All 'Men' Suck. Even The Movie
#177: "Men," "Jackass 4.5," "The Apartment," "Top Gun"
Edition 177:
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: What does it mean to be an arthouse movie these days, as Alex Garland’s Men takes center stage. For streaming offerings, there’s more Jackass content and a couple of oldies but goodies. In this week’s “Trailer Watch,” my favorite movie star is in a big time action movie coming to Netflix.
Men
One of the most consistent themes in this newsletter is Hollywood’s relationship between commerce and art — that of hammer and nail, lately. I lament that fact constantly, and advocate for more resources (and hopefully fan engagement) invested into artistic statements that can, in the best of cases, change the way we view the world.
In that way, Alex Garland’s Men should be a poster child. No one who sees this movie could deny it is anything other than an exquisite rendering of Garland’s vision, which seems to be trying very hard to change the way we see the world.
And yet, in a world where Dr. Strange still plays at the box office, and this weekend marks the arrival of Top Gun: Maverick, it’s really difficult for me to advocate for a movie so thoroughly uninterested in audience accessibility.
In fact, I’d challenge anyone to watch this movie and attempt a coherent explanation of what exactly occurred across its brisk 100-minute runtime.
This much I know for certain. A woman — played by the always-awesome and interesting Jessie Buckley — rents a house in the English countryside to which she can escape and mourn the loss of her husband, who committed suicide after she told him she wanted a divorce.
Every single person in the little village around this house is a man, and every one of those men is played by Rory Kinnear, dawning different prosthetics and hair and costumes to inhabit a landlord, a priest, a police officer, a barkeep, and on and on.
This obvious break from reality, along with the movie’s title, would lead one to assume the movie has some grand message to send about the male gender…and that message isn’t pretty, as the men in the movie begin to torment her with increasing aggression.
This ‘all men suck’ ethos has led to laughs, cheers and even one “they do be like that!” from audience members over the past few months when the trailer for this movie would show before theater screenings (drawing the biggest crowd reaction until Nicole Kidman inevitably appeared on screen to welcome us to AMC, a promo that has become a full-on sing-a-long at theaters around Los Angeles).
Still, as the movie devolves from deeply unsettling suspense into all-out body horror, it dodges and deflects any clean narrative one could assign to it. And since there’s no real plot to speak of, one could be forgiven for believing it’s being difficult for difficult’s sake.
This isn’t the case of your usual indie arthouse fare, a little-engine-that-could if only it had the resources and exposure to reach the masses. As much as we want to crap on modern audiences’ preference for the juvenile, there’s not a single point in movie-going history where this movie could be a broad commercial success. It’s far too weird, too esoteric, too cryptic.
It’s a genre that A24, perhaps the most successful independent production company in history, seems to be a sucker for. As I’ve written about before, A24 movies love to use pagan imagery to conjure up uneasiness, and recently they’ve backed more and more fringe projects.
I’m not sure where that leaves Garland, who probably still deserves the latitude to make what he wants after the undeniable success of Ex Machina, one of my favorite movies of the 2010s. Now he has a track record of beautiful-yet-indecipherable stories (Annihilation, “Devs,” and Men) which won’t do good business at the box office.
What’s worst, for a niche arthouse movie that’s meant to be a piece of art, I’m not entirely sure there is a deep truth to be uncovered here. Buckley and Kinnear deserve plaudits for excellent acting performances, and Garland is a visual talent, but gestures toward grand statements are either lost in a maze on their way to audiences or they’re nothing more than that…gestures.
This weekend, if you’re going to hit the theaters, take the highway to the danger zone instead.
Something New
Jackass 4.5 (Netflix): Have you ever wondered what material the Jackass crew came up with and shot that was too gross, too dumb to put in their movies? Well, of course not, because they also bundled that stuff up and put it out there for all to see. Spillover from this year’s successful Jackass Forever is now on Netflix, and there’s not a whole lot to say about its content that you wouldn’t already guess — funneling hot sauce into their butts, getting shocked by an electric eel in the butt, and yeah a lot of other butt stuff — plus some interview snippets that give further insight into how they put the movies together. If you’re a fan, it’s more of what you love.
Something Old
The Apartment (1960, Amazon Prime): It’s funny to me that when people talk about all-time rom-com classics, it’s as if the genre never existed before 1989’s When Harry Met Sally, which kicked off the golden era of now-considered “oldies” in the 90s. Amongst cinephile circles, there’s far more respect — closer to reverence — for the work of Billy Wilder, one of the most accomplished writer/directors of Hollywood’s actual Golden Era with Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard and Some Like It Hot, to name a few.
In this one, Jack Lemmon stars as a spineless accountant who rents out his apartment for executives at his company to use for their extra-marital affairs. You could say it’s a “nice guys finish last” sort of setup, until things get turned on their head. The movie has all the fast-paced, clever dialogue and light-hearted gags signature to Wilder, with great acting performances and more than enough romance for those who haven’t explored past Meg Ryan and Julia Roberts. As I always say, don’t let the black and white stop you!
Something to Stream
Top Gun (1986, Netflix): This is the type of movie I wouldn’t normally recommend, only because I assume most of you all would have already seen it. But in the lead-up to the much-hyped sequel, I was alarmed to find that many of my friends had never basked in perhaps the most 1980s, least self-aware movie ever, and definitely the sweatiest, movie ever made. Any criticism can be parried away by remembering this is a movie in which guys play shirtless beach volleyball wearing jeans, smacking each other’s butts while Kenny Loggins’ “Playing With The Boys” blares.
Every single reviewer online seems have had a blast with the new movie, which is out this weekend and will be featured in next week’s newsletter, but when watched with the right spirit (of joyful ridiculousness) few movies are as rewatchable as the original.
Trailer Watch: The Gray Man
Maybe we’re underrating the degree to which the consistent Marvel criticism of “everything looks gray and flat and boring” might really just be the style of the Russo brothers, filmmakers who were brought up doing network and cable TV (a medium not exactly known for cinematic style) before rising to direct the MCU’s biggest hits (Avengers: Infinity War, Endgame and a pair of Captain America movies). This movie, ironically titled “The Gray Man,” shares the same drab aesthetic as the pair’s other post-Marvel movie for Netflix, Extraction.
But this movie has something its predecessor did not, and that’s a fantastic cast — led by probably my favorite movie star, Ryan Gosling, who seems to be modulating moment-to-moment between the stiffness of his Bladerunner: 2049 or Drive characters and the quippy comedy he brought to The Nice Guys (he can pull off both with equal skill). Surrounding Gosling is no less than Ana de Armas, Chris Evans (sporting a ridiculous mustache), Billy Bob Thornton and Regé-Jean Page.
It’s a big, loud movie dropping on Netflix in July, so who are we kidding, of course we’re going to watch it.