Some thoughts on Digger

Posted by on October 12, 2026 · Leave a Comment 

 
A number of people (zero is a number) have asked me to write about what I thought of Digger. Massive spoilers ahead for the movie Digger. If you don’t want to know anything about Digger, you shouldn’t read further. If you want to go see Digger, go see Digger. I don’t want to stop you. If you read on, and decide that hey, that sounds like a cool movie, please go with my blessings.
 
I find Digger to be a fundamentally dishonest movie.
 
So. In the movie, Tom Cruise plays an actor named Curtis. Curtis is the star of a play, titled Fossil Fools, which is a broadly comic satire about a global catastrophe, and, specifically, the oil baron who is responsible for said catastrophe, Digger Rockwell. So Tom Cruise is playing an actor who is playing a role in a play in a movie about the production of that play.
 
In the third act of the movie, it is revealed that the play we’re watching is not fiction, but a cartoonish recreation of historical events that happen in the future. That is to say, we are in a theater, in the future, watching a performance of a play about a historical event that happened twenty years earlier (in the movie’s timeline).
 
If all that sounds like exciting postmodern storytelling to you, you’ll love Digger. Lots of wonderful people do.
 
Here’s my main problem with the movie. Fossil Fools, the play that takes up the bulk of the runtime of Digger, is really bad. It’s a hack piece of political farce that’s grating, obvious and clownish.
 
The play is also in love with its main character, Digger. Digger is an oil man, but that’s not his skill set. His skill set is bullying people and forming narratives that can manipulate people into doing what he wants. And he wins every time. He gets all the best lines, and is shown to be wise, canny, foxy, and the smartest man in any room he enters, because he’s so good at manipulating a narrative. The truth, he takes pains to explain, is not a story, and people cannot resist a good story, no matter how true or untrue it is.
 
No other characters in the movie come anywhere near to besting Digger. He’s too smart, too funny, too unafraid to tell it like it is. Bang bang bang! The token liberals in the play are all weak-willed eggheads, spouting statistics and displaying their hypocrisy, while Digger is loud, crude and proud of it.
 
The play loves Digger, and the movie does too. Digger wins in every scene, no matter what problem is presented to him. Every character sent to oppose him, and there are many, is shown to be a gibbering idiot, sometimes literally so. While everyone else shouts and frets and trembles, Digger always has a solution and a path forward. His solutions only serve himself, but no one else in the movie has any alternative.
 
The climax of Fossil Fools takes place at some kind of world court, where Digger is forced to get up and explain himself to the world he’s destroyed. He gives a version of the Col Jessup speech from A Few Good Men (for which Jack Nicholson was nominated for an Academy Award), except in A Few Good Men, Col Jessup’s speech is the thing that hangs him and wins the case for Tom Cruise, and in Digger the speech is meant to tell the audience that billionaires aren’t responsible for destroying the world, the masses are, because they forced Digger to drill faster and faster, to keep up with our insatiable thirst for oil.
 
I’ve seen people online repost this scene, saying “This is the greatest speech in the history of film,” which surprises me, because it’s essentially saying “corporate greed is OUR fault, leave the billiionaires alone!” Indeed, in the scene, Digger turns the court completely around. He goes in and they bay for his blood, but by the end everyone is cheering for him and the few dissenters are shouted down by the crowd.
 
At which point, I found myself asking, why are we watching this story? If the point of the movie is that we’re all responsible for murdering the planet, why are we spending our two hours traffic upon the stage following around a billionaire as he escapes accountability? What is the audience of the movie, and of the play in the theater in the movie, supposed to make of that scene, where the oil-baron protagonist points to everyone in the crowd and says “You MADE me do this!”? In this movie about the destruction of the planet, why is the billionaire’s story the only one that’s deemed worth telling? No one else in the play has an inner life, everything revolves around Digger, his is the only fate that gets explicated.
 
So I find myself asking “Why does this movie exist?”
 
It is revealed that the production of Fossil Fools has been financed by Kenny, the nephew of the “real” Digger Rockwell, played by Jesse Plemons. Kenny comes forward out of the darkness to tell the cast and crew, and us, that he’s been obsessed with this play since it was first performed 20 years ago (in the movie’s timeline), and he wants a live audience to see the life of his uncle Digger and the world he destroyed in all its silliness and farce. But I have to ask myself, what is Kenny’s real motive for financing this production?
 
We find out that Kenny is ALSO a billionaire, and owns some sort of Palantir-style surveillance company. So why is Kenny spending so much money on this play? The only two reasons I can think of is that he either sincerely wants to own up to his own role in the ruin of the world, or he wants, like his uncle Digger, to create a narrative that will keep the masses happy enough to ignore the rest of the things that billionaires are doing to ruin the world.
 
There is a subplot about Curtis’s daughter getting lost in a hurricane during the tech rehearsal, and Kenny steps in to offer the services of his surveillance company. This is seen as a purely good thing, and Curtis is super grateful to Kenny for saving his daughter, even though, by Kenny’s own admission, he didn’t really do anything.
 
So the play Fossil Fools loves Digger, and the movie certainly loves Digger, and the actor playing Digger loves Digger, and also Digger’s nephew, because billionaires, the movie has already shown us, are the only people that matter. They make the decisions, they tell us what we can and can’t see, and, most important, they still control the narrative, even as the theater audience wanders out of the theater at the end of the movie into a ruined city.
 
So that’s all very meta and very smarty-pants, and I have no problem with that. But, I have to ask myself, if the message of the movie is “Always question the motives of a piece of corporate entertainment,” well, Digger, the movie starring Tom Cruise, is a piece of corporate entertainment. It is directed by an Academy-Award-winning smarty-pants director Alejandro González Iñárritu, who won Leo his Oscar for The Revenant (which is a great movie).
 
But the movie would not have happened without Tom Cruise. Why did Tom Cruise want to play Digger? Because he wants an Oscar, probably. What was Cruise’s impact on the production? Based on my 30 years experience as a screenwriter, I will guess that Cruise went through the script, line by line, and gave all the best lines to himself, and told the writers to make everyone else really stupid and easily defeated.
Because he’s Tom Cruise, he can never lose on film, he must always win. He’s Tom Cruise.
 
Did the director ever push back? No, because getting Tom Cruise in the movie is the only way the movie is getting made. In the same way that Digger may be a jerk but a necessary evil, Digger gets sacrificed to its star who will never allow himself to shoot a scene where he loses.
 
(People online talk about how amazing he is in this movie, but I don’t see anything particularly difficult about playing a cartoon character.)
 
There’s even a scene where Curtis, played by Tom Cruise, stops the rehearsal to complain that his character, Digger, is not played sympathetically enough. So at that point we know that the play, the movie, and the lead in the play all think Digger is awesome and doesn’t deserve the crude treatment he’s given in the narrative.
 
Anyway, all this was produced by a huge corporation, a corporation huge enough that they can blow $250 million on an art-house movie without anyone worrying about losing their job. And so I find myself questioning that corporation’s motives. I don’t think anyone at Warner Bros (if anyone is still there as of today) thought “well, we should make this movie to assuage our own guilt over our role in the destruction of the world,” or “this will serve well as an opiate for the masses.” They just thought that Tom Cruise + Alejandro González Iñárritu = Oscar Oscar Oscar. They gave him a Mission: Impossible budget for his movie about a play, and a massive promotional campaign. They did all that because they expected to get their money back. The movie stars a man who has made two feature-length commercials for the Navy, regularly flies private planes by himself, and, not for nothing, has a household staff of literal slaves supplied to him by the church/human-trafficking cult he’s the figurehead of. It would be interesting if Cruise took this role as some sort of apology for the life he’s led, but I very much doubt it, because, as I’ve said, he loves Digger, thinks he’s awesome.
 
At the end of the play Fossil Fools, Digger, reduced to living on a drilling platform in the middle of the ocean, is betrayed by all the people he made wealthy, and then all the people who work for him, and he kills himself after sharing a last dollop of wisdom with his nephew Kenny (who is not named Kenny in the play, tellingly enough). The scene is shot for tragedy, but the audience in the theater of the play hoots and yells, cries and shouts. Why? The play is clearly an elegy for a great and complex man, why does the audience respond as though they just watched him torn to pieces by a lion in an arena? The answer, it seems to me, is that the director’s real message is “audiences can be manipulated any way you want them to be.” Which is also what Fossil Fools is about. Digger, throughout the play, is playing to an audience of some sort or other, whether it’s his staff or the president’s cabinet. Everything is a performance, and every scene can be “won” if you know how to manipulate a crowd.

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Some thoughts on Frankenstein (2025)

Posted by on November 16, 2025 · 1 Comment 

A number of people (hey, zero is a number) have asked me my thoughts on Guillermo Del Toro’s new adaptation of Frankenstein. I’m going to try to limit myself to the screenplay, which makes a number of lethal mistakes.

The novel Frankenstein is over 200 years old, and has been adapted thousands of times. I’ve seen dozens myself, without even seeing most of the Universal movies or being any kind of Frankenstein expert. Guillermo Del Toro certainly must know that he’s up against some of the most well-trodden cinematic tropes of all time, so when he chooses to divert from or adhere to the source material, as well as the centuries of lore that have grown from it, it greatly sways my opinion one way or another.

Spoiler alerts for everything going forward!

The movie starts with a long prologue set in the frozen Arctic (about which I will have more to say later), which is also a significant portion of the novel and many other adaptations. So the whole first part of the movie was slow-going for me, I’d seen these scenes a hundred times and the director’s filmmaking style, which, more and more, emphasizes old-style Hollywood glamour and sheen, wasn’t adding any new context to those scenes.

Then, for a good chunk of the movie, it gets really exciting, as the script explicates Victor’s processes, both mental and physical, for building his perfect creation. For those coming in late, Mary Shelley gives no description whatsoever as to Victor’s method for building his monster, so, while that area of the narrative is wide open for artists to go wild, most adaptations give us merely more elaborate versions of the methods in the James Whale movies: a spooky castle on a mountaintop, a dug-up dead body, a bunch of elaborate lab equipment that shoots sparks, and a revival procedure that depends on a complicated series of precision-timed events, including a massive electrical storm.

The new movie hits every one of those tropes, but adds a fascinating new wrinkle: funding. Victor meets an ultra-wealthy defense contractor, who agrees to give him all the money and materiel he needs to build his monster. And, for a half-hour or so, the movie comes to life, as we see the horrifying scope of Victor’s process. He plows through hundreds of corpses, provided to him by the defense contractor, and assembles his monster piece by piece. This new angle on Victor, where he goes from being a crank with a dream to a war criminal because another war criminal is funding him, is a vital and invigorating new take on Frankenstein that got me really excited about where the movie was going.

At the end of this act of the movie, Victor has assembled his monster and the lightning storm is coming, and suddenly the defense contractor announces that he is dying of syphilis and wants Victor to put his brain in the body of his splendid new creature.

At that point my brain kind of exploded, for a number of reasons. On the one hand, I had been thinking for the past half-hour that the defense contractor wanted to fund Victor’s project because the end product would be an immortal, unstoppable killing machine that he could use to sell to all the feuding kingdoms of Europe, so the last-second announcement that his intent the whole time was to have his syphilitic brain put into the product is a fantastic twist. On the other hand, if that had been his intent all along, it seems to me that bringing it up at the last minute, asking Victor to perform last-minute BRAIN SURGERY, IN THE MIDDLE OF THE LIGHTNING STORM, WHERE EVERYTHING HAS TO BE TIMED PRECISELY OR IT WON’T WORK, makes the defense contractor an idiot. Worse, it breaks the audience’s faith with the script. If a character is an idiot, the stakes plummet. If the character has been presented as a wily, Machiavellian master manipulator of men’s emotions, and is then revealed to be an idiot, the stakes go through the ground.

Which, oddly enough, is exactly what happens to the defense contractor: he bumps his head and falls down a hole and goes splat. In the space of less than a minute, the script brings up a fascinating new idea, then adds a different twist that makes it stupid, then says “Never mind, that’s dumb, kill it,” and essentially flushes the character down the toilet. After a sold half-hour of “yes, and”-ing Shelley, the script suddenly “no, but”s its own genius and goes right back to adapting the novel.

That, in and of itself, broke my trust with the movie. It suddenly went from fascinating to insulting to boring.

Going back to the beginning: The movie opens with a set piece where the monster comes upon this ship frozen in the Arctic, and runs amok, killing six crewmen who were only defending their ship. After the script plods through the rest of the novel, we come back to that ship, and the monster is back, but now it’s nice, and so the sailors let it on board and bring it to the captain’s cabin so it can have a nice chat with the captain and tell its life story.

So: the movie opens with the big violent set piece, because the director wants people to get jazzed about this exciting new version of Frankenstein. This creature is seven feet tall and now has Wolverine powers! Awesome! Look at it go! It’s unstoppable and horrifically violent!

But then, after we’ve sat through most of the movie, the director now wants us to think differently about the monster. So he has the crewmen on the ship think differently about the monster. Now, me? If I were a crewman on a ship frozen in the Arctic and a seven-foot, unstoppable, supernaturally gifted, indestructible monster killed six of my crewmen, I’m not sure I would be so quick to warm up to it. That is to say, again, when the character behave like idiots, the stakes plummet. Who cares what happens to idiots?

Anyway, the basic plot of the framing story is that the monster, angry about the state of the world, has fled north, and Victor has followed it, intent on destroying it. He’s given it a good shot, but the monster cannot die. Now we’re on this frozen ship, and its time for Victor and his monster to have their showdown.

And then the monster says “Now let me tell you MY story.” And the script makes the unforgivable decision to, after two hours of runtime, to START THE STORY OVER. At exactly the moment the narrative needs to speed up, to hurtle to its conclusion, it stops dead and becomes a very pastoral, slowly-paced slog through the novel. Again.

No script could recover from that, but this one manages one final insult. As the movie nears its conclusion, the monster, out of nowhere, forgives Victor, kisses him on the forehead and forgives him. The script does absolutely nothing to build a bridge between the monster’s blinding rage and his loving forgiveness. It feels like the monster just looks at his watch and says “Well, we better wrap this up. In closing, um, well dad, you were a misunderstood genius, and I guess you gave me eternal life, and that’s pretty cool I guess.” And to have his last line to him be “Victor,” after the script has told us at least FIVE TIMES that VICTOR means WINNER, the monster’s farewell to the fucking psychopath who dragged him into the world, created out of the parts of thousands of dead people, funded by a fucking war criminal, is, essentially, “you win.”

Let me repeat that. In a story that has been reconfigured to be a story about the cycle of child abuse, the movie ends with the abuse victim forgiving his abuser with the words “you win.”

I have no idea what the fuck I’m supposed to do with that.

I get that the movie is about the cycle of abuse, that the monster “rises above it” and forgives his abuser. And I fucking call bullshit. You cannot go from “rampaging, unkillable monster” to “so long dad, I love you, and I’m going to spend the rest of my life roaming the earth, like Cain, in Kung Fu,” without putting SOMETHING in there to account for the change of heart. If you want to make that the point of your movie, the whole movie has to be about just that journey, not a footnote added because the runtime has gone past its limit.

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Some thoughts on One Battle After Another

Posted by on September 30, 2025 · 1 Comment 

I was very excited to see Paul Thomas Anderson’s new movie, One Battle After Another. I was confused by the trailers, which made it look like some kind of stoner comedy, but I was anticipating great things. I sat down and watched all his movies, from Hard Eight to Licorice Pizza, all in a row, so that I could absorb his themes and preoccupations and prepare myself to be blown away by what was sure to be a masterpiece.
 
(His overarching theme, it seems to me: Deeply damaged, highly neurotic people search for love and attempt to build families. If they succeed, those families are deeply dysfunctional.)
Sure enough, the first act of One Battle After Another delineates a trio of deeply damaged, highly neurotic people with some wild doozies of hangups, searching for love and building deeply dysfunctional families.
 
The innovation that the new movie brings to this theme is “what happens next?” Once the damaged people have found love and built their dysfunctional family, what happens next? Or, rather, what happens when two dysfunctional families come into life-and-death conflict with each other?
The movie is composed rather like a symphony, with three acts that soar and simmer, percolate and undulate to rhythms well outside the Hollywood norm. At almost three hours, it never gets tiring or outstays its welcome. Rather the opposite.
 
On my first viewing, I was convinced I was watching a political thriller with a family-saga twist. What confused me was the timeline. The narrative involves a terrorist group who, sixteen years ago, went on an immigrant-freeing, anti-capitalist rampage. Doing the math, that meant that the first act of the movie would have to be set in 2009, and, while Obama was certainly deporting his fair share of immigrants, there was no bomb-throwing terrorist group upending the status quo.
It was only on my second viewing that I realized that the first act is not set in 2009, but in the present day, or maybe the near future, which places the bulk of the movie not in the political thriller territory but the sci-fi-futuristic dystopia territory. The trick the movie pulls is presenting us with a future that looks exactly like our present day.
 
That tactic suggests that, under our current dictatorship, society, technology, culture and design will grind to a dead halt, or even regress. It further suggests that our current dictatorship will be ever-more pervasive sixteen years from now, to the point where the movie never even has to name names or over-stress futuristic design choices. The ICE agents of the future won’t be wearing weird futuristic clothes, they’ll be dressed exactly as they are now. Everything will look exactly the same on the surface, it’s the underpinnings that are weird, ugly and twisted.
 
That tactic applies to the cinematic language that the director has concocted for this project. It’s both very much like one of his movies, and not at all like any of his movies. It’s epic in scale, but intimate on a scene-by-scene basis. It’s shot in 70mm, but consists largely of close-ups, which gives the performances a shocking intimacy.
 
(A second viewing is highly recommended, if only to savor the drama now that you know how it all turns out. I think I enjoyed the movie three times as much the second time around.)
 
There is a kind of elevated filmmaking that’s extremely rare, when a director connects with the material, works well with actors and non-actors alike, and is given enough time to develop the screenplay and rehearse with the cast and then re-write the script and then rehearse more and then shoot and cut the scene, and it doesn’t feel like you’re watching a scene in a movie, it feels like you’re in a big dark room and a shutter has opened and you’re getting a view into a real place where actual human beings are having actual interactions. There is nothing more interesting than that. If you live in a city, you could be sitting in your apartment watching the greatest movie ever made, but if the couple across the alley starts having a fight, you will instinctively turn off your lights and the movie and you watch them instead. If you can get something approaching the feeling of “actual humans interacting” on film, it’s a miracle. Altman did it a lot. Mike Leigh made it his life’s work. Paul Thomas Anderson has done it a lot. This movie does it all the time. The characters are both slightly exaggerated and extremely grounded, shockingly real.
 
The three acts tell an accelerated timeline: the first act takes place over a number of years, the second over a couple of weeks maybe, and the third in less than a day. As the tempo increases, the sense of time expands, climaxing in that most American of film conventions, a car chase through the desert, shot using such a unique cinematic vocabulary that it is sure to become a classic sequence on the scale of the shootout at the end of The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, or the chase through the desert at the end of Greed, or, for that matter, the climax of The Godfather.
 
I thought a lot about The Godfather while watching One Battle After Another, because One Battle After Another is a “futuristic-dystopia thriller” in exactly the same way The Godfather is a “gangster movie.” Epic in scale, intimate in scenework. The scene in The Godfather where Clemenza shows Mike how to use a gun? One Battle After Another is full of scenes like that, intimate moments that, when tied together, create a much, much larger drama, all referencing a world we do not see onscreen. We don’t see it because it looks just like our own world.
 
I also thought a lot about Kubrick. Like him, Paul Thomas Anderson tends to structure his screenplays in big chunks. One large section will delineate one process, then the next large section will delineate another process, and it’s only when you understand the large, over-arching structure of the piece that you understand why the smaller sections were structured the way they were. For instance, the first act of Full Metal Jacket shows the process of “how does the Marine Corps turn individual men into heartless killing machines?” and then the second act has a completely different tone and feel, taking in a much larger, more complex world, one that seems only tangentially related to the first act, and it’s only in the third act, the whole sequence in Hue City with the sniper, that the logic of the two preceding acts comes into focus. Or, for that matter, you have 2001, where the first act shows a bunch of monkeys fighting over a waterhole, and then suddenly Act II is about a guy on a routine journey to the Moon. It’s only after taking in the whole narrative (and Kubrick throws a LOT of curveballs at you) that you understand how the first act leads to the second, and how the “questions” raised in Act Four (Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite) are easily answered, if you’ve been paying attention (and have maybe watched it a half-dozen times). There were times when it felt like Altman was shooting a Kubrick script. I mean that as a very good thing.
 
Anyway, it is a new American epic, both a grand adventure and a riveting drama, a witty dystopic action thriller and probably the movie of the decade.

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Some thoughts on Caught Stealing

Posted by on August 30, 2025 · Leave a Comment 

Just when I was ready to write off 2025 for good, along comes Darren Aaronovsky’s crime comedy Caught Stealing, with an astounding script, bone-deep comic performances, and production design that literally brought me to tears.
If you have a script like Caught Stealing, where a “normal guy” gets entangled in a dangerous mess with violent thugs, you can make an enjoyable romp like Snatch or Nobody, or you can make a serious, character-based drama like Jackie Brown or Uncut Gems, or you can make a paranoid thriller like The Man Who Knew Too Much or Marathon Man. What Aaronovsky has done is combine all those approaches and then produce it like it was Lawrence of Arabia.
Caught Stealing, most importantly for me, EXACTLY captures the look, mood, textures and atmosphere of the Lower East Side in the 1990s, which is where I spent my 30s. The details are correct down to every sticker, graffito, pile of garbage, cigarette butt and piss stain. It’s a very rare thing for me to be able to smell a movie, but that’s what this one accomplished.
Of course, there weren’t criminal escapades going on on the scale seen in the movie, but, walking the streets of Alphabet City on a Saturday night, one always SUSPECTED things like this were going on. If it’s not a true story, it’s an incredibly true mise en scene. Every character looks like someone I would see on St. Mark’s Place, every song pouring out of every passing car is accurate to time and place, and Austin Butler’s front door is identical to the one I had on 6th St. on Indian Row, in the 1800s tenement apartment I lived in, where the “bedroom” had no window except the one that was a pass-through into the kitchen (which had a bathtub next to the stove), which had been boarded up decades earlier.
The thing that gets me is, the script would have worked in present day. Aaronovsky shoots it in period, on real streets, in New York City, which involves tons of money, and can easily double the budget of the movie. Why did he devote so much time and energy and budget to bringing that time and place to life? Well, of course that was Aaronovsky’s time and place too, when he was making Pi and Requiem For a Dream. And young screenwriters like me would go to see those movies and dream about the movies that we would make when we got the chance. And there was a whole community of artists, filmmakers and writers and performance artists and puppeteers and vaudeville acts and a million other kinds of cultural miscreants, and that was the scene that produced Aaronovsky, and me, and I’m forever grateful that he bothered to remember that time and place, and to recreate it with such an attention to detail and a total absence of sentimentality. The place was a filthy hellhole and the movie presents it as such. Tompkins Square Park was the scene of riots protesting the yuppies moving in, but the yuppies were moving into abandoned buildings that were firetraps and shooting galleries, not sweet little communities where people got along or ethnic neighborhoods that got displaced. They were moving into buildings that were cheap because people had died in them.
There was another layer to the movie that sold it for me, but probably only for me. The plot revolves around this guy, played by Austin Butler, who had been a star baseball player in his teens but had an accident and can no longer play. Instead, he follows the team he almost joined, the SF Giants, and calls his mother, who coached him as a teen, after every game to discuss the game. It’s a movie about loss, and how to recover from it. What does one do when one has lost everything? How does one move on when one’s identity, all one’s hopes and dreams, are erased in a heartbeat? Anyway, at a certain point I realized that Austin Butler’s character is a lot like me. Like him, I almost got the chance to make it big. Ironically, I’ve always looked at my career as never hitting a home run, but always managing to get on base. I wrote a lot of screenplays, and a handful of them were made, and two of them were actual hits, although I was not credited for one of them. Neither has left a cultural footprint, but I did enter the arena and, for a few years, had the opportunity to play, as the movie calls it, “real ball.” At its deepest level, Caught Stealing is an ode to perseverance, about keeping going when there’s nothing left to keep going for, and at a certain point I realized that I was watching a movie by the guy whose movies I used to go see when I was dreaming of being America’s next great writer-director, and I still go to see movies every week even though I’m no longer in the movie business, and I realized that, tonight, I was watching a movie about myself watching this movie.
The acting, by the way, is uniformly great, but I want to give special shoutouts to Griffin Dunne and Vincent D’Onofrio, both of whom vanish into roles that any other actor would have played as stock one-joke characters.

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Weapons

Posted by on August 28, 2025 · Leave a Comment 

 
I very much enjoyed Zach Creggar’s newest suspense masterpiece Weapons, but what has really impressed me are the grosses. It has made over $200 million globally, a shocking number for a $35 million movie ($10 million of which went to Creggar for writing and directing, bargain of the century) that is not a four-quadrant marketing juggernaut like Lilo & Stitch or Superman.
It’s been a terrible year for movies, and a terrible year for grosses, especially for projects like this, low-budget movies whose budgets are too high to be considered “indie” but too low to be thought of as “studio.” There is no marketing angle to Weapons, there is no famous IP, there are no plush toys or video-game tie-ins. It’s just a movie that came out and people are responding to it in a way that they have not responded to any other movie this year, with the exception of the also-brilliant Sinners.
The lesson, I’m afraid, is not “quality will out,” not exactly anyway. My personal theory for why grosses have been so low this year is that all the movies that have been released this year were made last year, when the idea of a second Trump presidency was a laughable joke, that Trump was a bad memory we had just shaken off and the world would be ready to forget their troubles at movies like The Amateur or Death of a Unicorn.
So audiences have been going to movies and finding that nothing onscreen captures the anxiety and distress they feel being a citizen of the world under the control of a physically ill, mentally ill billionaire man-child who decided to wreck the global economy because it made him feel good and who can’t think any further than his next photo op or shakedown.
My theory is that Weapons is a massive hit because audiences, as with Sinners, are finally seeing their lives onscreen, adequately filtered through the lens of metaphor.
So, what is Weapons about? Spoilers necessarily follow.
In Weapons, a small town is torn apart because an evil force has invaded the town and is slowly pitting citizens against each other in order to distract everyone from the enormous crimes they’re committing. Nobody knows what the evil force is, but a couple of townspeople are trying to figure it out. Others are just trying to live their lives and make it through the day, and a small minority are actively helping the evil force spread its influence.
How does this evil force manifest itself? The Weapons title card, and the entire end-credit crawl, features a prominent blue triangle, which, I have learned, is the logo for Alcoholics Anonymous. So there is a metaphor of addiction at play in the narrative. This evil force that has invaded the town makes people act like addicts, and if they are already addicts it makes their addictions worse. There are alcoholics and a crack addict in the story, but the addiction metaphor remains a metaphor, and the viewer is not required to “get” the metaphor in order to enjoy the narrative. I certainly didn’t “get” it until after a second viewing, which may give you an idea of how well the metaphor is deployed. There’s a lot going on in the movie, a lot of stories to take in, and, as with Barbarian, the script only makes sense when you realize that Creggar doesn’t think about plot the way other screenwriters do. His first feature, Barbarian, was a brilliantly constructed series of scenes that are connected by theme and only “come together” in the movie’s third act. Weapons has a similar conceit, but the narrative is divided into different sections according to character, so we see the narrative from one character’s perspective, then we back up and see it again from another character’s perspective, and so forth.
(For me, the most brilliant part of the script is that the different characters’ stories are presented in order of “most affected” to “least affected,” so that we’re given an inciting incident (seventeen kids disappear) and we start the movie with the story of the grade school teacher whose kids all disappear, then move to the story of a father whose son disappeared, and then move to the story of a cop who is dating the school teacher and isn’t affected by the missing kids at all, and then a local crackhead who literally doesn’t know that any kids have gone missing at all. The structure makes the audience feel like they’re getting further and further away from a solution for the town’s problem, even as the evidence grows more and more obvious. Then, in its third act, it suddenly gives us the inside story from the one character we had completely forgotten about, pulling all the threads of the story together like the frogs at the end of Magnolia, a movie Creggar cites as a main inspiration for Weapons.)
Anyway, that’s what Weapons is about. An evil force invades a town and creates chaos, which turns all the townspeople against each other as this evil force makes everyone fall back on bad habits, abusive behaviors and chemical solutions to bad feelings.
Which is how we’re living our lives every day now.
The question on your mind is, well, what is this evil force? That would be a major spoiler, but let’s look at the physical manifestation of evil as it is presented in the movie.
Evil is described in Weapons as having a ridiculous haircut, a ridiculous sense of style, a cloying, annoying, boundary-ignoring personality and a penchant for getting under people’s skin. It makes good people doubt their sanity, it pushes sober people to drink, makes law-abiding citizen suspect each other, and creates a culture of fear and oppression that pushes townspeople toward violent solutions to common problems. It spreads evil because that’s how it stays alive. And it literally steals our children’s futures.
Who does that sound like?
How is evil defeated in Weapons? Let’s just say it’s so satisfying that it’s unexpectedly extremely gory and breathtakingly hilarious. To me there is no mystery as to why Weapons is a smash career-making hit: it gives the audience the solution to the problems they face every day.
 
 
 
 
 

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11/6/24

Posted by on November 6, 2024 · Leave a Comment 

As I always have in moments of anguish, tonight I turned to art for perspective and comfort. The Criterion Channel is showing nine Coen Bros movies this month, saving me the exhaustive burden of having to reach up to my DVD shelf in order to watch them.

Tonight it was their 2010 western masterpiece, True Grit, starring Jeff Bridges, vanishing into the role of Rooster Cogburn. Bridges has many great performances, but to vanish into a role like Rooster Cogburn, a role that had already served as an Oscar-winning capstone to the career of John Wayne, is nothing short of miraculous. The acting throughout is the best done by all in the cast, including Matt Damon and Domhnall Gleeson, unrecognizable as a nervous, skinny young bandit.

The movie is about a teenage girl, Mattie, who sets out in pursuit of justice. A criminal, Tom Chaney, has killed her father, and she intends to see him hanged or kill him herself. The justness of her cause is clear, but the route to justice is twisted. Everyone agrees that Chaney is guilty, and everyone agrees that he’s a horrible man and should be punished, but no one has the desire or resources to go after him. If Mattie wants Tom Chaney to be held accountable for his crimes, she will have to go after him herself.

The script, as with all Coen Bros scripts, is about economics. Most of their stories are about “the little man” who tries to rise above his station and is punished for it by “capital,” the “big man” at the top of the food chain who gets what he wants because he has the money to buy it. True Grit was their first script where “captial” is actually the protagonist. Mattie, the teenage girl, is the one with the money, and she uses her money to pursue justice, hiring the one-eyed alcoholic US Marshal Rooster Cogburn, and the two of them form an alliance with a Texas Ranger who has been chasing Chaney for years.

So Mattie is pursuing blood vengeance with two men whose motives are entirely financial. What’s more, they are not shining paragons of liberal thought. They are both ex-Confederate soldiers, and Cogburn rode with Confederate war-criminal William Quantrill. He also, like so many legends of the Old West, freely drifted from one side of the law to the other, whenever it happened to suit him, whichever paid more at the time. They’re both fundamentally dishonest and disagreeable men of variable skills, but they come through when the chips are down.

Long story short, the road to justice does not go as planned, and there is much sacrificed in its pursuit. Oddly enough, her life-altering journey does not alter Mattie much at all; we meet her at the end of the movie as a middle-aged woman, and she is exactly the same as she was at 14 — stubborn, opinionated and money-minded. While pursuing justice for her father, she fell in with men she considered disgusting, to pursue men who were no more or less morally upright than her allies. And yet, her adventure with Rooster Cogburn haunts her for reasons she doesn’t fully understand.

What did I get out of this movie tonight? Something about justice, and how it never looks like we think it will, and how economic forces favor the criminal with the most money. And, while it goes unmentioned, the narrative eventually overlaps with The Gilded Age, one of the many times corruption overtook the United States and the wealthy decided it was everyone’s sacred duty to make them wealthier, leading, of course, to the Great Depression, etc. And that the things that stick with us as life goes on are the memories of the people who struggled with us.

The movie is perfect, almost more like a sonnet than a screenplay, without a wasted moment, a superfluous shot or an off-key performance. Even the fancy camera moves and editing tricks that made the Coens famous are absent, giving way to a taut narrative strategy and a stately classicalism that makes the movie feel timeless.

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Unexpectedly edifying double feature of the week: The Apprentice and Heaven’s Gate

Posted by on October 17, 2024 · Leave a Comment 

I can fully understand why people would not want to watch a movie about Donald Trump, and I can also understand why people would not want to watch a notoriously panned 4-hour movie about a massacre, but I watched both in a 24-hour period and learned a lot.

The Apprentice is kind of our Young Mr. Lincoln, but instead of Henry Fonda playing a prairie lawyer forming his opinions about injustice in the United States, we have Sebastian Stan playing a born-rich real-estate speculator obsessed with “winning” at all costs. Tired of taking emotional abuse from his father, Donald Trump instead pursues a friendship with Roy Cohn, the lawyer who got the Rosenbergs executed, made McCarthysim mainstream, and, by the early 1970s, was one of the most powerful men in New York and one of the most feared men on the planet for his relentless attacks on anyone he didn’t like.

Both the lead performances are extraordinary, especially Jeremy Strong as Cohn, who is riveting, nauseating and utterly repellent. The world that Young Mr. Trump enters into is one populated by wealthy, powerful men who sincerely, honestly believe that the world belongs to them to do with as they please, and anyone who gets in their way or tries to stop them is “the enemy” and must be utterly destroyed. Attack Attack Attack, never apologize, never explain, and never ever admit defeat. If someone complains that you broke the law, hit them with so many lawsuits that they are forced to retreat or else die broke with their reputations in ruins.

For these men, there are no rules or standards, there’s just “what they want” and “what they can do to get it.” A philanderer preaching family values? A gay man disparaging gay men, while supporting Reagan, while also dying of AIDS? These men see no contradiction, because no rules apply to them, they just absolutely don’t see it. Who cares about contradictions, who cares about truth? They make their own truth.

I’ve read a number of reviews that call The Apprentice a “sympathetic” portrayal of Trump, but I wouldn’t use that word. Trump is presented as a human being, which, I must begrudgingly admit, he is, but the movie isn’t “sympathetic” as much as it is “fair.” It acknowledges that he was never a nice person, was always a shallow, vulgar creep obsessed with status and dominance, but that he became much worse after getting a whiff of the kind of power and wealth that Cohn had.

Anyway, so I was also watching the infamous 4-hour director’s cut of Heaven’s Gate, which is a wonderful movie by the way, and I had completely forgotten that it opens with a very long prologue set during a graduation ceremony at Harvard University in 1870. At this ceremony, Joseph Cotten plays an orator who informs the graduating students that, as Men of Harvard™, they are in a position of privilege that will define their lives, and that their duty is to use that social position to help positively shape the still-new melting-pot nation of the post-Civil-War United States. One student, our protagonist, played by Kris Kristofferson, takes the speech to heart and, after graduation, moves to Wyoming, becomes a landowner, businessman and marshal, and helps keep the peace of a county populated by newly-arrived Slavs, Poles, Germans, Russians and sundry other European immigrants. By 1890, the immigrant farmers are being pushed out, violently, by cattle barons who want the entire state for pastureland. A few immigrants, starving to death, have stolen corporate-owned cattle, which the cattle barons use as an excuse to label the entire immigrant class criminals, anarchists and insurrectionists.

Also at the 1870 Harvard ceremony is Sam Waterston, who does not heed the message of Joseph Cotten’s speech and instead moves to Wyoming and becomes the head of the Wyoming Stock Growers Association, a cabal of rich fucks who, like Young Donald Trump, sincerely, honestly believe that the world belongs to them to do with as they please, and anyone who gets in their way or tries to stop them is “the enemy” and must be utterly destroyed. In the blink of an eye, his plan goes from “punishing cattle thieves” to a “death list” of every man in the county, and eventually evolves into all-out war on the entire immigrant class, with the help of the Union Army. As he kills more and more people, the remaining folks, on all sides of the conflict, work together to help him out in the fear of worse recriminations. No one wants to stop him because they’re worried he might do worse to them.

So I couldn’t help but see The Apprentice as the “before” picture of the Trump Era, and Heaven’s Gate as a displaced preview of coming attractions. Things really never change.

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Joker: Folie a Deux

Posted by on October 7, 2024 · Leave a Comment 

I saw Joker: Folie a Deux on Friday night and liked it a lot, thought it was really well done, but a weekend of reading and listening to men talk about it has made it easily ten times more interesting to me. I don’t want to get into it here because the discourse surrounding movies like this exhausts me, but I will point out one aspect that I feel like has eluded people.

The movie is a musical, and most people think it’s a “half-hearted” musical, or a “musical that’s ashamed of being a musical,” or just a terrible musical. As someone who enjoys musicals and has seen a lot of them, I was curious to see what it was doing with the form, given the wall-to-wall suffocating grimness of the first movie.

The first thing I noticed is that everyone in the movie sings, but in varying degrees of confidence and enthusiasm, and with the backing of the production values. That is, some characters just stand in the background and hum tunes, others are more spotlit and foregrounded, some sing a cappella, some sing with instrumental backing, and still others sing in elaborate “1950s classic musical” set pieces. Everyone sings “in character,” meaning that they sing as people who don’t sing well, except in the big production numbers. It was almost as though the movie is sung through, but the songs were tuning in to a hard-to-locate radio signal, as though the movie is a straight drama where an alternate universe, one filled with musical numbers, bleeds through reality to present a different reality.

That’s a device that was used in another widely-reviled musical bomb, Pennies From Heaven, except there, the dividing line was clear and distinct: life in the “musical” universe was bouncy and peppy and carefree, and “real life” was a horrifying catastrophe full of bitterness, loss and insanity. Joker: Folie a Deux takes that concept and adds the wrinkle of “well, but it’s not that black and white.” The “musical” universe, it says, is always there, and it’s accessible to everyone, but it only occasionally blossoms into full 1950s musical fantasy.

Once I understood that’s what was going on, it occurred to me to ask “Why? What does that mean, narratively speaking?” Well, Joker: Folie a Deux is about a broken man who constantly teeters on the brink of madness, and, in the narrative scheme of this movie, “madness” is revealed by music, a desire to sing out loud. That is, Arthur Fleck, the character at the center of the story, wants to be sane, wants to matter, wants to be loved and appreciated, but he owes all the fame and love that he has to his alter ego, Joker, and we can gauge how tempted Arthur is to give in to Joker by watching how “produced” each song in the movie is. As Joker takes over Arthur’s mind, the musical numbers become more elaborate and more retrograde, reflecting the musicals and TV specials Arthur would have seen as a child (in the care of his abusive, psychopathic mother). Meanwhile, this madness, this desire to leave the gray, suffocating world, is shared by everyone else in the movie, to varying degrees. Arthur’s fellow prisoners sing “When the Saints Go Marching In” and his brutal guard sings “Get Happy.” Those characters don’t get production numbers, but then the movie isn’t about them.

In any case, while it doesn’t surprise me that people don’t like the movie (its message is, essentially, “That guy you came to see? He’s not a good person, you shouldn’t want to see that guy”) I cannot help but think that its conception of itself as a musical has been widely misunderstood.

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Trap

Posted by on August 5, 2024 · Leave a Comment 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Generally speaking, whenever I go to see an M. Night Shyamalan movie, I spend the first 90 minutes admiring his skill as a director, and the last 30 minutes sighing bitterly about his skills as a writer. He’s always been an astute and inventive director of suspense, but his talents too often work in service of scripts that are embarrassingly jejune and insipid at the conceptual level.

Over the weekend, I read so many takes on his new movie, Trap, that were less about what the movie is and more about the reviewers’ complicated relationship with the writer-director, that my curiosity finally got the better of me. I bit the bullet, lowered my expectations to student-film levels, and braced myself for the worst.

Surprise! Trap is actually quite brilliant.

You may have heard that the plot is ridiculous, that the dialogue is tin, that the characters don’t behave like normal human beings, that the performances range from quite good to found-object. All of those things are true. In spades. With bells on. But it turns out that none of that matters.

David Mamet, in the decades before he lost his mind, wrote a number of excellent essays on the craft of writing. In one of them, he mentioned that the only question a viewer should be asking during a movie is “What happens next?” All the absurd coincidences, staggeringly implausible setups and on-the-nose dialogue in Trap exist for one purpose: to deliver 107 minutes of high-flown, nail-biting suspense. And, because he’s such a superlative director of suspense, the viewer goes along with all the silliness because it keeps the suspense going. In short, Trap is a suspense-delivery machine that never lets up for its entire run-time, something I’ve never seen before. Even masterpieces like Psycho or Body Double give the viewer moments of rest, but I’ve never seen anyone do what Shyamalan does here. Every time you think “Oh, he’s going to do this, but then that will happen,” he introduces a new wrinkle, a new wild idea, a new character, creating almost two solid hours of “What happens next?”

On top of that, the script is, surprisingly, about character. Essentially, it’s about a man who wants to create a memorable day for his teenage daughter by taking her to a concert by her favorite act. His daughter’s happiness is very important to him, and, throughout the first two acts of the movie, he has to balance his love for his daughter with his paranoia about being captured by the police who are after him. In the third act, the action shrinks down to a domestic level, with the daughter fading into the background as the pop star takes a central role. That might seem lopsided, but then Bettelheim teaches us that there are always fewer characters in a story than we think there are. On a conceptual level, the pop star is the woman the daughter wants to grow up to be, so the script addresses both the father’s present with his daughter and also their future. That is, the daughter is the girl who doesn’t know who her father is, but the pop star is the woman the girl grows up to be, the woman who now knows who her father is. The fact that Shyamalan has cast his own daughter as the pop star only underlines the concept.

I could go on, but I don’t want to spoil anything about this deliriously bonkers movie. Suffice to say, if this movie had been directed by Brian De Palma, it would be hailed as an astonishing return to form.

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Some thoughts on Furiosa

Posted by on May 31, 2024 · 1 Comment 

BEWARE: spoilers, mostly conceptual, for Furiosa/Fury Road

When I was a young man, a million years ago, my writing teacher explained to me the different scales of storytelling. A drama, he said, is the story of a group of individuals, a saga is the story of a family, told across generations, and an epic is the story of a people. It was an earlier, simpler time, when words meant things. Now, of course, “drama” is when someone acts out at work and “epic” is when you execute a flawless ollie on your skateboard.

I go to the movies every week, and so I will often see the same trailers, week in and week out, for months at a time. The trailers for Furiosa gave the subtitle “A Mad Max Saga” and promised a revenge drama, but the true genre of the movie is suggested by a key line in the trailer, which (spoiler alert) is also a key line in the movie: “Do you have it in you to make it epic?”

On first viewing, I greatly enjoyed Furiosa, but I agreed, with many others, that it lacked something. It does not have the elegant mirror structure of Fury Road, which is the story of a chase scene that stretches out to the horizon of the world and then snaps back like a piece of elastic. It builds and builds toward a tale of revenge, but it’s a revenge drama where the vengeance is visited upon a man who has no idea that anyone was coming at him for vengeance. It’s a revenge drama where the character seeking revenge could have just as easily sat back and done nothing, because the man she hates is doing a great job of undoing himself.

Because I trust George Miller to be a master storyteller, I assumed there must be reasons for the odd narrative choices of the movie’s final act. But, on first viewing, I’d spent 2 1/2 hours priming myself for the satisfaction of Furiosa’s revenge, and when that revenge presented itself in the curiously muted way that it does, I felt slightly dissatisfied. A second viewing, within seconds of the movie’s beginning, erased all those concerns, because Furiosa is not a revenge drama, or a saga, although it contains elements of both those forms. It’s an epic, the story of a people. Or, rather, it is the first two acts of a three-act epic, with Fury Road providing the third act. It is the story of a people, and the people in question is us, you and me, here, in this world, right now, literally today, this day, May 31, 2024.

The question of the movie is not “Do you have it in you to make it epic?” but rather “How does one survive in a world run by horrible, tyrannical men?”

Furiosa is born into a utopia, a “land of abundance,” a hidden valley in the outback where the community has trees, fresh water, windmills and a fierce loyalty to the community. She is wrested from that community and re-born into a scarred, scabbed, ruinous wasteland ruled by tyrants and warlords. It’s important that Furiosa has only a child’s memory of her home, because that’s how people my age all remember our childhoods: we were born into a world where tyrants were unfashionable, where nature was considered a vital part of life on Earth, and where men who overstepped the bounds of decency were investigated and dealt with through democratic means and an independent judiciary. Of course, the world wasn’t that, but that’s what we were taught, and there was enough evidence available to at least suggest that those things were true. Now, we live in a world where words are used only to lie to us, where the truth can be anything our leaders decide it should be.

Furiosa is ripped from her childhood utopia and re-born into The Wasteland, where every relationship is transactional and every conversation is a negotiation. The screenplay is remarkably pure in this regard. Literally every conversation in the movie is laden with tension because any conversational miscalculation in this world can lead to your instant death.

In this transactional world, what is valued? How does one live? That is Furiosa’s real question. The answers are: resourcefulness and competence. Not intelligence, because intelligence is the exclusive provenance of the tyrant. Critical thinking is in desperately short supply in The Wasteland, while blind loyalty and fanatical worship of authority are elevated to a religion, where even dedicated fanatical warriors are tossed aside like fast-food wrappers when it suits the needs of the elite.

Does any of this sound familiar?

The world of Furiosa shows an age of tyrants coming to an end. Because all tyrants fall; that is their nature. The question is, what do we do, as citizens, when their fall arrives?

(The most alarming aspect of Furiosa/Fury Road, for me anyway, is how closely they hew to the story of Antz, a screenplay I worked on myself, about an individual’s response to a corrupt society run by tyrants. In that movie, the individual bolts from society in search of a fabled utopia, and succeeds in his quest, only to find out that the utopia really is a fable and that the true burden of the individual is to abandon notions of a false utopia and change the society you’re in, to make the society you’re in the utopia you seek.)

So Furiosa’s quest is not necessarily “how shall she get her revenge upon the man who tore her from her childhood?” but “What lessons shall she take from the society she lives in to succeed in transforming it?” Because the vast canvas of Furiosa is a tangled web of corruption, strong-arm tactics, transactional relationships and barbarism on an enormous scale.

Miller tells the story, not just of an individual, but a whole culture, where resourcefulness and competence are the most prized attributes. The movie is full of competency porn of the Jason Bourne variety, a series of set pieces where winners and losers are decided by who knows what to do in a given moment.

You would think that such a cutthroat, caustic world would have no room for art, but there is art all over the place in the world of Furiosa. There are artisans who take pride in their work, engineers who toil to make things of beauty. There is fashion, there is folklore, there is makeup, there is interior design, architecture and urban planning, and even forms of theater. There are times when the movie approaches anthropological study.

What Miller has accomplished in this movie is to present all this, all this culture, all this anthropology, as a series of action sequences — chase scenes, daring escapes, daring rescues, daring choices made during daring attacks. The movie suggests that a culture can be fully examined through the actions its people have been trained to take. Friendships and alliances are based on how good (that is, useful) you are in a fight, love is based on one’s ability to rise above squalor, value is based on usefulness. (Repeatedly, characters are given the choice of saving either a fellow human being or saving a valuable piece of machinery. No points for guessing how those scenes turn out.) It’s like Ben-Hur, if Ben-Hur was one long series of chariot-race sequences.

Furiosa, the lost girl who grows into the woman who grows into the ultimate leader of The Wasteland, is the only person in this world who remembers that fabled utopia where there was community and plenty. She knows that the answers that the tyrants of The Wasteland have come up with are not the only answers available to us as a people. When the target of her revenge asks her “Do you have it in you to make it epic?” he means it in the skateboarding sense, but Furiosa takes it to mean its storytelling sense: do you have it in you to make your story the story of a people?

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