'Don't Look Up' Proves Satire Can Still Rock
#156: "Don't Look Up," "The Matrix Resurrections"
Edition 156:
Hey movie lovers!
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PROGRAMMING NOTE!!
I’m doing a kind of “cram for the exam” week. Two (ish) movie reviews per day leading up to the big reveal on Friday morning, when I’ll rank every 2021 release I saw this year (a list with well over 80 entries already).
I had to scratch The Tragedy of Macbeth, a movie I desperately want to see, because I thought it was going straight to AppleTV+ and now I can’t find a theater near my parents house that is showing it. I may sub in Encanto for Thursday for an all-Disney edition.
Tuesday: West Side Story, Nightmare Alley, Being The Ricardos
Wednesday (today): Don’t Look Up, The Matrix Resurrections
Thursday: Spider-Man: No Way Home
Friday: 4th Annual! Every Movie in 2021, Ranked
Don’t Look Up
(Theaters, Netflix)
It’s been said that Donald Trump killed satire. To a degree I think that’s true (ask “Saturday Night Live”), because these days we’ve been exposed to so many stranger-than-fiction stories on the real life news that seeing a fictional portrayal of some absurd situation seems almost tame.
I believe it’s a little more nuanced than that. What Trump and our current hyper-polarized chaos “killed” (or at least put on pause) is comedy based on any kind of righteous hope or central point of view, because making fun of something now is immediately perceived as an endorsement of the opposite side’s political leanings. So the only target now is hopeless despair about the world.
Adam McKay is a perfect avatar for this new wave of nihilism. After sneaking in subtle social messages to his big dumb comedies for years (Anchorman, Step Brothers etc.), he put down the scalpel and picked up a filmmaking sledgehammer (The Big Short, Vice), waging a liberal crusade against authoritarians and conservative billionaires ironically from the perch of his multi-million dollar Hollywood productions.
Don’t Look Up is an extremely obvious metaphor for climate change. The creep of global warming is replaced here by a more immediate threat of a planet-killing asteroid headed directly toward Earth, but still the scientists who make the discovery are continuously ignored or polarized until they’re rendered ineffective.
It’s an urgent message, and McKay’s opinions on the topic are far from secret here, but one cannot help but observe that his disposition has mellowed somewhat since his deliberately mean-spirited 2018 sendup against Dick Cheney.
Maybe it’s the nihilism talking, or maybe this movie, which was initially conceived before the Covid-19 pandemic, underwent significant changes after the shape of this movie’s “satire” played out in almost perfect lockstep with the national response to another existential threat over the past two years.
The White House, occupied here by a buffoon president played in a rare comedic performance from the great Meryl Streep and a return to comedic roots for Jonah Hill as her son/chief of staff, prove too incompetent to be nefarious yet dumb enough to cause a lot of collateral damage in pursuit of their own political gains. Their words and actions are legitimately hilarious, and seem outlandish until you do a Google search later and realize many of the quotes and actions were taken directly from real life events.
The razor’s edge between hilarious farce and poignant observation is what makes this movie exceptional, one of my ten best of the year. It’s consistently laugh-out-loud funny, dampened only by the creeping feeling that it’s too true. If anything, the intense anxiety it is able to produce is a testament to McKay’s ability to put his thumb on the specific pressure points that we’re feeling in our world today, heightened but not entirely inaccurate.
Of course, it helps to keep an audience on board when you get an A-List movie star to inhabit practically every single role in the entire movie. Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence play the lead scientists, and in addition to Streep and Hill there’s Mark Rylance as a hilariously creepy Mark Zuckerberg-esque tech CEO, Cate Blanchett and Tyler Perry as cable news hosts, plus Rob Morgan, Ron Perlman, Himesh Patel, self-effacing performances from Ariana Grande and Kid Cudi, plus Timothee Chalamet as a kind of homeless teenager who really doesn’t make any sense in the movie whatsoever?
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: this is in contention for most stacked movie cast of all time.
The movie is playing on Netflix, which in this rare case feels more appropriate than a movie theater ever could. The scenes are cut at a frenetic pace, and constructed in the kind of bang-bang-bang cuts and pop-ups more readily found on cable news television. Yet unlike many other Netflix-distributed movies, it cannot be put on in the background while you do other activities because it rips along with the speed and chaos of a social media scroll.
I’d stop short of calling this movie special, and I doubt it will be legible as the years pass by and the vocabulary and references of our current moment fall out of fashion, but in this moment the satire certainly worked on me. I laughed a lot and nodded my head solemnly in equal measure. Leo is great as always, and gets his share of big movie moments (including a Network-esque monologue that will go on his career highlight reel). Jonah Hill steals the show and gets a belly laugh at pretty much every line he delivers.
I definitely recommend checking this movie out, with the warning that you must prepare to have a conversation about politics after the credits roll on one of the funniest post-script insert scenes I’ve seen in a long time. Love him or hate him, Adam McKay certainly knows how to make us laugh.
The Matrix Resurrections
(Theaters, HBO Max)
Just as the original The Matrix sci-fi masterpiece so appropriately captured the mindless consumerism and drone-like cubicle culture that was prevalent around its 1999 release, this reboot perfectly embodies 2021 — namely, a shameless money-grab scrapping the last remaining dollars out of a 20-year-old good idea.
The Matrix Resurrections suffers from a pair of fatal diseases frequently identified in this newsletter: sequel-itis and blockbuster mumbo jumbo.
As a quick refresher, sequelitis is a condition where all of the mystery and discovery of a world has already been exhausted from a first movie, so a second movie has no choice but to widen the world out to ridiculous proportions and lose all of the magic that made the first one great. Blockbuster mumbo jumbo is a more recent phenomenon, in which huge blockbuster movies are so over-stuffed with backstory cannon that one would need a master’s degree in the franchise in order to understand what’s going on, so filmmakers compensate by dumbing everything down. The movie constantly explains itself through burdensome exposition, and each moment is preoccupied by some immediate problem that must be solved so it doesn’t really matter if viewers understand anything about the big picture.
That’s certainly the case for this movie’s plot, which if it gave viewers even a second to catch their breath would be poked so full of holes it would be unrecognizable. And in another lovely 2021-appropriate miscarriage, the story goes full meta to show groups of people literally brainstorming what would be in a Matrix sequel, at one point even name-dropping “our parent company Warner Brothers” (!!). Their responses are meant to be jokes (“people want us up in their gray matter,” “all anyone cares about is bullet time”) but they manifest themselves throughout the movie’s run time, a bloated 2hr23min that leaves one final painful reminder of its 2021 release.
The first movie, though it was cloaked in an entire dictionary of philosophy terms and concepts, was ultimately a pretty simple and effective premise. What if the world you’re living in turns out to be a computer simulation? There are people, some actual very smart people, who seriously believe that’s true about the world we live in. Attached to that premise is a pretty typical story about “the one” and his one true love and an oracle and all the rest of that, but ultimately it’s human vs. robots. We can grasp that.
I still can’t really explain what this movie is about, or why anything happens the way it happens, which is almost impressive considering this movie is a near-total rip off of the plot of the original movie (like what The Force Awakens did to the original Star Wars). As if to assuage my concerns, it’s sure to drop in a nostalgic callback to the original trilogy at least once every five minutes.
What’s worse is this reboot doesn’t take advantage of its 20-year time gap by giving us any sort of technological “wow” moments. It uses all the same effects (bullet time, slow-mo punching, body morphing) the exact same way as the originals, and for my money, they don’t even look as cool.
It’s hard to be really surprised that a movie as brazenly opportunistic as this one would be bad, but part of me certainly hoped that with one of the original directors (Lana Wachowski) and the original stars (Keanu Reeves, Carrie-Ann Moss) returning they could make this movie watchable for those of us who didn’t indulge in approximately 2.5 bong hits before viewing. Alas, not even Keanu can save us from the woes of forced franchise sequels.
Trailer Watch: I Want You Back
When I’m deciding whether a certain movie is worth watching, I may look to see if it’s made by an awesome director, or staring any A-list actors, or whether it’s won any awards…or is just a vaguely comedic rom-com starring some people I want to hang out with.
This movie sits firmly in that final category, the type that’s likely to become more and more common as movies begin to be released directly to streaming (this one will be on Amazon Prime on Feb. 11). I just think Charlie Day and Jenny Slate (and to a lesser extent Gina Rodriguez) are cool people I want to hang out with. It’s one of those that you can throw on late at night or while you’re folding laundry and just have a great time watching with no expectations — and, importantly, it’s a million times better than Red Notice or whatever similar crap Netflix is shoveling these days.