Late Night with the Devil

For the longest time I kept giving Late Night with the Devil the benefit of the doubt, overlooking things and tones that didn’t square with the film’s presented milieu — it’s supposed to be footage from a late-night TV talk show that aired live on Halloween 1977. It’s got subtly powerhouse work by David Dastmalchian, striding into a rare lead role with confidence and his usual emotional transparency. He’s playing Jack Delroy, the host of the fourth-network show Night Owls with Jack Delroy, and it’s clear he’s watched enough vintage chat and horror-host shows to have internalized how such hosts acted and spoke. Dastmalchian makes the movie fun to watch all by himself. It’s the movie around him that falters.

Obsessed with beating Johnny Carson’s ratings, Jack loads his Halloween show with guests he hopes will lure and hook viewers. There’s “Christou” (Fayssal Bazzi), a psychic who purports to be in touch with audience members’ deceased loved ones. There’s Carmichael Haig (Ian Bliss), a Randi-type debunker of flim-flam. Finally, there’s reputedly possessed girl Lilly (Ingrid Torelli), whose parapsychologist guardian Dr. June Ross-Mitchell (Laura Gordon) saved her from some sort of demonic cult. It’s not long before Jack finds out the real target of satanic energy isn’t any of his guests. 

Gee, could the (real-life) Bohemian Grove and its shadowy meetings of powerful men in the entertainment industry have something to do with it? Grasping at any means to take down Johnny, Jack has joined these weird ritualistic get-togethers in the woods. This isn’t a spoiler, as the too-explicit narration spills the beans right at the start. We then learn Jack’s wife had died of lung cancer despite never smoking (such a thing is rare but not so unheard-of as to suggest demonic cause). So we go into all the supernatural events with the knowledge that it’s all happening due to Jack; he is the nexus of this paranormal activity. 

This is why horror movies get less legitimately frightening the deeper they wander into the weeds of exposition. It becomes Jack’s problem, Jack’s fault, rather than something random and scary that could happen to you. As I said, Late Night with the Devil is a fun tribute; sometimes it looks like genuine 1977 video footage and sometimes not (I assume because if it looked too much like video from 1977 it’d just look terrible, like a smeary, staticky fifth-gen dupe). It’s a decent enough stylistic calling card for the director brothers Colin and Cameron Cairnes, who also wrote and edited the film; perhaps next time they could hire another writer, or resist whatever pressure they may have been under to force the weird events — including levitation, projectile vomiting and someone with worms emerging from his flesh — to make some sort of narrative sense instead of allowing them to be harrowingly unexplained.

What’s worse, rather than letting the whole film just be the show’s footage, the brothers Cairnes often give us black-and-white “behind the scenes” segments that are necessary, I guess, to deliver plot points (as when someone dies offscreen and Jack hears about it during a commercial pause), but that also violate the imaginative contract we’ve bought into that this is actual coverage taped off of late-night TV. Not that we literally believe it’s real, of course, but we want to like what the movie is doing, want to make ourselves vulnerable to whatever scares it packs, and such breaks in the style and narrative shatter what should be unquestioning absorption. Again, it’s a writing issue. 

Dastmalchian is one of the most effortlessly engaging actors we’ve got. In a recent two-parter on The Rookie he played a corrupt ex-soldier who faked his own death; his character showed such strong certainty that he was untouchable by the cops (including the one he once served with) we were left with little reason to doubt him. Late Night with the Devil lets Dastmalchian run the gamut from TV-host smarm to insecurity to grief to terror — it’s a full package. The movie would be considerably easier to dismiss and forget without him as Jack, the ringmaster of his own small circus whose animals get out of his control. For his pains, he’s just surrounded by a bunch of Australian actors who needed work. One of them, Rhys Auteri as Gus, Jack’s Ed McMahon figure, gives an on-target performance without ego. Most of the rest of the cast appear to be too “in character” as guests on a Halloween show — are they on the level or not? These directors seem to know how to leave good actors alone, but the (let’s say) other actors don’t get the guidance they need. By the time the climax fizzles out into a weak post-climax that fills the studio floor with casualties but leaves us unmoved, some of us may already have checked out mentally. Enjoy the movie for Dastmalchian, but don’t expect much more.

Oppenheimer

Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is a massive pot roast of a movie, sliced into edible bits. Most of it is top-shelf craftsmanship, except for the back-and-forth structure. Certainly a sharper brain than mine could tell you why the film hops timelines, or goes from color to black and white. When Oliver Stone did this sort of thing in JFK, it was to convey as much information as concisely as possible (given the three-hour running time); there were so many moving parts, so many talking heads, that Stone’s illustrative, almost free-associative approach felt necessary. Here there are only talking heads and, from what we’re given here, a simple story: Once there was a very smart man who did a very bad thing, and ironically was raked over the coals for stuff he didn’t even do. Meanwhile, even more ironically, he gets medals and handshakes for the bad thing. The end.

There’s one element worthy of unreserved praise here, and that’s Robert Downey Jr.’s welcome-home performance — his comeback, if you will, from his comeback, which kidnapped him into Marvel movies for eleven years — as Admiral Lewis Strauss, the man who got J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) stripped of his security clearance on the grounds that Oppenheimer had Communist leanings. History views Strauss unkindly, but Downey makes him a smart man with understandable sore spots; he imbues Strauss with wit but not an ounce of the smug hipness that characterized, say, Tony Stark or some of his other roles. For me, the movie changed from Oppenheimer to Strauss whenever Downey showed up, his upper lip drawn down in umbrage. Downey and Nolan must have understood that a cardboard anti-commie villain wouldn’t do.

As for Cillian Murphy, I’d like to say that he shoulders this whole ungainly thing and holds it all together, but aside from an accent that sounds at times eerily like Robin Williams in serious mode, Murphy’s Oppenheimer seems purposely blank. It’s nothing that Murphy does or doesn’t do. It’s that this Oppenheimer has been hollowed out. We empathize with his wife Kitty (Emily Blunt) and lover Jean (Florence Pugh), who are always chastising him for one thing or another. Oppenheimer is reduced to visual iconography — the straight-brim fedora, the dark suits, the cigarette or pipe. Early on, we see Oppenheimer spike a contemptuous professor’s apple with cyanide (the plot is a failure). He mentions it later on, but if any linkage is intended to his complicity in developing the ultimate death-dealer, it’s certainly kept quiet. Murphy recedes into himself, enacting the self-abasing emotions of a martyr, and the movie slips from his fingers into the robust hands of Downey, or Blunt or Pugh or Matt Damon.

Anyway, Oppenheimer delivers the bomb. It becomes urgent to get the bomb before the Nazis do — an army that carries the bomb before it is invincible, as old Marcus Brody might say. “Does it work?” is an existential question, since one of the possible events if it doesn’t work properly is, oh nothing bad, just the annihilation of the planet. But it works, and thereafter Hiroshima and Nagasaki are knocked off the board. “Compartmentalize,” goes a refrain from Damon’s General Groves, and Oppenheimer has to keep his science and his morals in different boxes. As Tom Lehrer sang of Wernher von Braun’s ethos, “Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That’s not my department.” That verse speaks more mordantly, and God knows more concisely, about the paradox of Oppenheimer than this whole solidly built but pompously designed edifice does. Does Oppenheimer care where they come down? (Does Nolan?) He says he does, but does he really care about anything other than physics, his passion for which is also given short shrift? Given the two icons in this summer’s Barbenheimer event, I know which one seems more plastic and less human.

All Quiet on the Western Front (2022)

Continuing Oscar catch-up: Edward Berger’s bleak adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s anti-war classic All Quiet on the Western Front is there, I suppose, for people who need periodic reminding that combat isn’t a game. Technology and a more elastic R rating have made it possible for movies to put us right next to young soldiers getting their heads blown off or their bowels slashed out, their blood spurting or misting, steaming in the cold winter air. This All Quiet (the book’s 1930 adaptation won a Best Picture Oscar, and the new one is nominated for that and eight more) certainly doesn’t skimp on the misery and filth of trench warfare in World War I. It is not, nor is it intended to be, “entertaining,” though Berger and cinematographer James Friend occasionally give us the reprieve of natural beauty to counteract the gore-saturated mud and ruined flesh.

I respected the film’s commitment to the unpleasantness of the endeavor, but like Sam Mendes’ 1917 it unfolds at a bit of a remove. We spend most of our time with one soldier, 17-year-old Paul Baümer (Felix Kammerer), but find out very little about him other than that he enlists with a few friends, one of whom is blown to hell almost as soon as he hits the front line. Paul and the others are fed by wartime rhetoric and propaganda, of which the ugly realities of war disabuse them. The point of the story might be to show the process of a young warrior’s disillusionment. In Remarque’s book and the 1930 film, Paul goes home on leave and confronts a schoolmaster who has no idea what actual war entails now — the bombs, the tanks, the flamethrowers, the gas. There’s nothing like that in Berger’s film, nor does it get into how soldiers who go home physically unharmed still carry the inner scars of war with them, as the book did.

The movie is a technical achievement, I guess. What pleasure can be derived from it comes from its craft and its performances; newcomer Kammerer gives us a Paul alternately numb and terrified, and he doesn’t falter during a key scene involving Paul and a lone French soldier he encounters in a bomb crater. Berger succeeds at framing the battle scenes as death panoramas criss-crossed with horror and rage — soldiers drop dead everywhere you look, and we wonder how anyone managed to get out of it alive. A sense of futility sets in fast. What neither the book nor the 1930 film knew at the time, of course, was that the World War was only World War I, that there was an even ghastlier sequel coming. Berger is working with that knowledge, and tries to drum up our sympathy for boys who were lured into the meat grinder by nationalist populism. He adds a subplot not in the book involving higher-ups negotiating for an end to the war; he invents a character, General Friedrichs, who resents not having the glorious military career his ancestors did, and orders Paul’s regiment to carry out one last attack on the French before the armistice takes hold.

Things like that did happen, but by his additions and omissions Berger pulls focus away from what should be a study of the breakable human soul in wartime. So the movie just ends up striking us as a brutal account of the Realities of War, and doesn’t make much impression otherwise. If we’re supposed to feel the existential horror of Paul turning into a merciless killer and then realizing the import of what he’s done, only Kammerer’s performance conveys a little of that. This All Quiet seems to have lost track of the story’s point. The relentless physical awfulness of this particular war has been dramatized far better before, most recently in Peter Jackson’s documentary They Shall Not Grow Old. And even the theme of “Hey, the German soldiers were people, and they suffered too” was signed, sealed and delivered in Wolfgang Petersen’s Das Boot. I’m afraid Berger’s film wants to be great but is only occasionally even good. It seems to have been made now solely because the technology was there to make it.

Weird: The Al Yankovic Story

Every so often a movie comes along that makes one feel like a real Grinch for finding fault with it. This time, that’d be Weird: The Al Yankovic Story. It’s hard to find anyone who doesn’t like Weird Al, who capered around on the margins of ‘80s MTV pop with song parodies (and accompanying video parodies) of acts like Michael Jackson and Madonna. Weird Al’s takes on popular songs, gentler than Tom Lehrer and goofier than Mad magazine’s resident song parodist Frank Jacobs, were good-natured enough, and also skilled enough, that pop stars came to see a Weird Al parody as a sign they’d made it.

Weird, starring a game and enthusiastic Daniel Radcliffe as Al, makes no bones about being a complete farcical fabrication. That’s part of the joke, that Weird Al (who wrote the script with the movie’s director Eric Appel) can’t even tell his own story straight. The plot touches on the usual rise-and-fall tropes and clichés of rock-star biopics, which prevents it from being as wild and, well, weird as it could have been. In real life, Weird Al’s parents were supportive, with his father holding the exact reverse philosophy that the movie version of him does — that it’s important to do what makes you happy. So I’m not sure why Weird Al turns his dad into a forbidding, violent grouch who works in a factory and only later reveals his true colors. In 2004, Al’s parents both died in a tragic freak accident in their home, and we wouldn’t expect that to be covered in what’s supposed to be a comedy — but if you know that background, you might wonder why his parents are in the movie at all being portrayed as glum killjoys. Why not rub against the grain of the usual biopics and have the old man fantastically, unrealistically supportive of his son’s unusual goals?

Weird Al’s path eventually crosses that of Madonna (well-played by Evan Rachel Wood, who nails Madge’s insouciant narcissism), who wants him to parody her song and give her the “Yankovic Bump.” They become romantically involved, which is funny for about a minute, but not when it goes on for scene after scene and leads to a dead subplot involving Weird Al superfan Pablo Escobar. (Even if this premise hadn’t been addressed in The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, it wouldn’t be all that funny here.) A good chunk of the film finds Weird Al behaving like a jerk twisted by the goblins of success, which we all know is Al’s self-deprecating goof on the actuality of his being a nice, normal nerd who’s only weird in his music. But it doesn’t make it less annoying to watch, because we know he’s scheduled for a wake-up call and comeback. Weird plays too slavishly by the rules of music biopics — there aren’t many surprises. Rainn Wilson does come through with a sensitive turn as Dr. Demento, the radio DJ who inspired and launched Weird Al, but even the good doctor gets an awkward moment where he stammers that he never had any kids and wants to adopt Al (in real life, Dr. Demento and his wife — she passed in 2017 — were childless by choice), but Al demurs. There’s discordant father-figure stuff throughout Weird that gives one pause.

Radcliffe throws himself into whatever each scene requires, and he’s often fun to watch, but the performance doesn’t really cohere. He’s playing a goofball variation on Weird Al that seems to shift from scene to scene. Weird is the feature directing debut of Eric Appel, who has worked on various comedy shows and on Funny or Die projects. On the evidence here, he should probably stick to short-form gags; the movie is predictable and borderline dull, poorly paced and, if I’m not mistaken, badly sound-synced during several performances. (Radcliffe sang the songs live but was later dubbed by Yankovic.) I like Weird Al a lot, don’t get me wrong, but my hunch is that people’s fondness for him (and for Radcliffe) is rubbing off on the rather inept movie. Stick with it through the end credits, though, for a new Weird Al ditty (“Now You Know”) that roasts movie-fed mythology far more efficiently than the film preceding it.

The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent

Some of The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent is likable and emotionally rich enough to be worth watching, but it’s depressing how it declines from being a good Nicolas Cage movie to being a bad Nicolas Cage movie — after fighting off the bad movie for about its first three-quarters. Cage plays a fictionalized version of himself, the over-the-top “Nick Cage,” an actor still beloved despite having toiled, out of financial necessity, in direct-to-video cash-grabs for over a decade. Unbearable Weight sets him up as a man serious about his craft, whose time as a Hollywood must-hire may have come and gone. 

For any of us who feel great affection for Cage as a person and great respect for him as an artist, the premise — he’s so desperate for cash he’ll appear at a rich guy’s birthday party — is just saddening. But then Nick gets to his destination and meets the birthday boy, Javi Gutierrez (Pedro Pascal), and when they’re together the movie can get away from its dumb-ass plot. That plot has two CIA agents (Tiffany Haddish and Ike Barinholtz, both poorly used) recruiting Nick to keep an eye on Javi, who they believe is the head of a lethal drug cartel. The plot also involves the kidnapping of not one but two teenage girls, and we’re shown their tearful fear in what’s supposed to be a quirky comedy. 

But when Cage and Pascal are just hanging out, the movie is gold. Pascal radiates kindness and warmth; his Javi is just the sort of superfan Nick and his battered ego need. Halfway across the planet, in a well-appointed mansion, Nick’s work genuinely moved this weird, soft guy who may or may not be a druglord. I recognize that if movie studios made their products according to my wishes, they’d have all gone bankrupt long ago. But I cannot express how dispiriting Unbearable Weight gets when it drops the Nick/Javi bromance and lurches into action-comedy mode. By the time the excessively boring car chase rolled around, I had more or less emotionally checked out. It had become apparent that what I valued in the movie wasn’t what its makers — director Tom Gormican and his co-writer Kevin Etten — valued.

And so we get a scene with Nick in disguise as some ancient drug dealer, in make-up that makes him look like Al Pacino playing a latter-day Frank Serpico. We get shootouts and Mexican standoffs. We shrug as the CIA agents are completely thrown away without a backward glance. We may not be very impressed by the meta aspects of the script, all of which have been done more cleverly elsewhere, including in the Cage-starring Adaptation, whose ending did what Unbearable Weight does but with the intent of showing how pat and empty that expected Hollywood “climax” had become. I don’t think we’re meant to take away anything comparable from this movie, though. Or maybe we were, before the presence of Cage and Pascal softened its edges. When you have guys with the warm rapport they share, you don’t want them to be in a cold satire about how the dream factory they believe in so devoutly is a corrupt sweatshop dictated by money. You just want to see more of them. I wouldn’t mind if this were the first of several Cage/Pascal team-ups.

I don’t know whether the very ending is just soggy or a comment on soggy endings, but either way it doesn’t leave us with much. It’s hard to say where Unbearable Weight will fit into Cage’s general portfolio, though it’s sad that it couldn’t do what it tries so hard to do, which is to put Cage back in the sort of wham-bam box-office hit he used to have. What a Hollywood ending that would have been — the great actor comes in from the cold and gets the standing ovation (just as he does in the movie). Instead, it barely cracked the top five its opening weekend, and hemorrhaged money soon after. Maybe Cage’s Con Air and Face/Off days are behind him, but these days his work in smaller things like Joe or Mandy or even Pig (I didn’t care for it but can respect it as the kind of blues riff Cage gravitates to) is where you’ll find the Cage worth loving. We find him only intermittently here. 

X

A work of art or entertainment can have a lot on its mind and under its hood, but if you don’t like it, you don’t like it, and no amount of sophisticated subtext is going to make you like it. Which brings us to Ti West’s X, a nasty retro slasher film, set in 1979 and indebted to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre as well as to a number of ‘70s porn flicks. X conflates sex and violence in an almost comically obvious way; it’s about a small crew of porn filmmakers who go to a remote location and get picked off gorily one by one, but not before they’ve plied their trade. So in a way, the movie is a meta commentary on the fuck-and-die motif that distinguished (if that is the word) many slasher flicks in the ‘80s. It feels almost as if West intends it as a minimalist distillation of slasher and porn tropes: Here, this is what all those gross-out and skin flicks were getting at all along.

I suppose part of the meta joke is that X doesn’t really deliver either as horror or as sexploitation. West and cinematographer Eliot Rockett stage the porn-making scenes unimaginatively, and the murder scenes, when they eventually come, follow suit. X is a slow burn, though it starts with a flash-forward to the police nosing around the bloody crime scene, as though West were saying “Yes, the first half of the movie is a lot of talk and hanging out, but don’t worry, gory stuff is coming.” And it does, but I found I didn’t care about the victims any more than I cared about the psycho fodder in, say, Friday the 13th Part 3. 

The camera really only has eyes for Maxine (Mia Goth), a young porn actress with ambitions of being a star, whose freckles seem to come and go depending on the scene. Maxine is set up as the Final Girl, but she’s not especially likable or smart or … anything, really. Maxine’s psyching herself up in a mirror is perhaps a nod to Boogie Nights, and if we remember that film we know that X’s setting in 1979 is heavily ironic: Home video would soon turn porn into what it always really only was, jerkoff fodder, and the concept of porn “stars” more or less died. (I think the last adult-film performer whose name crossed over into mainstream consciousness was Stormy Daniels.) So Maxine is heading for a future in videos with titles like Dirty Texas Sluts, Vol. 17. 

We can tell that Ti West wants X to be taken more seriously than the rotgut splatterthons whose aesthetic it plunders. That’s apparent in the first half’s sense of melancholy, its tonal lip service towards the sadnesses of age, the lost freedom of youth. A lot of the film seems to meditate on the sexual frustration of an elderly woman, Pearl, who with her husband owns the property where the porn crew are filming. Maxine finds Pearl’s sexual (and, it appears, bisexual) neediness pathetic and disgusting, and the movie seconds her. One can’t really divide the audience’s sympathies in what’s supposed to be a slasher throwback; you end up cancelling out any sympathy. I won’t say horror movies should be nice, or even politically correct, but if we’re to care about a character it’d help if that character didn’t invite our disdain, either by ageist bigotry or by murderous brutality. In brief, the movie’s take on sexuality among the elderly is that, however gently Pearl’s longing is framed, codger sex is creepy and gross. 

In a movie where people are pitchforked, fed to a gator, and generally roughly treated, we search in vain for a warm heart. But, whatever West’s intentions, X comes across as a cold exercise rather than a hot, blood-red shot of the strong stuff. Cold and unfeeling. You can’t ask us to think about an old woman’s feelings of hopelessness and then push us to root for her messy death. Whatever West is trying here doesn’t ultimately land, maybe because West himself doesn’t seem to care about any of these people. (Regardless, we are told that a prequel film, Pearl, is already in the can.) Anyway, something is seriously amiss with the tone. Some viewers will find it a spicy hit of cruel fun, while others will feel a little rubbed raw, not to mention disappointed and bummed out. There are actual pornographic horror films, with a budget for gory effects and everything. Any of them, in their simple, mercenary eagerness to please, might set on the stomach a bit better than X. 

CODA

The well-meaning CODA, which has unexpectedly pulled into the lead in the race for the Best Picture Oscar, seems designed to make skeptics feel like bullies. It’s about a family — mother, father, son, daughter — in which all but the daughter are deaf. The father (Troy Kotsur) and his kids Leo (Daniel Durant) and Ruby (Emilia Jones) go fishing for a living — the film is set in Gloucester — while the mother (Marlee Matlin), worried about bills, just seems to want to sell the boat. Looking for a gut elective her senior year of high school, Ruby drifts into choir, partly because singing is something she enjoys doing while flinging fish, partly because she’s crushing on choir kid Miles (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo). 

The presence of the Shaggs’ immortal record Philosophy of the World in Ruby’s room shouldn’t fool you. Ruby doesn’t seem to have a passion for music; the plot just dictates that she enter an art her family can’t share her experience of. (The script, by director Sian Heder, proposes a couple of ways deaf people can enjoy music, but still has the mother ask Ruby, “If I were blind, would you paint?” Well, Mom, for starters, visual art can also be tactile; and a movie about such a family developing ways to process their daughter’s expression sounds a lot more interesting than CODA is.) Eugenio Derbez, huge in Mexico and slowly penetrating American film for the last decade, gets to play the plum role of the choir teacher who’s a checklist of traits: impatient, arrogant, a terror to unserious students but a believer in Ruby’s talent. He tells her not to try to sing pretty. She sings pretty anyway.

An exercise in irony, CODA makes a big ally show of putting deaf characters on the screen, casting actual deaf actors, and establishing the parents as sex maniacs, which goes so far in the other direction from the standard depiction of disabled people as sexless that it’s kind of crude and campy — but the movie isn’t really about them. The movie shouts it out loud: Deaf people — it’s like they’re people or something! They get drunk and high, they boink, they get in barroom fights. The one thing they can’t do, apparently, is make a living without Ruby as their free interpreter. Intentionally or not — since it centers Ruby and her dilemmas — CODA ends up saying: Deaf people — what pains in the ass! Ruby’s loyalty to her family threatens to derail her destiny as a great singer (even though that destiny was unknown to her during the first 16 years of her life). Now, a lot of movies have set up the conflict of the talented kid who needs to get out of the small town, the house, the needs of his family. The family, though, usually isn’t three-quarters disabled. Having your young lead resist leaving home because she can’t abandon not one, not two, but three disabled family members is, I’m sorry, overkill. The deaf people in this movie are unavoidably plot obstacles on the cute abled kid’s path to glory.

The tone seems off: the family seems selfish for not wanting Ruby to go; Ruby seems selfish for wanting to go; then Ruby seems selfish for not wanting to go. The emotions of the story feel unresolved, almost ignored. Do the parents and the brother come up with some other way to have a hearing person on board? (According to the movie, they need ears aboard because the father and brother can’t be relied on to pay attention to the flashing alert lights on the boat. Deaf people: they get into such wacky mix-ups! Anyway, this is a dramatic distortion of a real 2003 case: google “Coast Guard Cites Deaf Boater.”) Does Ruby still want to leave for Boston when her sweetie won’t be going? And does anyone who’s seen a movie before doubt what the outcome of Ruby’s audition will be? The acting here is aces across the board, and it’s nice to see a majority-disabled family in a movie who’s also working-class. But the movie didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know about Deaf culture (except for the mother delivering a brief speech, which Matlin sells beautifully, about how she’d wanted the newborn Ruby to be deaf — which flirts with emotional complexity far, far beyond this film). It’s a movie about a cute kid who wants to go off to Fancy School in the City. The deafness is very much incidental.

@Zola

Not everything needs to be a movie. That’s not to say that the legendary 2015 Twitter thread by A’Ziah “Zola” King doesn’t seem like — and play in our minds like, when we’re reading it — a movie-god-given piece of natural cinema material. It has everything: sex, violence, and, as Zola says in the first tweet, a story “full of suspense.” Zola’s common-sensical voice is loud and clear; it carries us through, and we can hear it in our heads, with its heartbeat-monitor spikes of disbelief and outrage. What I’m getting at is that Zola’s thread is almost a perfect little movie in itself. Imagining the story’s excesses, we collaborate, make it funnier to ourselves.

It gives me no pleasure to opine that @Zola, the movie director Janicza Bravo and her cowriter Jeremy O. Harris have made from Zola’s story, feels somewhat redundant. The actual film before us can’t compete with the mind-movie we made when reading the thread. (Maybe a viewer is better off going into the film cold.) I really didn’t want it to be this way. I was rooting for @Zola to be a disreputable but electrifying bonbon of sin and hyperbole, something along the lines of Spring Breakers or The Rules of Attraction in its mash-up of art and exploitation. And Bravo, who has a strong eye for trance-out color and movement, at first seems the ideal filmmaker for this tale. 

Part of the thread’s appeal, I think, is that its narrator (Taylour Paige) is Black and her companion, a sex worker here named Stefani (Riley Keough), is white. Stefani is also a hot mess who drags Zola into a hard-bass netherworld of guns and lust. Zola is essentially an observer on the side as Stefani, her pimp X (Colman Domingo), and her hapless boyfriend Derrek (Nicholas Braun) make everything ridiculously worse. We hear some of Zola’s tweets as narration, though they may lack the tartness and surreal listen-to-this-shit humor they had in our heads. Taylour Paige is fine as Zola but somewhat inexpressive, ceding the movie to Riley Keough’s dumpster-fire Stefani, who talks like a dumb white chick’s idea of how Black women talk, gleaned from tabloid talk shows.

Neither woman seems to learn much from their experiences, though, and the movie arrives at a stop without having really arrived at an end — or a point. @Zola appears to advise viewers not to trust crazy white women, who are too padded by privilege to feel the sharp edges of the danger they get themselves in. (It’s the whiny, insecure Derrek, also white, who makes the worst mistake and almost gets everyone killed.) The film doesn’t put much stock in Black men, either. We’re aware we’re getting a subjective account (and Bravo puts the movie on pause to let Stefani control the narrative briefly), the purpose of which is to show the wisdom and resilience of a Black woman. No problem there, except that it tends to keep Zola at a remove. In this chaotic, candy-colored universe of sin and stupidity, Zola is the one keeping her head while all around her lose theirs. She’s watching and relaying the story; she’s seldom truly in it. 

Everyone else on screen is flawed, hilariously (Nicholas Braun kept getting unanticipated laughs out of me) or frighteningly (Colman Domingo’s stealth-African X loses his fake American accent when he’s angry). Zola isn’t. She has no quirks, no likes or dislikes, and when you get right down to it she exists in her own plot to save the infantile white people from the savage, street-smart Black men, who will get money out of your carcass any way they can, whether pimping it or murdering it. Can a movie written and directed by Black people be prejudiced against Black people? Not consciously, maybe. And I don’t doubt that Bravo and Harris must have responded to the wild tall-tale aspect of @Zola; I don’t presume classist bad faith on their parts — again, not conscious. Bravo is eminently worth watching as a director; the movie at its pure-cinema finest is like a neon mandala. But, man, does this film give off some discordant vibes. 

Nomadland

There’s a Facebook group called “Capitalist Dystopia Stories Rebranded as Heartwarming Bullshit.” It provides links to news bits like the recent one in which a seven-year-old girl is selling lemonade to help pay for her brain surgery. I don’t know how we got to be a society that isn’t horrified by this. Anyway, stuff like that may help explain why the more I think about Nomadland the angrier I get. The movie is beautifully made (though not “poetic,” as many will tag it, so much as pictorial). It’s also heartwarming bullshit. Taking off from Jessica Bruder’s nonfiction book, Nomadland gives us a community of good earthy folk who live in vans and RVs, roaming the country, taking temp work. This is the nicest movie about homelessness, financial despair and human frailty you’ll ever see.

Frances McDormand anchors the plotless, anecdotal film, but her role has been shaped by writer-director Chloé Zhao to make her the anchor — it’s an actor’s delight, a silently strong hero who stoically suffers. Zhao is known for filling her movies (previously, Songs My Brothers Taught Me and The Rider) with nonactors “playing” themselves, and with the exception of McDormand and David Strathairn as Dave, a quietly unstable fellow nomad, that’s how Nomadland is cast. McDormand plays a woman named Fern — the name isn’t far off from “Fran” — and her last name starts with “McD.” So is McDormand also playing herself? Let’s say she seems to be behaving as Fern, just inhabiting Fern with as few frills as possible. After a while it seems to be an exercise in how much of herself she can suppress.

I’m as hooked into Amazon as anyone, but the movie’s wishy-washy depiction of Amazon warehouses as places that give our kind nomads a nice paycheck or two stuck in my craw. See, the film unavoidably says, Amazon doesn’t exploit desperate Americans — it helps them. Thank God for the largesse of our corporate overlords! Will you be requiring anything else, sirs? The people in Nomadland, though, aren’t defined by the work they do. They all seem to have opted out of the rat race. Many are out there in their vans because the economy cast them off, but we hear a lot more often from the nomads who just can’t get used to sleeping under a roof, in a soft bed. They want to live under the stars with others of their tribe. So the movie really has no political or economic consciousness at all. Taken to its logical conclusion, Nomadland could be saying that all homeless are homeless by choice; they’re just not built for house living or careers.

Fern sits and talks with real-life nomads playing versions of themselves. Two examples of this are of monumental tastelessness. One woman, Charlene Swankie (named only as “Swankie” in the film), plays a scene in which she has a headache and confides that she has cancer and hasn’t been given long to live. The actual Swankie is healthy, and the movie mixes fact and fiction in this sort of strange way, asking a nonactor to pretend she has a mortal illness. The other example finds nomadic guru Bob Wells getting choked up as he tells Fern about his son, who committed suicide. As it happens, that tragedy did in fact befall Wells. But it takes us out of the movie (is his story real or scripted? we wonder), as Swankie’s feigned illness also does.

Chloé Zhao has no anger in her about how the country has failed these nomads, how it uses them up and denies they exist. She’d rather just groove on the serene vibe of a group of outcasts sitting together around a fire, being each other’s family. As drama, Nomadland is pretty null; the emotional crescendo comes when we gasp at Dave accidentally dropping some of Fern’s cherished dishes. Yet Fern’s anger at Dave gets the movie to snap into focus for a moment — suddenly, McDormand has a professional actor to play off of, and she lunges at the opportunity while scrupulously staying within the cramped bounds she sets for Fern. But as far as we can see, there isn’t anyone scary out in Nomadland or violent or mean. Nobody ever seems in trouble. Everyone looks after each other. It all seems very nice. If the film gets any award traction it’ll be due to the current moment’s collective yearning for community. But let’s not be numbed to the cold realities of being nomads, or the larger society that has, through economic or social pressure, ejected them. Nomadland comes close to saying whatever happens to drifters and vandwellers is okay, because they have each other.

Saint Maud

Every couple of years, a little oddity emerges from the indie-cinema beat and gets lionized as the next great thing to happen to horror. Generally these films are scrupulously calibrated and express the drive and obsession that a young filmmaker — in this case, Rose Glass, a British writer-director about thirty — feels about a story or a theme. What they don’t express is true fear. Glass’s feature debut, Saint Maud, meditates on a lonely young woman burning in shame. Once known as Katie, a bit of a wildcat, she has changed her name to Maud, shifted her nursing emphasis from hospital to hospice, and given herself over to God. At this point, I’ve seen so many somber art films about the rigors and torments of faith that a movie just amiable and matter-of-fact about Christianity (and no, not one of those awful belches of propaganda that usually star Kevin Sorbo or Kirk Cameron, either) would be genuinely radical and unique.

Saint Maud follows its lead (Morfydd Clark in a tremulous, detailed performance) as she tries to take care of her client, former dancer Amanda Köhl (Jennifer Ehle), struck down by lymphoma and approaching the end. Maud tries to get Amanda to hand it over to God, but Amanda isn’t biting. She fears the void but is reasonably sure there’s nothing else for her. Amanda’s doubts make Maud’s own misgivings flare up. Aside from a few people who seem to exist only to anger Maud, the movie really only has these two characters, and once Maud cuts herself out of Amanda’s orbit, it’s just Maud, and Jennifer Ehle’s serenely mordant vibe is badly missed.

Clark performs heroically, free of self-consciousness, worrying at her flesh or kneeling on popcorn kernels (ouch, but using Legos might’ve been funnier). For her part, Rose Glass takes the dread and anguish with the utmost seriousness, as if afraid to be unworthy of Maud’s stations of the cross. Glass creates a dour, foreboding mood that nobody is really allowed to tease — not even Ehle, handed this potentially juicy role but then finding most of the juice has dried up. In Saint Maud, I can tell what I’m supposed to be responding to, but it feels tepid and frequently-told one way or another. As Maud’s visions get weirder, the quiet material takes a Nestea plunge into loud horror; the film was distributed by A24, which also gave us the work of Robert Eggers and Ari Aster, and A24 would probably like you to think of Saint Maud as the next Hereditary or The Witch. The film has already inspired comparably caffeinated songs of critical praise; I wish I’d seen the same film they did, but the one I saw, frankly, feels twice as long as it is, and it’s only 84 minutes long. The one I saw is almost punitively dreary and grim; even an anecdote of casual sex, which should be an occasion to get some fresh air and acknowledge the power of pleasure, just ends in casual rape.

Rose Glass brings some verve and emotional vividness to the narrative. It’s not a bad movie, just glum and unengaging. Maud’s story just feels too familiar; it spends a lot of time competing with Paul Schrader’s First Reformed (another A24 film) for the championship in tragically repressive religiosity, and then towards the end it’s as though First Reformed turned into The Exorcist. Yes, it’s likely imaginary, but the tonal damage is done. The true horror lies in watching a miserable loner spiral into madness, which is well-covered ground by now anyway, but the lapse into the often-tacky visual vocabulary of genre horror just shatters the spell.

Glass has talent and sensitivity, but a lot of potential drama in the material just slips through her fingers. And we get back to my earlier point: where’s the fear? Is there anything in Saint Maud that truly scares Glass? Sometimes, at good and bad horror movies, you might get one scene that truly feels sweated over, something that emerged from a genuine nightmare. But Glass doesn’t seem disturbed by her subject; she doesn’t seem to feel one way or the other about it. The story is just an excuse for slow-burn scenes with Maud trudging through her lightless existence until she finally goes completely around the bend. Does Glass feel anything at all about Maud? I didn’t.