It's finally time for VOIR

Plus let's do some LAFCA catch-up quick bites

It’s Monday, December 6, and here’s where we are…

There must be something wrong with me because this is the thing I am most excited about today, and it’s not even close.

I mean, LOOK AT IT. I am so curious about this film, and I love that three weeks from release, no one has any idea what happens in the film. I know a few broad strokes spoilers. I know that Trinity and Neo were both recovered by the machines and that they have been kept alive but separate and that this movie is about the way their love eventually creates a crisis for the machines and their fragile peace with humanity. I know that Thomas Anderson is the creator of a MMORPG called The Matrix that was hugely popular in the early 2000s but which is now overdue for a reboot. Beyond that, I don’t know much… and I love it. I love that they’ve got us all guessing and that whatever Lana Wachowski’s up to, it’s not just going to be a cookie-cutter return to the thing we already know.

Now… okay. There is this other thing I’m a little bit hyped about today. Please allow me a moment of indulgence. It’s taken long enough to get here.

Right at midnight, I did a search on Netflix for it. Sure enough. There it was. VOIR.

A few minutes later, both my kids pinged me from their mom’s house on our Discord server. “OH MY GOD. IT’S HAPPENING. LOOK. IT’S REALLY THERE!” I sent them a screenshot of the way my Netflix landing page looked right at midnight…

… and they got super-excited, and then I got super-excited, and basically, we’re all running around like Kermit the Frog introducing a very special guest right now because it’s finally time for VOIR to be unleashed.

It’s fitting that it went live overnight. The first time David Fincher reached out to me, it was a late-night email that was very direct and very simple.

A phone number. “This is David Fincher. Call me.” That’s it.

So of course, I did what anyone would do. I ignored it because it was obviously a practical joke played by one of my asshole buddies.

Then I got another email the following evening. “Seriously. Call me. David Fincher.”

It was a call on the third day from an incredulous and obviously real David Fincher asking why I wasn’t calling him that finally convinced me that I was not, in fact, being pranked.

That was in 2018. I still feel like I’m being pranked because this has been a dream experience. I’m used to the word no at this point in my career. I’ve accomplished things I am proud of, but I have bounced off more doors than I’ve walked through, and frustration has become a baked-in part of my career. Not here, though. From the moment I took Fincher’s first call, he’s been a man of his word. He works at his own pace, and he works in a very particular way, but he does what he says he’s going to do. Once he decided we were making this show, he really locked in and pushed it all up the hill.

Keep in mind, we all came to it with different levels of experience and different skill sets. Tony Zhou and Taylor Ramos were the ones who had all the video essay experience. I would argue Tony and Taylor helped define the landscape for video essays with Every Frame A Painting, and they came to the process fully formed and ready to go. I’ve written films and I’ve had a ton of on-video experience, but the video essay itself is brand-new to me, and it required a pretty radical rethinking about how to approach a piece of criticism. Thankfully, I’ve known David Prior since the early ‘90s, and when he came on board to help with the production end of things, it was clear we were in good hands. Between the two Davids and editor Keith Clark and the rest of the team from Campfire, we were given all the technical support we needed, but each of us was tasked with finding our way to whatever we were going to do, and there wasn’t a lot of hand-holding.

I like this kind of professional environment. I like being given a task and then being given the trust that I will figure it out and accomplish it. I am happy with my first episode, but the moment we locked it, I already had a list of 20 things I would do differently next time. We’ve got several scripts ready to go if Netflix decides they want more, and I feel like every time I make one of these, I’m going to get better at it, which is something I think Fincher can understand. After all, this is a guy whose first feature film nearly ended his career.

My history with Fincher’s work is complicated. I hated Alien 3 when it was released. I was in my early 20s and I was still prone to blaming everything on the filmmaker. After all, it was their name on the movie, so anything that was wrong with it had to be their fault, right? I was such a fan of Alien and Aliens that I felt personally betrayed by his movie, and I had no idea he felt the same way. When Se7en came out, I went into it with my arms crossed, a chip on my shoulder, sure I was going to hate it.

That was the last time I underestimated him. Once we finally spoke, he explained that he was putting together a group of film critics for a project and he invited me to join in the first big round-table discussion. The final VOIR line-up for season one is not the same as the group who met on that day. Some of us are the same. Some people never made it past that first meeting. Others have been added along the way, some very late in the game. Throughout it all, Fincher’s had a very clear vision of what he wanted to do, and it feels like we got on the dartboard even if we weren’t able to execute it exactly. If we get to make more, I think we’ll get even closer to that original vision, but that totally depends on what happens now that the show is out there in the wild.

If you have Netflix, you can follow this link directly to the show right now. It is amazing to be able to say that, and I hope you enjoy.

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LAFCA Quick Bites

I’m still making my way through a ton of end-of-the-year screeners and starting to put together my list of what I really loved this year. There’s no real rhyme or reason to the way I’m watching things. It’s pretty much just whatever comes off the stack first. I figure I’ll offer up some Quick Bites as we count down to the LAFCA vote on the 18th of December. What I found interesting with this batch is how expectations played into my reactions to all of these movies.

image courtesy of A24

Beginners was a solid first film. Not my favorite of that year, but it stuck with me, and I thought it was an uncommonly good Ewan McGregor performance. His second film was the one where writer/director Mike Mills knocked me flat, though, and 20th Century Women is one of the best films of 2016, a dense, rich, human movie that manages to balance humor and heartbreak easily. I’ve been excited to see his follow-up, but I have to confess that C’mon C’mon largely left me cold. Joaquin Phoenix plays Johnny, a journalist who is working on a project where he interviews children of various ages about what they expect from the future. He and his sister Viv (Gaby Hoffmann) are struggling to stay connected in the wake of their mother’s death, and they’ve been estranged for over a year when she calls him and asks if he can come to Los Angeles to help her. She’s got a son named Jesse (Woody Norman), a nine-year-old, and she isn’t sure what to do with him because she’s got to go help get Jesse’s father into rehab. This is a very small film, and the real meat of it has to do with the way Johnny and Jesse learn to connect while Viv is off struggling with Paul (Scoot McNairy). Jesse is a very complicated role for a kid and Woody Norman does his best to rise to the challenge. He and Phoenix have a sweet chemistry together at times, but in the end, I think Mills put too much weight on the kid, and I don’t think the choice to shoot in black-and-white adds anything to the film in any way. This feels like a half-cooked idea at best, and while I admire the ambition of the central relationship, I don’t think it works on screen, and without that, the film just plain doesn’t play.

image courtesy of Neon

Have you ever watched a film that made you question your reaction to another film? I loved Pablo Lorrain’s Jackie when it was released, and it was one of those deeply divisive films where I felt strongly about it regardless of the naysayers. Now I’m on the other side of the equation because I’m absolutely baffled by his take on Princess Diana, and it’s got me worried that I wouldn’t feel the same if I went back and looked at Jackie again. I’ll admit that I think the entire industry that exists around the British Royals is bizarre and unpleasant, and in a year that also saw a big documentary, a new season of The Crown, and a terrible musical about her, I don’t think there’s anything left to say about Diana. Spencer does nothing to change my mind, and I think this may be the first time I have ever disliked pretty much every choice that Kristen Stewart makes in a movie. It’s a blank of a performance, all twitches and hairdos, and the film around her is suffocatingly silly. I don’t believe anything in it, and it doesn’t feel like it offers any insight into the actual person. That would be fine if Lorrain had something to say about the surface that the world saw, but that doesn’t seem to be the film, either. I think Diana’s story is terribly sad, and I have no doubt you could make a great film about the way the monarchy can destroy you. This is not that film, though. This is a style exercise, and it tips quickly into self-parody in a way that I felt bordered on disastrous. This may be the hardest sit I’ve had in a while, and I honestly can’t recommend it on any level.

image courtesy of UA Releasing

It’s a bummer when you see a film by a filmmaker you normally like and you bounce right off of it, but the inverse of that is delightful. Joe Wright frustrates me because he’s obviously gifted and when he makes a good film, it’s really good. When he makes a bad film, though, it’s brutal, and the lows of Pan and The Woman in the Window are incredibly low. It can be dispiriting to see a film that bad, and it can shake your confidence in a filmmaker. With Cyrano, Wright is back in “wonderful” mode, and his adaptation of Erica Schmidt’s stage musical feels casually confident. He knew what he had here, and he leans into it. There’s a passion to the filmmaking you can feel from the moment it begins. There have been numerous versions of Cyrano de Bergerac, and it’s one of those stories that seems fairly limber. You can set it any time and you can gender-bend it and you can give Cyrano a variety of reasons he does not feel he can tell Roxanne that he loves her. It’s all about how you take those broad strokes and make them sing, and in this case, it’s literal. With music by The National, the actors routinely erupt into a kind of hyper-emotional indie rock, and it’s largely successful. Haley Bennett and Kevin Harrison Jr. are terrific as Roxanne and Christian, the beautiful star-crossed lovers with Cyrano as the bridge between them, and Ben Mendelsohn makes an appropriately loathsome De Guiche. The reason to see the film as soon as you possibly can, though, is Peter Dinklage, who gives an all-timer performance here, attacking the role of Cyrano like a starving man eating a steak. This is a perfect showcase for his charisma and for the way he plays wounded, and if you let yourself get swept away by the familiar tale, told exceptionally well, it is positively pulverizing, a Christmas gift for anyone who wants a good cry.

image courtesy of IFC Films

Finally, when it comes to Paul Verhoeven, Benedetta is exactly what I expected it to be, and I’m delighted to see this profane and rowdy film about faith at this point in his career. When you’re known for being provocative and edgy, you can paint yourself into a corner as a filmmaker, and Verhoeven came pretty close to burning himself down forever with Showgirls. What has always made him so interesting is the way you can sense the wicked sense of humor underlining his provocations, and even his biggest mainstream hits leave the audience wondering if they’re in on the joke or not. Benedetta is indeed a movie about a nun who has a lesbian affair with another nun in a 17th century convent and it is saucy in an old-fashioned European style that grounds it in a whole tradition of exploitation cinema. But Verhoeven isn’t just interested in the nudity, and the way he articulates the inner life of Benedetta (Virginie Efira) and her relationships with both God and Bartolomea (the ferocious and feral Daphne Patakia) makes it clear that Verhoeven isn’t kidding. He’s fascinated by someone who has mystical visions, who has a communication with the divine, and the idea that someone who is “tainted” by this desire that is so scandalous could also be the one person actually in touch with God is what I think he finds irresistible here. It’s supercharged and silly at times, but Efira gives a grounded, emotional performance as the lead and Verhoeven seems inspired by the subject matter. This may be the year’s most sincerely outrageous arthouse hoot.

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AND FINALLY…

Today’s a quick one. Adding more content means I have to be willing to hit send by noon on each of the days we publish.

That’s fine. There’s plenty more coming this week. I’ve still got a big stack of screeners to work through. On Wednesday, I’m heading back to The Nostalgia, the strangest movie theater in Los Angeles, and then on Friday, I’ll have two big reviews for you in one day.

A new Del Toro and a new Spielberg? In one newsletter? You’ll just have to see it to believe it.