'Lightyear,' 'Spiderhead,' And The Best Documentary Of The Year
#181: "Navalny," "Lightyear," "Spiderhead," "Cha Cha Real Smooth"
Edition 181:
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: We’ve got a whole slate of new movies to talk about, starting with an absolutely fantastic documentary, then a Pixar blockbuster (kinda), a Netflix prestige movie (kinda), and AppleTV+’s successor to CODA. In this week’s trailer watch, it’s an extremely creepy new horror movie coming in the fall.
Navalny
HBO Max
It was a packed out movie week, but I’d be doing you all a disservice if I didn’t put the best movie up top. Navalny is best documentary of the year and one of the best films of the year for the not-so earth-shattering reason that it’s real.
If the events of this doc were to play out in a fictional narrative movie, they’d be too crazy to believe. Cameras follow in real time with Russian political figure Alexei Navalny, the leading opposition candidate to Vladmir Putin, after he narrowly escapes a poisoning by the pseudo-dictator.
Incredibly, Navalny then sets out to investigate the plot of his own assassination attempt and prove Putin’s involvement, in a thriller that’s part All The President’s Men, part Three Days of the Condor, and part Spy Games (I didn’t pick three Robert Redford movies on purpose, I swear, but the point stands). Without spoiling any of the crazy revelations, there are moments of espionage here that are as tense as anything I’ve ever seen in any spy thriller, and twice as mind-blowing, because it turns out all the crazy stuff we see in movies actually happens in real life in this part of the world.
On the periphery, there is much to be learned about the current state of Russian politics, as the country remains thoroughly under the thumb of an authoritarian regime that is aggressively resisting the creeping influence of western culture and values.
Admittedly, this part of the movie is less effective, because the movie is told entirely from Navalny’s point of view and he’s a skilled politician presenting a biased worldview. But as he says explicitly to the camera, when the other option is Putin, politics become incredibly simple. Human rights, freedom of speech, election integrity. And given the revelations in this movie about Putin’s inhumane tactics, there’s a pretty compelling case for literally anyone else to be in power there.
Ultimately, the movie can be enjoyed regardless of this. Because the camera is in the room with Navalny as these crazy events are happening, there’s a breathless quality to the movie. At one point, I had to literally pause it and pace around my apartment because I couldn’t take it. If that’s not the sign of a great movie, I don’t know what is.
Lightyear
Theaters
The less said about Lightyear from me the better, I think, considering Disney seemingly lowered its target audience for this one down from the usual 12 years old to somewhere around six or seven.
The fact that the Culture Warriors came after something as totally inconsequential within the context of this movie as a two-second same-sex kiss, a Pixar first, during a time lapse montage should tell you all you need to know about the movie’s ability to produce memorable moments. There were three screenwriters on the project, yet the best joke any of them could come up with, or at least the only one I can remember anyway, involved sandwiches in the future being constructed meat-bread-meat rather than bread-meat-bread, a gag that goes on for a solid moment and left me legitimately stunned by its stupidity.
Pixar is the only studio who I could give the benefit of the doubt to when approaching a project as blatantly commercial as this one, especially considering they’ve already made four Toy Story movies, and the fourth was in my top five movies of 2019 (a great movie year). I was even so bold as to say earlier this year, when reviewing the excellent Turning Red, that Pixar movies “almost always occupy the range between good and very very good.”
Well, dear reader, this one does not. The company’s usual attention to detail only goes so far as to cover the stunning visuals on display throughout the movie. The plot is simultaneously too dumbed down to be enjoyed by grown-ups and too in-the-weeds about the space-time continuum to be understood by its target demographic. And far more disappointing is the characters, usually so dynamic and relatable in Pixar stories, who here feel extremely one-note.
Perhaps I’m secretly disappointed because Pixar has not-so-secretly been making movies for adults for several years now — most notably, Soul — and has matured their Toy Story movies along the timeline of the kids who grew up with the first couple. It seems strange that they would then revert to the youngest possible viewer, but I guess it makes better business sense to have a Toy Story for every new generation.
Good for them. There will be plenty of little robot cat toys for sale between now and Christmas, even more after this movie limps its way through a disappointing box office run and immediately enters the play-on-a-loop rotation on Disney+. I do not have little kids, so I will not be joining them.
Spiderhead
Netflix
Top Gun: Maverick is buzzing the tower of $1 billion at the global box office and it’s hard to imagine anyone is having a better month than Joseph Kasinski, who now adds the release of a splashy, A-lister Netflix movie.
The idea here was pretty clearly, “what if we made Ex Machina but with Thor and Rooster and added in more jokes,” using a short story by George Saunders as the baseline for a mysterious prison program that gives inmates (Miles Teller, among them) a chance to shave time off their sentences if they agree to participate in tests like lab rats.
The tests are for emotion-altering drugs being developed by Chris Hemsworth’s genius tech/pharmaceutical CEO — I don’t know how many times I’ve mentioned that evil tech billionaires make the best movie villains (just ask Ex Machina). And what’d’ya know, things aren’t as they seem and stuff starts getting out of control as more and more secrets are revealed.
It’s Hemsworth’s charisma that really carries the project, dominating the two-hander with a miscast Teller, who cannot bend his intensity and bro-y charisma into the kind of hangdog idiot needed to fully earn our sympathy. He, like the movie, doesn’t quite work but is compelling enough that you can’t look away.
Within that low hum of set it and forget it streaming movie, this slots right in. Think too deeply about it, or pull on one too many strings and the whole thing is likely to unwind.
It’s disappointing, somewhat, given the potentially controversial premise, that the movie never generates the electricity of anything unsafe or unknown. Perhaps that’s par for the course now for Kasinski, who much like in Top Gun: Maverick, would rather play a crowd pleaser to the cheap seats than make any kind of statement about the world. Still, he’s proven to be a strong craftsman and gets some visual flair out of a story that’s mostly people in rooms talking.
Unfortunately, Netflix’s original films department is developing a bit of a reputation for half-baked projects. Their slate is pockmarked with movies that didn’t totally make sense, totally went off the rails or simply didn’t rise to any level of cultural importance. As I wrote about a few weeks ago with Operation Mincemeat, it doesn’t help that the movies appear seemingly out of nowhere with no build-up, then are buried just a few days later underneath Algorithm Mountain.
And yet, on the strength of Hemsworth, a clever premise and an incredibly generous soundtrack budget, this is still a movie I’d recommend to anyone with a few spare hours on a weeknight.
Cha Cha Real Smooth
AppleTV+
There are reasons to be cynical about boy wonder Cooper Raiff, the writer/director/star who announced his arrival with 2020’s Sh*thouse (MY REVIEW) at the tender age of 23, but there are vanishingly few reasons to be skeptical that he is not a talented filmmaker.
In point of fact, Raiff is yet another young white guy who is making movies about himself, and being rewarded handsomely for it. After premiering at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, this movie was snapped up by Apple for $15 million as the streamer’s pseudo-successor to Best Picture winner CODA (purchased at Sundance a year earlier for a record-$25 million).
But his low stakes, emotional stories are like soft pitch softball for a streaming home run. They are funny and sentimental and ultimately quite effective in this story about a young man who graduates college and has a hard time launching out into the real world, so he gets a job as a party host/hypeman for local bar mitzvahs.
The talent is obvious on all three levels — acting, writing and directing — and his ability to juggle all three on a bigger production, this time with name co-stars like Dakota Johnson and Leslie Mann, is undeniably impressive.
For those that loved CODA, which should be all of you, I think you’ll enjoy this movie — and perhaps be a little creeped out by the age-gapped-semi-romance that feels a little like wish fulfillment?
I’ll admit, it’s hard to shake the idea that Raiff is making these movies as a form of identity creation, marking himself in the public eye as the caring, funny and awesome guy who gets to make out with a much-older Dakota Johnson. But that strategy worked for the likes of Woody Allen and Albert Brooks before him. And shoot, I liked those two guys’ movies too.
Either way, I have a feeling I’m going to be watching Raiff’s forthcoming movies for the rest of my life. Climb aboard the train now!
Trailer Watch: Smile
The beauty of a great horror movie, from a business perspective, is that all you really need to be successful is a great idea. If it’s a great idea, and it’s scary, people will show up (that is, the certain type of people who enjoy the sick and twisted worlds of these movies…can’t be me). The genre is cheap to produce, making it the perfect breeding ground for new and emerging filmmakers.
I have no idea whether this writer/director, Parker Finn, will emerge as a great talent or not. But this trailer was genuinely terrifying, and features some iconic images, which I think is a great start. Whether it’s this week’s The Black Phone, or next month’s Nope from Jordan Peele, or earlier this year with Scream and X — not to mention the scary stuff happening outside the silver screen every day — it looks like it’s going to end up being a great year for horror.