What won your personal movie weekend?

There are plenty of good options right now, so what are you enjoying?

I think it’s me. It’s definitely me.

When it comes down to it, I can’t really separate my feelings about America’s foreign policy and the way we back it up with military force from movies in which I’m asked to applaud the individual heroics of decent men in horrible circumstances.

I get why The Outpost is connecting with a certain audience. If I were someone who had lost an important person in a military conflict, a film like this honors not only these individual men but the entire notion of what it’s like to serve next to someone else and carry the responsibility for their well-being in your hands. That’s a very powerful thing. But when I watch Rod Lurie’s well-made adaptation of Jake Tapper’s book about the real-life incident, all I can think the entire time, louder than anything else, is, “We shouldn’t be there.” It doesn’t lead me to feel like I’m celebrating heroism when I watch a film like this or Black Hawk Down. It makes me feel like I’m watching a pointless sacrifice and it makes me angry, more than anything. I’m also really not comfortable with the way “the bad guys” are portrayed in these films. I’ve never felt more uncomfortable in a theater than I did during Black Hawk Down. It felt like an exercise in depersonalization, like Ridley Scott shot the enemy in that film like they were the bugs in Aliens, and The Outpost isn’t particularly interested in humanizing any of the Taliban fighters who invaded the American station that day, either. I get it. I can’t argue with it in the context of the film. But I also can’t pretend I am comfortable with it or that it works for me as entertainment.

On the other hand, I thought Greyhound was the best of the new movies I watched this weekend, so it’s not that I dislike films about war entirely. Aaron Schneider’s last film, Get Low, was a low-key charmer that got a lot of mileage out of pairing Bill Murray and Robert Duvall, so he clearly knows the value of a movie star, and certainly, Tom Hanks, whose appetite for WWII and space stories seems bottomless, is a strong, unflappable center to this particular story.

His real contributing strength this time, though, is as a writer. Based on a novel, Greyhound could easily be a logistical mess, a big grey mush in which a bunch of boats and subs do… stuff. Hanks managed to build this thing as a script in a way that cleanly lays out the geography, the stakes, and the players so that the suspense and tension are allowed to play out as a very pure and clean experience. A US Navy Commander leads an escort group to defend a merchant ship convoy through 50 hours of territory where they’re being hunted by submarines without any air support. It’s early 1942, so the U.S. is just starting to wade into the war, and when it comes to bad guys you can unapologetically root against, it’s hard to beat Nazi submarines sinking supply vessels.

The film is lean, a mere 90 minutes, but I bet it would have been a treat in a theater. It’s just a wee bit on the old-fashioned side, and that’s a strength. It isn’t trying to reinvent the form or put some modern contextual spin on the story it’s telling; it just dramatizes this insane situation in a way that puts you there and gives you some sense of what it must have felt like. I love that the film isn’t about a turning point or one of the most important moments of the war. This is what I think of as everyday heroism, and it does a nice job of making the point that there were plenty of lives lost that were not on a battlefield that were still part of the greater sacrifice.

I thought The Old Guard was fine, but the things that stand out about it are mainly just reactions to the standard way of doing things. It still feels like the script by Greg Rucka leans heavily on some very familiar tropes, and it doesn’t really do much with its premise beyond setting up a larger world. There’s a great easy chemistry with the cast, and Charlize Theron is one of our coolest action icons. She clearly shows up ready to do the hard work, and I love what she does. I’m down for her making a sequel to Atomic Blonde for Netflix, and I think she should be on the short list for any action film right now. She’s awesome.

Having said that, I do think there’s a problem that’s setting in with modern action scenes, and my girlfriend articulated it during one of the sequences here. “Boy, they’re absolutely perfect together considering they’ve never fought together before.” There is a polished perfection to these action scenes that is visually striking, certainly, but it doesn’t always translate into excitement. Everyone wants to make John Wick now, but the reason the Wick films work is because it is action as character definition, and there’s a particular way people move through those scenes. If you make a movie where every character is John Wick, it becomes incrementally less interesting, no matter how spectacular the choreography. It’s a fine line between “precisely staged sequences” and “I can hear the actors counting their way through the scene,” and it always seems to me that I’d rather see a scene feel a little more ragged if it adds to the reality for these characters. I think Gina Prince-Bythewood proves conclusively here that she is every bit the action filmmaker as any of her male peers working in the space right now, but like a lot of Hollywood product, I think she’s been given a widget here. She makes a good widget, and she gives the widget some character it might not otherwise have, but it’s still a widget, and I’ve seen a lot of these at this point.

I’ve still got First Cow and Relic to watch, and I’m going to check out The Beach House on Shudder and I’d like to see Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets and maybe sneak out to a drive-in this week. It definitely doesn’t feel to me like I’m in any danger of running out of movies right now, and there are books showing up here at the house that I’m enjoying as well, one right after another. I’m about 2/3 of the way through Charlie Kaufman’s massive Antkind, and I just finished Daniel Vaughn’s Living Dead, and honestly, it’s exciting to have this much good new stuff worth thinking about. It’s easy to get caught up in everything else, and certainly, there are larger issues that are very important, but it is also urgent that we find ways to take care of our brains right now.

I’m not sure I’ve said anything about this in print or on social media, but I am officially a big fan of Hulu’s series The Great. Elle Fanning and Nicholas Hoult star as Catherine the Great and Peter III of Russia, and the series takes a satirical look at her rise from a naive and hopeful outsider to the longest-ruling woman in Russian history. It is a canny piece about the distance between the truth of history and the story that is eventually told, and it is often blisteringly funny. I think Fanning’s been one of those actors who has shown a lot of promise in a lot of terrible films, and this is a role that fits her perfectly. Hoult’s even better here, a great big awful man-baby, subject to dim-witted whim and fits of pique, driven mostly by libido. The entire supporting cast is given room to shine over the course of the whole season, and by the end, I was heavily invested. I’m excited they got the go-ahead for a second season, and I will tune in as long as they bring this kind of wit and energy to the future seasons.

On the other hand, I’m about half-way done with Normal People, which I love, and I hope this is the only season of it. I can’t imagine how this is more than a single series, and part of what’s so great about it is the small-detail observational quality of it all. It’s a story that is oddly covering a ton of ground while focused on the tiniest of things. Hulu’s also streaming this one in the US, and I will cop right upfront to watching it with subtitles. I’m starting to lose some of the nuance in my hearing at age 50, and when I’m watching stuff at home, I can lose fine details. I am a big fan of using subtitles, and especially when I’m wrestling with accents as dense as these can be at times. It lets me focus back in on the nuance instead of struggling to keep up.

Both Daisy Edgar-Jones and Paul Mescal are fantastic as Marianne and Connell, a pair of Irish kids who meet in secondary school and continue to drop in and out of each other’s lives all the way through college. It’s stark storytelling, sexually frank at times, but it is remarkably wise in the way it looks at the continued push and pull these two feel for each other. I haven’t read Sally Rooney’s book, but I love the scripts written by her and Alice Birch and Mark O’Rose, and I think Lenny Abrahamson and Hettie Macdonald have done exception work as filmmakers here. It’s adult and honest and painful and I feel for both of them in different ways. It’s not about who’s right or who’s wrong, but rather, about the responsibility we take on when we become sexually or emotionally involved with someone. There’s no rule book, and we are so often left navigating difficult terrain without any easy choices. People make terrible mistakes and miscommunicate and hurt each other and the whole time, they’re not doing it because they’re cruel or because they’re bad or because they don’t love each other. They do it because they are human, and because there is nothing more terrifying or vulnerable than truly opening yourself up to someone else.

It feels like the difficulties between these characters have to eventually become easier or end, though, and that’s why I’m not sure I feel like this is a show designed for multiple seasons. I’m okay with that. I don’t need every TV show to run forever. Sometimes, I just like the use of a single season to tell a contained story. I still think the first season of Murder One is one of the best mainstream TV shows I’ve ever seen, and if they’d never made another minute of it, that would have been fine.

Basically, I’m of the opinion that there is no single shape for what TV should be, and that’s exciting. It’s a far more flexible form that commercial cinema, where people get weirdly hung up on running times and what things “should” be. Especially right now, when we’ve got all of this time to fill, it’s nice to be able to pick and choose from a variety of lengths and styles and storytelling choices that seem to increasingly be based on the requirements of the story instead of just the standard operating procedure.

I’ll see you guys Wednesday, I hope, with a pretty special edition of the newsletter that will be just for subscribers. Today, though, it’s a freebie!

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