We're back with a trio of new reviews

Superheroes, outer space monsters, and a fallen cultural icon

It’s Monday, August 17, 2020, and here’s where we are…

First, I’d like to announce that starting next week, we’re moving the weekly Friday Spotlight so that it’s going to be the weekly Sunday Spotlight moving forward. We’ll also be doing the Friday Free-For-All instead, which will be along the lines of what we were doing on Saturdays. In fact, it strikes me that Friday Free-For-All and Sunday Spotlight just plain sound better anyway.

I just want to shuffle the week a bit and I think it frees up the rest of the week to be more responsive. Now that the summer’s ending, I’m going to start to impose some structure on the newsletter again. I’ve been living my life on pause like so many of us this year so far, and it can’t continue. It’s not a viable way of doing things, especially when it comes to a disordered brain like mine. I like structure. It’s one of the reasons I think I should have been writing books this entire time. There’s something very orderly about the way my schedule while working on the books right now that is soothing because I’ve finally figured out how to finish them.

If my Secret Thing We Cannot Speak Of actually moves forward, it will provide a fairly rigorous structure to things, and I crave that. I love being consumed by a creative project. I love losing myself in both the research and the writing, and I look forward to that phase of things. I look forward to reaching a point with this newsletter and my other side ventures that allows me to simply focus on the work without having to wonder where the next check is coming from every single day.

Tonight, I thought we’d take a look at a trio of new releases, all of which rewarded my time and attention in different ways. I’m curious if any of you watched any of these, which ones, and why. Right now, it feels like the rules about what dominates the conversation are out the window. If anything happens as a result of our shared time this year trapped in the ForeverNever, I hope it reminds people that “new content” is overrated, and that any content you haven’t seen before is new content to you. More than that, I wish it would light a fire under the studios to start treating their catalogs like the cultural gold mines they are.

I’ll dig into that a little deeper this week when I write about the Ketchup Film Festival I held with the boys last week. But for today, let’s talk about some of what’s just rolling out for you right now…

NOT SO HAPPY HAPPY, VERY LITTLE JOY JOY

Ren & Stimpy was appointment television for my friends and I.

It was when I was living with my best friends in my 20s, and we were all working at Dave’s Video, the laserdisc store in the Valley that was largely an industry crossroads. There were a ton of animators I met during that era, and one of the reasons was because animators loved the way laserdisc allowed them to study other animated films frame by frame. Makes sense, right? We would hear about projects because of the hiring process, and there was a moment where they all started talking about this show that was staffing up. It was apparent right away that something had them excited, and it came to a head one afternoon. Eddie Fitzgerald, one of our regular customers, told me he was quitting his job at Tiny Toons Adventures because he had seen the future of animation. “Just wait,” he said. “Everyone’s going to be talking about Ren & Stimpy.”

Even in his wildest dreams, he couldn’t have imagined the bomb blast that the show dropped onto the animation industry. No one knows they’re about to revolutionize things when they do it. They’re just busy making whatever it is they’re making, and in the case of Ren & Stimpy, it was a perfect storm of energy, all focused around the manic charisma of John Kricfaslusi.

It’s perfectly understandable that someone would want to make a documentary that explores the way that initial blast of amazing creativity happened, and the way it landed on a generation of animators and audiences alike. It would also make sense to make a documentary about the way the show burned to the ground. At the time, the story was all about how John K. was done wrong by the network, but an exploration of the truth about what went down would be welcome.

Most importantly, though, in the last few years, it’s become clear that John K. is also a serial sexual abuser, a guy with a pattern of grooming underage girls with promises about help he’ll give them in the industry, and you could make an entire film about the way men abuse access in order to not just coerce sex but how they derail and destroy women’s careers in the process.

Happy Happy Joy Joy: The Ren & Stimpy Story is all three of those documentaries in one, and that mixture may leave some viewers dissatisfied or unsettled. I think there’s something effective about the way the film is built, though, because it seems like about as honest a framing of the conversation around the show as you can have in 2020.

After all, it was brilliant, and it did change television animation permanently. You can’t look at modern television animation without seeing the direct visual influence of the show, and it opened up an entire style of storytelling that we see everywhere now. Just the background paintings in Ren & Stimpy deserve their own film in order to discuss just how important they were to setting the style for pretty much everything we see now.

The film lays out that case first, and it definitely shows you how John K. was able to build this community of brilliant animators around him. It sets the context correctly, showing you just what a wasteland television animation was in the early ‘90s, especially the animation aimed at children. What got Eddie Fitzgerald so excited in that initial conversation we had at the front counter of Dave’s Video was the freedom to finally get back to pure cartooning, not worrying about selling toys or placating sponsors. Animators love animation. That’s why they do what they do. And the horrible dirty truth of the industry is that most of the animators who get into the business because they love the art form end up frustrated by the nature of most of what they work on because America treats animation as a vehicle for children’s films and little else.

Ren & Stimpy was animation by animators for animators before it was anything else. If it never made anyone else laugh, it would have played perfectly to its intended audience of John K. and anyone who happened to agree with what he thought was funny. Just on a performance level, Ren & Stimpy was a huge breath of fresh air. The characters actually seemed to be giving performances. They weren’t just the same old poses and model sheets we’d seen for decades. This was work that came right from the twisted hearts of these animators who were set free by John K. who made himself the figurehead of this new freedom.

That never ends well.

The documentary doesn’t seem overly worried about offending Kricfalusi, even though he clearly sat for a prolonged interview and cooperated with the film at some point. I think the filmmakers do a nice job of deflating the myth that John K. had his show stolen from him or that it was unfair when Nickelodeon fired him. I know that in my early 20s, I sympathized with John K. at that moment. Looking at things now, listening to the interview with Vanessa Coffey and listening to everyone else talk about the way John K. did things, it’s a miracle anyone put up with him as long as they did.

If his greatest crime were hubris, that would be one thing, but it’s clear that John K. indulged in criminal sexual misconduct, and not just once but as an ongoing pattern. It’s also clear that even when Kricfalusi talks about how sorry he is for anything he “might have done” to Robyn Byrd, he’s not remotely dealing with the things he also did to Lynne Naylor or Katie Rice. He’s obviously compartmentalized things, and even as he claims to apologize, he tells the directors he’d love for them to broker some kind of communication with Byrd, who speaks in the film about the nightmares she still has about him. There is no real self-awareness here, no actual remorse. This is a guy who is chastened because he knows he was caught, but who doesn’t seem to have actually internalized what damage he’s done or what damage he can still do.

It feels like the stories about Byrd and Rice broke while they were making the film, and the structure of it reflects the way we all learned this disappointing and grotesque truth. The final chunk of the film deals with the way we look at a show like this after learning something like this. Can you still watch Ren & Stimpy? Can you still enjoy it? They ask Byrd the question, and she seems unconcerned about anyone’s feelings about those original episodes. She can’t watch them, obviously, but she doesn’t seem remotely upset about someone else watching them and remembering how they made them feel. That wasn’t the point of her sharing her story, and it’s still not. Ren & Stimpy was the work of many more people than John K., and it’s pretty clear looking at the work he’s done since he was fired that he was not the sole voice of that program. It was the combination of so many people who saw this moment and took this opportunity and made something great that burned bright even if it burned briefly.

And the fact that Kricfalusi is a massive piece of shit should erase him from the conversation moving forward, but it doesn’t change the past. It only complicates it, and that’s what this film captures so ably.

THE FUTURE OF SUPERHERO MOVIES… LITERALLY

On the surface, Project Power is basically a cookie-cutter riff on superhero and action films circa 2017. That’s when Mattson Tomlin wrote and sold his spec script, which was hustled into production so it could be filmed in the fall of 2018. Tomlin is one of 2020’s hot-shit screenwriters, and that’s because he’s been one of the hot-shit screenwriters plugging away at it for the last eight years or so, constantly placing scripts on the Hit List and the Black List, selling specs and taking assignments.

One of those scripts was called Kill The Leopard, and I’d argue that script is, more than anything, the reason Mattson Tomlin is writing The Batman for Matt Reeves. It basically is a Batman script, and a smart one at that. The Leopard is a costumed vigilante, unofficially sanctioned by some members of the police force, who drives an armored tank and whose identity is a closely-kept secret. He’s got an arch-enemy who is constantly engineering elaborate scenarios meant to kill him and a year before the script begins, the two of them clashed in a high-tech skyscraper and The Leopard did the only thing he could do to resolve things… he burned the building down. Now it’s been rebuilt, and when a new hostage situation erupts on the night of the opening, The Leopard ends up having to face the consequences of his actions in some startling and surprising ways. The entire time I was reading it, I just kept picturing Batman any time The Leopard was mentioned, with the Joker in the place of the bad guy in the film, and it worked perfectly. Warner could have easily bought the script and just done that if they’d wanted.

What’s clear from reading much of his work, including the hot spec sale 2084, is that Tomlin is a voracious genre nerd who is working variations on familiar pop culture ideas or themes in a voice that feels contemporary and inclusive. Right now, it feels like there are less than 20 people who studios trust as the closing writer on big studio tentpole films, which is crazy and stupid and is one of the reasons everything sounds the same and all has the same general plot and all sort of blends into one big homogenous blockbuster goo after a while. It’s the reason we remember set pieces and moments and movie stars more than the movies as a whole now. That’s how they’ve been designed.

The more restrictive that system has become and the more consolidated the creative voice, the less chance there is that something actually new or actually fresh gets made. It’s why you have these cycles in Hollywood where things just atrophy for a certain period of time. I don’t want to name names, but if Akiva Goldsman never “wrote” a blockbuster again, we would all be better for it. The system is built to perpetuate his career forever, though, and his track record, which is littered with spectacular disasters that should weigh just as heavily as his undeniable successes, should be as much a hindrance to his employment as a help. But it’s not. The disasters don’t matter. He’s seen as a guy “who can do it,” and so they have him do it over and over and over and over and it all just feels like the same goddamn movie on a loop. There’s a glowing thing. People chase it. Lots of chaos. They have to get to a roof. Hero’s journey framework with perfunctory “arcs” for this year’s flavor. Rinse. Repeat. It’s cynical. It’s junky. He’s certainly not the only person doing it, either.

Project Power feels like a script that is modeled after the standard studio fare, but with enough twists in terms of character and attitude to nudge things forward. A bit. It helps that Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman seem aware of what’s most fun about the premise. The structure of the story works against that fun, unfortunately, but that’s because it’s playing the game that Hollywood has set up, laying down all the same shoe leather that it feels like these films have to have in them. I don’t care about the corporation or the evil scientists or the conspiracy behind the scenes, and I’m willing to bet no one else does, either. What’s fun here is the idea of a pill that gives you superpowers for five minutes, and everyone has a different reaction to the pill. Full-stop, that’s the reason to watch, and that’s what delivers the most entertaining moments.

The best character idea in the film is the relationship between a young dealer and the cop who buys pills from her so he can level the playing field on the streets against this sudden wave of momentarily-superpowered bad guys. The biggest failure of this kind of storytelling can be highlighted by just how frustrating the narrative imbalance is here. I would really just like to watch a street cop having to navigate the incredibly difficult moral landscape established here, leaning on a teenage dealer to keep him in the fight. That’s interesting. That offers up a way to slip in some commentary on the way might makes right in superhero movies overall. Politically, the genre’s a nightmare, an entire type of storytelling that is largely about how the biggest gun wins. If we were more limber with genre in American filmmaking, we would be getting all kinds of movies that happened to be set in superhero worlds at this point, but superhero films are like westerns were in their heyday. They follow fairly rigid codes, and the only way filmmakers seem to be able to break convention is by degrees.

When Project Power is interesting, it’s very interesting, and there are a few scenes involving superpowered rampages that make these powers feel genuinely awesome. We’re getting used to the impossible on film, and it’s not always easy to underline how truly surreal some of these images are. I love the way certain small details land here, like Joseph Gordon Levitt’s single bloodshot eye after the gunshot to the skull, and I wish there was more of it in the film. I think this is a far better film than Netflix’s earlier genre/cop hybrid Bright, but in some ways, it suffers from the exact same problems. The world they’re building is clearly more important than the story they’re telling, which is never a good thing.

I’ve read enough of Tomlin’s work to feel comfortable saying that he’ll be one of those guys for the next decade or so who studios bring in on everything. Get used to his name. He’s got something to contribute, too, a real voice, and I think his love of these ideas he’s playing with is palpable in the way he attacks the page in his spec scripts. My question about him now is whether he’s going to use this opportunity to really try to explode some of these old ways of doing things once he’s firmly entrenched, and watching what he and Matt Reeves do with The Batman is going to go a long way towards answering that question for me. Tomlin is unavoidably part of the future of superhero movies now, and I’m optimistic that can be a good thing.

ALIEN AGAIN AND AGAIN

There are certain films that cast such long shadows over their genre that they become unavoidable. There are only two ways to deal with movies that are so iconic. You either have to acknowledge their existence and the influence that they have on everyone, or they have to work overtime to avoid anything that even remotely hints at the earlier film for fear of being accused of borrowing from them.

There is no question that the makers of Sputnik are well aware of Ridley Scott’s Alien, as we all are, and they’re not pretending they are the first people to ever tread this particular territory. Instead, they lean into the things you think they’re going to do and then they push the basic idea into some great personal new territory, and the end result is one of the best monster movies I’ve seen in a while.

It’s hard for me to recommend horror films right now. It’s hard for me to watch horror films right now. It’s just not where my appetites are because so much of my day is consumed with anxiety and dread that is specific and real. I’m not sure I need more anxiety and dread as my entertainment. I’m sitting on a few horror films that sound great and that come highly recommended and that I’m not sure I have the stomach for right now. When I turned on Sputnik, I turned it on with the intent of bailing out if it started to bum me out too much, and I pretty much didn’t blink until it was over two hours later.

Two cosmonauts encounter something in space and then return to Earth. A doctor is brought in to study the one who survived to see if there’s something wrong with him. It’s a safe bet he’s carrying an extra passenger of some kind, and Sputnik is consistently inventive and delightful in the way it plays out the answers to that question. There’s a monster in the movie and it’s a doozy, with a strong personality and a real sense that it’s a physical thing these people are interacting with. More than that, there’s a real respect for each character. Yes, there’s a military guy who wants to use it as a weapon. Yes, there’s a doctor who wants to see if it’s more than just a monster. Yes, we’ve seen these ideas before. But Sputnik is well-performed and well-directed and well-designed, and because each of those characters is written with respect, none of it feels like perfunctory genre trappings.

Egor Abramenko exhibits real control at every turn, from the way he sets things up to the speed with which he gets to the heart of things to the way he shoots his monster as a character instead of a special effect. The script by Oleg Malovichko and Andrei Zolotarev never spends too much time on the expository stuff, instead leaning on character and behavior. It holds a few cards close until the very end of the film, and it ends up feeling less like a twist and more like a final puzzle piece being snapped into place at the right time. That’s not easy to do, and it leaves you with an emotional impression instead of going for a cheap scare or a sequel set-up.

Finally, special praise must be given to Oksana Akinshina, who plays the specialist who is brought in to help figure out if the cosmonaut and his parasite can be separated. It’s the Amy Adams role in Arrival or the Jodie Foster role in Silence of the Lambs. She’s brought in and dropped into a situation where she has to navigate a dangerous landscape opposite a largely unknowable opponent, and Akinshina does a terrific job here. She’s most familiar before this from the wonderful Lija 4-Ever, and it’s great to see the quiet maturity she brings to bear here.

It’s an impressive film, top to bottom, and it’s not just emotional punishment for the sake of it. If you love monster movies at all, Sputnik should be a priority. I haven’t stopped thinking about it for the last few days.

AND FINALLY…

I am delighted by the news that Apple TV+ is planning to release the new film by Sofia Coppola in October. On The Rocks sounds terrific, full stop, and I’m glad to see they’re not being precious with this one. I’m glad they’re not doing whatever the festival thing is this year. There is no fall festival schedule. Not really. More than ever, it feels performative, like a gesture instead of something that actually serves either viewer or filmmaker.

The best thing any film can do in terms of reaching an audience right now is just put the films out. Make your work available to audiences. They are hungry for new films, and if you’re smart, you can make a big noise in this brave new world. I’d like to see A24 consider the same kind of release for the other titles they’re sitting on, and I suspect that the coming clusterfuck when theaters start re-opening is going to lead to every company in town rethinking their release plans sooner rather than later.

More on that in the next few days. And remember… our publishing schedule’s going to be a little different moving forward, so keep your eyes peeled as I get things set up. And if you’ve been here for a while, now’s a good time to ask what you want more of or less of as we kick into the fall.

Today’s newsletter is for everyone. The Sunday Snapshot is typically just for subscribers, though, so if you want to read this moving forward, consider signing up! It’s just $7 a month, and even less if you buy a whole year at once.

As always, any titles in bold were particularly enjoyed.

THIS WEEK’S BOOKS: Blood Rites by Jim Butcher; Dead Leprechauns and Devil Cats: Strange Tales of the White Street Society by Grady Hendrix; The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones; Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

THIS WEEK’S COMICS: Darth Vader (2020) #4; Adventureman #3; Superman World of New Krypton Special #1; Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen Special #1; Superman #681 - #685; Action Comics #871 - #874; Supergirl #36 - #38; Superman #51; Adventures of Superman #474; Action Comics #583 - #591; The Man Of Steel #1 - #6; Superman #1 - #8, #51, #52; Adventure Comics Special Featuring The Guardian #1

THIS WEEK’S TV: Ramy S1 E4; Arrested Development S1 E11, E12; High Fidelity S1 E5; Night Court S1 E4 - E6; The Umbrella Academy S1 E4; Schitt’s Creek S3 E11, E12; Ted Lasso S1 E1 - E3; Star Trek Lower Decks S1 E2; Married At First Sight S11 E5; Big Brother S22 E2 - E4

THIS WEEK’S GAMING: Ghost of Tshushima; Fall Guys

THIS WEEK’S MOVIES: A Piece of the Action; Howard; Cuckoo On A Choo-Choo; Yes, God, Yes; Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring; Back To The Future; Raiders of the Lost Ark; E.T. - The Extraterrestrial; Poltergeist; The Jerk; Back To The Future Part II; To Kill A Mockingbird; Young Frankenstein; Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom; Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers; Back To The Future Part III; Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade; Beetlejuice; Pulp Fiction; Contact; Lord of the Rings: Return of the King; Happy Happy Joy Joy: The Ren & Stimpy Story; Michael Jackson’s Ghosts; Project Power; Sputnik

Image courtesy of Nickelodeon Networks
Image courtesy of Netflix
Image courtesy of IFC Midnight/XYZ Films
Image courtesy of A24/Apple TV+