'Concrete Cowboy' Could've Been an IG Post
#125: "Concrete Cowboy," "Bad Trip," "WeWork," "Quigley Down Under," "Hell or High Water"
Edition 125:
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!
Click HERE to join our Oscars pool, which you can play free or join the $2 winner-take-all prize pool. Ballots are open from now until April 25th. Can you predict more of the 23 categories correct than me? (Spoiler alert: no)
In this week’s newsletter: We’re talking about westerns! Howdy Pat’na! That starts with this week’s release of Netflix original Concrete Cowboy, and after a brief hiatus into a few other new releases I highly recommend, goes back in time to my favorite classic white hat western then zooms ahead to the best western of at least the past eight years. Then in this week’s “Trailer Watch,” the bard of the modern west sneaks one final feature film under the gun before he is drowned under the money spigot of streaming television.
Concrete Cowboy
(Netflix)
In the journalism world, we have a saying for stories that don’t quite live up to their billing. We say, “coulda been a tweet.” Hundreds of words of set up, fluff and recap are built around a single nugget of information or intrigue, and the whole thing is passed off as a story.
That moniker can aptly be applied to Concrete Cowboy, and many of the other Netflix original releases that come out every Friday. To appease the almighty algorithm, you need two things, and the first is a quick hook. This movie definitely has that.
Seriously, did you know that throughout the 20th century even to this day there are horses being kept and hidden in urban Philadelphia? That’s pretty wild. The sense of responsibility, identity, and intergenerational bonding is giving young street kids an alternative to a life of crime, but the unstoppable creep of gentrification is slowly making these ghetto riding clubs go extinct.
Stretching that premise into a two-hour plot is where the rubber doesn’t quite meet the road. The central storyline — a prodigal son returning to Philly to get straightened out by a father he barely knows — is colored by cliche and some genuinely confusing characters, all of which unfolds episodically instead of building towards a satisfying climax.
With all that being said, the existence of the movie serves as a powerful rebellion against the whitewashing of cowboy culture in mass media, an idea that gets brushed by within the actual movie in favor of more melodramatic speech-ifying by the movie stars at the center of the project. It’s estimated that at least 25 percent of workers in the range-cattle industry in the 1800s, “cowboys,” were black, though that history has been all but erased by decades of John Wayne and Clint Eastwood and the all-white casts of mid-century Hollywood.
The best comparison point would be Nomadland, since both projects feature a cast of mostly non-actors playing versions of their real life selves set in the actual locations. Both capture that slice of life, but Nomadland succeeds in immersing a viewer in the world and provoking deep thought where Concrete Cowboy feels more like a museum tour. In Nomadland, the lead actors defer to the real life people and the movie spotlights them, whereas Concrete Cowboy is dominated by its stars.
Which brings us to the second thing required by the almighty Netflix algorithm, and I haven’t found a catchy term for it yet but it’s the Instagram aesthetic that has begun to dominate pop culture. I’ve spoken about this several times before but really can’t bring it up enough. Does social media now serve the movies, or do movies serve social media? Which is the cart and which is the horse?
For mega stars like The Rock and Millie Bobby Brown, it seems clear as day to me that movies are being selected specifically for the social media photos and videos they will generate. When you have 50 million followers, generating more money than any movie could, do acting jobs exist solely to fuel new content for your social feed?
That doesn’t translate perfectly to Idris Elba and Caleb McLaughlin (though the latter was with MBB on “Stranger Things”), because neither of those two are social media megastars. But from Netflix’s perspective, some not-insignificant percentage of why this movie exists is the visual of powerful black men in cowboy hats riding horses through the streets of Philadelphia. It makes for a great thumbnail on the Netflix home screen, and can be played in slow motion for a great trailer (actually, not even just the trailer…there are a few shots in the actual movie that don’t make narrative sense but would make for great freeze frames).
So for Concrete Cowboy, Enola Holmes and many of the other Netflix originals, I’m altering my journalism axiom somewhat. Truly, they “coulda been an Instagram post.”
Something New
Bad Trip (Netflix): If Sacha Baron Cohen is the gateway drug of pseudo-fictional prank shows/movies for many people, then Eric Andre would be like mainlining the hard stuff. His prank talk show on Adult Swim can politely be called experimental (and more accurately be called batshit crazy), but this time around he’s strung together a feature-length narrative by enlisting Lil Rey Howery (of Get Out mf-ing TSA fame) and Tiffany Haddish (of Girls Trip grapefruit fame) to go on a road trip with him across the country. The biggest difference between Cohen and Andre, and the reason I like Andre more, is that while Cohen uses his characters to expose the evils that people out in the world are capable of, Andre casts himself as the ultimate buffoon to expose the heroic good side of normal people. That doesn’t mean he isn’t going to delight in making you feel very uncomfortable along the way, but I promise it also produces wild laughter.
WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn (Hulu): The thing that has always fascinated me about the story of Adam Neumann is the fine line between genius and buffoon. He is hardly the first megalomaniac entrepreneur, and the inflation of his value was not any more dishonest than, say, Steve Jobs using NeXT computers with no operating systems to trick Apple into hiring him back. He played the game of American Capitalism and he played it well. The only difference is that in the end he lost, though even there he came extremely close to winning had he secured the second SoftBank capital infusion, at which point he would’ve been universally considered a genius.
It’s ironic. But the grave of his reputation is particularly enticing to dance upon, because of his particularly brash and dickish behavior. This documentary is a nice overview of his arc, and I’d encourage anyone interested to check out Reeves Wiedeman’s book on the topic for a proper and thrilling deep dive.
Something Old
Quigley Down Under (1990, Netflix): I’ll never be able to be objective about what for me is the ultimate white hat western, because my dad introduced me to it at the perfect age when seeing a cowboy do-gooder on screen named Matthew (Quigley) still felt like an achievable dream for me. Tom Selleck stars as the tall, handsome American sharpshooter (with perfectly groomed hair at all times, somehow?) hired by an Australian rancher played by the immortal Alan Rickman to hunt aborigines. Quigley refuses, of course, and gets banished into the outback with a damsel in distress (the lovely Laura San Giacomo). This movie hits every western cliche in the book, and does it with such purity and earnestness that it’s impossible to resist the its charms. (Plus, as an added little Easter egg, one of Rickman’s henchmen is played by a 21-year-old Ben Mendelsohn!).
Something to Stream
Hell or High Water (Hulu): This is the best pure western since at least 2012, depending on your feelings towards Django Unchained, and it solidified Taylor Sheridan as the bard of the modern west. A climactic shootout on the rocks of west Texas is unmistakably influenced by the Australian outback of Quigley, but this film comes with the specifically American gravity of post-2008 financial desperation. It’s anchored by memorable performances from Chris Pine and Ben Foster as bank-robbing brothers on the run from classic Texas sheriff Jeff Bridges, and delights as much on the surface as it penetrates to the core of what it means to be a cowboy outlaw in the 21st century.
Trailer Watch: Those Who Wish Me Dead
Speaking of Taylor Sheridan, it seems he was able to squeeze one more feature film project under the gun with Warner Brothers/HBO Max before he took a nine-figure blood oath with Paramount+ to expand the Yellowstone extended universe (or something like that). Any concerns I had about Sheridan not writing the screenplay for this movie were dissuaded somewhat by this cast: Angelina Jolie, Jon Bernthal, Nicholas Hoult, Tyler Perry and Aidan Gillen (forever known as Littlefinger from “Game of Thrones”). From the looks of this trailer, I doubt we’re going to get the same “elevated genre” fare Sheridan’s writing usually produces, but a classic genre action western with this cast? I’ll take it six days a week and twice on Sundays.