Catching Up With Everything Else
Sunday Catchup #4 - A Quiet Place: Day One! Horizon: An American Saga! Evil Does Not Exist!
Every week I take a break from the highbrow cinema of the Criterion Collection to detail what else I’ve been watching/reading/listening to, from current films/TV/music to the sheer tonnage of Bravo content I consume weekly.
Since I’ve been under the weather, I’ve mostly been rewatching things that don’t need my full attention, but this week I was starting to feel like I needed to catch up on some of the smaller and foreign films that came out this year so far. So I pulled up all the “Best Films of 2024 So Far” lists and started watching; only a couple of those will be on this catchup today, but I’m sure there will be many more in the coming weeks.
Films
I think I have to admit that the A Quiet Place films just aren’t really for me. Once again, with A Quiet Place: Day One, they hire a lead actress that is so compulsively watchable that it doesn’t really feel like time wasted, and Lupita Nyong’o’s beautifully expressive face is perfect for a movie without much talking, but on the whole I just find them all pretty silly. The premise of these movies always makes for a few compelling sequences, but the rules are generally all over the place and take me out of the movies; why is Alex Wolff’s shirt tearing enough to get him killed but glass crunching under people’s feet later on and characters whispering to each other not? Director Michael Sarnoski (Pig) is certainly talented, and wrings tension out of plenty of individual moments, but like the 2 other films in the series, I inevitably get a little bored with everyone being quiet and the film barely registers for me a day later. Do not recommend!
I truly never thought I would ever see Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1 given my apathy toward Kevin Costner and westerns (and a 3-hour runtime), but after being very pleasantly surprised by Open Range a few weeks ago I figured why not give it a shot. It is definitely a mixed bag, and the whole thing very much feels like a TV miniseries and not a movie, but I felt myself getting swept up in the sheer scope and melodrama of it all for far longer than I expected. The disparate stories are all set up well, investing you in the various characters and their pursuit of a life out West, it’s only when the film starts wrapping up that it lost me; not even attempting to bring the stories to a satisfying stopping point for this “Chapter” and instead showing a prolonged “Next Time On” sequence to show you where these characters are headed. It’s supremely unsatisfying, and leaves you with a bad taste in your mouth (especially considering Chapter 2 is shelved for who knows how long). Costner has definitely matured in that everything in the film is way less black-and-white than many of his films, and he’s satisfied to let it exist in a much more conflicted place in regards to the Native Americans vs White Settlers aspect, but he overestimates just how much we care about these stories in order to be satisfied with an incomplete story. Mildly recommend!
I don’t really have a ton to say about Janet Planet besides HOLY SHIT, Julianne Nicholson. She’s an actress I’ve been invested in since she was added to the cast of Ally McBeal for one season in the very early aughts (yes, I’m old) and has consistently been the standout of many films and TV shows in the 20-plus years since then. She’s given the perfect role in this small but deeply felt film to really show off how talented she is and how much she can do with a small shift in her face to convey the internal life of this character. I wish the film had just a bit more storytelling verve or narrative, but it looks great and Nicholson is matched by Sophie Okonedo and newcomer Zoe Ziegler in bringing these well-sketched characters to life. Makes me excited for whatever else debut filmmaker Annie Baker has up her sleeve. Recommend!
I’m very glad it didn’t take writer/director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi very long to follow up his stunning breakthrough Drive My Car, and while Evil Does Not Exist is a very different movie, I think it shows off his patience and his ability to thoroughly fill out his characters and conflicts in surprising ways. The first half hour is incredibly slow, drawing out our protagonists life and duties in his small town with his daughter, but it’s not just slice of life fluff, and these tasks he performs come back later in interesting ways to illuminate the central conflict between Takumi and 2 representatives for a developer trying to build a glamping site in his village. The film explores the delicate ecosystems of the places we live and our lives in very interesting ways, and does a beautiful job of showing the humanity of everyone, including the 2 representatives who are introduced as antagonists, to further complicate the story. It all builds to an enigmatic and powerful ending that provides no easy answers, and makes you question whether the title is a question or a statement. It’s not gonna be everyone, but I found it thoroughly engrossing and rewarding. Highly Recommend!
Stress Positions feels very much like a spiritual successor to Lena Dunham’s Girls and your reaction to it will probably depend on how you respond to that statement, since Girls remains one of the most divisive shows to this day. Personally, I think the show is one of the all-time greats, a no-holds barred examination and often takedown of the twentysomething millennial mindset, and I think Stress Positions does the same thing in really interesting ways. It takes place during the early months of the pandemic, and it brilliantly underlines the absurdity of how we lived during that time without giving you trauma flashbacks, and John Early inhabits the character of Terry with a nervy, livewire energy familiar to anyone who lived through 2020 in a big city. But it’s mostly a comedic takedown of the ignorance and performative nature of the white American liberal, showing the wreckage “woke” millenials leave in their path for those less fortunate. It’s a surprisingly complex script, with all of it’s disparate stories and characters crossing in incredibly satisfying ways. But it’s not afraid to show the ugliness of all it’s characters, even if it’s mostly done comedically, much like Girls, and I can see many people saying they just hated the characters and so they didn’t like the movie. I can’t blame anyone for that, but I think the creative team is exploring some uncomfortable truths about people in really rewarding ways, and that can be a tricky balance that doesn’t necessarily satisfy everyone, but it certainly did me. Highly recommend!
TV
I found myself looking for something kinda lightweight to binge this week, and stumbled upon FX’s Clipped when scrolling through the various apps. Laurence Fishburne alone is a reason for me to watch almost anything, so I gave it a shot and found myself watching the whole thing in one sitting. It’s by no means high art, and I question some of the writing and tonal shifts, but it tells the story of the Clippers/Donald Sterling controversy with clarity and sensitivity that ended up being more successful than not. The real issue for me was the tonal shifts due to the larger than life character of V Stiviano (Cleopatra Coleman); the show feels frothy and fun when exploring her relationship with Donald Sterling, and her increasingly bizarre behavior once she leaks the audio of Sterling’s racist tirades. The creators takes the character seriously and try to explore how a Black woman could have this relationship with an obvious racist, but it only goes so far down that road before pulling back and then sidelining her character for awhile. The more successful part is when the show digs into Doc Rivers (Fishburne) and the rest of Clippers team dealing with their success as a team being inextricably tied to a racist, and how a white man with money will compromise your values just by being the one holding the purse strings. It’s interesting and thematically rich enough that I wished it would’ve stayed on them more, but the show also focuses on Sterling (Ed O’Neill) and his wife, Shelley (Jackie Weaver), as they clash over how to extricate themselves from this situation of his own making. The show doesn’t shy from showing their rich ignorance, and taking potshots at Shelley’s hypocrisy in trying to paint herself as "the good billionaire” in opposition of her husband, but it’s just not as interesting as the other parts. So while it ends up being a mixed bag, I found the exploration of some it’s core themes of just how pervasive racism affects everyone when it comes from the top to be worth the journey. Recommend!
Theater
Company has been one of my favorite musicals based only on having heard the cast recording, seeing the D.A. Pennebaker documentary about said recording, and watching the 2006 revival with Raul Esparza on YouTube. So I was excited to see the new gender-flipped revival that started in the West End pre-pandemic this week at the Pantages. But I found myself disappointed for many reasons, the biggest among them that the gender-swap doesn’t really do anything to further illuminate the material. In fact, I think it makes the musicals exploration of singlehood in your mid-30s feel a little retrograde when it’s about a woman. There are an untold number of books, movies and TV shows about women being single past a certain age, many of them very sexist and wrong-headed about the whole thing, and a group of people hounding a woman about being single like in Company puts the musical in… well, some bad company! The show is still very smart in how it undercuts the married couples, and their supposed happiness, and Bobby remains a complex character, but it loses some it’s bite being yet another thing about a single woman having a crisis about being single. I would also love for someone to stage this in more than the minimalist sets that seems to have been the tradition since the beginning. This production does enough clever things with the sets that it didn’t feel like a black box, but I’d love to see a production set in 1970 with a lush set to play with. Mildly recommend!