Aubrey Plaza Goes Full Heisenberg in 'Emily The Criminal'
"Emily The Criminal," "House of the Dragon," "Go," "Book Of Eli"
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Hey movie lovers!
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In this week’s newsletter: Another indie movie sneaks its way into my top 10 for the year, with a huge assist from Aubrey Plaza. Then, we have to talk about the “Game of Thrones” prequel, and how to find new movies you’ll love. In this week’s “Trailer Watch,” we’re introduced to what appears to be an awards season juggernaut.
Emily The Criminal
Call it serendipity. The same week President Biden announced $10,000 in student loan forgiveness, we get a movie that shows what extreme depths that debt can drag someone to.
The titular Emily doesn’t start out a criminal, of course. She just a down-on-her luck 20-something with a mountain of debt and a dead end job. Like early episodes of “Breaking Bad,” each decision she makes is one the viewer can empathize with, rationalize, likely even agree with. Next thing you know, she’s gone full Heisenberg.
The movie certainly has designs on making a social statement about the crushing weight of the current economic system on young people, and aside from the “yeah me too” aspect of things I found it refreshing to see some other motivating factor for our main characters, other than the usuals: being a bad dad, having a bad dad, or, as in the previous example, cancer.
In that way, Emily is not your usual anti-hero. She’s kind of a mess of a human being, constantly makes poor decisions, and doesn’t really treat others well. And that’s before she starts committing an escalating series of crimes.
The thesis is pretty simple, yet bleak — money and respect can be had for the millennial generation, if and only if they are pried from someone’s fingers by force.
It’s a testament to the charisma of Aubrey Plaza that we as viewers continue to root for Emily through all of this. Quietly, Plaza has become something akin to what Steve Buscemi was in the 1990s — which is to say, the coolest indie actor on the planet. She’s appeared as the star in an impressive slate of small budget films — Ingrid Goes West, Safety Not Guaranteed, An Evening with Beverly Luff Linn, Happiest Season — and her star is only ascending. Next year, she’ll star in season two of Emmy darling “The White Lotus” and be a co-star in the passion project of one Mr. Francis Ford Coppola.
In this she’s note perfect, and gets to really display the full range of emotions within this character who is at times vulnerable, at times intimidating, at times crazy, and at times charming as hell. One wouldn’t dare call this a “de-glam” play for prestige recognition from the comically inclined Plaza, because she is both funny in the role and in a handful of scenes quite “glammed.” It’s one of the best performances I’ve seen this year.
While the social commentary here is juicy — one job interview scene where Emily refuses the offer of an unpaid internship will be burned into my memory for a long long time — the essence of the movie is actually a stripped down neo-noir. The world is bleak, the gender-swapped femme fatale is a mysterious small time scammer played by Theo Rossi, and in the end there’s a bag of money everyone is gunning for. Like any good noir, no good deed goes unpunished. My kind of movie.
The big hang up with most independent movies is that they use all their good ideas in the first half of the script, but here the movie’s tension and pacing only ratchets up as it progresses, until it reaches a very real fever pitch.
The two movies that came to my mind while watching it were the Safdie Brothers’ Good Time, for the anxiety-inducing escalation of action, and Kajillionaire, for the movie’s focus on small time thievery and every day life rather than some highly stylized heist.
The ability to excel on an unflashy canvas has me very excited for what debut writer/director John Patton Ford will do next. Personally, I wouldn’t be too upset if it was another old school, neo-noir thriller like this one, which slots easily into my top 10 movies of the year.
Something New
House of the Dragon (HBO): Nothing on the silver screen this week was more cinematic and blockbuster-y than the new “Game of Thrones” prequel, which debuted last Sunday. The original show was so many things to so many people that following it up was always going to be a gargantuan task, but this new show’s quality was always going to be secondary to the management of the franchise, and in that it certainly succeeded. There’s dragons, epic string music, palace intrigue, violence, nudity, and all those familiar elements that will make the show the most talked about thing in pop culture for the next several weeks.
That said, holy moly did they burn through a lot of plot in one episode. My hope is that the burdensome pilot did a lot of the hard work to set up a more reasonably paced season, but my mind cannot help but wander back to the final two seasons of GoT when the show pushed its plot machine to hyper speed and lost the nuance that made it special.
If you all are looking for truly special TV, this latest season of “Industry,” and especially last week’s episode, were incredible.
Something Old
Go (1999): Here’s a great way to find new movies to watch. Pick out a movie you love, then find out what else the director has done, or the writer. In that regard, I’ve failed as a cinephile for never before seeing Go, which was Doug Liman’s follow-up to Swingers — one of my all-time favs — just before he did The Bourne Identity (and for what it’s worth the writer, John August, is the host of an excellent podcast I listen to).
The movie plays a lot of similar notes as Swingers, following the lives of postgrad kids in LA working crappy jobs during the day and going on epic adventures at night (up to an including a spontaneous trip to Las Vegas). The plot follows the fallout of a small time drug deal gone bad, retelling the crazy night from four overlapping perspectives. And just like its predecessor, this movie discovered some impossibly young future stars — Katie Holmes, Timothy Olyphant, Taye Diggs, and in one scene even Melissa McCarthy. It wasn’t as good as the two movies it was sandwiched between, but when you find a director you like, you tend to enjoy their style in just about everything. Liman is one of those guys for me (he also did Mr. And Mrs. Smith and Edge of Tomorrow). Check him out.
Something to Stream
The Book of Eli (HBO Max): I got a little nostalgic this week for the era of cable TV movies, when you’d flip around the channels and randomly get sucked into a movie you’d never heard of midway through. That’s how I got introduced to this post-apocalyptic thriller starring Denzel Washington, and subsequently it became the movie that would always rope me in no matter what scene I was starting it from. (You remember that viral TikTok about “stages of a dad watching a movie on a weekday” ? That was my dad every time he saw this movie on TV).
Denzel plays a blind traveller slash prophet who carries with him a mysterious book only he can read, because it’s in braille. Mila Kunis ends up playing his traveling companion, and Gary Oldman the big bad. It’s sort of like a Mad Max: Fury Road meets the “Fallout” video game franchise, where marauders roam a wasteland fighting over resources. But each scene is super dramatic and way more stylish than it needs to be for a straight ahead popcorn flick, and the movie’s twist ending hits on the first, fifth or fiftieth viewing.
Trailer Watch: Empire of Light
Tag line: A love story set in and around a beautiful old cinema on the South Coast of England in the 1980s.
This teaser trailer doesn’t give much away — how they all should be! — but I’ve seen enough to officially call it our second Best Picture nominee trailer to drop of the year (the other being David O. Russell’s Amsterdam). Writer/director Sam Mendes is now a prestige filmmaker, fresh off the near-win for 1917, and this new project is fronted by the Academy’s Meryl Streep successor in Olivia Coleman, penciled in as a nominee every year.
As far as production teams go, they don’t get more impressive than cinemetography by the GOAT Roger Deakins (14 nominations, two wins), editing by Lee Smith (three nominations and a win for Dunkirk) and scoring by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross (two wins for The Social Network and Soul). It’s simply too many geniuses in one room to expect anything other than a great movie.