A Talk to Remember

Sometimes there’s a name that, when attached to a project, makes you very excited to see that project.  Those names often come with guarantees—Tom Cruise generally means you’re going to get a high-octane action film with great stunts, Denis Villenueve usually means you’re going to have stunning visuals and visual storytelling (even if I thought Dune was boring Christ-figure nonsense), Ryan Reynolds means you’re going to get Ryan Reynolds playing Ryan Reynolds.  But for me, the number one name that gets me excited might be Mark Duplass.  I know, he’s not really the A-list talent that anchors record-breaking popcorn flicks and you’re likely not going to see him headlining an MCU movie any time soon (though I would have said the same about Paul Rudd and the first two Ant-Man were delightful), but he rarely disappoints. Safety Not Guaranteed, The One I Love, Your Sister’s Sister, Language Lessons, Paddleton; when you see his name attached to a project, especially as more than just an actor, you’re in for a well crafted, emotionally affecting movie that is small in scope and will stick with you for years to come.

Blue Jay (streaming on Netflix) is no different.  Released in 2016 and garnering a 91% RT score, it’s the kind of hidden gem that I love bringing to your attention because even I had never heard of it until I scrolled past it one day in a couch-bound reenactment of browsing the Blockbuster when you don’t know what you want to watch.  Another small scale indie, it stars Mark Duplass, Sarah Paulson, and just about no one else, and is written by Duplass, directed by Alex Lehmann.  Like The One I Love, this is a showcase of two actors’ ability in the craft.  And like a lot of Duplass’s projects, the movie largely improvised; the script itself consisted of a two page outline that was workshopped with a woman-led creative team and then approached fairly cold by the actors.  Duplass said it was the movie that he was perhaps most unprepared for in his career and that was by design.  Much like the overshadowed and underappreciated masterpiece Past Lives, Blue Jay thrives on the genuine performances of its main cast and that was aided by the spontaneity of Duplass and Paulson.  Sarah Paulson especially was a revelation—I’ve seen her act very well before, powerfully even, in shows like American Crime Story (she was fantastic as Marcia Clark), but I’ve never seen her act like this.  It is so low key and natural and just so incredibly real.  The two of them disappear into their roles in really flawless performances that make you feel like you’re there, like you’re watching a memory, not a movie.  I honestly can’t speak highly enough of their performances in this film.

Memory lane is not always the most smoothly paved road to drive down.  Time may be a flat circle, but we experience it as a one way street, always moving forward, relentlessly forward, whether we want it to move or not.  And trying to go backwards down a one way street is at best uncomfortable, at worst inadvisable, and, most of the time, painful.  Even happy memories can be tinged with sadness, because that happiness is in the past.  If you’re not happy now, those pleasant memories may be fleeting moments that leave you feeling more melancholy than before.  I think happiness as a state of being is somewhat of a red herring; happiness comes in moments, perhaps contentedness is more a state of being, but happiness?  A smile on your face and that warm feeling in your chest?  All the time?  Or at least generally?  I don’t think you can reasonably experience that outside of a worry-free childhood.  Maybe I’m wrong and there are people who are truly happy most of the time, but that’s not been my experience.  Regrets stack up, those insomniac nights, those waking somnambulisms; it takes work not to be crushed under the weight of your past decisions, right or wrong.  Blue Jay is a movie about the pain of the past; the mourning of the person you used to be, the life you wanted to lead, and the loss of the fantasies of your future that wither and die as reality sets in.  But that’s not to say that this is a downer or a melodrama.  It’s not sappy, it’s not happy, but rather it’s the natural oscillation of life. It’s a deeply funny movie in some ways and there are moments of pure joy and happiness as the film progresses, just as there are heart-wrenching moments; it’s just like life.  It’s up and it’s down, and, yet, time still marches forward.  The characters play through silly little memories; they are in very different places in life and that makes things difficult.  So yes, memory lane can be a painful place, but it can also be a joyful one.  Life really is a mixed bag, isn’t it?  The bastard.

The black and white film opens with some atmospheric establishing shots before settling in to the quiet picture of Jim (Mark Duplass) standing at the aisles of a grocery story looking quizzically at the items on the shelf when he recognizes Amanda (Sarah Paulson).  Yes, I know, black and white often feels pretentious, but the aesthetic really works here to drive home the dreariness of the town in which it takes place, from where they both fled after their teen years; lacking the vibrancy of color aids the storytelling.  The interaction is short and awkward and Jim is visibly upset at how it went when they part ways, only to bump into each other again in the parking lot.  It’s clear from the off that they have a past and knew each other quite well once upon a time, but have long since grown apart; I’m talking patently obvious from the moment they see each other that their stories were once deeply intertwined.  Jim asks her to coffee and she agrees.  Amanda is in town because her sister is having a baby, Jim is in town because his mother passed away and he is there to manage her affairs.  They haven’t seen each other in twenty years, but it doesn’t take long for them to loosen into an easy chemistry; after the awkwardness of the market aisles, their shoulders stop tensing and they start to catch up.  Amanda is married now, she has two step sons—Jim, upon hearing this news, spontaneously cries.  It’s subtle, not some over the top melodrama, and it’s not the only time it’s going to happen.  He’s emotional about seeing Amanda again and clearly going through a lot in general; surely he must have figured that life goes on, but hearing it causes him to tear up.  He assures her that things are fine, that his face just leaks, and tells her what’s going on with his life, which is considerably less.  No family, a job putting up drywall in Tucson, and now he’s here, sitting in an empty house.

And when I say empty house, I mean a very full house, filled with memories and his mother’s belongings.  It’s haunted by the past.  Overstuffed with supermarket checkout line romance books that somehow make Jim confront his mortality, his room untouched, unchanged since he left town decades ago.  Amanda says that she wants to see it and “the famous lovebirds”, as the only other actor, an old general store owner calls them, return to Jim’s childhood home.  But not before picking up a six pack and some jelly beans and chatting more.  The moments here shared between the two of them are so perfect, so incredibly powerful, such a terrific example of storytelling.  It’s hard to call a movie that is basically a conversation between two people a powerhouse in visual storytelling, but it really is, because of the level of acting between these two.  So much is said with body language and facial expressions; on one occasion, Jim opens his mouth to say something, but nothing comes out.  Amanda opens her mouth slightly, likely to assure him that it’s okay and that nothing needs to be said, but the words don’t come for her either.  And that moment is perfect.  Real.  Genuine.  The product of an occasion that the characters are trying to navigate, not a script where everyone says the right thing all the time.  This nonverbal communication between the two is just absolutely excellent, which adds to this feeling of genuineness and realness in the film.  There’s something about these slice of life films—Blue Jay takes place over the course of one day; an afternoon and an evening—that can just be so powerful when they’re done right.  All the clues of their past are there, they don’t need to sit down and state things that they already know for the benefit of the audience.  If they sat there, eating jelly beans or drinking the bad coffee at the diner they used to go to as kids and said “Well, as we both know, we used to date in high school, it was a passionate and strong relationship that ended irrevocably and significantly and we haven’t seen each other since,” it would take you completely out of the narrative and make the movie feel like a movie, like a product.  If you’ve been reading my blog for a little while, you’ve seen me appreciate when the creative team trusts the audience to pick up on cues and not need everything spelled out.  When you trust your audience and let the actors shine without having to dump a lot of unnecessary exposition, I really appreciate that—when you don’t, when you feel the need to explain every little thing in painstaking and needless detail, and with repetitive retreads, it not only hurts the narrative flow of a story, it also really annoys me.

That is not the case here.  This is the second time I’ve seen this movie and much like watching a mystery again, you see all the clues as to the depth of their story the second time.  But it doesn’t take multiple viewings for Blue Jay to have an impact.  When the penny drops, it hits you like a ton of bricks and upon a second viewing, you see how well everything was choreographed, like a ballet with talking instead of dancing (actually, there is a little dancing, to be fair).  As Duplass himself said, the idea of two old flames meeting again is not new, it’s not novel, but you can tell it in a different way that is new and novel.  And that’s exactly what this movie does.  It’s not about star-crossed lovers who find their way back to each other, it’s not some cliched story you’ve seen a million times, even though the premise isn’t exactly original.  I don’t want to tell you any more about what happens in this film because it’s something every fan of film should experience for themselves—after all, the movie is almost entirely a conversation between two people, if I tell you what they say, it would ruin the whole thing.  And that would be a proper shame, because this is a fantastic movie.  Sit down, put your phone away, and really watch Blue Jay, because that’s the way to really appreciate it.  At a brief 80 minutes in length, it won’t take up your evening, but it might just ruin it in the best way possible.  We are all trying to heal from from something.  We are all dealing with something; perhaps from the past, perhaps in the present, our dystopian now.  But as sad as memory lane can be, I highly recommend this film, even if you’re struggling mentally and emotionally right now, as so many are. Because Blue Jay acts as a reminder that healing is a painful, but possible process.   

Port Circuit

It seems like since John Wick released to surprise (and earned) praise in 2014, we’ve had a spate of revenge thrillers.  From the pale pretenders and copycats like Nobody, to the ultra violent and unforgiving shoot ‘em ups like Wrath of Man, shows that forgot about the thrill part like Black Doves, to emotionally deep and affecting films like the cheesily named, but excellent Riders of Justice and the quiet, contemplative Pig, it seems like every time you turn around, there’s a new revenge thriller coming out.  Some are great, like the aforementioned Riders of Justice and Pig, also Monkey Man, and most of the John Wick sequels (Wick 3 dragged a little, but Wick 4 was more than good enough to justify its nearly three hour runtime), some are less successful, like The Foreigner, which was such a forgettable waste of Jackie Chan’s talents that I can barely remember that I watched it, let alone what happened.

Today, I want to tell you about another revenge thriller that you might have missed when it first came around, Upgrade.  Released in 2018, it was kind of overshadowed by Venom, even though it was a critical success with an 88% RT score and 88% audience score.  It stars Logan Marshall-Green, whereas Venom has Tom Hardy, and to be honest, back in 2018, I used to mix the two up all the time.  Logan Marshall-Green seemed like an American Tom Hardy, the kind of guy you get when you want an outstanding actor in the role, but don’t necessarily want the cost of an A-list superstar like Hardy (if you really want to see a showcase of his abilities as an actor, check out 2015’s The Invitation, an excellent horror indie—and readers, you know horror is not my genre, so I think it’s really something special if I’m mentioning it).  And Marshall-Green brings it in this movie, as I’ve come to expect from him.  In addition to a gruff, but handsome white guy, both movies feature a second voice in their heads that is more than slightly murderous at times.  And, to top it all off, Venom had a recognizable IP behind it and Upgrade did not, and despite the spectacular failure that is Sony’s Spider-Villain-verse, and the fact that Venom was terrible, it was successful enough to get a few sequels and Upgrade is a seemingly forgotten movie. Which is a shame, because it’s quite good.

Upgrade opens on our protagonist Grey working on a 1970s Pontiac Firebird Trans Am in his garage.  He’s getting dirty, working with his hands, and when he drops the engine in, he celebrates it firing up by cracking open a beer.  It’s a very Hank Hill start to a movie about a futuristic world in which robots and AI run much of our lives and there’s constant drone surveillance with facial recognition. Grey’s wife Asha returns home from work in a self-driving electric car that looks like a futuristic Lamborghini Urus with blacked out windows, all angular and sleek.  The contrast couldn’t be more evident; it’s not just the Firebird or his 1971 Dodge Challenger that’s the anachronism, it’s Grey himself.  He’s an analogue man in a digital world, and he’s happy to keep it that way.  Frankly, I understand the impulse; I briefly had an Apple Watch, wore it for about an hour, and promptly returned it before going back to a mechanical watch, fatigued by the constant connectivity and alerts (as much as I wanted to feel like Dick Tracy, talking into my watch, the gimmick wore thin really fast), I drive a car with a manual transmission and wouldn’t have it any other way.  I get it.  Grey doesn’t want or need to be connected all the time, which is increasingly difficult in our world now, but even more so in the near future world of Upgrade, where Cyberpunk 2077-like cybernetic implants are the norm and your coffee table displays your emails.  Opt me out of that, please.

Grey tells Asha that he wants her to accompany him to drop off the Firebird for a client because he can’t take the self-driving car back, since he doesn’t know how to use it and he’s afraid he’d press the wrong button and end up in a different country.  When dropping off the car to reclusive tech genius Eron Keen (that’s right, not Elon; Eron, pronounced like Erin), Asha fangirls a bit—turns out she works for one of his competitors and is a big fan of his work.  He’s then prompted to show off his newest piece of technology, a chip called Stem.  Grey is of course unimpressed by the chip that can do just about anything; where Eron sees the future in Stem, Grey says he sees ten people on the unemployment line.  Eron seems a little miffed that he thinks it would only replace ten, to be honest, and this introduces the central societal conflict that underlies the story—what is the human cost of technological improvement?  I’ve always said that all good science fiction is a way to talk about real societal concerns, and Upgrade is no different.  More on that later, though.

On the way home from Eron’s luxurious underground bunker—I hesitate to call it a house—the car malfunctions, taking Grey and Asha to Grey’s old, crime-ridden neighborhood and proceeds to go full speed into a head-on collision, flipping the car (must be a descendant of Tesla’s Autopilot software).  Now, as I’m sure you can imagine, being in a serious accident is already a bad day, but flipping and being stranded in a dangerous area makes things much worse.  A car full of masked men arrives and things get much worse, very quickly.  Grey is hurt and drags himself from the car, but only in time to watch one of the men pull his mask down and shoot Asha point blank, before shooting Grey in the neck, severing his spine and leaving him a quadriplegic, helpless as he watches his wife die.  It’s a horrifying prospect; shocking random violence, with no rhyme or reason, that strikes in the middle of a happy moment.  Tearing away the person whom you hold most dear, in an irreversible act of cruelty; it’s as unthinkable as it is, sadly, commonplace.  I think it’s part of the reason revenge thrillers are such an easy sell.  We want to know that when people face tragedy, there is a way to get justice, even if the system fails to deliver it.  In a world with an increasingly unreliable justice system, the idea of going outside of it becomes more and more palatable, and even more seemingly reasonable, despite the fact it’s probably a bad idea in reality.  But it’s not reality, it’s the movies (let’s set aside the messages that entertainment media can and do send for the moment).  So how exactly does a quadriplegic get revenge on hardened killers who gleefully murder for no reason?

Enter Stem.  Eron explains to Grey that he can implant (or should I say install?) Stem into his spine to take over the functions that his body can no longer do; Stem can bridge the broken neural pathways and give him his body back.  Grey is resistant at first, wanting to end things, but he eventually acquiesces and has the surgery in secret, because Stem is years away from the human testing phase.  It’s after this that Stem starts talking to Grey, helping him analyze data that the police aren’t able to and giving him some leads on the killers.  What ensues then is some top notch hand to hand action as Grey lets Stem take over and use its faster-than-human reflexes to start a campaign of revenge against the people who took everything from him.  If you’re up for a great action movie that eschews the gun-fu of John Wick in favor of a more brutal approach, Upgrade delivers.  It’s one of the things that helps it stand out from the crowd of Wick-likes and makes it a unique experience rather than a copycat.  And it’s more than that.  Just like John Wick stands above other movies that were similar and how every movie that feels like Die Hard doesn’t quite feel as good to watch as Die Hard, Upgrade has a few tricks up its sleeve to make it special.

I mentioned earlier about the underlying conflict of the greater world in Upgrade and while the movie isn’t always the most subtle in getting the point across, it does indeed have something to say about the world in which we live.  Grey sees the human factor in everything; he’s not what I’d call a people person, but it’s clear that he’s empathetic to the struggles people face.  Upon seeing some folks addicted to VR, he questions the wisdom of living in fake world instead of the real one.  I’m assuming the VR in this near-future is more like OASIS from Ready Player One (a fun book with a movie adaptation I did not care for) and less like the nausea-inducing VR we have now, otherwise it wouldn’t be much of an escape.  But the real one in Upgrade is pretty bleak—unlike the shiny post-scarcity, techno-utopia from Star Trek, this is a dark, gritty world, full of crime and poverty.  I’ve written on the importance of escapism before, but it can be taken too far; if escaping the real world becomes your entire existence, it’s a problem.  Technology is amazing, technology is what allows me to share these thoughts with you, and so many other things, but we’ve already reached a point where tech can seriously interfere with the rest of our lives.  Upgrade shows a snapshot of a society in which tech and life are fully integrated and Grey is the outlier.  The drones above can scan people for their cybernetic implants, the murderer has a gun implanted in his arm, you can be tracked by the technology you put into your body (much like our phones can be used to track us now).  And the cost of all this progress is plain to see when the police have no leads on Asha’s murder and just don’t seem to care too much about it until other bodies start dropping.  After all, it might have been the worst day of Grey’s life, but in this crime-ridden and poverty-stricken world, it’s just another Tuesday for the 5-0.  Tech is being used to replace humans, AI is the new buzzword and the hot commodity, whether or not it works well, and it’s being used in the worst ways.  Being used to replace creative jobs, writing terrible press releases, violating copyrights, replacing artists, used by high school students to write awful papers and avoid learning; we’re already seeing the human cost of technology.  I have no solutions for you, unfortunately, I’m not delusional enough to think I can solve the world’s complex problems from this little blog, but it’s still important to talk about them.  And Upgrade opens the door to conversation.

But like Attack the Block, you can let all the social commentary pass over you and Upgrade is still a great action film, made on a shoestring budget (a reported $5,000,000, which makes you wonder why garbage like Red One cost $250,000,000), that is genuinely fun to watch, has depth to the storytelling, and is well worth the 1 hour, 40 minute run time.  It’s a compact movie with a lot to say and do and it doesn’t waste its time or yours.  Available to stream on Netflix, I definitely recommend checking it out.

Office Headspace

I am a person, you are not.  It’s a cold message no one wants to receive, but one they do in many ways, from many sources.

Severance is back.  If you somehow missed the fervor around it before, I don’t blame you for missing my brief mention of it back in 2022 when it first gripped me and wouldn’t let go.  Now here we are, in the beginning of 2025, and it’s finally returned, after I spent actual years holding off on rewatching it so I could have the freshest eyes possible.  To get you ready to head into the office once again, I want to talk deeply about the themes and implications of the first season.  If you haven’t seen it yet and want to, don’t worry, I’m going to avoid major spoilers.  If you haven’t seen it yet and you’re on the fence, I’m hoping this will convince you to watch it.  And thankfully, Apple TV is doing weekly Friday episodes instead of a binge drop, so there’s still plenty of time to catch up between episodes.

Severance is a process used by a (definitely pharmaceutical, perhaps more) company called Lumon to surgically alter the brain so that the your memories are geographically split in two.  It’s said that the work is so sensitive that some jobs at Lumon require severance and what this does is create a separate you when at the office.  This goes way beyond not friending your coworkers on Facebook or letting them follow you on Twitter, it’s a completely different person that never sleeps, has no friends, and lives exclusively in the office.  Season 1 starts with the extremely talented Britt Lower waking up on a conference room table with no memories.  She’s Helly, she’s told, as she’s greeted by a disembodied voice giving her a survey.  Confused and angry, she asks to leave.  But she doesn’t.  Well, she does, but every time she walks out the door, she walks back in, inexplicably.  After several attempts to quit, which has to be approved by her “outie”, the main personality outside of the office, she receives that cold, cold message.  The outie is a person, Helly is not.  And her outie is 100% on-board with whatever is happening to Helly, so it doesn’t matter that she isn’t.

In Severance, there are mysteries abound.  What are they working on that’s so sensitive?  The team we see the most of, Macrodata Refinement, groups seemingly random strings of numbers by feeling until they’re out of numbers for the quarter.  Why is the technology at Lumon so seemingly out of date?  Seriously, what’s with the 70s aesthetic?  The computers look more rudimentary than when Matthew Broderick had to hold a phone handset up to his modem to connect to the internet in WarGames.  Why are the severed groups kept separate from each other?  Why does Lumon seem so cult-like?  Their handbook is written more like a Biblical text than anything I got at work, which consisted mostly of meaningless motivational garbage and warnings about insider trading.  Just how much power do they have (the town where our severed protagonists live and work is called Kier, a clear reference to the Lumon founder Kier Eagan; he’s even depicted on the license plates; and while we’re talking about license plates, why do they say “a cure, for mankind” in Latin? That sounds like a corporate slogan).  And what exactly does Lumon do?

But that’s not what I want to talk about.  We can have plenty of discussions on the theories, pick apart the clues, but I can’t do any of that without spoiling the show for you.  What I want to focus on more are the implications of severance and the questions raised by the very concept of severing your memories.  And that cold, cold message from Helly’s outie.

It’s not just corporate culture, either, which Severance does ask a lot of questions about, it’s the nature of life and identity itself.  If you have no memories of your outside self, are you the same person?  Who even are we without the memories of who we were?  There’s an old saying, that no man ever steps in the same river twice, because he is changed and the river is changed; but we carry those memories with us, we have the echoes of our previous selves rattling around in that squishy gray trap in our skulls.  Without those memories, how can we be sure of who we are?  Lumon is generous enough to let people use their real first names; up top, our main protagonist, played by the always brilliant and yet somehow still underrated Adam Scott, is depressed widower Mark Scout.  We see him crying in his car and always cloaked in darkness when he’s in the outside world, a complete mess, rudderless and adrift in a sea in which he no longer feels complete after the loss of his wife.  On the severed floor, he’s the relatively well adjusted Mark S., but only because they told him so and he has to believe it.  You’re given a name, kept separate not only from your coworkers (so they don’t find each other on the outside; they’re given staggered entrance and exit times to minimize outside contact), but also from yourself.  You don’t even get to know who you are; outside clothes are changed and kept separate, Mark even has to leave his Vostok in the locker in favor of a sterile dial watch.  Any reminder of yourself is quite literally checked at the door.  Mark is running from the grief of losing his wife, but we all carry things like that with us.  We all have pain, grief, and trauma that haunt us, that fly invisibly above our heads like a cloud in an ad for antidepressants.  But we have joy as well, we have happy memories, we have formative memories, and they’re part of us too.  They’re the parts that make the cloud easier to deal with, the parts that make things better when it seems like they’re all bad.  Divorcing yourself from the grief may seem attractive, but at the cost of losing your joy, losing your self, is that worth it?

I suppose that’s a question that you’d have to answer for yourself, if you lived in a world where the severance procedure exists, but I know what my answer would be—and it’s a resounding no.  I’ve thought back on the things that I’ve gone through in my life and even my worst days, the ones that creep into my mind when I’m staring at the clock on my bedside table late at night, I wouldn’t give them up, not even for a few hours a day.  Because those bad days made me who I am just as much as the good days.  As The Babadook showed us, grief isn’t something you get over, even the acceptance stage in the DABDA model doesn’t mean that you’ve let it go; it just means that you learn to live with it, that though it with stays with you, it loses its power.  Joy doesn’t.  Joy stays with you and doesn’t fade.  Sure, the salient details may fade as memories do, but the feelings stay with you and they don’t lose their power.  I may not remember the exact route of my driving test, but I definitely remember the feeling the first time I took to the open road as a licensed driver. I wouldn’t trade that, not even for a brief escape from my ghosts.

Severance also asks a lot of questions about work/life balance, a wink-wink-nudge-nudge phrase used often in jobs where the balance is meant to be tipped heavily towards work.  I remember getting my first BlackBerry, which somehow was meant to make my work/life balance better, but also seemed to mean that even though I’d get home from work at 7 or 8 at night, I was still supposed to be available.  It’s funny how these technological advancements are sold as making our lives better, but the ultimate benefit seems to be with the employer.  Now, a severed employee shouldn’t have to worry about taking work home with them, this is a completely different problem.  It creates a version of you with no rights, no anchor in the world.  It creates an unseen, unknowing, and unknowable slave.  That’s not a word I use lightly; I know the weight it carries and I know the history of it in the United States—but it’s also not history in a lot of places and it’s in places that we benefit from.  Is slavery acceptable just because we can’t see the slaves?  Because it doesn’t affect us personally?  Because we don’t know about it?  The Good Place addressed the complications of modern life and how difficult it is to live without contributing to harm unknowingly; Severance drives this point home by asking if we’re complicit by being willfully ignorant of the harm to which we contribute.

When the question is asked about what they do at work, which neither the outie nor innie actually know, the cost is raised.  The moral cost, that is.  Is this separation worth it if the cost is killing people eight hours a day?  Not that I think that’s what they’re doing, but I don’t know—and they don’t know either.  We have things like fast fashion, almost certainly made in sweatshops in third world countries.  We’ve heard of factories with such terrible working conditions that they have safety nets installed to counteract suicide attempts and, hell, even here in the US, the working conditions at companies like Amazon make my complaint about my BlackBerry positively quaint.  Even without all that, it calls into question the very idea of separating your work and personal life.  How are you supposed to even do that?  Am I a person at home and not a person at work?  Just an employee, property like the desk where I sat or the water cooler which I huddled around to talk about Game of Thrones?  To be fair to my old employer, they actually did a pretty good job at letting you be a human being at work, but I know that’s not the case everywhere.  And that’s the question Severance is begging you to ask—you are the person you are and you are that person whether or not you’re at work, so how are you supposed to be someone else just because you walked through a specific set of doors?  Time and time again, our protagonists have said the work they do is important.  They’re told it’s important.  This prompts Helly to ask “Is it really important or is it just important because you say it is?”  It’s a salient question when they don’t actually know what they’re doing.  But it’s a question that’s applicable to many of our lives.  We put work ahead of so many things—family, leisure time, the arts, our hobbies, etc., because it’s something we have to do—and that’s not to say work can’t be important.  I certainly wouldn’t imagine a doctor or a nurse having to question the importance of their work, and the pandemic showed us just how many jobs are essential, but in an office setting?  Moving numbers around?  Is it all that important to the level that we have to exclude other things from our lives?  Severance, in addition to being an incredibly well constructed, well acted, and well written mystery, is a terrific vehicle for meaningful philosophical questions about practical, everyday life.  We’re not talking about Immanuel Kant and Epictetus here, we’re talking the daily lives that each of us are living right now, today.  And that’s part of what makes Severance so brilliant.

I didn’t even mention that in the midst of all this mystery and deep moral questions, there are standout performances by the entire main cast.  That may be odd to say, but there’s so much to every character, so much depth and realness to these people inside and out of Lumon’s Macrodata Refinement department, that each one of them gets more than one moment to stand out above the rest from time to time.  Of course Britt Lower’s Helly and Adam Scott’s Mark are excellent, but the performance as Irving by John Turturro shows off his masterful ability as an actor and Zach Cherry’s star turn as Dylan took him from the guy I recognized from a bit part in Search Party to a role in another one of prestige TV’s gems, Fallout, and I’m sure there’s more to come from him.  Tramell Tillman as Mr. Milchick and Patricia Arquette as Ms. Cobel are also magnetic when on screen.  Even the supporting cast is excellent, especially the self-aggrandizing blowhard of a dime store philosopher whose every superficial thought he treats as a revelation, Ricken, played by Michael Churnen. And on top of all that, the show is genuinely hilarious, giving moments of true laugh out loud comedy in amongst the darkness and mystery (sometimes wholly unintentionally, in the case of Ricken).  If you haven’t tuned into this show yet, do it.  It’s worth getting an Apple TV subscription just for this.  It’s that good.  Severance marks not just the return of the water cooler talk-worthy show (owing in part to its weekly episodic releases), but the return of appointment television.  In an era where so much content is available at any given time, we’re inundated constantly with shows that don’t respect our time because in the streaming space, time works differently, Severance is a show that wants to give you the most from your time and the space to digest, think about, and discuss.  Thank goodness for that.

Slack to the Future

Every once in a while, a movie comes along that is so shockingly good, that is everything you hoped it would be and more, that it redefines your expectations for not only the creative team behind it (I’m talking actors, directors, cinematographers, etc), but the genre itself.  They become an experience you don’t want to have too often so as not to lessen their impact.  Like how hearing a joke too often makes it not as funny, you want to savor it, mete it out in small doses, make sure to stave off the effects of diminishing returns as long as possible.  I’m talking about Safety Not Guaranteed and The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, movies that deeply affect my views on film and what the medium can do, while putting a smile (and sometimes salty eye water droplets) on your face.

Relax, I’m From the Future (available to stream on Prime) is not one of those movies.  I really hoped it would be the next Safety Not Guaranteed, but while I did enjoy it, it wasn’t quite at that level.  What it is, however, is an incredibly sweet and charming time travel film about the importance of trying.  But I’ll get to that later.  If you’re unfamiliar, Relax is a 2022 film by writer/director Luke Higginson, a feature length adaptation of his 2013 short of the same name, starring Rhys Darby (whom you may know from Flight of the Conchords, the main NPC in the new Jumanji films, or as gentleman pirate Stede Bonnet in Our Flag Means Death) and Gabrielle Graham (who is in the new Netflix miniseries The Madness).  Darby plays Casper, a well-meaning and fairly unprepared time traveler who comes to present day Ontario to gather more information about the past and experience it for himself.  When reaching the 21st century, he realizes that he has just about no money, no way to feed or clothe himself in anything but the bodysuit he traveled in, and proceeds to write notes on scraps of trash with a borrowed pen from a convenience store clerk.  He heads to the local library to start the process, but is kicked out after the librarian finds him asleep in the stacks.

Graham plays Holly, a jaded, aimless young woman drifting through life, fed up with the world.  She crosses paths with Casper when she takes pity on him and gives him the nachos she didn’t like and then invites him to a show that she’s working for the band on her t-shirt, which he recognizes.  From there, the two of them bond over booze, cigarettes, and cocaine (a recipe for fast friendship, if I’ve ever heard one), and he tells her that he’s from the future and that he has a plan.  They talk about the concept of time travel, to which Holly mentions that as a Black lesbian, most of history is a nightmare for her, and the idea of going back in time is just not appealing.  Of course, as any sane person would, she doesn’t believe him when he tells her he’s a time traveler, so after a trip to a diner to prove it, they talk very briefly about the mechanics of time travel.

This is where the movie really pivots from a lot of time travel films; the mechanics aren’t important.  Casper very briefly explains how it works; it’s a one way trip through a sort of wormhole to the past, a portal, if you will.  She asks about changing the future and creating a multiverse through the butterfly effect, but Casper very quickly shoots that down.  It’s a mushy blob, time is; it adapts to the changes and as long as no big ones are made, everything basically works out okay.  And that’s it.  No scientific justification, no pseudoscientific pontificating, just a quick conversation and they get on with the narrative.  I really appreciate that, because it’s easy to get stuck on the science of something that’s completely theoretical.  It’s just not worth the runtime to me to get a science lesson on something that doesn’t exist.  Getting stuck in the weeds just isn’t the best use of time, in my opinion and I’m glad the movie doesn’t spin its wheels here and bloat the 94 minute runtime with a bunch of fake science.

As they discuss the world, Holly talks about how she doesn’t care about anything anymore.  It’s too hard to care.  Every time she does, she finds out the people behind it are Nazis, rapists, or both.  “Everything is a trap…nothing is just good,” she says.  And boy do I feel this hard.  This speaks directly to the millennial experience of the world.  I remember being younger and believing in things, only to be let down time and time again.  I can’t sit down and discuss The Usual Suspects, a brilliant film I love, without having to address the Kevin Spacey of it all, for example.  And how many people grew up on Harry Potter only to now be conflicted by their feelings for a story that affected them emotionally because its creator is a raging transphobe who has decided that her entire existence is going to be dedicated to harming people who are just trying go through their lives the best way they know how?  Joss Whedon, too, as much as I love Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  And now the horrible, monstrous details of Neil Gaiman are coming to light; I’m still processing that, as many people are.  How many times does it take, how many times can you be burned by caring about something before you decide to just wall yourself off and let your heart go cold because the world is full of awful people who try to convince you they’re not awful, only to have the truth exposed?   They use you, they use your desire to care, your desire to make the world a better place and belong in it, and then all of a sudden you realize, like Wile E. Coyote looking down after he’s run off a cliff, that there’s just a dust cloud and a drop beneath your feet. And that makes it hard to care about—and hope for—anything in the world.  It’s okay, though.  Casper has a plan.

Casper wants to use his future knowledge to make some money, that’s Phase 1.  All low impact stuff, nothing that would get you famous, nothing that would raise too many eyebrows, nothing that would affect the mushy blob we call time.  Phase 2 is save the world.  He’s much more vague about the how, but it seems that Phase 2 hinges pretty strongly on a waiter who draws in his off time, apparently, and this leads to a fair bit of dark comedy that Rhys Darby plays off very well.  Holly, of course, is in.  She’s tired of struggling, tired of working for other people to barely get by, to go through the parade of the unfulfilled and unfulfilling that she calls her life.  Easy money, little work, and staying off the radar are hugely appealing to her, as I think it would be to a lot of people.  Who wouldn’t jump at the chance to make your living off placing bets on sure things?  I’m not talking Biff Tannen, change the world rich; but being completely comfortable for the rest of your life without any of the trappings that come with fame and fortune?  Who wouldn’t jump at that opportunity?  I know I would.  We don’t get a lot of time here, yet so many of us toil endlessly in jobs we don’t like while our blue sphere spins around a big yellow sphere in a big, empty black sky.  Of course this is an attractive offer.  While Holly does this, which bankrolls Casper because she’s a real person with a credit card and a Social Insurance Number (Canada’s equivalent to the SSN), Casper goes about with his goal.  Learning about the past, the real lives of the people here, and preserving artifacts for the future.  It’s all very sweet, really.  He befriends the elderly, people he can be honest with because the time they have left isn’t enough to affect the timeline.  He’s very kind with them, lending them an ear and genuinely caring about their well-being.  It could have come off as exploitative, but Darby plays it with earnest and it works.  Of course, there are complications along the way and a good amount of fish-out-of-water comedy that is aided by Darby’s New Zealand accent and his excellent comedic timing, which allows him to pull off even the darker moments with aplomb.  Rhys Darby really is an underrated comic actor.  Casper gathers information for months, Holly lives comfortably, and all seems well for the time being.  If you’ve seen a movie before, you’ll know it probably doesn’t stay that way.

Humanity seems to always be hurtling towards its destruction, for as long as I can remember, anyway.  Every 80 years or so, we seem to be on the precipice of a cataclysm; it seems as long as there’s been recorded history, there have been people calling it the end times.  So it’s always been this sort of nebulous feeling of impending doom, people don’t really know how they’d act when faced with the concrete.  Holding up a sign that says “the end is nigh” probably wouldn’t cut it and rocking back and forth with your arms around your knees and crying probably seems logical, but it’s not the most useful course of action.  But as the movie draws to its third act and the future comes into plain view, Holly is forced to look at herself in a different light.  Casper keeps assuring her that everything works out okay and he’s got a plan.  But when it comes right down to it, the question remains: everything works out, but for who?  Who is left when the dust of the future settles?  Who is okay after the existential dread we feel, that we keep locked in a cage in the back of our minds, comes to a head in a very real way?  What does okay even mean after that?

And this is where the movie really shines as a narrative and it’s what makes Relax, I’m From the Future such a pleasant movie to watch, despite its flaws.  The plot is fairly simple, the plan is fairly simple, Casper is fairly simple.  But the message—the feeling that despite the futility, despite the slow march of progress, despite being burned more times than you can count—that you should still care, that you should still try to make the world better, that the cataclysm, the apocalypse is not written in stone, is not an inevitability, could not be more needed.  If you try, you fail.  If you fail, you try again.  And if you fail again, you dust yourself off and get back to it.  It takes more than the names that are written in history books to change the world.  It takes everyday people, waking up, going to jobs they hate, caring about things, and doing something, no matter how little, about them.  It’s a big, heavy world out there, but there are twice as many shoulders as there are people to carry the weight.  As long as people continue to step up and put their shoulders side by side with other people’s shoulders, our fate is not sealed.  Our future isn’t written, not just yet.  And that’s why Relax is a movie I won’t savor, not one I’ll only trot for special occasions, and is one I’ll watch over and over again, because I need that reminder sometimes.