In praise of fun messes and silly horror
This week, I appreciate the crazy swing and the “let’s just have fun with it” over the movies that get stuck in their own tar pits of seriousness.
“This is a big weird plate of crazy mess” was my thought while watching Digger(in theaters), the latest movie from director Alejandro G. Iñárritu (who also co-wrote). If your Iñárritu experience is, say, The Revenant, I could see how going from that to this could seem confusing in the “how is this the same guy?” sense (“cinematography and production design” would be my answer). There is more similarity here to his Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), which like this movie has some backstage-at-a-theater elements. But really I think the line you can draw more directly is to 2022’s Bardo: False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths, where, for example, stuff about family and immigration and Mexico’s relationship with the U.S. is mixed with recurring images of axolotlsand the main character talking to the ghost of Hernán Cortés. This is very much that — Something Important to Say mixed in with a lot of ideas, strangeness and whimsy. And with elements that had me thinking of the Coen Brothers and even Wes Anderson.
Tom Cruise is the other big swing happening here — he plays a character named Digger Rockwell, a loud yee-haw American oil man. When an oil operation in Greenland causes an explosion that sets a big sheet of ice adrift, he’s more concerned with saving his business than saving the lives of the millions of Europeans in the path of what will be a devastating flood. Adding to the Coen Brothers feel are John Goodman, Michael Stuhlbarg, Jesse Plemons and others as hapless U.S. government officials.
The movie takes some twists I found myself willing to just sort of go with, even to some obvious places. Headlines from early reviews and its dismal box office performance had me expecting a dud, but this is more interesting than that. It is fascinating in its presentation and Tom Cruise is clearly Doing A Thing, a little flight of fancy from his standard action fare. Here, he’s loose and weird and very watchable. Not great, exactly, but very watchable — which is also how I’d explain this oddball movie overall.
Expectation, of course, can color your reaction to a movie. Perhaps moviegoers expecting bloodcurdling horror will be disappointed by Other Mommy(in theaters), but I found it one of the funniest movies I’ve ever seen about parenting anxiety, middle-age dissatisfaction and mom-pressure. Oh, and a demon — in addition to the mistakes of parenthood, the Big Scary here includes a demon.
Jessica Chastain plays regular human mom Ursula, who works a lot and doesn’t have patience for all the kid stuff, like listening to daughter Bela’s (Arabella Olivia Clark) “Story of Me” essay. Chastain also plays Other Mommy, the spooky something-in-the-closet that Bela gets up to play with after lights out. Other Mommy looks like Ursula but with darker hair, sharper bangs and extra creepiness. Also, I guess she doesn’t walk so much as levitate.
The first delight of this movie is that after a basic introduction to Ursula and her husband, Russell (Jay Duplass), who is the primary kid caretaker, and to the marital tension between them, we pretty quickly get to Russell setting eyes on Other Mommy creepily hiding under a table. Russell freaks out, grabs Bela, leaves the house and calls the police. Not long after this, Ursula also gets a look at Other Mommy and is also freaked out. Thus we totally skip all the “is it a ghost or just the wind?” nonsense that stretches out your standard horror movie and get right to this couple trying to figure out what the heck to do about this entity. Can they just leave the house? Do they need to call a priest? Does Ursula’s mother (Karen Allen), a frequent consultant of psychics and mediums and a big Russell-disliker, have friends who can help?
There are some jump scares here and some real-world “my child is lost in a ball pit!” fears. But most of the horror, such as it is, is the ever-swirling, low-grade dread built on the “am I screwing up my kid with some element of my life I don’t even realize impacts them” stuff. The movie tempers this with a fair amount of sly humor that for me made this more funny than scary. And it accomplishes all of its fun-horror business in a brisk 93 minutes.
Going funnier could have helped Soulm8te (streaming on Hulu and available for rent or purchase), a highly skippable spooky-season movie, which Wikipedia says is or was supposed to be part of the M3gan universe but which doesn’t capture that movie’s blend of scariness and zaniness. In Soulm8te, the sentient evil robot is now a “companion” (which means exactly what you think it means) with robots in beta testing who all look like Lily Sullivan, who plays “Sara,” main nerd David’s (David Rysdahl) special new robot friend. David is a sad nerd still mourning his recent-ishly deceased wife and can’t yet act on coworker Aubrey’s (Claudia Doumit) totally unwarranted attraction to him. But he sure as heck can help devise a “Sara” who can be his bestest friend and confidant. When “Sara” isn’t sassy enough to feel “real,” David messes around in her code and yada yada yada her software update makes her a clingy killer.
I get that this movie probably thinks it’s doing Social Commentary about what men think they want and how women feel they need to respond. I happened to see the Saturday Night Live “Mean, Scary Girlfriend” skit with Dakota Johnson about the same time I saw this movie, and that video short does something in a few minutes that is similar and funnier than what this movie does in its 99 minutes. Soulm8teneeded to be smarter and/or a whole lot dumber to reach those M3gan absurdity heights.
Taking itself way too seriously is The Social Reckoning(in theaters). A sequel to 2010’s The Social Network, this movie is also written by Aaron Sorkin, who this time replaces David Fincher in the director’s chair. This means that for The Social Reckoning Sorkin, not unlike Mark Zuckerberg as portrayed here, has no one to tell him “no.” Every scene with a man and a woman talking to each other features at least one line of dialogue that makes me want to throw something at the screen and the only things more loathsome than the villains are the “nice guy” heroes. And Jeremy Strong does a very good job of making Zuckerberg a pretty loathsome villain. We primarily see him as he preps for his appearance at U.S. Congressional hearings. This prep happens to take place on Jan. 6, 2021, in the movie’s telling, which means that all the arguing he does with staff and advisors about the wording of his answers and why he won’t fact-check political ads eventually takes a back seat to real-world troubles that social media has inflamed.
Intercut with these scenes are scenes of Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White) starting in 2019 when he begins covering Facebook. Eventually he makes contact with Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison), a true Facebook believer who works for the company’s civic integrity team. She’s concerned about some of the evidence Facebook is ignoring about its operations — specifically, she learns that a formerly politically progressive friend has become a racist right winger. How does this happen, she asks, kind of knowing how it happens but initially reluctant to blow open all of Facebook’s dodgy methods for increasing engagement.
Set aside the arguments between Frances and Josh, two people presented as roughly the same age, that sound like an aughts-era Millennial girlie versus a Boomer dad debating the issues at Thanksgiving. And the criminal underuse of Betty Gilpin, who plays an editor/boss cartoon character. And the movie’s attitude about those Wall Street Journal stories which, as you’ll recall, totally led to serious, well-enforced regulation of social media, a culture of robust local and national journalism and a fully functional government. Even setting aside all of these variously maddening things, The Social Reckoning feels like a movie that could have been an op-ed, like Sorkin wanted to be sure that we know that he knows The Social Network wasn’t the end of the story. There is no narrative reason for this movie to be; the Wall Street Journal series does not provide the dramatic tension the movie seems to think it does. Full of Sorkin-y twitches, this movie doesn’t feel like it has anything particularly new or thoughtful to say about Zuckerberg, the later years of Facebook or what Sorkin thinks it all means.
Similarly mired in its own Importantness is Netflix’s new release Animals. The quick review of Animals is that I liked it better when I saw it last year and it was called Highest 2 Lowest (still available on Apple). Like that Spike Lee movie, Animals features a seemingly wealthy and powerful man dealing with the kidnapping of his son, which then is revealed to be something else. But while that movie, imperfect though it was, had a Spike Lee bounce and riveting performances from Denzel Washington and Jeffrey Wright, Animals has just a whole lot of flailing.
Ben Affleck is, according to Wikipedia, a co-writer and director in addition to the movie’s male lead, Mark Kimball. A candidate for mayor of Los Angeles, Mark gets a call that his son, Denny (Christopher Woodley), who he believes is out trick-or-treating, has been kidnapped by a man who wants $7 million for his safe return. Mark should have the money but, as he’s neglected to tell his wife, Abigail (Kerry Washington), he’s basically blown most of their money, including the significant fortune inherited from his father, on the election that he is currently losing. Don’t worry, though; Abigail has her own secret and his name is Ron (Ray Fisher), a man who has just left his own wife so they can be together.
I know a lady who can give us the cash, says Mark’s campaign manager, Sam (Steven Yeun, probably giving the movie’s best performance). Sam calls a woman Wikipedia says is named Dayle (Gillian Anderson), but it’s clear that’s not her name nor will any of these people ever know it. Dayle is someone who can show up with $7 million in cash in the middle of the night but requires $1.4 million as payment for that service. She also offers some advice on dealing with the kidnapper and does so in the clipped British accent of a Gillian Anderson having a great time playing a silly character. When the Kimballs’ housekeeper Cecilia (Adriana Paz) and her boyfriend Ramon (Luis Gerardo Méndez) discuss the character, what they decide is that everybody is scared of her and she seems like a Mafiosa, both of which are fairly accurate.
Cecilia and Ramon are mixed into the tale because Cecilia was with Denny when he was taken and because the Kimballs turned her down when she asked them to hire Ramon, who is undocumented. We in the audience already know from the movie’s opening scenes that the kidnapper’s whole deal is something else entirely, but the movie spends a lot of time talking about The Latino Community in a way that doesn’t feel, you know, problem-free. Mark is currently behind his opponent (a Latina candidate) in polls of Latino voters, whose votes he needs to win. And he can’t hire Ramon because that would break the law but later when Ramon needs his help Mark can’t turn him away because that would be bad for showing solidarity with those voters. Also Mark is a Good Guy who needs to make a Moral Choice and “oh barf” is my response to all the movie’s clunky nonsense about Mark’s goodness and of-the-people-ness.
This movie feels like it tries on different variations of who it wants Mark to be and those different types of guy don’t all fit together. There is a scene somewhere in the middle of the movie between Mark and Abigail that feels fully cut out of a different movie with different characters. This movie picks up story ideas, turns them around for a bit, and then, like, forgets them entirely. Unlike Digger, Animal isn’t a fascinating mess, just a box full of L.A. noir scraps and thriller pieces that add up to nothing.
Also having absolutely no fun is Apple TV’s release Matchbox: The Movie, whichfeels like a bit from Apple TV’s comedy series The Studio that accidentally became a feature-length movie. If Mattel’s idea here was that it could just Barbie any toy into a popular film, hopefully this will at least slow that IP wave a little bit. Unlike Barbie in Barbie, Matchbox cars here feel more like a product placement than like an integrated part of the film.
In a 1990s that looks more late-1970s, a bunch of kids who call themselves the Matchbox Gang hang out at one of their uncle’s (Bill Camp) salvage yard and autobody shop, playing with Matchbox cars, until one of their number, Sean, moves away from their home town. In the now, Sean (John Cena), a super secret CIA whatever, returns to pay his respects when the uncle dies and decides to hang out with old buddies Crosby (Sam Richardson) and Charmaine (Teyonah Parris), who are now married to each other; Ted (Arturo Castro), who is now an AP high school science teacher, and Aimee (Jessica Biel), Sean’s long ago crush. But “just a few drinks” leads to the gang getting drugged and waking up in a cargo plane. The CIA now believes that Sean never actually delivered the nuclear weapon he was supposed to deliver in the movie’s initial (forgettable) action scene. Sean insists he did deliver the weapon, which means someone else on his team has turned traitor. Soon Sean and his gang of regular-Joe friends (though each with some pretty specific and helpful skills, like Charmaine’s ability to fly a helicopter and speak a bunch of languages and Ted’s ability to blow stuff up) are tasked with finding the errant bomb to save the world.
Matchbox: The Movie is rated PG-13; had it gone for a PG, I think some of the flat-soda quality, the Supermarket Brand Movie Product nature of this could have been forgivable as the price you pay for watching something newly released for “free” with the whole family at home. But this movie is probably too violent for that and definitely too boring and plasticine to watch on purpose as an adult or a teen or anybody who has any better choices at all, to include other movies, TV, books, sleep or staring at the wall. Cena has less than his normal sparkle and nobody has any human chemistry with each other. The movie isn’t fun, isn’t funny and doesn’t, like, Matchbox at all.
Featured photo: Digger.
