Exploding teenagers, hippie cosplay, and brand-new Fincher

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It’s Friday, October 9, so let’s have a Free-For-All!

I used to keep track of release dates like they were important to me personally. Like it was life or death. I was better at keeping track of when films would be available, both in theaters and at home, than I was at keeping track of actual significant dates regarding people in my life. I’m not saying that as a good thing. It’s just the way my horrifying weirdo brain works.

Or it was. One of the few benefits of the way coronavirus blew up the regular ways things worked is that I have no idea when anything is coming out and I’m okay with it. Every day is like Christmas now because I have stopped worrying about it. I mean, I see announcements go by. I know that Promising Young Woman decided to double down on a December release date, which seems stupid. I know that The New Mutants will be out on Blu-ray and streaming in mid-November, so I’ll finally see it then. I know that Netflix set an early December date for Mank, which is hugely exciting news. I know The Trial of the Chicago 7 is about to come out but I couldn’t tell you which day specifically. Like… I have a general sense of things.

But there’s so much coming out, on so many different platforms, that I frequently end up surprised by things that I’m looking forward to, and I love that feeling. I love waking up and realizing that Spontaneous came out or that there’s a full season of a new Gareth Evans TV show to watch or that Primal returned this earlier this week. I’ve been hammering this idea lately, but I think it’s important: there’s no reason to be hung up on what we’re not seeing right now because there is so much that we can see, and that doesn’t even get into the ocean of stuff you haven’t seen that already exists.

Hype is a drug, and the studios push hype, not actual movies or TV shows. Once something exists, sure, they can milk it for everything it’s worth, but your reaction to it is largely out of their control at that point. You either like it or you don’t, and if you do, they’ll soak you as often as they can, and if you don’t, they’re done with you. But when they’re just selling you hype? They can keep you on that hook forever. At this point, hype is pretty much all they know how to do, which must be terrifying. It would seem like the easiest thing in the world to simply tell people when you have a good film, but that’s not the way marketing works. One of the reasons the studios have embraced this “All IP All The Time” model so wholeheartedly is because it supposedly reduced the risk that comes with making giant blockbusters. If you know you have something people have already purchased before, then it’s supposedly some sort of guarantee. It’s not, of course, and that lie has led to the situation the studios are now in, one that is untenable. The age of the Tent of a Thousand Poles is coming to an end. It was always a matter of when, not if. But just because that’s true, it doesn’t mean theatrical itself is dead. It’ll have to evolve, yes, but it’s certainly not dead.

All of the hand-wringing right now and all of this frantic energy being spent to convince ourselves that things are fine seems like a waste to me. Instead, let’s get busy actually figuring out what normal is. Theaters aren’t dead in a permanent cultural sense, and I would argue that the moment they are safe, they are going to see a huge boom. They’re just not a safe or smart space right now, though, and as a result, we need to figure out how to get on with the business of living and releasing films and TV shows in the meantime. The companies that seem like they’re going to weather all of this the best are the ones that have already started taking active steps toward adjusting all of their efforts in that direction. It’s interesting that Pixar’s Soul is going to debut on Disney+. Not another $30 extra charge, either, but just regular Disney+. That’s the right move, and it’s one their customers are going to remember moving forward. It’ll be a lovely holiday treat to be able to watch a brand-new Pete Docter Disney film at home with everyone this year. I am genuinely happy with the choice they made.

I’m in wait-and-see mode on the way Universal’s handling things. Maybe this is the best answer. Freaky and Promising Young Woman both could be test cases for this new hyper-collapsed theatrical window of 17 days, but neither one of them has set any kind of official date for when they’ll show up at home. They both have to play AMC in order to take advantage of that collapsed window, at which point other chains that are doing PVOD could potentially play them as well. But no one has indicated that’s the plan here, and right now, all of the marketing for these films, as well as the new Croods sequel, is focused on the idea that these are theatrical releases.

Last night’s debut of Freaky at Beyond Fest’s drive-in edition seems to have gone very well, with happy audiences talking about how well it works as both slasher film and body-switch comedy, and I’m eager to see the film. But I’ll be waiting for the home debut, and if the window really does turn out to be 17 days, then it turns theatrical right now into an extended marketing campaign for the film. Basically, it’s the same window junket press used to get in talking about a movie before it opened for the general public. It’s going to be for the most hardcore to go see something in whatever venue makes them feel safe so they can talk about it online to prove how hardcore they are, and then everyone else can join the conversation two weeks later. I’m okay with that. I still wish companies weren’t encouraging anyone to be inside movie theaters right now, but a two-week window levels the playing field culturally and gives these films a chance to actually generate some conversation. Still… until they say what they’re going to do, this is all just speculation on the part of the press. Just because AMC and Universal signed that deal doesn’t mean they’re going to push forward on those plans right this minute.

Netflix is going to do a limited theatrical run for Mank before it arrives on the streaming service in December, and if you haven’t seen the trailer for the film yet, take a moment to savor this big beautiful slice of movie nerd heaven:

Full disclosure time. I have an ongoing creative business relationship with David Fincher. For the rest of this year, when I talk about Mank, you should be aware of that. You can decide whether to read what I have to say knowing that, and I would hope you decide it doesn’t really matter. My opinions of David Fincher’s work predate that relationship and they’re easy enough to find online, and they are the same now that they were then.

Still, working for him for a few years has given me a little bit of new insight into the way he thinks, even if I have studiously avoided talking about his new film with him. I am a film fan before I am anything else, and I didn’t want to try to pull the magic trick apart before I got a chance to see it. It’s exciting to have a new Fincher film just around the corner, and the arrival of the trailer is great because it gives us some idea of what the game is this time. Mank isn’t just a movie about a certain moment; Mank is very much meant to be a film that feels like it was made in that moment. From the look to the sound to the costumes to the way everything right down to the credits were done, all of it is in service of making this feel like it could be a film from 1942.

Part of what I love about Fincher’s work is that insanely film nerdy brain of his that layers on so much more gravy than you need to just get the job done. Every shot, every production detail, every performance… it’s all important, and it’s all in service of a larger aesthetic idea. Nothing is tossed away. Nothing is left up to chance. I’d be excited to watch any good filmmaker tackle the visual legacy of Citizen Kane, but to watch Fincher do that on such a personal project is doubly exciting. I think filmmaking can be an act of film criticism, and that the two impulses are not as removed as one might think. Tarantino’s films are a great example of that, and I know that Fincher’s own ideas about the history of this industry and why different eras unfolded the way they did are very strong. He’s read the same Pauline Kael and Peter Bogdonavich pieces you have and he’s also done plenty of his own legwork over the years. He’s a voracious collector of stories about film history. He is like a bullshit archeologist when it comes to Hollywood history, digging through the “great stories” in search of the true ones, and it’s going to be fun to not only see what he’s done, but how people react to it. I’m sure those conversations are part of the point.

That voice of Fincher’s that is so clear in all of his work… that’s so key. Voice is one of the things I look for first in any film. Voice is pretty much all you have as a filmmaker, whether you’re a writer or a director. Figuring out not only what your voice is but how to convey that voice is the real trick of things.

Today, then, let’s spotlight a few new films where voice is crucially important…

HOLLYWOOD LUCK TURNS

Brian Duffield is a fascinating case study in how Hollywood luck cuts both ways, often at the same time, and there is no road map for navigating a 21st century career in this town.

Brian’s got a strong voice on the page, and if I were a development executive reading his work, I’d buy it, too. You read one of his scripts and you get a very immediate and vivid picture of the film he’s describing. That’s what you want. That’s what gets directors excited. That’s what gets them to sign on to make something.

If you look at all of the times Brian’s work has ended up on The Black List or how many times there have been major announcements about new projects from him, you would think he’s living a charmed life, that everything he touches turns to gold. There is a difference between an announcement and a place on a list and an actual finished project, and while there are very few working screenwriters who don’t have horror stories about how something went off the rails, Duffield’s horror stories should be taught in school. Jane Got A Gun alone is the kind of heartbreak that could crush someone.

In a few weeks, Paramount will be releasing Love and Monsters, which was written by Duffield, but it’s another one of those films where the difference between the finished film and the script he wrote is going to be substantial. It might work. It might not. But whatever it is, it’s not the thing he originally had in mind. It’s strange, because while Paramount was having that experience with him, they were also working with him on Spontaneous, which is available now, and I feel like if you really want to judge who Brian Duffield is as a filmmaker, this is the first time you can get a true unfiltered idea of who that is.

The answer? He’s a brat.

I mean that in the best possible way. Spontaneous is a bratty film. It is basically sticking its tongue out at you for most of its running time. This movie has a big fat attitude, and if you don’t like it, feel free to explode. It is entirely appropriate, since the movie is a character piece about what it feels like to be a teenager stuck in an uncontrollable crisis situation. It is an entirely internal film, a film that is meant to simply convey an experience, one that seems impossible and bizarre and wildly unfair. Why wouldn’t this character and this film have a giant chip on their shoulder? Why wouldn’t they feel like flipping off the entire world?

If you make this movie from the outside, simply watching what happens, it’s impossible. You aren’t going to end up liking this main character if you aren’t in her skin with her. The film, adapted from a book by Aaron Starmer, is about the senior year of high school for Mara (Katherine Langford) and how that gets complicated when kids in her high school start to explode. That’s not a metaphor, either. They just explode. Bunches of them. And because they all start to explode, everything changes. They’re locked down, isolated from their parents, and the government starts to poke and prod them to figure out what’s happening.

I love that the film really isn’t about the why of the explosions. There’s no real answer offered, no magical solution that fixes everything. Instead, the film keeps us close to Mara, immersed in her perspective, so that we feel this the way she feels it. Because Mara is a wise-ass who keeps a healthy emotional distance from everyone and everything at first, the movie does the same thing. But there’s this one guy, Dylan (Charlie Plummer), who manages to get past that wise-ass exterior to the sweet and playful person Mara can be, and because they find each other, suddenly the quarantine and the terror and the exploding don’t all seem so bad.

Because the film is so sassy and irreverent at first, it is surprising and effective when things start to play more seriously. The film isn’t interested in just giving you the easy glib version of the idea. Right now, everyone I know seems to be struggling with some genuinely complicated emotional weather because of the state of things this year. It feels like we’re constantly under attack, like our central nervous systems are just being zapped with non-stop electric shocks, and it’s traumatic and exhausting. This film captures that feeling precisely, and there’s a “fuck it” attitude that is easy to adopt in moments like this that is also incredibly dangerous. It’s cynical and dangerous in someone who’s an adult, and it’s even more of a sin when it’s someone young, someone who has a whole life left to live.

Spontaneous surprised me consistently, and maybe because I never watched the Netflix series that made her famous, so did Katherine Langford. She’s great here, able to play contradictory notes within a scene, charming and funny and adorable without ever sacrificing the real edge and the bitterness that makes Mara interesting. She’s not just playing the jokes here. She gets that the jokes are a form of armor that Mara wears, and she’s terrific at showing you the vulnerability underneath the constant rapid-fire sarcasm. Charlie Plummer is equally good as Dylan, and I love the chemistry between the two of them. Falling in love in movies is all about shorthand. You have to boil this complicated gigantic thing down into a series of easy to digest moments that sort of signify the things that we know about what it feels like to fall in love. That process isn’t simple or easy or just some light switch that gets thrown, but that’s how it seems in movies if you do it wrong. Here, we see the way things progress between Mara and Dylan in small real moments that add up to something that feels honest. That’s important so when Duffield wants to break your heart, he can.

Not every writer automatically knows how to direct their own work. There are plenty of talented screenwriters who are not directors, and vice versa. Spontaneous would suggest that Duffield should be directing his scripts, and that the tricky shifts of tone that make his work so appealing on the page, the same ones that seem to be the first thing to go when the projects get mired in development hell, actually work when they’re executed properly. I hope this is the turning of a corner for him. It certainly should be.

HIPPIES AND YIPPIES AND SPIELBERG, OH MY

Aaron Sorkin, on the other hand, seems to be at his best when he is in collaboration with people who will push him, and I suspect the reason The Social Network is still the best thing he’s ever done is that the mix of Sorkin and Fincher is one of those great push-and-pull sweet-and-sour yin-and-yang types of things.

When Sorkin spoke recently about how he would write the ending of Trump’s Presidency if given the chance, I thought it was naive to the point of being ridiculous. But that’s one of the things that makes his writing work. There is a very pure optimism to Sorkin’s POV on the political system and the general nature of people, and he truly wants to believe that, given enough time, we tend to do the right thing.

Fincher, on the other hand, seems to believe the exact opposite, and it feels like that tension between the two of them is part of what makes their collaboration great. Rob Reiner knew how to pump up A Few Good Men so it felt like the Super Bowl of courtroom dramas, and Thomas Schlamme basically invented the Sorkin walk-and-talk as a reaction to the scripts he was getting on The West Wing. What we think of as “Aaron Sorkin” is due in large part to the filmmakers who have brought his work to life, and it seems like the more he is the sole creative voice in the process, the less it feels like he really lands his punches.

Part of me wishes someone else had directed The Trial of the Chicago 7. It’s not a bad film. Indeed, at times, it is very entertaining. There are things I like about it quite a bit. It feels to me like a case of material that Sorkin was perfect to write but that he was overwhelmed by as a director. Someone needed to come in with a strong point of view to help shape the finished version, and one of the things Sorkin seems to be slightly beaten by was the casting. I get it. These are massively famous people who left an indelible impression on several generations. Finding the right people to play them can’t be easy. I may not have been alive in the ‘60s, but at this point, I’ve seen and read enough about Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin and William Kunstler and Tom Hayden that I feel like I was there. This was originally a Steven Spielberg project, and it’s interesting that the best casting in this version of the film, Sacha Baron Cohen, is a holdover from Spielberg’s time on the film. With Spielberg at the helm, this would have been more of an event for actors. I’m curious who he would have had play Jerry Rubin. There are some good choices here, like Frank Langella, who will most likely pick up a whole boatload of awards for his work here, but Sorkin makes some weird missteps as well. Jeremy Strong, who is so brilliant on Succession, is not only miscast as Rubin, but stranded by some sub-sitcom writing that turns this activist icon into a goofy Tommy Chong knockoff who is mainly concerned with how hurt he is that he wanted to sleep with an undercover cop.

The biggest problem with the finished film is that I’m not sure whose story is being told, and I don’t think Sorkin ever quite answered the question for himself. There are so many dynamic personalities here that it feels more like they’re all competing for screen time than like there’s a strong perspective that’s steering us through. There’s a sort of “and then this happened and then this happened and then this happened” quality to the film. The trial is so outrageous that the matter-of-fact episodic approach isn’t without some rewards. I spent much of the movie freshly dumbfounded by this event or that comment or some other injustice, and for people who aren’t familiar with the trial or the events around it, there will be plenty that seems too shocking and ridiculous to be true.

But as storytelling? It feels misshapen. Occasionally inert. The casting that doesn’t work feels too contemporary, like people doing a revival of Hair rather than an actual snapshot of the time. To be blunt, Sorkin’s a little square for this. It makes sense that he didn’t really know what the trial was about when Spielberg first pitched it to him, because he doesn’t seem like the radical left was his comfort zone. Sorkin is The Man, and he has been for a looooooong time. The West Wing works because it is a fairy tale told from the point of view of the establishment, a story of what they hope they are at their best, told to soothe because they know they can’t really live up to it. It’s comfort food because it reassures us that the people in charge really are trying their best. Sorkin is less sure how to give voice to the various prickly factions that made up the radical counterculture in the late ‘60s. It feels like Tom Hayden is probably the character he most identifies with, the guy who probably doesn’t belong in this room, and for this film to really work, I think you would have needed the filmmaking equivalent of Abbie Hoffman behind the camera. Someone bold and rude and perpetually angry.

Oddly, I just happened to read the remarkable Kent State by Derf Backderf, and he took an equally volatile moment from that same pivotal moment in history, ostensibly even more unwieldy as a story, and he turned it into a riveting, emotional, character-driven masterpiece. Backderf was a child when the Kent State shootings happened, and it clearly left a deep mark on him, and he’s crafted a deeply personal story that manages to work as a kaleidoscope without seeming episodic or disjointed. Backderf’s earlier graphic novel, My Friend Dahmer, was the end result of a wild creative process that told the true story of Backderf’s friendship with Jeffrey Dahmer when they were both teenagers growing up in Columbus, Ohio. It’s a startling piece of work, one that offers empathy to a morally horrifying monster, and I thought it was deeply impressive when I read it back in 2012.

Kent State: Four Dead In Ohio is better. I love that Backderf’s art makes me think of R. Crumb or Peter Bagge or Daniel Clowes. I love comic art that isn’t about photorealism but that emphasizes exaggeration for emotional effect instead. It’s the perfect voice for telling this sprawling Robert Altman-esque snapshot of all of the forces that built up and tangled up and eventually exploded in deadly violence. He introduces you to a ton of characters, and you’re supposed to get kind of lost and dizzy with a giant ensemble like this so that when things finally happen, you have no idea what’s going to happen to anyone. He shows you an entire community, tracing all of the tensions that are at work. It reminds me of Do The Right Thing in that way. There is no one bad decision that leads to the Kent State tragedy. Instead, it is a perfect storm of terrible choices and hurt feelings and fully justified pent-up anger finally overflowing, and the book makes it all feel fresh and immediate.

It’s not a dress-up ‘60s pageant, like so many movies about the big moments from the ’60s often are. It feels instead like a fully-realized tapestry, and it brought the event to life for me in a way no other work has. The ‘60s generation has been buried up their own backsides for decades now. They started making themselves into movie myths in the ‘80s, a mere 20 years after things went down, and they’ve never stopped. They’ve been making movies about American culture between 1960 and 1975 for three times longer than it took to actually live through it the first time, and it can be hard to make it live and breathe in a way that brings something new to the table. Backderf’s book pulls it off in a way that Chicago 7 couldn’t quite, and it reminded me that it is possible. It’s just brutally fucking difficult.

AND FINALLY…

The crazy thing about the trailer for Amazon’s upcoming Invincible animated series is how barely it looks like they’ve adapted it. That is pretty much exactly the comic book. It looks like the exact scenes, the exact designs, and in most cases, the exact angles of the original artwork. Here, take a look…

I’m not much of a fan of The Walking Dead, but that doesn’t mean I don’t like Robert Kirkman, the creator/writer of the book. While he was busy getting famous for creating the comic book that inspired the biggest TV horror franchise of all time, he was also publishing a 144-issue superhero comic book story that is one of my all-time favorite riffs on superhero tropes. Like Alan Moore and Grant Morrison and Neil Gaiman and so many of the great modern comic writers, Kirkman knows his comic history inside out, and Invincible is his chance to turn those ideas inside out. The story is huge and sprawling and dense and they could easily do ten or twelve seasons of television while faithfully adapting the original books. Not sure if that’s what they are going to do, but they could. Considering how right they got it the first time, that seems like a good idea to me.

For now, let’s wrap up today. Since this is the Friday Free-For-All, let’s throw a question out to the group. What’s your favorite superhero story of all time? It can be traditional or it can be a post-modern spin like Watchmen or it can be an episode of the Adam West Batman show. Whatever. I’m just curious if there are any particular stories that you hold dear, and if so, why?

As always, the Friday Free-For-All is open to anyone to comment on pretty much anything. The question above is a jumping-off point. I’d love to know what’s on your mind. Just keep it civil, both to me and other people in the replies, and otherwise anything goes.

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Image courtesy of Netflix
Image courtesy of Paramount
Image courtesy of Netflix
Image courtesy of ABRAMS