'A Thousand And One' Reasons To Leave New York City
#220: "A Thousand And One," "Murder Mystery 2," "Grizzly II: Revenge," "Vanilla Sky"
Edition 220:
Hey movie lovers!
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This week: A heart-breaking drama about New York City gentrification, the latest Adam Sandler dumb comedy, and a cult classic that took thirty years to reach screens. In this week’s “Trailer Watch,” the new trailer for Barbie just dropped and the internet is losing its mind for it.
A Thousand And One
Art is in its most powerful form when it can tell a macro story through a micro lens. Think about what Schindler’s List says about the Holocaust. Or what Olivia Rodrigo singing about her relationship on “Sour” makes us feel about our own relationships. There’s something about specificity that can transcend relatability and trigger full-on empathy within us.
As much as I’d read about the drastic changes gentrification has had on New York City’s neighborhoods and the people who live in them over the past 30 years, it takes a story as immersive as the one in A Thousand And One to bring me to a deeper understanding.
The movie begins in 1994, and depicts a city that is rough yet vibrant. Our heroine, played by hit 2000s R&B singer Teyana Taylor, gets out of prison and reconnects with her son in the foster care system. She kidnaps him in Brooklyn and stows away to Harlem, and attempts to give the boy the life and stability she never had.
By the time he prepares to potentially go to college, it’s 2005 and the neighborhood is a vastly different place. Subtly, yet systematically, mother and son no longer feel welcome, and that’s before the bottom drops out and a massive plot twist sends the story into utter chaos. I won’t spoil it, but it’s the type of twist that takes all of the air out of your body and makes your jaw hit the floor.
This NYC civics lesson does well to not come off preachy or even overtly politicized. It’s the ultimate example of show-don’t-tell, and the focus never strays far from our main protagonists. It’s deeply personal, creating a movie that sneaks into your heart and you don’t realize how deeply it’s burrowed until it’s too late.
From a filmmaking standpoint, this indie Sundance hit doesn’t carry the prestige necessary to make it feel “significant,” whatever that means. It’s not visually mind-blowing or technically genius. Still, I think it’s a masterwork of writing, one that will undoubtedly open the floodgates of opportunity for writer/director A.V. Rockwell, never mind the fact that the industry desperately needs black female voices anyway.
It’s early enough in the movie calendar that this doesn’t mean all that much, but I will tell you that so far in 2023, this is the best movie I’ve seen. It might be hard to find in theaters but when it hits a streaming service, I’ll try to bring it back up in this newsletter so you make sure to have every opportunity to see it.
Something New
Murder Mystery 2 (Netflix): At some point, I’ve promised myself to stop dignifying the flavor-of-the-week Netflix garbage releases with recognition in this newsletter. There are diminishing returns on pointing out how Adam Sandler has gotten away with — not just gotten away with, but fully thrived — putting the absolute least effort possible into his Happy Madison projects.
My only insight into this aggressively meaningless sequel to 2019’s crime caper with Jennifer Anniston (an original which at least begins from a place of story logic), is that perhaps the ‘two remaining brain cell’ humor is part of what makes Sandler such an international star. In the movie business, it’s well known that comedy doesn’t travel well internationally because of cultural differences. But I guess fart jokes and step-on-a-rake type stuff is universal. This movie is bad, there’s no getting around that, and for me personally it wasn’t even all that fun in its badness. On the service, it’s been firmly entrenched at No. 1 for the past week so it looks like the Sand Man did it again.
Something Old
Grizzly II: Revenge (1983, Showtime): The backstory behind this movie is far, FAR better than the 75-minute movie itself. But what a story it is. This movie is the big screen debut for George Clooney and Charlie Sheen, and the first non-child acting role for Laura Dern (two future Oscar winners and one “winning” movie star). They costar with a 16-foot mechanical bear, acting out basically a B-movie version of Jaws made a few years after to capitalize on the animal predator craze. But the movie was filmed in Hungary during Cold War tensions, and its financier stole all the money, and a million other crazy circumstances led to the movie never being finished and never being released until 2020. Now it’s a relic of movie history, and an instant cult classic for any hardcore B-movie cinephiles out there (watching it will remind you of The Room, or movies like that). For everyone else, I highly recommend this story about the herculean effort to resurrect the movie and release it.
Something to Stream
Vanilla Sky (Amazon Prime): Way way back in the era Tom Cruise was still willing to play characters with some amount of humanity and vulnerability, the ancient year of 2001, he worked with director Cameron Crowe (Almost Famous, Jerry Maguire) on this story about a wealthy, young New York publishing magnate who gets into trouble because he scorns one beautiful woman (Cameron Diaz) to pursue another (Penelope Cruz). Like I said, so relatable!
Anyway, he gets into a car crash that mangles his face and his life starts to unravel. It progressively gets weirder to the point where he begins questioning his own reality. Just when it seems the movie might be a mess, a big twist is waiting at the end to explain the confusion. Well, some of it. There are questions left unsolved at the end, which is either a delight to curious audiences or a frustration to those who prefer things tied up in a neat bow. This isn’t Charlie Kaufman, by any stretch, because Crowe’s sentimental streak is a mile wide and he fundamentally wants to make his audiences feel good. But here he’s willing to stretch them ever so slightly. For those who go along the ride, rewards abound.
Trailer Watch: Barbie
The first trailer, playing on 2001: A Space Odyssey, was glorious, but did little to show us what Greta Gerwig’s take on the world of the iconic Mattell doll would actually look like. Now we have our first true look, and it absolutely delivers. The aesthetic, tone, jokes, memes, THE CAST, and the excitement without ruining the mystery of how the heck you turn the plastic doll into an actual story. It’s hard to understate how massive that release weekend in July, the same day as Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, will be for the future of the box office industry.