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Mike Schulz confirms with Dave Levora and Darren Pitra that the Reader has a database where you can look up old reviews by Schulz to find out what he thought about, say, The Hateful Eight (which none of them have any love for). Levora and Pitra also comment upon Schulz’s critical industry, because, well, five films requires a lot of time to sit on one’s butt in a dark room staring at a screen, y’know? The first film to test Schulz’s gluteal endurance was Priscilla, directed by Sofia Coppola and starring Cailee Spaeny, Jacob Elordi, Ari Cohen, Dagmara Domińczyk, Tim Post, Lynne Griffin, Dan Beirne, Rodrigo Fernandez-Stoll, and Dan Abramovici. Schulz typifies Priscilla as “Sofia Coppola like crazy,” “more of a mood piece than it is a drama” — a polite way of saying “weak on narrative, so unless you’re a Brian De Palma-type cinéaste who will sit through any old tripe as long as the mise-en-scène is sufficiently compelling, you are going to suffer.” Since Coppola’s métier is “differently-scaled tales of loneliness among really well-off people,” she’s also asking for your sympathy on behalf of a stratum of humanity whose overweening dilemma is a lack of self-knowledge about their own lives, rather than, say, trying not to get their butts blown off in Gaza. Coppola draws on Priscilla Presley’s memoir for her sense-impressions, starting with Priscilla at age fourteen, when she first meets Elvis Presley at a German military base, to age 27, when she leaves Presley for the last time. Schulz thought Spaeny did a fine job as the titular character, believable when portraying Priscilla at either age. Spaeny’s scenes with Jacob Elordi (Elvis Presley) weren’t as creepy for Schulz as the ten-year age-gap might suggest (*yawn*) because Elordi is (approximately) six-feet-five-inches and Spaeny is five-feet-one, though he did confess to a certain ickiness about their intimacies. Again, the film isn’t terribly effective as a drama; it’s more the cinematic equivalent of catching butterflies and watching them float in a jar. If you prefer food similes, it’s as light as a soufflé; not much to it. And one wonders, once again, based on her demonstrated talents, how much traction Sofia might have gotten in her career were her surname not “Coppola.” Elsewhere, Schulz caught the biographical sports-drama Nyad on Netflix. Directed by Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin and starring Annette Bening, Jodie Foster, Rhys Ifans, and Karly Rothenberg, the film concerns Diana Nyad (Benning), a former Olympian who undertook to swim from Cuba to Florida without a shark cage. Nyad made five attempts, starting in 2011 when she was in her sixties, before she succeeded at her task. Schulz appreciated the expertly procedural approach to Nyad’s undertaking, getting the audience to appreciate the amount of sweat-equity goes into a given activity without boring them to tears. The only drawback Schulz saw was that swimming isn’t intrinsically interesting once the element of competition has been removed from it. This becomes especially apparent when there aren’t any stakes against which Nyad is pushing — no threat of a bomb going off if she doesn’t make it to her goal on time — aside from her own survival, which gets obviated by the support team in the boat following her for the four days it took. It’s essentially an action film without much action — the kind of exercise Coppola might have went in for were she not deathly terrified of water (one presumes). Schulz appreciated everything else about Nyad, as the whole subject is fascinating, even if the visual spectacle of the sport itself fails to interest. Then there’s The Marsh King’s Daughter, a psychological thriller directed by Neil Burger and starring Daisy Ridley, Ben Mendelsohn, Garrett Hedlund, Caren Pistorius, Brooklynn Prince, and Gil Birmingham. Based on the 2017 novel of the same name by Karen Dionne, Marsh King concerns Helena Pelletier, who was fathered by Jacob Holbrook (Mendelsohn), and spent her formative years (wherein Helena is portrayed by Prince) learning about surviving in the wilderness from Dad, unaware that Dad kidnapped Mom (Pistorius) some time ago. Twenty years after Mother and Daughter escaped from him, Helena (portrayed thereafter by Ridley) fears that Dad is coming to get her daughter, Marigold (Carson), so she draws upon the survival skills taught her by her evil-rapist dad to protect them both from him. Schulz thought Burger executed a professionally-made work of cinema, but one that is incredibly unpleasant to watch — or, as Schulz puts it, “It was well done. I just hated it.” Burger crafted a work of cinema that no one can behold — another subject upon which Coppola might have dilated for ninety-plus minutes, were she not scared to death of forests (presumably). A hard sit, indeed. Next, there’s What Happens Later, directed by Meg Ryan and co-starring David Duchovny. From Schulz’s description, What Happens Later does not sound like the rom-com it’s been touted as. Rather, the film concerns Ryan and Duchovny as two people who were lovers a quarter of a century ago who get stuck in an airport during The Storm of the Century, and are forced to rehash all the elements of their relationship that didn’t work out. Since Ryan and Duchovny are the only actors who have any lines throughout the film, they’re basically working out their differences, oftentimes in an intense, dramatic way. One might have mistaken What Happens Later for a comedy because of the announcer on the PA — the only other voice you hear in the film — occasionally offering pithy rejoinders to the characters’ dialogue, suggesting that the whole enterprise might turn into Airplane! at any given moment. On a $3 million budget, What Happens Later has made $2 million. Perhaps the Intercom Guy might have created some tonal confusion about the film, which the two-million ticketholders communicated back to the one-million would-be ticketholders? Or perhaps we have the Hollywood actors’ strike to blame for that? Had it ended a week or two earlier than yesterday, Ryan and Duchovny might have done the talk-show rounds and ginned up some enthusiasm for it. Incidentally, the agreement struck between the studios and the actors is a tentative one, to be revisited in three years — back on the strike-lines, no doubt. . . Then there’s Fingers, a science-fiction-romance film directed by Christos Nikou and starring Jessie Buckley, Riz Ahmed, Jeremy Allen White, Luke Wilson, Amanda Arcuri, and Annie Murphy. Schulz made a couple disgusted-sounding noises before he could finally articulate his thoughts on Fingers. Based on his description, the “yeech!” makes sense, as the film is set in an alternate reality where science can make hard-determinist readings of whether couples’ relationships are built to last or are fated to disappear beneath the shoreline, and it can be done by ripping out a fingernail from each person, sans anesthesia, and sticking them in a microwave. Take that premise, add a bunch of emotionally-atonal behaviors that defy all earthly logic, and you’ve got a rom-crom that David Cronenberg might have directed if he were persuaded to undertake one. Since Christos Nikou is not David Cronenberg, and he doesn’t offer any stakes beyond a couple not knowing for sure whether they should take the test or whether they should abide by it — a government decree, perhaps, saying you can’t get married unless your relationship has been confirmed by the fingernail test — he can’t make the premise work as memorably or as intelligently. Schulz tells us that his father, who’s 83 and has dementia, offered a solution to the whole-fingernail dilemma on which more cognitively-intact individuals evidently failed to connect the dots. But then, you lose the whole spectacle of people yanking their fingernails out and screaming in pain. Everything might suddenly make way more sense than it does here, but you couldn’t have that. As for previews, we have The Marvels, directed by Nia DaCosta and starring Brie Larson, Teyonah Parris, Iman Vellani, Zawe Ashton, Gary Lewis, Park Seo-joon, Zenobia Shroff, Mohan Kapur, Saagar Shaikh, and Samuel L Jackson. The Marvel Universe is such a narrative ecosystem that one fears that in describing the plot to this outing, we might inadvertently give away some plot point that will ruin a Marvel-weened viewer’s moviegoing experience. Or perhaps we’re laboring under the misperception that these movies will just keep coming out from now until the end of time. Either way, hearing Levora read off the intricacies of the plot description, one feels that he should be making time-and-a-half for the homework he brought to the reading so he could get through it without swallowing his tongue. Good job, Dave! There’s also a Biblical musical, Journey to Bethlehem, on its way to theaters. Directed by Adam Anders and starring Fiona Palomo, Milo Manheim, Lecrae, Joel Smallbone, Antonio Banderas, Antonio Cantos, Stephanie Gil, Rizwan Manji, Geno Segers, and Omid Djalili, it’s the Baby-Jesus story — with music! Schulz is enthusiastic about seeing The Holdovers, directed by Alexander Payne and starring Paul Giamatti, Dominic Sessa, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, Carrie Preston, Gillian Vigman, and Tate Donovan, wherein Giamatti playing a curmudgeonly New England prep-school teacher circa 1970 who has to stay over Christmas break to watch over the kids who can’t go home for various reasons. And tomorrow, David Fincher’s The Killer, starring Michael Fassbender, Arliss Howard, Charles Parnell, Kerry O’Malley, Sala Baker, Sophie Charlotte, and Tilda Swinton, starts streaming on Netflix. Compelling cast, solid director — what might possibly go wrong there?. . .
Priscilla, Nyad, The Marsh King’s Daughter, What Happens Later, and Fingernails