Trappin’ in the Woods

If you know you’re going to be in a horror movie, there are a lot of places you don’t want to be.  Isolated hotels, for example, well, that’s all work and no play, so you want to avoid them at all costs.  I’d also really avoid creepy mansions or any sort of old, Victorian architecture where nighttime occurs, that’s generally a bad idea.  The Haunting of Hill House and Bly Manor taught me that.  Forget about summer camps.  Summer camp was particularly harrowing for me as well; not only do I have to worry about bugs, sun stroke, dehydration, and nature in general (I am an indoor boy), but also psycho killers who died some milestone number of years ago on this very night?  No thank you, can’t be bothered to learn what SPF I need, let alone deal with a resurrected murderer.

But there’s one place that is so especially horror movie that the fear of them has creeped fully into real life.  That’s the cabin in the woods.  It’s a location so horror iconic that there’s even a horror movie called The Cabin in the Woods.  So when eight Black friends venture out into forest to have a little reunion and celebrate Juneteenth in a rented cabin, you can imagine their weekend plans are about to significantly change.

The Blackening opens with Morgan in the cabin, getting the place ready for the rest of her friends to arrive.  Morgan, played by Yvonne Orji (Vacation Friends, Insecure), isn’t alone though.  Her boyfriend Shawn, played by Jay Pharaoh (Saturday Night Live, Urkel Saves Santa: The Movie) is there with her, but he gets a rude awakening in the form of an elbow to the face when he tries to sneak up on Morgan and give her a fright.  He directs Morgan to the game room where he shows her his discovery.  A board game, sitting on a table in the middle of the room, called The Blackening.  He opens the box to the sight of a talking head, complete with minstrel show blackface.  Not a great start to game night, to be honest, but they decide to play anyway.  The voice in the board tells them that they have to get every question right or they die; really not a great start to game night.  The trivia card asks them to name a Black character who made it to the end of a horror movie.  Morgan and Shawn fumble through, coming up with the names Omar Epps and Jada Pinkett Smith in Scream 2, but Morgan points out that they were the first ones to die.  They exchange knowing glances when the mention that they felt like they were only killed off because the studio didn’t have the budget to pay for them to be there for the whole production because they were the two biggest names.  It’s at that point, they learn just how not alone they really are.

And there’s the introduction to the metacomedy of The Blackening.  As you can imagine, this particular trivia round doesn’t go well for Morgan and Shawn—I’ve had some rough nights at bar trivia, but never this rough.  This opening scene is so good for a lot of reasons.  For one, we get treated to, albeit for just a fleeting moment, Jay Pharaoh’s excellent impressions.  But also, it sets up the entire tone of the film.  It is self aware, it is meta, it understands the universe in which it, a Black-led horror film, lives and where it stands in that universe.  It plays on the tropes that Black characters have existed in for at least as long as I can remember and it gives you a good sense for the tone of this movie.  I mean, the tagline of the movie is “We can’t all die first”.  Even the opening crawl lets you know that the film is looking to horror movies for its inspiration, being a movie “based on true events that never happened”.  You’re in for a horror-comedy, with the emphasis being on the comedy.

Afterwards, we get to meet the main cast, and even though it is mostly full of names I didn’t recognize, it is one hell of a cast.  A true ensemble movie, everyone gets their moment to shine in The Blackening.  Okay, yes, it’s true that Dewayne, played by Dewayne Perkins (The Studio, One of Them Days) who also co-wrote the screenplay, does stand out above the others just a little bit, but overall, there isn’t a weak link in the bunch.  Dewayne is driving to the cabin with Allison, played by Grace Byers (Empire, The Retirement Plan), and his best friend of the group Lisa, played by Antoinette Robertson (Dear White People), when Lisa lets the cat out of the bag that her old boyfriend Nnamdi, played by Sinqua Walls (Carry-On), will be there.  And like any good friend, he’s concerned about that because Nnamdi used to cheat on Lisa all the time.  This introduces not only a good bit of existing group dynamic, which makes the characters feel more lived-in and real, but it also introduces the near-telepathic communication using looks and glances between Black women, that apparently white folks can’t understand.  In a movie that’s completely not supernatural, it is a very fun element, kind of like this movie’s version of shining from The Shining.  We also have King, played by Melvin Gregg (whom you may recognize from The Paper, which admittedly endeared him to me immediately) and another standout character Shanika, played by X Mayo (The Farewell), who runs into Clifton at local gas station.  Clifton, played by Jermaine Fowler (Sorry to Bother You, Coming 2 America), is stranded with a dead phone and a dead car, so Shanika gives him a lift to the cabin after loading up on wine and Rap Snacks at the station.

Once they get all reacquainted, they peel off to chat with each other and we get to see more of how the group interacts in different pairings.  Allison gets teased often by the others for being half-white, Dewayne is not happy that Nnamdi is there, Nnamdi is eager to show King that he’s grown up since college, Shanika is ready to get wild, etc.  It’s all very funny and their interactions had me in stitches with laughter.  Eventually, as the spades game gets interrupted, they go looking for Morgan and Shawn and stumble upon the game room, finding The Blackening.  They open it up and see a little pouch filled with personalized game pieces, each one representing a person in the group.  And it’s a trap.  Of course it’s a trap.  The whole house seems to be rigged; closing, opening, and locking the doors at will, even controlling the lights.  Forced to play by the voice, they start in on a quest of Black trivia to save their lives.  The game, it seems, is a test of Blackness, asking questions about The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Nas songs, Black cultural icons, and more.  Get one wrong, someone dies.  Refuse to play, everyone dies.  One more reason not to use Airbnb.

What ensues is a fight for their lives and a trip down Black stereotypes and horror movie tropes that will have even the casual fan of horror movies (or cinema in general) going absolutely hysterical with laughter, as I did.  The cast works so well together and the writing elevates what easily could have felt like an all-Black version of Scary Movie into a proper satire.  Don’t get me wrong, there’s plenty of place for parody like Scary Movie, but the writing here takes it out of the realm of parody and into the realm of commentary, and boy do I like that.  Of course it helps actors get lost in their characters when you don’t have preconceived notions of actors (for example, I’m not sure I’d buy Tom Cruise as George Washington, right?), but I feel like the cast here has so much chemistry and impeccable comedic timing.  It’s one of my favorite old sayings that dying is easy and comedy is hard, but here, both are very much on the table and the cast handles both sides of that coin wonderfully.

What’s more than that, though, is the commentary.  What I think makes this movie so successful, like Attack the Block, is that you don’t have to engage with the social commentary to get an enjoyable experience out of this film.  It’s very much still a very fun, very funny horror-comedy that blends elements of Scream, Saw, and other horror movies to create something that’s both unique and pays homage to the films that made it possible, even if you don’t want to get deep into what it’s saying beyond what’s written in the screenplay.  But you know me and that’s why we’re here, so let’s look into what The Blackening is saying.

I should preface this by noting that I am not Black myself, but I’m going to do this carefully and, as always, I encourage you to seek out Black voices and listen to them—not just about this movie of course, but in general, and that goes for any marginalized community.  But I’m going to do my best here, leveraging my own experience as a racial minority in America and some research I did before writing this.  For one, it is so refreshing to see a movie that is about Blackness and doesn’t talk down to the audience about it.  It has the feeling of authenticity about it which not all movies that address a Black experience can do.  I think one of the most telling moments is when a literal white savior rolls in to help and despite saying all the right things, the immediate feeling is fear and distrust.  And you can’t blame them even a little bit; there’s a world weariness that comes with being a minority in America, because everyone knows what the right things to say are.  Even though the sentiment around open racism is rapidly changing in today’s America, for a long time people got very good at hiding it.  It’s easy to learn the right words and pay lip service to them, but it’s harder to live by them and even harder to trust the person saying them.  Even in a life and death situation, I understand the hesitation, because trusting the wrong person can lead to a terrible outcome under normal circumstances, without a crossbow wielding maniac hell bent on killing you.  I joked with people once that the game Among Us was a perfect encapsulation of the minority experience in America; people look you in the face and tell you that you’re safe, they may even do a little dance to show you they’re a friend, and then they pop right out of their normal looking skin and the monster they really were straight up eats you.  So believe me, I get it.

Then there’s the proving of their Blackness, the very premise of the game they’re forced to play.  There are these external pressures that are put on minorities that lead to phenomena like code-switching.  Code-switching, if you don’t know, is when people, largely minorities, change their language, manner of speech, or mannerisms based on who they’re around.  This one is something I’m particularly familiar with as I’ve been doing it for much longer than I’ve known the term existed.  So you go from one room trying to fit in with people of a different background to acting differently in the next while trying to fit in with people of the same background.  Both times, you’re acting in a certain to show that prove that you are enough of any certain characteristic that marks as a part of that group.  Allison is a great example of this problem in the film, because she has a white father, so her Blackness is constantly the butt of jokes and teasing for as long as they’ve known each other, but at some point in the film, each character has their Blackness questioned and tested as if that’s a thing that someone should have to prove.  Co-writer Tracy Oliver said she wanted the movie to be a commentary on what it means to be Black and how there’s no one right way to do that, and as someone outside of the Black community, I think they did a great job.  This is far too complicated for me to truly unpack, nor do I feel qualified to do so, but I will say that for a long time I used to listen to the LA Times podcast Asian Enough while that was still in production, and hearing those stories from other Asians and South Asians like me was extremely affirming when I’ve been called a coconut all my life (brown on the outside, white on the inside).  So I can only imagine what it feels like for Black people to watch a movie so unapologetic in its Blackness as The Blackening.

But like I said, whether or not you choose to engage with this level of commentary that The Blackening offers, which I believe you should (and I’m sure there’s more I either haven’t touched on or didn’t register with me), it’s still an incredibly funny, well acted, and well written film that will add a great deal of laughs to your spooky season.  For me, this is one of the top horror-comedies I’ve ever seen, sitting up in S-tier with movies like Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead.  At 1 hour and 37 minutes, it’s also a sensible length for a comedy, without ever feeling overstuffed or too light in detail.  This R-rated comedy is available to stream on Netflix and is definitely worth adding to your Halloween ritual.  And with a sequel officially confirmed, I can’t wait to see what’s next for this cast and crew.

One Flew Over El Cuco’s Nest

It’s that time of year again.  Spooky season.  And thus kicks off the Study Room’s special Halloween coverage, where I will be posting twice a week on the run up to the last fun holiday of the year, All Hallows’ Eve!  I’m pretty excited for this and I’m looking forward to giving you twice the hidden gems, twice the shivers down your spine, and twice the deep dive analysis.

As you know, horror isn’t really my most favored genre, but I do love when horror, like science fiction, uses its themes to get deep into the human experience through the use of the fantastical, and in the case of horror films, dread.  So I want to start off with one of my favorite horror shows of all time, the underrated and largely unknown The Outsider.  Unfortunately, it came out in 2020, which was a big year for a lot of reasons that you may remember, and on top of that, it was overshadowed by its own network’s Lovecraft Country later in the year.  So despite it being a Stephen King adaptation, it’s gone largely missed and forgotten.

[Now for a content warning—this post will contain discussion of child murder and self-harm; if that’s not something you want to read about, hit the eject button and I’ll be back next time with something less disturbing, but still spooky]

Man’s best friend discovers a parent’s worst nightmare.  We start with overhead footage of an idyllic suburb that quickly gives way to the hint that something very wrong is hiding.  As so many of these things begin, The Outsider opens with a man walking his dog when they happen upon the body of a small child, Frankie Peterson.  Any child’s death is upsetting, but this is especially so—dismembered and eviscerated, with human teeth marks present.  The scene is truly, truly horrifying in a way that sent a shudder through me.  The show doesn’t hide from how disturbing this is, even the man who discovered the body is close to catatonic from what he’s seen.

A few days later, Terry Maitland, played by Jason Bateman (Arrested Development, Game Night), is getting his family ready for a little league game.  It’s a stark contrast to the opening scene, but all is not well.  Detective Ralph Anderson is laying on his dead son’s bed.  Unlike the victim at the beginning of the episode, his son very unfortunately lost a battle with cancer; but the grief he’s experiencing is no less palpable.  Ralph, played by Ben Mendelsohn (Rogue One, Andor) is still overwhelmed by the weight of the loss of this son, but he’s ready to make an arrest.  One of his neighbors committed a terrible, heinous crime against the most defenseless of victims.  The drive to the arrest gives the opportunity for flashbacks.  Ralph telling the Peterson family about the discovery of their son Frankie, witnesses seeing Frankie get into a van with Terry Maitland, another witness seeing Terry leaving the crime scene covered in blood, including his face and around his mouth while making a feeble excuse about a nosebleed.  Ralph wants the arrest to be very public—the game was a coming together moment for the community, a time when neighbors were going to go do something normal in the wake of tragedy.  Not to forget the loss of Frankie Peterson, but to be there to support each other when fear and loss grips them all.  Ralph wants the community to know that the man—the monster—who did this to young Frankie is being brought to justice.  But when the officers show up to arrest Terry, he’s in good spirits.  He seems to be coaching the team well and appears to genuinely care about the kids.  Terry is in total shock and disbelief when he’s being arrested; he cannot fathom why they thing he did what they’re accusing him of doing.  As he’s being escorted, in handcuffs, off the field, he takes a moment to tell the first base coach to take over; even in that moment, he’s thinking of the kids.  That doesn’t seem like the action of a cold blooded, cannibalistic child murderer, does it?

And yet, despite the numerous eye witness accounts and a mountain of DNA evidence, it turns out they might not be.  Because there was also a teachers’ conference in another city that he was definitely at during the time the murder was committed.  But as Ralph and GBI investigator Yunis Sablo, played by Yul Vazquez (Russian Doll), trace Terry’s steps, they get so much evidence that the DA starts champing at the bit, absolutely thrilled with the insurmountable proof piling up against Terry.  Eyewitness reports after the murder, CCTV footage, a taxi dispatch call (that he insisted on being made), even a handprint under a security camera he all but winked and smiled at; it’s a slam dunk for sure.  Except, well, there’s video footage of Terry talking against banning books in schools in a city miles away.  Can’t be in two places at once, can you?  Well, when the police execute their search warrant on the Maitlands’ home, a crowd gathers, watching the home get torn apart and the distraught wife and children of the alleged killer try their best to not have a complete breakdown under the stress.  As we’re there, watching the scene unfold, the camera focuses on one mysterious hooded figure—or as I started to refer to him in my notes, the Hooded Disfigure—watches on intently, soaking up the distress caused to the Maitland family.  The shot and the length of time that the camera lingers on him means that, in case you forgot that we’re in a Stephen King story, there is much, much more to this man than the average onlooker.  You can barely see his dark, otherworldly face under his hood, but when you do, he stares right through you.  Not the camera.  You.  Well, me anyway.  It’s a chilling visage to behold, a clear indication that something was wrong here, even more than the child murder.  And you got the distinct feeling that he was doing more than just enjoying the fallout of his handiwork.  No, this was a monster in more ways than one and he is not finished.

Unfortunately, the Peterson family was not able to avoid a complete breakdown.  Frankie Peterson’s mother is so overcome with grief that she suffers serious medical trauma and dies.  Frankie’s brother doesn’t make it either, choosing a very violent end.  And Frankie’s father, with his whole family dead in a matter of days, he attempts suicide and ends up braindead as a result.  The whole family destroyed.  All that pain.  All that grief.  It consumed them.  And that makes the Hooded Disfigure very happy.  Ralph is a likable sort; he’s a good cop, flawed sure, but good.  He’s still deeply affected by the loss of his son, but it doesn’t stop him from being there for others.  Including his wife, who is grieving just the same as he is.  As a side note, I really love how Ralph and his wife Jeannie’s marriage is depicted in this show; it just feels like such a caring and supportive partnership, it’s really refreshing to see, especially in a show where you’d expect to have the hero cop with his put-upon wife who revels in the sacrifice her family is making for her husband to be a cop.  Anyway, Ralph is a lot like me.  He’s rooted in reality; he’s not superstitious, he’s not religious, he doesn’t put stock in the evidence of things not seen.  He’s that just the facts kind of guy who wants to find a logical explanation for things, but he’s stymied.  What’s the logical explanation for irrefutable proof that the same person was in two places at once?  What’s the logical explanation for visits to a young girl in the middle of the night by a mysterious, hooded figure who somewhat resembles her father making threats and demands?  What’s the logical explanation for a trail of unexplainable gruesome child murders where each killer has an airtight alibi?  You feel for Ralph; he doesn’t know he’s in a Stephen King story either and that seems to get in his way.

Enter Holly Gibney.  That’s a name King fans will know, but she’s a new one to me.  Here, she’s played by Cynthia Erivo (Wicked, Bad Times at the El Royale), and she is a rare one.  Ralph doesn’t like unexplainable things and Holly is pretty unexplainable herself.  I don’t really know the best way to describe her, but she has perfect knowledge of things she could never know.  The attendance of baseball games she’s got no familiarity with, she can tell what any car is just based on the exhaust note (even Memphis Raines would be jealous), and she can look at a building and tell how tall it is, within a few feet.  She has no explanation for how she’s able to know these things and neither do the doctors that have been testing and poking and prodding at her for her entire life.  As evidence mounts that continues to not make any sense, it’s Holly who first comes to terms with the idea that if something can’t be logically explained, maybe the explanation is simply illogical.  Ralph needs to know that the world makes sense based on the rules we’ve figured out through science, but Holly, knowing full well that science has yet to figure her out, is more readily amenable to the idea that something here is outside the bounds of human knowledge, human rules, and perhaps humanity itself.  Ralph’s singleminded quest for justice—real justice, through investigation, evidence, and process is what makes rooting for him feel so good in a time when I don’t really watch things with police protagonists, but he is everything good we convince ourselves the police are.  And that’s why I like him.  Holly is strange, open, curious, and almost exactly contrary to Ralph, but in the situation, knowing what you know as the audience, you immediately get behind her too (not to mention that Cynthia Erivo is a great actress and is absolutely on point as Holly).  Obviously they can’t both be right and knowing that this is a Stephen King adaptation, not a bookie in the world would take bets on who is.

Now if Ralph is everything we wish cops where, Jack is everything bad we can say about the police.  He’s drunk, he’s belligerent, he doesn’t particularly care about justice, and he’s a man so driven by the desire to kill that he decided on a career where he would have the chance to do it on a professional basis.  His wife left him, which I get, because he’s a miserable sort of bastard who loves the power trip his badge gives him.  It’s no wonder he becomes an easy target for the Hooded Disfigure.  Through Holly’s research, she comes up with a list of names for the Hooded Disfigure and starts to figure out a few things about him.  He’s been called many things; there seems to be many stories about what he is.  El Coco, El Cuco, El Cucuy, the Baba Yaga, El Glotón Para Dolor, and so on.  The last name is particularly descriptive: the glutton for pain.  Just like the Petersons were consumed by their grief and pain and he kept showing up, even going to the Maitlands’ home as well while they were defending Terry from the horrific accusations levied against him.  The grief eater has a name and Holly knows it now.  She also thinks she’s figured out his pattern.  And he’s not very happy about that.  In the midst of this, angry Jack becomes a pawn in El Cuco’s game and, well, there’s a price to pay.  For a lot of people.

I have a baker’s dozen pages worth of notes on this limited series and while I would love to sit here and tell you every single thought I have about it, this is such a poignant and lasting examination of grief and the role grieving plays in our lives (and even the difference between healthy and unhealthy grief management) that I want you to just watch it and I don’t want to take anything away from that experience for you.  I have left out so many of even the main characters who are important to the series, but to go into each and every one of them and why and how they’ve come to be so meaningful to me, well, we’d be here all night.  It’s also stunningly shot, with so many intentionally composed frames that someone who knows much more about that than I do could probably wax poetic for hours on it.  And it’s so incredibly well acted, the cast is so, so good.  That’s not to say it’s a perfect series, though.  There are moments where it feels a little slow, but I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing.  At 10 episodes, it possibly could have been cut down to 8 for a snappier, pacier show, but I also can’t think of a scene to cut.  There are moments where things don’t happen, where the story isn’t being pushed forward, but it’s in those moments that we get the humanity of the series. 

It’s those scenes where the characters talk to each other, tell each other their stories, talk about what they’ve been through and what may come next for them that really stick with you.  It’s not the action or the investigation or the dread of El Cuco, but rather those stories that are prominent in my mind even years after I first watched The Outsider.  Even not getting the picture of Paddy Considine’s (Deep Cover, Hot Fuzz) Claude Bolton or Derek Cecil’s (House of Cards) Andy Katcavage or Jeremy Bobb’s (Russian Doll, Jessica Jones) Alec Pelley in this post, you will hopefully watch the series and build as much affection for them as I have.  Because this show has so much to say about the lives that we’re living and it effectively uses every character for it to get its point across.  We take on so much grief in our lives.  Not just our personal tragedies, but the world of it.  A world where children are less safe in their schools than any time I’ve been alive, a world where we sit idly by as genocides happen half a globe away.  A world where women don’t feel safe to walk the streets.  Where people are interrogated and violated in public restrooms over their appearance.  We carry so much of this pain and grief on a daily basis that we have to tune it out just to be functional. We make ourselves so cold to the suffering of others to manage our own that we also make ourselves cold to each other.  We forget that the person across from us is just as human as we are, that they’re suffering just as we are.  Those who act as if empathy is something to eradicate have it so incredibly wrong that it’s astonishing.  We need more empathy, lots more; more than I can muster on most days.  But believe me, I’m trying.

Alec Pelley has some words of wisdom that ring louder than a bell tower on a tranquil morning.  “You take small bites.  You accept what you can to keep your shit together and nothing more until you’re ready for another bite, that’s it.”  They work for the moment; believing in the impossible despite it going against your entire foundation, but also for dealing with grief and trauma.  You can ignore all the supernatural stuff and see this as a painful, unflinching look at the enormity of grief and loss that we as humans have to go through.  We endure such unimaginable and unceasing pain and are told how to get past it all the time.  But that’s not what we do, is it?  No, we live with it, we carry it.  Eventually, we’re able to fold it up until it fits in our back pocket, getting on with our days while managing the pain of loss—and there is some kind of tragedy in that as well.  The Outsider embraces living with the grief rather than trying to ignore it.  And as painful as that may feel, I think it’s probably healthier.  The 10 1-hour episode series is available to stream on HBO Max and if it’s not clear by now, I highly recommend you do so if you can.  It is not an easy watch, but by the end, as the dust settles and the dead are mourned, the show is hopeful and not bleak.  And that makes it something I keep coming back to.

Loop Dreams

Weddings can be hard to deal with sometimes.  Whether you’re in a relationship or not, big life events tend to bring up feelings in people.  They make you take stock.  Milestones make people reflect and reflecting can be difficult.  So when family screw-up Sarah arrives at her perfect sister’s wedding, she is kind of overwhelmed by the situation.  Until she meets Nyles, that is, the only person at the wedding in a Hawaiian shirt and swim trunks.  He spends his day drinking and lounging in the pool, nihilistic as ever, declaring that everyday is the same and life is meaningless (I mean, I’ve been to weddings, I get it).  Nyles bails her out of a sticky situation by giving a truly moving, romantic, and hopeful speech in her stead, and then dances through the crowds of guests undulating to the music, floating across the floor with a surprising level of grace for a man that drunk.  It felt like his toast was written just for Sarah and then he caught her eye when gliding through the reception like a carefree ghost that only she can see, in a scene of great visual humor.  His deft movements and nonchalant attitude lead to a frankness that Sarah finds intriguing.  He even admits to not believing a word of his crowd-pleasing toast.

Nyles, played by Andy Samberg (Brooklyn 99, Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping) isn’t a close friend of the family, but his girlfriend Misty, played by Meredith Hagner (Search Party, Bad Monkey), is one of the bridesmaids.  They’re a bit on the rocks, the two of them, but he’s at the wedding anyway.  Sarah, played by Cristin Milioti (The Penguin, Fargo), follows him to the window outside where Misty is cheating on him with another member of the wedding party.  The two of them then sneak off into the desert of Palm Springs to get drunk together and probably make some bad decisions.  However, this is interrupted when Nyles, full on in the middle of the wooing process, gets an arrow to the shoulder and yells out into the night air to a man called Roy.  They say most people know their attackers, but to know it even when taking a silently fired arrow in the back?  That’s on another level.  Nyles retreats to a cave, a spot he knows well, and hides as the desert sand bathes in an otherworldly glow emanating from the cave.  Roy, unable to find Nyles this time, makes his way into the cave and disappears.  Nyles, now feeling the effects of his archery-related injuries, drags himself towards the glow as Sarah appears trying to be of help.  Nyles implores her to just go away and to not follow him into the cave, but she’s dragged in anyway.  And when she wakes up the next morning, it’s this morning.  Nyles has been in it for a while, but, oh no, this is Sarah’s first loop.  And she’s not too happy about it.  Weddings, right?  The cake is always disappointing and then you get stuck in a time loop.

And thus begins Palm Springs, a brilliant take on the done-to-death time loop film.  The Hulu original hit the streamer in 2020 in a strange coincidence; while Hollywood was figuring out how to keep going when we weren’t supposed to get within six feet of each other, writer/director Max Barbakow delivered the perfect quarantine film almost by accident.  While much of the world was shut tight in their homes trying to survive a global pandemic and repeating the day over and over again, what could be easier to relate to than a man stuck at a wedding with his cheating girlfriend and a bunch of people who don’t know him, repeating the day like a video game level that you just can’t beat?  By the time we meet Nyles, he’s been in the loop so long that yesterday, today, and tomorrow are not just literally indistinguishable from each other because time stopped moving forward, his memory of everything that’s happened has blurred together.  Just like we were, he was stuck in place with what felt like no way out.  And despite it being an awful realization for her, like Daffy Duck realizing he’s standing in quicksand, Sarah getting stuck in there with him is probably the best thing that’s happened to Nyles for a long, long while.  After all, the only other person stuck in there with him was Roy (played by the legendary JK Simmons), who is trying to kill him.  And often succeeding, because all it takes for the loop to start over is to fall asleep or die and Roy seems to get really creative with how he goes after Nyles.

Palm Springs pulls off a neat trick here, something that you rarely see in time loop movies.  The gold standard is Groundhog Day, of course, and most movies follow that model of having one person stuck in the loop.  But here, not only are there more than one person in the loop, they’ve all been there for different lengths of time.  It allows the film to skip over the specifics of the loop that it doesn’t feel like taking the time to go through and focus on the differing stages of being stuck.  Nyles knows the rules well enough, or rather, simply doesn’t care much about anything anymore, accepting his fate.  Anything the film isn’t interested in explaining is brought up and waved away, so you can zip through the extraneous trappings of science fiction.  What follows then is an interesting exploration of a life free of consequences.  Everything that happens with that day just resets.  We get an incredible montage of Nyles and Sarah’s exploits together.  This section of the movie really packs in the laughs per minute, as their antics ramp up over the course of many loops.  The first act is very funny as well, but the second act gives you just so much pure comedy that if you look away you’ll miss something.  But the movie does stop and take a breather now and then, as you get to see these two people try to figure out what their new life is.  In addition to shooting a cake with a crossbow, they also take time to ask some philosophical questions about their predicament; if there is no forward progression in life and none of your actions have consequences, then is life meaningless?  Nyles answers with an emphatic yes; the kind of answer that comes with the resignation of having spent too much time suffering a Sisyphean punishment for reasons unknown.  Being doomed to live the same day over and over again can’t be great for the psyche.  But as that montage showed, even being stuck in hell can have its upsides if you’re stuck in it with the right person.

While the first two acts are mostly fun and games, the third act takes a more serious and dramatic turn; I’ve said many times before that I feel like comedy, when done at the highest level, is visual literature and I think Palm Springs reaches that level.  Nyles and Sarah start asking very relatable questions about the human condition and that’s what elevates this over other more run-of-the-mill comedies.  A good laugh is great, but if you can get a good laugh and feel something, that’s even better and that’s exactly what Palm Springs delivers.  Loneliness plagues us in our modern life and then urges us to put up even more walls, cementing ourselves into our loneliness in the name of protection.  But indiscriminate openness isn’t a viable option either; people need to protect themselves.  I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but it’s not the best world out there and being that open leaves yourself exposed, vulnerable to dangers physical, emotional, and mental.  Opening up is hard and sometimes it does take being stuck in a situation with someone to let the walls down a little and try to make a genuine connection with a person.  Life is meant to be shared, but finding the right people to share it with is hard.  I don’t have an answer for you, though I wish I did.  I’m a member of this so-called modern society as well (though with how we behave towards one another, I question this idea that we deserve to be called modern and sometimes I feel like society is a stretch) and I’m going through it just the same as anyone else, including Nyles and Sarah. 

Andy Samberg really shows off his range here—I always love it when comedians and comic actors get serious because they’re just so damn good at it.  Like Will Ferrell in Stranger Than Fiction and Everything Must Go or Jim Carrey in The Truman Show, Samberg kills it as the nihilistic Nyles, handling both the comedy and drama with equal aplomb.  And it should come as no surprise that I will be full of praise for Cristin Milioti, just as I was for her performance in The Penguin and just about everything else I’ve ever seen her in.  The Emmy nominated actress can’t stop showing off how good she is at this acting thing; she is so expressive in every frame and feels incredibly real in every moment of the film.  Part of that is the writing, of course; Sarah is a fully realized and complicated character, with flaws and nuance, not just the romantic interest for Nyles.  But Milioti’s acting ability sells Sarah every second she’s on screen and I can’t praise her enough. She’s probably the most underrated actress out there today and I won’t stop talking about it until she’s recognized as the best in the biz.  And the chemistry between the two is at the heart of this film.  It’s so strong that the actors disappear into the characters and the world is immediately believable and real to you; and it’s no small feat to make Jake Peralta disappear into another character, that’s for sure.  Milioti was predictably excellent because she always is, but it’s Samberg who is truly a surprise and I really hope to see more roles like this from him in the future.

There is something truly beautiful about Palm Springs.  The movie manages to pack in a lot of comedy and reality into its 90 minute runtime without ever feeling rushed or overstuffed.  It’s a celebration of all of life’s foibles and troubles and the things that make them worth it.  It’s a joyful, optimistic film about meaning in life being found through our connections with others.  What felt like the perfect movie for the moment it was released turned out to be a great movie for any time.  This is only the second time I’ve seen it and I admit to a small amount of hesitation to watch it again.  I was worried that outside of that moment it wouldn’t hold up, but I am so glad that I have been proven wrong.  While pure coincidence means that Palm Springs captures the feeling of being quarantined during the COVID pandemic flawlessly, its quality in writing, acting, and direction mean that it remains a great film regardless.  Streaming on Hulu with an RT score of 94% and an audience score of 89%, I highly recommend taking the hour and a half to check it out.  I doubt you’ll be disappointed.

Since you made it this far, it’s time for a little housekeeping.  Palm Springs marks the end of summer and now we’re getting into spooky season.  So starting with the next post, we’re getting into spooky media.  I’ve got an ambitious plan for October, so let’s see if I can pull it off together.  As always, thanks for reading!

News Cruise

It’s time to get into The Paper (not the incredible, overlooked 1994 film of the same name), Peacock’s new The Office spin-off series.  No, we don’t need more reboots and we definitely didn’t need a recycled version of The Office, but while borrowing the style and feel—and documentary crew, at least in the fiction of the show—and changing the focus, the same format feels surprisingly fresh.

As we learn in the opening moments of the series, while Bob Vance, Vance Refrigeration is still in the same office park, Dunder Mifflin has been sold off to a company called Enervate, which makes paper products, including their big revenue generator Softees, the toilet paper brand.  Also in the “use in the bathroom” division of their company is the Toledo Truth Teller, their newspaper.  As you can imagine, this means we’re not in Scranton anymore, but rather Toledo, Ohio.  And as you can also imagine, the Truth Teller is not in the best state.  Like most news, the print edition is all but dead and what is working for them is the online world of advertorials and clickbait articles, each one a swing of the hammer on to the head of a nail in the coffin of journalism.  If you’re a regular reader or you read my post on The Paper film, you know how important journalism is to me and how important I feel it is to the world.  So when Ned Sampson, played by Domhnall Gleason (Ex Machina, Brooklyn), an idealistic nepo baby with a knack for toilet paper sales, shows up with big dreams of turning the Truth Teller into a bastion of honest journalism like it once used to be, I was immediately rooting for him in his new position as Editor-in-Chief.

He’s a very different kind of boss from Michael Scott.  Unlike the sort of oblivious, cringey, but trying guy that Michael was, Ned is optimistic to a fault, wanting desperately to be the crown jewel of journalistic integrity and it allows him to sometimes get in his own way with his decision making.  But he’s a competent journalist, despite his relative lack of experience in the business.  He’s flanked by the replaced Esmeralda Grand, who was the acting EIC, played by Sabrina Impacciatore (White Lotus), who works to undercut him at every opportunity, and Mare Pritti, played by Chelsea Frei (Animal Control, The Moodys), his top and only competent reporter.  When I say Ned is relatively inexperienced in the field, we have to take a look at the rest of his staff to put that into perspective.  News used be the loss leader of a network or a company; a talismanic revenue sink that gave them credibility. But profit is king and running a real staff that investigates and reports the news costs a lot more money than Enervate is willing to spend, so he’s stymied immediately until he asks for volunteers to spend some of their time being reporters.

The bullpen has its characters who feel like they need more time to grow; so far you’ve got one guy who cannot read social cues and is hopelessly smitten with a coworker, a religious guy who is deathly afraid of having more kids (he currently has four), a Black woman who serves side-eye like it’s her job, and others.  The standouts here are Duane R. Shepherd Sr., who plays Barry, a veteran reporter who is past it now, but still in the game; he’s kind of got the one move, but it’s not overused and he can elicit some serious laughs.  There’s also Nicole, played by Ramona Young from Legends of Tomorrow, a bright young staffer with aspirations and an admirer who cannot read social cues, and especially Eric Rahill, who plays Softees employee-turned-staffer Travis, who is just full of surprises.  At first, I thought he was going to be one note, but every time I turn around he’s giving me Zeke from Bob’s Burgers vibes and that’s a big compliment. 

Oscar Nuñez returns as accountant Oscar Martinez, who transferred from Dunder Mifflin Scranton to Enervate when they were bought out.  He’s a very welcome and familiar sight in a show that is clearly not The Office, but is okay with the inevitable comparisons it will draw.  This time the Jim is Ned in the Michael role, the Pam is Mare in the Jim role, the Michael is Esmeralda in the Dwight role, and so on and so forth.  But of course, it’s not as cut and dried as that.  No character is a 1:1 carbon copy of someone from The Office, but the DNA is there.  And it doesn’t feel like some hollow game of character trait musical chairs either, each character feels genuine and consistent, at least through the episodes I’ve seen so far.  And I hope to see even more growth and depth to them as the show progresses past the first 10 episode season.  Also prominently featured is Tim Key (Taskmaster, See How They Run), playing Ken Davies, corporate suck-up in love with Esmeralda and threatened by Ned.  I’m always down for some Tim Key whenever he pops up; he plays the sycophantic yes man antagonist so well.

Of course, this is a comedy, so I wouldn’t expect too much along the lines of hard hitting journalism (which I’ve also not come to expect from the news anymore, sadly), but they manage to impart that Abbott Elementary vibe of just wholesome, comforting macaroni and cheese in television form.  The struggle between news and profits is clearly evident in the show; the Truth Teller’s parent company’s name even means “cause someone to feel drained of energy or vitality”, in one of the more clever jokes of the first season (sounds like someone put “energy” and “innovate” together in typical corporate speak and came up with Enervate—I love a layered semantic joke).  As much as Ned wants to be a principled journalist and a good boss, he can let his ego get in the way and, more than any other of this flaws, his immaturity.  It most certainly can get the better of him sometimes, but he always eventually comes to the right course of action, which is most definitely uplifting to see. 

Ned is the heart and soul of the show; the Truth Teller is his project and he sets the culture of the office and the series.  He brings the warmth and kindness to the role that infects the entire cast.  Even when it comes to dealing with Esmeralda, the perpetual saboteur, he never gets vindictive or mean; he’s perhaps even naive and too trusting when it comes to her.  But Ned’s innate goodness is what sets the tone for the series.  He, like me, really romanticizes journalism and wants to make the Truth Teller the honest, above board, beyond reproach trusted source of news like it used to be before it became a clickbait infotainment listicle site.  There’s even something oddly comforting about the American accent Gleeson plays Ned with, which sounds fairly convincing and easy enough to forget it’s being put on after only a few minutes.  His idealistic optimism, like Janine Teagues’s in Abbott, never feels too out of reach.  There’s something about his determination and the dedication of his volunteer staff that makes you want to believe that they’re going to succeed and become an example for journalism all across America, unlikely that may be.

The chemistry between Gleeson’s Ned and Frei’s Mare is phenomenal.  It is real, it’s tentative, it’s built out of genuine connection.  They will never be Jim and Pam, but it is a very pleasant will they/won’t they that is bound to get complicated and messy, since Ned is Mare’s boss after all.  But I could watch them will or won’t for 10 seasons, I don’t mind it at all and I’m usually not one who goes for that sort of thing.  Frei is coming off a strong showing in Animal Control and gets to show off more of her comedic talents here.  She shines in the The Paper, taking a starring role amongst her peers and running with it.  She plays the role without any cynicism, though she has her doubts and worries about the paper and her own abilities as a real journalist.  Mare has a military background, which seems to translate into a coolness under pressure, a frank approach, and the appearance of unshakeable confidence.  But she’s not just some trope; Mare’s already shown herself to be a more fully realized character than I’d expect to see this early in a comedy’s life cycle.  It usually takes a few episodes for a consistent voice of a character to emerge and up to a season or two for them to really lock into their performance.  Frei seems like she was able to instantly walk into Mare’s shoes.  Esmeralda’s even got that Dwight-like quality of being just annoying enough that you enjoy seeing her lose, but you never really hate her and you like it when things go right for her every once in a while, as long as it doesn’t come at the cost of our main protagonists.  The rest of the staff, while still underdeveloped are quite charming as well, each with their endearing qualities.  While Ned, Mare, and Esmeralda are the main focus, the tertiary characters get their moments to shine as well and you really just can’t help but start to like them more with each episode.

Just like The Office, I’m sure that The Paper will need time to grow and the actors will need to fill out the roles.  I mean, go back and watch the first season of The Office and tell me that’s anywhere near the level of the rest of the series.  Parks & Rec didn’t truly become Parks & Rec until Ben and Chris show up at the end of the second season.  Superstore had a strong start, but got better once its more sideline characters stepped up.  Even the venerable Buffy the Vampire Slayer took some time to graduate from monster of the week (great monsters of the week, sure) to deeper, stronger storytelling.  But based on that, The Paper is off to a good start and I really feel like it’s going to get better and better if given room to breathe.  This may not be exactly what you were hoping for if you wanted more of The Office; but if you are looking for a funny show, with a big heart and endearing characters who are good people trying to do good things, then The Paper is definitely for you.  I had to pace myself through the first season, but much like The Office, I’ve already started a rewatch.  I honestly can’t wait for the next season (and I hope it’s a longer one; ten episodes just isn’t enough).  And it’s already been renewed for a second season, so I’m hopeful that NBC and Peacock see the potential in this wholesome, comforting show.