Delayed Reaction: Intolerance

Premise: The theme of intolerance is explored through 4 parallel stories told from a variety of time periods.

 

I was in no hurry to see this movie. It’s been physically at the top of many lists of mine for a while due to it being the earliest film on my lists. I keep deciding that life’s too short though. I really hated The Birth of a Nation, director D.W. Griffith’s film before Intolerance. I respect the filmmaking of it, I guess, but the prominent racism of the story took all the focus. I’ve seen Intolerance called a corrective in a lot of ways. Apparently Griffith made a point to say it was not meant as an apology for The Birth of a Nation though, which isn’t very comforting.

 

Anyway, I spent a week taking a different decade(ish) each day and watching a few films from then. It felt like as good a time as any to check Intolerance off the list. And it’s true. This movie isn’t racist. A low bar. The filmmaking for 1916 – over a century ago! – is pretty impressive. I appreciate the ambition of the 4 storylines with a thematic linking. Even in this primitive form though, it really feels like Griffith was a blockbuster director for his time. The film is handsomely dressed and staged. The scale of the production is grand. I wasn’t that captivated by the performances or characters though. This feels like a movie where the focus was on what Griffith could do technologically more than creating a fulfilling movie. Or maybe I’m just no good at watching silent films. That’s a distinct possibility.

 

One thing that threw me off is that one story takes place in 1914. That’s like making a movie about the COVID shutdown right now. 1914 isn’t a period piece in this movie. That was reflecting the present day. My brain literally couldn’t process that. I kept turning that into a period story like all the others. Even the 1920s I can imagine as a real, modernly documented time. Anything before that can only be a period piece for me.

 

Verdict: Weakly Don’t Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Crush

Premise: A high school girl's life gets complicated when she gets a crush on her longtime crush's sister.

 

I had a strange reaction to this movie, and an uncomfortable amount of it was because I'm getting set in my ways. I grew up on a very specific brand of high school movie. It was comfortably PG-13. It never felt like a real high school experience. It could only hint so much about the real high school experience. You know, your Bring It Ons, 10 Things I Hate About Yous, or Get Over Its. I love these movies in large part because I knew them in my formative years. However, if you'd ever ask me generally, I'd say I wish more high school movies sounded like high school and spoke more frankly about sex in particular.

 

That's what Crush is and does. By plot, character, and quality of writing, it's a very traditional high school comedy. There's a love triangle and a lot of people talking in punch lines. It also has much franker dialog. Lots of "fucks" and vibrator talk. I appreciated that, but weirdly, I balked at it a bit too. It doesn't play by the rules of my high school comedies the way that even a Love, Simon does. So, as much as I actually did enjoy the movie, some annoying part of my brain kept trying to reject it. That's a me problem though.

 

Overall, I really enjoyed Crush. It's exactly the movie it wants to be. I mainly showed up for the cast, which is a sort of young performer all-star team. It stars Rowan Blanchard (Girl Meets World). The two love interests are played by Auli'i Cravalho (All Together Now, the voice of Moana) and Isabella Ferreira (Love, Victor). The best friends are played by Tyler Alvarez (American Vandal, which, you’re right, I should go rewatch that right now) and Teala Dunn (I don’t know what she’s from specifically, but she has a lot of Disney/Nickelodeon-type credits). For many of them, this feels like a last hurrah before they can’t pass as high schoolers anymore. Ferreira is the only one even still in her teens. Dunn and Alvarez are hitting the back half of their 20s. So, it’s nice to see at least one more high school performance out of them before it either gets too hard to buy them in the roles or they start going for other types of roles.

 

Look. There isn’t much to say. It’s a Gen Z high school love story with a strong young cast and a couple older ringers (Megan Mullaly, Aasif Mandvi). The plot is charmingly predictable. The dialogue isn’t particularly clever but it tries to be. I appreciated the attempt. It’s certainly a better movie than, say, He’s All That, although it doesn’t match some of the films from a half-generation before like The Edge of Seventeen or Love, Simon.

 

Verdict: Weakly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Hell’s Angels

Premise: Two brothers become pilots in WWI.

 

I'm pretty sure Hell's Angels is better known for the behind the camera elements of it than what's on screen. I know of it as the Howard Hughes film, and even as I watched it, I kept thinking back to the scenes of The Aviator about making it. Otherwise, I just confuse this movie with Wings, the first Best Picture winner. They are pretty different movies though except for the airplanes. Hell's Angels is a lot more risqué and violent than I expected. It's clearly a pre-Code movie. Jean Harlow in particular would've been toned down just a couple years later.

 

For all the time and expense it took to make the movie, it is very impressive for its time. Midway through production it was turned into a talkie, and I can barely tell. The development of sound from The Jazz Singer to this in just three years is night and day. The aerial scenes are quite a sight too. I barely understand how they get shots now. With clunky 1920s technology, it's a miracle that Hell's Angels looks as good as it does.

 

Still, it is the 1930 version of an impressively produced Michael Bay movie. The movie didn't particularly engage me in any way. So, while it's nice to appreciate as an historical artifact, I found it much less enduring than a King Kong.

 

Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend

Delayed Reaction: White Hot: The Rise & Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch

Premise: …the title pretty much covers it.

 

I try to not be too navel gazy about the past. All generations have a period where they overstate the significance of their lived history. The greatest generation (just look at that name) dined on WWII for decades. The Baby Boomer through a mix population dominance and an undeniably turbulent 1960s really codified their generation as a golden age to be alive. Gen X has made the 1980s sound like a pop culture high point for years thanks to the weird SciFi and John Hughes. Right now we’re in a real era of Millennial nostalgia. “Only 90s kids will understand”. It feels especially toxic for Millennials, because, thanks to the timing of the internet, we’re the first generation who never had to fully let go of the things we liked when we were young. Although, I recognize that even saying that is evidence of my own myopia.

 

I try not to bathe in nostalgia too much, but sometimes it is nice to be reminded of a time and place that’s familiar. So, I watched White Hot. I was never an Abercrombie & Fitch kid. I’ve never owned a piece of their clothing. I honestly don’t recall ever going into one. I knew the brand though and had my associations, and they matched up with everything said in this documentary. Except the racism. I can’t say I noticed that when I was 13. I needed some hindsight on that.

 

Oddly, watching White Hot reminded me of watching a Studio 54 documentary. I think Studio 54 is a fascinating topic. There’s always a tone to people talking about it like I’m listening to the winners. Studio 54 sucked by most measures. It was elitist and broke so many laws. For every person who made it in and had a coke-fueled religious experience in there, there were dozens more who stayed in line for 2 hours only to be mocked and turned away. Had I been alive in the late 70s, I imagine my opinion of Studio 54 would be much lower than that of the people who get interviewed about it now. That’s how I am about A&F. I didn’t care for it at the time. I associated it with overpriced clothes that were used as a status symbol. Many of the talking heads in White Hot though came from the inside and spoke about A&F like there was some innocent time when the brand wasn’t built on elitism. There’s the part where one former employee mentions the horror of seeing the bully in Spider-Man dressed fully in A&F because it meant something had shifted in the brand. Whereas, my memory of it was that the brand was built on that.

 

That’s not to say this doc was generous about A&F. It got pretty brutal by the end. Even during the rise part, they weren’t that forgiving. I’m bringing a lot of my own baggage to this. I’m guessing to someone younger who didn’t live through this, the doc feels properly balanced and damning. And I really liked the parts about the queerness of it all. I’ll admit, that’s one of those things that was such a staple that I never thought deeper about it. It’s funny in hindsight to remember the stores with giant pictures of half-naked men on them and it not immediately clicking who they could be targeting.

 

Anyway, this was a nice little jolt of nostalgia. The doc is nothing special otherwise. Pretty boiler plate. The kind of thing I’m sad that VH1 does do anymore.

 

Verdict: Weakly Don’t Recommend

Delayed Reaction: C’mon C’mon

Premise: A man agrees to watch his nephew while his sister sorts some things out with his brother-in-law/her husband.

 

I’m disappointed that I didn’t love this movie more. I really should. It’s got all the right parts. Coming of age story. A24. Good cast. A somewhat meditative tone. And I ultimately did enjoy it. It’s great seeing Joaquin Phoenix chill down and play a human. The kid, Woody Normal, gives a solid child actor performance. I love where Gaby Hoffman has settled now. While she never really went away, for most people, she came back from being a child star around 2013 with some very adventurous roles. The best example is Crystal Fairy & The Magical Cactus. For a while, if you needed someone crazy, you hired Gaby Hoffman. Then, in the last couple years, it’s like she got that out of her system and is very interestingly normal. In C’mon C’mon and Winning Time she’s great without it seeming like she’s trying to get someone to notice. Altogether C’mon C’mon is a thoughtful little movie.

 

As I said though, I wanted to like it more. There’s no single thing about it I disliked. Rather, there were just small strikes against it. Like, by and large, Joaquin Phoenix doesn’t do it for me. While I recognize his talent as an actor, he’s never a selling point in a movie for me. I’m not seeing a Joaquin Phoenix movie. I’m seeing a movie that Joaquin Phoenix is in. Change this to a Michael Shannon movie and I’m at least a couple percentage points more interested*. Similarly, Mike Mills’ particular brand of thoughtful rumination doesn’t connect with me as well as others. Beginners and 20^th Century Women I also thought were good but didn’t blow me away. The David Lowery or Richard Linklater version of this I probably would’ve liked better. And it’s petty, but the blank and white annoyed me. I’m getting tired of that getting used as a cheat code to make a movie more respectable. It’s like a musician going acoustic to make a song feel more personal. I see what you are doing.

 

*OK, I don’t think Michael Shannon would be right at all for this. I just did a quick search for actors born the same year as Phoenix and I noticed his name first. Don’t let that distract from the greater point.

 

As I said, it’s a bunch of small things that got in the way of me connecting with the movie as much as I’d’ve liked too. I liked it enough though. Pairing Phoenix with a child is a smart way to bring out his best qualities as an actor and temper his worst. He carries himself with so much “hurt child” energy to begin with that forcing him into a situation where he has to be the adult creates interesting conflict in his performance. As is, C’mon C’mon is feeling a lot like a Moonlight: a movie I respect that leaves me on the outside looking in.

 

Verdict: Weakly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Jackass Forever

Premise: 20 years later and they are still pranking.

 

Two of the biggest turnarounds I’ve had in fandom over the years are both from the early 2000s: The Fast and the Furious and Jackass. The Fast and the Furious I hated at first. It took the remarkable pivot to success with the 4^th film for me to go back and appreciate the first few films for what they were. Jackass I think I hated even more. It was just a bunch of dumbasses pranking each other. At 14, I couldn’t articulate why it bothered me, but now, I think it was some mix of “they’ll put anything on TV” and believing the pranks came out of a desperate need for attention. I’m still not fully on board with Jackass, but over time, I’ve definitely come to appreciate it more.

 

The odd thing about watching Jackass Forever is how much history there is to it. While there are some new recruits they brought in, the core of the movie is the same group of guys doing the same stupid shit to each other. None of them need to do this. It’s not a cry for attention. They aren’t doing the pranks to get people to like them. This is literally just how they get along. You get the sense that these guys would be pulling these same pranks and trying these stupid stunts even if there were no camera [albeit on a much smaller scale]. At first, it all looks like cruelty, but then you start to see the amount of trust involved. I’m shocked each time a prank or stunt goes horribly wrong and the victim ends with a smile. It’s cool how many of the stunts were variations of things they did 20 years ago too. I never thought Jackass would make me sentimental, but here we are.

 

Look, I have my issues with it too. I hate hidden camera pranks on unsuspecting people. Maybe I have a stick up my ass or sound holier than thou about it, but I just don’t find it funny when the joke is on people who didn’t sign up for this. Even if they sign wavers afterwards. It’s why I mostly enjoyed the Jackass movies but couldn’t stand Bad Grandpa. And I don’t care for dick, semen, and shit humor as much as them. Thank god I didn’t see this in theaters, because I had to be able to look away at numerous times.

 

Still, the movie is a tight 96 minutes. It’s admirable seeing the original crew still taking some of the roughest stunts. It’s crazy to think that the new people literally grew up on Jackass and were motivated to do stunts in the first place because of them. This is lowest-common-denominator entertainment, but once every few years, that’s ok.

 

Verdict: Weakly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse

Premise: A wife’s home movie about her husband’s extended work trip.

 

I’ve come to noticed that documentaries often become victims of their own notoriety. The elevator pitch of the movie is so intriguing that the truth of the movie ends up a little disappointing. Catfish created a new lexicon for the internet age with its crazy story proving that you never know who you are talking to on the internet. Then I watched the movie and realized that the story was more sad than sensational. Blackfish became infamous as a takedown of Sea World, then I couldn’t even finish the movie because of how lopsided the story telling was. Super-Size Me was a lot tamer than it sounded. Murderball wasn’t as brutal as it was billed. I’m sure if I ever watch the Fyre Fest docs, I’ll be disappointed by the difference between their reputation and actuality.

 

That’s where I am with Hearts of Darkness as well. It’s a very famous documentary. Its story of a film production gone mad has seeped into the fabric of Apocalypse Now more than any other troubled production. I’ve seen parodies of it on things like Documentary Now! and Community. So, when I finally got to the real documentary, it was a little underwhelming. It was all familiar already. Ironically, the very reputation this movie created made Hearts of Darkness feel like some late-era mythmaking of Apocalypse Now. Like, I found myself thinking “Do I really need to see another account of how hard the production of Apocalypse Now was?”, fully aware of the irony of thinking that about the film that was the original account of it.

 

Hearts of Darkness is good and probably better the less you already know about how Apocalypse Now was made. It’s nice to get confirmation that most of those scenes were as awful to film as they looked. And it’s Exhibit A in my often-repeated thought “It’s a minor miracle that any movie can get made and even be functional”.

 

Verdict: Weakly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Antlers

Premise: A teacher learns that her student may be connected to some murders and creature sightings around town.

 

This comes from the genre “Stuff someone heard about in passing while on vacation then made a movie about what they remembered”. Other entries include The Forest, about the suicide forest in Japan and The Ruins about ruins in Mexico. I don’t know if Antlers is based on any kind of real Native American folklore, but it sure sounds like someone took the basics of a story and made it into horror. I’m really not against this idea. Some good movies come out of it. Antlers is more of an OK movie.

 

I like that it gives Keri Russell a leading role. It remains strange to me that she isn’t a couple rungs higher on the fame list. It’s a Guillermo del Toro-produced, Scott Cooper-directed movie, and it looks exactly like a movie produced by Guillermo del Toro and directed by Scott Cooper. It has del Toro’s creature fascination and Cooper’s eye for the less glamorous side of things. Antlers is set in a soggy, rundown part of Oregon. It does trend a little more toward gawking than exploring in how it looks at the community. The creature visuals are pretty cool. In a 99-minute package, this was harmless enough that I enjoyed it.

 

I do wish it would’ve picked a lane when it came to the commentary and allegory. There’s a lot about generational trauma, poverty, and Native American culture. The movie is at its best when it’s being a horror movie, but often, it felt like it would rather be a supernatural drama. Given the choice though, I’d rather them keep it relatively short and short-change a few topics than drag for over 2 hours to cover everything sufficiently.

 

Verdict: Weakly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: The Bubble

Premise: A film cast and crew attempt to film the 6^th installment of a moderate blockbuster while in COVID isolation.

 

This! This right here is what I mean when I say that Netflix is for bottom of the pile projects. In a lot of ways, Netflix has been a godsend for film production. In an attempt to fast-track their reputation as a respectable studio, Netflix has thrown money at major filmmakers and producers to work with them. This seems to happen in one of two ways. The first is that they tell the filmmaker they will make that ambitious project that every other studio in town has turned down due to expense or lack of commerciality. The second is that they throw money at the filmmaker to make anything. In the first group, you have things like The Irishman or Roma. In the second you have Christopher Guest making Mascots or the Adam Sandler deal. Either way, there’s a feeling that Netflix is making something other studios have rejected or something the filmmakers don’t think is worth bringing to the studios. Hence, bottom of the pile projects.

 

I love Judd Apatow’s movies. As a producer, I think he’s one of the defining voices of the 2000s. I loved his early films when he was giving overdue star vehicles to the likes of Steve Carrell and Seth Rogen. I loved his deeply personal films like Funny People and This is 40. I’ve liked his more recent films where he lent his talents to someone else’s project (Trainwreck, The King of Staten Island). Never question my love of Judd Apatow’s work.

 

With that said, The Bubble is by far the weakest movie he’s been this involved with. I don’t know the specifics of how it came about, but this is how I imagine it. Late 2020, Apatow heard about the filming of Jurassic World Dominion and thought, “That could be a funny idea for a movie: a movie about shooting a movie in quarantine”. It wasn’t a fully formed idea. He brought it to Netflix, who had been calling him, asking him to do anything for them. Netflix immediately said yes. Like, they didn’t even stop to ask him what it was about. They just said yes. Now Apatow is on the hook for a movie that’s still being written. It’s going to be about the pandemic despite not knowing what the fallout of it would really be. He gets together whatever mix of people he can. Obviously, his wife and daughter are on board*. He’s heard Karen Gillan is always game to be funnier in stuff. He casts a net for any familiar stars who want to sign on and reels in David Duchovny, Keegan-Michael Key, and Pedro Pascal. He signs on a few rising comedy stars that not everyone has heard of like Maria Bakalova and Guz Khan. Finally, he sets up a few Zoom and real-life cameos. That’s enough for a movie.

 

*I adore Leslie Mann and think Iris Apatow has a lot of potential. She’s very good in Netflix’s Love. That said, Judd Apatow has some of the most transparent nepotism in his projects. They are good, but it is funny to laugh at it.

 

It’s hard to pick a single reason why The Bubble doesn’t work. The movie is absolutely too self-aware. It’s a movie about making a movie. It stars actors who made this movie in a bubble commenting on how annoying it is to make a movie in a bubble. It tries to comment on both how hard it is to be in a bubble and how actors still have it so much easier than everyone else. It’s mocking actors complaining about the hardships while also putting exaggerated hardships on them. This movie tries to make way too many points at the same time.

 

COVID humor has been a tough egg to crack. TV and film are by nature slow. This movie was written sometime in 2020 or early 2021. Filming was completed by April 2021. That was a lifetime ago in the COVID cycle. A year later, none of the COVID humor of the movie works. Dozens of other projects have done the same jokes about going stir crazy inside, not liking the nasal swab, and the existence of a secret vaccine that all the rich people got first. It’s responding too directly to COVID-19 without the value of hindsight. There’s genuinely nothing clever about it. The reason a movie like Tropic Thunder is able to work is because even in its commentary, it’s responding to general trends, not exact one. The Bubble hopes that jokes that worked in late 2020 will still work over a year later. There’s a reason why the best timely humor exists on late night shows. They can make the jokes before they get worn out. The Bubble is a sketch from the end of a Last Week Tonight episode that has been stretched into an entire movie a year late.

 

Not to pile on, but the stuff commenting on the movie industry in general isn’t that great either. Judd Apatow is a filmmaker who has been able to work for 20+ years making increasingly personal projects. It’s weird to watch a movie from the guy who got to make This Is 40 that’s complaining about how the Hollywood machine only makes tired blockbusters. A small change in this that I think could’ve made all the difference is if the scenes of Cliff Beasts 6 (the movie within the movie) actually looked competent. Isn’t it more interesting if there’s a contrast between the onscreen product and what’s going on behind the scenes? Then, when a scene falls apart because of a production mistake or an actor’s ego taking over, it’s more effective. Even a stupid blockbuster is competent. This was based on a Jurassic World COVID production. I haven’t liked the Jurassic World movies, but the problem with them is that they are 15-20% away from being great, not that they look cheap. The idea of The Bubble is that Karen Gillan’s character returning to the Cliff Beasts franchise is going to be a boon for her career, but Cliff Beast 6 looks like a straight to DVD sequel from its inception. Think about the biggest flops. The problem isn’t that they look like Ed Wood movies. The problem with a Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore is that is looks like an expensive, professionally-made movie yet all the structural parts are off slightly, from the story to performances.

 

The most telling and damning thing about The Bubble is that by far, my favorite parts were the TikTok dance segments. And that kind of proves my point. Those are the only time in the movie when anyone seems competent. They are being ridiculous but everyone is hitting their marks. It’s the only time when I believe that any of these people could actually be movie stars. It’s a lot like Michael Scott on The Office. That show is mostly a joke, but a couple times a season, Michael Scott would do something to remind you how he got his job. They show that he really is an amazing salesman. I needed those moments to make his most insane moment works. The Bubble only has the insanity. There’s none of the grounding.

 

Verdict: Strongly Don’t Recommend

Delayed Reaction: A Room with a View

Premise: A woman trapped by proper English society has promised herself to one man despite falling for another.

 

The Merchant/Ivory pictures, I’ve learned, are a “you had to be there” kind of thing. The Marchant/Ivory brand was such a defined product that it took me years to realize that was the name of the producer and director, not just the name of the production studio. In my defense, it doesn’t help that “Merchant” and “Ivory” are both words with meanings that could even work together. How is that name different than Castle Rock Productions or Working Title Films? Anyway, Marchant Ivory is its own genre that today has come to mean the worst kind of stuffy Oscar bait. While they never snagged a Best Picture award, they sure came close. The film for this post actually lost to a film, Out of Africa, that I’d probably guess was Merchant Ivory.

 

I can’t say I’ve come away from the few Merchant Ivory films I’ve seen with a higher opinion than “stuffy Oscar bait”. A Room with a View is a fine film. The cast is incredible. It has a sly sense of humor that can get lost in the fancy costumes. I certainly don’t begrudge anyone who does like the movie. I just found it a hair too stolid for the romance of it to work. It gets to a scene like when Lucy (Helena Bonham Carter) and George (Julian Sands) first embrace and it felt perfunctory. I didn’t get any animal magnetism; just a need to complicate the story.

 

Without such a terrific cast, this film would be absolutely inert. I’m embarrassed to say that despite knowing Daniel Day-Lewis was in the film and even mentioned in the opening credits, it still took me too long to realize who he was in the film. I often find him overrated, but he sure can disappear into a role. It’s an odd era to see Maggie Smith and Judi Dench in. Of course, I know of them in their AARP eras and I’m comfortable seeing them as young women. Mid-1980s, when they were 50, is a bizarre in-between. They’re good, of course, but I kept mentally adding 15 years to them. It was weird seeing Helena Bonham Carter (in her film debut) so young. She must’ve been 18-19 when she filmed this and holds her own with all the adult characters so well. There are some actors who were never children no matter how young they look. Margot Robbie has the same thing. I tend to associate Carter so much with her Fight Club/Tim Burton era that I forget how much of an ingénue she was in her early years.

 

Verdict: Weakly Don’t Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Moonraker

Premise: James Bond travels around the world and into Outer Space to save the world.

 

Occasionally I think about binging all the Bond movies I haven’t seen. It’s a series I’d like to be a completist for. It’s fun tracking how it has evolved over the decades, including the failed attempts to jump on trends. I think I prefer how I’ve been doing it though. I get to a new Bond movie once or twice a year and in a crazy order. This isn’t a very serious franchise. Even the Daniel Craig films are metatexually fun despite the films’ serious tone. So, it’s much more enjoyable to treat these films as a goodie bag that I’ll keep taking from until it’s empty. In my mind, there’s always another Bond movie with something silly or creative going on.

 

Moonraker is among the silliest Bond movies I can remember. “In space” is a punchline people use to joke about a franchise that has gone off the rails. It’s hilarious to think that the producers saw the Star Wars popularity and thought this was a good way to jump on that bandwagon. Jaws is also a funny villain. He’s arguably the most powerful henchman Bond has faced. His size alone is a sight gag. Giving him the metal teeth is plain cartoonish. By the end of the film, he’s outlandish and even a little lovable. I kind of miss the days when Bond girls had names like Holly Goodhead. It’s so direct that it doesn’t even count as wordplay. I definitely appreciate the nutso energy of these Roger Moore movies over the more generic Timothy Dalton movies a decade later.

 

Verdict: Weakly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: The Last Black Man in San Francisco

Premise: A black man looks for a way to take back the house his grandfather built in a neighborhood that has mostly pushed out the non-affluent.

 

There’s a sentimentality in this film that I lack, which affected how I watched this. It’s ultimately a movie about a love of a place. The scene at the end on the bus when Jimmie Fails says “You don’t get to hate it unless you love it” is something I don’t connect at all with. I’ve lived in Louisville my whole life except for college. I like living here. I’ve found the areas of the city I enjoy. I wouldn’t call myself a proud Louisvillian though. I doubt I’d say that about any city I lived in. I’m not a community kind of person, and I don’t mean that in a “I’m a nonconformist” way. I mean, I’m a straight white atheist with no specific cultural history. My parents have no traditions from the old country. There are no communities which I naturally fall into like a church. I say none of this as a complaint. I’m not saying I wish that I had a safe space to celebrate my white guy culture. I’m just explaining where I’m coming from with this movie*.

 

*I think the closest I come is that I’m a Disney World adult. But even with that, I enjoy that there is a Disney World. I don’t get choked up by the founder’s plaque or treat Walt Disney as a folk hero. I’m impressed with Disney World as a product and engineering marvel. It’s a place I enjoy going to not a special or sacred place. I understand my transactional relationship with it.

 

The Last Black Man in San Francisco is a really great movie about San Francisco and the frustration of the people who live there who feel like the city no longer wants them. There’s almost a poetry to the movie that can make it feel like a daydream at times. Jimmie Fails and Jonathan Majors are both great in it. The world of the film is well-observed and lived-in. There’s a tangible difference to a movie where the filmmaker knew the streets of every location before the location scout found them.

 

I liked this movie as much as I could without loving it. So much about this film relies on me being able to relate to “You don’t get to hate it unless you love it” and I can’t quite get to there. I’m like most of the people in the film telling Jimmie it’s just a house. Much of the connection with this film will depend on if you have this brand of sentimentality.

 

Verdict: Weakly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: After Yang

Premise: In a not-too-distant future, a father goes looking for a way to repair the robot sibling he purchased for his adopted daughter.

 

My main memory about this movie is how quiet it feels. I don’t know that it actually is quiet. It’s just the tone of the movie. The film is basically an extended obituary, which is a type of movie I realized I like a lot. Citizen Kane I truly love, and that’s about a reporter finding out about a man’s life. I adore Me & Earl & the Dying Girl, and a lot of that has to do with the scene at the end when it explores the Dying Girl’s room after the funeral. I love the idea of investigating a life without the person. Hell, one of the most formative shows for me is the old MTV competition Room Raiders which was all about trying to piece together who someone was based on their room. After Yang starts as a somewhat bureaucratic quest for Collin Farrell to get the robot sibling, Yang, back for his daughter, but it turns into a journey into the unseen sides of Yang. The more I think about it, the more I’m liking the movie.

 

Writer/director Kogonada seems to like these low energy films. His first movie, Columbus, could lazily be describe as “two sad loners walk around Columbus, IN”. After Yang has the same energy, but it works for it. Collin Farrell has sneakily turned into an internal actor. I don’t need him to give some big speech to understand the curiosity and fear that drives him for much of the movie. At first, he’s afraid he needs Yang because he won’t be enough for his daughter, then it turns into a realization that he never got to know Yang as well as he could’ve. Farrell is really good in this. I was happy to see Haley Lu Richardson come back. I do wish Jodie Turner-Smith had a bit more to do, but some of that was the design of the movie.

 

I didn’t love After Yang. Kogonada is a bit too deliberate with the pace and vision for the film. It really needed a few more moments of life like those excellent opening credits. Really excellent opening credits. I’m likely to rewatch those before I ever rewatch the movie. And perhaps that implicitly promised something early that the movie then ran away from. And there was something too familiar about the realization of Yang’s past life. It felt a lot like Bicentennial Man or even late-stage Janet on The Good Place. When Farrell goes through Yang’s memories, that really should’ve wrecked me. It the exact kind of thing I respond to.

 

Verdict: Weakly Recommend