'Operation Mincemeat' Shows Why Netflix Is Faltering
#176: "Operation Mincemeat," "The Bubble," "Presumed Innocent," "Memories of Murder"
Edition 176:
Hey movie lovers!
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In this week’s newsletter: We take a look at the state of Netflix, through the prism of a new WW2 espionage drama and a really trashy Judd Apatow comedy. Plus, some streaming suggestions for lovers of legal and crime thrillers. In this week’s “Trailer Watch,” my favorite movie from this year’s Sundance Film Festival is finally being released.
Operation Mincemeat
Netflix’s bombshell announcement of lost subscribers a few weeks ago is the news item that launched a thousand think pieces, and these days seemingly everyone has an opinion on the state of the Streaming Wars. If prognosticators are to be believed, this event will kick start some pretty drastic changes across the industry.
The strategy for Netflix, up to this point, has been to become everything for everyone. It has cornered the market on stand-up comedy, reality TV and true crime while paying up for Oscar contenders and Emmy winners, adult animation and multi-cam sitcoms, international blockbusters and talk shows and whatever the hell we’re calling “Is It Cake?” … a show so dumb I hesitate to even describe the premise.
All of that is how the streamer became as much of a necessary utility in American households as water or Wi-Fi. The vast amounts of user data are meant to perfect an algorithm that could both give everyone exactly what they want and provide a Midas touch to any show or movie the service wants to be a hit.
Operation Mincemeat, which was released unceremoniously last week, is a perfect example of why that strategy doesn’t work. I never knew this movie existed until I fired up Netflix on Thursday and there it was, despite some real pedigree — accomplished director John Madden (Shakespeare in Love, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, Miss Sloane) and stars Colin Firth and Matthew Macfadyen.
I track new movies religiously, so if I hadn’t heard of this movie’s existence I assume very few of you all would have either. For Netflix, that’s not a bug, it’s a feature. The goal is to lure viewers into opening up the Netflix app without knowing what to watch, therefore making the brand more important than any one piece of content.
However, I believe sustaining that behavior has exhausted interest in the brand. Subscribers are either overwhelmed by the volume of content, and stuck in a 30-minute doom-scroll, or they allow themselves to be force-fed whatever the latest release is, adding to the feeling that shows and streaming movies are disposable…here one day and gone the next.
What I’m saying is that the idea of a “Netflix original” has lost all of its novelty, and frankly most of its value too, a fact that has come into even sharper focus in recent months as HBO Max and AppleTV+ have run off a string of high quality content. So if suddenly if I’m going to the Netflix homepage not expecting to find something fulfilling, the rising tide suddenly begins to sink all ships.
I don’t want to disparage anyone by saying that it’s hard to see the reason why Operation Mincemeat exists, other than to show up on the “For Those That Liked ‘The Crown’” carousel on the streamer’s home page.
It’s another stiff-upper-lipped British World War 2 drama, the likes of which we’ve seen now dozens of times. Churchill is grumpy yet saintly, and his doomed war effort is rescued by the bravery of heroic yet reserved British dudes in large suits smoking cigarettes, with the invaluable help of wise-cracking secretaries.
The focus here is on an intelligence operation to convince Hitler that the British invasion of Sicily is instead going to take place in Greece, leading to a crazy plan wherein fake operations documents are planted on a dead body and washed up on enemy shores (the “haversack ruse,” for those who are familiar).
It’s a crazy true story, and embodied well by the able talents of Firth and McFadyen — the former with a seemingly first right of refusal to any role of aforementioned valorous mid-century British dudes, and the latter inescapably just his Tom Wambsgans character from “Succession” but with a mustache.
Still, it lacks any of the electricity offered by Gary Oldman in Darkest Hour, or the technical brilliance of Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk, or the cleverness of The Imitation Game or the lovability of The King’s Speech, to name just a few recent examples from the same subgenre.
The movie is entirely competent but incapable of surprise. Its best utility might honestly be future use in history or social studies classes, as it takes great pains to deliver historical exposition and detail with what I can only imagine is painstaking accuracy, as any concessions to Hollywood storytelling might have been more compelling.
My gripe is less with this totally fine movie — in fact I’m thanking my lucky stars it wasn’t an eight-episode mini-series — and more with the service that served it up to me unannounced this week, only to be thrown on the scrap pile two hours later. If this movie were really good, or really bad, or just kinda chilling somewhere in the middle, it would come and gone just the same.
Something New
The Bubble (Netflix): Speaking of really, really bad, the second worst movie I’ve seen this year (behind another Netflix original, Home Team) is this broad comedy from Judd Apatow, a former comedy kingmaker who I think it’s fair to say has lost his touch. The appetite for Covid movies is low, and it’s hard to think of a plight less interesting during this era than that of movie productions. And yet, here’s a movie about how hard it is to make movies during a pandemic. It is self-aware about how far up it’s own bum it comes across, and yet gleefully continues to dive deeper into the same lifeless well of unfunny.
The real shame is the waste of such quality actors. Once Apatow finished casting his wife and one of his daughters in two of the main roles, he managed to sign up Pedro Pascal, Keegan-Michael Key, David Duchovny, Fred Armisen, Kate McKinnon and Karen Gillan to play along to comedy bits involving puke, drug overdoses and a fair amount of “those crazy kids and their TikTok.” If movies like this do anything, other than waste two hours of our lives, it is to remind us how special Tropic Thunder truly was.
Something Old
Presumed Innocent (1990, HBO Max): My brother and several friends have been going through law school finals these past couple weeks, so my contribution to the cause was firing up this courtroom drama starring a young Harrison Ford. He plays an assistant district attorney who is assigned to the mysterious murder of a coworker, who also happens to be his mistress.
He’s eventually put on trial for the murder himself, of course, because this is one of those 1990s thrillers where everything is written in the most perfect and clever way possible. The plot is twisty and the ending is enormously satisfying, even if the middle section of this movie is such a granular display of legal procedure that I almost felt like I could try a case by the time it was done — a great time capsule of a time in America where everyone was obsessed with courtroom dramas from John Grisham to the soon-to-come O.J. trial. But hey, not all of them have a lawyer as handsome as young Harrison Ford!
Something to Stream
Memories of Murder (Hulu): It’s really a blessing that Bong Joon-ho’s recent commercial success has motivated a major streaming service to pick up his 2003 Korean serial killer drama, which up until now was incredibly hard to find. Kang-ho Song (people will remember as the dad from Parasite) stars as a homicide detective in a rural town, interestingly both not great at his job and not all that interested in it. When a big city cop from Seoul comes down to help him catch a serial killer, the two butt heads as they come face to face with an inexplicable evil.
When compared to Bong’s western projects (Snowpiercer, Okja, Parasite), the pacing of this plot may seem slow, but it’s incredibly rewarding for those who are patient, an act made easier by Bong’s beautiful frame composition and surprising storytelling decisions. As with all his work, it’s a treat to witness.
Trailer Watch: Cha Cha Real Smooth
Writer/director/star Cooper Raiff made a splash with his 2020 debut Sh*thouse, at the ripe old age of 22. Now he’s back with a slightly bigger budget and some recognizable faces (Dakota Johnson, Leslie Mann, Brad Garrett, Odeya Rush) to tell another Richard Linklater-esque coming of age story about a young post-grad looking for purpose and fulfillment in a job as a barmixtzfah hype man and “other man” to the much older Johnson.
This movie fetched the largest sale price at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, where I saw it and liked it very much, announcing Raiff as a rather particular kind of auteur. It seems he fashions himself as a kind of modern day Woody Allen, his movies an extension of his own personality and point of view, and at times I get the sense that he — like Allen — makes movies simply in order to create their own image in the way they want to be viewed (in Raiff’s case, cool and caring and kissing Dakota Johnson).
Don’t let that deter you from seeking out this movie, either at an arthouse theater or on streaming. If anything, it only makes it more interesting, because Raiff is someone who will be on our screens for decades to come.