'A Quiet Place Part II' is a Movie Worthy of Your Theater Return
#132: "A Quiet Place Part II," "Cruella," "Some Like It Hot," "It Comes At Night"
Edition 132:
Hey movie lovers!
As always, you can find a podcast version of this newsletter on Apple or Spotify. Thank you so much for listening and spreading the word!
In this week’s newsletter: One of my favorites from Sundance came out this week, and you’re not going to want to miss it. But feel free to skip Zack Snyder’s new Netflix joint, Bill Simmons’ all-time favorite movie, and the “Friends” reunion special. This week’s “Trailer Watch” has me as hyped for any movie that’s going to come out this year.
A Quiet Place Part II
(In theaters for 45-day window)
Back in 2018, we were all just amazed that Jim from “The Office” directed a movie. By the fall, we were delighted to learn the movie was actually good. And by January we understood that John Krasinski had authored one of the great success stories in recent Hollywood history.
In the end A Quiet Place tallied over $340 million in box office receipts against a modest $17 million budget, minting a new kind of “event movie” based on an audio or visual component that compels people to experience it in a theater.
That meant two things. One, that Paramount Studios would do anything in its power to produce a sequel, and two, that Krasinski had the power to hold them off.
No matter how much he and his wife slash co-star Emily Blount claim to have had their “heels dug in” on the movie being a one-off, the timeline from Fall 2018 release to write, shoot and edit for a Spring 2020 sequel seems to suggest they held out for only as long as it took to cut the check.
With that in mind, A Quiet Place Part II would be the true test of Krasinski’s filmmaking abilities.
And?
He passed.
The reason why in most instances a sequel can never live up to the original is simply that mystery creates drama, and the second time around the logic of that particular world has already been revealed. A standalone movie gives an audience only what they need to know in the exact moment they need to know it, while a sequel must manage the entire set of previous revelations as well as manufacture some new ones.
Mystery thrillers, like A Quiet Place, carry the particular burden of pivoting horror elements into bigger, noisier action. The monsters have to come out of the shadows, more characters must be introduced, and the stakes must continue rising.
The saving grace here is the confidence Krasinski had to avoid widening the world TOO much. Sure, the action builds on the original. But we still never really learn why the monsters are attracted to sound or what they want out of their invasion of earth. We don’t really get a sense of society being built in the aftermath of the invasion. That’s good! Everything is told through the prism of this one family’s experience, so it plays out like “the continuing adventures of the Abbotts” and in that there is infinite potential for more story.
A Spielberg-esque flashback sequence to open the movie immediately reengages the sentimental tone that separated the first film from its monster movie predecessors, and satisfies the obligation for Krasinski to appear on screen (no spoilers). Both movies are aided by the vérité of the real life Krasinski-Blount relationship and their very public parenthood, which once again gives a straightforward adventure plot some emotional depth. If the first movie was a love letter to raising kids, then this second one is a testament to the trials of raising teenagers, which pays off in a single shot of Blount giving a “proud mother face” that almost brought a tear to my eye.
After the flashback we pick up in the moments immediately following the conclusion of the first movie — a technique that works (Rocky, Back to the Future, John Wick) more often than not — and proceed in almost real time.
The ensuing action displays Krasinski’s maturity as a director, even at one point cross-cutting between three separate scenarios to build toward an emotional climax. Of course, it helps when your wife happens to be one of Hollywood’s great leading ladies, and Blount continues to carry the now-franchise with her heroic mother routine. The child performances are strong, but the addition of a heavy hitter like Cillian Murphy is what gives the movie enough gas to get over the finish line. At different points we fear him, we don’t like him, we empathize with him, and we love him. Again, without spoiling anything, I think the movie realizes at the end just how important he might be to the future of the franchise.
And make no mistake, this is now a franchise. Based on the way the movie ended, my very first comment after the credits rolled was, “well, they’re definitely going to make another one.”
Why wouldn’t they? The movie raked in almost $60 million over its Memorial Day weekend release, the biggest box office weekend of any movie since Covid hit (almost double what Godzilla vs. Kong made!). It’s a big fat hit, and once again, the unique sound of this movie means you kinda need to see it in theaters, which makes it streamer-proof. When compared to the other IP universes sprouting up out of nowhere, I’ll support the heck out of this model moving forward.
So if you’ve been looking for the right movie to get you to venture back out to the movie theater, look no further. It’s time! Movie theaters are back baby!
Something New
Cruella (Theaters): Recasting one of Disney’s most cartoonishly evil villains as a feminist empowerment hero is a surprising if predictable development for a company dead set on ringing out every dollar from its past hits. Director Craig Gillespie undeniably serves up a feast for the eyes in one of the most visually and aesthetically impressive films of the year, which is unfortunately sunk by the thousand-pound obligation to the 60-year-old original One Hundred and One Dalmations.
An even more pressing question than the obvious “who asked for this?” is a simple “who is this for?” It’s certainly not a kids movie — not just because the kids who were in my theater told their parent quite loudly “this is boring” and “mom that was mean” — and it’s not really allowed to be the grungy 1970s London orphan heist movie that Gillespie seemed to be grasping at from the visual style because of all the obvious appeals to a young audience (including the use of Paul Walter Hauser, one of my favorite actors, basically doing Laurel-and-Hardy-esque fat and dumb jokes the whole movie).
Somehow, despite the patronizing voice over and the distractingly heavy-handed soundtrack full of classic rock hits and the fact that this supposed origin story doesn’t actually show how the character got to where she was in the original (which one would think would be the point), I actually couldn’t help myself from falling for some of the movie’s charms. Emma Stone and Emma Thompson both have a magnetic screen presence, and at its best the movie is having a lot of fun and mixing in a few true Soderberghian heist sequences. But in the end its offering tiny delights to lots of different people and not a lot to any one person, so it’s hard to recommend.
Something Old
Some Like It Hot (1958, Amazon Prime): This past weekend I visited the Coronado Hotel in San Diego, the primary filming location for this classic comedy from Billy Wilder (director of classics Sunset Boulevard, Double Indemnity and Sabrina) which is best known as the movie that solidified Marilyn Monroe’s status as America’s most legendary sex icon. Her embrace of the male gaze makes a viewer feel less self-conscious about the less-than-progressive social dynamics of the movie, which is helpful because the actual plot revolves around two men (played by Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon) who cross dress and join an all female traveling band to get away from the Chicago mafia.
My reaction to Marilyn was the realization that, wow, she really was just the Kim Kardashian of her day. My reaction to the movie was, wow, nobody can sustain adventure while layering in screwball comedy as Billy Wilder. This movie is funny, exciting, and its pacing holds up extremely well for modern audiences. Another chance for you to take the plunge on black and white movies!
Something to Stream
It Comes At Night (Netflix): If you were a fan of the first A Quiet Place, then you’re going to get very similar vibes here from A24 and writer/director Trey Edward Shults (who would go on to make one of my recent favs, Waves). It’s a paranoid family drama set in some mysterious post-apocalypse where a family is hiding from an unknown threat. But whereas Krasinski uses the threat to strengthen the family bonds, Shults takes a characteristically darker and more unsettling angle by allowing the fear to infiltrate the family’s trust in one another. The result is deeply tense and riveting to watch, anchored by a great cast from lead Joel Edgerton to early roles for rising stars Kelvin Harrison Jr., Christopher Abbot and Riley Keough. I can’t imagine why surviving the apocalypse might be such a hot topic these days…but here’s another movie for you to satisfy that.
Trailer Watch: Old
Can we chill for a little bit on time manipulation movies? I think we’re good on that, collectively. The ever-present M. Night Shyamalan has a new one for us, ugh, but following the arc of his career I know the minute we count him out is exactly when he surprises us with a good movie. Having seen this trailer, which reveals the premise but little else (not mad about that!), I have really no idea how you can make a whole movie out of the idea of a cursed beach. But hey, we know that Shyamalan twist is coming at the end, so maybe the beach…dun dun dun…isn’t cursed?