The exquisite NOMADLAND is finally available at home
A review of one of the best movies we've seen in a while
It’s Friday, February 19, and here’s where we are…
My return to podcasting is imminent.
I’ve gone through several stages in terms of podcasting. There was the old Motion/Captured Podcast which I posted when I was at HitFix, and those are gone completely at this point, scrubbed from the internet thanks to the fine folks over at Uproxx. I was a one-man-band on that show, editing it and recording it and organizing it, and HitFix didn’t seem particularly interested in my podcasting one way or another. It just wasn’t part of their larger strategy, which is hilarious considering our CEO is now the CEO of Wondery so all she thinks about at this point is podcasting.
That show was a real grab-bag of things, interviews and conversations with Rebecca Swan, my longtime friend and collaborator, and whatever else I felt like throwing at the listener. There was no regular release schedule and no regular format, so it never really worked as a show in any conventional sense. But it was a fun experiment, and from time to time, I think we put something really fun together.
‘80s All Over was a whole different thing. Carefully produced, carefully-structured, and released on a regular schedule complete with bonus episodes that served a whole different purpose than the main show, it was almost completely what we intended for it to be. We created something we couldn’t sustain, though, and when we had to pull the plug, it was deeply frustrating. I miss it enormously.
I’ve been thinking about how to get back into podcasting, and I am close to working out the plan now. I have two different shows I’d like to do on a rotating basis, and it’s a matter of putting together a team that’s going to get those shows to the finish line.
In the meantime, I’m listening to plenty of other people’s podcasting and really trying to focus on what it is that I hope to accomplish this time. It’s not enough to just throw another podcast out there into the ecosystem. There has to be something I feel like we’re adding to the conversation and something that isn’t just a duplication of work I’m doing elsewhere.
As you head into the weekend, I presume many of you are watching WandaVision. It’s interesting to see Disney+ crash precisely at midnight every Thursday night just as they release the new episode. Last night, they were also adding all five seasons of The Muppet Show, which I consider one of the biggest additions to any streaming catalog right now. If you own the rights to the entire catalog of the Muppets, it would seem to me that The Muppet Show is the crown jewel, still the best thing the company ever did, as well as an important record of what pop-culture looked like at a certain moment. I was surprised to see the condition of the show, but I suppose at this point, short of doing some sort of massive upscale to 60 FPS, there’s really no way it’s ever going to look any better than it does right now. That’s the source material. That’s just the limitations of when they shot it.
There are only two episodes from the entire run that they don’t have on Disney+ now. One is the Brooke Shields episode and the other featured guest star Chris Langham. I have no idea why the Shields episode wasn’t included, but it may well be music rights, a problem with a lot of shows from the era. I’m guessing the Langham episode was intentionally excluded considering he went to jail for possession of child pornography and he was placed on the sex offenders’ registry in the UK. It’s tricky, though, because Langham was a writer for the show for the full run. Excluding his one on-screen appearance is probably a good idea, but it’s impossible to erase him completely without erasing The Muppet Show, and I can’t imagine anyone thinks we should erase The Muppet Show. With the way we seem to be re-examining every piece of culture that was produced longer than five minutes ago, cases like this spotlight just how tricky that can be.
If you haven’t seen WandaVision yet, make sure you stay tuned for a mid-credits scene this week, the first they’ve done on the show. If you missed it, make sure you go back. It’s a pretty significant beat. This week definitely gave viewers a ton of new information without quite giving up the entire thing. There are only two more episodes to go, and it feels like this entire series is going to end with Wanda in a very interesting place emotionally, but without any clean resolution. There has been plenty of speculation about the future of the Marvel universe, and things like the casting rumors about Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness only feed into that.
But if there’s any advice I can give you, it is that fan rumors are often wrong and getting attached to them is a recipe for disappointment. I see it all the time. People read a rumor like “Reed Richards is going to show up in episode seven and he’s going to be played by John Krasinski!” or “the last three episodes are going to be an hour each!” and they take it as fact because they see it amplified by social media or reprinted on site after site after site. People can’t resist these stories because they are so appealing, but when they don’t turn out to be true, audiences end up holding it against the show unfairly. No one ever promised you Reed Richards, but at this point, if he doesn’t show up, you’re going to hear people bitch about it for months, complaining that Marvel didn’t do what they said they were going to do. Expectations are a fragile thing, and part of what happens with fan rumors is that people will make these elaborate wishes and they’ll pass them off as “something I heard,” and because fans can make any wish they want, those rumors are often pie-in-the-sky crazy. WandaVision was not created simply to exist as a backdoor pilot for The Fantastic Four, so don’t get upset when you don’t get the thing no one promised you were getting.
Speaking of things that were finally released today…
STILL LIFE
France McDormand has the best face in movies.
I didn’t see Blood Simple in theaters, so my introduction to McDormand was in Raising Arizona, where she is a human cartoon as Dot, wife to the truly loathsome Glenn. She started building an amazing filmography quickly from that point, with standout work in Mississippi Burning, Hidden Agenda, Darkman, and Short Cuts. It was Fargo that pushed her out of the “hard-working character actor” category, though, and turned her into a genuinely bankable movie star, and it remains one of the most appealing, engaging performances of the ‘90s.
For me, it’s always been about that face. Great actors practically radiate what they’re thinking about without having to speak, and McDormand’s thoughts always seem to be playing out across her face with no filter whatsoever. It’s like she is transparent and you can see directly into her. She also has some of the same flinty appeal as Spencer Tracy, a general “don’t fucking try it” attitude that makes her fascinating. No matter who she’s playing, there’s a keen intelligence that informs every choice, and you get the feeling that nothing gets past her.
She can eat her co-stars alive if they let her, and when you look at her in a film like Wonder Boys or Almost Famous or Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, she’s a force of nature. You don’t beat her in a scene. If you’re lucky, you keep up with her. She frequently gets the best out of her co-stars and you can see just how much heat she will throw when she’s got someone worth her best. It’s easy to say she works with her husband frequently because they’re married, but it’s probably more accurate to say that they were drawn to each other because they recognized some particular strain of brilliance, some secret language.
It can be daunting as an artist to try to find a collaborator who is in tune with you, especially if you’re someone with a strong personal point of view. For McDormand to find Joel and Ethan Coen was a one-in-a-billion chance. For her to also find Chloé Zhao is truly remarkable, and the result is an incredible film, a piercing and human experience that has lingered with me for months since I first saw it.
Nomadland is based on a non-fiction book by Jessica Bruder, and the film occupies a strange space between truth and fiction. It stars McDormand and David Strathairn, two of our best working actors, recognizable from dozens and dozens of films, but it also features people like Linda May, Bob Wells, and the fascinating Swankie, real people who play themselves. It is shot on real locations, and there’s something almost documentary about the approach that Zhao took to the storytelling, but it’s as controlled and elegant a film as you’re going to see this year. It feels both shapeless and also incredibly specific. It is a magic trick as much as it’s a movie, and I am absolutely in love with it.
McDormand plays Fern, a woman who has started living in a van on a traveling circuit, taking seasonal work that forces her to constantly move in order to be able to make money. The first job we see her working is at an Amazon fulfillment center during the Christmas season, and if there’s a more American metaphor than that, I can’t think of one. This isn’t a film that is trying to drown you in metaphor, though. It’s very direct, very frank. When Fern moves on, we move with her, and that’s pretty much the whole thing. We go to a big gathering in the desert, then we move on to a series of jobs like an RV park, a tourist stop, and a beet farm, never really getting comfortable at any of them. There are other characters who drop in and out of Fern’s life, characters who are also on the road, whether by circumstance or by choice, but no one’s allowed to get too close.
There’s a bit of backstory for Fern, communicated at the start with a title card about how the US Gypsum plant closed down, effectively killing the town of Empire, Nevada, but this isn’t a movie that is trying to play this as a big tragedy or setting Fern up as a mystery to solve. Instead, Zhao seems more interested in communicating how everyone on the road has a different story. There’s no single way people end up with an impermanent home. There’s no common story that unites everyone we meet in this film. Zhao uses Fern to drop us into this world in a way that allows us to soak it up.
And through it all, everything keeps coming back to that face. As Fern cycles through the various stations of this new nomadic life, the one constant is that she’s alone. And it’s not a problem she has to solve or an issue she has to confront. She is alone. She has reached this point where that’s what her life is, and the film is basically just her learning how that works and what that looks like and what it really means. And because so much of the film is about her being alone, there are long stretches with no dialogue. So it’s just Frances McDormand against these American landscapes, and Zhao has the nerve to just let McDormand do all of it with her eyes and with her face and with her silences, and she is more than rewarded for having that nerve. This is where it feels like words fail to fully communicate what makes art so effective and what makes a film feel special to you. I can tell you that McDormand speaks volumes without actually speaking, but that’s as much about me as it is about the film. Films like this make space for you to have a reaction, and what you get out of this is largely about how effectively it pokes you right in the empathy center.
I have had a scary few years, financially-speaking, and while I am optimistic things are changing, I’m not out of the woods yet. I don’t think I’m ever going to feel secure again. It’s just been too clear to me for too long now that things can drop out from under us without warning and that there is no permanence to any of this. We move through other people’s lives just as fleetingly as they move through ours and just because you want to hold on to someone, there’s no guarantee you’ll be given that chance. We are at the mercy of larger forces in our economy and we are all disposable. Even when we think we’ve got it all locked down, things can slide out from under us, and the only thing you can really count on is that you can’t count on anything.
Fern doesn’t learn some magical lesson that fixes her in this film, and it’s not a movie about finding her way out of this lifestyle. The film doesn’t judge Fern or any of the people she meets. There is a generosity to the way people are presented here, and this is where Zhao’s gifts as a filmmaker shine brightest. There are few things I value more in a filmmaker than the ability to offer up a full and human portrait of the people in their films, and Zhao seems dedicated to giving each of the people she encounters their full dignity. She just wants to understand them and to be honest about this new loosely-connected community and why it exists. Joshua James Richards, her photographer, does exquisite work, and they manage to capture the dusty, dented beauty of this America without it feeling like they’re fetishizing any of it. Somehow, this film about people who have become disconnected from what we think of as “normal life” doesn’t feel depressing or like it’s shot through with sadness or stress. Instead, there’s something celebratory about Fern’s strength and about the choices she makes. It is a film about resilience in the face of the storm, and about finding peace amidst chaos, and if this is what we can expect from Chloé Zhao, then I can’t wait to see her fifth film, her tenth film, or her twentieth. Nomadland is not only one of my favorite films of the year, but it’s also one of the few American movies I saw that I feel is absolutely essential if you want to understand who we are right now.
AND FINALLY…
Look, I get the way this stuff works.
There’s a part of me that’s fairly cynical about casting announcements. Certainly, if you’re trying to drum up publicity, one sure-fire way is giving us a new Superman or Supergirl. Warner has been working behind the scenes to figure out their Superstrategy overall, and The Flash is an important part of establishing how they move forward. The introduction of Supergirl is just one of many bits of housekeeping they’ll be handling with Andy Muschietti’s film, and part of the responsibility of this film is going to be the way he casts these roles.
Even knowing how much pressure there is on them and how calculated Warner publicity can be, there is another part of me that is a human being and I can’t help but be excited for someone getting an opportunity to do something transformative. Today on Twitter, the studio shared the moment where the director called Sasha Calle, his new Supergirl, to tell her that she’s got the part…
That’s a great human moment to share, and it’s hard not to respond to someone having this kind of reaction to a personal victory. I don’t know her work at all, but I look forward to seeing her take a swing at this character who has seen a number of interpretations so far, none of them definitive. Like Flash, the best versions of Supergirl so far have been on TV, and as far as film goes, there’s plenty of room for Mushietti to be the one that sets a tone for both of these characters and for the larger DC multiverse that they’re trying to establish for the movies that are in development.
I’ve got some superhero stuff to talk about in the weeks ahead, but not from Marvel or DC, which is refreshing. Amazon sent over the first three episodes of Invincible, their animated adaptation of Robert Kirkman’s terrific epic comic book, which I thoroughly enjoyed pretty much start to finish. I’m embargoed on the show itself, but looking forward to the conversation. In the meantime, I would urge you to start watching Kid Cosmic on Netflix, which is a joyous, silly, hilarious little thing. Just looking at those two shows, it’s clear that while “superheroes” may be a common denominator in a lot of our pop culture right now, there’s room for plenty of genres and subgenres and styles and tones under that broad, broad umbrella.
The comments are wide open for whatever’s on your mind. I’ve got more for you this weekend, but that’s all for paid subscribers only. There’s another edition of the Star Wars column coming out this week as well as a few more entries in The Library. It’s going to be busy, and you don’t have to miss out if you just pony up a mere $7 a month. It’s even less if you buy a full year all at once!
Here’s this week’s media diary, and as always, everything I particularly enjoyed is in bold.
THIS WEEK’S BOOKS: Sherlock Holmes and the Shadwell Shadows by James Lovegrove; The Steel Remains by Richard Morgan; Infinite by Brian Freeman; Suburban Grindhouse by Nick Cato; Black Coral by Andrew Mayne
THIS WEEK’S COMICS: Savage Avengers #18; MODOK: Head Games #3; Star Trek: Year Five #19; Star Wars: The Thrawn Trilogy; Star Wars: Dark Empire Trilogy; Star Wars: The Crimson Empire Saga; Sara #1-6
THIS WEEK’S PODCASTS: The Dana Gould Hour - “Proops Positive”; Screen Drafts - “Canon”, “Relationship Horror”; High and Mighty with Jon Gabrus - “Weezer with Matt Apodoca,” “Transit with Scott Frazier”; MBMBaM - “Jeans All The Way Down”; The Dollop - “The Meat Riot,” “The San Jose Bees”; Blank Check with Griffin and David - “The Little Mermaid with Esther Zuckerman”
THIS WEEK’S TV: Superstore S6 E9; Perry Mason (1957) S1 E2, E20; WandaVision S1 E6, E7; Fawlty Towers S1 E2; Jackass S1 E1; Taxi S1 E18, E20 - E22; Monty Python’s Flying Circus S1 E5; Police Squad! S1 E1; The Expanse S1 E7, E8; Last Week Tonight with John Oliver S8 E1; Perry Mason (2020) S1 E3; Your Honor S1 E4; Mr. Mayor S1 E7, E8; Search Party S2 E9; This Is Us S5 E8; American Idol S19 E1; Resident Alien S1 E4; Invincible S1 E1; Can’t Get You Out of My Head S1 E1; The Lady and the Dale S1 E4
THIS WEEK’S GAMING: Hitman III; Assassin’s Creed Valhalla
THIS WEEK’S MOVIES: Willy’s Wonderland; Judas and the Black Messiah; Duel; The Matrix; When Harry Met Sally…; Hot Fuzz; The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou; In Search of the Castaways; Monster Hunter; 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea; Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde; Wrong Turn (2021); Kidnapped; The Black Hole; The Fighting Prince of Donegal; The Bears & I; King of the Grizzlies; Ten Who Dared
I did a quick dig through a hard drive and I actually have what I think is all 45 episodes of the Motion/Captured Podcast saved. I still think you could do an entire podcast based around Movie God/Remake This.
With 2 episodes to wrap things up I would be disappointed if there just will be a “to be continued“ situation on WandaVision. It feels like it right now.