What do Soderbergh, J-Lo and Agatha Christie have in common? Movies out this week!
#164: "Kimi," "Death on the Nile," "Marry Me," "I Want You Back"
Edition 164:
Hey movie lovers!
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In this week’s newsletter: What a week! We’ve got four new release movies to talk about, and four trailers for highly anticipated upcoming projects. Whether you’re a fan of Steven Soderbergh’s down and dirty thrillers or glossy rom-coms or Ben Affleck and Ana De Armas gettin’ it on or Elvis freaking Presley, this edition’s got it all!
Kimi
The last eight years of the great Steven Soderbergh’s career have been marked almost exclusively by experimentation. He tried reverse-financing (Logan Lucky), non-linear plot (Mosaic), filming with an iPhone (Unsane, High Flying Bird), filming on a fully-functioning transatlantic ferry crossing (Let Them All Talk) and in his last five features giving up on theatrical entirely and releasing straight to streaming.
It’s the thing I love about him, even though it’s difficult not to think of these as “lesser Soderbergh” because of the lower stakes nature of the projects.
That label would be a sin of omission, because each of these movies tangles with ambitious ideas (The Laundromat goes after tax evasion for the super wealthy, and No Sudden Move takes on redlining and generational wealth). Through that lens Kimi could be seen as an exploration of online data privacy, the omnipotence of modern tech companies, and the post-pandemic fear of reentering society.
Still, Kimi is an extremely tight, 89-minute plot steam engine. It most resembles his tactile 2011 thriller Haywire, a similar straight ahead thriller, even if its premise more closely follows Brian De Palma’s Blow Out: a woman who works as an audio technician for a Siri/Alexa-style home assistant hears a strange sound on one of the recordings, then unravels the mystery as to the sound’s origins.
Soderbergh’s greatest talent, as I’ve said many times, is the way he doles out only one breadcrumb of information at a time, leaving viewers in the dark until the moment he wants to unveil something.
That’s why we don’t really know exactly what our protagonist’s condition is, though it resembles agoraphobia. She’s a shut-in who’s afraid to leave her apartment, and has built her entire life around self-sufficiency and the internet. And we don’t really know why she’s so obsessed with finding the truth about what’s on the recording, despite its danger to her own safety, until the story continues to unravel like an onion.
In general, straight-to-streaming movies are designed to be easily digestible and easily forgettable time-killers. Soderbergh’s movies, on the other hand, cannot be viewed in the background. They make you think, and often call for repeat viewings. Each detail is fussed over, elevated to the next level of craft.
To watch this movie is to remember that movies can be an art form without necessarily needing to be “high art.” Kimi will not compete for awards, nor does it aspire to. But when someone looks back on the 2022 year in movies, on the careers of Soderbergh or star Zoe Kravitz (or Derek DelGaudio, whose one-man show In & Of Itself was one of my favorite things of 2020), they will only have great things to say about this movie.
I’ll savor new Soderbergh every chance I get.
Death on the Nile
There’s always going to be an appetite for murder mystery whodunits. Famous people love making them, and we love watching them (even if that famous person is Adam Sandler and the most creative name he could come up with is Murder Mystery).
The real question is whether or not there’s still room for Agatha Christie’s staid period melodramas in a post-Knives Out world.
Christie has long been the queen of the genre, her source text being to true crime junkies what Jane Austen is for lonely white women or Tom Clancy is for dudes with American flags hanging off the back of their trucks. Adaptations of her work have always proven lucrative on the silver screen, including this same story (told much more effectively) in 1978 with Mia Farrow, Bette Davis and Peter Ustinov, and most recently Kenneth Branagh’s Murder on the Orient Express, which in 2017 netted $350 million in global box office receipts.
But Knives Out changed the game, and in terms of star-studded, colorful casts orbiting an eccentric detective, Death on the Nile feels ancient compared to the self-aware whit of Rian Johnson’s developing franchise.
It doesn’t help that this movie sat on the shelf for over a year, in which time one co-star was exposed as a cannibal, one (possibly two) was exposed as an anti-vaxxer, and one has been exposed as truly limited actor. You can Google around and find out which is which, but suffice it to say the Gal Gadot-Arnold Schwarzenegger comparison has become more true with each passing movie.
The biggest disappointment, however, is the almost inexplicable decision to “recreate” Egypt in a studio and fill in the rest using CGI. For a movie so tied to its location, the absence of that sense of location is a death sentence.
That same sort of surrealist feeling carries over to the cast, which asks American actors to play British (Armie Hammer, Annette Benning), British actors to play American (Emma Mackey) as well as French (Branagh, Rose Leslie) and Gal Gadot to play the only character she can, which is Gal Gadot.
The plot machinations are polished and the execution of the story, which took wide liberties from Christie’s original tale, is done well. On the whole, it’s a competent movie that lacks any of the fizzle that would make it memorable.
Perhaps it’s simply a case of sequelitis, since all of the mystery about Poirot and his unusual manner of solving crimes was explained in the previous movie, but a successful whodunit must not only lay out and solve a crime creatively, it must also have fun along the way. The more I think about it, that’s what Death on the Nile lacks. Fun.
Marry Me
The premise of this movie — an international pop star pointing out a member of the audience at her show to marry on stage — is so preposterous that the first time I saw the trailer I thought I was being punk’d.
Then as the movie unfolded I realized, this isn’t any more crazy than the setups of those hallowed rom-coms of yesteryear. The movie, in spite of itself, succeeds in transcending joke status to provide the kind of glitzy, brain-off, crowd-pleasing entertainment found in those dime-a-dozen romantic comedies of the 90s (many of which, perhaps not coincidentally, also starred Jennifer Lopez).
Romantic comedies have made a tepid comeback in recent years, but only as a shadow of their former glory — tight budgets, actors either on-the-rise or over-the-hill, and the kind of storytelling (not to mention production design) you’d expect from the Hallmark channel.
That is certainly not what this is. Marry Me is a legitimate mid-budget, major studio release starring two stars with name recognition in Lopez and Owen Wilson.
The movie is clearly built for J-Lo, a credited producer, to be a brand extension of her own real-life pop stardom. And though her hair, makeup and costuming can be a little heavy handed — at one point a frumpled J-Lo offers desperately to buy a winter coat off anyone on a commercial airplane with her and in the next scene is wearing one that retails for around $1300 — it’s exactly the kind of magical fairyland glamour that fulfills every audience member’s fantasy (I’m going to a Dua Lipa concert in March and certainly wouldn’t object to this happening).
I’d stop short of calling this a good movie, and I don’t want to hear anyone ever complain about Notting Hill again, having taken basically the identical premise and created much more comedy, drama and romance in the process. If you’re picking between that classic and this cheap imitation, don’t think twice.
I Want You Back
It often feels like modern rom-coms, of the cheap variety I outlined above, are created more to fill a content hole in a streaming strategy rather than to have ambitions of being great.
That’s why almost all of them are “high concept,” banking basically their whole existence on the one sentence sales hook that could entice people to click on the corresponding box on, in this case, Amazon Prime Video.
So how’s this: a guy who just got dumped befriends a girl who also got dumped, and they hatch a plan to break up their ex’s new relationships and get the corresponding partners back together.
All the primaries are played by well-known faces, if not names, which helps — Charlie Day and Jenny Slate as the main pair, Gina Rodriguez and Scott Eastwood as the exes. The plotlines are clear, if predictable, and some of the humor is clever (though it’s a shame to cast two world class weirdos in Day and Slate and then have them play the movie so straight).
It’s exactly the type of movie you put on when you can’t decide what to watch, have a nice time, and never think about again. That’s why, even though this movie is objectively better than Marry Me, it feels insignificant.
Trailer Watch: Nope
Jordan Peele-directed movies have very quickly reached the rarified event status reserved for the Tarintinos, PTAs, Coens and the other tip top filmmakers in the industry. But in terms of cutting a great trailer, Peele’s Monkeypaw Productions is literally the best of the best — even for movies he himself does not direct.
He shows the vibe, the setting, the actors, and gives away almost none of the plot. Like Get Out and Us, this movie appears to be some sort of “social thriller,” though it’s message isn’t as obvious in foregrounding Hollywood-adjacent Black horse trainers on a remote ranch. Here’s what we know: it’s creepy as hell, the imagery is incredible as always, and the lead cast of Daniel Kaluuya, Keke Palmer and Steven Yeun make this a can’t miss.
Trailer Watch: Fresh
I’m pumped that this surprise Sundance hit will be releasing wide to Hulu on March 4! So soon! The trailer does a good job of not giving away the full premise (don’t read around on the internet if you don’t want it spoiled), but I love the tone of this dark, acidic comedy. Slightly ridiculous, slightly insane, and fully leaning into the bit.
Plus, as I said above about the lead actor and actress making or breaking a rom-com, it would be hard to do better right now than Sebastian Stan and Daisy Edgar-Jones. Expect a full review in a few weeks!
Trailer Watch: Deep Water
This Ben Affleck-Ana De Armas erotic thriller has been talked about for so long, delayed and delayed again, literally outlasting the stars’ fake relationship tabloid cycle designed to promote it, that some of us wondered if we’d ever see it come to our screens.
This week we finally got a teaser, and never before has the word “teaser” been used so literally. It looks equal parts sexy and ridiculous, exactly the kind of experience director Adrian Lyne made famous with Fatal Attraction and Indecent Proposal. As a conversation point, this may end up being one of the movies of the year (from a quality standpoint…not so much).
Trailer Watch: Elvis
My feelings towards this movie have now flipped 180 degrees after seeing this trailer. First, relative newcomer Austin Butler (last seen as Tex Winter in Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood) looks, sounds and even movies like The King. Supposedly that’s him singing too, and the fact that I can’t tell is high endorsement. I thought this movie would be overwrought and hagiographic, but instead it looks visually stunning and dramatic.
And the one thing I thought would be a sure fire success in this movie — Tom Hanks playing a villain, of sorts — appears to be the most out of place element in the whole project. He can try to hide behind prosthetics and a somewhat hinky accent, but it’s clearly still Tom Hanks and he sticks out like a sore thumb it what otherwise looks like a pretty compelling biopic.