Gamut of Reviews: September of Movies, Part 2

topics covered: comedy, novel adaptations, and the black hole of action

It's not every day that I have something to ask, but here I am. It's really two questions, and if you dropped me an answer wherever you have me (whether it be in the replies of this Substack or you reaching out to me elsewhere) I'd be very, very grateful:

1. Do you want a regular feature of these movie reviews? I do watch movies regularly, so it wouldn't be extra effort to me. I rather liked the last time I worked on it. It wouldn't be too big a problem. (If you do, I'll think of a new name for this section. Maybe "Peer to Peer"? "Highlight Reel"? Something like that.)

2. Do you want the Music Dispatch back? I will absolutely not do that on a weekly basis, though. Maybe a little looser than before and less regularly, but I also keep up with new albums still and listen to them every Friday, so this, too, wouldn't be too big a problem. It simply would go back to being on a first-listen basis. Or I weave in some older music I listen to. What do you think?

If I get no answers to any of this, somebody hacked into my Substack and added the two paragraphs above LOL. Anyway, back to the program.

from Theater Camp (2023, dir. Molly Gordon & Nick Lieberman)

Like I said last time, I love movies. A lot. But I wouldn't have guessed that I'd watch this many movies. Seriously, I saw 21 movies in September. I have a full-time job! My average is like eight a month this year? So, you know, this is way above my usual average. Today's post naturally covers the movies I've seen after Elemental, which is where the last post left off. It also covers two more films I've seen in October: The Color Purple and One Piece: Strong World.

The full list is as follows:

• The Woman King

• Kubo and the Two Strings

• One Piece: Film Red (I talked about this in depth here)

• The Bad Guys

• Bottoms

• After Hours

• I Want My MTV (will also cover the book, which I've read last July)

• Love At First Sight

• Theater Camp

• The Color Purple

• One Piece: Strong World

Let's get the One Piece out of the way, and then I'll get to the other movies in reverse chronological order. Here we go.

One Piece: Strong World (2009, dir Munehisa Sakai)

Whatever people have to say about anything doesn't interest me, especially if the place where they say it is Letterboxd, famously known for people thinking they're the funniest people alive, just littering the whole thing with corny jokes. But this review, the most popular one, pissed me off: "it takes 15 minutes of plotless sakuga to get to the actual title drop/opening credits/set up of the whole thing and it's punctuated by a dance sequence featuring a dude with swords for legs, a giant gorilla wearing novelty shades, and a clown doctor wearing fart shoes".

Wrong. Sakuga is not an Oda thing. Silly characters have been done in various OP romps before. Are you new here? You can tell Oda wrote this, yes, but for other reasons, such as:

• Sanji is written especially stupid, and all his reasoning is about "ladies".

• Usopp and Zoro get the worst injuries. This one is an Oda classic.

• Nami has a strong focus as the damsel-in-distress, emphasis on distress rather than damsel.

• Luffy is the moral compass; I've touched upon this on Film: Red, the other Oda-written kinda-maybe-romp. I found it kinda strange how Usopp, who has left the group over a ship by the girl he likes, would ask Luffy why they're going back to East Blue at a perceived threat, but it is set-up for the classic Luffy Must Always Be Right.

• a strong emphasis on the tsukkomi-boke type comedy, with a touch of the absurd (perhaps that is what the Letterboxd reviewer tried to get at, but again, other romps have had wacky characters and sakuga)

• Lines about how Luffy is like Gol D. Roger. Zzzz.

Okay, now that we have this out of the way: Strong World thrusts us into a sky island in which the food chain indulges in Mortal Kombat-levels of mortal combat. We find out that our big bad, Shiki the Golden Lion, possesses the Fuwa-Fuwa Fruit and can make anything float. Through his ability, he aims to erase the whole of East Blue by dropping his ship and the whole sky island on top of it, while also unleashing mutant animals. In the process, he destroys the ecological equilibrium of the sky island — not that he cares. The Strawhats, originally concerned that various villages have disappeared from the East Blue — where the core crew is from — and graciously take his offer to be taken there to check. But Shiki tricks them, taking Nami as his crew's new navigator (sound familiar?) while scattering the other Strawhats to various island offshoots. They must reconvene before Shiki ends all of East Blue, etc.

As usual, the final fight was pretty boring. The animation was cool (holy shit Gear 2nd looked incredible, there was serious animation budget in this) and the premise of the world pretty sick, although underdeveloped and left to the wayside for, again, the fight, just like various threads like the missing East Blue villages. For a romp with no consequence, if you were to put it on the relevancy spectrum I last talked about, it's closer to Baron Omatsuri than it is to Film: Red, but not because Sengoku and Garp talk about Shiki, thus "making" this "more canon" than the others (which, given the inherent premise of traveling self-sufficient islands… LOL). It's more so because of the core idea of friendship comes through quite nicely with Nami and Luffy, though it isn't anything we haven't seen in Arlong Park and Alabasta arcs and done better there. It's almost like the emotional core of OP lies with its main five characters, who have personality and weaknesses and aren't just mascot-gag characters (not you, Robin). Hmm! But yeah, not the best OP movie.

I will say, for a movie that focused on Nami, it was pretty strange to see the tattoo - one of her defining character traits — appear like three quarters into the movie. Before that, it's more about some bracelets? And the Clima Tact only appears at the end too? Okay... Also, like, did anyone else get a Pokémon vibe?

The Color Purple (1985, dir. Steven Spielberg)

Celia and Nettie are two young girls in the Deep South. This is in the early 20th century, and Celia has already had two children by her father. Things don't end there, though, as the Albert wants Nettie to be his wife. Nettie's father refuses, giving him Celia instead. Nettie briefly joins her, but is forcibly taken away after defending herself from Albert's attempted rape. Celia grows up (Whoopi Goldberg) in a horrible household and barely finds a chance to escape, but encounters with Sofia (Oprah Winfrey) and showgirl Shug (Margaret Avery) empower her and give her a sense of community... And above all, she wonders... is Nettie still alive?

Maybe you can tell from such a dense summary already, but despite a generous runtime of two hours and thirty minutes, the movie has a severe case of Novel Adaptation. The Color Purple has a quick pace and big moments not led up to all that great that you know are moments in the actual novel filmed with a sort of duty to keep things "faithful". I also didn't enjoy the ending in that I'm not sure if I would've ended it there, although reunions always make me cry. Going in blind (I knew nothing of this film except this being a Spielberg featuring an all-Black cast and story?) I didn't expect the lesbian moment, which was a delight! That was well led up to! But then I found out that Spielberg tampered it down severely, which he later said he regretted, and that all other suggestions that author Alice Walker had to the film were thrown out of the window. That probably explains why it's there in the beginning and disappears later as if nothing happened (you mean to tell me Celia sees Shug with a husband later and doesn't feel some type of way about it? Or Shug about Celia? You know...) But there were things to adore here, too, mainly the acting. Whoopi Goldberg is such a force here, as well as the one and only Oprah Winfrey as Sofia.

Theater Camp (2023, dir. Molly Gordon, Nick Lieberman)

Theater Camp: a place where all the weirdos can be themselves. It runs semi-okay for many years and a steady cast of teachers, but things fall into disarray when the original founder and CEO Joan (Amy Sedaris) has a stroke and falls into a coma. Now crypto-bro Youtuber Troy (Jimmy Tatro) has to pick up the pieces, just as Theater Camp starts the new season. At the same time, life-partners Rebecca-Dianne (Molly Gordon) and Aaron (Ben Platt) announce a play for Joan as the crowning achievement of the camp, "Joan, Still" having written no word of it.

I loved this. The "documentary" conceit of this movie justified the various flash cards interspersed into the movie, and while I feared that it would expose too much (or otherwise be a little too convenient, if that makes sense) it only featured strongly at the start and end, so it's fine. The Parks & Rec-style, off-the-cuff filming really helped immerse matters also. What I really adored was how the comedy came from characters that were totally serious about it. You had a character doing seances and you knew she meant it when she tells a little child "You're the oldest soul here. This is your last life". A character rolls in the grass to reach someplace fast and nobody stops to laugh out loud. Yes! I love this type of absurdity a lot, where the wall isn't "broken" half the time, and nobody involves knows they're in a comedy. (Least of all Troy, who naturally made me laugh the most, like the en-TROY-preneur he is.) There were so many moments that had me laugh out loud. I'm not exactly a theater kid (too broke :') ) but the world of overly serious people deeply committed to the craft and with a couple screws loose still felt familiar to me. Gordon, who co-directed and co-wrote the movie, is a revelation in this film - I can't believe she was used in such an annoying manner in The Bear. Normal pixie girlfriend? Her? Come on! Theater Camp embodies all I want in a comedy... almost, because I would've loved to see more Ayo Edebiri as Janet Walsh, who lied on her resume. Can somebody tell the stage combat teacher what stage combat is?

Love At First Sight (2023, dir. Vanessa Caswill)

Stop me if you know this one. Hadley (Haley Lu Richardson) is late for her flight to see her father in London. While she boards her other flight, she meets Brit Oliver (Ben Hardy) and they fall in love... at... first... Sorry. I just fell asleep. What year is it? Right. So they lose each other at customs... the question is will they have their happily ever after despite that?

As someone who was just in Heathrow, the customs guy right at the gate made me lol. Not my experience, honestly! Okay: I don't care for Netflix, and romance is not my forte. (You want romance movies, ask

Miranda

.) I was only here for Haley Lu Richardson, an actress who deserves to be named in the same breath as Rachel Sennott and Ayo Edebiri right now - Richardson excels at a certain type of exasperated young adult who is still a little too in her head. She makes the minor feel profound with her unshowy style. She was good in the second season of the wholly unserious HBO show The White Lotus too, but I still like her best in the Kogonada joint Columbus. But in either case, you see how her style makes her a natural fit for romantic movies like these.

The problem I have with romance is that it brings out some shallow sides of me, like: how hot are the leads? I thought Ben Hadley was not. Their chemistry was okay given the fact they know each other for really short. The other problem of this movie, and this one is not shallow, is that it wanted to be way smarter than it really is, with these "statistical likelihoods", which means you now have a narrator (Jameela Jamil) rattling off numbers half the time. It has a plot reason, and I can't pretend it isn't like... badly done, but it's boring. The whole film is boring. Algorithmically so. (It's also a YA adaptation, which I hadn't guessed, but I did wonder if it was a novel adaptation at the very least. A couple heavy-handed dialogue choices here and there that make more sense on the written word... some of us read, honey) It pissed me off, though, with "Video Killed The Radio Star", a song that cannot conceivably be your song to boogie to. What? That's the MTV song. ???

If you want to watch a chance encounter romance full of heart, humor, and (hot) leads with fantastic chemistry that came out this year and also features London, watch Rye Lane. There's a Colin Firth cameo in that one!

I Want My MTV (2019, dir. Tyler Meason, Patrick Waldrop)

novel by Rob Tannenbaum and Craig Marks
The MTV era: flashy colors, big synthpop, girls in slight clothing, sex, drugs, big cats, Michael Jackson, and rock 'n' roll. It is the reason the Second British Invasion happened. It is the reason Madonna is as big as it is, who went on codify the pop star as we know her. It is the reason we care so much, even to this day, about music videos. And it is not an era I'm fond of. The reason for that is twofold: the racism (there is a section in the book detailing it, with a story alleging that an entire network — I forgot which — threatened to pull out its music catalogue if they didn't play Michael Jackson) and the music coming out of it just uniformly sounding the same. I mean, yeah, I do like Hall & Oates, and there's some good inside — beyond the usual suspects of Prince, Tina Turner, Madonna, Janet & Michael Jackson, etc — but you take a trip through the Billboard Hot 100 Number Ones past 1985 like I have in summer and it's starting to look a lot like this picture. At least Hall & Oates spam the same chorus over and over! (My favorite: "Private Eyes".)

To the book's great credit, no stone was left unturned for this oral history. Everyone gets to talk, including talking shit and contradicting one another. That is great when the discussion turns to the anti-Blackness of the channel and all the MTV executives scramble to say that akshually they were never anti-Black, it's only that Black people aren't rock 'n' roll! But it does numb quite a bit when it comes to the fifteenth discussion about this one music video, or this one artist, or various MV behind the scenes stuff. The other thing that this book does well is that - unlike Please Kill Me (the oral history on punk) - there's a little blurb of text detailing the context before the heads start talking. It sets the scene for the most part, though I remember chapters in which the introduction would have nothing to do with what happened at the end. The book is well worth a read, though, if you even have a passing interest in pop music.

The documentary (runtime: 1 hour 30 minutes) to this book (608 pages)? Forget it. Self-flagellating garbage. I had a good laugh when they went on to suggest that they decided to change their mind on Black music because David Bowie (a lifelong fan of Black musicians) told them so in some interview. LMFAOOOOOOOOOOOOO

After Hours (1985, dir. Martin Scorsese)

Paul (Griffin Dunne, who kind of looks like a young Alex Turner...) works a regular life as a word processor. But this one evening after work, he decides to visit a girl he's just met at a café and is attracted to in her place all the way down to SoHo. Between dead bodies, women with sculpting hobbies, Mohawk nights and a mob led by an ice cream truck driver, Paul is not getting a wink of sleep that night. Will he be able to get back home?

I checked this film out because it happened to be recommended to me while I was checking out Bottoms, and the name rang a bell because The Weeknd named his best album after it. And, why lie, Martin Scorsese films are always worth a watch. I expected something like Casino, a sprawling epic of love and power and money, but this was not that. This is a movie that initially feels dark and a little scary, but then you realize there's... a comedy within that. As Paul gets more exasperated and things get increasingly absurd and really fucked up, all that is left for the viewer to do is to sit back and have a laugh at the man's expense. I think the funniest two moments is the moment with the bouncer in Club Berlin (the quarter line had me in tears) and then Paul rattling off to a random stranger what happened to him while getting more and more worked up about it (which is the trailer, a perfect choice). But what elevates this from just a funny flick to an incredible one is the ending. I won't spoil it, but wow. There couldn't have been a better one. This has absolutely nothing to do with The Weeknd's album - it's funnier and cleverer, for one, not as caught up in self-pity, and incredibly stylish to boot. Now that I've typed it, though, I think the album that kind of gets this movie's vibe is AM. Equally urban and nocturnal, but not as funny.

Bottoms (2023, dir. Emma Seligman)

PJ (Rachel Sennott) and Josie (Ayo Edebiri) really, really want to get laid with the two hot cheerleaders. While they're moping about their lack of rizz, their car lightly hits the high school's hotshot quarterback Jeff (Nicholas Galitzine), who cries bloody murder. Called to the headmaster, PJ and Josie lie about them "defending themselves" for their "fight club". It's a lie, but it could be a lucrative one: if there was an all-girls fight club, they could get the girls of their dreams...

Like I talked about earlier, for me to find a movie funny, it has to be absurd and keep at it. Nobody should know they're in on the joke. That's what makes a situation hilarious. It made After Hours hilarious to me, and it made Theater Camp so, so endearing. One Piece uses tsukkomi-boke type jokes a lot, meaning that when one character is absurd, one character will be the voice of sense. It doesn’t always hit, but when it does work, it does so because the tsukkomi (the one calling it out) has an outsized reaction to it. (That is typically Usopp, and an example I've recently rewatched that made me laugh really hard was Camie pointing out that she gets caught over twelve times and Usopp going “you get caught too many times, man”) Jeff's character worked best for me for this reason - he was always crazy and not once did Galitzine "pull out" of the narrative and crack a joke about the situation. He was the joke. The other character that worked well for me was Josie (Ayo Edebiri), because her character had a bit of a dramatic pull behind it - she really wants to be with Isabel (Havana Rose Liu), because not doing that means an unhappy lavender marriage with a gay priest (an improvised scene I wish had been baked into better into the film). But what's worth working characters when the plot itself felt so hodgepodge? It was too obsessed with telling jokes and not obsessed enough with telling one, one, story.

I'm not a high school comedy gal, so half the (likely?) references I didn't catch, leaving a wholly uneven movie with strange pacing and a predictable plot of the lie blowing up in PJ and Josie's faces. And when that does happen, the scene is meant to be serious and sad, but then at the end of it the teacher/club advisor Mr. G (Marshawn Lynch) launches this ridiculous monologue that completely ruins the mood. There were many scenes like that, especially at the beginning. Worst of it all was Rachel Sennott to me - who is normally better at being within a character and doing absurd shit, and it's what made her character in Bodies Bodies Bodies, a movie I loved, so much fun. PJ was barely a character, had no interiority to her, and Sennott just kept doing Twitter-esque haha jokes that felt like I was scrolling the timeline while watching the movie. I'm not surprised to hear how much improv was in this, because the jokes fizzled once and nothing happened afterward. Like a Tweet.

The Bad Guys (2022, dir. Pierre Perifel)

An all-animal crew of gangsters (leader Wolf, right hand Snake, shapeshifting Shark, aggressive Piranha, and techie Spider) are caught red-handed trying to steal the coveted Golden Dolphin, an award handed to Good Samaritans (in our case, scientist Guinea Pig). Guinea Pig, like the good citizen he is, wants to prove that even these evil people can be good and takes the gang in. But turns out that a meteor that crashed into Los Angeles has powers and that, in order to stop the evil scientist from using it, the bad guys have to actually be good? And Mayor Fox seems awfully aware on what's going on...

The movie really tested me at the start. Wolf (voiced by Sam Rockwell in the original - thank God we watched the Turkish dub) is this uber-cool guy who, very early on, has this subconscious reaction on being good (wagging his tail). And it's like... okay, dog. But the movie kept at this, probing at the idea of how good it feels to help others, and how they felt pushed into the role, and it worked and had a surprising sensibility to it? There were the obvious Soderbergh switcheroos, and apparently in the original, they explicitly say "Danny Ocean" to Wolf once, so you know where the inspirations lay. (The Turkish dub went "Clooney") It's a children's film. Don't expect any mega-complex concepts in this one. It's formulaic in its story, but the animation is decent and for what it set itself out to do I found it accomplished most of it.

Kubo And The Two Strings (2016, dir. Travis Knight) (rewatch)

If you must blink, do it now! Kubo is a young storyteller who can make origami sculptures come to life with his shamisen playing. His father Hanzo, a brave knight and the subject of Kubo's stories, has passed away, and his mother is neither here nor there, slowly forgetting more and more of her husband's brave stories. Her family, especially her father the Moon King, wants Kubo's eyes, so he must never be outside after dark. Which, of course, happens when Kubo tries to talk to his father on the Lantern festival. With the last of her strength, Kubo's mother sends him away to a distant tundra. Kubo, who now travels with a snow monkey and meets an amnesiac beetle knight, must find Hanzo's helmet, armor and sword to be able to fight the Moon King...

This was a rewatch for me. I had forgotten so much of the movie - I saw it seven years ago - except the key reveal (lmao). I really liked Kubo, he's the cutest kid ever, and his power is so, so impressive. It's a very sweet film with very little narrative surprises. Actually, I thought the Moon King aspect was a little underdeveloped, as well as the found family stuff? The pace was a smidge too fast for me for certain. But the animation is very impressive! The stop-motion of it all!

The Woman King (2022, dir. Gina Prince-Bythewood)

Dahomey, 1823, is a West African kingdom at war with the bigger Oyo Empire, because the Oyo Empire tried to abduct and enslave Dahomean women. The Dahomean kingdom needs to stock up on warriors, who are the all-female Agojie, and this is where Nawi (Thuso Mbedu) joins. Under the strict tutelage of leader Nanisca (Viola Davis) and commander Izogie (Lashana Lynch) she passes the test and must defeat the Oyo Empire troops so Dahomey can stay independent.

I was curious about the historical aspect of it while watching the film, and I was mildly surprised at the ending (this one ends positively for Dahomey, lol). But it makes sense - the movie has a distinct TV feel for it, meant to be consumed with snacks and a couple ad breaks here and there. Slightly uneven pace and structure; for instance, we find out late (for my tastes) that (spoiler) Nanisca was raped and had to give birth to a daughter, which... I'll let you guess who that is! Many plotlines that were hinted at didn't really come to fruition. I hesitate to call it the "black hole of action" in that fight scenes take up so much time and rob of moments of character work, because that is a reductive view on narrative and what fight scenes can do, and an even more reductive view on a movie that is a by the numbers action movie, but it did feel that way with The Woman King. This is like a two hour film and either we could've had more by reducing the action setpieces or less plotlines. I think if this was only about Nawi, I would've liked this a bit better. Her section on training to be an Agojie was so good, and I love me a training arc in a palace in which people become soldiers. That's my shit. Other than that, the acting was really solid, especially Davis' regal and wounded air as Nanisca, and Lynch, who brought a joyful angle to her character that worked quite well for me. Oh, and John Boyega. Wow... what a man... a king.