BIG ANNOUNCEMENT! Plans for 2021
#112: "Promising Young Woman," "Pieces of a Woman," "Erin Brockovich," "Spy Game"
Edition 112:
Hey movie lovers!
New year, new look, same (hopefully great) content. During this past week I moved my newsletter operations from MailChimp to Substack, which is why you probably noticed things are looking a little different around here.
At the most basic level your experience shouldn’t change at all. Every Friday morning you can expect the same fresh reviews and streaming recommendations in your inboxes.
But this new platform also comes with some features I’ve been dreaming about since I started this thing two-plus years and 111 editions ago. For starters, we’ve finally got an operational archive! Instead of fishing through your inbox for past reviews, you’ll be able to catch up with anything you missed on our home page — https://mattcraig.substack.com/ — including a search bar that will allow you look up movies by name.
This solves two problems I’ve heard countless times from you all: 1) that you save my review until you’ve seen the movie (even though my reviews are spoiler-free!) then can’t find it in your inbox, and 2) you wish there was a way to cross-check whether a movie you found on a streaming service is any good. Kind of like a much more trustworthy version of Rotten Tomatoes.
Over the next week I’m going to go back through my library and change all the subtitles to list each title discussed in that edition, making the search process much easier.
This platform shift is part of a much broader initiative to step back and reevaluate the ways in which I can improve my newsletter offering. If you have any suggestions, please let me know by replying to this email or leaving a comment if you’re reading the online version (another new feature!). This year I’m hoping for more reader recs, more reactions, more snark!
As always, I can’t thank you all enough for reading every week and interacting with me. Especially during the social isolation of 2020, this has become quite a fun community. With that in mind, is there one person you can think of who would enjoy joining our weekly conversations? It would mean a lot to me if you shared with someone!
Until then, I guess I’ll see ya at the movies!
In this week’s newsletter: We’re celebrating female stories, done right. Less than a week removed from the botched girl-power monstrosity that was Wonder Woman 1984, it’s good to know that movies with strong feminist themes do exist in forms other than sanitized corporate shrink wrap.
Promising Young Woman
There’s a saying you can hear people mention when they talk about movies these days. I’m as guilty as anyone of believing it myself. You’ve surely heard it before:
“They’ve run out of good ideas for movies.”
Oftentimes it’s said in reference to the 9th sequel of this or 5th reboot of that, the newest polish on the oldest turd, but the idea also seeps into conversation about movies we might generally consider “good.” Every year in the Best Picture category you can just about pencil in a war movie, a costume drama, and at least one reductive portrayal of some hot button social issue.
The thing about about Promising Young Woman, the big screen debut for “Killing Eve” showrunner Emerald Fennell, is that it really couldn’t exist until this moment in history. It’s a new idea, a good idea, constructed with shockingly modern sensibilities.
The window for a female revenge fantasy like this one wasn’t open until the #MeToo movement took off in 2017, and even then, it took at least this long to put real money behind a project written and directed by a woman that captures the feelings of many women who feel powerless and wish they could enact vengeance.
The avatar of that vengeance is Cassandra, a protagonist whose life was derailed by a traumatic experience in her past (no spoilers!) which has filled her with an insatiable desire for justice against a particular brand of men.
Now I realize I might threaten my credibility by using this newsletter to gush about a new movie for several weeks in a row. But this movie far exceeded all my expectations. By my own rules I’m listing it as a 2021 release, where it’s likely to hold the No. 1 spot for quite some time. Were it to be ranked against the 2020 slate, I’d have a hard time placing it outside the top 5, though I can’t tell if recency bias is the only reason I’d want to rank it above titles like Mank, Soul, and Mangrove.
From the acting performances, to the production design, to the cinematography, to the costuming, every element shines while serving Fennell’s truly unique vision.
She uses heightened surrealist fantasy to expose the harshest realities in our world today.
Fennell’s target is the large support network of (mostly but not exclusively male) enablers who prop each other up amidst misbehavior, many of the same “nice guys” Jordan Peele went after in Get Out, who “would’ve voted for Obama for a third term.”
That breed of prey gives this movie a dangerous edge, never allowing viewers to get too comfortable with the idea that everything might actually turn out okay. In that way, this is its own kind of horror movie. We expect the worst to happen, and then it doesn’t actually happen until the exact moment we think it might not.
In much the same way I praised Steven Soderbergh a few weeks ago for Let Them All Talk, Fennell confidently withholds crucial information and doles it out in a bread crumb trail leading the viewer through harrowing situations. She knows our predispositions, our assumptions about who characters are and how they will behave in those circumstances, then flips them on their head.
These reversals of fortune come early and come often as the main plot of the movie is concealed behind a far more conventional subplot in the foreground. Boy meets girl. In this case, the boy is played by Bo Burnham, who you might know as the comedian-turned-filmmaker who made one of my favorite movies of 2018, Eighth Grade. Here he’s a totally charming and hilarious male love interest with layers of complexity hidden beneath the surface.
And girl is played by Carey Mulligan, who carries the movie in nearly every frame with a performance so charismatic and magnetic it’s a crime the movie is too pulpy for Oscar recognition (similar to James McAvoy in Split). She plays funny, charming, sweet, cruel, evil, vindictive, drunk, and violent all in equal measure, with an extra measure of chaotic energy that pulses from start to finish.
For all its righteous fury, the movie is really just a helluva good time. It’s just as cringe-worthy when Burnham is introduced to Mulligan’s parents in typical awkward rom-com fashion, as it is when Mulligan is confronting an enemy. Really, the best word to describe this movie is “woah.”
Promising Young Woman is wild. It’s a trip. And I can say with confidence it will be one of the best movies of 2021.
Something New
Pieces of a Woman (Netflix): As awesome as Fennell’s revenge fantasy was, this story is far closer to how someone in the real world would react to severe emotional trauma. The movie reminded me a lot of Manchester By the Sea, both in its naturalistic style and its grappling with intense grief. Honestly it’s really a difficult movie to watch, from an opening 30-minute birth sequence (that I watched through my fingers) straight through the unraveling of the main character’s life. Still, Vanessa Kirby inhabits that character masterfully, and deserves the Oscar buzz she has received.
Unlike Manchester By the Sea, which I still think was better executed but tells the familiar tale of Dudes Being Sad, this embrace of female sorrow and the reclamation of narrative stirs up a deep empathy within any viewer with a heart. It’s worth your while, just prepare yourself for the experience beforehand.
Something Old
Erin Brockovich (2000, Amazon Prime): Julia Roberts won her (shamefully only) Oscar for this portrayal of a single mother who becomes a legal assistant and takes down a powerful corporation poisoning ground water in this Steven Soderbergh-directed docu-drama. It’s a very in-the-weeds procedural journey through the building of a class action lawsuit, yet Soderbergh’s deft touch and Roberts’ unbelievable charisma ensure it never drags. It’s like a dose of medicine with a pinch of sugar.
Spy Game (2001, HBO Max): Here’s one for all my dudely dudes out there. I was horrified to find my friend Justin — a noted admirer of Robert Redford’s work and Brad Pitt’s perfect jawline — had not seen this espionage two-hander about Gulf War-era spycraft. Its plot is laid out like a jigsaw puzzle, and you’ll need to pay close attention as the story jumps around with little regard for chronology in order to fully appreciate the incredibly satisfying climax. Or if you’d rather, take the Tenet approach and kick back to enjoy Redford and Pitt doing super cool spy stuff. Either way, it’s worth it.
Something to Stream
One Night in Miami, News of the World (Amazon Prime, VOD): It’s a bit of a cheat to once again suggest movies I have not actually seen, but you all seem to like when I give you a heads up of what’s coming next week so you can watch ahead of time (and hey, I gave you two Something Olds!). Regina King’s directorial debut and Oscar hopeful drops on Amazon on Friday, and the latest Tom Hanks earnest morality play is available on video-on-demand now (though currently at the steep $20 price tag). I’ll be discussing both next week, but if you get around to them before then definitely let me know what you think and I may include it in my review!
Trailer Watch: The Little Things
By this point in his career, we all know the clear delineation between “Movie Star Denzel” and “Serious Actor Denzel.” Both versions are awesome, and we’re lucky enough to get one of each in 2021. For fans of Malcom X, Training Day or Fences, you’ll be pumped to hear he’s playing Macbeth in Joel Coen’s Macbeth in the fall. And for those who prefer Man on Fire, Safe House or The Equalizer, allow me to introduce this neo-noir thriller co-starring Jared Leto and Rami Malek (two of the more…questionable Oscar winners in recent history, but still). Action, mystery, intrigue, DENZEL. Yes please!