For Zoom the Bell Tolls

Sometimes I don’t know where to start because I’m so overwhelmed by a movie’s brilliance that building something to share with you and paring down the themes in a way that I hope will inform your viewing experience should you take the time to watch said movie can be hard when staring at a blank screen.  The movie I’m bringing you today is not that kind of movie.

No, today I’m bringing you a movie that is so bad, I don’t know where to begin with it at all.  I’m talking about the 2025 Prime Video original film, War of the Worlds.  Starring Ice Cube (21 Jump Street, Three Kings) and Eva Longoria (Desperate Housewives, Nespresso: The Detective).  A COVID-19 production, it was filmed entirely remotely and is told through computer screens and phone footage.  That’s not the best way to make a film, as admirable as it is that it could have been done during the pandemic; why this movie took 5 years to get to streaming, I’ll never know.  But by now, it feels like the death knell for this format of storytelling, after films like Searching (2018) and Missing (2023) and shows like Staged (Britbox’s excellent pandemic dramedy starring David Tennant and Michael Sheen) and Modern Family managed to do it so effectively.  Unfortunately for anyone who wants to delve into this creative form of storytelling, it will forever be haunted by the ghost of War of the Worlds; this feels like the “jump the shark” moment for this narrative structure.

Adapting any novel is difficult, especially trying to take one that is so outdated and has many adaptations to its name already.  And it proved to be too difficult a challenge for the team behind this one.

Will Radford (Ice Cube) logs into his job at Homeland Security, firing up the invasive surveillance machine to spy on just about everyone and everything—people on the streets, government buildings, and above all, his own children.  Radford is about the most unsympathetic protagonist I can remember watching in a long time; as he’s going about his threat checks, he gets a call from Sandra NASA (Eva Longoria).  I’m not sure if her name is Sandra NASA, but since she also works at NASA, that would be quite the coincidence.  Am I the only person who puts first and last names in their phone?  After undergrad, I looked at my contacts and realized having 8 entries that just said “Mike” (and one that said “Mike vodka double shot?”) wasn’t a very efficient way of keeping in touch with people.  Was that one Mike with 8 different phone numbers?  Was it 8 different Mikes?  There’s no way I knew that many people named Mike.  Anyway, she’s asking about very strange weather patterns that are becoming dangerous.  He immediately dismisses her and reiterates that all he cares about are human threats, not the weather.  Not only is he running a seriously invasive surveillance program that goes way beyond the NSA’s metadata collection in a very dystopian governmental program, he also loves to spy on his adult children.  He calls up his very pregnant daughter Faith to criticize her for buying a muffin for breakfast and tells her to eat a single hard boiled egg instead.  And then he hacks her fridge to point out that she’s not eating enough protein. 

Just normal dad stuff, right?  Not at all controlling, red flag behavior.  Then he hacks his son Dave’s computer and deletes a video game off it because he thinks games are a waste of time.  Not considering at all that his son’s job involves video games; he just wants him to stop doing whatever he’s doing and join the NSA so he too can be an invasive, rights-violating surveillance jockey for the government.  When his son’s protests, he justifies his work because having your rights violated is better than being killed by terrorists.  Which is an insane thing to put in a movie that you’re releasing in 2025, a time in which masked men are rolling up in unmarked SUV and black bagging people on the street in the name of a safer society, but I guess this was written during the pandemic, so we weren’t worried about being put in concentration camps back then?   It’s okay though, he’s got a dead wife, which is a shortcut to making us care about him.  Right?  If this is the society we’re fighting for, let the aliens win.

After that lovely interchange between father and son, Faith’s boyfriend Mark calls him up to ask him to reconsider going to Faith’s baby shower.  Now, I know what you’re thinking; Radford sounds like he’s be a damn ball at parties, of course they want such a fun guy there.  But no, as it turns out Faith never invited Radford to the shower and he didn’t know it was happening.  So, taking a moment to reflect on what behavior as a father would lead to his daughter not wanting him to share in that wonderful moment together, he realizes his mistakes as a parent and starts to make positive changes in his relationship with his children.  I’m kidding, of course.  His immediate response is to hack her computer and spy on her iMessages with her boyfriend so he can see what they’re saying about him.  Very healthy.  Not at all a massive violation of trust.  And also probably not something you’re supposed to do when working at DHS.  If one of his coworkers caught him using government resources to spy on his adult children, he’d have been in lots of trouble.  Luckily, for some reason in this massive DHS building, he’s the only one there.  He’s the only one in the room, he’s the only one seemingly in the building, and they never explain why or even address it a little bit.  While he’s dropping electronic eaves on his daughter, they slot in the heaviest-handed foreshadowing I’ve seen in a movie in some time.  Mark reassures Faith that she’s going to save the world someday with her work, a “Cannibal Code” that will rewrite DNA to attack sick cells.  If you’ve seen any adaptation of War of the Worlds before or read the book or have seen Independence Day, you know where that particular thread is going.

But being predictable isn’t this movie’s problem.  It’s hard not to be at least a little predictable when you’re adapting a 125 year old novel—some plot points are going to make their way into the public consciousness in that time period, as much as you try to avoid spoilers.  Everything is this movie’s problem.  The writing is baffling at times, the special effects are horrendously bad, often using spotty connections and pixelated VC calls to try to cover up the fact the CGI looks terrible.  For a reported $65 million budget, it feels like someone is walking around with $64 million in their back pocket.  Back in 2010, Gareth Edwards made Monsters for $500,000 and did the special effects on his laptop in his bedroom and that looked better than this.  And so much of the movie just doesn’t make sense.  While helping the FBI conduct a raid on Disruptor, an Anonymous-like hacker group, the lead FBI agent puts him on FaceTime and walks into the location with her phone up in one hand and her gun in the other so he could watch the raid as it happens.  Shouldn’t the FBI have more specialized gear for that sort of thing?  Don’t tell me that bodycams are just cell phones taped to people’s chests.  Doesn’t matter though, not a single shot is fired as the hacker they were after wasn’t where they tracked him to.  But after that, meteors come raining down all the over the world, peppering the globe with what looks like a massive meteor shower.  In a very Star Trek: The Original Series moment, Radford is thrown around a bit in the shock of nearby crashing meteors and spills his coffee on himself.  It is a cheesy and an unintentionally funny moment, one of many in the film.  Also, throughout the film, there are numerous news reports that are always immediate, accurate, and tailored for Radford to hear exactly what he was hoping not to hear.  It constantly takes you out of any modicum of immersion that you can have in this movie.  Furthermore, global networks go down, leaving the world’s militaries stranded and planes falling out of the sky; yet when it’s convenient for the plot, everything is working again with no explanation.

Sandra gets to one of the crash sites and, yes, video calls Radford to show him around it.  A lot of this movie is based around nonsensical Zoom calls where the person on the phone is doing something that they most definitely should have two hands free while doing and also not splitting focus to look at their phone.  As the video feed gets conveniently fuzzy, we see the big reveal; there’s something alive in the meteors!  Now, in addition to this pixelated video mechanic not being a compelling storytelling device, much like the conveniently cutting out radios in Jurassic World, it also feels like a shameless way to shove product placement in our faces.  Throughout the course of this movie, we see FaceTime, Zoom, Microsoft Teams (RIP Skype), iMessage, and WhatsApp, at the very least, and that’s just in the communication app space.  Not only is Faith’s boyfriend an Amazon delivery driver, the phrase “see what’s in their Amazon shopping cart” is used multiple times and someone is even bribed with a $1,000 Amazon gift card.  You know, just in case you forgot you were watching the movie on Amazon’s video streaming service.  Anyway, the aliens start blowing a bunch of stuff up, including the lead FBI agent.  Good thing these characters are all so one-dimensional or that might have been sad.  His son calls him, trying to give him what he says is important information, but in typical fashion, Radford dismisses him outright and argues with him for seemingly longer than it would take for Dave to give him the information in the first place.  So instead of listening and possibly getting something useful, he just hangs up.  Remember, we’re supposed to root for this guy.

All this happens about 25 minutes into the movie, which doesn’t seem like a long time to wait for the big reveal that aliens are coming in your alien movie, but it’s nearly a third of the way into this 91 minute film and it feels like it was an hour.  Or two.  I was honestly shocked that it was only 25 minutes because it had been such a slog to get there.

Radford watches footage from all over the world, the camera cuts to him writing out what’s happening as it happens, because watching him watch it happen probably isn’t enough for us to get the idea.  The movie wants it extremely clear that the aliens who crash landed on Earth and started blowing everything up are really not great folks.  He gets in touch with Faith, who for some reason decided to leave the building where she was sheltering because despite being a very smart scientist, she’s incredibly stupid and the movie apparently can’t happen unless an alien tripod attacks her, leaving Radford worried that she died for a few seconds.  Because still in the midst of a global attack that is probably killing millions, if not billions of people, the only thing we care about is the protagonist’s family and it’s the only thing he seems to care about.  As she’s running away and holding her phone on FaceTime, she falls down.  Actually, pretty much everyone who is running from something on a video call falls down, sometimes multiple times.  It’s as if trying to look at a phone while running from chaos is a bad idea.  So her leg is impaled and Radford decides that he’s going to go save her.  He runs to the door and it won’t open. “Damn it, they locked it”, he narrates to us in the most unintentionally laugh out loud moment I’ve seen in a movie since I watched Lena Waithe pretend to hand Tye Sheridan a virtual Chucky doll in Ready Player One.  Unable to get through the locked glass—yes, glass, the famously impenetrable material that can never be broken by less than superhuman means—door or the glass walls of his office, he settles for hacking a Tesla to get her to a safe place.  They have an overwrought heart to heart about the baby shower; you can tell that they thought it would be some sort of emotional catharsis, but it’s executed with the panache of a middle school play.  And during this, he starts to write her an email about how hard being a parent is.

We get the reveal of what the aliens are up to and some more very not-surprising reveals as well, and the whole world comes together to protect our “way of life”.  Not our very existence, no, our way of life.  It makes it seem like the aliens came down to gently get rid of social media and make us be nicer to each other, not exterminate the human population.  And so on and so forth, heroic actions abound, conspiracies exposed, and the movie finally comes to an end.

I try my best to find things to like in every movie I watch, I really do.  After all, movies are art and there’s subjective interpretation and most of the time, people put a lot of care and effort into bringing these pieces of art to us.  But War of the Worlds doesn’t feel like there was care and effort put into it.  It felt like a commercial product incompetently made and offered for our consumption.  This is a movie that makes Electric State look watchable and like The Gorge, it felt more like it would have been an engaging game rather than a movie.  This is a movie with a 3% on Rotten Tomatoes and I’m still trying to figure out how 3% of critics (and 21% of audience reviewers) found anything enjoyable about this movie.  The moments of unintentional hilarity are not enough to redeem War of the Worlds or turn it into a so-bad-it’s-good movie; it’s just bad.  If you’re in the mood for down to earth alien invasion sci-fi, I would highly recommend not wasting your time on this and instead watching the aforementioned Monsters (while Gareth Edwards has had more misses than hits at the helm, Monsters put him in line to give us Rogue One) or the absolutely deep, well-thought out, well written, well acted, and well directed Attack the Block, which is everything that this movie is not.

And readers, if you felt like the pictures included in this post were a bit repetitive, imagine what it was like watching the movie because that’s pretty much how it went. 90 minutes of Zoom calls and Ice Cube reaction faces until the credits roll.

Night Bawler

Courage is no good:

It means not scaring others. Being brave   

Lets no one off the grave.

Death is no different whined at than withstood.

“Aubade” by Philip Larkin

It’s not often I open a post with an excerpt from a poem (in fact, it’s never happened before) and don’t worry if poetry’s not your thing; it’s not a new format.  But the movie I am bringing to you today reminded me so much of this poem, that I’ve had open in a tab in my browser since I first heard it in an episode of Devs in 2020, that they’ve become forever intertwined.  Meet Orion, the boy with so many fears that he keeps a sketchbook to document everything he’s afraid of.  And it’s a lot.  Murderous sewer clowns, cell phone cancer, mixing up his words when called on in class even though he knows the answer, cats, dogs, etc.  He’s scared of getting picked on by his bully.  He’s scared of standing up to his bully and accidentally killing him graveyard dead.  It’s pretty much everything.  At one point, the bully grabs his sketchbook and goes through his fears and Orion just thanks him.  It was such a pitiable moment that the bully doesn’t even know where to go from there.  Orion is the poster child for anxiety.

At the end of the school day, he is the only student who doesn’t hand in his permission slip for the class field trip to the observatory—you guessed it, because he’s afraid of everything from the bus ride over to being crushed by the exhibits falling from the ceiling.  Then, as he arrives home, he reveals the saddest fear of all; that his parents will move away while he’s at school, leaving him on his own.  That’s completely unfounded, from what we see of his parents.  They seem supportive of Orion; they understand his fears and they don’t think something is wrong with him.    They don’t try to correct his behavior and they’re never disparaging in any way.  There’s no “that boy ain’t right” moment with Orion’s parent.  Sure, they want to encourage him to face his fears, but they don’t push him and there’s no talk about trying to fix him, which is very refreshing.  And then, as night falls, we get to see Orion’s greatest fears come to fruition.  Darkness.  And death, can’t forget death.  He lies awake at night trying to imagine what death is like—the vast, meaningless darkness that awaits us all, enveloping us in its nothingness.  It’s at this point that I should note that Orion is a 5th grader, about 11 years old.  Wait until you get to your 30s, kid.  It gets rough.  And that’s how the first ten minutes of DreamWorks’ Orion and the Dark goes.  Good god, this is a relatable movie.

And then the dark shows up.  I mean Dark, the embodiment of darkness, the being that makes the nighttime all across the world as the sun dips itself beneath the horizon.  He’s fed up with how afraid Orion is of him and how much his screaming and crying at the darkness interrupt his nightly work.  But more than that, Dark is hurt.  Most people are afraid of him in some way or another, people think he’s evil or ominous or foreboding.  As Dark, voiced by Paul Walter Hauser (Cobra Kai, The Fantastic Four: First Steps), explains it, “so much of how you see yourself is through the eyes of others”.  It’s painful for him to be hated by so many and Orion, voiced by Jacob Tremblay (Room, Luca), is the one who hates him the most.  Dark makes a proposal: Orion comes with him for the night to witness what he does and hopefully he’ll see that the dark isn’t so scary after all.  Of course, Orion refuses at first because he’s, well, too damn afraid.  But not wanting to be afraid of everything for his entire life, he reluctantly agrees to go with Dark.  It’s at this point, we cut to the future, with Orion the adult played with real Colin Hanks energy (which makes sense because, as I looked it up, he is voiced by Colin Hanks of Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle and King Kong fame) telling the story to his own daughter Hypatia.  This was an unexpected form of narrative structure, but a nice one—the scenes with adult Orion and Hypatia are unbelievably cute, reminding me of 8-Bit Christmas’s narrative structure.  It’s not the easiest structure to pull off, but when it works, it’s so satisfying.

Dark introduces Orion to the rest of the Night Entities, taking a break between time zones: Insomnia, Quiet, Sleep, Unexplained Noises, and Sweet Dreams.  The character design here is really interesting; Quiet is an adorable mouse-like fluff ball, Insomnia a bug like creature that buzzes in your ear, Unexplained Noises a bit like a robot.   They don’t love that Dark brought a kid around, but they go about their business anyway, trying to help Dark convince Orion that there’s nothing really all that bad about the night.  Although, if you’re keeping track, Insomnia and Unexplained Noises probably aren’t the best examples; being two Night Entities meant to keep people up at night, whispering your insecurities into your ear and making you wonder just what the hell made that sound (it could be a murderous sewer clown heading your way).  We also meet the one everyone loves to see—Light.  Light, voiced by Ike Barinholtz (Neighbors, The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent), is exactly what you expect him to be: the embodiment of morning, daytime, and sunlight, the thing that brings life to the planet.  Together, they form the constant cycle of day and night that envelopes our world, though they can never be in the same place at the same time.  Should Light ever catch Dark, well, what happens when you shine a light into a dark corner of a room?

From there, the two of them go on their adventure together, with Dark trying to get Orion to confront his fears and, well, sometimes failing.  As Hypatia likes to point out to her dad, parents may like simple stories with neat resolutions, but that’s not real.  And as Hypatia puts it, the only stories that really help are the real ones—so while simple stories may be the most convenient for parents to convey complex moral conundrums in easily digestible ways, that’s not how they always work out.  Just because you face your fears doesn’t mean they go away and certainly not something as primal and evolutionary as the fear of the dark. Cavemen probably didn’t invent fire to cook meat (since we all know it tastes better raw anyway); I mean, I’m sure warmth on cold nights was one of the motivating factors, but a fire fending off the dark of night is most certainly one of the reasons as well.  So true stories resonate more because they’re true and I think we can see the value in being honest about things, especially with children.  I think that sort of honesty imbues kids with realistic expectations for life (just like Orion’s parents telling him to face his fears rather than be fearless).  There’s something so human in honesty, a vulnerability that people connect with, and that’s something this movie definitely is. Honest and vulnerable.

Even the things we’re afraid of can have fears of their own; as Dark faces his own existential crisis, he tells Orion that his fear is more easily managed because Orion is there with him.  And I think that drives home one of the messages of the film, that simply being there for someone—not offering solutions, not trying to “fix” them or their problems (an issue I, admittedly, have myself, but I’m working on it)—can make as much of a difference as anything else.  One of the things that I find most interesting about Orion and the Dark is that Light isn’t the enemy; he’s not an antagonist, as much as Dark seems envious that people are happy to see Light and very much less than excited when he rolls around.  Light’s not the enemy, fear is.  It’s the voice in our head that says we’re not good enough, not smart enough, not thin enough, not tall enough, not enough period.  This is a movie about how we need ourselves and each other to get through the world, because it is a scary world out there.  Just watch the news for 30 seconds, our reality is terrifying.  But it’s through facing our fears that we grow.

The movie isn’t about eradicating fear.  It’s about learning to live with it and through it, not letting it dictate our lives and stop us from experiencing what life has to offer.  Fear can paralyze us and keep us from truly living.  Some fear is good, natural, and necessary.  But it shouldn’t determine our every action.  Bravery may save no one from the grave, as Larkin told us, but it may save us from ourselves.  This is a movie that is ostensibly for kids, but it’s about real adult issues.  Orion has very real fears that go beyond the worry of saying the wrong thing in class—the fear of death, the fear of the unknown, the fear of being alone; these are real things that grip adults everyday.  We live with this fantastic fear of everything and somehow most of us are able to cope with it and make it through our days.  The nights, though, those can be quite a bit harder.  Like Orion, I myself have spent many nights staring at the ceiling, with Insomnia whispering my insecurities and fears in my ear, the ever-present thoughts of what has and will and will not come to pass.  [T]his is what we fear—no sight, no sound, no touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with, nothing to love or link with…but slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape, and we go about our daily business.  Unlike Orion, we don’t get mythological beings to guide us through facing our fears; instead we have to rely on each other.  A burden shared is a burden lightened.  And that is the overarching message here; that with each other, with empathy and understanding, we can face the fears that would otherwise petrify us in place, turning us into stone like we just lost a staring contest with Medusa.

Orion and the Dark may be an animated film, but it’s definitely not just for kids.  It is as deep and complex as the night itself, but funny and heartwarming as well.  Orion is a perfect stand-in for anyone who has felt fear or anxiety gripping at that pump in their chests, and it’s shocking to me that this hidden gem went as under the radar as it did.  It’s rare that a movie approaches fear and anxiety with such care as this does and it deserves to be celebrated.  It lacks the catchy tunes of KPop Demon Hunters, but it’s every bit the real, adult story that Demon Hunters is.  It was apparently released straight to Netflix after the failure of Ruby Gillman: Teenage Kraken to avoid taking a bath at the box office, it snuck through 2024 being an anonymous film, despite its 91% RT score, that is quite simply one of the strongest, most beautiful, and most real stories I’ve seen.  This is DreamWorks dipping into some of that Pixar magic for 93 straight minutes.  And I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Requiem for a Scheme

As the saying goes, cats have nine lives.  Zsa-Zsa Korda has more.  When we meet him for the first time, he’s sitting on his private plane, which explodes, killing the only other passenger, before crashing.  An assassination attempt, nearly successful, and his seventh plane crash.  He’s survived the previous six and, despite a vision of the afterlife, in which his own grandmother doesn’t recognize him, he survives this one too.  And that’s how Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme begins.

One close call in a long line of many, Korda decides to name his only daughter Liesl (sounds like), an aspirant nun, as his sole heir and executor of his estate.  His nine sons (some biological, some adopted) seem none too happy about the idea, one in particular sharpening his toy crossbow bolts and taking a few potshots at dear old dad while he explains the scheme to Liesl.  It’s a grand scheme in Phoenicia, the former name for parts of Syria and Lebanon, taking an arid area, going deep, and essentially stripping it of all its natural resources in a highly lucrative operation that will make a wild amount of money for his family for generations to come; 150 years by his estimates.  Korda, played by Benicio Del Toro (The Usual Suspects, Sicario), is an absolutely ruthless businessman and he doesn’t care a damn thing about anyone or anything but the money.  Much to his daughter’s dismay, played by relative newcomer Mia Threapleton (The Buccaneers) in her first Wes Anderson film, he uses the most underhanded tactics to get his way, including slave labor and causing famine in areas of operation so people have no choice but to work for him and take his meager wagers.  Make no mistake, Zsa-Zsa Korda is a terrible person, an awful father, and perhaps an even worse husband, as he’s currently on three dead wives, with rumors swirling that he murdered them, including Liesl’s mother.  But he has this Rasputin-like ability to survive the many attempts on his life—the multiple plane crashes, of course being the most dramatic, but this is a guy who tests everything he eats and drinks for poison, and with good reason.  I mean, I kind of want him dead and he’s the protagonist.

Meeting with Liesl, they see each other for the first time in years and Korda tells her about the plan and tries to coax her into leaving the Church so she can fulfill these duties he’s trying to thrust upon her.  Initially hesitant, due in no small part to her belief that, as rumors say, Korda murdered her mother, Liesl resists and states her devotion to the Church.  He emphatically denies it, of course, but there’s still doubt in her mind—and yours, when you’re watching.  Eventually she’s convinced after a dinner at his large home with her brothers.  It’s an odd affair, as there’s no fondness between father and sons and Korda’s staff is treated with indifference.  One of the sons says that the soup is good, so Korda summons her to tell her so by banging his foot on the floor twice, prompting the cook to come upstairs.  You can see the real apprehension in her face; she has no idea what will happen when she gets up there.  The meeting between Korda and Liesl is absolute comedy gold.  There’s a deep strangeness between the two and when Liesl finally acquiesces, they go so far as to replace her rosary with a more secular one—the absurdity of the statement left me laughing out loud.  Now, to be fair, I don’t know much about Catholicism, but I’m pretty sure that the rosary is inherently tied to religion and I can’t imagine how you would have a secular version of that.

In the background of all this, there is another scheme in the works, as a shadowy meeting of competing business tycoons and governments who are threatened by Korda convene to find a way to neutralize him.  After all, if someone keeps trying to kill your protagonist, you’ve got to figure that someone is out there orchestrating the whole thing.  And indeed they are, but in this case, the cabal says that killing Korda is over the line; they just want to ruin him, not take him off the map entirely.  Which, I suppose is good and an interesting introduction to one of the main themes of the film, morality and sincerity.  We see two opposite ends of the spectrum at the beginning of the film: Liesl, the pious aspirant nun, fully sincere in her beliefs in what was considered a traditionally moral organization, and Korda, as cutthroat a businessman as you can imagine, someone who only values money even over life and is only barely convincing when he says that he would never murder anyone (or have anyone murdered, which I feel is a distinction that, if you have to make in the first place, casts serious doubt on anything you say you would or wouldn’t do).  The cabal here represents the first of many gray areas that get introduced in the film; obviously they’re not the best folks out there, but they do have lines they won’t cross, which suggests some sort of moral compass within them.  And not one from religion, that’s for sure.   

After Liesl joins up with Korda, he replaces his tutor, a person he hires to teach both him and his children things about their areas of expertise.  The last tutor, you may remember, was bifurcated when the plane in the opening scene went down—he was the passenger who died.  Enter Bjorn, played by Michael Cera (Arrested Development, Barbie), a professor of entomology and some other unimportant disciplines.  It surprised me when I realized Michael Cera has never been in a Wes Anderson film before, because he’s such a natural fit.  He has that deadpan awkwardness down to a highly skillful degree and fits in so well with all the rest of the delivery in Scheme.  It’s pithy and quick, but no one ever makes a joke in the fiction of the story.  It’s purely an absurdist measure—in the world of the narrative, this is how they act and it’s perfectly normal.  But from the outside looking in, I would wager that Scheme is the most laugh out loud Wes Anderson film I’ve ever seen.  I spent a couple hours whiling away time in a hotel room this weekend watching Happy Gilmore 2 and because I couldn’t put together a coherent thought about it other than “I didn’t like this”, I dove into Scheme when I returned home and found myself laughing out loud even more than I was cringing at Adam Sandler’s antics. 

The casting choices are many of the Wes Anderson mainstays, like Bill Murray, Jeffrey Wright, Tom Hanks, Richard Ayoade (another perfect fit for this kind of deadpan comedy), Scarlett Johansson, Willem Dafoe, and Rupert Friend, and seeing a newcomer like Michael Cera bed into his first Wes Anderson movie so well shows off why Anderson is so keen to work with the same people over and over again.  There’s obvious aesthetic and vibe to Wes Anderson films and its makes sense to work with actors who are on board and familiar with it already.  There was really only one other notable newcomer to the Wes Anderson ensemble (outside of Mia Threapleton, of course) in the form of Riz Ahmed (Rogue One, Sound of Metal); a small role, but acted well with a surprising amount of laughs generated from the dramatic actor and rapper.  I was surprised not to see perennials like Adrien Brody, Jason Schwartzmann, and Owen Wilson in the film, but that’s fine, because it was packed with tons of great actors and actresses in mostly very good cameos (I’d say only Scarlett Johansson’s casting felt off; her character and performance were very forgettable in a movie full of noteworthy performances).

Speaking of Wes Anderson’s aesthetic and vibe, Scheme has it in spades.  It immediately looks and feels like a Wes Anderson film, and if that’s a positive for you, then I think you’d definitely like this.  It’s even set in 1950 to help fit that aesthetic.  If you’re on the fence about Anderson, it’s still worth a shot; but if you absolutely can’t stand him, you’re not going to enjoy the film because he’s not doing much different with the way he’s making his film here than he does with the rest of the films he’s made thus far.  But there is one thing that struck me as very different from the movie that got me to perk my ears up and start to revisit his work after being kind of a Wes Anderson hater for much of my life, Asteroid City.  Yes, both movies are stylized and at least somewhat absurd, but Asteroid City drew me in with its portrait of profoundly sad people in a very strange situation.  From there, I gave The Darjeeling Limited a try and while it didn’t beat out Asteroid City for me, I liked it quite a bit and it was also about profoundly sad people.  I don’t know what it says about me that as I get older I am enjoying and identifying more with movies about sad people in strange situations, but there you have it.  However, Scheme isn’t about that; Liesl is lonely, sure, being in a convent and all, and I’m sure Korda is lonely as well, living a solitary life despite being surrounded by staff and children, and fending off near-constant assassination attempts is its own sort of intimacy, I suppose.  But I wouldn’t describe either of them as sad or depressed.  Longing, perhaps; looking for something that’s missing in their lives, even though they don’t quite know what it is yet.  But not sad.  And I think that’s what lends itself to this more overtly comedic film; even though there is depth to it, it is very funny.  In a way, the idea of seeking morality and sincerity in a world of chaos and relentless mercilessness is funny in itself, but not in a “ha ha” funny kind of way, more in an odd funny way.  However, Anderson and the cast bring this absurdity out to you in expert fashion.

But it’s not just funny, there is depth here.  Yes, there’s a lot of religious imagery and every time Korda has a near death experience or even nods off unexpectedly, we’re treated to a black and white vignette of Korda meeting his maker, being judged for his actions, and all the stuff that tends to come along with that.  What ensues is a journey between two opposite ends of the morality spectrum.  Liesl faces temptation, both in the form of both Korda’s money, always a corrupting influence, and Bjorn, who is immediately smitten with her.  What we see throughout the film is a painting of people trying to find acceptance and understanding of themselves in a mad world.  The idea of living a moral and sincere life that comes from within yourself instead from an external source, like religion, runs through the entire film—it starts with a despicable protagonist and ends with something else.  Korda has to learn a new way of interacting with the world as he realizes that he is indeed incomplete with the life that he’s been living.  Every major character in the film needs to change to live a life true to who they are and a good one as well.  So on top of being really quite funny, it’s a fairly beautiful film and I kind of can’t wait to watch it again.

The Phoenician Scheme may not make a fan out of a Wes Anderson hater, but if you’re open to his very distinct style of filmmaking, the brisk 1 hour, 41 minute film is worth your time and it’s available for streaming on Peacock.  With a 77% RT score, I was, like Liesl, hesitant myself, as I’ve discussed the curse of corporate mediocrity in the 70% range, but this doesn’t fall into that trap at all.  I, for one, am looking forward to revisiting even more Wes Anderson movies that I might have passed over because this is three in a row now that have really spoken to me.  It’s a movie that asks you to help yourself to a hand grenade and in this case, my answer is an emphatic yes, please, I’ll take one.

Lone Wolf and Stub—The Fantastic Four: First Steps

Well, it’s that time again.  Another trip to the celluloid cathedral for me to tell you about.  As a reminder, this Lone Wolf and Stub series of posts are spoiler-free looks at movies I went to go see in the theater.  Today, I want to tell you about The Fantastic Four: First Steps.

It’s no secret that Fantastic Four movies in the past have failed miserably.  In the pre-MCU days, we had Chris Evans, Jessica Alba, Ioan Gruffudd, and Michael Chiklis portray the title family and that was the most successful movie we’ve had from the foursome, enough to get a sequel even worse than itself.  Then we had the utterly misguided misstep that was the Miles Teller-led Fant4stic, and the less said about that movie the better.  I did watch it once, but it had the effect of a white noise machine; it made folding and putting laundry away a welcome distraction from paying attention to that disaster of a movie.

I was cautiously optimistic after Thunderbolts*, but everyone knows that one home run doesn’t make for an MVP season and whether or not I would allow myself to be hopeful that the MCU was turning things around would hinge on subsequent films.  And now with First Steps, I can officially say I think the MCU is on the road to recovering the magic it had lost.

If you’re not familiar with the Fantastic Four as a group, they are four explorers: Reed Richards, Ben Grimm, Sue Storm (later Richards), and Johnny Storm, her brother.  While in space, they were bombarded with cosmic radiation that forever altered their DNA.  Reed became Mr. Fantastic, a full size version of Stretch Armstrong.  Played by Pedro Pascal (The Last of Us, The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent), a man of whom I am a big, big fan, in one of the most well acted, touching, and emotional roles I’ve ever seen him play.  It wouldn’t be too much of a stretch (I’m sorry for the pun) to say that his performance in this movie gave me faith in the concept of fatherhood again.  Almost, anyway.  Ben Grimm comes back as a large rock monster kind of insultingly called The Thing, and this time he’s played with absolutely sincerity and warmth by Ebon Moss-Bachrach (The Bear, The Punisher, which I suppose means we won’t be seeing his return in any future Punisher projects).  Sue comes back as the Invisible Woman, with the power to turn invisible, as it says in the name, and create powerful force fields.  Played by Vanessa Kirby (Mission: Impossible, The Crown), she is the heart and soul of the Fantastic Four, and probably the strongest member of the lot, both in power and emotional fortitude.  Not only that, Kirby stands out in this film, delivering a wonderful performance I can’t wait to sit down and watch again.  But stealing almost every scene is Johnny, who returns as the Human Torch, able to catch fire and fly, played by Joseph Quinn (Stranger Things).  In a role that easily could have been obnoxious, Quinn plays it with an earnestness that is incredibly endearing.  And how could I forget H.E.R.B.I.E., the Wall-E style robotic assistant to the Four, who is almost almost too adorable?  And no, I don’t know what it’s an acronym for and that doesn’t bother me one bit.

They made some very smart decisions with First Steps.  Instead of doing another origin story, we see the group already established and an explanation of what happened, quickly at the beginning of the film.  It allows them to get right into the story they want to tell rather than retreading the same ground that’s been done before, in a paint-by-numbers exercise.  Another thing they did was give proper stakes by setting it in a different universe than the sacred timeline; because you know when someone wants to eat Earth-616, it’s not going to happen.  Because all my stuff is there.  But here on Earth-828, anything could happen.  The 1960s retrofuturistic style of the film gives it a unique look and feel compared to the rest of the MCU films and allows for a very fun and interesting aesthetic that draws you into the world.  A complete opposite turn from Fallout, this is the clean, kind version of the retrofuturistic world, the kind of thing you can imagine Walt Disney thinking up when he opened Tomorrowland in 1955.  Normally I don’t like multiverse stuff because a lot of that is an excuse for “shocking” moments that ultimately mean nothing because your protagonists are usually tourists in an alternate reality, but in this case, you’re there with them.  Their struggles feel real, the people feel real, and, well, when faced with impossible odds, a win isn’t necessarily guaranteed.  And all those people who feel real feel like they’re in very real danger.  It also avoids questions like “Where are all the other superheroes?” because there aren’t any.  The Fantastic Four are the protectors of their world, it is up to them.  No one’s coming to save the day, they’ve got to do it themselves.

On top of all that, First Steps is an incredibly wholesome and heartfelt movie.  Where Thunderbolts* had a great message couched in a lot of snark and darkness, First Steps is the kind of movie you can watch with your kids after Thanksgiving dinner because there’s something there for everyone and very little that parents wouldn’t want their kids to see.  The violence is largely sanitized, the swearing is basically nonexistent, if that’s something you care about, and while there are some scenes that could be a tad bit scary for the youngest of viewers, I don’t think it’s too much for most kids to handle (ultimately, you the parent would have a better grasp of what your kid as an individual can handle or what you want them to be subjected to than I am, and it is PG-13, so, at your discretion, of course).  This movie is the beacon of hope—not just for the MCU—that I’ve been hoping to see on the silver screen and for that, I love it.  I want to see this movie again and I can’t wait to give you a full post on it in the future.