'Thirteen Lives' Is Trapped In The Cave Of Streaming
#187: "Thirteen Lives," "Not Okay," "A Room With A View," "Road to Perdition"
Edition 187:
Hey movie lovers!
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In this week’s newsletter: A new Ron Howard movie with all the trappings of blockbusterdom is headed straight to streaming…why? Plus, Zoey Deutch’s next star vehicle on Hulu and some good ol’ fashioned streaming suggestions. In this week’s “Trailer Watch,” John Boyega is so much like Denzel Washington in a new movie it’s scary.
Thirteen Lives
If this week’s industry-shaking rumors out of Warner Media and Netflix’s inability to produce a quality movie this summer have taught us anything, it’s that, despite infinite amounts of customer data, the major streaming services still don’t really know what the hell they’re doing.
Should movies go straight to streaming? After all, these companies are now measured by their rising sea level of subscribers (a stat that can be misleading, but that’s a topic for a different newsletter).
Should movies play in theaters? People are coming back, box office returns continue to beat expectations, and that’s where the serious money can be made.
Or should movies just be discarded entirely and used as a tax write-off? That’s seemingly the fate of the $90 million Batgirl movie that Warner axed this week.
Case and point, there’s a new movie out on Amazon Prime Video. It’s directed by Ron Howard (Apollo 13, A Beautiful Mind), an Oscar-winning filmmaker and a celebrity in his own right. It’s written by the guy who wrote Gladiator for goodness sakes. It’s starring Colin Farrell, Vigo Mortensen and Joel Edgerton. And it’s about an event most people in the world are at least familiar with — the group of boys who got trapped in a cave in Thailand for two weeks back in 2018.
If those elements aren’t enough to push Thirteen Lives into theatrical release, let alone a full fall festival rollout and awards campaign, it’s hard to think what is.
This is Howard’s return to the type of movie he does best, and arguably better than anyone — a problem-solving movie. After dalliances with blockbuster (as a fill-in on Solo: A Star Wars Story) and prestige awards movie (Hillbilly Elegy) in recent years fizzled out, we’ve now got what essentially amounts to Apollo 13 (or In The Heart of the Sea, or The Da Vinci Code), just in a cave.
Of course, the true events of the 2018 Thai cave rescue are incredible enough on their own accord, so there’s little need for filmmaking embellishments. But I’d bet a huge number of people, myself included, do not know the specifics of the story going into this movie. Even if they do, it’s one thing to read about what happened and another to be thrust, experientially, into the impossibility of the task required of the rescue divers.
The plot is incredibly simple — get the kids out — and is constructed around a never-ending cascade of puzzles. And I have this semi-hot take that people (or in this case movie-watchers) actually like puzzles, or what I call “2 + 2” storytelling, because that “ah-ha!” moment feels a lot better after we’ve worked a little bit to earn it.
Viewers may not be challenged — a legitimate Howard critique — but they will certainly be stimulated. The movie somehow remains visually interesting and coherent despite taking place in cramped, dark spaces, and the real star of the movie is the underwater sound design. That full immersion means there’s never a moment to relax, and the “climax” lasts for a solid 45 minutes, making it one of those movies that leaves you feeling exhausted after the credits roll.
That’s precisely why it’s so disappointing to see it dropped on a streaming service, where undoubtedly it’s two-and-a-half hour runtime will be paused, interrupted, or otherwise competing with the distraction of a second (and third) screen.
It’s not a brilliant or overly ambitious movie, but it truly wrings out every last ounce of potential from its subject and leaves audiences immensely satisfied.
It’s telling that after both times I’ve seen the movie (in theaters!), my fellow moviegoers were excited to talk about the subject matter of the movie, rather than the filmmaking. That humility, either on the part of Howard or in deference to the seriousness of the real-life events, perhaps has doomed the movie to the inevitable fate of all disposable streaming movies. Here today, gone tomorrow.
So for you all who have read this far, don’t let it pass by! I currently have this as my No. 5 movie of the year. Needless to say, it’s worth your time.
Something New
Not Okay (Hulu): The only thing slowing Zoey Deutch’s unstoppable movie star ascendance is, ironically, how ambitious her role choices have been. The juicy parts have to this point come in disappointing movies.
Her latest, Not Okay, explores the “zillennial” generation (the movie’s word for those stuck between the stereotypes of the millennials and the Gen Z’s…a group I’d technically fall into) and our desperate attempt to escape the malaise of meaninglessness, told through the story of a girl who photoshops a bunch of pictures about a fake trip to Paris to gain Instagram “clout.” A terrorist bombing coincides with her “trip,” and she perpetuates the lie all the way to short-lived celebrity, and eventually inevitable cancellation.
The movie is, above all, incredibly cringe-worthy. That’s not necessarily an insult, as it is the movie’s intended effect, and though it falls far short of having “anything to say” about our culture it still manages to be enjoyable (and surprisingly light-hearted, considering its traumatic subject matter).
The whole thing is far more interesting as a corrective for Dear Evan Hansen, from which it quite literally borrows almost the entire plot, and character archetypes. It’s a rip-off, but because this movie is unafraid to criticize its protagonist — so much so that “unlikable female protagonist” is listed in the pre-movie content trigger warning — it succeeds in many ways the film adaptation of DEH does not. That alone makes this streamer worth watching — well, that and seeing Dylan O’Brien doing an unintentional Pete Davidson impression for the entire movie, which is hilarious.
Something Old
A Room With A View (1986, HBO Max): If you’ve never seen a “Merchant Ivory” movie, you might be put off by their incredibly formal British veneer. But things aren’t as they initially appear. The movie actively makes fun of its stiff British mannerisms, which somehow works both to wink to those who find it all ridiculous (the filmmakers agree with me!) and appease those who love turn-of-the-20th-century England-ness (the filmmakers agree with me!).
So it’s a legitimately funny “comedy of manners,” about a young girl (played by Helena Bonham Carter) who has a fling during a trip to Florence before getting engaged back in England to a joyless aristocrat — one of the first film roles for a young Daniel Day-Lewis (!!!!!!!). And then Judi Dench (!) writes a novel about it! Of course the lover shows up and the whole thing unwinds.
Keep in mind that this movie came out in the same year as the original Top Gun. Talk about counter-programming! And yet, it too was a commercial success, and nabbed eight Oscar nominations. Seriously, 1986 was a wild time.
Something to Stream
Road to Perdition (Netflix): Last week I recommended “The Last Movie Stars” documentary series on Paul Newman and his wife Joanne Woodward, which got me thinking a lot about Newman as perhaps the consummate movie star + serious actor of all time. The closest competitor I could come up with was Tom Hanks (and Denzel, but disregard that for now). That thread lead me back to this bloody crime epic from 2002, directed by Sam Mendes (who did American Beauty, 1917, and most importantly Skyfall).
Putting Newman and Hanks in the same movie should be enough to get you running to your nearest streaming device, but in case it’s not, how about a supporting cast of Jude Law, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Stanley Tucci, Ciarán Hinds and a very young Daniel Craig? The movie’s Oscar-winning cinematography captures a bleak 1930s midwestern landscape dominated by gruff dudes in overcoats wielding Tommy guns. You know the story….redemption, revenge, and all the other stuff they used to make movies about in the early 2000s that they’ve totally forgotten about now.
Trailer Watch: The Banshees of Inisherin
Martin McDonagh is one of the more under-the-radar auteurs working today, and I’ve enjoyed pretty much everything he’s done from the hitman buddy comedy In Bruges to the heavily awarded yet (in my opinion) unfairly derided Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri.
But even I have to admit this is an extremely strange premise for a movie, re-teaming In Bruges co-stars Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson in a small Irish town as best friends, until one of them starts to hate the other out of the blue and tensions begin to mount. It’s a case of “how is this a movie?” carried by enough talent (in addition to McDonagh writing/directing and the two stars, there’s Kerry Condon and Barry Keoghan) that I’m willing to trust it’ll be good. And funny!