The blown potential of 'Reminiscence'
#142: "Reminiscence," "Annette," "Hoop Dreams," "Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy"
Edition 142:
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: I’m both impressed and disappointed with the new noir mystery starring Hugh Jackman and Rebecca Ferguson. Annette flew way over my boring, normal head. Then I’ll take a look at Hollywood history through the tables at a famous restaurant, and suggest a travel food show that is guaranteed to make you smile. In this week’s “Trailer Watch,” Kristen Stewart plays Princess Diana.
Reminiscence
(Theaters, HBO Max)
Earlier this summer, I broke down the essential elements of film noir: the shadowy streets, the double crosses, the femme fatale, the weary and flawed hero, the overwritten voice over, the convoluted plot.
It’s a genre I absolutely love, and honestly I don’t think I’ve ever seen a future-set noir environment rendered so brilliantly as the underworld of Reminiscence.
In the not-too-distant future, climate change has submerged Miami and made the heat of daytime unlivable, forcing everyone onto the damp, neon-lit streets of the Miami night. Rich people live on elevated dry lands, while poor people are relegated to the “sunken city,” navigating around in boats instead of cars. Scarce resources has everybody scrounging to get by.
Instantly I’m in, I’m hooked. I want to know everything about this world.
When you think about coming up with an idea for an original movie, conceiving of a world like this one is the hardest part. What’s an environment that’s original yet familiar, aspirational yet relatable, interesting but not too strange, one you want to spend time in but also leaves you on edge?
Kudos to writer/director/producer Lisa Joy for imagining such a world. It’s the perfect setting for dozens of fascinating stories.
The most disappointing thing about Reminiscence is that it chose the least interesting of those stories to focus in on. Our story follows a sad sack veteran who, basically, gets ghosted by a girl and can’t let it go.
For work he operates a technology which allows people to re-experience their memories by basically wearing a fancy headset and floating in a sensory deprivation tank. By the way, that’s not a horrible premise for a movie either, even if in this case it’s definitely a hat on a hat…
…on another hat and another and another, it turns out. The story brings in drug smuggling, a corrupt land baron, a crooked cop, a whole other city (New Orleans) and about a dozen other elements it cannot possibly maintain.
Noir is no stranger to biting off more than you can chew, but here it just feels like we’re missing a central thread that pulls us through all the interweaving plot lines. Take The Maltese Falcon. It’s confusing, there’s tons of characters, but as long as we’re tracking down the priceless bird statue everything else makes sense. In Chinatown, where’s the water going. In The Big Lebowski, the rug really tied the room together.
Here the driving force is, I guess, a fling between our hero and a client that may have lasted two months and included enough red flags to fill a warehouse. The primary reason they love each other is, I guess, that one of them looks like Hugh Jackman and the other looks like Rebecca Ferguson (there are worse reasons).
Ferguson isn’t given a super complex character to work with, and neither is the excellent Thandiwe Newton as the other female lead. Really, neither is Jackman’s hero.
Which leads to a less-than-compelling story through an incredibly compelling world. The set design and production design is fantastic, the cinematography is awesome, but I found myself searching the edges of the frame for people I’d rather spend time with.
It pains me to not love a movie that represents so much of what I love about movies, and represents the hope for what I want them to continue being, but I can’t in good faith tell you this is anything more than an a replacement-level mystery thriller.
Carry on!
Something New
Annette (Amazon Prime): I’d never heard of the musical group “Sparks” until Sundance, when Edgar Wright’s documentary premiered on the premise that they were “the best band you’ve never heard of” and “your favorite band’s favorite band.” What they are, really, is weird. They have that off-beat sensibility in their music, and now in the screenplay they wrote together about a famous female opera singer (Marion Cotillard) and a raunchy comedian (Adam Driver) falling in love, having a baby, then falling out of love.
The movie is staged like a broadway musical, from its traditional overture opening to its utterly bizarre conclusion. It’s surrealist. For example, the baby in question is made out of..like…paper mache(?), and the chorus for the song about how they love each other is literally them singing back and forth, “we love each other so much.”
I guess all the weirdness is supposed to symbolize some deeper truths, or something. I don’t necessarily hate the attempt, but it didn’t land for me so I ended up not enjoying myself at all here. Being divisive is kinda the Sparks whole thing, and what I’m learning about myself is I more often than not end up on the side of the squares. Ho hum.
Something Old
Musso and Frank Grill: This is not an old movie but rather an old restaurant, started in 1919 right in the heart of Hollywood. Really ever since then it’s become the center of the Hollywood social scene, from the early days when F. Scott Fitzgerald and Raymond Chandler would drink at the bar, and Charlie Chaplain would ride his horse over from the studio to eat lunch in the corner booth there, up through Marilyn Monroe and Joe Dimaggio canoodling by the door and Humphrey Bogart puffing cigars in the back room, all the way to the movie biz dealmaking that still goes on in its faded red booths.
I got a chance to eat there this week, to celebrate a fellow movie-crazed friend who is moving out of town soon. It was a fantastic experience. Then again, you get what you pay for.
Oh, yes, that’s right, some recommendations! Unsurprisingly, Musso and Frank has been hosting scenes from iconic movies and TV shows going back decades. It’s where Al Pacino and Leo DiCaprio meet in Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood, where Ben Stiller mopes in Greenberg, where Johnny Depp’s character meets a brooding Orson Welles in Ed Wood. It’s been in episodes of “Mad Men,” “Bosch,” last year’s “Hollywood” (duh), and played a central role in “The Kominsky Method.”
For a city eager to discard its past, this restaurant is one of the rare places that captures the magic of Hollywood’s golden age.
Something to Stream
Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy (HBO Max): I recommended this series to you all several months ago during its linear TV run on CNN, with the full realization that for many of my newsletter subscribers, sitting down at a specific time and tuning into a specific channel in order to catch the latest episodes would be entirely too big of an ask from me. Well you’re in luck, because now the show is streaming!
For many years, we’ve been searching for a successor to Anthony Bourdain, an impossible task. But CNN used his same crew and stunning production design to follow around Stanley Tucci, a completely different kind of host. Instead of being edgy and searching, Tucci is delightful and diplomatic, making this show the ultimate comfort food (pun intended). Each of its six episodes focuses on a different region of Italy, where Tucci walks around Bourdain-style meeting people, talking about the culture and most importantly eating tons of incredible looking food. I dare to say it’s even better for the soul than watching “Ted Lasso.”
Trailer Watch: Spencer
Apparently the latest season of “The Crown” wasn’t quite enough Princess Diana content for one year. We’re also getting this prestige project starring Kristen Stewart from writer Steven Knight (“Peaky Blinders”) and the director of Jackie.
I want to commend not only the movie, which looks like an awards contender, but also this trailer, labeled here as a “teaser trailer.” If I were in charge, movies would only be allowed to release teaser trailers, no longer than one minute in length and not revealing any plot details. All we need as an audience is to see the actors, get the vibe of the movie, the premise, and see a few beautiful shots to decide whether we want to see it or not. Even if there isn’t much mystery to the events of Princess Diana’s life, a teaser like this leaves me wanting more. (Inevitably in a couple of months we’ll get one more multiple full length 2-minute trailers that will outline the entire arc of the movie.)