I have hit a weird wall, folks. Might as well be honest about it.
I have started today’s newsletter four different times. I missed last Friday’s spotlight because of business and personal obligations, but even if I hadn’t been occupied, I’m not sure what I would have written or published.
This year is getting to me. I’m not enjoying the taste of my food, metaphorically speaking. I am having a hard time watching or reading anything right now. It’s like my brain’s having a hard time engaging fully with things. I feel like I’m glancing off of a lot of what I watch, and it doesn’t really feel like I’m able to give myself over to a movie or a show for some reason. At least, not if I’m watching it just for me.
Part of it is pure anxiety. My other job, the job that is supposed to be keeping the lights on, The Top Secret Thing That Is Top Secret, is in a blinking yellow holding pattern, perpetually on the verge of moving forward but not quite moving forward, and that wouldn’t be such an issue if my literal survival weren’t sort of hinging on it.
At least I have a job that might theoretically happen at some point. I know how many people are completely out of work at the moment, and that only feeds into the anxiety and the worry. This isn’t about one job or a bunch of jobs, though. This is about years of this kind of low-grade constant dread. My industry’s been upside down for years now, shedding jobs with abandon. This is about an economic tsunami that’s washing in that is going to seriously kick the shit out of a lot of us for a very long time. Some people won’t recover. I may not recover. We’ll see.
I had so many plans for this summer. I had so many things we were going to do as a family. So many things I wanted to do with my girlfriend. We just celebrated our five-year anniversary, and while it was lovely, I couldn’t really surprise her with a night out or a new adventure. I couldn’t do the things that made sense for my birthday or for Toshi’s birthday. We were supposed to see both Hamilton and The King and I live this summer in Hollywood. We were supposed to travel with family. There were concerts on the books. There were friends to see. There was life to live.
2020 is an asterisk in year form. It’s like the ellipses that appear as you’re waiting for someone to finish typing a text, and that feeling of being on hold is one of the reasons I get so angry at people who aren’t participating, who won’t wear masks, who won’t do the basic goddamn things we have to do if we’re ever going to get back to any semblance of a working America. My kids are getting ready for another year of home-based education, and thank god they both have laptops and we have wi-fi in both my home and my ex-wife’s home. We have every possible advantage here. The LAUSD knows what’s coming and they’re preparing for it, and I am confident we’ll have something that works in some way cobbled together by mid-September. But my boys are both losing key years of their social education, leading electronic friendships at a time where they need to be face to face with their peers, and it bums me out that they’re going to have to spend this year in isolation.
It all comes down to finding ways to make this adjustment period right now palatable. We have to be smart and especially with one of my sons having chronic respiratory issues, we have to be careful. Finding things we can do that do not put them at unnecessary risk is not easy, but Monday night, we decided to head out to see The Goonies and Gremlins as a double-feature at the drive-in that is closest to me here in LA. The boys have seen both of these films before, but they didn’t remember them. They vaguely remember the experience, but not the films.
That’s actually an interesting conversation we’ve been having lately. There are movies they’ve “seen” that they have zero recollection of, and enough of them that we’re going to program an actual film festival full of them for the boys before they start school again. Sometime in the next few weeks, we’re carving out a big chunk of days and we’re going to be holding the First Annual Ketchup Film Festival, watching stuff they’ve seen before like Young Frankenstein, The Jerk, Contact, Beetlejuice, and the Lord of the Rings films, and we’re going to see how the older versions of the boys react to films that overwhelmed them when they were just learning what movies were.
This is one of the reasons I’m intrigued by the question of when you show your kids certain things. It’s really only in the last five or six years that I think both of the boys are taking in the films fully and retaining them, and I think it’s possible to waste a lot of great films on little kids by using them as wallpaper, overplaying certain classics to the point where they’ll never be able to really watch them as films when they’re older.
I try to keep their diet constantly changing, constantly feeding them a variety of new stuff, old stuff, things they’ve seen, things they’re just now ready for, things that might push them a little. The one time I find myself fully engaged with a film right now is when I’m curating it for someone else, whether it’s my girlfriend or my kids. I love seeing how something lands with someone, and I find that when someone else is giving a movie their full attention, it makes me do the same thing. That’s where the communal joy comes in, and even in a room with three or four people, there’s a version of that which I find very powerful.
I make mistakes right now with media and they feel like shots to the ribs. I started Paul Tremblay’s new book Survivor Song, which is a harrowing story about a pregnant woman whose husband dies in the early moments of a pandemic spread of a new hyper-rabies, and reading the way Tremblay paints the crumbling of the infrastructure of things was enough to make me literally shake from low-grade anxiety. I had to set the book aside and read something else entirely.
I have had moments of pleasure, of course.
On those occasions I actually can work on The Top Secret Thing That Is Top Secret, it makes me ridiculously happy. It’s one of those jobs that you can’t believe exists, much less that you’re the one who gets to do it, and it feels like the kind of thing I could do forever once it’s actually going. But right now, everything’s in that weird COVID limbo, so that joy is on a particularly frustrating pause.
When the boys are here, we usually have a movie as the last part of the night, and this past weekend, we played roulette with my Plex playlist of things I want to watch with them. There are about 50 films in there at any given time, and we did a random shuffle to pick three. That meant Friday night was Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom, Saturday was the Coen Bros. version of True Grit, and Sunday night was, appropriately enough, Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey. I love that the trailer for Bill & Ted Face The Music dropped about two days earlier, so Bill & Ted were already on their minds, and when that was picked, they were both really excited to finally see it.
All three films landed well. It feels like they’re open to anything right now in terms of genre or style, and they like talking about how the films are different, about what they like and what they don’t. They were endlessly fascinated by the dollhouse quality of Moonrise Kingdom, the cascade of language in True Grit, and the unfettered weirdness of Bogus Journey. We talked about the original version of Grit and the different ways each film approaches the Charles Portis novel. We talked about other Wes Anderson films and which ones they’ve seen (Rushmore and Isle of Dogs) and which ones they want to see (everything else including The French Dispatch in a theater the moment theaters are open again) and those amazing casts he puts together. We talked about the way the Coens play with language in their films, specifically in Fargo and The Big Lebowski, which the boys have seen in the last year. We talked about how great Bill Sadler is as Death. We talked about that a lot, too, because Bill Sadler really is that great as Death.
And, yeah, the trip to the drive-in was terrific. We went to the Mission Tiki, which is in Montclair, about an hour east of my place. They seem to be doing an excellent job of setting up health precautions for all of their guests, and the cars are distant enough that you aren’t interacting with anyone directly. But there’s something of the communal experience again as you hear sound bleeding from the other speakers, and the sound system in my car is pretty good so there’s something fun about sitting in the speakers for Gremlins as they’re wreaking havoc.
The Goonies played well, but I think Gremlins was the hit of the night. I’m pretty famously not a fan of The Goonies, and this didn’t particularly change my mind. I think this might be the best screening I’ve ever had of the film, though, and the things I do like about it really stood out. When it’s earnest, I like the film. I think you’d have to be pretty hard-hearted not to respond at all to the way Mikey stays focused on saving his home, and Sean Astin is every bit as sincere here as he was as Samwise. It still feels too shrill and shaggy overall for me, but I didn’t care at all as we watched. We talked through a lot of it, talking about how it was made, talking about Spielberg and their memories of his other work. They love talking about filmographies right now, about the way something fits into the larger picture, and they will ask a billion questions once we’re rolling.
It blew their minds when I told them Howie Mandel was the voice of Gizmo, and Toshi, fresh off his first encounter with Fast Times At Ridgemont High, seemed pleasantly startled when he realized Phoebe Cates was in Gremlins. Any mention of Fast Times seems to send him into a private reverie at this point, and when Judge Reinhold showed up, he seemed doubly surprised. “They have that exact same scene together in this film,” I told him, “except it’s a red snowsuit.” He may have actually choked on his popcorn at that point.
Honestly, though, if there’s any one moment that has recharged my own ability to just enjoy a film recently, it was with my girlfriend a few days before the boys arrived. I’ve been enjoying Karina Longworth’s excellent You Must Remember This! podcast this season. She’s been telling the story of Polly Platt, and it’s been wall-to-wall amazing, a complete recontextualization of her career and her contributions as a creative collaborator. It’s hard to listen to the show and not pull out the films being discussed, and I decided to watch What’s Up, Doc? for the first time in what must be at least 20 years. My girlfriend told me how much the film meant to her at a certain age, and I told her how little I remembered about it. Like the boys, there are films I know I’ve seen, films I remember the experience of more than the film itself, and while I knew I liked What’s Up, Doc?, I would have been hard-pressed to tell you why.
Watching it that night, giving it my full attention, I got lost in how great it is. Part of what I felt while watching it was a deep sadness because I’ve never seen it in a theater, and I would imagine that film with a full audience must be intoxicating. It’s built on a series of rolling running gags that just pay off over and over, and those are the best things to see with an audience. I’d love to do a double-feature of What’s Up, Doc? and The Party sometime, but I’m worried I’d be sore the next day.
It was such a great screening precisely because I’d forgotten the film. I thought I knew what I was getting and I went into it with my defenses down. It blindsided me. My girlfriend, who remembered the film perfectly, seemed entertained by how much it blindsided me. The huge wave of laughter I kept riding turned into a huge wave of nostalgia for me thinking about the era in which this film was a hit, and that just made me want to watch a whole bunch of other films for pleasure, the thing that I’ve been missing so acutely as of late.
These are strange days, my friends. There is no quick exit from where we are, no simple road back to what you knew. Even if this damnable virus vanished today, it would take us years to repair what’s happened since the start of 2020. It is vital right now to take the joy you can take from things. More than ever, that’s what I want to talk to you about when I write these newsletters.
I got burned out by the grind of what is required from daily entertainment publicity/journalism and it nearly took the pleasure of movies and TV away from me. Today, it is the sheer weight of the real world that occasionally dims that light. But it is knowing that I have this place and this conversation, knowing that you guys have taken the chance on subscribing to this newsletter, which gives me room to write about the pursuit of the pleasure, and to make that pursuit in the first place.
Thank you for that.
I FEEL THE EARTH MOVE UNDER MY FEET
One of the reasons it’s been difficult getting this particular edition of the newsletter published is because it feels like every fifteen or twenty minutes, there’s some new story that shifts the landscape of theatrical exhibition and home video windows in some cataclysmic way. I don’t want these to simply feel like disposable knee-jerk reactions to every little twitch.
That’s part of what I hated about the daily grind of having to write about every single casting break, every trailer, every poster, every date change… it’s not possible to genuinely give a shit about all of that or to read all of it like tea leaves, and it’s not important. You can go nuts chasing all of it as a vast and unending stream. If this newsletter is supposed to be of value, then sometimes that means I need to digest what’s happening and talk to people and get some perspective. This story is going to evolve fairly rapidly, and the conversations I’m having about it make it sound like the chaos is just ramping up.
I still can’t imagine I’ll be ready for a movie theater by Labor Day. Warner Bros seems like they’re determined at this point to open Tenet overseas starting at the end of August with plans for select U.S. cities to follow. I still think they’re delusional when it comes to a domestic release, but that’s not surprising. Delusion is the fuel that runs America right now, and if you want to read a disturbing and wickedly funny look at just how deluded we are, this piece about the reopening of Walt Disney World is a killer.
There’s nothing wrong with Warner opening Tenet where they can. I mentioned the UK the last time I wrote about this, and there was some debate about whether the full UK is ready, but they’re certainly looking to be part of the August 26th wave of releases. I think Warner isn’t being realistic about what’s ready and what will be ready on their schedule, but when has that slowed them down so far this year? It’s not up to me to make that call, and I am not going to pretend I have access to more information or resources than Warner Bros does on a global scale. That would be silly.
At this point, I just want Tenet to be released so we can stop talking about whether or not they’re going to release Tenet. This is like the world’s worst edging video. We get it, Warner Bros. You want to be first. You want to save movie theaters. You want to be the first blockbuster of the year… maybe the only real blockbuster of the year. It is a super-expensive movie that hinges on no established IP and really isn’t leaning on movie stars to sell it. It must be terrifying. But there’s something sweaty about the way the conversation during this entire pandemic has all been focused on how “THERE IS NO WAY YOU WILL EVER SEE TENET AT HOME FIRST BECAUSE EVEN IF YOU PLAYED IT ON A HOME SCREEN FIRST IT WOULD JUST MAKE YOUR HEAD EXPLODE BECAUSE YOU CAN’T POSSIBLY COMPREHEND IT THROUGH A TELEVISION SCREEN!”
I’m exhausted from being told how amazing it’s going to be. But that’s the game here. You want Christopher Nolan’s Unique Vision to be served The Way It Was Intended because none of us can possibly absorb the power and the majesty of his backwards action footage unless it is REALLY REALLY BIG. And you are going to play this unending game of chicken until it actually happens.
So fine. Do it. Release the movie. Let’s see what happens. Let’s see if there are cases reported that use theaters as clear contact points. Let’s see if we have any theater employees die. Let’s see. Because in America, nothing is going to stop people except actual human death, and even then, probably not. It has to be a lot of human death or, more specifically, the right human death. If Melania Trump was lying in a bed somewhere hooked up to a ventilator… wait, scratch that. If Ivanka Trump was lying in a bed somewhere hooked up to a ventilator, we would be wearing masks that would be permanently stapled to our heads by Trump’s Personal Police, because beating COVID-19 would be of personal importance to him, and anything less than that doesn’t matter.
AMC’s deal is not the endgame in the conversation about theatrical release windows, just as Tenet is not the final word in whether films are released in theaters or not. Even if Warner does go full speed ahead in America once Labor Day weekend arrives, there’s no guarantee anyone else is going to follow suit. If it goes badly, that could be the last thing we see for a while, and if it ends up hurting people, it could be a real disaster for the industry. AMC and Universal are now partnered up financially on both ends of the transaction, which seems good for AMC but not great for any other theater chain out there. Forget independent cinemas, because it certainly feels like Universal has. I understand why AMC would want a piece of the streaming PVOD pie; I’m just not sure I understand why Universal felt remotely obligated to give it to them.
“You’re trying to ruin theaters!”, I can imagine people yelling when I question the position of the theater owners in all of this, but that’s like saying someone doesn’t believe in God because they’re upset when a priest commits a crime. I want theaters to exist. I want the theatrical exhibition experience to be a robust and vital one. I feel like I can want those things and also criticize the strong-arm tactics of AMC, a failing chain that has done very little to convince me that they deserve my loyalty as an audience member.
When AMC threw their public temper tantrum over Universal’s release of Trolls: World Tour this spring, I knew there was no way they were done playing Universal’s films. Universal has been advocating for a collapse of the traditional 90-day window more than any other studio, and they’ve been doing it behind-the-scenes for years. Universal seems to be the clear winner here, but just because they’ve made this deal with AMC, it doesn’t mean everything’s set and we’re just going to automatically get every Universal film on PVOD 18 days after it arrives in theaters. The other studios have their own agreements in place. The other theater chains and indie theater owners are going to have to have their say on things. This is just the opening shot in what is going to undoubtedly be a complicated attempt to shift the entire landscape of home streaming for new releases, and there’s no guarantee it actually works. I suspect this is the moment where everything pivots, but we’ve seen moments like it before.
The international landscape is even more complicated because of the way distribution deals work, and if you have something streaming in America before it even opens in other regions in theaters, you’re setting up a weird uneven ecosystem that just infuriates customers globally. Listen to the whining you’re going to hear from Americans if Tenet opens overseas. They’re going to grumble and complain and they’ll justify that as a reason to pirate the Nolan film, and they’ll never acknowledge how this is the way international releases routinely work, with American blockbusters taking months to open in many places.
It’s going to have to play out, and before it can play out, there have to be theaters for people to go to, and that brings this all full circle since I’m still not sure I believe that’s actually happening right now.
But, hey, the cars go backwards in the car chase. Cool.
AND FINALLY…
There are plenty of things I watch these days that I never write about. There’s just no point. I don’t have anything to say that would add to the conversation about the thing I watch, and I’m not obligated at gunpoint to turn every hour of viewership into content.
I do, however, see things that compel me to write about them, something that I’m watching simply for pleasure that I realize I need to write about because I would hate for someone to miss a chance at this experience. That’s how I feel about Normal People, which is streaming in the US on Hulu. Originally aired on BBC Three and RTÉ One, it’s an adaptation of the Sally Rooney novel about two Irish kids who meet in high school and the way they stay in one another’s orbit over the course of five or six years. Paul Mescal and Daisy Edgar-Jones play Connell and Marianne from secondary school to undergraduates, and they are fantastic.
I can’t say enough good things about the chemistry between the two of them, or about the spectacular small-scale observation in both the writing and the direction. Lenny Abrahamson and Hettie Macdonald share directing duties on the series, and it’s remarkable work. These two characters are both so fragile, and it’s impressive how everything is communicated in the tiniest of details. It’s a very frank show, sexually explicit at times, but it’s really about how terrifying it is to show yourself wholly to someone, and how nobody outside of a relationship can every truly understand what it is that binds two people. You can’t see those private moments, and those private moments are everything. The way someone’s skin looks when it flushes, the way their eyes look just before they cry, the words that make them walk out the door or, hopefully, stay. These things only really exist between the two people and the rest of the world can’t ever really get it, and Normal People understands that innately.
If you do end up watching it, I’ll just say this: it has the best three final lines of dialogue, a simple ping-pong exchange, of anything I’ve seen this year, film or TV show. I wish there were four more seasons of these two, but I also think the ending is exactly what it had to be. It left me fully satisfied and absolutely rabid to see more. That’s about as high a compliment as I can pay anything.
I’ll definitely have the Friday Spotlight this week, and it’s only for subscribers. I’m going to use it to showcase the other thing that’s been giving me joy these days, and maybe we can do another sneak peek at the ‘80s book, which continues to chase me through each week like the boulder from Raiders Of The Lost Ark.
The important thing is that I outran it again this week.
Today’s newsletter is a freebie. Feel free to share it if you want. If you dig it, though, and you want to subscribe to get access to everything, it’s only $7 a month and it’s less if you subscribe for a whole year at once.
Images courtesy of Warner Bros
Images courtesy of Focus Features
Image courtesy of Hulu
My mind has completely turned to goo over the past week. I hardly go a day or two without watching a movie usually but the last movie I saw was Greyhound and that was almost a week ago. I can't figure out what to watch, I'll sit here on letterboxd and look through my watchlist or endlessly scroll through my myriad subscriptions but NOTHING looks appealing. I have been in a mental fog just watching Community (TV series) for the first time this past week. I have also been reading about film, I'm currently reading Sanctuary Cinema: Origins of the Christian Film Industry by Terry Lindvall but actually sitting down and watching something seems like such a daunting task and I find no joy in it. I am currently recovered from a small bout of Covid 19 where I had to quarantine away from home because my dad is at risk since he has a paralyzed diaphragm. Maybe I'm just now realizing what an oddly stressful situation I was and still am in with my health. I'm not certain. I just want to be able to enjoy movies again and being in this funk is scary.
You write so incisively and about feelings so close to my own at the moment that the first three paragraphs brought tears to my eyes. You are not alone, Drew, and we all thank you for saying what we are feeling. Thank you.