A few final quick bites as we say goodbye to 2021
And some thoughts on the new year
It’s Friday, December 24, and here’s where we are…
The year is finally winding down, and I’m thrilled about it. 2021 has been a lot.
I’ve just had some surprising news to wrap up the year, and as a result, I am discontinuing sales on my book I published this fall, The (In)Complete McSwan, Vol. 1. The book is a collection of five original works I wrote with Rebecca Swan over the span of our 20-year partnership, and I’m pulling it because we no longer own all five of those pieces of work. I would have never expected to see someone circle back around on these scripts, but here we are. It’s fun news, and if you’re interested in getting a copy of this book before it vanishes forever, you have until midnight PST on December 24. That’s only a few hours from the publication of this newsletter and then that book is gone, gone, gone.
It was on December 19, 2019, that I first announced this newsletter. We’re coming up on the second anniversary, and I am amazed at how much not only this newsletter has changed in that period of time, but the world itself. I was feeling my oats when I hit publish on January 8th, looking forward to what I thought would be a big year of moviegoing. Instead, the newsletter almost immediately became a plague diary, a record of how I used movies to try to emotionally navigate a truly harrowing situation. It seems unreal that we are still grappling with this pandemic, but at this point, that’s the normal that this entire newsletter has been set against. My first newsletter to feature COVID in the actual title was in March of 2020, just a few months after I started publishing. So much of what we talked about in that first year was just “movies as comfort food,” and I think more than ever, I’m curious about what relationship you have with movies.
If you’re reading this newsletter, and if you’ve been reading it from the start, then clearly you are someone who enjoys the conversation about films. You like to chew on the things you watch. You might agree with me sometimes. You may even agree with me often. But I guarantee you don’t agree with me all the time, and I’ll bet when we disagree, we disagree wildly. I love that. What interests me most is the way we can agree sometimes and disagree other times, because that says everything there is to say about film. There is no single objective opinion. There is no absolute right and wrong. If there was, it would be easy and boring to be a film fan. You’d just watch the list of the good things, ignore all the bad things, and there would be zero thought required.
Last night, my older son Toshi reached out to me on my Discord. He and his brother have been with their mother for the last two weeks, and I won’t pick them up until midday on Saturday. They’re desperate to see both Spider-Man: No Way Home and The Matrix Resurrections, and we’re seeing Matrix on Monday. They’re doing their best to stay spoiler-free, but they certainly see and hear things, but Toshi was concerned when he reached out because he’s seen some really angry reviews for Matrix now.
Keep in mind, Speed Racer was his formative experience in a cinema. We saw it three times in IMAX because of how much he loved it. He and his brother both love The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix, and when they saw Cloud Atlas this year, it was a hit. I told him that all of those films were met with scathing reviews when they were released. He wrote back, “Oh, okay. Got it. I’m excited, then, because those movies all rule!”
Maybe they’ll like it. Maybe they won’t. They certainly don’t love every film I show them, and when they disagree with me, they disagree vehemently. What I’ve noticed is that they’re never afraid to tell me what they think, and they don’t get hung up on those places where we disagree. We can talk about the “why” when it happens, and the more we talk about it, the better we understand our own positions and feelings. I don’t write criticism to convince anyone to think the way I do, and I don’t do it to try to change someone else’s mind about something. I do it because I think I can offer an informed context to things and because I love to dissect my own reaction to art. When something works for me, I love trying to pick apart the magic trick. When it doesn’t, I find real value in trying to understand the intent and why I didn’t have the intended reaction.
I’m always very conscious of what value you get for your money, and I sometimes forget I’m only charging you $7 a month. I look around at what $7 buys you in other media and I look at how much I produce, and I actually think I’ve got this weird need to overdeliver. In doing so, I hamstring myself because I eat up time that I could use on longer-form projects, and this coming year, I’m going to try to be more aware of how to divide that time. I know I’ve been playing with format here a lot lately. I have a restless brain, and I’m feeling good about the format overall while also feeling like there’s still room to refine and streamline things. I’m trying new things, refining older things, and I’ll continue that in 2022 as well.
One thing I know you’ll get more of this coming year?
QUICK BITES
Lauren Hadaway’s directorial debut The Novice is an impressive piece of work built around one of the year’s very best performances. Isabelle Fuhrman made a strong impression when she was younger in the absolutely bananas Orphan, and the only reason that film lands its ridiculous twist is because of the work she did, playing much older than she actually was. Here, she’s Alex, a college freshman who decides to join her university rowing team. She quickly decides she wants to make it to the primary varsity team her first year, something no one does. She begins to push herself physically and psychologically far beyond what seems like a rational breaking point, and the film puts you in her skin as she punishes herself. It almost feels like performance art. It’s so dedicated, so single-minded, and her physical presence in the film is so raw. This is the kind of work that made icons out of guys like Pacino and De Niro and Nicholson in the ‘70s, and if there’s any justice at all, this will launch Fuhrman and Hadaway both into a different level in this business. This is uncompromised, tough-minded, and impossible to shake, and movies about obsession are hard to pull off because they often leave us on the outside looking in. I’m not sure I’d call this a horror film, which is how I’ve seen it categorized, but it is lacerating and fearless in a way that is definitely terrifying.
Watching the conclusions of both Hawkeye and Dickinson this week, the big takeaway for me is that Hailee Steinfeld should be a much bigger star than she is. Hawkeye is my favorite of the Disney+ Marvel shows, start to finish. It may not be as ambitious or contain some of the weird highs of the other shows, but I really admire the scaled-down nature of the story they’re telling, and the chemistry between Florence Pugh and Steinfeld is so off-the-charts charming that I demand 80 episodes of a series about them eating spicy macaroni and talking shit right now. Dickinson was always a much stranger show, a show that could be swooningly romantic, hilariously silly, and emotionally raw, often within the same scene. I would have never guessed that I’d watch three seasons of a series about Emily Dickinson and her family, but saying goodbye to that terrific supporting cast and Steinfeld’s remarkable central performance will be harder than I expected. Equally adept at the sort of big-ticket action that is clearly important for anyone who wants to be a working movie star these days and the kind of intimate, character-driven work that really feeds an actor, she seems to be built for stardom in the 21st century. She’s only gotten better since making one of the great screen debuts for a young actor in True Grit, and she’s been pretty good about avoiding the kinds of junk that can derail a young actor’s career. I suspect this one-two punch is just a preview for what she’s capable of, whether continuing to play KateBeeshop in the larger Marvel universe or developing her own material that matters to her, and I would urge you to check out both series if you haven’t.
HBOMax has struck paydirt with their Music Box series, produced by Bill Simmons and his Ringer cohorts. It’s a series of music-themed documentaries, and I was particularly struck this week by Jagged, a portrait of Alanis Morissette as she released her breakthrough album Jagged Little Pill. Directed by Alison Klayman, it’s a fairly straightforward affair, but built around interviews with Morissette that I found engaging and, at times, quite moving. Morrissette has always been an arresting figure, and she seems just as sharp and uncompromised now as she’s always been. There are some moments in the doc that allude to some real darkness during the earliest part of her career, but that doesn’t seem to be something she’s willing the explore. Still, it’s enough to more than justify any anger that was present in her early work, something that over defined her at the time. The film does a great job of making a case for why she mattered at the moment and why she still matters now. I hope Simmons continues with this series in the future.
Fran Kranz makes a strong debut as a feature writer/director with Mass, which could easily have worked as a stage piece. It’s smart and self-contained, entirely character-driven. Two sets of parents meet in a private back room at a church to discuss something that happened between their kids. Gradually, it becomes clear that one set of parents lost a child in a mass shooting, and the other parents are the ones who raised the shooter. It is a conversation that feels, sadly, perpetually relevant right now. I would love to reach a point where we could look back at this as a record of a moment that has passed, but right now, we are still neck-deep in the culture that allows these things to happen over and over, offering thoughts and prayers instead of any meaningful dialogue that might actually change anything. The film never descends into simple diatribe, thank to Kranz’s script and the terrific work by all four actors. Jason Isaacs and Reed Birney are the fathers, and I think they both get to the difficult, horrible guilt and anger that would define these men. Ann Dowd, always great, plays her role as someone who is simply swallowed by guilt, unable to understand how her love could have created something so curdled. The performance of the movie, though? Martha Plimpton, who has never been better than she is here. She has a scene late in the film that flipped some switch in me, leaving me more emotionally wrung-out than I have been by any film in recent memory. It’s all so unadorned and direct that I have to respect that Kranz keeps it so stripped down. It is a film that knows how charged every emotion around these ideas is, and it never overplays anything, trusting you to have your own reactions.
And finally, let’s wrap on a much lighter note. Disney+ added Encanto today, a mere month after it opened in theaters, and that’s great news for families. Stephanie Beatriz voices Alma Madrigal, the film’s narrator, a member of a large magical family who all share an enchanted house in Colombia. There is some surprisingly adult material involving why her family created the house in the first place, and it’s handled adeptly, but the film is primarily about family dynamics and the pressure placed on us by the roles our families expect us to play. It’s a solid script that pays off emotionally, but it mainly serves as a structure to hang all the songs on, and Lin-Manuel Miranda’s songs are the reason to see this one. It is a genuinely delightful original musical, and pretty much every number lands. I love the film’s look, too, with some great appealing character design and a vibrant palette. I wouldn’t say this is top-shelf Disney, but in general, animated mainstream movies are made at so much higher a level of directing and writing than they were when I was young that it’s kind of amazing. I can imagine this one working as a stage production easily since almost the entire thing takes place in or around the magical house, but directors Jared Bush and Byron Howard take full advantage of the freedom of animation to turn their musical numbers into these great big expressionistic explosions of music and emotion. This was a low-key holiday treat, one that families still not willing to venture out to theaters should welcome.
AND FINALLY…
I know I said I was going to tackle The Matrix Resurrections today, but the holiday has gotten the better of me. I don’t want to half-ass this review. I’ll simply spotlight what I wrote when I published a piece about the trailer in September, when I still wasn’t sure if what I was hearing about the movie’s plot was true or not:
“Wait, why are they showing a scene from The Matrix in a club in the new Matrix sequel? How does that make sense? Is The Matrix just a movie inside this movie somehow?”
As far as I know, no, it is not.
But it is a VR video game experience. One that was created by Thomas Anderson, who owns a major game company that published The Matrix to great success and acclaim over 20 years ago. He’s haunted by that success, and by the push to return to the property that built his entire empire. Just that little bit of information sets a frame around that trailer that changes it dramatically. Go watch it again with that in mind.
At one point in the trailer, you see what looks like a shot from the opening scene of the first film, with Trinity sitting in that room on the phone, her back to some Agents. Only… that’s not Trinity. As I understand it, that’s the opening scene this time, too, and by the end of it, the audience should be wildly off-balance, confused by the familiar. Too often, sequels are delivery systems for an experience you’ve already had. So what if someone made a sequel that interrogated the entire idea of returning to something 20 years later, that digs into the idea of sequels and reboots and remakes? What if they used that sequel to discuss the entire notion of fandom and how fandom reacted to the original act of creation? What if they found a way to reclaim the entire red pill/blue pill metaphor from two decades of bad faith arguments that distorted the intent?
And what if they wrapped it in a love story that actually had something to say?
Turns out, that was indeed correct, and I love the end result. I love it so much that I want to dig in and do it justice when we talk about it. Please give me a little more time, and hopefully you’ll check it out before we talk.
For now, though? That’s it. Time for the holiday party. Last one out of here, turn all the lights off and lock up. See you next year.
We’re going to kick off on January 1st, and then we’ll launch a whole month full of fun stuff including that long-promised return to Bond and my big fat list of the best stuff of 2021. I plan to enjoy the holidays with my family, and I want to thank anyone reading this.
If you’re reading this, hopefully you’re a subscriber to Formerly Dangerous, and that means the world to me. It is brutally difficult to make a living if you do not want to plaster your work with advertising and if you don’t want to work for someone else. I’ve done both those things, and I understand the way the larger industry works, and at this point, it is more important to me than ever that I maintain real independence. That’s only possible because of you, and in 2022, I hope to spoil you rotten as my way of saying thank you.
Time for the weekly media diary. As always, anything in bold was particularly enjoyed.
THIS WEEK’S BOOKS: The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K. Dick; Keep Mars Weird by Neal Pollack; They Thirst by Robert R. McCammon; Every Dead Thing by John Connolly
THIS WEEK’S COMICS: Young Avengers: Sidekicks; Young Avengers: Family Matters; Kang the Conqueror #5; Darth Vader #19
THIS WEEK’S PODCASTS: How Did This Get Made? - “Snowmance”; ‘80s All Over - “March 1985,” “April 1985”;
THIS WEEK’S TV: MacGruber S1 E2; How To with John Wilson S2 E4; The Real World: Homecoming - Los Angeles S1 E1, E2; The Voice S21 E25; Station Eleven S1 E1, E2; Dickinson S3 E9, E10; The Great S2 E5, E6; Sorry: Louis CK; The Beatles: Get Back S1 E2; Curb Your Enthusiasm S11 E9; Hawkeye S1 E6; Bob’s Burgers S12 E10; Squid Game S1 E7; It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia S15 E7, E8; Severance S1 E1; Jim Gaffigan: Comedy Monster
THIS WEEK’S GAMING: Far Cry 6; The Matrix Awakens; Pinball F/X
THIS WEEK’S MOVIES: Antlers; Mother/Android; The Novice; Mass; The Martian; Jagged; The Matrix Reloaded; The Matrix Revolutions; Rogue One: A Star Wars Story; The Matrix Resurrections; Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City; World of Tomorrow Episode Three: The Absent Destinations of David Prime; The Matrix Resurrections; Reno 911! The Hunt for Q Anon; Encanto
Love is too strong a word for my reaction to The Matrix Resurrections, but as with the sequels, I feel overall there’s quite a bit more to like than not. Looking forward to your review.
Happy holidays to you and the family, Drew. Thanks for all you wrote this year. It always seems to arrive at the right time.