This week on the FilmWonk Podcast, Glenn and Daniel check out Doug Liman‘s faithful and surprisingly enjoyable Road House remake, a film which somehow finds its feet with a western premise that was dated in the 80s, transplanted here into the Florida Keys, where that decade never ended. And then we reach back into 2023 for an epic of Biblical apocrypha by The Harder They Fall director Jeymes Samuel, The Book of Clarence, a mixed bag of religious satire which somehow manages to give The Life of Brian a run for its money. Exvangelicals should not miss this one (1:05:48).
May contain NSFW language.
FilmWonk rating (Road House): 7/10 (Glenn), 7.5/10 (Daniel) FilmWonk rating (The Book of Clarence): 7.5/10 (Glenn), 6.5/10 (Daniel)
This week on the FilmWonk Podcast, Glenn and Daniel check out The Beekeeper, an enjoyably uncomplicated John Wick retread which is heavy on bee metaphor and light on everything else. And then they check out The Kitchen, the near-future dystopian sci-fi film on Netflix, set in London’s last remaining social housing unit, and featuring the feature debut of actor Daniel Kaluuya as co-writer/co-director (53:59).
May contain NSFW language.
FilmWonk rating (The Beekeeper): 6/10 (Glenn), 5/10 (Daniel) FilmWonk rating (The Kitchen): 7.5/10 (Glenn), 6.5/10 (Daniel)
Show notes:
[02:26] Review: The Beekeeper
[21:04] Review: The Kitchen
[45:11] Spoilers: The Kitchen
The audiobook production of Vladimir Nabokov‘s Lolita that Daniel referred to was indeed narrated by actor Jeremy Irons, and is available on all audiobook platforms.
Directed by Larry Charles, screenplay by Aaron Jackson and Josh Sharp.
Dicks: The Musical is available as a paid rental, and will be available to stream on Max.
Wonka, a film I broadly enjoyed, was middling and forgettable as a musical, and its terminal rehash of “Pure Imagination” was nothing less than a confession that the filmmakers were quite aware of that. Not so with Dicks: The Musical, which is one of the most memorable and horrifying musicals I’ve ever seen. This has to be why the film’s outstanding red-band trailer led with song – it knew it had a book of certified bangers on its hands. The film began as a two-man show off Broadway (called “Fucking Identical Twins”), and was expanded with new songs in its film adaptation featuring the talents of Megan Thee Stallion, Nathan Lane, and Megan Mullaly. The show’s original writer-performers (Josh Sharp and Aaron Jackson) reprise their roles as the [extremely obviously gay] alpha-hetero salesmen Craig and Trevor, who amp up the misogyny and horniness to a farcical pitch before turning to their main objective: discovering that they are long-lost brothers, and getting their parents (Lane and Mullaly) back together, despite everyone involved being an adult with a job and a place of their own, and despite Lane playing the only out gay man in the entire story – unless you count Bowen Yang as God. The production design from veteran art director Steven Wolff (an assortment of TV projects, plus Starship Troopers and Steel Magnolias?) is magnificent, with the film never missing an opportunity to turn a background poster into a horny joke. And that’s before you even get to the Sewer Boys, which – despite Trevor’s plea that his father explain them immediately – defy explanation both internally and upon review. They are, however, disgusting, hilarious, and a significant driving force behind the third act – and almost solely responsible for landing this film in the problematic 11th slot. Because Dicks is destined to become a cult classic, or so the Sewer Boys keep whispering inside my mind.
#10: Barbie
Directed by Greta Gerwig, written by Gerwig and Noah Baumbach.
Mattel, a toy company, isn’t going to shock me with its desire to sell more toys, any more than Nintendo trying to sell more games, or Hasbro smashing toy robots together. But movies are still a medium of stories and characters who will, at some point, have to explain to me why I should bother watching what amounts to a two-hour toy commercial, and the Barbie doll’s position as an iconic but dated piece of Americana doesn’t obviate that requirement. So you can imagine my delight when director Greta Gerwig (with a script co-written with frequent collaborator Noah Baumbach) decided to play with a broad and inclusive set of dolls, all singing and dancing a medley of existential dread on the border between Barbieland – a plastic, pastel fever dream (beautifully realized by veteran production designer Sarah Greenwood) where Barbie’s in charge and Ken is surplus to requirements – and the real world, where the Patriarchy is alive and well; we just hide it a bit better than we used to. It’s not much of a boast to say I’m less of a fragile little bran muffin than Ben Shapiro, whose vague fleshy blob turned instantly to windblown ash the moment the P-word was uttered in dialogue not once, but a baker’s dozen times. But if you’ll indulge me a problematic compliment, I was genuinely delighted to see that this toy commercial had some fucking balls. Because while my cynical side will assume that Mattel approved every image and sound that appears on this screen, and corporate feminism always exists with a degree of self-aware marketability, it’s hard for me to imagine that having a modern child (Ariana Greenblatt) tell Barbie to her crying face that she’s the dumb, fascist scion of a vapid and environmentally destructive consumer culture was their first advertising choice.
Directed by Kitty Green, screenplay by Green and Oscar Redding.
The Royal Hotel is available for paid rental on all VOD platforms, and will likely be streaming on Hulu later this year.
There’s nothing fun or glamorous about the latest subtle and brutal work of psychological terror and feminism from writer-director Kitty Green (The Assistant). This is not the only film on this list that engages in a credible way with the patriarchy, but it is the one that manages to do so without ever mentioning it in its script, instead presenting the reality of a pair of American expats (Julie Garner and Jessica Henwick). The pair navigates their way from partying in Sydney to running out of money and going to work as bartenders in a far-flung mining town in the Outback, where the misogyny, dick jokes, and possessiveness by the men who live and work there becomes the smothering ambiance of their daily lives almost immediately. And yet, the moment that most clearly announced the tone of this film took place back in Sydney, as Hanna (Garner) tries to buy a drink at a club and finds herself interrupted in turns by various men asking if she’s Swedish, if she’s French, disapproving of her choice of shitty Australian beer to drink, and finally a bartender (also a man) who instantly dismisses her request that he run her [declined] credit card a second time, turning her aside in favor of another dude ordering drinks. Now, her card was in fact maxed out, and the bartender ignoring her in favor of another customer was perhaps understandable. But at the end of this long train of minor masculine annoyances, it just played like the final twist of the knife. Don’t listen to her. Don’t indulge her. Given that she’s not going to fuck you at the moment. Just put her aside and seek your fortune elsewhere, until you’re off work and it’s time to hit on her again.
To the extent that this film had a message, it’s that walking through this world as a woman can be a constant, Kafkaesque trial. And it didn’t need even need to make it to the titular sausage fest flophouse in the middle of nowhere for these women to start to experience it. The Royal Hotel is just the metaphor that allows the audience to hold the patriarchy at a distance. And that’s what makes this film land in such a brutal and devastating fashion. It’s not that there aren’t any pleasant men in this film, or at least, moments of men behaving pleasantly, but all of them behave in ways that are informed by the incentives of the world they exist in – and those incentives encourage constant competition and hoarding of every resource, treating sexual access to women as the greatest resource of all, worth laying our fists into each other like beasts to secure. And whatever excesses they engage in while pursuing these objects – not people surely – are excusable as men acting like drunken, loutish men. And in a world of loud, disgusting, amoral, mendacious boors like Donald Trump and Boof the Rapist holding or pursuing every lever of power, the metaphor of this place lands even more harshly. Because The Royal Hotel is everywhere. And it’s good to be the king.
#8: The Holdovers
Directed by Alexander Payne, written by David Hemingson.
The Holdovers earned its place on this list almost entirely through its performances, as Paul Giamatti‘s multilayered cantankerous professor Paul Hunham is a fascinating enough ’70s character study even before you add in Da’Vine Joy Randolph as the school’s head cook Mary Lamb, a bereaved mother whose adult son was recently killed in the Vietnam War. The pair act as reluctant caregivers for student Angus Tully (debut actor Dominic Sessa), who is left behind over winter break at the prestigious Barton Academy in Massachusetts, where both adults work. Fundamentally, this is an amusing and heartwarming Christmas film about finding family in the least likely of places, and it’s to the film’s credit that it really makes its characters work for it. Truth be told, when I reached the third act, in which the trio goes on a bit of a field trip, I was expecting it to veer into shallow sentimentality. Instead, The Holdovers goes in some genuinely unexpected directions, but in a manner that is thoroughly explained and justified by the narrative and acting choices that preceded it. Yes, this film will make you smile and perhaps cry, but what makes it such a triumph is its presentation of flawed people embracing honest relationships with each other, and the joy they can find in that honesty. No matter how much they abhorred each other at the start.
Saltburn is under arrest, going directly to horny jail, along with everyone who made, watched, or enjoyed it. After two features from director Emerald Fennell, my oddest compliment is that she’s very good at making self-important melodrama. Promising Young Woman tapped a rich well of darkness and sincerity via the deep and longstanding rage of women living in the maw of patriarchy and rape culture – but it was fundamentally a tawdry, pulp revenge fantasy akin to Teeth – its most memorable scene had Britney’s “Toxic” playing, for fuck’s sake.
Saltburn feels tawdry for much of its runtime, but takes a while to explain what sort of revenge fantasy it wants to be, and rides that tension masterfully for its entire runtime. Which is fine, because I was captivated during its first act even before we arrived at the titular manor. Saltburn begins with Oxford scholarship student Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan) becoming friendly with – and then fixated upon – fellow student Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi), eventually becoming enmeshed in Felix’s wealthy, aristocratic family. As this Ripleyesque game is playing out, the feelings and motivations of its characters shift in ways that are perceptible, and yet demand a second viewing to see whether you properly understood each interaction as it was happening. Many of Oliver’s actions hover on the cusp between serving some larger, well-defined scheme and simply acting upon a desire to connect, dominate, and get off. And yet he seems like such a harmless, helpless thing at the film’s start – more flotsam than predator – and what a scheme it turns out to be nonetheless.
The story takes place in the mid-00s for no obvious reason – it’s not as if the relationship between wealthy landed gentry and their pauper friends has changed in any major way in the last 15 years. But each member of the family – especially Lady Elspeth (Rosamund Pike) and cousin Archie (Archie Madekwe) – is on the receiving end of very particular attention from Oliver, and watching them all throw verbal barbs at each other is quite an entertaining spectacle. I’m talking around what this adds up to because it is a satisfying mystery, although I suspect some will reach the end and find the answer unsatisfactory due to a lack of sympathy for any of these characters. And to that I say: Sympathy is often surplus to requirements. That the characters’ motivations are shifting and dubious makes them feel more real, not less – and that’s quite a statement when discussing a film which frequently borders on farce. It also ends with a dance that must be seen to be believed.
#6: Rye Lane
Directed by Raine Allen-Miller, written by Nathan Bryon and Tom Melia
The romantic comedy has been on life support for years, relegated to the sort of artless posturing that gets vomited en masse at Christmastime, selling romance on the basis of extinct, apolitical small-town and holiday vibes entirely external to the individuals involved. At best, the genre has transcended this formula by either embracing it with a bit of self-awareness (as in Somebody I Used to Know) or raising the stakes with a sci-fi or fantasy genre pairing (as in Palm Springs). So you can imagine my surprise and delight to see this debut feature from director Raine Allen-Miller, a talent I will be keeping an eye on in years to come. This Gen-Z romance was written from a script that was originally titled Vibes & Stuff, and this is a decent summation of the romance that erupts in an arts district between a pair of south Londoners, Yas and Dom (Vivian Oparah and David Jonsson), who have an awkward meet-cute in the gender-neutral loo where Dom is crying in a stall about his recent horrible breakup (he calls it The Breakup – that’s how you know it’s recent). They’re both at a weird art exhibition, featuring an artist and mutual friend, Nathan, played by Simon Manyonda, who steals the handful of scenes he’s in, beginning with Nathan warning his tearful friend that if he can’t keep it together, and he’ll have to “sling a sign on [him] and call it performance art”. But Yas and Dom just keep right on vibin, looking at the weird art (with Dom succumbing to peer pressure to buy some) and then wandering out together in the same direction, through Rye Lane Market.
Here in Seattle, we have Pike Place and other such markets (and if I’m being honest, our unwillingness to banish out-of-place cars somewhat limits its appeal beyond tourists), but it’s fair to say that every slightly interesting city has a place like this, and it’s always a prime location for people-watching, grabbing a quick or weird bite, and bonding over a shared feeling of being a part of the city you’re in. For a rom-com or a real date, its built-in production design provides a stellar backdrop for an impromptu wander to bond with a stranger. Yes, I’m showing my urban bias here a bit, but I find this romance of odd hipster happenstance to be far more credible on its face than the city magazine editor returning to Frost Gulch, Wisconsin to bond with a suspiciously well-groomed lumberjack who is silent about where he was on January 6th. A good deal of this is owed to Oparah and Jonsson’s stellar chemistry and charm, but it also relies on the film’s sense of style and self-awareness when it comes to the artificiality of a first meeting like this. Yes, they’re doing a bit of a Before Sunrise here, wandering the city and talking about what matters to them both, but they’re also putting on a bit of a show for each other and the others they interact with, doing an impression (or perhaps an audition?) of a relationship they don’t yet have with each other. And what is a first date, if not that? It’s when these vibes and gestures – hilarious in their own right – give way to the unvarnished truth and emotional vulnerability that it really feels as if these two are connecting, and that journey really is a pleasure to behold. It didn’t needColin Firth to cameo as a burrito truck chef wearing a “Love Guac’tually” t-shirt, but it was nice to see the old guard pop in to give a stamp of approval that this film had already earned on its own. Rye Lane is an hilarious and artful romance. One for the canon.
#5: Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves
Directed by Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley, screenplay by Goldstein, Daley, and Michael Gilio, story by Gilio and Chris McKay.
[The] requirement to balance coherent storytelling with freewheeling anarchy might explain why a tabletop RPG like Dungeons & Dragons has some unique adaptation challenges compared to video games (which also have a fairly spotty cinematic record). If you want to adapt a video game, your choices exist on a spectrum between “make a version of the game as played by the best player ever” and “just slap the name onto an generic adventure tale that vaguely resembles it”. Previous attempts to adapt D&D have largely opted for the second method – but this feels like the first attempt to capture the loose, jokey, improvisational chaos that is fundamental to the appeal of the game. You’re telling a story, sure, and that story ultimately has to make some kind of sense. But you’re also making choices ranging from the rational to the ridiculous, and rolling the dice as to the outcomes of those choices. A skilled DM will attempt to balance the madcap randomness of gameplay with the fun and coherence of the story (usually by selectively breaking rules as needed) – and that seems to be the difficult path that these filmmakers chose to tread – or at least convincingly imitate – with the script of Honor Among Thieves. And to my unrelenting delight, it worked.
[…]
If all the best parts of a campaign occurred in a single rowdy, Mountain Dew-soaked night, without any table drama or rules-lawyering or spell slot fuckery – with good ideas rewarded by creative counterattacks from the DM, without every choice succeeding, but each one resulting in the sort of improvised flailing that molds it into an even more insane plan with each moment – it might look something like this movie. And I’d be talking my friends’ ears off about it the next day until they begged me to stop.
Linoleum is a surreal dramedy about Cameron Edwin (Jim Gaffigan), the host of a failing children’s TV science show, à la Bill Nye, and his wife, an aerospace museum curator (Rhea Seehorn, the absolute rockstar from Better Call Saul), who are having troubles and headed for divorce, when a satellite crashes in their backyard, and the TV host decides he wants to try and build a rocket out of it.
The other plotline involves their daughter Nora (Katelyn Nacon) who strikes up what might be a romance or a platonic friendship with a new boy in town, Marc (Gabriel Rush). Nora and Marc’s connection is ambiguous for the usual reasons (they’re confused teenagers), but also because as a prior condition, she makes it clear she’s not flirting with him, because she likes girls. But she also finds him interesting and wants to be pals, and the feeling seems to be mutual. Marc’s father is Kent Armstrong, a hardened ex-military man who is about to take over network hosting duties of Edwin’s science show. It’s hard to imagine this man commanding the attention of children in quite the same way as Edwin, and yet…he is also played by Gaffigan? Gaffigan-as-Armstrong is a deathly serious exercise in self-parody, transforming so thoroughly in appearance and manner that I found myself unsure at times whether I really was looking at the same actor. It’s genuinely bizarre as a starting point, and the film only gets stranger from there, despite retaining its earnest streak and heartfelt performances that roped me into the story initially.
The vibe of Linoleum, as well as several of its visual, musical, and thematic tricks, are cribbed directly and unapologetically from Richard Kelly‘s 2001 film Donnie Darko, but it is also very much its own thing. It ends up being a fascinating elegy on childhood hopes and dreams, love, identity, and a lot more – and that is about the limit of what I may say here, because as with Donnie Darko, the outstanding ending of this film ties all of the surreal elements together in a manner that is comprehensible, but not explained perfectly in the text. You’ll walk away feeling as if the journey made sense, but it will decline to answer every question.
#3: Poor Things
Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, written by Tony McNamara
Poor Things is in theaters now, and will stream on Hulu at a date yet to be announced.
Lanthimos makes his third appearance in the Glennies and McNamara his second, with the writer-director pair having previously written The Favourite (also starring Emma Stone), which was my favourite film of 2018. McNamara went on to apply his thoroughly debauched and loosely historical eye to The Great on Hulu, which I’ve adored in the intervening years, so naturally I came into this film fully prepared to see what twisted, sexy, violent, and utterly human spectacle he would bring to bear on the sci-fi genre. And yet, I was unprepared for just how much the film would rely upon a single, transformative performance from Stone, who also executive produced the film.
Stone plays…Frankenstein, essentially. A creative amalgamation of a mad scientist and twisted parental figure played by Willem Dafoe. Yes, the first sentence was a pedantry test, and you passed, dear reader. Stone is Bella Baxter, an assemblage of recycled parts made manifest by the dream of a madman named Godwin (“God” for short), who watches her toddle about like a child before bringing in medical student Max McCandless (Ramy Youssef) to take notes on her cognitive and linguistic development. The steampunk menagerie in which God operates is utterly depraved to a degree that seems familiar within Lanthimos’ oeuvre (feels like a satellite operation to The Lobster), but which serves a clear narrative purpose. This is a man who sews animals together for scientific fun. He has a half-goose, half-dog. A half-pig, half-chicken. And they all wander around the yard perfectly healthy to show off his crimes against nature, and offer a preemptive explanation for the inevitable question: Why is Bella Baxter? Because when we learn Bella’s origins in the first 30 minutes of the film, there’s no reason why he had to bring her to life in this particular way except that God is a mad scientist, and wanted to see if he could. And yet, in his own way, he was following his own code of ethics in doing so, not violating the will or decisions of his unwitting parts-supplier.
What follows is a Bildungsroman – a chronicle of Bella’s growth, engagement with the world, and gradual intellectual and philosophical awakening as she embarks on a series of romantic and depraved adventures, initially with the rakish Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), who is as basic and hilarious as he is despicable and unimportant (with an absolute hoot of a performance by Ruffalo). Duncan absconds on a romantic adventure with Bella…in order to fuck and then discard her, obviously, and Bella makes it clear that she knows exactly what use they have in mind for each other. And yet, for all the worldliness that gradually coalesces from Bella’s self-styled “questing nature”, Stone’s performance never fully leaves behind the verbal and physical tics that the character had at her start, nor the innocence with which she approaches every question about why the world is how it is. And it is Bella’s guileless exploration that makes Poor Things so utterly fascinating, as she meets other characters who could have existed as mere mouthpieces for a particular worldview, and yet feel fully formed and appealing as objects of exploration. She finds the most interesting people in the room and becomes one of them in turn, schmoozing with the likes of consummate cynic Harry Astley (Jerrod Carmichael) and brothel madam Swiney (Kathryn Hunter), each of whom acquits themselves well in the handful of moments they have in this film.
Bella finds herself, her friends, and her purpose, and what a wondrous journey of self-discovery and self-possession it turns out to be, with the world itself rendered in a fantastical blend of miniatures and CGI reminiscent of Wes Anderson and yet justified as an expression of how Bella sees the world: full of wonder, despite and because of its myriad horrors and contradictions. Poor Things is a delight, despite its frequent attempts not to be.
#2: American Fiction
Written for the screen and directed by Cord Jefferson, based on the book by Percival Everett.
American Fiction is in theaters, and will be available to stream on Prime Video, on a date yet to be announced.
American Fiction is sincere, hilarious, and a great deal more than the sum of its elevator pitch: that frustrated fiction writer and professor Thelonious “Monk” Ellison (Jeffrey Wright) would adopt an authorial minstrel persona in the form of fictitious fugitive “Stagg R. Leigh” in order to write a pandering pastiche of Black trauma porn, only to see it embraced by the literary establishment and the white world writ large. And the film’s greatest trick is to treat this pitch…as an afterthought to the establishment of Ellison himself – and his family, history, and relationships – as the furiously beating heart of this film. […] Monk doesn’t hide his contempt for the publishing world…at one point demanding on a conference call to the marketing department that his new book be retitled from My Pafology to simply…Fuck. Which, of course, they agree to do, and it only makes the book more buzzworthy. It hardly matters whether an artless exercise in self-parody actually gets read by anyone, as long as it makes for an interesting cover and conversation piece. Monk’s literary agent Arthur (John Ortiz) concludes a reading of a racist review of his last book, in which the critic essentially tells Monk to stay in his lane (wondering what the book’s subject matter “has to do with his experience as a Black man”) by commenting that white people think they want the truth, but what they really want is absolution. […] As a critic, American Fiction was a reminder to stay humble. And as a reader of fiction, American Fiction was a reminder that nobody knows anyone else’s life. And sometimes, the richness and texture of that life can be pleasant to immerse yourself in whether or not you can turn it into a grand observation about your own.
It’s rare that I give a film 10/10 – the last such recipient was American Factory (my #2 of 2019), and Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of the non-fiction book Killers of the Flower Moon, while not a documentary, received this nod for a similar reason: it answered a question I didn’t even know to ask, and did so in a manner which left me thunderstruck, unwilling to change a single thing about it. The United States of America is exceptionally good at making tokenistic nods to the sins of its past, but is deliberately less thorough when it comes to connecting that past to present dysfunction and economic inequality, content to maintain a narrative that Americans have always succeeded through skill and hard work, and anyone who is poor and downtrodden probably deserves to be in some way at this point. After all, all those bad things we did to them are in the past, and everyone affected by them is long dead, right? Right?
We’re all quite familiar with this attitude as applied to slavery, but perhaps a bit less so with the myriad mistreatments and indignities that the surviving members of the Indigenous peoples of this continent have had to suffer. After the wars, genocides, forced resettlements, and invasive diseases decimated their pre-Columbian civilizations, shunting tribes onto reservations of the most useless and remote land that the white government could deign to provide was also a fine excuse to ignore them in perpetuity. Imagine their surprise when some of that land turned out to be bubblin’ crude? The resulting oil wealth flowing into the Osage Nation in Oklahoma also brought a flood of white supremacy, ensuring that as much of that money would be clawed back as possible. Because if there’s one thing this country cannot stomach, it’s the wrong people getting rich.
It’s this hands-off attitude toward the uncomfortable and ceaseless tide of history – reinforced by all levels of government and politics for over a century (and currently being aggressively pushed by the know-nothing, iconoclastic resurgence of the white nationalist GOP) – that has caused acts of terrorism like the Tulsa race massacre (which gets an explicit nod in this film) to fail to be taught in schools and not become widely known until the 2010s. The institutionalized abuse of guardianship and a campaign of organized crime and theft against the oil wealth of the Osage Nation in the 1920s is a similar tale, in that I had truthfully never heard of it until this film was made. And that’s the rub, isn’t it? As with the fictitious white world of American Fiction above, I find myself praising this film for its fearless truth-telling, grappling with America’s original sins, even as I know that I’m seeing this story from the perspective of the white people who decided to tell a story that the Osage Nation itself was telling continuously while it was happening, and ever since. The original trite observation about history is that it is written by the victors. And that is true even for the subset of those victors who fruitlessly seek absolution for the life they now enjoy, built upon the shoulders of giants – and trod upon the victims of the same.
Flower Moon‘s powerhouse set of performances include another career-best from Robert De Niro as pimping gangster and gleeful white supremacist William King Hale, and another from Leonardo DiCaprio as Ernest Burkhart – a riveting, classic dumb guy, a Great War veteran with nasty teeth and zero prospects until his uncle decides to set him up as a potential murderous husband to Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone), an Osage woman whom they fully intend to murder along with her entire family in order to ensure that her oil rights end up in their white hands. On our podcast, I commented that the film’s sprawling ensemble cast and demystifying of a historical turning point reminded me favorably of Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln – but ultimately, its best reminder of that film came with how much preexisting baggage of American history education that I bring to it. Because as a wholly unfamiliar story, the events of this film (of a rein of terror and murder that lasted for years) would already be devastating. But with everything I know of the rise of the global oil industry and its role in building American wealth during the 20th century, it provokes a bit of a knowing nod. “Ah, that makes sense.” While I have nothing but praise for Gladstone’s performance as well as the rich tapestry of Osage life, dress, culture, etc., that is presented in this film (and which the real-life Osage Nation apparently had quite a bit of involvement with), it is hard to come away feeling as if I really know these people or understand their perspective on these events, because we’re essentially just watching them be victimized as part of a true crime drama in which all of the heroes and villains are white, and the victims – however richly they are rendered, are mere props and crying icons.
I truly don’t know how to square this circle, except to say that Killers of the Flower Moon seems well aware of its limitations as a story told by and for white people. And my only hope in lauding the film so thoroughly is that it doesn’t end the conversation about it, because the various peoples at the heart of this film have a lotmoreto sayto anyonewho will listen.
Joy Ride (directed by Adele Lim, written by Cherry Chevapravatdumrong and Teresa Hsiao)
Dream Scenario (written and directed by Kristoffer Borgli)
Oppenheimer (written and directed by Christopher Nolan, based on the book by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin)
Nimona (directed by Nick Bruno and Troy Quane, screenplay by Robert L. Baird and Lloyd Taylor, based on the graphic novel by ND Stevenson)
How to Blow Up a Pipeline (directed by Daniel Goldhaber, written by Goldhaber, Ariela Barer, Jordan Sjol, based on the book by Andreas Malm)
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (directed by Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, and Justin K. Thompson, written by Phil Lord, Christopher Miller, and Dave Callaham)
Asteroid City (written and directed by Wes Anderson)
LOLA (directed by Andrew Legge, written by Legge and Angeli Macfarlane)
M3GAN (directed by Gerald Johnstone, screenplay by Akela Cooper, story by Cooper and James Wan)
Beau is Afraid (written and directed by Ari Aster)
May December (directed by Todd Haynes, screenplay by Samy Burch, story by Burch and Alex Mechanik)
One of the earliest and most trite observations of my 20s was that authenticity is an overrated virtue. As I’ve gotten older, my opinion has softened a bit – authenticity is indeed a virtue; it’s simply impossible to assess either internally or externally, which renders it meaningless as an article of praise. At worst, authentic is used to describe an unfamiliar cuisine by people who have never eaten it before, often in the same breath in which they describe it as bold, experimental fusion. It gets worse when describing stories – at best, a story might be deemed “authentic” by a non-critic who shares some verifiable life detail with a work’s subject, e.g. a soldier rating another soldier’s memoir as such, often before asserting that no one can truly understand war unless they’ve lived it. Even the people who lived a particular life or in a particular neighborhood or with a particular worldview will be the first to tell you – their people contain multitudes, and nobody’s the same as anyone else. So what is authenticity, really? A stamp of approval of the truthiness of a thing? Confirmation bias as analysis?
I began this review with a discussion of authenticity because it is skewered so thoroughly in first-time film director Cord Jefferson‘s American Fiction (Master of None, Succession, Watchmen), an adaptation of Percival Everett‘s 2001 novel Erasure. If you really want to damage your critical psyche a bit, spend about 15 years reviewing films and then go back and re-read every time you’ve used the word “authentic” in a review. Cringe appropriately. As a current practice, I prefer to judge a work by its perceived sincerity, and American Fiction is sincere, hilarious, and a great deal more than the sum of its elevator pitch: that frustrated fiction writer and professor Thelonious “Monk” Ellison (Jeffrey Wright) would adopt an authorial minstrel persona in the form of fictitious fugitive “Stagg R. Leigh” in order to write a pandering pastiche of Black trauma porn, only to see it embraced by the literary establishment and the white world writ large. And the film’s greatest trick is to treat this pitch – almost certainly the reason why it has attracted such buzz in the wake of its audience award at the Toronto International Film Festival – as an afterthought to the establishment of Ellison himself – and his family, history, and relationships – as the furiously beating heart of this film.
When Monk ends up on a forced hiatus from his academic position after excoriating a white student for complaining a bit too much about the presence of the N-word in a class on literature of the American South, he returns home to his ailing mother Agnes (Leslie Uggams), and is joined in turns by his adult siblings, Lisa (Tracee Ellis Ross) and Cliff (Sterling K. Brown) – both doctors, and both recently divorced. This family is solidly middle-class bordering on upper, and – like many American families, just one medical crisis away from financial ruin. And so the family comes together, their history spelled out so plainly from the first interaction that I wanted to stew in it, because these people are as wryly hilarious as they are deeply damaged. Ross is a particular delight, having to establish a sibling dynamic with Wright in just a few utterly charming scenes in which these two make it clear that despite being out of touch and having serious shit to deal with in their lives, they still love and like each other, and are genuinely thrilled to be back in each other’s orbits. Brown, meanwhile, plays Cliff as the black sheep of the family, off his head on cocaine in half his scenes, and exploring his newfound identity as a divorced, gay, Black man, having only lived a third of that out loud so far, and experiencing pain and pleasure in equal parts at the freedom and pathos of finally letting his family know the entirety of himself. Cliff is very much not the focus of this story, and yet it is a testament to Brown’s performance that this character feels so fully realized. His life is a mess, but it goes on when the camera stops rolling. So it is as well with Lorraine (Myra Lucretia Taylor), the family’s longtime housekeeper and caregiver, who is rightly and mutually seen as part of the family, even as she finds herself the only maternal figure remaining as Agnes’ health begins to fade. And again with Coraline (Erika Alexander), an attorney and public defender who lives across the street from the family’s beach house, mid-divorce herself, and as eager to strike up a hasty, casual fling with Monk as he is to find a distraction from his deep well of career disappointment and self-loathing. These people exist outside of Monk and he outside of them, and yet they sketch out a life that is fully realized both onscreen and implicitly before the film began. I can’t speak to their authenticity, but they sure felt real as I watched them. And I spent so much time laughing aloud at their biting humor – as well as uncomfortable moments where the laughter was just a discomfited placeholder for incoming pathos – that I hardly had time to ponder what purpose they served as archetypes. I just wanted to live with these people for a bit, and hear what they had to say.
Where Wright really shines is in his character’s capacity for both self-awareness and self-deception. From his first scene, he is utterly in command of both screen and classroom, and yet, he has so much anger stewing beneath the surface that he feels fit to burst (and ultimately does burst, kicking off the film’s plot). And yet, Monk has had a fortunate career and he knows it. He writes books that are sold in chain bookstores – albeit not with the kind of regard he wants. “The only thing black about this book is the typeface,” he says to a store clerk as he moves his book out of the “African-American fiction” section, even as the clerk assures him that he has no choice about the placement and that he’s just gonna move em back as soon as Monk leaves. Monk has written works that he is personally proud of, but he can’t continue to sell them to an increasingly monolithic and tunnel-visioned publishing world that only wants one specific narrative from Black writers: the Real Black Experience. By which they mean…a ghetto. Poverty. Drug abuse. Crime. Murder by the police. And slavery, if it’s a period piece. This version of Black fiction is represented in the film by a novel called We’s Lives in Da Ghetto by Sintara Golden (Issa Rae), who also fits the bill of characters who appear in Monk’s orbit fully-realized and yet feel as if they have a life outside of it. Sintara went to Oberlin and grew up well off, and touts the authenticity of the AAVE and patter in her book by saying she based her book on “real interviews”. This is the Michael Lewis of poverty tourism fiction authors – she hasn’t lived it and doesn’t really understand it, but…she sure can sell it. And she’ll defend herself persuasively to your face if you dare to try and make her feel bad about giving the market what it wants.
It is to the film’s credit that it really doesn’t take a position on whether Sintara’s mercenary attitude is any less dysfunctional and twisted than Monk’s self-important sense of discontent. Monk doesn’t hide his contempt for the publishing world nearly as well as Sintara does – at one point demanding on a conference call to the marketing department that Stagg R. Leigh’s new book should be retitled from My Pafology to simply…Fuck. Which, of course, they agree to do, and it only makes the book more buzzworthy. It hardly matters whether an artless exercise in self-parody actually gets read by anyone, as long as it makes for an interesting cover and conversation piece. Monk’s literary agent Arthur (John Ortiz) concludes a reading of a racist review of his last book, in which the critic essentially tells Monk to stay in his lane (wondering what the book’s subject matter “has to do with his experience as a Black man”) by commenting that white people think they want the truth, but what they really want is absolution. This sort of cynicism is well-earned by the film’s plot, even if it taps out a bit at the end into a Kaufmanesque discussion of how the story should end for the audience they’re trying to sell it to. Monk playing ball with this discussion almost feels like he’s come around a bit to Sintara’s way of thinking, but it’s hard to forget how much he talked down to her about it without even deigning to read her book for himself. They’re both pretty awful in this moment, and yet, not nearly as awful as the white people praising Fuck for its authenticity. As a critic, American Fiction was a reminder to stay humble. And as a reader of fiction, American Fiction was a reminder that nobody knows anyone else’s life. And sometimes, the richness and texture of that life can be pleasant to immerse yourself in whether or not you can turn it into a grand observation about your own.
This review originally appeared as a guest post on 10 Years Ago: Films in Retrospective, a film site in which editor Marcus Gorman and various contributors revisit a movie on the week of its tenth anniversary. This retro review will be a bit more free-form, recappy, and profanity-laden than usual.
“What the fuck is this?” -“It’s actually pretty good. It was made by this Danish woman in the ’70s. It’s probably not what you’re used to looking at, but it’s pretty hot.” “OK, look, I have a girlfriend, all right? So…” -“I’m sorry, did you think I was hitting on you? Because I’m not… I thought you could use something better than that shit you’re watching on your phone. …am I right? If you have a girlfriend, why are you watching dirty movies?” “You’re fuckin’ weird, you know that?” -“I don’t entirely disagree, but you’re the one who’s gonna pretend you’re texting while you watch people pretend they’re fucking on your phone.” “The shit I watch on here? They’re not pretending.” -“Of course they are!”
Jon (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and Esther (Julianne Moore), having a little chat in public about porn, as I’m about to do with you.
All of the actual porn clips that appear in Don Jon are cropped narrowly enough to get the film an R rating, but its dialogue is unrestrained in both obscenity and depth when it comes to discussing all things pornographic and masturbatory. The 1994 Kevin Smith film Clerks settled the question of whether theatrical movies can discuss sexuality in such candid terms without getting an NC-17 rating, via an argument made by legendary creep and fascist-coddler Alan Dershowitz, spawning an all-timer for that “worst person you know made a great point” meme. But even as no-account New Jersey fuckboy Jon Martello, Jr. (Gordon-Levitt) explains in exquisite detail each step in his several-times-daily ritual of porn and self-pleasure (noting that the sound of his MacBook booting up gets him hard as a fucking rock), it still feels transgressive, because most candid discussion about sexuality is either preposterous (like the FiftyShadestrilogy) or in pursuit of a quick joke, never offering any real insight into sex where a brief, discomfited chuckle will do. And don’t get me wrong; Jon’s monologue is as hilarious as it is off-putting, but it never feels shallow. Jon describes masturbation like he’s ascending to Nirvana: “All the bullshit fades away…I don’t gotta say anything, I gotta do anything. I just fucking lose myself.” And that honest feeling of disconnection from his sexual partners seems worth exploring, whether or not his attitude about porn is cause or mere symptom.
This film was originally titled Don Jon’s Addiction and even premiered at Sundance under that title, and its creator’s acquiescence to the distributor’s title change makes me wonder just how confident he was about that “addiction” framing. JGL took to Facebook on that occasion and opined that he didn’t want people thinking the movie was about porn addiction and sex addiction, which is fair enough, and was probably about the limit of my understanding at the time. While Jon does try and fail to stop watching porn at his girlfriend’s behest, and another character questions whether he ever tries masturbating without it, nobody ever actually refers to this common behavior as an addiction, but rather treats it like what it is: A thing lots of people do, which can be done in excess. If you ask the professionals, the answer is pretty definitive – sex addiction does not appear as a distinct disorder in the DSM or its international equivalents. My own state’s coalition of sexual assault prevention programs (WSCAP) published a discussion guide to accompany Don Jon, and the word “addiction” does not appear in it even once. The consensus of scholarly and professional opinion is that sexuality is an ordinary human behavior expressed in a variety of ways, and attempting to isolate “sex addiction” as a distinct disorder serves to pathologize ordinary human behavior in a way that is both counterproductive to treatment for better-defined mental health conditions which might encourage illegal, disruptive, or upsetting sexual behavior, and also used as an excuse by policymakers and religious conservatives to isolate and pathologize ordinary expressions of sexual behavior that they deem undesirable and seek to repress as a means of cementing their political power. The entire LGBTQ community can tell you about that one.
So in the same way that Jon is forthcoming with the audience about what he gets out of his quotidian jerk sesh, so too is Don Jon honest about the limitations of its scope: Jon has very little at stake except his own maturity when it comes to sex and relationships, and consequently, the film plays less like a social document and more like a coming-of-age flick for horny twenty-something dudes who kinda need to get their shit together. And that is a fine and uncommon thing. It’s the rare indie gem, like Ben Lewin‘s The Sessions or Bill Condon‘s Kinsey, which discusses sexuality with any honesty, and even then, it’s usually in pursuit of some greater storytelling or biographical objective which justifies this odd moment in which we normie, God-fearing, uptight Americans find ourselves discussing sex when we’re all clearly too uncomfortable with the topic to do so. So I have to give some credit to JGL for crafting and portraying a character who is…essentially no one in particular except…a young American bro who likes watching porn between going to church to confess about it, and having sex with a parade of women he meets at The Club with The Boys, occasionally punctuated by a shouting dinner with his parents (Tony Danza and the late and excellent Glenne Headly) and his almost entirely taciturn sister (Brie Larson) about how his life is off-track and he’s a terrible football fan. That’s to say, JGL is putting himself forth through a fictional lens as a basic douchebag, and then putting that good-lookin fella on camera to confess to us, his friends beyond the fourth wall, that he doesn’t even really enjoy sex that much, and prefers the noble path of Onan and Pornhub. And lest we run the risk of liking him too much, he even troubles a one-two punch of suggesting that women can become hot enough to avoid having to give blowjobs and referring to men who enjoy performing the act of cunnilingus as “fucking crazy”.
Now, I’ll leave to the reader’s imagination whether and how often my tongue does a glissando – and it’s fair to say that men’s performative outrage at anyone questioning their watercress-grazing skills usually exceeds their true aptitude down south. But it’s also fair to say that Jon’s early and repeatedly-expressed desire to get head (as well as a variety of coital positions) without providing any reason why a partner would want to do so is presented to the audience as both an unlikable characteristic and a symptom of Jon’s dysfunctional attitude toward his own sexuality. Jon’s problem isn’t that he likes porn – and it isn’t that he’s dating a woman, Barbara (Scarlett Johansson), who doesn’t trust or even particularly like him (feelings which seem to be mutual anyway). It’s that he doesn’t really understand how to connect with other humans on a deep emotional and physical level, and sees porn as an outlet that doesn’t even make him try. And all it asks in return is for us to occasionally, shamefully acknowledge that it has a better claim to invention of the internet than Al Gore.
Back to Jon’s opening monologue for a moment. He describes the feeling of ejaculating to the perfect porn clip as “losing himself”. And why not? If you’re all alone, and you lose yourself, who’s left? The contrary view is embodied by Esther (Julianne Moore), a woman of the world who lost her husband, child, and any remaining verbal filter over a year before she meets Jon at night school and casually fucks him in her Jeep Wrangler. And it is in naked conversation with Esther that we finally see another human giving and receiving the kind of honesty that Jon had never thought about pursuing before. Relationships, she explains, are reciprocal. And all of Jon’s myriad dysfunctions – which Esther freely admits she wouldn’t tolerate if a meaningless hookup with a beefy bro weren’t something she sorely needed right now – are simple enough to explain: Jon has only ever pursued one-sided relationships, in which he gets whatever he wants – his pad, his ride, his girls (always rated on the 10-scale) – and he thinks little for anything he ought to give in return. This is why he was willing to accept a different sort of one-sided relationship with Barbara, who has very particular ideas about who he should be and how he should act – many of which are presented as facially reasonable, if Jon really is ready to settle down, and really wants to settle down with her specifically. I really have to hand it to ScarJo for a brilliant performance as a character who has to act in a deeply unlikable way while also being treated unfairly and misogynistically by the film’s protagonist. Barbara fits the mold I often call “more concept than character”, representing a version of henpecked, marital femininity as rendered by men who are terrified of finding a woman they deem hot enough to make them suppress their baser nature for a while. It’s a very particular and stereotypical view of how (immature, cishet, monogamous, marriage-inclined) men and women think and act towards each other, but even for its limited intended scope, this examination feels self-aware. The heteros are upsettero*, and in the course of explaining their gross feelings, we not only get to bask in Johansson’s wicked charm, but also get a breathtaking quasi-sex scene in a hallway which is perhaps one of the best pieces of physical comedy either actor has ever performed. We also get Brie Larson in the film almost exclusively to confirm, through female lips, that “that girl has her own agenda” and “she doesn’t care about Jonny” – fine and true bits of subtext which perhaps betrayed a lack of confidence that the audience would clock that both of these people are behaving with immature emotional intelligence and communication skills which they will both, hopefully, eventually, grow out of. Apart from losing a bit of my own verbal filter when it comes to discussing sexuality (adding a bit more candor, vulnerability, and empathy to my existing repertoire of the grotesque and the profane), those are precisely the skills I’ve put the most personal effort into improving over the last decade, because they seem essential to becoming a well-functioning human.
And like Tyler Durden said, self-improvement is masturbation. Meaning it’s fine and everyone should get on it. Pretty sure that’s what he meant.
This week on the FilmWonk Podcast, we do a #Barbenheimer (Greta Gerwig‘s Barbie and Christopher Nolan‘s Oppenheimer), then split the difference of pastel colors, artifice, and nuclear testing with one we missed from June, Wes Anderson‘s Asteroid City. (1:05:52).
May contain NSFW language.
FilmWonk rating (Barbie): 8 out of 10 (Glenn) FilmWonk rating (Oppenheimer): 8/10 (Daniel), 7.5/10 (Glenn) FilmWonk rating (Asteroid City): 8 out of 10
What ultimately disappointed me about The Super Mario Bros Movie was that it contained nothing new or unexpected, give or take a Jack Black song that – despite being a pernicious little earworm – is barely a song at all. Mattel, a toy company, isn’t going to shock me with its desire to sell more toys, any more than Nintendo trying to sell more games, or Hasbro smashing toy robots together. But movies are still a medium of stories and characters who will, at some point, have to explain to me why I should bother watching what amounts to a two-hour toy commercial, and the Barbie doll’s position as an iconic but dated piece of Americana doesn’t obviate that requirement. So you can imagine my delight when director Greta Gerwig (with a script co-written with frequent collaborator Noah Baumbach) decided to play with a broad and inclusive set of dolls, all singing and dancing a medley of existential dread on the border between Barbieland – a plastic, pastel fever dream (beautifully realized by veteran production designer Sarah Greenwood) where Barbie’s in charge and Ken is surplus to requirements – and the real world, where the Patriarchy is alive and well; we just hide it a bit better than we used to. It’s not much of a boast to say I’m less of a fragile little bran muffin than Ben Shapiro, whose vague fleshy blob turned instantly to windblown ash the moment the P-word was uttered in dialogue not once, but a baker’s dozen times. But if you’ll indulge me a problematic compliment, I was genuinely delighted to see that this toy commercial had some fucking balls. Because while my cynical side will assume that Mattel approved every image and sound that appears on this screen, and corporate feminism always exists with a degree of self-aware marketability, it’s hard for me to imagine that having a modern child (Ariana Greenblatt) tell Barbie to her crying face that she’s the dumb, fascist scion of a vapid and environmentally destructive consumer culture was their first advertising choice. In truth, it was their 43rd choice. But it’s one I found myself happy that they troubled to make at all.
Following an amusing satirical nod to the opening of 2001: A Space Odyssey, we start in the Dream House with Barbie (Margot Robbie), a narrative device reminiscent of The Lego Movie and Monsters, Inc., as we learn that Barbieland exists in a loose, metaphorical parallel with the Real World, with each Barbie corresponding to a real human child’s toy. Robbie, the tall, blond original model, is referred to in dialogue (by herself and others) as Stereotypical Barbie, with every other woman in this world also claiming the Barbie name, from President Barbie (Issa Rae) to Dr. Barbie (Hari Nef) to various Mermaid Barbies (Dua Lipa). There is also Ken – whose original (generic white beefcake) model is played by Ryan Gosling, with the narrator (Helen Mirren) informing us that the only thing that determines whether he has a good or a bad day is whether Barbie smiles at him – a bleak existence that is presented as such. This motivation unites all of the Kens, played by other beefcakes like Simu Liu, Kingsley Ben-Adir, and – briefly, in Merman form – John Cena. Between their cloying pursuit of the female gaze and various machismo contests on the Beach (in which they offer to “beach [each other] off” repeatedly), the Kens live a vapid and ill-defined existence, with no real place to go when the nightly dance party concludes at the Dream House, and the nightly Girls’ Night slumber party begins anew. Barbie and Ken play at romance as devised by a toddler, kissing with free-floating faces near each other, and “being boyfriend-girlfriend” with only the vaguest notion of what that actually means. Although they’re both quite clear on their physical limitations, with Robbie’s Barbie dutifully informing a few catcalling real-world construction workers that she has no vagina.
The key detail about Barbieworld is that it is a perfect, happy, feminist utopia where…literally nothing is at stake. Barbie’s food and drink are all automated play-objects that she doesn’t really need to consume. Dr. Barbie displays a heart-shaped x-ray of a minor Ken injury, but heals it with the ease of a child’s narrative handwave. President Barbie is the president of dancing and wearing sashes. But make no mistake – women and girls are in charge of Barbieworld, and men are their dutiful, superfluous sidekicks. And it is that unstable malaise that kicks off Barbie‘s plot: Stereotypical Barbie ends her nightly dance party by asking some of the other Barbies in the room whether they ever think about dying. And then her permanently high-heeled feet collapse into flats, she notices cellulite on one of her thighs, and she’s immediately sent to go see Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon), her oddball fairy godmother with a messy, multicolored hairdo, doing permanent splits – perhaps a metaphor for adulthood, feminist awakening, queerness, or all of the above – to explain what she must do: Journey to the Real World and connect with whichever human child is playing with her wrong, a girl named Sasha (Greenblatt), who greets her with the devastating takedown I mentioned above.
Barbie’s Real World mission gradually expands to include Sasha’s world-weary, millennial mother, Gloria (America Ferrera), who deals with her existential ennui about the dolls she used to play with (and a tween daughter who wants nothing to do with them) – by working at Mattel and sketching dark and fucked-up little doodles of the Barbies she dreams about now. Cellulite Barbie. Fear of Death Barbie. Barbies who are allowed to pause for a moment and consider what the world is like if everything’s not perfect all the time. When Barbie finally meets Gloria, it’s in the course of discovering that Mattel, and the world it exists in, is run by men and the patriarchy, who hold all meaningful positions of power and advance their own ambitions at the expense of anyone who challenges their vision of how they should continue to hold that power. With Donald Trump and the entire Republican coterie of lifetime-appointed priest-kings a full year into their experiment with taking women’s reproductive rights backward half a century, this should not be a controversial position for anyone other than the right-wing cohort whose paychecks derive from performative outrage at people describing the world as it is. At the same time, even for a sympathetic audience, merely mentioning the patriarchy or Barbie’s desire to smash it wouldn’t have been enough by itself. An insubstantial and inconclusive riot grrrl vibe tanked my enjoyment of Amy Poehler‘s Moxie, which ultimately felt more like the ghost of 90s feminism’s past, rather than a story with anything useful or interesting to say about the modern world.
Instead, Barbie posits and persuasively argues for a common fourth-wave feminist talking point: That the patriarchy is harmful to men and boys as well as women and girls and everyone in-between. Given the film’s dutiful fourth-wall breaking, I’ll go ahead and lay my Low-T, Beta Cuck cards on the table here: I simultaneously believe this talking point is a piece of realpolitik coalition-building on the part of feminists hoping to make disinterested men give a shit about their cause – and that it’s objectively true, so I don’t really begrudge its functional purpose. The patriarchy is real, describing a system of historical, social control that empowers and benefits men in a huge and tangible way, but ultimately harms those same men by slotting their range of possible outcomes and identities into a handful of stifling archetypes, limiting their ability to ever truly know themselves and explore the full range of who and what they could be within a mutually supportive community of other men, women, and enbies who are free to do the same. The film begins by displaying a topsy-turvy fantasy world in which women are in charge, but there’s precious little to be in charge of, and even in that place, we still get a sense of how harmful the situation is to the Kens who don’t know their place, nor particularly have the mental wherewithal to consider it at all. To wit, Barbie begins with a cartoon matriarchy and says that’s Bad Too, Actually, before it even considers what the real world is like. When Gosling’s Ken finally sees the Real World, he is instantly taken in by it – men are men (and occasionally men on horseback), constantly supporting and high-fiving each other as they prop up a world they unapologetically rule over. As Barbie is learning about catcalling and sexual harassment, the script is positing, through the eyes of its most naïve and corruptible character, Ken, that the patriarchy is seductive. And as the patriarchy roils forth to corrupt Barbieland, it somehow doesn’t feel like it’s calling out anything that wasn’t always there in both worlds. Even as Barbie’s real-life creator Ruth Handler (Rhea Perlman) appears as a wandering spirit to confess the unachievable dream she was always selling with her creation (even calling out her eventual SEC charges and removal from the company), the film digs deep into Mattel’s archives to show us some of the gross shit Mattel was engaged in as recently as 2009, when it introduced…Sugar Daddy Ken (Rob Brydon), or 40 years earlier, when it released a Skipper (Hannah Khalique-Brown) whose boobs inflated with the crank of an arm as she grew up into a “tall, slender teenage doll“. Despite the presence of Will Ferrell as a business guy in both films, Barbie goes a step beyond The Lego Movie in arguing that despite multiple chipper song and dance numbers tooting a similar horn, everything was not awesome in Barbie World or ours to begin with, and a return to the status quo in either one will not be nearly as useful as characters who can speak honestly about the sinking feeling and cognitive dissonance they experience just trying to exist.
Gloria is ultimately handed the megaphone to make this point, and Ferrera delivers this monologue beautifully, laying out a litany of dysfunctions and contradictory expectations that come with being a modern woman. And as the badass boss bitch who sits directly outside the all-male board room at Mattel, Gloria is precisely the flawed avatar that this point deserves, because she’s a character that props up a system that she knows was harmful to her own childhood, but is ultimately just an ordinary woman trying to get through the day, take care of her kid, and participate in a system that she had little say in setting up, without ever feeling like a monster or a failure or a hypocrite. It’s an impossible standard. And for Ferrera to express it in a way that simultaneously feels relatable and sympathetic for a modern, multi-gender audience is a real achievement. Because a girly movie with something to say…which is only seen and heard by girls…isn’t accomplishing nearly enough (even if it manages to bring in a few terminally online film nerds who crafted an unlikely juxtaposition with a dour historical drama). And while Robbie’s Barbie does close the show (with a line I still can’t believe the movie had the audacity to end with), she spends a fair few lines acknowledging that this wasn’t entirely or even mostly a story driven by her version of Barbie. Barbie the film knows what these dolls are and what they’ve represented in American society, and it acknowledges that history in more than a tokenistic way, speaking less about the dolls themselves and more about the oppressive system for which they always functioned as brand ambassadors. Don’t just be a girl. Be this girl, with her waist-length blond hair and giraffe neck. Gloria gets it. And she tells the audience what’s what so smoothly that it stops just shy of being didactic or punitive to any dudes who showed up, voluntarily or with some encouragement, because ultimately all I felt from Gloria was a desire to cut herself and myself some slack about what society expects us to be. Because life in plastic…ain’t fantastic.
This week on the FilmWonk Podcast, Glenn and Daniel face the destiny of Harrison Ford, who returns for his third and presumably final legacy sequel to a blockbuster franchise (barring any eventual return to Jack Ryan), Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. But first, we check out the upcoming raunchy road trip comedy from Crazy Rich Asians screenwriter Adele Lim, Joy Ride, in theaters this Friday (1:10:24).
May contain NSFW language.
FilmWonk rating (Joy Ride): 7.5/10 (Glenn), 7/10 (Daniel) FilmWonk rating (Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny): 4/10 (Glenn), 5/10 (Daniel)
Show notes:
[01:53] Review: Joy Ride
[22:42] Spoilers: Joy Ride
[34:53] Review: Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
[54:35] Spoilers: Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
I did indeed misremember – Daniel did not like Crazy Rich Asians as much as I did.
How does a world-weary millennial approaching middle age with two kids even begin to discuss The Super Mario Bros Movie? By establishing his Nintendo bonafides of course. I won’t bore you with a list, but my first of 11 Mario games (plus another half-dozen Warios and Donkeys Kong) was Super Mario Land for Gameboy – the first portable Mario game ever released, and the one that became my sole obsession from that Christmas to the following June. I spent hundreds of hours playing Super Smash Bros on the Nintendo 64. And I spent a significant portion of AP Calculus in the back of the classroom tapping away on an unauthorized ZShell port of Dr. Mario on the TI-85 graphing calculator. The video game series has sold nearly 400 million copies, and I am so sure that anyone reading this also grew up with these characters that I’m cutting off the nerd solipsism right there. Truthfully, I adore Mario Mario (Chris Pratt), his brother Luigi Mario (Charlie Day), his pals Toad (Keegan-Michael Key) and Princess Peach (Anya Taylor-Joy), his pet Yoshi – whose brief, shelled appearance after the end credits is the closest thing this movie has to a spoiler but I don’t care and neither do you – and of course I love Bowser (Jack Black), as well as the waves of expendable weirdos he sends after me to be smashed and roasted and frozen and knocked aside as Koji Kondo‘s classic themes proclaim in a cheery symphony what an awesome job I’ve done – Brian Tyler allegedly composed an original score for this movie, but he was more of a DJ this time.
The reason why I love these characters is because they’re nothing more or less than they ever needed to be – bog-standard adventuring archetypes to support the world of a then-groundbreaking and still entertaining 2D side-scrolling platformer. And eventual 3D platformer. And eventual open-world game. And eventually other game mechanics. Mario the avatar, Mario the instrument – that Mario has always made sense to me. He was there to be a bright and colorful escape whose appeal was always ultimately in the sense of triumph he handed to whatever child overcame the mechanical difficulty of gameplay, whether it was you, the neighbor kid, an online strategy guide, or a call to a Clippy-like Luigi who ultimately led you to victory. And Shigeru Miyamoto is owed a debt of admiration by children of all ages for his iconic creation that can only be repaid in $60 installments to see what wondrous new game mechanics Nintendo’s skilled developers and hardware engineers have come up with this time.
But Mario the movie? It’s bright and colorful and well-made. Up to the standards of big-budget 2023 animation. Its characters and enemies and vehicles are studiously faithful to their most recent 3D game renditions. And The Super Mario Bros Movie succeeded in its supremely limited ambitions. I mentioned the voice actors above, but with the exceptions of Day and Black, they all essentially disappeared into bland characterizations with motivations and backstories whose simplicity was calibrated precisely for the 4-year-olds who will be seeing it next weekend. Including my own! And I am genuinely looking forward to seeing the delight on the faces of both my kids as they watch their favorite characters come to life on a gargantuan screen. But as an adult, I hoped that the appearance of Pratt heralded the arrival of something more like The Lego Movie, whose shallow, corporate, brand-promotional premise was handed to a pair of bonafide storytelling filmmakers who turned it into something that stands beautifully on its own, rather than a 92-minute unskippable cutscene that you’d watch once, admire for what it is, and then button-mash your way past to get back to the gameplay, the promotion of which is ultimately and transparently the only reason why this movie exists.
The plot: The Mario Bros are plumbers in Brooklyn whose mostly-mustachioed family (including a father voiced by original Mario voice actor Charles Martinet) doesn’t believe in their lofty, unrealistic dream of quitting a plumbing business to open a plumbing business. Then they’re sucked into a portal to the Mushroom Kingdom, and everything I just mentioned ceases to matter at all. Bowser, the Incel King of all Koopas, is invading every level of Super Mario World (including, eventually, the Mushroom one) with a Star power-up, which he will use to impress Princess Peach enough that she’ll overlook his status as a conquering warlord and agree to marry him. Princess Peach, a human from worlds unknown who was raised by Toads in the Mushroom Kingdom, strikes out to get the assistance of the Kong army, and allows the newcomer Mario to join her on this critical mission for the same reason she was elevated to rule the Mushroom Kingdom in the first place: Humans rule in this place, because they’re the ones who can learn the gameplay mechanics and interact with the powerups – rendered here as Mario reluctantly eating fist-sized mushrooms even though – like the four-year-olds he’s speaking to – he thinks he doesn’t like them despite how powerful they make him.
While a few brief action sequences in our world attempt to demonstrate that Mario has some natural aptitude for platform mechanics (by way of construction scaffolds, cars, and other real-world things), these mechanics become literal and unexplained once the Marios enter the Nintendo gameworld. Mario undergoes a sports training montage with Peach, as she teaches him about the powerups, and he leaps and slides his way through a 3D platform environment that just kinda floats over the Mushroom Kingdom. I managed to spend a few seconds pondering how the Mushroom Kingdom’s grasp of biohacking and gravity-defying metamaterials might, in time, make them formidable adversaries for Bowser’s warmongering, but the movie helpfully handwaves all of that away in the same manner as the games: Look, the platforms are only there so Mario has some way of hopping around up there to jump on Bowser. The Toads are just there to look helplessly adorable (one of them even explains this in dialogue), and Bowser is an unstoppable nemesis until you manage to jump on him three times and then he collapses like a neutron star. And in this movie, all of those same things will occur, but a camera will swoop around Mario impressively as he looks a bit frightened that he won’t make it, before he ultimately makes it. Peach kindly explains that not everyone gets it the first time, before strongly implying that she did. And even as we get a glimpse of the subtle evolution that Peach has made over the decades from being the object of gameplay to a sorta-protagonist, this movie contains no shortage of reminders that it has literally nothing to show you that you haven’t already seen in a video game.
There’ll be some driving, of course. The Kongs toodle around on Mario Karts, and the Rainbow Road highway chase was everything that a colorful pursuit through a formless void with shells and banana peels being thrown around can be. And Donkey Kong (Seth Rogen) was certainly a character who appeared in this movie. I’m so tired. I don’t want to dunk on The Super Mario Bros Movie anymore, I really don’t. And it’s not necessary. It’s headed for a $225 million opening weekend. Everyone already knows the emperor has no clothes (preferring to stomp around in a spiky shell), and they’re going to come see the parade anyway. Let it never be said that I can’t appreciate shallow spectacle – I did, after all, put Avatar: The Way of Water into my Top 10 for last year. I appreciate its entertainment value for a demographic I used to be in, and its mere existence won’t stop me from shelling out for the next Mario launch title whenever Nintendo gets around to releasing a new system. Which means that if nothing else, the movie was effective. I just wasn’t one of its desired effects.
On July 8th, 2000, in an episode of the NBC teen dramedy Freaks and Geeks, 15-year-old Sam Weir (John Francis Daley, who would go on to co-direct this film) explained the appeal of Dungeons & Dragons:
“We sit around and crack jokes and eat junk food all night while we’re fighting dragons and saving princesses and stuff. It’s pretty fun.”
The scene is striking in retrospect for the sheer number of successful future comics that appeared, including Samm Levine, Martin Starr, and James Franco (the series also featured some of the first appearances of Seth Rogen, Lizzy Caplan, and Jason Segel), many of whom would go on to create a body of comedic work with a mix of scripted and improvised dialogue, frequently collaborating with the writer of the episode, Paul Feig, as well as his show co-creator Judd Apatow. What does any of this have to do with D&D? Well, first, improvisors are, without exception, a huge bunch of nerds. But also, fundamentally, D&D is an improv game. It’s based on rules, and the players’ and dungeon master’s choices have to exist within some version of them. But it’s also a special, off-the-cuff, live event that will only occur in exactly that way one time, and as comedian Ben Schwartz told my Seattle audience last weekend before spinning up a long-form improv show, “If you try to tell your friends about anything that happened here, it’s going to sound like a whole bunch of nonsense” (can confirm).
This requirement to balance coherent storytelling with freewheeling anarchy might explain why a tabletop RPG like Dungeons & Dragons has some unique adaptation challenges compared to video games (which also have a fairly spotty cinematic record). If you want to adapt a video game, your choices exist on a spectrum between “make a version of the game as played by the best player ever” and “just slap the name onto an generic adventure tale that vaguely resembles it”. Previous attempts to adapt D&D have largely opted for the second method – but this feels like the first attempt to capture the loose, jokey, improvisational chaos that is fundamental to the appeal of the game. You’re telling a story, sure, and that story ultimately has to make some kind of sense. But you’re also making choices ranging from the rational to the ridiculous, and rolling the dice as to the outcomes of those choices. A skilled DM will attempt to balance the madcap randomness of gameplay with the fun and coherence of the story (usually by selectively breaking rules as needed) – and that seems to be the difficult path that these filmmakers chose to tread – or at least convincingly imitate – with the script of Honor Among Thieves. And to my unrelenting delight, it worked.
The story starts in media res with merry bard Edgin Darvis (Chris Pine) sharing a prison cell with his partner, barbarian Holga Kilgore (Michelle Rodriguez), who quickly reinforces her barbarian bonafides by fracturing an orc along several geometric planes for creeping on her while she was eating her daily jailhouse potato (per Edgin: “pretty much the highlight of her day”). If I may pause a moment and praise the sublime casting of Rodriguez as a barbarian – this is a classic performance of a D&D character with high Strength and low Intelligence on her character sheet. That’s to say, Holga is a dumb meathead who can rip people’s heads from their shoulders, and not only does Rodriguez play the character’s thickness and brutality for laughs quite effectively; she also executes stunningly brutal fight choreography. It’s a beastly dance, and the closest we’ve seen to Rodriguez whooping superheroic amounts of ass besides her variousbouts with UFC fighters during her career as the tank of the Fast party.
While the thieves rot in prison for a heist gone wrong, their former partner, conman and rogue Forge Fitzwilliam (Hugh Grant) has used the proceeds from their failed heist (both pecuniary and arcane) to elevate himself to the noble in charge of the city of Neverwinter, with Red Wizard Sofina (Daisy Head) as his silent and lethal partner, and Edgin’s long-lost daughter Kira (Chloe Coleman) as his ward. After it becomes clear that they’ll need to steal treasure and family alike back from the greedy Forge, they devise an elaborate heist to break into the city vaults on a day when every noble in Faerûn will be coming to town to bet on the local arena tournament. And yes, that is almost the exact plot of Ocean’s Eleven, but let’s not focus on that. Speaking as a D&D player who once freely ripped off Pirates of the Caribbean for one of my campaigns, that feels like par for the course, and hardly works against the film’s appeal.
What makes Honor Among Thieves work so well is that it takes pains to justify the assembly of the party and give each character a personality and a compelling reason to be there – namely, they’re all threatened in some way by Forge and Sofina’s horrific rule of Neverwinter – and a backstory which made me care about their survival and success. Simon (Justice Smith) is a low-level mage with appropriately low confidence – a partner from the previous heist who feels guilty for its outcome, which allowed himself to escape while Edgin and Holga faced the music. Holga is an exile from her tribe and became something of a sister to Edgin, as well as a surrogate parent to Kira, whose birth mother died when she was too young to remember. Doric (Sophia Lillis from It), a tiefling druid living in the woods, is directly threatened by the Bolsonaro-worthy forest destruction that Forge’s expansion of Neverwinter has wrought upon them. Xenk Yendar (Regé-Jean Page), the paladin, in addition to looking forthright and dependable every moment he swaggers around in his cape, refuses the call to adventure, but is willing to help the party out where his war ended, as a mere survivor of the Red Wizards’ conquest of his home country. And Edgin himself…he wants his daughter back, but also has to grapple with the trauma that his separation from Kira has caused her, even as she repeats back the poison that Forge has fed into her ear during her time in Neverwinter. Forge may be a selfish usurper, but he really does like having Kira around, albeit in a gross, possessive way (the idea of molding a young mind to believe whatever lies he spins for her is genuinely appealing to him), which means Edgin can’t merely steal his daughter back. He has to persuade her that she belongs back with her father. And that’s one of several strong emotional cores embedded in this heist.
Grant, as I called out in my 10YA retrospective of Cloud Atlas, is simply unmatched at playing an unrepentant shitheel. Forge’s glee at seizing power and taunting his former friends for accidentally helping him do so is…well, roguish. He doesn’t want the credit in public for all the amazing bad things he did, but he’ll happily monologue about it in private, as long as he has plenty of malevolent magicians and stabby soldiers to do his dirty work out of sight. Edgin, meanwhile, has to be likable in public, because that’s what Bards do – and this is where Pine brings his best Kirk-worthy optimism (along with a fairly pleasant singing voice) to the group. He is not only essential to selling the nobility of their quest to skeptical would-be helpers, but his bravado amounts to a compelling personal arc, because winning back his daughter’s favor will require the very things he is least suited for faking: self-awareness and remorse. This bard has to learn that being likable is not enough – you need to be reliable as well. And Pine plays every bit of nuance that this arc requires, including Edgin’s persistent struggle to stop defending his good intentions in the face of his many bad choices.
In the lobby afterward, I likened this film to “the best D&D session ever”. I wish to clarify my meaning here, because while it is literally true that this is the best D&D film ever made, what I mean is that Honor Among Thieves contained all of the peaks of a well-run D&D campaign, one right after another. The close shaves and quick reshuffling of strategy after a bad roll were all there – as were the brilliantly absurd choreography and visualization of an entire party attacking simultaneously during each six-second round. If all the best parts of a campaign occurred in a single rowdy, Mountain Dew-soaked night, without any table drama or rules-lawyering or spell slot fuckery – with good ideas rewarded by creative counterattacks from the DM, without every choice succeeding, but each one resulting in the sort of improvised flailing that molds it into an even more insane plan with each moment – it might look something like this movie. And I’d be talking my friends’ ears off about it the next day until they begged me to stop.
Like any good DM, it also welcomes newcomers. Yes, if you’re a player, you will cackle a bit as you see a barrage of magic missiles explode against a displacer beast, but even if you’ve never heard of any of that nerd shit, the script gives you just enough detail to skate freely into this world as a fun, familiar fantasy place, just like Stardust and The Princess Bride before it.
FilmWonk 