fact – because he constantly either doesn’t lean into his woke commentary enough or does so far, far too much, the result being a weird lump of a movie that at times grates with its try-hardiness and at others makes a mockery of its own attempted didacticism with every swing back towards childish genre thrills. When your protagonist reaches the conclusion that “the rapists who constitute the killer’s victims were monsters who deserved to die horribly! except not! but also yes! And the woman who offed them was totally in the right! except not! but also yes! also that police officer could have saved me weeks of grief by just telling me his fucking name,” you, uh, missed the thematic off-ramp in a pretty bad way, possibly rolled your Range Rover off the side of the highway in the attempted course correction.

Wright wants to fold the #metoo movement into the delirium of his genre cinephilia so he can Be an Ally while also clapping his hands and laughing at exploitative thrills, which isn’t wrong out of hand (Pam Grier and Rudy Ray Moore movies do this all the time!) but the attempt is handled so disastrously as to be borderline offensive. The wacky little Englishman’s heart is in the right place, though, and I always hate when a person’s work is spiked like a volleyball into the center of the Earth with no reference made to the sincerity of the attempt, so we’re left instead with this: as an exercise in widening the scope of his storytelling to include characters and experiences previously invisible to him Last Night in Soho is a shaky but admirable first step forward, but as both a social statement and a feature film meant to entertain it’s another, more disappointing first in Edgar Wright’s career – a failure.