We kick off our hybrid Sundance and SXSW coverage with THE SPARKS BROTHERS and more

Plus we tackle the trouble with disappointing sequels

It’s Friday, March 12, and here’s where we are…

There have been some dark days in the last year since I started the publication of this newsletter. Starting a new publication is tough under any circumstances, but this year was an insane time to get any business venture off the ground. There were times during this year when I wondered why I bothered, when I questioned pretty much everything. This was a year that pushed many of us further than we ever expected to be pushed, and I know I got off light compared to a lot of people. Even so, I know I’ve let some of that leak into the work. It’s inevitable.

It’s important to take a moment, then, to celebrate when things feel like they’re turning in a different direction, and this week, it’s been hard to be upset about much of anything. I got some great professional news I’ve been waiting for, I got my first Pfizer shot, and thanks to one of you, there’s a PS5 hooked up to the system now, just waiting for me to take it on a test-run.

Every one of those things happened because of someone else, and I am keenly aware this week how lucky I am to have made the friends I have over the years and also to have readers who are so actively engaged and who work in such disparate fields. My extended community has taken care of me this year in ways I could not have anticipated and I cannot thank everyone enough. It’s easy to get overwhelmed by the negative and to let that define how you see things, but it is important to acknowledge when things are going well and to be thankful for the people that make it possible.

image courtesy of Universal Pictures

It feels like everyone’s rushing to re-open theaters just as we’re all starting to turn the corner, and I’m not sure how I feel about the idea of theaters in Los Angeles as early as next week. It seems premature to me. On the one hand, I just passed the one-year anniversary of the last thing I saw, which was The Hunt, and just typing that seems absolutely inconceivable to me. One year without being in a movie theater. I don’t have a lot of years left, and I just gave an entire one up, never setting foot inside my church, not seeing anything with a crowd of friends and strangers, all of us sharing that experience, and more than that, I have learned a sort of anxiety about the thought of having that experience again. That anxiety makes me furious. I shouldn’t be afraid of returning to a movie theater. Now that I’m scheduled to have both my vaccine shots by the end of the month, I’ve certainly helped my own odds, but this isn’t just about me. I have kids who haven’t been vaccinated, and if I start heading back to theaters but can’t take them, what’s the point? I’m not putting them in that position for the sake of their health, and I don’t want to be in that position emotionally. It all just feels no-win at the moment, when we’re so close to being in the position to do this all correctly. The defining memory I will have of this era is how hard it is to get people to do the right thing no matter how important or obvious or in their own interest it is. That’s a hell of a lesson to absorb at the age of 50, and if not for my personal experiences during all of this, it would have put a serious dent in my belief in the better nature of people.

Many people I’ve spoken to seem to have spent this past year doing some self-reflection, not all of it voluntary, and I think with age and perspective, it’s often important to really take stock of how we got to where we are and what the forces were that shaped us. I am excited to hear that Steven Spielberg and Tony Kushner have been working together on a script that is inspired by Spielberg’s childhood and his memories of his mother. Michelle Williams will star in the film, and I’m excited to see what shape this finally takes. Kushner and Spielberg have clearly created a rich collaboration at this point, and I’m itching to get a look at West Side Story as soon as possible. Hell, they’ve even said that one of the reasons Spielberg wanted to make West Side Story was because of his mother’s love for the piece. It is rare for Spielberg to write at all, and the last time he took a co-screenplay credit, it was for A.I., which was based on Kubrick’s work and the underlying material by Brian Aldiss.

This is something else entirely, though, Spielberg tackling some of the fundamental things that define who he is. The marriage of his parents is something that you can see resonate through so much of his work thematically, with anxiety about divorce and abandonment baked into many of his most personal and effective films. Making a movie that is overtly about those things is something I don’t think a younger Spielberg would have even attempted, and I’m curious to see who the actual focus of the film is.

As much as I’m excited to see something this personal from Spielberg, I am also happy to see him announce (again) that someone’s going to try to bring The Talisman to the screen. He’s been trying to figure this out since the book was initially published and I’ve been waiting that entire time for him to do it. I think the Duffers seem like the right collaborators on this one, and I’m just floating the general idea that I would happily do terrible things to be allowed the chance to write for a TV version of The Talisman. This epic story of a young man traveling across the country in order to save not only his own mother but the mirror-world version of her as well is one of my favorite King novels of all time, and there’s a character in there who may well be my favorite character in any of his work.

It’s a story that never seemed well-suited to a film adaptation, and I think streaming is the perfect way to approach it. Netflix will give them room to indulge the story’s full darkness but it will also allow it to breathe so you’ll have room to really get to know Jack and all the people he meets as he makes his way across America and the Territories. I spent an entire summer reading this aloud to the boys at bedtime each night, and it’s one of my favorite memories out of all the books we read together. I hope the adaptation finally works this time, and that it’s been worth all the time they’ve taken and all the missteps along the way. After all, if there’s anything The Talisman says as a book, it is that the journey matters, and after this last year, I think that’s the kind of story that we can all get behind thematically.

I wanted to try something for the next few weeks, scattered among the other things I’m planning to publish, so let’s get right into it today…

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KICKING OFF SUN BY SOUTHDANCE

It’s been a while since I’ve published festival coverage of any kind.

I like film festivals. If you’re just talking about the actual event, I’d go so far as to say I adore film festivals. There’s really nothing quite like the experience of mainlining 25 or 30 or 35 films in a week or ten days. I have covered Sundance, Cannes, Toronto, and more, and I have done pretty much anything you can do at these festivals. It can be exhausting but deeply rewarding when you’re in the midst of it and it feels like you help get a film the right attention at the right time. There’s a piece in the new Entertainment Weekly where Clark Collis talks to Joe Cornish about the midnight debut of Attack the Block at SXSW and how important that particular screening was to his film’s eventual fate. I was the moderator for that screening and I will always remember the energy in that room. Cornish says he was stressed out and worried and didn’t know how anyone would react, but I remember how electric things were pretty much from the start of the screening. They didn’t have a distributor at that point, but the energy from the room that night is what helped change that, and I have witnessed that over and over and over, screenings where a film catches that perfect wave and is suddenly born into the pop culture conversation as a result of everyone writing about that feeling.

It’s hard to do that with a digital film festival. Even if there is a consensus about something, there’s no equivalent to the overall experience, and there’s no group energy you can absorb. That’s how you know something really works. A good filmmaker doesn’t need to hand out questionnaires at the end of a screening… they can just stand in the room and listen and know if something’s playing or not. You can feel the way the energy rises or falls in a room, and being there when that happens for the first time is one of those special things I love carrying around as a film fan. I was there for the first screening of Holy Motors at Cannes, for example, and that was one of those afternoons I’ll never forget, in part because of the wild range of reactions around me. That’s as much fun as something like the Secret Screening at Fantastic Fest when they dropped John Wick on an unsuspecting crowd who proceeded to lose their fucking minds en masse.

I’m not officially covering either Sundance or SXSW this year, but I’m watching a big fistful of movies from both festivals. As a result, my spring is a sort of jumbled up collection of stuff that I’m watching on my own schedule, and so if I’m going to offer up my thoughts on it, I’m going to call it my Sun By Southdance 2021.

So far? Off to a solid start.

image courtesy of 3011 Productions

The grim family drama John and the Hole is an accomplished exercise in mood and tone that ultimately doesn’t quite go anywhere. A 13-year-old boy, played with chilling control by Charlie Shotwell, discovers an excavation behind his house where a bunker was going to be installed. John’s this disconnected kid, and every interaction he has in the film feels like he’s just slightly off, like he’s not quite getting the same thing out of the conversation as anyone else. One morning, his mother, his father, and his older sister wake up in the hole with no explanation. John is the one who put them there, and his reasons are as unclear to him as they are to his family. Mainly, he wants to see what it would be like to be an adult, but none of the experiences he has while his family suffers get him any closer to that elusive answer. It’s a creepy film, but it’s not a horror film in any overt way. Director Pascual Sisto’s got an interesting eye, and there’s a real skill to the way the film stays detached from things. It may frustrate some viewers to see how small-scale things remain and to see the way the film concludes, and I found a parallel story that is seeded throughout the film’s relatively brief 98 minutes to be a real dead-end, but there’s enough here that I would recommend it.

The documentary Summer of Soul (… Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) is one of those I can confidently predict I will rewatch a number of times just to let the amazing soundtrack fill my house. As a film, it’s good. But as a document of a cultural moment that was previously forgotten? It is explosively entertaining and a huge accomplishment. In 1969, the Harlem Cultural Festival was held in Mount Morris Park in Harlem for six weeks, with over 300,000 people attending the event. The event was filmed, but the footage just sat in boxes until Ahmir Khalib Thompson (best known as Questlove) came across it. The idea that this event could be largely unknown for the last 50 years rattled him, as it should rattle anyone, and he decided he had to make this film as a way of finally giving this event the spotlight it deserves.

image courtesy of Fox Searchlight

It’s amazing to see this stuff and think it sat in a box, uncelebrated and unshared. There’s some Nina Simone footage here that is worth it all by itself, but that’s really just the tip of the iceberg. The Stevie Wonder set that opens things is terrific, there’s a tremendous Sly & The Family Stone appearance, and sets by Mongo Santamaría and Hugh Maskela that are positively transcendent. The event encompasses gospel and R&B and soul and a wide range of styles and sounds. It is a celebration of Black American culture at that particular place and time, but more than that, it is a record of the people of Harlem at that particular moment. I love the crowd footage. I love the way the audience reacts to everyone, with this open-armed love and joy, and the modern interviews that set things into context are incisive and well-chosen. When you see the 5th Dimension talk about how they weren’t thought of as “Black music,” it’s a great perspective and it really brings into focus the importance of this event for them as performers. They felt welcomed, and they needed that validation.

It’s also worth setting this into context against Woodstock, and I think these two films would make an important double-feature. I love the Hendrix set at Woodstock, but for me, the star of that film has always been Ritchie Havens. His version of “Freedom” absolutely burns down the screen, as does the Hendrix “Star-Spangled Banner,” but Black music of most stripes remains largely absent from the Woodstock stage. That film and that concert have long been held up as the pivotal cultural event of its time, but there are so many voices that are unrepresented there, and it goes entirely unchallenged. It kills me to read that the guy who shot all this footage originally couldn’t find a commercial home for it at the time. That seems insane to me. This is music history as rich as anything in Woodstock, if not richer. I mean, that movie gives time to Sha Na Na, while this one features a duet between Mahalia Jackson and Mavis Staples that gave me chills, but sure, I guess those two things are equal.

It’s easy to get angry about that kind of overt imbalance, but Questlove’s film is not an angry film. It is a film that simply makes its case by presenting the art and laying out the context in which the festival took place. If you can watch Nina Simone’s “Are You Ready, Black People?” and walk away even remotely ambivalent about the significance, both artistic and cultural, of this event, then clearly we judge art in radically different ways. I am excited that Searchlight plans to make this one an event. It deserves it.

image courtesy of Focus Features

Edgar Wright’s The Sparks Brothers is a big, fat, overstuffed hoot and while I’m sure the running time will baffle some people, it seems entirely fitting to me. You might argue that it was indulgent of Edgar to make a documentary about this obscure footnote in pop music in the first place, and that’s kind of the point. He didn’t just want to make a film about them. He wanted to make a film that positioned them as the greatest band you’ve never heard of, a major force that you somehow missed completely, and this kind of pomp and circumstance is exactly how you do that. This is the opposite of Summer of Soul, cheeky and decidedly inconsequential in the way that only great pop can be.

I felt like I was getting pranked as I was watching the film. I consider myself fairly in tune with pop culture, and I grew up listening to all of the music that influenced Sparks, just like I grew up listening to all the music that was evidently influenced by them. I watched MTV religiously in the ‘80s, and I remember all the shows that the documentary shows clips from. So why don’t I remember Sparks at all? It’s like Edgar made this incredibly clever mockumentary, except all of the albums that they talk about are real and you can find them on Spotify right now, and they genuinely did influence a bunch of other artists. It’s not a goof, no matter how much their entire existence makes me feel like I have a brain tumor.

Sparks is hard to describe, which may be why they’ve always been elusive, constantly changing but never as a reaction to anything other than their own particular inner voice. Ron and Russell Mael, the brothers who have been making music together since the late ‘60s, are larger-than-life characters, and Edgar has a blast giving each of them plenty of room to assert these giant personalities. Russell’s the front man, the singer, and he has a rock star confidence that seems amazing onstage when you see how soft spoken and gentle he is offstage. Then there’s Ron, the keyboardist, who is also the songwriter. Defined largely by his weird little Hitler mustache that Paul McCartney borrowed so notably in the “Coming Up” video, Ron is a cartoon character and I love him.

You can find a playlist of Sparks music on Spotify that Edgar Wright curated, and it’s a great way of showing just how much range they’ve got. They worked with Giorgio Moroder in the disco era, did a cross-over with Go-Go’s guitarist Jane Wiedlin in the ‘80s, and had a huge German radio hit in the ‘90s, and none of that has anything to do with the stuff they’ve been doing for the last 20 years, which is a whole different kind of sound and style. They are limber, which is what you need to be to have any kind of longevity in pop, and it amazes me how they manage to thrive without having the kind of crossover “success” that is typically what it takes to survive for so long.

The highest compliment I can pay the film is that I still don’t know if I’d ever throw on Sparks just for the sake of throwing on Sparks, but I love and respect who they are and what they’ve accomplished. I love that Sparks exists. I look forward to seeing the film they’re making with Leos Carax, and I think this film is so wall-to-wall entertaining that it not only makes up for the obscurity, it turns it into part of the appeal. How can something as singular as Sparks be a 50-year secret? Well, after this, they aren’t.

It should surprise absolutely no one who has read anything I’ve ever written about Jim Henson to hear that I wept quietly through most of Street Gang: How We Got To Sesame Street. I consider Jim Henson one of the true giants of television, one of the towering moral and entertainment figures in my lifetime, and Sesame Street is the cornerstone of why I consider him so important. I love the Muppets in general, but there is no way to overstate the influence I think Sesame Street had on an entire generation, and this documentary articulates all of that beautifully.

image courtesy of HBO Documentary Films

Based on the terrific book by Michael Davis, this documentary traces the origins of the show and really centers Jon Stone and Joan Ganz Cooney in the show’s creative foundation. While Henson and the Muppets were well-known, it’s Stone who was the key driving creative force on-set and Cooney who really guided the show, protecting it and making sure the creative team all had room to do not only their best creative work, but to guarantee they were actually teaching children.

Everything the show did was carefully designed and, speaking as part of the generation raised on the show, it worked. It worked beautifully. It wired me to see the world a certain way and it taught me to read at the same time. It was a social experiment that worked so much better than even the people at the Children’s Television Workshop could have imagined. It really was lightning in a bottle, every element perfect. The film celebrates the work of the great Joe Raposo at one point, and as they played cuts from a number of his different songs, it blew my mind how many of them were deeply ingrained in my mind, even forty-plus years after I saw them for the last time.

There is so much great archival footage here that for anyone who has any affection at all for the history of Sesame Street, this is like a shotgun blast of nostalgia right to the chest. I could watch ten solid hours of footage of the Muppet performers bringing their characters to life. It is always surreal to see Bert’s voice coming out of Frank Oz or to see Caroll Spinney walking around in his Big Bird legs, and this film’s got plenty of that. But it also talks about the toll they paid in their personal lives working as hard as they did to try to create this incredibly special thing. Marilyn Agrelo’s film is relatively brief, 107 minutes, and I could have easily watched a mini-series version of this with full episodes devoted to each of these people. No matter. I am so grateful to even have this movie, and I think it’s important to put the show and its legacy into context for people who don’t fully appreciate it, or for audiences who were never part of its history. I know that Sesame Street continues to influence children today, and hopefully, that will continue to be the case because it wasn’t an accident. This was built to give an entire population of kids who had been ignored and marginalized the tools to compete, using this thing that might otherwise damage them to give them a leg up. Television is simply a tool, and few people have ever put it to better use than the people behind Sesame Street, and it’s great to see that honored this way.

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AND FINALLY…

I really wrestled with how to review Coming 2 America, and I’ve settled on doing it quickly. I’m just going to rip off the band-aid and get it over with. There are some films that are just no fun to write about, and this is one of them.

Coming 2 America is a big disappointment and a strange one. I wish it wasn’t true. I loved Dolemite Is My Name and I was excited to see Craig Brewer work with Eddie Murphy again, especially on a return to one of Eddie’s most beloved films. It’s not my favorite of Murphy’s films, and it’s not the worst of his sequels. I’ve already had my heart broken in that regard (I’m looking at you, Beverly Hills Cop 3) so it’s not like I’m shocked that it’s possible. It’s just obvious when you look at Dolemite Is My Name that Brewer adores Eddie and understands his iconography. In some ways, the film is a reaction to Eddie’s entire career and a celebration of it and knowing they just did this together, I hoped that same energy would carry over to this film as well.

There are so many creative choices in this film that baffle me that I hardly know where to start. The biggest problem is that the film’s primary device, Eddie’s illegitimate son, is a bizarre plot decision and, beyond that, poorly cast. Jermaine Fowler is a talented guy, but I don’t get this character at all, not the way he’s imagined or the way he’s played. In the film, Prince Akeem (Murphy) is worried about his legacy because he has three daughters, and only male heirs are allowed to rule Zamunda. Now that King Joffe (James Earl Jones) is dying, things are becoming more urgent, and General Izzi (Wesley Snipes), the military ruler of neighboring country Nexdoria, is starting to make it clear that there will be a reckoning of some kind in the near future.

image courtesy of Amazon Studios/Paramount

The simple version of this film has Akeem deciding to stand up to Zamunda’s way of doing things and his daughters proving to be all he needs. KiKi Layne plays Meeka, Akeem’s oldest, and she’s my favorite new cast member. A film about Akeem learning to value his daughters and to stand up for them would be more than enough. There’s really no story reason to return to America, and the big reveal that Eddie was date raped by Leslie Jones is a deranged story hinge. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, but it doesn’t. That’s the entire joke. The film eventually comes around to “Akeem realizes that his daughter should be running things and stands up to tradition” in the last act, but it’s a long way to go to get there, and it all feels like a script from 1992 that would have felt dated even then. The efforts the film makes at being “woke” feel just as painful as my use of that word, awkward and forced.

Even worse? It’s not funny. I love Eddie. I am the king of cutting Eddie some slack. There’s just nothing for him to do here. The only comedic pulse at all comes from the scenes involving the barbershop in Queens, where Eddie and Arsenio once again play multiple characters, and when Leslie Jones or Tracy Morgan are allowed a little room to run. I was surprised by how little Wesley Snipes had to do, considering how great he was in Dolemite. It’s clear they want him to be a comedy highlight, but the entire film feels like they’ve forgotten how to build actual jokes into their comedy. They have these set-ups that go nowhere, and these characters that just don’t pay off.

Here’s the most controversial thing I’m going to say: even if people hate him, John Landis was an indelible part of the original film. The particular mix of Eddie Murphy comedy and fairy tale and big Hollywood glamour was something we’d never seen in one of Eddie’s movies, and Landis nailed it. I missed him here, and I know that’s not a popular opinion, but it’s true. I also miss Rick Baker keenly. I know he’s retired, and I don’t begrudge him that. The industry treated him poorly no matter what he did, and I don’t think they truly understand exactly why his work was so special. The make-up effects here are very good, and they draw strong inspiration from the designs that Baker did for the 1988 original, but there’s something magic that happens when Baker and Murphy get together. Eddie Murphy comes to life when he’s buried under Baker’s prosthetics, and it allows him to vanish into characters in a way he can’t when he’s got to be worried about what you think of Eddie Murphy. His character make-up work is his freest work, and Baker was the one who really figured out how to make that happen for him. A Coming to America sequel without Landis and Baker is as hard for me to accept as it would have been without Murphy, and I think you can feel the loss of both them in the finished film.

I don’t want a Beverly Hills Cop 4. I don’t want Murphy to keep mining old territory. I want him to push forward. Brewer’s a good fit for him as a filmmaker, but this was the wrong project. I want them to find more scripts like Dolemite, strong writing where Murphy will have a chance to do original work and really shine. He’s obviously still got the fire, but making safe and poorly considered choices like this does no one any favors.

Since today’s Friday (for a few more minutes, at least), let’s throw this open to a Friday Free-for-All question: What’s the most disappointed you’ve ever been in a sequel, and why?

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Let’s close things out with my weekly media diary. I missed last week’s Friday column, so this is two week’s worth of media. Don’t judge me. As always, anything I particularly enjoyed is in bold.

THIS WEEK’S BOOKS: Suess Goes To War by Richard H. Minear; The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2020 edited by Diana Gabaldon; The Princess Bride by William Goldman; The Warehouse by Rob Hart; How To Avoid a Climate Disaster by Bill Gates;

THIS WEEK’S COMICS: Epic Collection: The Amazing Spider-Man - Great Power; Epic Collection: The Amazing Spider-Man - Great Responsibility; Epic Collection: Fantastic Four - The World’s Greatest Comic Magazine; Epic Collection: Fantastic Four - The Master Plan of Doctor Doom; New Gods: The Complete Collection by Jack Kirby; Star Wars #12; Eternals #3; The Fade-Out by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips; Curse Words Vol. 1; Epic Collection; Avengers West Coast - Vision Quest;

THIS WEEK’S PODCASTS: How Did This Get Made? - “Jade”; Doughboys - “KFC 2 wth Lauren Ash and Christy Oxborrow,” “Munch Madness: Pie Noon Round 1 with Jon Gabrus”; High & Mighty with Jon Gabrus - “Conspiracy Theories w/ John Gemberling and Anthon Atamanuik,” “Identity w/ Kelcey Ayer”; The Boogie Monster - “Roller Skates, Vans & The Aurora Incident”; Screen Drafts - “Godzilla vs Kong with Graham Skipper and Miguel Rodriguez,” “Classic Disney Live-Action Adventure with Drew McWeeny and Bryan Cogman”; The Kingcast - “The Green Mile with Mike Flanagan,” “Doctor Sleep with Louis Peitzman”; MBMBaM - “The Spider-Man Truth,” “Non-Euclidian Meat Cone”; Blank Check with Griffin and David - “Aladdin with Jerah Milligan”

THIS WEEK’S TV: Superstore S6 E10; The Abbott and Costello Show S1 E1; The Dick Van Dyke Show S2 E20; Sneak Previews S3 E5, E7, E12; Married At First Sight Australia S2 E7, E8; 30 Coins S1 E2; Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel S1 E3, E4; Search Party S3 E3 - E7; Firefly Lane S1 E5; The Great North S1 E3; Your Honor S1 E6, E7; Last Week Tonight With John Oliver S8 E3, E4; Allen v Farrow S1 E2; American Idol S19 E3, E4; Perry Mason (2020) S1 E5; Wellington Paranormal S1 E2; The Voice S20 E1, E2; Superman & Lois S1 E2; Never Have I Ever S1 E2; WandaVision S1 E9; Bob’s Burgers S11 E13; South Park S24 E2; Resident Alien S1 E6, E7; Married at First Sight S12 E9; The Flintstones S4 E3; The Addams Family S1 E15; All In The Family S1 E5; Maude S1 E3; Sanford and Son S2 E8; Chico and the Man S1 E1; The Real World Homecoming: New York S1 E1

THIS WEEK’S GAMING: The Unfinished Swan; Assassin’s Creed Valhalla

THIS WEEK’S MOVIES: White Lightning; Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors; The Vigil; Ready Player One; Jade; McCabe & Mrs. Miller; Ghostbusters II; Burn, Witch, Burn; The Blues Brothers; Apocalypse Now; The Fifth Element; Popeye; Happily; The Animatrix; The Birds; There’s Something About Mary; Summer of Soul (… Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised); The Sparks Brothers; John and the Hole; Coming 2 America; Crimson Tide; Rollercoaster; Cryptozoo; [EMBARGOED UNTIL MONDAY]; Unforgiven; Street Gang: How We Got To Sesame Street