Barbie: A Review - Pink Bubblegum Bullshit

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!****

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Underwhelming and disappointing. If you’re desperate to see it I’d say save your money and wait until it hits a streaming service.

I had no intention of seeing Barbie, the new blockbuster about the iconic Mattel doll starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, because I didn’t HAVE to see Barbie. You see, when I worked as a cultural critic for RT I had to watch and write about a lot of stuff I wasn’t that interested in simply because other people were interested in it which meant that it was culturally relevant. Well, I no longer work for RT so I no longer have to do that.

So, when Barbie came along, I just thought, due to the film’s obvious cultural politics and the fact that the film’s writer/director is Greta Gerwig – someone whose work I’ve never thought much of, it wasn’t for me so I’d skip this new battle in the endless and tiresome culture war.

But then Barbie, due to its relentless and highly effective marketing campaign, became an undeniable phenomenon, hauling in over a billion dollars at the box office and igniting a fan frenzy not seen at cineplexes in years, so I thought maybe I should see it. And then my wife said she wanted to see it…and whatever Lola wants…Lola gets! My thinking was, if people are going so nuts for this film - then maybe it’s worth seeing.

I went to a 10:30 AM screening on a Tuesday morning. Barbie had been in theaters for over two weeks at this point and still my screening here in mundane Middle America was totally sold out. Barbie is, like the recent Taylor Swift tour, satiating a primal need among our collective feminine culture for a massive communal “event”. An example of this eventizing impulse was that the theater I attended, which admittedly is not particularly big, looked like a sea of Pepto Bismol as it was overwhelmingly packed with pink wearing middle aged women (including one wearing just a big pink t-shirt…which didn’t cover nearly enough of her nether regions as it should have!) as well as teenage and pre-pubescent girls donning a ton of pink…along with some rather unfortunate looking pink-clad teen boys imprisoned in the friend zone desperate to win favor with their girl crushes with whom they were attending the screening.

My hope in seeing Barbie was that it was good and that I’d like it – I wasn’t the least bit interested in hate watching it. I fully expected to dislike the de rigueur girl power politics – something which I find to be pitiful and pathetic, but I hoped to like the film despite its predictable politics…something which I often do (for example my review of Promising Young Woman) if for no other reason than my own personal politics are so unorthodox.

The opening scene was a perfect example of what I was hoping for…as the film opens with a glorious homage to Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, where Gerwig replaces Kubrick’s monkeys with little girls playing with baby dolls and the mysterious monolith is replaced with a towering Margot Robbie as Barbie. While I was off-put by the visual of little girls smashing babies (even if they are dolls) in reaction to their newfound Barbie evolution, I still nodded in approval at this brilliant bit of moviemaking and it filled me with great anticipation for what followed.

And then I watched the rest of the movie. Unfortunately, it was all downhill from there as the film meandered aimlessly through a convoluted yet corporate cookie-cutter plot, allergic to profundity or purpose, and never even remotely approaching the genius of its opening.

In totality Barbie is an underwhelming, disappointing, cheap, shoddy, shitty, bland, boring, corporate money-grab wrapped in a vacant, vapid and vacuous feminist manifesto. In other words, Barbie is a poorly made version of exactly the thing it often pretends to belittle and/or satirize.

The film begins in Barbieland, a matriarchal utopia devoid of not only male power but babies or children….even the lone pregnant Barbie is exiled to the outskirts of girl boss heaven. The bit of the film initially set in Barbieland is ever-so-slightly amusing at first and then it gets old very, very fast. There’s a dance number in this Barbieland sequence that is supposed to be fun and funny but that is so anemic and tiresome as to be astounding. The low point is when Gerwig uses a ridiculously cliched record scratch to inject reality into the phony festivities. Yawn.

The final two-thirds of the film feature Barbie venturing to the “real world” – which is nothing like the actual real world, and the “real world” venturing in to Barbieland. All of it is sloppy but the scenes in the “real world”, in particular, are a total storytelling and cinematic shit show devoid of any redeeming cinematic qualities. The Barbie in the real-world, fish-out-of-water stuff shockingly doesn’t even muster a minimal amount of comedy.

To be fair, I did laugh out loud a few times during Barbie, all thanks to the aggressively amusing Ryan Gosling who absolutely crushes it as the desperate and dim-witted Ken. Gosling is destined to be nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his unbreakable and unshakeable performance as Barbie’s platonic boy toy.

Speaking of the Oscars, it’s 100% guaranteed that there will be a Barbie-themed musical number at this year’s Oscar ceremony. You can absolutely bet your life on that. You can also count on Mattel to turn the success of the Barbie movie into a Broadway musical…which is an eerily similar concept to the hysterically funny Marvel musical featured in the Disney Plus series Hawkeye…except Mattel won’t be making the Barbie musical ironically.

Margot Robbie is ridiculously gorgeous and perfect as Barbie but there isn’t much there, there. Robbie’s physical perfection is all she needs to play this part and when she’s asked to do more than that her acting is undercut by a really abysmal script that is chock full of cringe, freshman level women’s studies diatribes that ring hollow and feel forced making Barbie feel less human than she already is.

Besides the glorious Gosling, the other supporting performances in Barbie are shockingly devoid of life.

Who knew that both Kate McKinnon and Will Ferrell could not only be so unfunny, but so bland and so forgettable? You’d be hard pressed to find two more energized comedic actors but on Barbie they seem constrained to the point of comatose.

Somewhat surprising is that for a movie full of Barbies, there’s only one attractive one in the bunch – Margot Robbie…and she is certainly very attractive despite the sneaky and obtuse internet marketing campaign prior to the film’s release arguing that she isn’t. I have no problem with a Barbie movie featuring the vast diversity of the Barbie doll collection…which means we get a black Barbie, a fat Barbie, a wheelchair Barbie, a trans-Barbie and so on…but what befuddles me is why do all these Barbies have to be so “beauty-impaired” and visually unappealing?

The rest of the supporting cast are all interchangeable, dull and completely forgettable. Issa Rae and Simu Liu are like two sides of the same charisma-deficient coin. Neither one is remotely interesting or likeable.

Michael Cera as Allan feels like he’s in an entirely different movie…maybe because the script he has to work with is so incoherent and idiotic.

America Ferrera plays Gloria, a mom and Mattel employee, and she is utterly abysmal. She does get to have the big monologue in the movie which begins with “it’s literally impossible to be a woman…” and goes downhill from there. This monologue has middle-aged women across the nation pumping their fists in the air like gold chain and muscle shirt wearing Guidos at a Rocky movie when the Italian Stallion gets off the canvas and beats the shit out of the villain du jour. But here’s the thing…I understand the perspective behind the “it’s literally impossible to be a woman” monologue, but the fact is it isn’t “literally” impossible to be a woman…billions of women do it every minute of every day. Yes, it is no doubt difficult to be a woman due to the constant contradictions one must navigate…but you know what else is equally difficult…being a man. The obstacles and difficulties one must face and overcome as a woman are no harder than the ones men must overcome, they’re just different.

Life is hard for human beings, and for modern day feminists to claim empowerment by perpetually play the victim all while demonizing men, is pretty repugnant and frankly counterproductive.

Barbie also does what our awful culture has normalized which is to conflate masculinity with toxic masculinity, a perilous proposition since it is unquestionably masculine men that carved out a safe space in a dangerous world where women are free to make insipid and insidious films about how awful men are.

My wife, a very, very independent, powerful and, dare I say it, feminist woman, turned to me after the film and the first thing she said was that she found it to be “damaging”. As the mother of a young son, she felt the film sent a negative message to girls and woman not just about the nature of men and boys but about what it means to be a girl/woman, so much so that it depressed her and made her fear for the future. And I must say, I completely concur with her astute observations.

I’ve heard it said that Barbie is Black Panther for white women, and that is very true as Black Panther was an overhyped, shitty movie too that became super successful because seeing it was an act of cultural-political virtue signaling.

Other movies have somewhat captured the cultural political zeitgeist in the same way that Barbie has but from a different angle. For example, Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper was a terrible movie but flag waving numbskulls flocked to see and support it because it reinforced their patriotic – or rather anti-liberal, bona fides. That American Sniper was a God-awful movie regardless of its politics was irrelevant as all the flag-wavers loved it even before it started – they loved it simply because it existed…just like the pink clad buffoons are enamored by Barbie regardless of how obviously bad it is.

Sound of Freedom is another movie that is a virtue signal movie currently in theatres. Sound of Freedom is about the scourge of child trafficking and has become a cause celebre for anti-libtard right wingers and as a result has done exceedingly well at the box office – raking in over a hundred million dollars. No doubt the crossover of American Sniper fans with Sound of Freedom fans is enormous. I’ve not seen Sound of Freedom…mostly because I just assume it is poorly made…but I can plainly see that it’s a virtue signal movie just like Barbie.

Another film I thought of when watching Barbie was, ironically enough, The Passion of the Christ. Mel Gibson’s 2004 film smashed box office records for an independent film and made him something like half a billion dollars since he financed it himself. Gibson wisely marketed the film directly to churches and church groups and it became a cultural signifier among Bush loving right wingers.

The marketing of The Passion of the Christ was remarkable, as, just like Barbie, everyone was talking about it even if they hadn’t seen it. Barbie’s marketing was brilliant because it removed the film’s politics from the campaign, made it seem as if it were for adults AND kids (it’s not for kids!) and it was absolutely everywhere. You couldn’t escape the Barbie marketing machine, and frankly still can’t. That the marketing campaign has succeeded in making Barbie a cultural phenomenon doesn’t diminish the fact that the movie is garbage.

Truth be told I’ve never understood the critical love for Greta Gerwig’s films. Gerwig’s 2017 film Lady Bird was so overrated as to be astonishing. Critics adored the film yet I found it to be painfully thin and embarrassingly amateurish. It seemed to me that Gerwig, much like Jordan Peele who came out with Get Out in the same year (2017), was cashing in on the angry liberal political hysteria of the post-Trump election and were being elevated due to their race and gender, not their talent. Having seen both of Gerwig’s and Peele’s films since 2017 has only reinforced my belief regarding their lack of talent and skill and the absurd critical love they’ve received.

As for Barbie, I’ve had a rather interesting perspective on the film as I’ve watched from a distance as the usual suspects on both the left and right instinctively and reflexively loved or hated the film. Having finally seen the movie I can say that people who love it, who when pressed on its numerous shortcomings all say the same thing in defense of it, namely that “it’s fun!”, are delusional dupes and dopes. On the flip side, many of the critics reflexively hating it are so stuck on its politics that they don’t even care to examine the filmmaking….which feels less delusional than just plain disingenuous.

As for me, I didn’t like Barbie for the sole reason that Barbie isn’t a good movie.  Barbie isn’t funny and it isn’t interesting. That the film pretends to be rebellious, if not revolutionary, in its messaging, but then spews out the most corporate-friendly and approved, pedantic neo-feminist pablum, wrapped in a cavalcade of visually listless, dramatically lifeless, comedically flaccid scenes, makes it feel like watching a pink-hued Human Resources film for corporate employees to learn the new Diversity, Equity and Inclusion office rules.

The bottom line is that the masses being so enamored of Barbie says considerably less about the quality of the movie than it does about the easily manipulated morons populating our world and their astonishing level of group-think and gullibility, as well as the sorry state of our society and cinema.

Unfortunately, so few people nowadays are self-aware or introspective enough to resist massive marketing campaigns like the one around Barbie, which brainwashed otherwise intelligent people into not only mindlessly devouring this odious, rancid corporate pink taco but declaring they love it. I too succumbed and took a bite of the gigantic, rancid corporate pink taco that is Barbie, but to my minimal credit I at least am not foolish enough to don an oversized pink t-shirt sans pants and shriek “yummy…how fun!”

In conclusion, it is literally impossible for me to recommend Barbie.

Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2023

Bardo, False Chroncile of a Handful of Truths: A Review - Inarritu's Head Up Inarritu's Ass

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. A self-aggrandizing, self-pitying, self-righteous, and self-indulgent…not to mention pretentious, piece of crap.

In case you’d forgotten, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu has won two Best Director Academy Awards – for Birdman and The Revenant, which puts him in some very rarified air. To put into context, Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola have one Best Directing Oscar each, and Stanley Kubrick and Robert Altman have none.

I readily admit that I enjoyed Birdman (2014) and thought it was clever, and in hindsight its critique of superhero culture was spot-on and before its time, but I also thought the film badly bungled its ending.

I thought The Revenant (2015) was a flawed film but was deeper than it appeared on the surface and became much more interesting when seen through Jungian dream analysis rather than through the pop culture lens.

Except for those two films, Inarritu’s filmography is littered with some truly abysmal and pretentious pieces of work. For example, Inarritu’s 2006 shlockfest Babel may be the worst ‘taken seriously’ movie of the 21st Century…and its main competition is another Inarritu movie, 2003’s 21 Grams.

Which brings us to Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths, Inarritu’s newest cinematic venture, which is currently streaming on Netflix.

Bardo, which was a Netflix production and hit the streaming service October 27th, was written and directed by Inarritu and stars Daniel Giminez Cacho and Griselda Siciliani.

The movie, which describes itself as an epic black comedy-drama, is a fictional, pseudo-autobiographical story that chronicles Silverio Gama – a sort of stand in for Inarritu himself, as he navigates his life as a big-time journalist and documentarian who immigrated from Mexico to the U.S.

Gama wrestles with his career success, his critics, his artistry, his family, his grief, and his past, as well as the past of Mexico and his guilt over having left the country of his birth. Of course, these are all the same things with which Inarritu grapples.

Bardo, which runs two hours and forty minutes, is another in a bevy of films this year made by auteurs examining their own lives in feature films. For example, I recently reviewed Armageddon Time, James Gray’s dismal autobiographical effort, and I’ve yet to see Spielberg’s The Fabelmans or Sam Mendes’ Empire of Light.

I will say this about The Fabelmans and Empire of Light…it is absolutely impossible for them to be worse than Bardo. Bardo is bad-o. Really bad-o. Like excruciatingly bad-o. Like so bad it makes the awful Armageddon Time feel like Citizen Kane.

Bardo, which has a grueling two-hour and forty-minute run time, is somewhat remarkable as it’s simultaneously self-aggrandizing, self-pitying, self-righteous, and self-indulgent.

The problem with Bardo is not cinematic incompetence on the part of Inarritu. If Inarritu is anything it’s competent. He knows how to shoot a film and make beautiful images – and he’s aided in this effort by cinematographer Darius Khondji (who…curiously, also shot Armageddon Time – poor bastard). What Inarritu doesn’t know how to do is turn off his ego and turn down his adolescent maudlin impulses in order to tell a coherent and compelling story.

Bardo is supposed to be infused with magical realism but is devoid of magic and allergic to realism. In their stead Inarritu injects an extraordinary lack of subtlety and pronounced heavy-handedness as well as a steaming hot serving of middlebrow bourgeois bullshit philosophy.

This movie is, without exaggeration, literally a director bitching about how persecuted he is by critics, how envied he is by jealous less successful people, and imagining how devastated everyone will be when he dies. This is more akin to something a petulant teenager would dream up as they cry in their bedroom after their parents refused to buy them a sports car for their sixteenth birthday than something an adult filmmaker should put in a feature.

To give you an indication of what an absolute shitshow Bardo is, consider this…the film features a graphic scene where a baby is literally pushed back into a vagina, and another scene where Gama’s adult face is CGI’d onto a little kid as he has a discussion with his father in a sort of dream like sequence. Did I mention it was heavy-handed? Yikes!

In addition to all of that self-serving navel gazing, Inarritu also throws colonialism and anti-Mexican racism shit against the wall to see if any of it sticks…and none of it does.

Then there’s the virtuoso filmmaking stuff, like the extended, one-shot dance scene, which I was supposed to be impressed by but which I wasn’t impressed by.

What’s astonishing about Bardo is that Inarritu has made himself the hero of the story but only succeeds in exposing himself as being relentlessly unlikable. The Inarritu character Gama is one of the most punchable people to have graced the silver screen this year, and maybe this decade.

Even the film’s more interesting visual sequences, like when people start dropping dead in Mexico City, is derivative. I saw the same sequence done better in a Radiohead music video nearly thirty years ago.

Speaking of derivative, it seems to me that with Bardo Inarritu was trying to copy/emulate his fellow Mexican director Alfonso Cuaron’s film Roma (2018), and maybe even Terrence Malick’s Knight of Cups (2015). Roma is a brilliant, magical realist, autobiographical story about growing up in Mexico, and Knight of Cups is, in my opinion, a dreamlike masterpiece about navigating the hell of Hollywood and moviemaking.

The problem though is that Inarritu is no Cuaron and no Malick. He lacks their deftness, their depth and their profundity. Inarritu is an artistic poseur. A pretentious pretender who thinks cinematically pouting and preening is equivalent to being profound.

What is bothersome about Inarritu’s failure on Bardo is that we are witnessing the end of the auteur era at Netflix. The streaming giant in recent years made the decision to throw money at auteurs and let them do what they want. In the case of Cuaron, David Fincher and Martin Scorsese, that decision was cinematically fruitful as it gave us Roma, Mank and The Irishman. This year the two auteurs blessed by Netflix’s desire for prestige were Noah Baumbach and Inarritu, and they delivered the excrement filled dump-trucks that were White Noise and Bardo. It should not be a shock that Netflix announced this year that they will no longer throw money at auteurs…thanks Baumbach and Inarritu.

The bottom line is that Bardo may finally expose Inarritu for the philosophically trite filmmaking fraud that he is. His elevation to the heights of Hollywood success is more a testament to the buffoonery of the movie business than to the artistic genius of Inarritu.

Whatever one may think of Inarritu as a filmmaker, there is simply no denying that Bardo is an artistic catastrophe of epic proportions. This movie is nothing but a vacuous, vapid and vain exercise in cinematic masturbation. Avoid it at all costs.

©2023

White Noise: A Review - Sound and Fury Signifying Nothing

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. An unconscionably boring and banal, poorly written, directed and acted movie. I’d rather die in an airborne toxic event than watch this movie again. Go read the book instead.

It has been said that White Noise, Don DeLillo’s classic 1985 postmodern novel, was unfilmable, and now with Noah Baumbach’s flaccid cinematic adaptation now streaming on Netflix, that assertion has been proven true.

At the very end of Baumbach’s brutally boring and banal White Noise something miraculous occurs. After enduring two-hours and sixteen minutes of the most middling of middlebrow and mundane moviemaking, the film ends with all of the characters doing a choreographed dance sequence in a supermarket to a new LCD Soundsystem song while the credits roll. This credit rolling scene pulsates with the wit, vitality, frivolity and vibrancy that is entirely devoid from the film that precedes it, and highlights the glory of what could have been.

White Noise stars Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig and Don Cheadle, and tells the story of Jack Gladney (Driver), a professor of Hitler Studies at the College on the Hill, his wife Babette (Gerwig) and their four kids as they navigate life and contemplate death in 1980’s America.

The book is a clever postmodern meditation on existentialism amidst the controlling and conformist nature of America’s toxic, pre-packaged consumerist culture. Baumbach’s movie though is so poorly written, directed and acted that it barely scrapes the surface of those meaty topics and ends up being little more than an arthouse version of one of those Are We There Yet? movies starring Ice Cube.

Baumbach’s film tries to be an incisive satire of the 80’s, but ends up being an insufferable, self-indulgent, instantaneously forgettable piece of work largely due to a script that’s intolerably verbose with contrived dialogue that feels dramatically lethargic, if not leaden.

Baumbach’s decision to makes some changes to DeLillo’s novel, like adding a silly car chase scene and injecting Babette into the climactic sequence, not only dumbs down the material but is actively at cross-purposes with the drama and tone of the story.

The car chase in particular is cringe-worthy. The car mishap and drive through the river and woods that leads to a jump into a field is the most hackneyed, inane, embarrassing thing any filmmaker has done this year…and I say that having seen Amsterdam.

The fact that Baumbach added the car chase and yet cut from the film the scene in the book where Jack’s youngest son Wilder goes on a perilous and harrowing big wheel journey, is pretty telling of the kind of director he is…which is spineless and sackless.

To Baumbach’s credit, the credit rolling dance sequence really is infectiously enjoyable, as is a scene mid-film where Jack and fellow professor Murray co-lecture a class about Hitler and Elvis in a sort of dueling intellectual dance. Those two scenes are literally the only things that are remotely watchable in White Noise, and beg the question, why didn’t Baumbach make the whole film with that type of absurdist energy?

And I suppose it’s also to Baumbach’s credit that he attempts some ambitious things on White Noise, like using a few 360-degree shots, and imitating/paying homage to different directors, like Spielberg – whom he imitates by injecting some controlled familial messiness ala early Spielberg, or Robert Altman, whom he copies by having overlapping dialogue and conversations throughout scenes.

Unfortunately, Baumbach’s Spielbergian familial messiness feels a little too contrived and manufactured and his Altman-esque overlapping dialogue scenes feel unintelligible, cluttered and irritating because they’re undermined by subpar sound design and Netflix’s notoriously poor audio quality.

Baumbach is adored by critics but I find his filmography to be hit or miss…mostly miss. I liked the flawed The Squid and the Whale, and found While We’re Young to be amusing, but everything else is odious dogshit masquerading as arthouse gold. A perfect example was Marriage Story, Baumbach’s last film – which was nominated for Best Picture and Best Screenplay despite being an absolutely heinous, heaping pile of flaming garbage.

Baumbach’s films are usually much smaller in terms of scope, scale and budget than White Noise. This movie has a reported budget of $100 million, with some reports stating $140 million, and Baumbach doesn’t seem to know what to do with it. The film looks paper-thin and unconscionably cheap, with the exception being the gloriously staged supermarket with its spot-on color scheme and period proper pricing and products.

Maybe the budget went to the cast, but if so, that was a huge waste of money.

Adam Driver is horribly miscast as the lead Jack Gladney and gives an absolutely dreadful performance. Driver, like Baumbach, is a critical darling, but pinning down why exactly people think he’s a good actor is as elusive as getting a hug from Bigfoot – a role I’d actually like to see Driver play because then you wouldn’t see him much and when you did, he’d be hidden under make up and hopefully wouldn’t talk.

Greta Gerwig is another critical darling, and she’s in a long-term relationship with Baumbach, so they’re sort of the critical darling couple of American cinema. Gerwig plays Jack’s wife Babette and is abysmal in the role. Gerwig is nothing, she’s a dead-eyed, empty vessel entirely devoid of any gravitas or inner life. She’s like a tumbleweed rolling through scenes with no grounding and no life.

The rest of the cast are equally lifeless and/or underused.

Don Cheadle is never given enough to do. Andre Benjamin is a glorified extra. Poor Raffey Cassidy is distracting because she looks like a trans Harry Potter.

White Noise claims it is an “absurdist comedy drama”, but while the absurdity is self-evident, the comedy and drama are non-existent. There is nothing interesting, insightful, amusing or engaging in this entire two-hour and sixteen-minute venture except for the fun music video at the end.

If you’ve read the DeLillo book you’ll be entirely underwhelmed by Baumbach’s movie adaptation, as it loses everything in translation. If you’ve not read the book, you’ll be bored out of your mind watching Baumbach’s movie, not to mention completely lost in terms of its incomprehensible and incoherent plot.

The bottom line is that Baumbach’s White Noise is just another in a long line of directorial disappointments over the last few years in the world of cinema. The cinematic drought since 2019 is real and feels like it might even be getting worse.

I hope 2023 marks a turn-around for the art of cinema, but if the last few years have taught me anything, it’s that just when you think movies have hit bottom, and 2022 sure feels like the bottom, there’s always some deeper level of hell for things to fall to.

So, skip White Noise on Netflix as it’s a total waste of time, but if you’re interested maybe pick up DeLillo’s book and give it a read instead. It’s not transformational, but it is, unlike the movie, amusing. That’s how bad movies have gotten, I’m now recommending you go read a book. God help us all.

©2023

6th Annual Slip-Me-A-Mickey™ Awards: 2019 Edition

The Slip-Me-A-Mickey™® awards are a tribute to the absolute worst that film and entertainment has to offer for the year. Again, the qualifying rules are simple, I just had to have seen the film for it to be eligible. This means that at one point I had an interest in the film and put the effort in to see it, which may explain why I am so angry about it being awful. So any vitriol I may spew during this awards presentation shouldn't be taken personally by the people mentioned, it is really anger at myself for getting duped into watching.

The prizes are also pretty simple. The winners/losers receive nothing but my temporary scorn. If you are a winner/loser don't fret, because this years Slip-Me-A-Mickey™® loser/winner could always be next years Mickey™® winner!! Remember…you are only as good as your last film!!

Now…onto the awards!

WORST FILM OF THE YEAR

Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker - The geniuses at Disney decided it would be a good idea to strip the final film of the Skywalker saga of all dramatic consequences…well done shitbags! A mind numbingly incoherent movie that does away with death…and drama…and interest.

Knives Out - This is less a whodunit than a who-inherits-it. A film so full of white self loathing it should run for the Democratic nomination. It is nice to see director Rian Johnson ruining original films after he ruined his Star Wars movie.

X-Men: Dark Phoenix - One of the cheapest, least consequential and poorly made superhero movies in recent memory. Thankfully it is so flimsy you literally forget it as you watch it.

The Souvenir - This art house poseur is such a vacuous and pretentious piece of garbage it made me want to shoot heroin into my eyes. A truly awful film.

AND THE LOSER IS…Knives Out - If watching terrible over-acting, being completely bored to tears, and hating white people is your thing…then this steaming pile of shit is for you. This mess of a movie is so self-satisfied with its wokeness it is incessantly imbecilic to the point of absurdity. A glorious monument to everything that is currently wrong with Hollywood.

WORST PERFORMANCE OF THE YEAR - Julie Hagerty - Marriage Story : Julie Haggerty is a tour-de-force of awfulness in Marriage Story. Haggerty didn’t light up the screen but made me want to light myself on fire every time she appeared. Haggerty’s forced and strained performance felt like watching someone have a stroke while you are having a stroke.

WORST SCENE OF THE YEAR - Marriage Story - Being Alive : You would be hard pressed to find a worse scene in cinema in recent history than the one in Marriage Story where Adam Driver gets up and sings “Being Alive” by Stephen Sondheim at a karaoke bar. Driver is a shitty actor…and this is a shitty movie…but this scene…which is interminable…is the apex mountain of pretentious shittiness. I have never wished harder for a random act of violence in a movie than I did watching this scene.

MOST OVERRATED FILM OF THE YEAR - Marriage Story : Establishment critics adore Noah Baumbach for some mysterious reason (I have a theory to explain it called the Elvis Costello Theory!). Marriage Story was Baumbach at his most pretentious and phony…and he brought the sycophantic worst out of his adoring critics. The praise for this movie is utterly baffling as this is an actively awful movie. The performances are dreadful, the writing trite and the direction amateurish…but besides that it was really good.

SPECIAL ACHIEVEMENT IN CINEMATIC MALPRACTICE - JJ Abrams : Rise of Skywalker - It takes a special kind of asshole to take a gigantic dump on a beloved forty year old movie franchise…;and JJ Abrams is that asshole. Abrams direction on Rise of Skywalker is jaw droppingly atrocious. The decision to remove death from the Star Wars universe basically undermined the entirety of the previous collection of films. His inability to even tell the most rudimentary of stories, or to put together a coherent film…earns JJ Abrams his Special Achievement in Cinematic Malpractice.

P.O.S. HALL OF FAME

Jeffrey Epstein - Epstein gets his much deserved plaque at the POS Hall of Fame this year for being an insatiable pederast, sexual predator, Israeli spy and for not even having the common decency to kill himself. Epstein is dead of course, but if you think he actually hung himself I have a no-longer-a-Virgin Island to sell you, round-trip Lolita Express transportation included.

Epstein’s fortune, which he used to get close to people in power whom he then compromised by luring them to his underage sex parties, is a complete mirage, no doubt created by Israeli intelligence in order to give him cover as he plied his despicable trade.

Speaking of despicable…Epstein’s client list is a who’s who of scumbags. Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, Prince Andrew, Rupert Murdoch, Henry Kissinger, John Kerry, Tony Blair…and even everybody’s favorite douchebag, Alan Dershowitz. No doubt many, if not all, of Epstein’s clients will soon be joining him in the POS Hall of Fame…and with any luck they’ll also be joining him in hell soon too.

If you want to understand the demonic cult at the heart of the ruling elite and powerful in America and across the globe…look closely at the Epstein affair. This is who these people are…and their brazen murder of Epstein, and the media’s allergy to actually taking the story seriously, reveals their depravity and arrogance.

P.O.S. ALL-STARS

Bret Bed Bug Stephens - Stephens has always been a gigantic piece of shit…but he raised his game this year with his chickenshit claims that people pointing out his awfulness were anti-semitic, which was quickly followed by his attempt to get one of said critics who called him a “bed bug” fired. Then Mr. Bed Bug wrote a repugnant piece boasting of his and his fellows Jews’ superiority over other peoples. I look forward to picking Mr. Bed Bug’s teeth out of my knuckles one day.

Chris “Fredo” Cuomo - Chris Cuomo is easily the dumbest person to have ever appeared on television…which is an astounding achievement. Cuomo, who hosts an unwatchable program on CNN, makes the POS All Stars this year by threatening some guy at a party who called him “Fredo”. Cuomo claimed that calling Italians “Fredo” was just like calling black people the “n-word”. Ok Fredo…oops…is it better if I call you a fucking numbnuts dago greaseball guinea wop twat? Or better yet…how bout when i meet you I don’t say anything and just gouge your eyes out and skull fuck you, you useless piece of shit.

And thus concludes another Slip-Me-A-Mickey™® awards. If you are one of the people who “won” this year I ask you to please not to take it personally and also to try and do better next year….because remember…this years Slip-Me-A-Mickey™® award winner could be next year’s Mickey™® Award winner!!

©2020

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota Podcast!

HELLO READERS!

Well, after many requests over many years, I’ve finally broken down and done a podcast. Whether that is reason to celebrate or mourn will be left up to you.

The podcast is dedicated to cinema and my co-host, the inimitable Barry Andersson, a filmmaker and cinematographer based in Minneapolis. In general we will discuss a film per episode although that format is not set in stone.

The title of the podcast is Looking California and Feeling Minnesota.

Our first film discussed in Marriage Story.

The podcast is a work in progress, so thanks for giving it a listening!

Marriage Story: A Review

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 1.75 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. A vacuous, vapid and phony film riddled with mannered and manufactured performances that are so grating as to be repulsive. This interminable mess of a movie is an art house poseur and critical fool’s gold.

Marriage Story is written and directed by Noah Baumbach and is his pseudo-autobiographical tale of the Barbers, a married couple with a young son going through a divorce. The film stars Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson with supporting turns from Laura Dern, Ray Liotta, Alan Alda, Julie Haggerty and Merritt Weaver.

Marriage Story has marketed itself as a dramatically potent and poignant domestic drama, which is a genre that, when properly executed, appeals to me greatly. Due to its marketing campaign and the overwhelming amount of critical acclaim Marriage Story has been receiving, I was very excited to watch the movie over the Christmas holiday. Thankfully the film is currently streaming on Netflix which meant I wouldn’t have to trek out the theatres to catch it, but I would have to find two hours and sixteen minutes of my life to dedicate to watching it uninterrupted…no small task. Last night I finally got the chance to see it…and to say it was a let down would be the understatement of the new decade…and maybe the last one too.

The bottom line is this…Marriage Story is awful. It is really, truly awful. The acting, which has gotten resounding praise and is generating very loud awards buzz, is abysmal. The directing and writing is utterly atrocious. I am genuinely shocked and appalled that serious people think this mess of a movie is a serious film.

Marriage Story is supposedly loosely based on writer/director Noah Baumbach’s own divorce from actress Jennifer Jason-Leigh in 2013. Like Baumbach, the lead male character Charlie is a director and New Yorker, and like the female lead character Nicole, Jennifer Jason-Leigh is a Los Angeles born and bred second generation actor (her father was Vic Morrow), and like Baumbach and Leigh, Charlie and Nicole have a young son caught in the middle of their divorce.

Writing about yourself, even under the guise of slightly different characters, is standard operating procedure for artists, but in Baumbach and Marriage Story’s case…it feels like some pretty toxic narcissistic behavior. The reason for this is that the film unabashedly holds Charlie in the highest regard and can’t stop saying what a genius he is…going so far as to bestow upon him a MacArthur Fellowship Grant. Charlie’s greatest fault is that he cares about his art too much and is too dedicated. Baumbach seems to be using Marriage Story as some sort of art house fake out in order to humble brag.

The issues with Marriage Story are numerous, and one of the most glaring is the acting. The film is a sort of character study with the character being a married couple played by Scarlett Johannson and Adam Driver. The acting approach deployed in this film by the vast majority of the cast is a heightened, very theatrical style. The end result of this acting approach is that the characters all all feel incredibly phony and manufactured…like something you’d see in any acting class on any night of the week in New York or Los Angeles. I have lived my entire adult life in the New York and Los Angeles acting world and I can tell you that none of the characters in Marriage Story even remotely resemble real people. Marriage Story is populated by hyper-shticky, sitcom level cardboard cutout characters.

Nothing on screen in this movie is genuine, grounded or even remotely interesting. Due to the acting in Marriage Story getting so much acclaim, I have a genuine fear that this movie will set back the art and craft of acting decades, if not millennia…and if there are any aspiring actors out there, please listen to me now, do not try and emulate the style of acting on display in Marriage Story as it is the polar opposite of what you should be trying to do.

Now, to be fair, the two main characters, Charlie and Nicole, are a theatre director and actress, so I understand somewhat the theatrical flair on display, but the tone-deaf, over-the-top nature of the entire cast is so pronounced that no one and nothing in this world rings true. The lack of genuine characters and situations drains the film of all potential drama and emotional impact, thus rendering the film entirely impotent.

Adam Driver is getting serious Oscar hype over his performance as Charlie, the esteemed theatre director. Driver’s work in Marriage Story barely rises above being not-embarrassing, and should never in a million years be considered Oscar worthy. Driver tries to push and prod himself to give his performance depth and meaning but he strains so hard against the flaccid script it is like watching a constipated dog trying to take a much needed dump. Regardless of how hard he is working, the end result is the same as the dog…an itchy case of hemorrhoids and/or a stinky mess on the carpet.

Scarlett Johansson play Charlie’s wife and one-time theatrical muse, Nicole. It is difficult to put into words how repulsed I was by Johansson’s performance. At one point Johansson does an extended monologue that is so mannered and forced I felt like I was watching a high school drama student rehearse her audition for the school play in her bedroom mirror. It was at this point that I turned to my movie watching companion, an actress of some note who shall remain nameless, and asked, “is the acting in this movie as bad as I think it is?” She turned to me and in the most droll way possible simply replied, “yes…it most certainly is.”

Laura Dern plays Nora, Nicole’s divorce attorney, and she one ups Johansson in acting awfulness. Dern’s performance is so relentlessly fabricated and false it actually made my stomach hurt. I consider myself a fan of Laura Dern but her work in Marriage Story is excruciatingly vacuous and fraudulent.

By far the worst performance of the film is Julie Haggerty as Nicole’s mother, Sandra. Haggerty’s work in Marriage Story would be considered ‘too big’ even if she were wearing a red nose and big shoes center stage at a circus. Haggerty is not quite matched in acting awfulness by Wallace Shawn, but he does give it the old college try.

The only quality performance in the entire film is delivered by none other than Alan Alda. Alda plays Charlie’s lawyer Bert, and does such subtle and grounded work it is remarkable, especially considering the shitshow of acting going on around him. Alda’s Bert is the only character in the entire film who even remotely seems like a real person living in a real world. I found Alda’s performance, which is not very big, to be the most profound and poignant in the whole movie.

As for the direction and writing of the film, Noah Baumbach gets to take all the blame. Baumbach is obviously trying to pay a little bit of homage to movies like Scenes From a Marriage and Kramer vs Kramer, but he is simply in way over his head in trying to make a movie of any meaning or worth. Marriage Story proves, without question, that Baumbach is no Bergman (Scenes From a Marriage), hell, he isn’t even in the same class of movie makers as Robert Benton (Kramer vs Kramer).

It is Baumbach’s fault that the film is disjointed dramatically and entirely devoid of any notable craft or skill. Baumbach’s writing rings completely false and is akin to a really bad stage play for its artistic bombast, faux sincerity and grandiosity. In addition, all of the film’s characters are cutesy caricatures that bear no resemblance to any normal human being, they are one-dimensional props in Baumbach’s autobiographical fantasy. The film even has a couple of musical numbers that are so trite and contrived they made me throw my shoe at the television in frustration. Nothing in this film is believable, no dramatic notes ring true, none of the settings or characters feel in any way, shape or form, to be genuine. The entire film is a fraud and at best a farce.

The visual style of the film is flat and dull, which only emphasizes the absurdity of the performances and writing. Cinematographer Robbie Ryan, whose most notable work was on The Favourite, is filming a serious and gritty domestic drama (which is what the film is marketing itself as), but Baumbach and cast are making a farcical, near-absurdist comedy, and the mismatch is painful to watch.

I am not a superfan of Noah Baumbach, but I have enjoyed some of his other work. I thought The Squid and the Whale, another but much better “divorce movie”, was excellent, and was even pleasantly surprised by While We’re Young. But beyond those two films, I find his work to be strikingly sub-par. Other critics absolutely adore Baumbach…but I have yet to figure out why that is. My best guess is that, much like Van Halen front man David Lee Roth once said about critical adoration of Elvis Costello, maybe critics like Noah Baumbach so much because they look so much like Noah Baumbach.

Another theory I have as to why Baumbach is a critical darling is that critics are desperate to fill the Woody Allen void now that the old pedophile is radioactive. So critics have chosen Baumbach to be the perpetual winner of the Woody Allen Memorial - Critical Darling For Writing Hackneyed Shit Award. Woody Allen’s critical success has always baffled me, as his movie’s cinematic value are minimal at best, and it seems I will have the same relationship with Baumbach going forward. In my opinion, Noah Baumbach is not much of a serious director but is instead a cinematic charlatan, a maker of vacuous and shallow films who is incapable of creating anything of much artistic significance or dramatic profundity.

Marriage Story is nothing but vacant critical hype and, as a friend said to me after I saw it, is akin to a “Hallmark movie for hipsters”. The film is nowhere near worthy of your time or attention and should be avoided at all costs. Besides Alan Alda’s Bert, I had a visceral hatred for every single character in this movie, even the little kid, so much so that at one point Charlie walks into Nicole’s house and asks if anyone is home and is met with eerie silence and I said out loud “God I hope there was a gas leak that killed every single one of them”. Sadly, there was no gas leak, in the movie or in my own house, to end the suffering that was my experience of Marriage Story.

In conclusion, do not wed yourself to Marriage Story, instead run as fast as you can from this piece of fraudulent phony baloney. There are other cinematic fish in the sea besides this movie, and I promise that there is no possible way they will stink as much as Marriage Story.

©2020

Top 10 Films of the Decade - 2010's Edition

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes 24 seconds

Much to my surprise, I have been seeing a large number of writers putting out their “Best of the Decade” list in recent weeks. I was surprised by this because I had no idea the decade was ending. At my very best I barely know what day it is nevermind what month or year. Just this morning I saw a headline declaring the best movies of 2020 and had to stop and think about it a few moments and then eventually check my iPhone and make sure our current year wasn’t 2020 (the article was predicting what will be great in 2020).

Once I discovered that the 2010’s are actually ending just next week, I figured it was my duty to put together my own cinematic retrospective on the decade. In compiling my list I was wary of recency bias and tried to keep films from this year at arm’s length…but the problem is that 2019 is easily the best year for movies in the decade and thus far in the millennium…so my list simply HAD to reflect that.

So sit back, relax and enjoy my Best of the 2010’s movie list. As always, keep in mind my list is THE definitive list, and all other lists are incredibly, incredibly stupid and worthless.

BEST ACTION MOVIE OF DECADE

Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) - I was never much of a Mad Max fan at all. Mel Gibson was someone I never appreciated as an actor or action star (or a director for that matter), and the Mad Max phenomenon just passed me by when it was at its height in the 80’s. I missed seeing Fury Road in the theatre out of sheer disinterest, but stumbled upon on it one night on cable television and thought I’d give it a shot because I had no other options. I was ready to bail on the movie pretty quick but it totally hooked me and left me mesmerized to the point of being slack jawed.

Director George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road is insane. It is basically a violent, beautifully shot, continuous car chase. The film is supremely crafted and the long chase is exquisitely conceived, blocked and executed. I am so mad at myself for having not seen Fury Road in the theatres as I can only assume that the spectacle of it all was even more spectacular on the big screen.

Mad Max: Fury Road is a stunning spectacle to behold, a crowning achievement for the action genre and the best action movie of the decade.

BEST FRANCHISE OF DECADE

Planet of the Apes Trilogy - In a remarkable upset I went with Planet of the Apes over the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Marvel had a great decade, no doubt, and dominated at the box office for the entirety of the 2010’s, but the best franchise in terms of quality was Planet of the Apes.

The first film of the reboot, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, came out in 2011 and I thoroughly expected it to be awful. Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes film of 2001 was an absolute catastrophe that, being a huge Planet of the Apes fan since I was a kid, scarred me deeply. When I saw that James Franco was the lead actor in the 2011 reboot I figured this was nothing more than a vacuous money grab by producers trying to cash in on the glory of the older movies. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

Rise was a stellar origin film that appreciated, correctly understood, and properly connected to the mythology of the earlier films from the 60’s and the 70’s, and was followed by the equally fantastic Dawn and War. The CGI now available to filmmakers elevated the myth and material at the heart of the story and turned Planet of the Apes into the top-notch franchise it was always meant to be.

Great performances by Andy Serkis and the rest of the CGI ape-actors turned these films, which could have been a punch line, into a compelling and profound series that is better than anything Marvel, or anyone else, has put out this decade.

MOST OVERRATED FILM OF DECADE

A TIE!

Ladybird (2017)- Ladybird was the Greta Gerwig directed coming of age story set in Sacramento that critics absolutely adored (it has a 98% critical score at Rotten Tomatoes). I found the film to be little more than a sloppily slapped together mish-mash of trite SNL sketches completely devoid of insight, profundity or original ideas. Director Greta Gerwig is the darling of critics because she is the manic pixie dreamgirl of arthouse poseurs…this is only heightened by the fact that she married an arthouse poseur - Noah Baumbach! Look no further than the glowing adoration of her newest beating a dead-horse film, Little Women, for proof of my thesis.

Get Out (2017) - Critics loved Get Out because they were looking for a black director to be their messiah in the wake of the #OscarsSoWhite nonsense. Get Out was a flaccid and forced piece of banal nothingness that exposed the bias of critics and the power of white liberal guilt. For proof of my thesis look no further than Peele’s second film Us…which is a total mess of a movie but which critics adored anyway.

WORST FILM OF DECADE

Detroit (2017)- Detroit attempts to tell the story of the Detroit race riots of 1967 but is so ineptly directed by Kathryn Bigelow that she should have her Oscar (for The Hurt Locker) retroactively revoked for setting the art of filmmaking back four decades. As anyone who has ever been to Detroit can attest, it is easily the worst place in the universe, so maybe Bigelow was doing some meta commentary by making the worst movie ever with the title Detroit to match the awfulness of the city with that moniker…who knows. Regardless, Bigelow’s directorial incompetence is remarkable in a way, as it seems impossible to make a film as dreadful as Detroit. That said, Tom Ford gave it a run with his abysmal Nocturnal Animals, but still fell short. better luck next time Tom.

BEST FILMS OF DECADE

10. Hell or High Water (2016) - Hell or High Water could have been named “Revenge of the Working Class”, as screenwriter Taylor Sheridan’s script accurately captured the desperation of those of us living under the boot of the cancer of American capitalism that is devouring its own. Top notch performances from Jeff Bridges, Ben Foster, Chris Pine and Gil Birmingham (as well as the local hires and those with smaller roles) turn Sheridan’s script into a resonant and powerfully insightful commentary on modern-day America in the forgotten fly-over country.

9. The Big Short (2015) - Adam McKay’s cinematic adaptation of Michael Lewis’ book of the same name, is miraculous. It artfully tells the intricate and dazzlingly complex story of the 2008 housing meltdown with comedic aplomb and dramatic power. A great cast and stellar direction make The Big Short not only one of the best, but one of the most important film of the 2010’s.

8. Phantom Thread (2017) - P.T. Anderson’s collaboration with Daniel Day-Lewis is a mediation on control, power and the toxic and intoxicating brew when the anima is conjured. A twisted, lush and vibrant love story that peels away the skin and reveals the wound on the spirit of a powerful man, and the woman who loves him not despite of it, but because of it. A sumptuous feast for the eyes and the soul, Phantom Thread is powered by the masterful work of P.T. Anderson, Daniel Day-Lewis and Vicky Krieps.

7. Dunkirk (2017) - Dunkirk is a film of exquisite technical precision, insightful political analysis, heart-stopping action and gut-wrenching drama. Director Christopher Nolan is one of the great artistically populist filmmakers of our time and Dunkirk is his most well-made and daring film yet. leave it to Nolan to twist time and perspective in what could have been a straightforward story of British heroism. A solid cast, which include such surprises as boy band star Harry Styles, give excellent performances that are buoyed by some of the very best technical work cinema has ever seen…or heard to be more exact, as the sound in Dunkirk is amazing beyond belief. The best war film of the decade, and one of the greatest masterpieces of the genre.

6. The Master (2012) - The Master boasts the very best acting captured on film in the last decade…and even further in the history of cinema. Joaquin Phoenix reinvents the art of acting as the literally and figuratively twisted Freddie Quell, a recent World War II veteran with a knack for making delicious, delirious and deadly concoctions from bizarre items. The acting clashes between Phoenix and Philip Seymour Hoffman, who plays charismatic cult leader Lancaster Dodd, are absolute sublime perfection. The Master, like its two stars, is a compelling and combustible drama that elevates acting beyond its previous bounds.

5. The Irishman (2019) - The Irishman is a movie about introspection, retrospection and regret. Scorsese’s three and half hour masterpiece is both a genre and career defining and ending classic. The film boasts a solid performance from Robert DeNiro and two stellar supporting turns from Joe Pesci and Al Pacino, who are at their very best. Just as Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven commented on his own career while making his career defining genre, westerns, dramatically obsolete, so does Scorsese have the final word on his career and puts the dramatic nail in the coffin of the genre that, for good or for ill, defined it, the mobster movie.

4. Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood (2019) - This is Tarantino’s most dramatically potent and resonant film. DiCaprio and Pitt give two fantastic performances as a fading star and his stunt double and Margot Robbie is undeniably luminous as Sharon Tate. Tarantino transports audiences back to 1969 in order to tell the story of wishful thinking gone awry. A true masterwork from a master director.

3. Joker (2019) - In a decade where superhero movies ruled supreme, the last and final word on the genre was put forth by an emaciated lunatic with a Quaker’s hair cut. Joker has forever altered the current top genre by dragging it through the gutter and being brave enough to tell the actual truth about our time. When Arthur Fleck tells his disinterested therapist that “all I have are negative thoughts”, he spoke for millions upon millions of people living in the spiritual hell that is capitalism in late stage American empire. Joker is the best comic book movie of all time because it takes a chainsaw to the form and shapes it into an incendiary Taxi Driver/The King of Comedy sequel. Who knew that Todd Phillips of all people, had this level of greatness within him? It helps that Joaquin Phoenix, the best actor on the planet, used his formidable talent and skill to morph into the most interesting and human super villain (or hero) to ever grace the big screen. Joker is a game changer for superhero movies, and thankfully, cinema will never be quite the same.

2. Roma (2018) - Roma is a cinematic tour de force that was an exquisitely conceived and executed film of startling artistic precision and vision. Alfonso Cuaron wrote, directed and was even his own cinematographer on the film that catapulted him into the rarefied air of the cinematic masters.

1. The Tree of Life (2011) - The Tree of Life is not only the best film of the decade, it may very well be the best film of all time. Terrence Malick’s magnum opus veered from the present day to the 1950’s and all the way back to prehistoric times. Malick’s experimental meditation on life and loss covered large swaths of history but never failed to be breath-takingly intimate, thanks in part to sublime cinematography from Emmanuel Lubezki and grounded and genuine performances from Sean Penn, Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain. As spiritually, psychologically, philosophically and theologically profound and insightful a film as has ever been made. With The Tree of Life, Malick takes his place on the Mount Rushmore of filmmakers…and atop my Best of the 2010’s list.

Thus concludes my Best of List of the 2010’s…and soon the 2010’s will end too! Let’s hope the 2020’s will bring us some more great cinema!

©2019

Mind the Generation Gap: While We're Young, A Review

THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!!

A few weeks ago, a delicately beautiful young woman approached me and asked if I wanted to go to the movies with her. "What movie do you want to see?" I asked. "I want to laugh" she said, "let's go see Ben Stiller in While We're Young".  After an extended uncomfortable silence, I dryly retorted, "I thought you said you wanted to laugh."  I had zero interest in seeing While We're Young for a myriad of reasons, not the least of which is that I have an instinctive, gut-level impulse to punch both of the male actors in the film, Ben Stiller and Adam Driver, right in their stupid, idiotic, oh-so-punchable faces. Add to that the fact that I have a pretty strong revulsion to much of writer/director Noah Baumbach's previous work, The Squid and the Whale being the lone and notable exception, and you have a recipe for a nasty case of movie rage on my part. But when a charming young woman asks me to a movie, even a movie I don't want to see, who the hell am I to say no? As I do with all beautiful women, I relented to her request. And so we were off to the theatre to see While We're Young. 

Chalk it up to low expectations, or the attractive lady on my arm, but While We're Young actually won me over. I know, I know, I am just as surprised as you are about this turn of events. I mean, watching Ben Stiller and Adam Driver for an hour and a half sounds more like some heinous form of torture banned by the U.N. rather than a form of entertainment I'd pay for, but gosh darn it if those two punchable asshats didn't pull it off.

Now you may be wondering why I am so strongly repulsed by Stiller and Driver. This is a good question, and I can honestly tell you that I have no idea. Or at least I am not consciously aware of why they irritate me so much.  I've never met them or heard a bad word about either of them personally from anyone I know who knows them. I've actually even enjoyed some Ben Stiller films in the past too, although I can't name them off the top of my head and don't want to waste my mental energy searching the dark recesses of my mind trying to find them. Regardless of why I feel the way I do, I do feel it. There is just something about the both of them and their dopey, moronic faces that quickly triggers the punch reflex in me. I readily acknowledge this is much more an indictment of me than of them. (Although to be fair to Adam Driver, I have that same "punch reflex" reaction to every single person who has ever appeared on the show Girls, or who has ever even watched the show Girls, or has even thought about watching the show Girls. I don't like the show Girls, just wanted to make that clear. That said, I am not exactly Girls target audience, so if I did like Girls, Girls would probably be doing it wrong.)

Now that my irrational Stiller/Driver hate has been outed and explored, you can have some sense of what an accomplishment it is for Baumbach, Stiller and Driver to get me to like their movie. It is an accomplishment of Herculean proportions. How did they do it? Let's take a look, shall we?

While We're Young is the story of New York based documentary filmmaker Josh (Ben Stiller) and his producer wife Cornelia (Naomi Watts), both of whom are in their forties and childless.  Josh and Cornelia are losing all of their friends their own age to parenthood and are struggling to maintain their identities as artists and creative, cool people. Then they meet aspiring documentarian Jamie (Adam Driver) and his girlfriend Darby (Amanda Seyfried), a young hipster couple in their twenties who reignite Josh and Cornelia's zest for life and creative living. Through Jamie and Darby, Josh and Cornelia are born again hipsters. Josh wears a hipster hat like Jamie, and Cornelia takes hip-hop dance class with Darby.  

The story of While We're Young is straightforward enough, it is the tale of all of us as we age and try to stay current, cool and relevant. This is a fools errand of course, but that doesn't stop us from trying anyway. What made While We're Young resonate with me is that it very closely resembled my own life's journey, or at least my artistic life's journey. Stiller's Josh is a Brooklynite, a self tortured artist, and he worships his art with a religious reverence. I am guilty on all counts (although I have relocated my existential angst from Brooklyn, the city of my birth, to Los Angeles, the city of my death…most likely). The film not only mimicked my experience, but understood it and, at a very deep level, respected it. That is a great credit to director Baumbach, who is of my generation and shares a similar temperament, taste and worldview. He may have cut me to the bone with his insightful look at Josh's/my life, but he did it with surgical precision and I tip my hipster cap to him for it.

The generational struggle, be it Gen X'ers versus Baby Boomers, or Millennials versus Gen X'ers, is cyclical. The struggling artistic purist of today will be replaced with the corporate crowd pleaser of tomorrow. It happened to the baby boomers, it happened to the Gen X'ers and it has already happened with the millennials. But there are always holdouts from each generation. Like Japanese soldiers on remote Pacific Islands who never knew that World War Two had ended, so it is with the generational holdouts. I know because I am one of them, and so it Stiller's Josh.  We are true believers and we have such a respect and reverence for great art that we are exhilarated when we see a talented and equally, in our eyes, honorable artist in a younger generation, and indignantly horrified when we see the sellout, faux artists in that same generation, or any other generation. This is the struggle of the purist. For reasons too elaborate to get into here, Generation X is a group with a higher Purist ratio than other generations, and with Millennials, it seems as though Purists are a rare breed, and a nearly extinct one at that. Although the reality is much more likely to be that there are probably just as many Millennial Purists as there are Gen X Purists, but due to the seismic shift toward corporatism in the creative economy over the last twenty-five years, they are much, much harder to find. With this in mind, the two generations are wonderfully represented in While We're Young by Stiller's Josh (Gen X) and Driver's Jamie (Millennials).

This generational struggle is what I think will make While We're Young interesting for all sorts of people, not just Brooklynite artistic purists like myself. Releasing the mantle of being one of the cool people to the younger generation who are, by definition, the cool ones now, can be a catastrophic event for some people's ego and identity. But that doesn't make it any less inevitable. This is the story of While We're Young, this is the story of me, this is the story of everyone, sooner or later, whether we like to acknowledge it or not.

As for the rest of the film, it is well made. I laughed out loud quite a bit, or to put it in terms the kids use today I "lol'd". (See how cool I am, kids? I know all the lingo! Kids? Kids? Why are you rolling your eyes and laughing at me? I'm hip…I'm not jive!!) Stiller is excellent, creating not just a character, but a real person, who is at once frustratingly stubborn yet genuine and endearing. Naomi Watts, as usual, gives a solid performance. Her Cordelia is vibrant and carries a palpable wound that gives her a strength and a fragile charm.

Adam Driver is…good. He uses his unlikability to his great advantage in the film. I'm not supposed to feel completely at ease with Jamie, or to completely like him…and I don't. So mission accomplished. This helps drive the story and Driver is a great foil for Stiller to play off.  Driver, who is tall, with a commanding physical presence and a goofy confidence, paired with Stiller who is short, neurotic and desperately desperate, makes for a fantastically and uncomfortably poor pairing, which is why it works so well.

Amanda Seyfried is an actress I always enjoy watching, and she is interesting and very compelling here as Darby but is terribly under used. The film focuses more on Josh and Jaime than it does on Cordelia and Darby, which works out fine in the end, but I did wish I saw more of Watts and Seyfried…maybe because I like them very much as actors and don't want to punch them like I do with their male co-stars. Regardless, I think there is great potential for a similar film to be made from the female perspective.

In conclusion, While We're Young was a very pleasant surprise. It is a genuinely funny, interesting and painfully honest film that keeps you engaged and laughing. Like me, you may only be laughing at yourself because the films bare bones honesty makes you so very uncomfortable, but you will be laughing nonetheless.  

Oh…and one more thing. This is very difficult to type with my fists clenched so tightly but…a job well done by Ben Stiller and Adam Driver. You both did excellent work in the film, and I respect your talent. I offer this to you both...I cannot promise to try not to want to punch you in your stupid faces anymore…but I do promise to try to try not to want to punch you in your stupid faces anymore. Sorry, it's the best I can do, believe me. Now…GET THE HELL OFF MY LAWN!!!