The Difference Between Cinema And Content: 'No One Will Save You'
#242: "No One Will Save You," "Love At First Sight," "The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar," "The Squid and the Whale," "Lawless"
Edition 242:
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!
This week: A pair of streaming movies starring exciting young talent, and what they say about the state of the movie industry! Then I finally watched a hugely influential New York movie and revisited a hidden gem after walking by its star on the street this week. In this week’s “Trailer Watch,” a star-studded action comedy from director Matthew Vaughn.
No One Will Save You
In the midst of this week’s revealing GQ profile, Martin Scorcese quite intentionally returned to his soap box to preach about the need to “save cinema.” Cinema, as he defines it, doesn’t have to be super serious, weighty movies. But, he said, “I do think that the manufactured content isn’t really cinema.”
“It’s almost like AI making a film. And that doesn’t mean that you don’t have incredible directors and special effects people doing beautiful artwork. But what does it mean? What do these films, what will it give you? Aside from a kind of consummation of something and then eliminating it from your mind, your whole body, you know? So what is it giving you?”
Martin Scorcese, h/t GQ
That, more or less, is the founding thesis of this newsletter. I hope it comes off without sounding uppity or pretentious, but my goal here is to show you that there’s a difference between what Scorcese calls cinema — what I may simply call ‘good movies’ — and the ever-growing sea of content.
Now more than ever before, the lines between the two are quite clearly drawn. Within seconds of watching a trailer, even looking at a poster for a trained eye, one can usually identify which bucket a movie falls into. Then in a split-second a decision is made about whether to see the movie or not.
Therein lies the problem. Rarely do movies attempt to cross over and appeal to both sides. Which is why I’m so fascinated by 20th Century Studios and its current distribution deal with Hulu.
Clearly, this is an arranged marriage. Disney bought Fox and had to figure out what to do with its film properties, from X-Men and Avatar on down the line, at some point making the decision that lower ambition 20th Century Studios movies would go straight to streaming. Under a modern lens, these movies are like homeless vagabonds wandering the streets. They’re not flashy enough to be blockbusters, not crowd-pleasing enough to be popcorn entertainment, not dumb enough to be background noise, not high-minded enough to be critically acclaimed and not ambitious enough to be awards fare. Nobody wants to claim them.
(Disclaimer: a couple of these movies do fit in a box — Vacation Friends and White Man Can’t Jump are two examples of classic dumb streamer trash.)
Because of these circumstances, the only success metric or motivation for these movies to exist is to…be good? So we’re talking about mostly original concept movies with recognizable faces and modest yet adequate budgets, striving to be about something…
Which is to say, these movies are cinema. Prey was excellent and showed there’s a way to give fresh life and creativity to a tired Predator IP. No Exit was good. Even with the big misses (Deep Water, Boston Strangler), one can see the striving to be something great.
Expanding the aperture a bit wider beyond just 20th Century, from the past few years I’d put into this same category Palm Springs, Fresh, Run and Happiest Season, all Hulu movies I loved that are neither hits nor awards bait.
That excessively long introduction is meant to get you into the right headspace to receive the latest 20th Century-on-Hulu release, No One Will Save You.
The company has to market this as a simple home invasion horror movie, because really, within the first 10 minutes there’s a massive spoiler that would confuse or even ruin the movie for prospective viewers. In short, it’s wayyyyy weirder than that. At any given time, a viewer will have no idea where it’s headed next (a feeling I love), and in the end I’m left thinking the whole thing was an extended allegory for guilt.
But that makes it a perfect example of what I’m talking about. I tune in for a simple, straightforward streamer — something like Hush (which is excellent too by the way) — then within 10 minutes I’m blindsided by a creative new twist and we’re off in a new direction.
This only works if there’s a star at the center of the movie that makes a viewer want to stick around. Without a doubt, Kaitlyn Dever is such a star. Though her energy is way different, her career path reminds me of Aubrey Plaza’s, because she’s opted to be the lead star in smaller projects for the most part rather than be a fifth lead in a bigger movie. She shines in almost every role I’ve seen her. Eventually, like Plaza, she’ll front big movies because she’s that talented and charismatic.
The movie is formally daring. Dever is the only real character of any substance, it takes place mostly in one location, and basically the entire movie is dialogue-free. Yet the movie remains captivating throughout, drawing the praise of no less than Stephen King and several times by Guillermo Del Toro.
If nothing else, I hope this category of “homeless cinema” I’ve just created can be the proving ground for future directors, future legends, perhaps even future Scorceses, who can one day take up his mantle as crusader-in-chief and fight for the future of movies.
Something New
Love At First Sight (Netflix): Cinema it is not, but as far as the Hallmark-style Netflix rom-com genre goes, this has got to be very near the top of the heap. In classic rom-com premise fashion, two strangers fall in love on a cross-Atlantic flight then lose each other’s contact information once they land in London. Of course, the selling point is the chemistry and honestly the individual charm of both Haley Lu Richardson and Ben Hardy, but surprisingly, the movie manages to squeeze some depth and real emotional stakes into its back end, which allows it to stick the inevitable landing in a much more satisfying way then other similar movies in this genre. In terms of heart-warming stories, it’s dang-near a home run.
The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar (Netflix): Wes Anderson has kind of become a parody of himself at this point, creating these elaborately layered kaleidoscope productions that lay waste to human emotion and character building in service of pure artifice and creativity. This one is graded on a curve, because it’s only 38 minutes long and very much feels like an experiment rather than a complete artistic statement, but still, it’s a story within a story within a real life short story by Roald Dahl.
Anderson is nothing if not slavishly devoted to the beauty of the written word (and I love him for it), so in place of dialogue the characters more or less speak like they’re reciting passages in a book. It sounds off-putting, but Anderson has a way of making anything seem whimsical and endearing. There’s not much room for performance, but actors love working with him, so present here are no less than Benedict Cumberbatch, Ralph Fiennes, Ben Kingsley, and Dev Patel. Considering its length, I highly recommend everyone check out this creative, bizarre, highly-entertaining work of art.
Something Old
The Squid and the Whale (2005, Netflix): *sorry for breaking my 20 year rule*
A weird thing happens whenever you finally watch a movie that has served as an inspiration for several other movies you’ve already seen, a sort of “ah ha!” moment played out in slow motion. The entire class of over-intellectualized New York movies from the past 20 years, many of which I’ve highlighted here, are in conversation with this divorce movie written and directed by Noah Baumbach.
That’s not to say there weren’t divorce movies before — Kramer vs. Kramer being the most obvious — or even intellectual New York dramedies (see Allen, Woody), but this movie feels like a new standard-setter because of just how much it strips away the Hollywood glamour from the proceedings. Thanks to wonderfully naturalistic performances from Jeff Daniels and Laura Linney as an upper middle class Brooklyn couple going through a messy split, with Jesse Eisenberg and Owen Kline as the kids caught in the middle, the story feels raw, almost documentary. That makes it at times not the most pleasant movie to watch, but it’s emotionally resonant for me and I’m sure doubly so for anyone who has lived through a divorce in their family.
Something to Stream
Lawless (Netflix): This week I walked right past Shia LeBeouf on the streets of Venice, CA, wearing a hoodie and a big beard but no disguise or entourage, which got me fired up to revisit a movie of his this week. Despite his apparent difficulty to work with behind the scenes and entirely made up narratives on the promotional trail, I’ve defended LaBeouf in this newsletter because I believe him to be a once in a generation talent, the rare combination of an incredible character actor and magnetic movie star.
2012’s Lawless was probably the last time LaBeouf could’ve convincingly played the naive, soft younger brother to a group of bootleggers in Prohibition-era Virginia. His character wants to get involved in the illegal trade, and more than that, he wants the glamorous lifestyle of a gangster, which runs afoul with his no-nonsense brothers, played excellently by Tom Hardy and Jason Clarke, and the city slicking deputy sent down from Chicago to hunt them, played by the eminently punchable Guy Pearce. Gary Oldman also features as an Al Capone stand-in, plus Jessica Chastain, Bill Camp, and Dane DeHaan.
It’s a classic crime movie story with excellent aesthetic style and memorable characters, creating the type of world you want to spend more time in. Even in the face of a towering Hardy performance, it’s LaBeouf who carries the movie from start to satisfying finish.
Trailer Watch: Argylle
The premise of this movie is suspiciously similar to The Lost City — a novelist finds out that her fiction is actually happening in the real world and she’s thrust into the action — but the approach to the material is wildly different. That’s thanks to Matthew Vaughn, who began as Guy Ritchie’s producing partner before setting off to make his own line of irreverent action capers including Kick-Ass and three Kingsmen movies. His projects are just a ton of fun, a sentiment obviously shared by all the star talent who feature here: Bryce Dallas Howard, Henry Cavill, Dua Lipa (!!), Bryan Cranston, Samuel L. Jackson, Sam Rockwell, John Cena, Ariana DeBose. In February, usually a dead time for new movies, this one could make some serious noise. I’m pumped.