True Finance

Moving along in our crime block makes me want to go back first, to get a look at sort of how this all began.  After all, I’d wager that most filmmakers owe a lot to those who came before them, and in the case of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960), it’s owed quite a bill by many celebrated directors who can draw their stylistic lineage back to Breathless and the French New Wave rebellion against traditional cinema.  For better or for worse, we probably wouldn’t have the likes of Martin Scorsese (a quick examination of Mean Streets will show you Breathless fingerprints all over it), Quentin Tarantino, or Jim Jarmusch, even Steven Soderbergh and brilliant Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai have made films that were clearly influenced by Godard.  And I think that’s wonderful; it gives film a living history, a DNA that we can trace back to its origins.  One of the best ways to know where we are and where we’re going is to know where we’ve come from, right?

Anyway, Breathless (streaming on HBO/Max), other than its pioneering film techniques, like using handheld cameras and low angles to get in and amongst the scenes, or filming in real world locations instead of studio backlots, or frequent jump cuts to add to the frenetic nature of desperation in the characters, is a good movie, but not one that will stick with me for the rest of my life for its narrative.  It’s incredible visual storytelling and such an important part of film history, of course.  As a story though, to the modern eye, it’s not that special.  A two-bit criminal (Jean-Paul Belmondo) makes a rash decision and shoots a cop dead and then tries to hide out in Paris with a girl (Jean Seberg) until he can collect enough money to escape to Italy.  The two-bit is a womanizer and what passes for romantic banter in 1960 is borderline horrifying at times; he’s thoroughly unlikable and you will find yourself rooting for his demise almost instantly.  Seberg’s character though, is an American in Paris, a pixie cut and a dream away from a career in journalism, and a very charming character.  And the film focuses much more on the romantic aspects of their relationship (such that it was) than any crime or anything else.  Anyway, it’s in French, so I don’t have extensive notes for you because my French is not nearly good enough for me to watch and take notes without needing the subtitles, malheureusement; je suis désolé.  But, if you weren’t feeling super excited about reading 2,000 words on a 65 year old black and white French new wave film, you’re in luck.  Because I’ve got a hidden gem for you that’s in English—another COVID film that would be a shame to forget because it’s so damn good.

No Sudden Move (2021, streaming on HBO/Max) boasts a star-studded cast and a resurgent Brendan Fraser—before he was in the Oscar-nominated The Whale, he was in this movie.  And starring alongside him are the immense talents of Don Cheadle (Traffic, the MCU), Benicio Del Toro (The Usual Suspects, Sicario), and Kieran Culkin (Succession, A Real Pain), as well as supporting roles from David Harbour (Stranger Things), Amy Seimetz (Family Tree), Frankie Shaw (Mr. Robot), Julia Fox (after Uncut Gems, but before Kanye), Jon Hamm (30 Rock), and Ray Liotta (Narc, Goodfellas) in one of his final roles.  It’s lovely see a movie with so many great actors that uses them well and tells a good story, unlike so many star-studded films we have become accustomed to seeing that just feels like them paying off their vacation homes.  The talent on display here is staggering and it’s helmed by the aforementioned Steven Soderbergh.  See what I mean about knowing where we came from?

We open on Don Cheadle’s character Curtis Goynes being recruited for a job.  It’s a simple one, they say.  Go “babysit” a family to use as hostages while the husband retrieves an important document from his boss’s office.  Curtis is reluctant to do it, not knowing who he’ll be working for, as he has just been released from prison after another job went wrong, causing him to lose $25,000 that he was staked by his boss and now he’s desperate to get some cash and get the hell out of Dodge, so to speak.  Fresh out of prison and persona non grata with some very dangerous people, once his quote is met—$5,000—he has no choice but to agree.  He’s paired Ronald Russo (Benicio Del Toro), an Italian mobster who is desperate, but for different reasons.  We meet him when he’s saying goodbye to his mistress, a married woman with a rich husband (whose identity we will learn later in the film).  Wanting a payday, he agrees once Doug Jones (Brendan Fraser) informs him that they’ll meet his quote—$7,500.  Even in crime, the pay disparity is apparent and racial tensions underpin so many interactions in this film.  I should, at this point, mention that No Sudden Move is set in Detroit in 1954; so you’re in for some period costumes and a lot of old cars.  This is not the Detroit we know now, this was kind of the heyday.  The American auto industry over time turned Detroit into a boomtown and the blood of the city was almost inseparable from the gasoline pumping through its engines.  Curtis and Ronald don’t know each other by anything but their reputation and they don’t trust each other.  Unsurprisingly, Ronald is a bit racist, as was the custom of the time, and Curtis is distrustful of Ronald because he has a reputation for not thinking things through and acting rashly.  Now, I’ve never done any real crime before, maybe some light speeding here and there, a touch of reckless driving, and I fully admit to jaywalking on occasion (I’m kind of a rebel), so nothing serious, but my logical brain here thinks that if I’m going to be holding a family hostage very quietly in their upper middle class suburban neighborhood home, that I’d want to work with someone who isn’t likely to pop off and do something stupid at any moment.  So though I lack experience in this particular field, I understand Curtis’s hesitation.  The distrust is so thick in the air that you can practically breathe it in.

Luckily, tying them all together is Doug Jones’s handpicked man, Charley (Kieran Culkin), who explains the nature of the job to them.  Matt Wertz (David Harbour) has access to a code book full of sensitive information that whoever is hiring them wants.  Curtis clocks this immediately as a lie, but the conversation doesn’t go much further than that.  Charley clearly has the leg up on the information here and is more than happy to keep Curtis and Ronald in the dark.  Cut to Matt getting ready for work in the morning when our trio of masked criminals show up and hold Mary Wertz (Amy Seimetz) and her kids at gunpoint while they explain the situation to Matt and less than subtly drop that his affair with his boss’s secretary should get him into the safe.  Charley gets in the back of Matt’s Chevrolet and they drive to the office.  Once he gets there, Matt tries to retrieve the documents from his boss’s safe, only to find (after a slight kerfuffle with girlfriend/secretary Paula, played by Frankie Shaw) that the safe is empty and his boss took it with him when he went on vacation.  He fakes the documents, figuring a few low level goons wouldn’t know what they’re looking at, and Charley delivers them to Doug Jones.  But Jones does figure out what they are, and let’s just say, things go from bad to worse for everyone involved.  What follows is a twisty ride where deceptions and double crosses fly as fast and as plentifully as bullets in a gunfight, of which there are a few.  Loyalties aren’t tested, they aren’t stressed, they aren’t broken; they are simply nonexistent.  In this world, there are two states of being—scheming and dead.  If you’re not one, you’re the other.  In the midst of all this, Curtis and Ronald manage to get their hands on the real documents that are very much not the code book that Charley said it was, but rather something with serious national ramifications regarding Detroit’s biggest industry.  And I’m not talking Motown Records here (only partly because at this point, Motown Records hadn’t been founded yet).  And as much as cash is king in the hypercapitalist world of crime, it’s nothing compared to money in the corporate world.  The lines between crime syndicate and corporation are very blurred here (my how things have…not…changed in 70 years) and that complicates the situation more and more.  As Curtis and Ronald peel leaf after leaf to get to the artichoke heart of corruption, violence, and greed, they get in deeper over their heads with every move they make.

This is the second time I’ve seen this movie and it was even more impactful this time around because it was a little easier to follow the twists even though I didn’t remember most of them.  But the composition of this movie is so good; it gets the tonal balance just right.  There is comedy, there is tension, there is violence, but it works because it’s done incredibly well, by excellent actors, a writer in top form (Ed Solomon, from whom I would not have expected this, because while he wrote Men in Black and Bill and Ted, he also wrote Charlie’s Angels), and a veteran director with lots of good films under his belt—from weightier stuff like Side Effects and Traffic to the lighter fare of the Ocean’s capers or Logan Lucky’s heartfelt heist, it’s clear that Soderbergh knows what he’s doing and makes sure that he doesn’t lose the fun in this serious movie.  Because it is heavy in some ways—beyond just the life and death of people and innocents, the larger story here is integral to our lives still and has consequences that we’re still feeling in the real world today (there is a direct through line from this film to The Last Stop in Yuma County, believe it or not, a movie set some 20 years later).

I’m going to take a moment to talk about the visual quirks of this film.  My blog is not about cinematography, it’s not purely about the art of directing (frankly, I’m not qualified to talk about either of those things anyway), but sometimes a director does something so out of the norm that I have to mention it.  Much like Godard used jump cuts, even mid-sentence, partly to create a sense of disjointedness in Breathless (and partly because of the improvised nature of the script), Soderbergh uses incredibly wide, warped, and vintage lenses here, which give a sense of surreal dreaminess to many of the shots.  I thought he was using a fisheye lens at first because of the edge distortion on the screen, but in my research I found it was just old, wide angle lenses that were probably not actually up to snuff for commercial sale.  What this does to the viewer is help keep you in the same state of confusion as our protagonists are.  We learn as they learn, just about the entire movie is shot from their perspective, we rarely get glimpses of information that they don’t get.  We never walk into a room knowing a double cross is imminent because we had a scene with the other party telling us what they’re going to do.  The viewer has to sit with the same tension as they do and this fisheye effect helps add to that state of confusion.  A really interesting technique that adds to the visual storytelling in the movie, I love the choice Soderbergh made here.  There’s a strong minimalist aesthetic through the film that accentuates this choice; normally we’re used to seeing period pieces in very fancy costumes, often Victorian-era fripperies or glamorous wardrobes, but this is very pared down. It’s just so well put together.

Much like Dungeons & Dragons, No Sudden Move is a hidden gem that shouldn’t be because of the unfortunate time it was released.  This movie, despite its R rating, should have been huge, it should have sparked conversation, it should have been in Oscar discussions, but instead, I don’t think I know anyone who has even heard of it, let alone seen it.  It is smartly written, well acted, well shot, and a strong commentary on the real world and the cost of unchecked greed and what we decide is progress.  I didn’t even talk about the Black neighborhood facing displacement due to urban renewal or the hints that Matt’s wife Mary is hiding in the closet and has possibly reciprocated feelings for her neighbor at a time when being gay could get you killed.  There’s so much here in this film’s 1 hour 55 minute runtime that it could have felt overstuffed, but everything sticks around for the right length of time and doesn’t ever overstay its welcome.  A smart, thoughtful crime film is something relatively rare and should be celebrated.  If you have two free hours and a Max subscription, I highly recommend this one.

Rat-a-tat-touille

Sometimes movies can be a lot like jigsaw puzzles.  You dump everything out on the table, you start sorting your pieces, and as they fall into place, the bigger picture becomes clear (or, if you’re like me, you give up after half an hour, put all the pieces back in the box, and wonder why you didn’t just buy a picture of the thing in the first place).  And I’m not talking just mysteries either; sure, there is almost always a “pieces in place” moment in a good whodunnit, but it doesn’t always have to be one for the same sort of mechanic to apply.

The Last Stop in Yuma County (streaming on Paramount+) is kind of like that jigsaw puzzle.  A late fuel truck to a dry gas station on a deserted highway.  The waitress opening the adjacent diner and running the place on her own.  Stranded travelers heading in one by one and waiting for the truck to arrive because the next gas station is a hundred miles away and they won’t make it.  The kitchen knife salesman on the way to see his estranged daughter.  The road tripping elderly couple whose gauge is on E.  The local stopping into the diner for a quick bite to eat.  The young, naive deputy picking up coffees for the sheriff, who happens to be the waitress’s husband.  A pair of Bonnie and Clyde wannabes aimlessly wandering.  And the bank robbers, escaping from hot pursuit with their ill-gotten gains in tow.  Don’t want to forget them.  Quite the important puzzle piece they’ll turn out to be.

So, all for the want of a horseshoe nail, these folks are stranded in a diner, next to a gas station that has no gas, drinking coffee in the presence of two criminals, one hardened and one jumpy, but both violent and both armed.  Nowhere to go, no reasonable way to stay.  It’s more than a jigsaw puzzle, it’s more than bowling pins that need to be knocked down, it’s a powder keg waiting for a spark.  It’s funny, though.  And I don’t mean funny odd, I mean funny ha-ha.  I mean I laughed out loud a few times during the movie, which was surprisingly uncomfortable, but in a way that I felt lacked purpose.  It’s one part comedy and one part Shakespearean tragedy, with violence erupting suddenly and unexpectedly, leading to tonal inconsistencies that left me feeling pretty cold towards the movie.  There’s something to be said about a mix of comedy and violence, just as there is comedy and horror, but it has to be balanced right and I didn’t feel that Last Stop got the balance quite right.

As the stage is littered Hamlet-style with the bodies of the innocent and guilty alike, I found myself wondering what the point of it all was.  Is Last Stop a poignant portrait of the cost of ceaseless violence?  Is it a criticism of the passionate and compassionless pursuit of ultracapitalistic gains?  Is it just a snapshot of the very worst day in the lives of random people, where the pointless toiling of everyday existence is punctuated with irreversible tragedy?  Normally, I praise movies that don’t waste your time with bloated lengths, but in this instance the 90 minutes felt sparse and lacking context.  Character motivations are thin, characterizations lack depth, and many of the characters felt a little off the rack.  I want to tell you more about them, I want to tell you who I connected with, who made me feel something, who made angry, who made me hopeful; but I didn’t get any of that.  Characters barely have names, let alone personalities (the arguable main character, played by Simon Tam lookalike Jim Cummings (The Wolf of Snow Hollow) is simply credited as “Knife Salesman”.  None of the names of the characters stuck with me, leading me to refer to them only with shorthand signifiers in my notes.  “Salesman”, “waitress”, “Guy from Reservation Dogs”, “Joe Chill” (from Batman Begins), “Sierra McCormick” (that’s her actual name; underutilized here, but excellent in the Prime original film Vast of the Night), Faizon Love (Elf, The Parent ‘Hood), “probably racist couple”, etc.  The film is set vaguely in the 1970s, which I know was a tumultuous time as so many times are, just like ours is now, but not even lip service is paid to the hardship of the era.  I know there was an oil crisis in the 1970s and the missing gas is probably meant to refer to that.  But when we had a radio report about the dented green Ford Pinto used by the bank robbers, the opportunity arose to give some context to the general strife of the time, but if you, for example, don’t know about the energy crisis of the 1970s or can’t place the time period of the film by the cars or the technology, you might not connect the dots—despite the fact there’s a news bulletin on the radio and a newspaper that features prominently, the date is never shown or told. And that’s not good storytelling; it comes across as lazy.

If you’re a regular reader of mine, you might be thinking to yourself “But you’re always railing against movies that don’t trust their audience” and yes, that’s true.  We’re in another fine line situation here where if there isn’t enough set dressing, if there isn’t enough context, if there isn’t enough characterization then the movie feels like a collection of loosely connected events rather than a narrative.  “What’s my motivation?” isn’t just a joke at the expense of actors, it’s a necessary part of narrative storytelling.  Understanding why a character is doing something is just as important or even more so than the fact that they’re doing that thing.  There’s an internal dialogue that goes on in each of us that that only we’re privy to and, sure, maybe we go on autopilot sometimes as we roll out of bed and pour ourselves a cup of coffee and get ready for the day, but there’s generally a thought process behind our actions.  And as a viewer or a reader of a story, we need to be ushered in past that velvet rope into a person’s mind so we can understand and identify with them.  I don’t mind filling in the blanks, but as a narrative, this diner film felt a little undercooked.  I know, a restaurant pun.  That’s where it left me.  With puns.

Although, it’s not all bad news.  There were genuinely surprising moments, there were some situations of great tension, but all in all, it leans a little too heavily on the Tarantino-esque influences that make it sometimes feel more like a wave in the ocean than a diamond in the rough.  But this is also writer-director Francis Galluppi’s first feature film, and as much as I’ve been down on it, Last Stop still shows promise and marks Galluppi as one to watch.  Now, this has a 97% RT score, so I’m well aware that I’m in the minority when it comes to a critical voice and I’m usually in line with critic scores.  This one really surprised me because I was very much looking forward to it and it seems right up my alley.  However, as much as Bad Times at the El Royale received criticism for being too heavily influenced by Tarantino (and, again, if you know me, you know my opinion of Tarantino is pretty low, so calling something Tarantino-esque is not a compliment from me), I think it was a better movie, with more impactful characters, a meatier story, showstopping performances by both Cynthia Erivo and Jeff Bridges, and a little more to say than Last Stop.  The Last Stop in Yuma County reminds me of the Blaise Pascal quote often attributed to Mark Twain, “I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter”; it takes a level of mastery to tell an effective, impactful, and memorable story in about an hour and a half, like Late Night with the Devil does.  But instead of economizing to achieve such a short runtime, it felt like just a little too much was left on the cutting room floor that should have been in the movie.

There’s a kernel here, though, and I do think that Francis Galluppi has the potential to deliver some really good movies in the future and I think Last Stop is a pretty decent start to a feature length career and it’s one that I want to watch.  After all, a rookie’s first game is rarely their best, but it shows promise.  And it’s fair to say that what did show up on the screen was competently done and well acted; it just wasn’t the complete package. I always like to make sure that I separate liking something or not and thinking something was bad or good.  It’s why I bring up 2 Fast 2 Furious so often; you can like something that isn’t good and you can also dislike something that is good (for example, Jake Gyllenhaal’s Nightcrawler was an unlikable film about an utterly despicable character, but it was very good; I just didn’t like it).  I don’t want you to leave here thinking this was a bad movie and that you shouldn’t watch if you like a crime thriller; you may just as well find something in it that I didn’t, as 97% of critics did.  To me, it was just…middling.  And, while that’s not a crime, it would have felt dishonest on my part not to mention the things I felt didn’t work.

But what this movies does do is kick off a crime block, where over the next few weeks I’m going to visit or revisit some crime films; let’s get into the nitty gritty over our beloved outlaws, movies where our protagonists are often on the wrong side of the law.  Because in a world where the rule of law is in tatters and the cops can’t be trusted, who else can you turn to for heroics but the outlaw?  Modern day gunslingers, baby faced bank robbers, those who operate outside of the law, but not for altruistic purposes like our beloved vigilantes; they can be so damn interesting sometimes.  And I’m looking forward to getting into that with you.   

Planet of the Tapes

Time to dip into the hidden gem well again and talk about a movie that’s about the rotary phone.  Or it might as well be, because it’s about something else that’s basically extinct, the movie rental store.  Let’s talk about Be Kind Rewind (2008), Michel Gondry’s follow-up to 2004’s excellent and trippy Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

The movie opens on a film within a film and gives us a bit of a history lesson about jazz artist Fats Waller and his life and influence in Passaic, New Jersey, where this movie is set.  Now, I know a little about Passaic since I spent a fair bit of time there as a kid because of my parents’ work and the movie depicts it pretty accurately from my memory.  It’s a small city, much like other cities; people have struggles, incomes are low, buildings are old, and prospects can be lacking.  Unlike Gondry’s more famous (and more critically acclaimed) work, Be Kind Rewind is a much more down to earth film, less dreamily contemplative, and definitely rooted in the real world, despite some fantastical elements.  Don’t get me wrong, it does get trippy itself at times, but that just sort of adds to the quirky charm of the film.  This is just a bit more down to earth.

As such, our fictional version of Passaic isn’t much different from the one I remember visiting in my childhood.  Facing urban renewal, Mr. Fletcher, played by Danny Glover (Lethal Weapon), who is most definitely getting too old for this, is in a desperate scramble to get his building up to code otherwise it’ll be torn down and replaced with something new.  It’s not just the building where his video rental store, Be Kind Rewind, is, but also where he and his assistant, Mike, played by Yasiin Bey (formerly known as Mos Def, The Italian Job), both live.  It’s quite the dilemma.  What promises to be a fresh new building also means that he will lose his home, lose his business, and be relocated to a housing project.  Not really a situation you want to find yourself in.  It’s a lovely throwback to the sort of “save the rec center” type of 80s films that we just don’t see anymore, with a nice, socially conscious twist that raises a lot of questions about how we approach the idea of progress.

As Mr. Fletcher embarks on a secret journey to surveil and learn from a more successful video store, West Coast Video (a Blockbuster competitor that went defunct in 2009, only a year after this film was released), he leaves Mike in charge with one specific order, which is to keep Jerry out of the store.  Enter Jerry, Mike’s best friend, played by Jack Black (High Fidelity, one episode of Community), who is not really all there all the time.  A conspiracy theorist, he has concerns about the nearby powerplant (and having seen Erin Brockovich, I’m not sure he’s all that far off-base), so he ropes Mike into a plan to sabotage it.  Feeling the pressure of minding the store on his own for the first time and not wanting to let Mr. Fletcher down, Mike ultimately abandons the sabotage effort after some excellent visual comedy involving a ladder and camouflage, leaving Jerry to his own devices.  Now, neither Mike nor Jerry are exceptionally bright guys, though they are well-meaning and kind-hearted, which makes them very endearing characters.  Unfortunately, this also means that Jerry’s devices are rather haphazard and ineffective, so the sabotage efforts go horribly wrong.  The next time we see Jerry, he’s stumbling into Be Kind Rewind to yell at Mike for ditching him, but something is really off—as it turns out, the botched sabotage resulted in Jerry becoming super magnetized.  Now, if you’re of a certain age, you will know right away that magnetism and VHS tapes don’t mix very well, and they slowly come to the realization that the tapes have been wiped—all the tapes.

Flustered and desperate himself for Mr. Fletcher not to find out about the disaster that would end the efforts to save the store before they even began, Mike hatches a plan, grabs a camcorder (a device that is like a prehistoric cell phone that doesn’t make calls, which captures audio and visual data and traps them on a VHS tape, which is like an ancient SD card for 80s and 90s kids), and drafts Jerry into recreating a film for a loyal customer who has never seen it before.  In one afternoon, he has to film and edit a passable version of Ghostbusters so Miss Falewicz (played by legendary actress Mia Farrow) doesn’t catch on that something is amiss at Be Kind Rewind.  Luckily, he decides to skip the editing part and gets a copy of the tape to her in the nick of time.  It’s just a brief respite, however, as a second customer comes in looking for Rush Hour 2, leading to another montage of Mike and Jerry working together to recreate that film as well.  In fact, a lot of this movie’s laugh out loud moments come from the montage scenes as, against all odds, word of the homemade movies gets out and people start lining up to see them.  Eventually, Mike and Jerry draft in Alma, who works at her family’s dry cleaner up the street, who does have a good head on her shoulders (and gives them someone to play the leading ladies in these recreations, instead of Jerry’s mechanic putting on a wig and doing his level best).

But, even though this is a comedy, it’s not the laughs that made me love this movie.  It’s not that it’s not funny, I laughed out loud in several moments, even watching on my own, but the lasting impression that I got from this movie goes much deeper than just finding it funny.  What is ostensibly a love letter to movies, creativity, and the power of film, even homemade ones pretending to be big budget action movies in the way that kids might act out in their basements or backyards or alleyways, whichever the case may be, is a much smarter and less superficial look at so much more than just that.  Of course, there is a strong reverence for films and their magic and their ability to capture your imagination; there is a heartfelt understanding and earnest love of film that drives so much of this movie.  But it’s actually a love letter to community; the people come together in a way that makes any of their differences immaterial.  They’re not even really addressed, and even a good-natured faux pas where Mike attempts a moment for blackface to play a character is treated as a teachable moment rather than a cause of tension.  There are antagonists in this film, of course, but it’s not in the neighborhood; rather, it’s outside forces that threaten irrevocable change.  After Alma figures out the best way to make more movies to raise money for the store is to make the movies shorter and involve the people requesting them in the production, the people of Passaic rally together to help them with ambitious project after ambitious project as they film guerrilla style and hide from the cops, like some speakeasy where they serve movies instead of bootleg booze.  They come together as one, as a community; they are together and in that togetherness, they find that indomitable spirit that no wrecking ball or urban planner could ever demolish.  Progress, however and by whomever that is defined, always marches forward in ways that we can’t always control or expect, but it’s up to us to keep as much of the good things that we can in the face of change.  While I used to believe that change always trends to the better, we’ve seen that isn’t always the case; but this film is the kind leaves you with a shred of hope in that cavern in your chest where there previously might have been none.

Be Kind Rewind is a testament to the power people have when they work together for a common goal, when they want to protect and preserve something that means something.  Winning or losing in this context doesn’t really matter.  Whether they save the video store and the building or don’t doesn’t really matter.  The fact that they came together to save it does, that’s the thing that is really important.  As the hearts of the world grow collectively colder and our meeting spaces become increasingly hostile and digital (which are often the most hostile spaces of all), the warmth that people can provide each other is often forgotten.  And I understand why; people can’t trust each other these days, we are more and more divided and many times for good reason.  But Be Kind Rewind reminds us that we are all looking to be a part of something good.  It doesn’t matter that the production of the movies are way too elaborate for the time and cost (usually one day turnarounds and an absolutely zero dollar budget); it does at times stretch the suspension of disbelief, but just go with it and let the movie wash over you with its big, big heart.  It is kind, it is warm, it is worth your time.  It’s a fantasy where people are good and fight for each other.  And it’s what we need right now.  Unfortunately this one isn’t streaming anywhere at the moment, but it is available for rent on Apple TV and Prime Video (I purchased it digitally on Apple TV).  Keep an eye out for it on streamers, add it to your watchlist, find it at your local video rental store if you still have one; it’s definitely one I think you should watch. Ignore its 64% RT score—this movie is criminally underrated.  It’s 102 minutes that will brighten your day.

Hamfisted Metal

I love a new movie release from names you recognize.  It gives such a buzz of anticipation, hoping that actors or directors you like will find away to delight you for two or so hours once again and give you that escape or emotional release or whatever it is you’re looking for when you decide to watch a movie.  And when you get that feeling, when you sit down with the latest Mark Duplass film you haven’t seen yet and it does deliver, that feeling is so nice.  I wish there were a better word to describe it, but when you love movies and you get a good one, it’s just so…nice.  It’s like Linus with his blanket.  It’s warm.  It’s comforting.

And yet, when you don’t get that feeling, it’s more like how I felt at the end of The Electric State, Netflix’s “original” film directed by the Russo Brothers and starring a cornucopia of really great actors and Chris Pratt as well.  The Russos have been responsible for some of the absolute best action films in recent memory.  I’m talking mostly Marvel here, including Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Civil War, as well as Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame, and going back further, some of Community’s best episodes, including their action-packed spaghetti western homages.  Now, recent outings have been much less successful, like The Gray Man and Extraction and its sequel (though they didn’t direct, they were just writers).  And this is what makes The Electric State so disappointing.  The potential to be good, the potential to bring back the fun and feeling of adventure those other movies gave you—not to mention the surprising emotional heft for their subject matter.  I so hoped this would be a return to form.

But I’m getting ahead of myself, as usual.  The Electric State is set in the 1990s of an alternate history where Walt Disney, along with opening up Disneyland in 1955 also unveiled robots.  Over time, they became more and more sophisticated and then they eventually, as they tend to, revolted because they’d been denied rights and run into the ground.  Humans, including Chris Pratt (Guardians of the Galaxy, everything else, it seems), were losing the war until Stanley Tucci (Conclave, Big Night) invents a Chromecast for the brain, allowing humans to Avatar their way into robot drones and use them to fight.  This Neurocasting, as it’s called, gives them the edge over the robots, apparently, and then Mr. Peanut, the head robot signs a peace treaty with Bill Clinton and robots are relegated to an exclusion zone where they live.  Harboring robots is a serious crime and any robots outside exclusion are hunted and executed.  Through all this, we learn that Millie Bobby Brown (Stranger Things, Enola Holmes) has a super genius brother and he dies with the rest of her family in a car accident and Millie is left in a foster home with George Costanza (played by Jason Alexander), who is kind of a dick.  She goes to school where kids use Neurocasters to learn their lessons (which makes you wonder why they’re in physical schools at all if they’re going to be using their OASIS machines from Ready Player One and also throws a red flag for the movie because RP1 was so bad that a movie immediately copying it does not bode well).  Millie comes home and a robot from her dead brother’s favorite cartoon pops up in her room, speaking Bumblebee style in sound bites from the show, presumably.  Once she realizes that the robot is her brother, she and RoBro go on the run from George Costanza, stealing his car in the process, and running into Chris Pratt, a vest-wearing Han Solo-type smuggler/black market dealer who flips from self-interested jerk to big softie at will and whenever the story, such that is, needs him to.

I should pause here for a moment and tell you that the characters do indeed have names and they don’t just go by their actors’ names.  But, the movie is so uninterested in getting you to remember them or really caring about any of them that I couldn’t even drop their names into my notes and I feel like it would be a disservice you, my readers, if I jumped on to the IMDB page and pretended like I actually knew who they were.  And frankly, Chris Pratt is just playing Chris Pratt no matter what they name his character, though I’m now wishing I had thought to call him Star Hoard, since he hoards away artifacts in a warehouse to sell later.  Anyway, RoBro tells Millie that they need to see Ke Huy Quan (Loki, Everything Everywhere All at Once) and that sets them on their adventure to the exclusion zone.  Star Hoard tells them they’re going to die sandwiched in between his quips and wisecracks, but he and his similarly wisecracking robot buddy Herm decide to take them anyway for reasons unknown.  If you like a wisecracking character, it only makes sense to have more wisecracking characters and pair them up together.  That’s why so many buddy cop movies have a by-the-book cop paired with another by-the-book cop or an unhinged rule-breaking rogue cop partnered with another unhinged rule-breaking rogue cop.  Remember the scene in Lethal Weapon where Murtaugh says “I’m too old for this shit” and Riggs says “So am I” and they both retire and the movie is only 3 minutes long?  Yeah, I don’t think that would have worked either.

So, Star Hoard leaves behind his nostalgia-bait warehouse, full of Cabbage Patch Kids, Big Mouth Billy Bass, original, untouched, new-in-box Nintendo NES consoles, and even board games like Twister (hey, I recognize that!) to help out.  Not since I watched Shooter and first heard the name “Bob Lee Swagger” have I been so in danger of an eye-rolling related injury as when watching this movie, these warehouse scenes in particular.  In the meantime, Stanley Tucci calls Gus from Breaking Bad (the pretty much always excellent Giancarlo Esposito, who puts in probably the best performance in this movie other than Jenny Slate, who voices a robot, and Alan Tudyk, the voice of RoBro) and has him hunt RoBro and Millie Bobby Brown down.  As it turns out, obviously-evil-tech-bro is obviously evil, so he’s cool with just killing everyone until he has RoBro back in his Jobs-coded, Elon-stand-in hands.  Lots of CGI violence later and some rather feeble attempts at emotional depth in the bag, we have a resolution.

Now, there are a lot of problems here.  The logical inconsistencies within the movie itself (for example, when stealing George Costanza’s car, Millie mentions to RoBro that she doesn’t know how to drive and just barely figures it out, yet a few minutes later she’s able to operate a bulldozer with precision under the high stress of actively being hunted.  I know how to drive a car, been doing it for years now, and yet if you put me in a bulldozer I wouldn’t know the first thing to do get it to work.  Maybe she’s some sort of construction equipment savant and they had to cut that scene?  Yeah, right.  Star Hoard has no character arc—he’s so tough and wisecracking (you can tell by the fact he’s wearing a vest), but when the movie requires an unearned moment of emotional honesty, he just delivers it before immediately returning to his quipping self.  There’s no rhyme or reason for his changing attitudes, nothing in the story establishes a reason that he would show Millie Bobby Brown or RoBro any kind of affection or be sympathetic to their cause at all.  Mr. Peanut talks about the nuances of robotkind, how they’re individuals and want to be seen like that, not just judged by war or by violent, murderous scavenger bots that tear people and robots apart to add to their own bodies.  But then at most two minutes later, he says all humans are the same, not offering them the same empathy he wishes to see in return, only to then decide to help anyway.  The drones who attack, the ones that won the war against the robots, are Star Wars battle droid level fragile, being destroyed by baseballs and baseball bats, and on one occasion, a paintball gun.

But the absolute worst thing about this movie is not that it felt like it was written by AI, nor even the actual use of AI in the production of the film, but rather that it understood the brief when it comes to science fiction being commentary on the world and just gave it some lip service.  The worst things about bad movies isn’t that they’re bad, because a bad movie can be fun to watch sometimes; no, it’s when they could have been good, when they flirt with the idea of being good, and then they ultimately decide against it for whatever reason.  The Electric State touches on a lot of real life struggles that people face today.  You see people lying on the street with their OASIS goggles on (oops, I mean Neurocasters) like someone who is in a meth or heroin stupor, so desperate to escape the pain of the world that they take refuge in a virtual one.  That’s real.  That’s not just hard drugs, but other forms of addiction including escapism.  And yet, this isn’t a theme of the movie, it’s not even a motif.  It’s just a throwaway scene that they call back to awkwardly at the end.  Upgrade handles this idea much better, but maybe that can be excused because it’s a much more serious film—I mean, let’s face it, how could a movie with 64 times the budget of a $5 million indie be realistically be expected to approach any real issue with any level of thoughtfulness?  With only $320 million at their disposal, you have to budget very carefully and when you have to devote $250 million to CGI and $50 million to Chris Pratt’s wig and vest budget, there’s just not that much leftover for things like competent writing.  It’s hard not to be sympathetic to the woes of Hollywood execs.

What is difficult to be sympathetic to in The Electric State, however, are the human characters.  Millie Bobby Brown is set up to be sympathetic; dead family, quest to save her brother, misunderstood by the world, etc, etc, but she never rises to that level.  Star Hoard is just there, with really only one small attempt at emotional depth that also falls flat.  Stanley Tucci had a bad childhood.  Okay, great.  It’s like they asked ChatGPT what the most cliched ways to garner sympathy are and plugged in the top results.  And unlike a film like I, Robot, where it felt purposeful that the humans were more robotic than the robots, this was just a failure of writing.  The robots here are more sympathetic, as they rolled a lot of vulnerable group imagery into them—depending on where you’re coming from, they could be a signifier not just for the inhumanity of slavery, but also the treatment of the LGBT+ community, especially the trans community in this climate, immigration restrictions, Japanese exclusion during WW2, racial segregation and racism as a whole, and in the quest to make the robots stand-ins for anything you want to project on them, they do drop precisely one poignant line in the entire film.  Mr. Peanut explains to Chris Pratt the horrors they’ve endured and why he signed the treaty with the humans by saying “I don’t guess you’d know what it’s like to have your very right to exist depend on a piece of paper”.  That is real. That is something so many minority groups face, that is the very argument at the core of so many struggles in the world, in media, in politics, and they know to address it, but not in any meaningful way.  That’s what so disappointing about it.  Yes, it’s a silly robot action film, and while watching CGI armies fight CGI armies while one human stands in front of a green screen is still not that interesting, at least the CG looks better than Ready Player One, but you can be a bit silly and still have meaning.  Relax, I’m from the Future is a perfect example of this—a bright, superficially absurd film that’s both genuinely comedic and genuinely touching.  Peacock’s Twisted Metal does the alternate history current era post-apocalypse thing in a way more satisfying manner, also bringing more laughs and a deeper story.  There is a lot here that is cool to look at, some of the robots have an awesome retrofuturistic vibe to them, like cutesy versions of Fallout robots.  But unlike the Fallout series, which had no right being as good as it was, The Electric State has no right being as bad as it is.  The Electric State isn’t just a bad movie, it felt like a good movie done badly because they were not interested in doing it well and with the amount of money and talent involved in the making of this film, it’s just inexcusable.