Quick Takes October/November

If you know me, you know why I am morally obligated to weigh in on a new James Bond film.

October was the Month of Television with me as I blazed through an unprecedented three series, two of which I will comment on here (my head is still spinning re: Succession). And of course, If you know me, you know why I am morally obligated to weigh in on a new James Bond film. Let’s goooooooo!

SPOILERS AHEAD FOR ALL OF THESE SHOWS AND MOVIIES

Midnight Mass

I went into Midnight Mass with absolutely no information other than the title and the fact that Hamish Linklater plays a creepy-looking priest. All The Big Short alums instantly earn my attention, so I hit play in hopes of some sPoooKy fun.

Fun is not what occurs in Midnight Mass. The show’s lack of commitment to any genre makes the first three or so episodes difficult to get through: we’re not sure if we’re watching a small-town drama, a religious thriller, or a supernatural horror series. We receive enough hints of the latter two options to keep us going, but at the cost of a lot of extremely talky and slow-moving sequences of sad-sack Riley Flynn (Zach Gilford) awkwardly existing in his Stephen King-sian island home town and re-connecting with high school crush and sweater-wearer Erin Greene (Kate Siegel).

In terms of identifiable screenwriting issues, this protagonist is extraordinarily inactive. Riley is not at home for any perceptible necessity, and is not trying to do anything in particular. This lack of causal fulcrum makes the show frustratingly meandering until the vampires show up.

Oh yeah! The vampires!

The appearance of a blood-sucking flying monster brings much-needed action but also a head-scratching layer of incoherence to the proceedings, especially given the religious ideas that the show has dealt with so far. So are angels actually vampires? Vampires actually angels?

The show also wants us to think (or at least consider) that vampirism just a scientifically explainable disease. So is the big vampire is just in the latest stages of that disease? If so, why the claw-ed wings and the ability to fly? We don’t know, and the show isn’t interested in letting us find out. But finding out is usually the most compelling part of a show of this type.

Thematic incoherence follows logical incoherence: we don’t know if the town’s religious hysteria is directed at anything real, so we don’t know how to view it in context of what the show is trying to say about human nature, or belief, or anything.

I wasn’t familiar with Mike Flanagan’s work before the show, but apparently he has a penchant for monologuing, which is absolutely out of control here. Show don’t tell? Yeah right, not in Mike’s world. Why show a story beat in two shots when you can accomplish the same thing in a three-minute anecdote about something tangentially related to the story beat?

Learned: Since Midnight Mass has been described as Mike Flanagan’s “passion project”, I think the best takeaway might be to never make a passion project. Kill you passions before they become boring television that only makes sense to you.

Squid Game

What can I really say about the global phenomenon that hasn’t been said? It’s brilliant, inventive, weird, messy, disappointing, and thrilling.

It might be worth just talking about the ways in which squid game inspired me personally, and the (smaller) ways in which it didn’t.

The first thing that hit me about Squid game was the sheer inventiveness of the concept, which is interesting because taking a step back, it isn’t at all new. The Hunger Games, Battle Royale, Saw, and plenty of others have all done different takes on the compete-for-your life subgenre.

So what made Squid game feel so fresh? I think it has to do with the details of the execution, especially in the design of the games themselves and the whole system that surrounds them. We understand early on that there will be games and the losers will die. The suspense comes from how specifically that will play out, and in what decisions that the characters will be forced to to make.

Maybe the best example of this is the Dalgona candy sequence, in which the characters are given a seemingly innocuous choice of four different simple shapes. We have no clue what these shapes will mean, but one character, Sang-Woo (Park Hae-soo) does. With this knowledge, he must decide whether to help his fellow players, or let them make a mistake that could kill them.

Squid Game gives us characters that we like and understand, and then pushes them to the absolute brink to show us who they really are. To tie it into my favorite Coen Brothers quote: “We get you invested, then shake the floor”.

Where the show broke down a bit for me was its need to give us a couple of last-episode reveals that if anything undercut the strong character work that was built up. I couldn’t come up with with a thematic point that the reveals underlined — they seemed to be there just for the sake of surprise. The show had so much dramatic power in its central engine that the gotchas felt cheap and meaningless, and also not the best setup for a second season.

Learned: Character is built by decisions made until pressure. Shake the floor hard.

No Time to Die

In February of 2020, my friend Laura and I came to the sad realization that pragmatically, we would probably never get around to watching every single James Bond movie.

Unless… we dared each other to watch one every single day for 24 days. We threw in the two non-canonical Bond movies for good measure, topped the month off with Austin Powers, and the 29 days of Bond February was born. It was a true test of endurance and sanity, but we came out on the other side with priceless confidence in the knowledge that NO ONE has seen more Bond than us.

Therefore it was with great anticipation that I approached the long-delayed No Time to Die, since I am now a leading authority on the subject.

I could easily nit-pick the film, but I had fun watching it and was engaged for all of its (very long) runtime. Fun set pieces, entertaining new characters (Ana De Armas and Lashana Lynch), and a third act that was one big callback to Dr. No made this a worthy conclusion to the comparatively outstanding Daniel Craig entries of the series.

This got me thinking about how the franchise could logically move forward, which I think boils down to one important question: what is the dramatic engine of James Bond?

While you can change his external features, Bond’s nucleus has to remain intact: he’s fundamentally a hardened killer who does not allow personal matters to get in the way of his job. Because of this, there’s really only one way for any semblance of an arc to be introduced into a Bond film: give him someone to care about against his better judgement, and then take that person away from him, either by their death or betrayal (or, in Casino Royale, both simultaneously). This breaks down his hard exterior and reveals a human man underneath. No Time to Die repeats the betrayal beat (then takes it back), which might be a bit predictable, but again, there’s not many other things to do with him.

Then my thought experiment became the following: what would happen if you reversed that dramatic arrow, starting with Bond as human and then showing how he loses that? Would it still be a Bond Movie? Just a thought, I dunno.

However I do have a pitch for the next Bond: Make James Bond Kinda Lame Again. We all fell in love with the super cool, super buff, super not embarrassing Craig Bond, but what if we headed back into Roger Moore territory of corny uncoolness? I think this is what we need to breathe life into the franchise, and there’s only one actor for the job:

Yes, big-eared softboi and The Crown‘s Prince Charles, Josh O’Connor. Unfortunately, googling “Josh O’Connor Bond” only yields the result of Josh O’Connor stating in an interview “I will not do Bond”, but let me dream, OK???

Learned: The distinctive core of a franchise character can limit the narrative choices that you can make, but that limitation must actually make for a really interesting writing challenge.

Last Night in Soho

Last Night in Soho marks the arrival of Edgar Wright as a true auteur — i.e. a director who is successful to the point that everyone is afraid to tell him his script is a complete mess with nothing coherent to say. You can tell that meaningful notes were not sought out or given during the writing process, because Last Night in Soho is full of first draft problems.

Last Night in Soho is about Eloise (Thomasin McKenzie), an aspiring fashion designer who leaves her home in the British countryside for London.

What happens next is as hard to explain as it is to comprehend while watching: Eloise has vivid waking (and not waking) dreams even before she arrives in London, but when she gets there, her apartment is also perhaps haunted. The dreams/hallucinations take an intense turn, with Eloise inhabiting the persona a woman who was possibly murdered there in the 1960s every time she goes to sleep. Here’s the first first-draft problem: Wright should have chosen either the hallucinations or the ghosts, or at least make it more clear how or if they are interacting with each other. As written, it’s incredibly confusing.

Last Night in Soho is on its surface meant to be a film about nostalgia: Eloise’s fascination with the 1960s is emphasized well, emphatically. However, that thematic line is not played out in any coherent way. The film fails to draw a meaningful distinction between the SoHo of the past and the SoHo of today, with both portrayed as a relentless hellscape for women with lots of colorful and moody lighting. Despite her discovery that the past is pretty scary, Eloise finds success and praise for her retro dress designs at the end of the film. Has her relationship with the past changed at all? If this is meant to be an indictment of nostalgia, it isn’t a very strong or clear one.

Edgar Wright’s approach to the experience of being a women is a predictable brand of nice-guy condescension. It’s implied that Eloise had never been harassed by random men before coming to the BIG CITY, as though seedy urban environments are really the problem, not, you know, men. Eloise is also given a saintly male love interest who is designed to make Scott Pilgrim fanboys comfortable. They can point and declare that they are like that guy: Nice To Women!

This note COULD be a nit-pick if the rest of the script was written better, but it’s actually worth pointing out that the entire plot, including the “twist”, hinges on the fact that the old actors do not look like their younger counterparts. This feels like a cheat because in any kind of realistic context knowing who the villain is would just be an observational no-brainer.

Learned: No one is so good that their first draft works.

Christine VS 80’s: Round 3

1984 was a pretty big year for movies. Ghostbusters, The Terminator, Sixteen Candles, Temple of Doom, Footloose, The Karate Kid, Friday the 13th, and my beloved Beverly Hills Cop were all released that year. Since Stranger Things 2 is going to be set in the fall of ’84, I figured I had better brush up. Let’s get into two flicks that I’ve never seen before, Dune and Gremlins.

Dune

I recently completed a master’s degree, which was difficult, but not as difficult as completing the audio book for Dune, Frank Herbert’s ~classic sci-fi novel~. Dune is the story of a young asshole named Paul aka Muad’dib who becomes even more of an asshole due to drug use and power. It’s basically Game of Thrones in space, which is not nearly as much fun as it even sounds.

David Lynch is a director whom I was aware of but had no real knowledge of. I figured I would try out his version of Dune, mostly because I was curious to see how anyone would approach adapting the book. I do not recommend Dune as an introduction to Lynch’s work, but if you’re up for it, it’s… something.

The road that Dune took to production is a lot to unpack, but the short version is that it was originally optioned to be adapted by OG cult director and noted crazy person Alejandro Jodorowsky, who planned on casting Salvatore Dali, Orson Welles, and Mick Jagger in key roles, as well as his own twleve-year-old son as the lead. Jean “Moebius” Giraud (who would later contribute to Alien) was set to handle production design, and the soundtrack was to be composed by Pink Floyd and Magma. If this sounds kind of insane to you, you’re not alone. The studios balked at Jodorowsky’s overly ambitious adaptation (it would have been over twelve hours long) and instead hired David Lynch.

Because Dune is such a long and dense story, there’s an almost impossible amount of exposition that needs to be conveyed in order for the film to work. Lynch attempts to accomplish this in two ways. The film begins with a straight-up five minute explanatory monologue by the Princess Irulan, who in the book serves as type of narrator through excerpts of her written historical works that begin each chapter. She briefs us on the planet Arrakis (aka Dune), the houses of Antreides and Harkonnen, and the Spice, the all important drug that makes space travel possible. In addition to the crash course, we hear the characters’ inner thoughts through voice-over to convey extra information. It’s not just the protagonists, it’s everyone, down to minor characters. This works in the novel because it’s a novel and that is how novels work. On screen, it kind of seems like everyone is just talking with their mouths closed for no reason.

Lynch adds his own weird touches of questionable narrative purpose, perhaps most notably the inclusion of a gigantic wrinkled worm thing floating in a tank. It’s supposed to be a Third Stage Guild navigator, which is something that isn’t in the first novel. Because this was not gross enough on its own, Lynch also includes many extended shots of the weird worm thing’s mouth flapping open and shut. Other fun touches include cat milking (not kidding) and the Baron Harkonnen drinking blood straight out of his servant’s chest.

The stoic director pictured with his weird worm thing.

Some good points: Lynch smartly cast uber-likeable Kyle MacLachlan as Paul, who does a good job of making me not hate him. Patrick Stewart is a welcome familiar face as Paul’s right hand man. Beyond that I am mostly grossed out and confused by this movie.

There is one important element of this film that cannot escape my mention: the puppies. The opening sequence includes a horde of bulldogs, and characters tote around pugs in many key scenes. The image of Patrick Stewart charging into battle with a giant laser gun in one arm and a pug under the other is forever burned into my brain. I am neither kidding nor exaggerating.

Watchability: 2/5

80’s Ness: 4/5

The Takeaway: PUGS NOT (Spice) DRUGS

Gremlins

When I was a child, someone foolishly gave me a Furby, 1998’s hottest and most horrifying toy trend. My overactive six-year-old imagination had me fully convinced that the thing was going to murder me in my sleep. My parents mercifully removed the object from our home, but my fear endured.

Because I am to this day repelled by anything remotely resembling a Furby, I have been putting off watching 1984’s Gremlins. But I have done it for the sake of this series, and I think my courage should be commended. Produced by Steven Spielberg and written by future Harry Potter director Chris Columbus, it’s an 80’s touchstone that I would be amiss not to tackle.

Turns out the fluffy Furby-esque thing that I was afraid of is actually not a Gremlin, but a Mogwai. Small-town aspiring inventor Randall Peltzer (Hoyt Axton) steals one from an extremely sketchy Chinatown shop as a present for his son Billy (Zach Galligan). No one questions the existence of this creature. No one is impressed or even surprised that it can speak primitive English and reproduce by a form of water-induced mitosis. The Mogwai itself (named Gizmo) is actually rather cute, but I’m not holding my breath because much like Titanic, I know from the title that this situation is going to go south very quickly. Sure enough, although Randall was given clear instructions on the safe care and feeding of the Mogwai, all of the rules are promptly broken, creating an army of scaly and mischievous Gremlins from a single Mogwai. They are still less scary than Furbys.

The Gremlins of course wreak havoc on the town, ultimately taking over a movie theater where they enjoy a screening of Snow White and The Seven Dwarves. I was kind of jealous of the Gremlins in this scene. I would love to watch a classic Disney movie on the big screen with all my buddies and unlimited snacks.

The funnest party ever.

Director Joe Dante added lots of classic movie references to Gremlins which are cleverly chosen and fun to spot. The setting in the small town of Kingston Falls is a nod to Bedford Falls from Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, which Billy’s mom is watching in the kitchen. Billy watches Invasion of the Body Snatchers, another film featuring monsters who incubate in cocoons. You can see posters for Road Warrior and the classic giant ant horror flick Them! in Billy’s room, and the town’s theater marquee features “Watch the Skies”, the original title for Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Due to an abundance of monster gore and some really dark discussions between the teenaged characters, Gremlins is one of the films along with Temple of Doom that prompted the creation of the PG-13 rating that year at Spielberg’s suggestion.

Columbus’ original script for Gremlins was apparently was even darker and grosser than the version that got made, since he was just creating a writing sample that he didn’t expect to go to production. Spielberg was so impressed with its originality that he bought it despite knowing that it would have to be toned down drastically to be family-friendly enough to sell as a kid’s movie. Even so, it’s pretty obvious that the spirit of the original spec script comes through in the final product. It’s a work of pure imagination, motivated by a deep love of cinema.

Stray Observations:

Quentin Tarantino straight-up lifted the ending of Inglorious Basterds from this movie, right?
Turns out I wasn’t the only one who noticed the Furby/Mogwai resemblence: Instead of suing, Warner Bros. struck a deal with Hasbro to produce a Gizmo Furby. It’s a huge improvement over the standard Furby. I would probably be ok with being in the same room as it.

Watchability: 4/5

80’s Ness: 5/5

The Takeaway: Gremlins just wanna have fun.

Netflix Pick: Chicken Little

In 2005, then Pixar chairman Steve Jobs and Disney CEO Robert Iger were in the middle of negotiating over the extension of the deal in which Disney marketed and distributed Pixar’s films, an already impressive roster including Monsters Inc, Finding Nemo, and most recently 2004’s The Incredibles. The talks hinged on the release of Disney’s first CG animated film produced in-house: Chicken Little, a loose adaptation of the sky-is-falling children’s tale. If the film was successful, Disney could argue that they didn’t have to depend on Pixar for 3D content, giving them the upper hand in the negotiations.

Chicken Little made $40 million in its opening weekend, tying The Lion King for Disney Animation’s biggest opener. While it didn’t fare as well with critics, it struck some kind of chord with thirteen-year-old me and my brothers: we watched our DVD copy over and over again and quoted it endlessly. When I saw it pop up on Netflix, I had to check it out to see if it held up.

For the past five or so years, we’ve all gotten used to Disney Animation cranking out beautiful, well-made CG features. They’ve done this in large part by embracing the narrative and artistic sensibilities of Disney’s hand-drawn classics. Although they don’t adhere strictly to their source material, mega-hits like Tangled and Frozen are essentially earnest musical retellings of fairytales (Rapunzel and The Snow Queen, respectively).

Disney didn’t arrive at this strategy overnight. At the outset, they tried to replicate the success of the less traditional offerings from Dreamworks and Pixar. From its opening frames, Chicken Little makes a concerted effort to distance itself from Disney’s old fairytale tropes, mocking both the classic storybook opening introduction and the beginning of Lion King.

From there we’re thrown straight into the inciting incident, in which a diminutive high-school aged Chicken Little (Zach Braff) insists that he’s seen a stop sign shaped chunk of the sky on the ground, causing panic and destruction in the animal town of Oakey Oaks. Little’s embarrassed father Buck Cluck (Gary Marshall) plays it off as an innocent gaffe, but Little can’t quite live it down. This makes high school rough for him and his misfit pals Abbey Mallard (Joan Cusack, an Ugly Duckling), Runt of the Litter (a rotund piglet), and Fish Out of Water (a fish wearing a diving helmet full of water).

After an unlikely baseball victory puts Little back in his father’s and the town’s good graces, another chunk of sky crash-lands in his bedroom. Turns out it’s actually a lost cloaking panel from an extraterrestrial spacecraft. From there the story becomes a goofy take on a War of the Worlds style alien invasion plot.

Compared to the recent sweeping epics like Frozen or Moana and the serious social parable Zootopia, Chicken Little feels like a feature-length Saturday morning cartoon, but that’s what makes it so much fun. As in the best cartoons, the humor comes from the characters, who are much broader comedically than those in typical Disney films. Runt of the Litter, played by the always funny Steve Zahn, is a perpetual over-reactor with a penchant for classic pop music. The wonderfully expressive Fish out of Water is unfazed and delighted by everything that happens to him, up to and including being abducted by aliens. He gets some of the best one-off bits, including constructing an Empire State Building out of homework papers and re-enacting the climactic scene of King Kong while the other characters have a serious discussion. My favorite character as a kid was the snotty popular-girl antagonist Foxy Loxy, whose pre-dodgeball declaration “PUMP IT, PUMP IT, PUMP IT UP!” became a go-to celebratory mantra for me and my brothers. She’s still pretty damn funny.

In addition to the cartoony fun, Chicken Little actually has a decently affecting emotional core in the form of Chicken Little and Buck Cluck’s relationship arc. Countless animated films are about the importance of family, whether they be biological or those constructed from unlikely companions. This can often feel a little vague and tacked-on, but Chicken Little narrows the focus down to the relationship between a father and son, and the social expectations and anxieties that go along with it.

The CG doesn’t hold up nearly as well as Pixar movies from the same time: the textures, fur simulation, and fluid simulations are all clunky and primitive looking by comparison. Nearly all of the non-hero characters are variations on the same generic animal model. Some of these cookie-cutter characters even have speaking roles, like the announcer at the baseball game. But none of this really distracts from Chicken Little’s strengths in terms of humor and characters. It’s an awfully fun movie with a great heart.

Stray Observations:

Some clever foreshadowing — check out the pattern on Chicken Little’s bedspread.
Disney originally produced Chicken Little as a Silly Symphony short in 1943, an allegory about the dangers of believing in rumors during wartime. It’s pretty dark — Foxy Loxy literally reads passages from Mein Kampf. If you look at the title card, you can see the same hexagonal pattern seen in the 2005 movie. Either that’s a weird coincidence, or the Disney designers took some inspiration from it.
This movie definitely relies heavily on musical montages, but I’ll forgive it because they’re so much fun. I had that Barenaked Ladies song stuck in my head for days.
It’s pretty incredible to compare Chicken Little‘s primitive animal crowds animation to the crowds work in last year’s Zootopia, in which according to fxguide featured 64 different species and 800,000 different character models.
For some reason, Abbey Mallard’s reaction to the cloaking panel cracks me up every time: “Bizarre!”

Picks for Kevin

I was discussing HBO’s Westworld with my college buddy, Kevin, when he mentioned that he had never seen Blade Runner. In general, he felt that he was lacking in the classic sci-fi filmic knowledge appropriate to a card-carrying nerd. To remedy this situation and to help him to expand his overall cinematic palate, I offered to come up with a list of movies for him to watch.

Here you go, K-Money. My hope is that each movie listed here can be a jumping-off point into a different genre or era of film that I think you’ll enjoy. I’ll take it for granted that Blade Runner is already on your to-watch list, and I KNOW you have Blu-Rays of Alien and Aliens, because I saw you stand in line to get them at Comic-Con a year and a half ago. You should watch them.

Total Recall (1990)
Since 2015 brought us an ultra-realistic look at life on Mars in Ridley Scott’s adaptation The Martian, I thought you might like to check out an earlier sci-fi depiction of the Red Planet. Even though it was released in 1990, Total Recall is quintessential 80’s action. Directed by Paul Verhoeven (Robocop, Basic Instinct), it’s full of ridiculous body horror and brutal fight scenes along with dumb, awesome one-liners by Arnold Schwarzenegger, in one of his best non-Terminator roles.

Set in 2048, Arnold plays construction worker Douglas Quaid, who’s plagued by nightmares about a mysterious woman on Mars. To remedy this situation (I guess), he decides to try Rekall, a service that will implant the memories of a trip to Mars in his consciousness. Of course craziness ensues, with Quaid finding out that his entire life might not be what he thought it was.

It isn’t just mindless fun, though. Total Recall is an early predecessor to movies like The Matrix and Inception, that deal with questions of the nature of reality. Like Inception, the movie itself is a puzzle that may take a handful of viewings to really crack, if there’s really an answer at all.

WarGames (1983)
As a software engineer, you need to see this film because it’s widely, and I think correctly, regarded as the greatest hacker movie of all time. Additionally, it’ll give you some much-needed context for the book Ready Player One and its forthcoming film adaptation, which is going to be directed by Steven Spielberg. Ready Player One is drenched in 80’s nostalgia, and WarGames is one of its major touchstones.

A pre-Ferris Bueller Matthew Broderick plays a young Seattle computer hobbyist who accidentally hacks into the military’s nuclear control system. He thinks that he’s accessed a nuclear-war themed computer game, but soon discovers that his tinkering has triggered real-world panic.

As much a Cold War movie as it is a hacker movie, WarGames tapped into the long-standing nuclear panic of the 80’s combined with the very new concepts of computers and hacking. At the time of its release, most people didn’t even have computers in their homes, let alone access to the internet. The idea that any person with a computer could influence events on a global scale must have been utterly mind-bending. WarGames even ended up helping to shape our national policy: the film evidently made such a huge impression on President Reagan that it prompted him to launch extensive investigations into the threat of cyber warfare.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
I know you’ve seen this at some point, but it’s worth revisiting. Although only a handful of Steven Spielberg’s films can be considered science fiction, he’s influenced the genre as much as any other director I can think of. His cinematic fingerprints are all over contemporary film and TV. If you re-watch Stranger Things, you’ll notice that multiple shots are directly lifted from his films.

Close Encounters features 70’s everyman Richard Dreyfuss as a father and husband whose relationships are threatened by his growing obsessions after an encounter with a UFO. While most films in the alien invasion subgenre rely on the aliens being a hostile threat to create tension and drive the plot forward, Close Encounters instead builds suspense as the protagonist gradually pieces together what’s happening to him. As a result, the pacing is slower than typical modern sci-fi, but it’s worth the patience that it requires.

If you haven’t seen the recent Arrival yet, I’d recommend watching this first if you have a chance. In many ways, Arrival is a spiritual descendent of Close Encounters, and in my opinion the first film in the genre to really approach the powerful sense of wonder that Spielberg brought to his film.

Chinatown (1974)
Director Roman Polanski and writer Robert Towne’s 1974 neo-noir is essential for anyone interested in the nuts and bolts of cinematic storytelling. Set in late 1930’s Los Angeles, Chinatown features Jack Nicholson in one of his most well-known roles as Jake Gittes, a tough private detective who’s hired to surveil the city’s chief water engineer by a woman claiming to be his wife. The gig turns out to be a set-up, launching Gittes into a web of deception and intrigue.

Every screenwriting book I’ve ever read uses Chinatown as an example of rock-solid story structure, pacing, and dialog. It can also serve as an entry point to New Hollywood, a renaissance era of filmmaking that stretched from the late sixties to the early eighties. Kicked off by Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde and Mike Nichols’ The Graduate in 1967, the movement was heavily inspired by French New Wave Directors like Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, and focused on the importance of the director as the film’s primary creative force, as opposed to the film studio.

Some Like it Hot (1959)
Let’s bring it back even further with a comedy that I think you’ll enjoy. Some Like it Hot was written and directed by Billy Wilder, one of the most prolific and versatile filmmakers of the twentieth century. It follows a pair of jazz musicians (Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis) who witness the 1929 St. Valentine’s day Massacre and escape by pretending to be women and joining an all-female band. This results in some surprisingly nuanced gender commentary that pushed cultural boundaries at the time of its release in the late fifties. It’s also a masterpiece of screwball comedy, ranked the Funniest Movie of All time by the American Film Institute. Some of its classic one-liners have become so embedded in the zeitgeist that you’ve probably heard them already, even if you’ve never seen it.

Rope (1948)
I thought that this would be an interesting entry point into the world of Alfred Hitchcock, which you’ve yet to delve into. Rope is unique within Hitchcock’s oeuvre of suspense movies in that it takes place in real time over the course of one evening in an apartment, and was edited to appear to be one long, continuous shot. This gives it a stagey quality that I think you’ll appreciate as a theater guy. It’s actually extremely reminiscent of The Hateful 8 (minus all the gore), to the point that I would bet money that Tarantino was strongly inspired by it.

If you want to explore more Hitchcock, I’d follow this up with Dial M for Murder, Rear Window, and Vertigo.

Double Indemnity (1944)
Classic 40’s film noir is both a genre unto itself and a hugely influential cinematic style, so I thought I would recommend the noir-iest of all noirs, as determined by this super scientific infographic .

Double Indemnity also happens to be one of my favorite movies ever, a film that I find myself going back to over and over. Directed by the same guy who did Some Like it Hot (he had some serious range), it follows an insurance salesman who gets talked into plotting his own wife’s murder.

The noir style had a massive influence on comics as well as film. Batman (especially Frank Miller’s interpretation), Watchmen, Daredevil, Hellboy, and many others can trace their stylistic DNA back to the dark, crime-focused movies of this era.

Get Excited About Jeff Nichols

I saw the sci-fi mystery Midnight Special on a whim one Friday night, drawn in by an understated advertising campaign that didn’t give much indication as to the film’s plot. In a cinematic world dominated by sequels and adaptations, it’s rare to go the theater without knowing fairly well what you’re getting into, and even rarer to see an original sci-fi film by a rising young director with an indie bent. I came out of the theater wanting more, and eagerly burned through two more of his films. What I found is a filmmaker with a new, unique voice, making original, thoughtful films.

I saw Take Shelter, Mud, and Midnight Special out of sequence, but I’ll talk about them here in chronological order.

take-shelter-grab-the-kid

Thoughts on Take Shelter

Take Shelter is actually Nichols’ sophomore effort, following up his 2007 debut, Shotgun Stories. Michael Shannon plays Curtis, a blue-collar Ohio man haunted by otherworldly dreams of an impending disaster. Convinced that his family is in real danger, he sets to building a tornado shelter in his back yard, which alarms his wife (Jessica Chastain).

The feeling that something very bad is about to happen is inescapable at the moment. In Take Shelter, Nichols’ uncanny storm feels like a stand-in for every brewing apocalyptic nightmare plastered across our social media feeds and cable news. This disaster itself and its consequences are of secondary importance within the story: the focus instead zeroes in on the relationship between Curtis and his wife, and its ability to survive an outside threat that may or may not be real. These two people have to get on the same page, or they’ll lose each other.

It’s difficult to imagine this film working as well with any actor other than Michael Shannon in the lead role. He is able to evoke dread without ever actually freaking out as his character goes about his life under a looming terror. It’s no wonder he became Nichols’ go-to leading man.

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Thoughts on Mud

Mud is a tense and evocative take on the coming-of-age genre, set in Nichols’ native Arkansas. The Mark Twain-tinged story centers on 14-year-old river dweller Ellis (Tye Sheridan) and his pal Neckbone (Jacob Lofland), who happen upon a lovelorn drifter named Mud (Matthew McConaughey) during an excursion to find a boat in a tree on an island and end up involving themselves in their new friend’s mission to find his girlfriend (Reese Witherspoon). Meanwhile, Ellis’ home life begins to unravel as he watches the erosion of his parents’ marriage.

Mud takes a different look at romantic relationships: their beginnings, their ends, and the lengths that we will go to preserve them, even when we shouldn’t. Ellis, desperate for an example of real love, latches onto Mud’s relationship as a prototype when his parents’ fails. He tries to replicate that love himself, and ultimately finds that it isn’t the ideal that he had hoped for.

A striking aspect of Mud is its sense of place and time. Nichols obviously knows the area intimately and captures it in its beautiful, mundane glory. It’s recognizably the South, but is devoid of the stereotypes that often plague Hollywood depictions. All of the lead players are natives of Southern states, lending a dose of authenticity to the performances and dialog. In front this rich backdrop is the most resonant depiction of American boyhood that I can recall since Stand By Me. As in that film, young men are faced with a situation that pushes them over the edge into the adult world, with all the emotional upheaval that goes with such a transition.

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Thoughts on Midnight Special

If Nichols dipped his toes into the sci-fi genre with Take Shelter, he takes the plunge with Midnight Special. Tapping into a budget twice the size of his first three films combined, he’s got a much bigger sandbox in which to play with the genre. Nichols wisely eschews CGI-laden spectacle in favor of solid storytelling and suspense, resulting in one of the most entertaining and genuinely spooky films of the year thus far.

We drop into the story as Roy (Michael Shannon) smuggles his young son Alton (Jaeden Lieberher) away from a cult-like religious group’s rural compound, accompanied by off-duty state trooper Lucas (Joel Edgerton). From there, details about who Alton is and the purpose of the mission come out in small doses, keeping the tension relentlessly high as both the religious group and the federal government pursue the boy.

The directorial approach is unapologetically Spielbergian, combining economical pacing with arresting, otherworldly imagery and more than a handful of lens flares. Nichols is able to capture some of the awe and magic of the eighties sci-fi classics without falling into the territory of homage, employing more restraint than JJ Abrams did in his unabashed throwback Super 8 (2011). Midnight Special’s aesthetic serves its story, not the other way around.

Beneath the sci-fi conceit, Midnight Special is a story about the lengths to which parents will go for their children, especially in the face of outside judgement and opposition. Shannon’s performance crucially captures the stress and joy of parenthood, while young actor Jaeden Lieberher gives Alton enough realism to make the father-son dynamic work.

Throughout Nichols’ films, we see different versions of human relationships that are struggling to survive. Nichols plays with genre and visuals in interesting ways, but only to the extent that they support the human-centered stories. It’s an extremely encouraging pattern to observe in an up-and-coming director’s work.