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Mike Schulz, Dave Levora, and Darren Pitra would have met up last week, 01/11, but for road conditions, which prevented Schulz from making it to the studio for his klatch with the Deez. No such distractions this week! Of course, this means lightning-round recaps of everything Schulz has seen this week and last.
Let’s get to it, why don’t we?
- Mean Girls, directed by Samantha Jayne and Arturo Perez Jr (in their feature directorial débuts), from a screenplay by Tina Fey, and starring Angourie Rice, Auliʻi Cravalho, Christopher Briney, Reneé Rapp, Bebe Wood, Avantika, Jenna Fischer, Tim Meadows, Busy Philipps, and Fey, this remake is based on the Broadway musical, mind you, not Mark Waters’s 2004 original. This may account for the confusing responses to everything on-screen that the film has drawn so far. Contemporary accounts have audiences laughing at the film rather than with it, because the characters in Waters’s film didn’t break into song when the tension became too much. This response seems to cut along generational lines, as those who were raised on the original film weren’t told beforehand that there was going to be singing in this remake! They thought it was going to be a straight-up remake, or reboot, of a film that is, in many viewers’ eyes, close to comic perfection. Which is an unfortunate misperception, because this Mean Girls, on its own merits, works better than, say, the recent adaptation by Blitz Bazawule of The Color Purple. Since Jayne and Perez Jr’s stakes aren’t the same as Bazawule’s, they didn’t have to worry about nuances so much, and they cut a number of songs from the stage production — a decision which Schulz applauds. It sounds like the whole production went into this film clear-eyed: Fey asked her two daughters about how certain pre-21st-Century conventions would play today, and she devised explanations to make such plot-points as the pre-social-media Burn Book plausible in the present day and age. Schulz was pleased by such intelligent choices, and enjoyed the film — even if, ironically, all that forward-thinking was lost on the millennial part of the audience. On a $36 million budget, it’s made $42.2 million so far, which must disappoint a few producers, considering the original made $24.4 million out of the gate and closed the year grossing $129 million worldwide. Oh, well. . .
- The Beekeeper, directed by David Ayer, stars Jason Statham, Emmy Raver-Lampman, Josh Hutcherson, Bobby Naderi, Minnie Driver, Phylicia Rashad, and Jeremy Irons. There’s nothing hateable (or hateful) about its premise: Statham is a beekeeper/secret assassin living in Rashad’s garage until Rashad loses everything in a phishing scam and takes her own life, for which Statham is initially arrested. Once he’s cleared, he resolves to take revenge on the phishers. Good so far. So how did Ayer botch the execution? Apparently, screenwriter Kurt Wimmer must answer for the lines he gives to Irons, who plays the phishing cabal’s leader, and he sounds like Peter Serafinowicz’s agency-director character trying to take out Pickle Rick. Wimmer has so much else for which he must answer, plot-wise; and since it doesn’t offer any camp kicks from out of the carnage, Schulz deems the whole enterprise a “foolish” undertaking.
- Night Swim, directed by Bryce McGuire (his feature-film début) and starring Wyatt Russell, Kerry Condon, Amélie Hoeferle, and Gavin Warren, concerns a haunted swimming pool. Talking about it last time, our trio thought Schulz would hate it, and were laughing merrily at the very concept. (Will we ever get a haunted escalator?) Well, Schulz liked Night Swim, dammit. Russell plays Ray Waller, the family patriarch who has MS and finds the pool’s waters take the pain away — at the expense of every other living thing around it. Including — well, especially — his family. The film is very Shining-like in its execution, where a creepy tension suffuses the horror, and the smart use of camera angles makes a PG-13-rated film feel like an R-rated experience. Besides, what were you going to do with those 95 minutes anyway? Who are you to resist it?
- American Fiction, directed by first-timer Cord Jefferson from his own script, and starring Jeffrey Wright, Tracee Ellis Ross, Issa Rae, Sterling K. Brown, John Ortiz, Erika Alexander, Leslie Uggams, Adam Brody, and Keith David, looks like it will be up for multiple Oscars. Based on Percival Everett’s 2001 novel Closure, Wright plays Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, a novelist whose submissions keep getting rejected for not being “black enough.” In a fury, Ellison writes a novel which he intends to be a satire on White expectations of Black authors. His editors blank out on the satire part, plausibly enough, and his publisher — all too plausibly — markets My Pafology as a streetwise account of ghetto life. The satire is very funny, while the sections concerning the individual ordeals of Ellison’s family feel heartfelt, though Schulz believes the two don’t mesh together as they otherwise might. Well, F Scott Fitzgerald, in his autobiographical essay The Crack-Up, wrote, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function” — something Scott found out the hard way when he took to salving his neuroses with alcohol. Schulz is holding it together well enough; and if the answer to his plight is also alcohol, there are centers that would cater to his needs. (Just kidding, Mike. Looking forward to seeing the film.)
- The Book of Clarence, a biblical dramedy written and directed by Jeymes Samuel and starring LaKeith Stanfield, Omar Sy, RJ Cyler, Anna Diop, David Oyelowo, Micheal Ward, Alfre Woodard, Teyana Taylor, Caleb McLaughlin, Eric Kofi-Abrefa, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, James McAvoy, and Benedict Cumberbatch. One of Christ’s apostles, you’ll remember, was Thomas. What you didn’t know about Thomas, aside from everything, is that Thomas had an identical twin brother, Clarence, both played by Stanfield. Clarence owes money all over Jerusalem, and the Roman centurions are racially profiling him every time a crime gets reported. How does Clarence extricate himself from the horns of this dilemma? By getting in on the apostle game, and declaring himself the thirteenth such in Christ’s clique. It seems like Samuel is going the route of Monty Python’s Life of Brian — although, you’ll remember, those Oxbridge atheists leaned away from satirizing Christ and instead spoofed the world around him. Well, you’d be half-right, and feeling amused with the whole spectacle, no doubt, until you learn that Jeymes Samuel is dead serious in his religious beliefs. Amidst the laughter, he’ll give you a crucifixion scene straight out of The Passion of the Christ — remember that funny business? Schulz thought the parts of American Fiction don’t line up ultimately; whereas here. . . they definitely do not. Samuel and his producers, which include Tendo Nagenda, James Lassiter, and Jay-Z, evidently aimed for the bleachers with this film. On sheer audacity alone, the effort is applauded: Schulz doesn’t hate it like he did The Beekeeper. As far as overall execution goes, Biblical Satire may have to wait another generation until it gets a film like Life of Brian.
- Society of the Snow, directed by J A Bayona and starring Enzo Vogrincic Roldán, Matías Recalt, Agustín Pardella, Tomas Wolf, Diego Vegezzi, Esteban Kukuriczka, Francisco Romero, Rafael Federman, Felipe González Otaño, Agustín Della Corte, Valentino Alonso, Simón Hempe, Fernando Contigiani García, Benjamín Segura, Rocco Posca, Luciano Chatton, Agustín Berruti, Juan Caruso, Andy Pruss, Santiago Vaca Narvaja, Esteban Bigliardi, Paula Baldini, Federico Aznarez, Alfonsina Carrocio, Silvia Giselle Pereyra, Virginia Kaufmann, Felipe Ramusio, Blas Polidori, Emanuel Parga, Iair Said, Louta, Carlos “Carlitos” Páez, and Maximiliano de la Cruz, is streaming on Netflix. The story involves the Uruguayan 1972 Andes flight disaster. If the material sounds familiar, it’s because it’s been done twice before: Once in 1976, by René Cardona, as Survive! and once in 1993, by Frank Marshall, as Alive. (The latter is the one with Ethan Hawke.) This doesn’t take into account the documentaries about the story, but it’s infiltrated the popular imagination enough that “Andes” has become synonymous with “The Donner Party” as “situations in which you never want to find yourself.” Aside from that, Bayona’s depiction of the events is effective, particularly the crash itself, and his use of first-time actors works in a naturalistic way. Schulz reports having been reduced to “a bawling wreck” by the film’s end. Moving on. . .
- Foe, directed by Garth Davis and starring Saoirse Ronan, Paul Mescal, and Aaron Pierre, is essentially the Season-Six episode of Black Mirror‘s “Beyond the Sea” episode, only duller. Next!
- Good Grief, directed by first-timer Dan Levy and starring Levy, Ruth Negga, Himesh Patel, Celia Imrie, David Bradley, Arnaud Valois, and Luke Evans, was forgotten by Schulz five minutes after he had seen it. When roused to memory, Schulz likened it to a Hallmark film. ‘Nuff said, Schulz. ‘Nuff said.
- Still: A Michael J Fox Movie, a documentary directed by Davis Guggenheim, won four Emmys and is up for Best Documentary at the Oscars. If Still wins, it will be the first doc to win an Emmy and an Oscar. Damn you, streaming! You’re messing with the categories of stuff! It’s not like Life Itself, the 2014 Roger Ebert doc, where you have to look at Ebert for an hour without a chin. Fox has Parkinson’s Disease, but he’s still recognizably Fox — meaning, his condition has gotten bad, but it hasn’t gotten so bad that it’s an ordeal to look at him. It’s streaming on Apple TV+.
No previews this week; Schulz has finished off the provisions. The trio will discuss the Oscar’s next week. Schulz expects Oppenheimer to clean up. So there’s that. . .
“Mean Girls,” “American Fiction,” “The Book of Clarence,” “The Beekeeper,” “Night Swim,” “Society of the Snow,” “Good Grief,” “Foe,” and “Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie”