None of us know how to talk to each other anymore. None of us know how to deal with one another in public anymore. No one knows what to do about their masks. No one knows what six feet of distance actually looks like. This is the strangest time I’ve ever seen, and I feel like it’s just ramping up.
Last weekend, we had two errands to run. Both were very specific and very targeted. We made a plan, we masked up, and we went. And let me tell you, it was terrifying and depressing. The stores were trying to make it work, but the people just plain weren’t. By and large, most of the people I saw seemed to have decided that life is back to normal and there is no need to be careful anymore, much less take any extra precautions.
I can’t imagine going to a restaurant and eating there. I can’t imagine feeling comfortable just browsing a mall, even an outdoor one like the Century City Westfield mall that keeps sending me e-mail about their grand re-opening this weekend. More and more e-mails keep showing up for businesses like escape rooms and swap meets and upcoming theatrical releases and I can’t get my head around any of it. I assume people will go, but I won’t be one of them, and I can’t imagine advocating for anyone reading this to go, either. I want to see Saint Maud. I want to see The Personal History of David Copperfield. I want to see Tenet. But I want my girlfriend and my son to be healthy and they both have compromised immune systems so why would I go see a movie right now?
I think both DC and Comic-Con seem to have good ideas, staging virtual events that will essentially just be long promotional reels for upcoming product. You can read details for the events online now, and I’m sure they’re still figuring out exactly what they’ll look like and how they’ll work. I respect the choice to make them virtual and not even flirt with putting people in harm’s way. I’m well past my own personal sell-by date on sitting through glitzy power-point presentations of marketing materials, but there’s a real itch that won’t be scratched this summer for hardcore fandom, and this will help. There are plenty of things about the live event experience that can’t be duplicated virtually, but I admire the effort to give people a chance to have something communal to participate in, something that at least anchors this summer for them a bit.
My own kids are starting to go a little crazy from all of the isolation, and I feel for them. I wish there was a safe way to fast-forward through all of this, but instead, I’m going to keep trying to find ways to keep them engaged and entertained this summer and enjoy the moment. Yeah, we’re stuck in the house, but maybe we can watch some things we wouldn’t have had time for otherwise. We can’t let all of this run us down because that’s when we end up making terrible choices. July 10 would be right after Toshi’s birthday this year, and he wants to get back to theaters desperately. But I can’t imagine taking him to do that as a gift… it sounds wildly irresponsible. We’re watching Beijing shut down again after trying to reopen too early, and I’d hate to be a statistic just to see a live-action remake of Mulan.
It’s impossible to write about film without writing about everything else. That’s what I’ve always loved about movies. You can curate your experience with film as a mirror to the world or an antidote to it. You can steer into your anxieties or build moats against them. You can do your best to get close to reality or you can do your best to completely shut it out. Film can be as political as you want it to be or you can turn those filters off and just lose yourself in stories and pictures. And when you write about film, you can write about all of that. Lately, it may feel like I’ve been writing about a lot of things that aren’t particularly related to film or pop culture, but they felt like things that had to be written.
I caught up with Shirley, the new film from director Josephine Decker, and it’s clear that Decker is building a very personal style as a filmmaker. Her film Madeline’s Madeline is a deeply emotional experience, but it doesn’t really engage the audience in any conventional ways. It does more to capture the feeling of being in the midst of an emotional upheaval than plenty of more conventionally structured films. Shirley taps some of those same feelings, and the screenplay by Sarah Gubbins, adapted from a novel by Susan Scarf Merrell, seems willing to meet Decker halfway in terms of the way it approaches narrative. The best moments in the film are the ones where we feel like we’re locked into Shirley’s mind while she’s creating or while she’s wrestling with her personal demons. Much of the film deals with the bizarre dynamic between Shirley, her husband Stanley Edgar Hyman (Michael Stuhlbarg), and two young students who become entangled in their lives. Moss is, unsurprisingly, amazing in the way she embodies Jackson in all of her complexity, but it feels like Decker is pushing against the screenplay with her work rather than working with it, and I feel like the two different films at war here never quite make peace. At its best, it gives you a very naked and unguarded portrait of what it is like to live in a marriage that is as much battlefield as union, toxic and constantly adversarial. You can’t ask for a better duet in acting than Stuhlbarg and Moss, and the moments here where Decker captures the insane push-pull of that dynamic are the moments where Shirley really flies.
On the other hand, I think the new documentary The Painter and the Thief, which is streaming now on Hulu, is wall-to-wall terrific and worth seeing immediately. Directed by Benjamin Ree, this tells the story of what happens when Barbora Kysilkova has two of her large oil paintings stolen from a gallery where they’re hanging as part of a show. The burglary is captured on video and when one of the men is on trial, the artist can’t help herself. She approaches him to ask him about why he stole it and ends up asking if she can paint him. The film manages to paint robust portraits of both the artist and her new subject, and it doesn’t really hit the easy beats I expected. Yes, forgiveness and the importance of finding a way to show empathy to even the most unlikely person are both major themes here, but not necessarily in the way I expected. There were two moments in the film that knocked me flat emotionally, and I think it is a beautiful film. It genuinely made me feel better to have seen it, and I can’t think of a greater value I can place on a film right now. Hope seems like something worth seeking out when you can find it, and I think this is a gorgeous example of that.
Hope is what drives a lot of fandom, especially when something they love is about to jump from one medium to another, and I feel bad when fans wait and wait and wait and then they finally get a movie aaaaaaaaaaaaand…
FANTASY, FULL AND FOUL
Ooooof, Artemis Fowl. Oooooooooooooof.
I am not the target audience for this film, even if it were a pitch-perfect adaptation of the eight-book series by Eoin Colfer, and it most assuredly is not. The books are very particular, and this is one of those cases where I wonder why the studio made the movie if they were as uncomfortable with the source material as they seem to be.
I tried to figure out the choices they made in adapting the property and, frankly, I’m baffled. It’s like they were mad at the books. Artemis Fowl is a supervillain from the very first page of the very first book. It is the reason he’s interesting. He’s in Vietnam, meeting someone because he’s got a lead on a magical relic. He’s with his bodyguard/best friend, and he’s already completely in charge. He’s also 12 years old. He’s unrepentantly bad. And, clearly, he’s completely wrong to be the lead in a Disney franchise.
Before I watched the film, I read the first book in the series. I can see why kids who were part of that Harry Potter generation would enjoy the world that was created here, but one of the big problems with the film is that they lean into the infrastructure of the magical world to a numbing degree, and that’s by far the worst thing about the book. It makes me tired to even think about having to explain how everything works with the leprechaun cops and their high-tech secret world and that’s a huge problem with a lot of this world-building driven franchise-minded IP. They get so hung up on trying to create this alternate world without bothering to tell stories that connect on any kind of human level in front of them. By the time Judi Dench shows up as the head of the Leprachaun cops and growls “Top ‘o the mornin’” in a silly Batman voice, I was done with the world this particular film was building.
Seriously. Check her out.
More than anything, Kenneth Branagh’s film feels joyless. Everything feels like it was shot by different units working from slightly different notes, like none of it quite pieces together. And forget about making sense of what happens from moment to moment. When you make a film like this where everything is exposition, you just stop hearing it after a while. The more they try to explain what you’re watching and the more they try to invest the Golden Acorn with importance and significance, the sillier and the more annoying it all seems. I think this is true of films where the world has to bear the weight of a very obvious metaphor, like the Divergent series, that makes no practical applicable sense. The more rules and the more hierarchy you create to prop up your “fun” idea, the less fun it becomes.
Basically, the moment this film begins with the main character surfing, something he resolutely would never do in the book, it’s clear that they not only don’t respect the books, but they don’t have any idea why anyone else does, either. That’s a terrible place to be working from when you’re trying to lay the groundwork for a “cinematic universe,” perhaps the most nakedly crass ongoing proposition from any of the studios. Audiences see through you. You know that, right? All this talk of “universes” isn’t really fooling anyone. If you like a thing that’s getting a “universe,” congratulations. What that really means these days is a slate of films where the studio increasingly seems confused about what it was the audience liked in the first place. “We’re not sure why you reacted the way you did, but here’s a whole lot more of our best guess!”
That’s not to say I think it’s a bad thing to think about a bigger picture. For example, I just read the first book from a new trilogy, and the entire thing was thrilling. Every idea it introduced landed, and the way it took its central idea and expanded on it made me tear through the thing, eager to find out how it would play out, but just as eager to read it a second time to just enjoy it. N.K. Jemisin is one of the biggest rising stars in publishing and for good reason. She’s a remarkable writer with a great easy natural storytelling voice. She paints vividly, and she’s able to etch a world by immersing you in the experience of living in it instead of ladling on endless exposition. That’s the difference for me when someone’s a truly gifted fantasist. It doesn’t feel like you’re reading fantasy. It simply reads like a great writer describing the experience of living in the world.
Her new book The City We Became is the beginning of her new Great Cities Trilogy, and the concept is simple: cities have souls. When a city reaches a certain point in its growth, it wakes up, and people within that city become its living avatar. From that simple beginning, she spins a beautiful story about New York, divided by its boroughs, united by its larger identity, and not only is it a richly realized fantasy, but it’s also a deeply-felt portrait of why New York is so special. Instead of being a book about how only New York could possibly have a soul, the book makes it clear that every city’s soul is different, and that’s what makes each of them worth protecting. That’s not to say that this is some rose-colored portrait. Far from it. It is a celebration of all the contradictory voices that collide in the identity of any shared space, and a look at the way those contradictions are a strength if we allow them to be. Each of the boroughs is a great character, carefully realized, and there are other cities who make appearances in the book who are equally well-written.
And now here’s where I say I hope no one makes a film based on this, because I worry what the big-studio version of this might look like. I don’t think it’s impossible or unadaptable, but I do worry that all of the things that make the book so wonderful and singular would be the things that were stripped away to make it more commercial or more mainstream. I don’t think the end goal of every piece of media should be to get adapted into something else. Part of the problem with our pop culture landscape right now is that weird itch as soon as people like something to start finding ways to squeeze more juice from the lemon. The Artemis Fowl books are not just better as books than they are as this particular film; they are also a record of a very particular moment in young adult publishing. It’s taken so long to get the first film made that the audience that was there for the books has grown up to become young adults, and publishing has moved on to new IP and new active interests. At least we know for sure we’re never seeing another one. Launching this film franchise this way in 2020 would be like Paramount making a $200 million Animorphs movie that they release straight to Hulu.
Seriously, though, I can’t urge you strongly enough to pick up Jemisin’s book and to explore her work overall, especially if you’re a fantasy fan who felt burned by another empty corporate attempt at cashing in on your love of that genre. In the right hands, fantasy can illuminate complex ideas and ignite a world of emotions, and even make you see the real world more clearly.
AND FINALLY…
Richard Rushfield was my editor for the home stretch over at HitFix. He was fired (without cause) the same morning I was fired (without cause), and he’s been one of my favorite sounding boards in the weird unstable times afterward. One of the reasons you’re reading this newsletter is because Richard pushed me so hard to meet with the people at Substack, who turned out to be exactly as decent as he told me they would be.
Richard writes about the business of show business as well as anyone working right now, with a keen analytic eye, and he does not depend on the studios for anything. Not access, not sources, and certainly not permission. As a result, he doesn’t have to worry about biting the hand that feeds in his work. Hell, he chews the entire arm on a regular basis because that’s exactly the point of what he publishes.
As Hollywood falls over itself to demonstrate just how much it believes that Black Lives Matter, it is important to point out the difference between what they say and what they do. It’s easy to say that, but the truth is in this town, power is the ability to greenlight. It is about who gets to say yes and who gets to say no.
Richard took the time to put together a visual essay on who really holds power in Hollywood, and I’m just going to recommend you take the time to look at it. It speaks more powerfully than words ever could. I haven’t seen anyone else make this case this clearly, and I hope people keep this tool handy as we have this difficult conversation on an ongoing basis.
Today’s newsletter is free. We’ve been publishing exclusively for paid subscribers lately, and we’ll definitely have more of that this week, but you can share this one as widely as you’d like.
Image courtesy of Neon
Image courtesy of Neon
Image courtesy of Disney+