(HBO MAX/kanopy/VOD) I appreciate a tight, succinct opening, and WHAT THEY HAD has it in spades.
The opening consists of: an older woman wearing a nightgown with a tight pedicure and freshly-painted toenails. She then pulls on gray knee socks, obscuring the nails. She draws on lipstick, crosses through a hallway with a Mucha painting, pulls on a gray wool coat, and marches erratically into a winterly urban alleyway toting a navy bag, then dissipates into the background; she fades away.
It’s a bit of a feint, as the woman — Ruth (the ever-industrious Blythe Danner) does return home. She has Alzheimers, but her husband Burt (an amazing Robert Forster) refuses to put her in a nursing home, even as his son Nick (BUG’s Michael Shannon) tries to talk him and daughter Bridget (Hilary Swank) into rehoming her. The end result is an emotional drama written and directed by playwright Elizabeth Chomko.
(VOD) I didn’t so much seek out THE WORLD’S GREATEST SINNER as had it forced upon me. When I moved to Chicago, one of the first video stores I walked into was BLAST OFF VIDEO, centered in Lakeview. (If you’re unfamiliar with Chicago, Lakeview contains Wrigleyville, home of the Cubs.) It was a tiny cult video store — an off-shoot of an Atlanta-based video store of the same name — whose front window was covered with spliced BLOCKBUSTER membership cards. (They’d give you several free rentals if you’d hand yours over. Unsurprisingly, you’d also find my card plastered to the glass.)
The shop was helmed by a man named Sam, who didn’t mind me shooting the shit with him for an hour or so twice a week. Sam was far more knowledgable about foreign and cult films than I was, and I’d listen to him rant about how RESERVOIR DOGS was a rip-off of CITY ON FIRE (which isn’t too far off the mark, although I wouldn’t say ‘rip-off’) or how Robert Mitchum really directed NIGHT OF THE HUNTER (which, probably). One of the first films he recommended to me was THE WORLD’S GREATEST SINNER.
Some might summarize THE WORLD’S GREATEST SINNER as a (very) low-rent version of Billy Wilder’s A FACE IN THE CROWD, but that’s selling it short. Timothy Carey (best known for appearing in THE KILLING), who wrote, directed, and acted in this passion project, made something uniquely his own. SINNER is extremely rough around the edges — they clearly only had one take for most scenes, lines often don’t land the way they should, it’s full of abrupt and halting edits, and it’s shot like a student film. However, all of that works in its favor. There’s a crazy alchemy to all of it that dovetails with the theme of a salaryman-turned-politician trying to ingratiate himself to the populace while questioning his faith and purpose in the process, all backed by a Frank Zappa soundtrack. It’s a whirlwind of a work, and one that Sam vociferously believed in.
Sadly, BLAST OFF VIDEO is no longer. They were priced out of Lakeview years ago and moved well outside of my radius, then they closed up shop in Chicago all together. However, when I was recently searching for them to see if their Atlanta store happened to be around, I stumbled upon a Chicago Tribune article about the shop, and in it they note how Sam finagled their copy of THE WORLD’S GREATEST SINNER “by tracking down the director’s son and asking him for a tape”. Godspeed, Sam, wherever you are.
“I don’t even care if they reject my book. I’ll do another book, and another one! And besides, a guy can always become a comedian, right?”
(Showtime/VOD) WORK IN PROGRESS is a television dramedy about Abby (show co-creator and comedian Abby McEnany) who self-identifies as a “queer, fat dyke” and lives in Chicago. Abby is also 45-years-old and miserable, and she’s decided that if she can’t find some semblance of happiness within 180 days (marked by 180 almonds, one of which she throws away each day), she’ll end her life.
That sounds morose, but the show is often hilarious thanks to Abby’s cynical persona and the inclusion of Julia Sweeney, who Abby hates because for years people kept comparing her to Sweeney’s ‘IT’S PAT’ SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE character.
One endlessly fantastic facet of the show is that it is shot in Chicago, and quite a bit of it is shot in Andersonville, my neighborhood. Andersonville used to be known as ‘Girlstown’ due the number of queer women and lesbian bars — including the historic Stargaze — but that moniker no longer describes the area due to an influx of queer men and straight couples who will live here for a few years with their dog and toddler before they head to the suburbs.
But I digress. Andersonville is not why I mention this episode (although it does open with Abby at a bar just down the street from me). I’m bringing it up because the last third of the episode takes place at Ravinia — technically in Highland Park, a Chicago suburb — the oldest outdoor music festival in the U.S., and this episode features my favorite scene of the entire season, briefly featured in the trailer below. Additionally, it’s a great solo episode that encapsulates the show!
(Lastly, if you watch season two, you’ll catch a glimpse of our neighbor’s house, as they shot some interior scenes there several months ago. It was a tad surreal, especially during the pandemic.)
(HBO MAX/VOD) Tom (Jason Segel) is an up-and-coming chef in San Francisco, and he’s been happily involved with his academic girlfriend Violet (Emily Blunt) for some time. He awkwardly proposes to her, she says yes, and they start to plan their wedding. However, she gets a job in Michigan, which sidelines the wedding, then his career falters, but pratfalls ensue and matters escalate.
As someone married to an academic, it was a surprising gut-punch of a watch. As it’s another film from Nicholas Stoller and Jason Segal — they wrote/directed FORGETTING SARAH MARSHALL — I thought it’d be a standard Apatow-ish shaggy comedy about an emotionally stunted adult man and, while there is some of that, it was surprisingly thoughtful and measured. The perspective balance isn’t exactly what I’d like it to be — it definitely skews towards Tom — but their career conflicts are better handled than most romantic dramas.
(My thanks to Damon for recommending it to me — I would have missed it otherwise!)
(tubi/VOD) I immerse myself in a lot of media but, despite how long I’ve been doing so, I’m surprisingly bad at it. I often watch movie series completely out-of-order. (Worst example: THE BEFORE TRILOGY.) I accidentally read lesser works by an author before cracking open their acclaimed works. (I ate up J.G. Ballard’s HELLO AMERICA, but have yet to read CRASH or EMPIRE OF THE SUN). Lastly, I all too often neglect to read the novels that inspired the works I’m currently reading. (I’ve read two novels this year where the authors have explicitly stated they were inspired by Donna Tartt’s THE SECRET HISTORY. I’ve only read THE GOLDFINCH and, while I was reading THE GOLDFINCH in a bar roughly two years ago, the bartender told me: ‘You should really read THE SECRET HISTORY’ and they were obviously correct, and I have yet to rectify that.)
One of the most egregious oversights I’ve made in my media consumption is that of the Marx Brothers. When I was in my early teens, I loved the indie comic CEREBUS by Dave Sim. (Dave Sim is now best known as being a rampant misogynist, not to mention being homophobic and transphobic, and — to be clear — I do not endorse CEREBUS or Sim — I’m simply relaying some youthful thoughts and anecdotes.) The comic started as a parody of CONAN THE BARBARIAN featuring an aardvark as the barbarian, then became political satire, then it became a commentary on religion, and then it spiraled.
I didn’t care for the aardvark, but I was fascinated by the loquacious character named Lord Julius and the political absurdity in HIGH SOCIETY, the second volume of the series. I met Dave Sim at a comic book convention many, many years ago and he drew a head sketch of Lord Julius in my dogeared copy of my HIGH SOCIETY ‘phone book’ (the label ascribed to the over-stuffed CEREBUS trade paperbacks) which, for a short while, was a prized possession.
What I didn’t realize until I went to college and started binging classic film was how nakedly he riffed on the Marx Brothers; how Lord Julius was an excuse for Sims to write Groucho-esque jokes, and how HIGH SOCIETY was simply Sim’s version of DUCK SOUP. All you have to do is look at this page of art and see: yup, lifting Marx Brothers for his own purposes. Once you know, you know, but when I was younger, when the interwebs didn’t fully exist? I didn’t know.
This has been a very long-winded way of saying that, even when I didn’t know it, my mind was being shaped by the sharp, vaudevillian wit of Groucho and his brothers, and DUCK SOUP is the epitome of their film career. It’s anarchic absurdity that happens to be politically evergreen, but it’s all in service of savvy jokes, circular logic, brilliant physical set-pieces, the glorious straight-faced work of Margaret Dumont, and some lyrical downtime to allow us to enjoy Harpo’s musical skills. In other words, it’s an immaculately constructed classic that holds up far better than CEREBUS has and, while it took me a while to get around to it, I’m happy I did.
(Arrow/kanopy/VOD) I’ll keep this one brief, the recommendation: TETSUO: THE IRON MAN was Shinya Tsukamoto’s breakthrough film and a visceral 67 minutes of inventively kinetic cyberpunk body horror with a banging soundtrack from Chu Ishikawa (RIP).
(Criterion/Kanopy/VOD/Vudu/YouTube)? Robert Downey, Sr. passed away this week at the age of 85. While his son is mostly known for more accessible fare, Downey Sr. was an anarchic indie filmmaker, and there’s no better example of his cinematic skills than PUTNEY SWOPE.
PUTNEY SWOPE is a nihilistic indictment of Madison Avenue, American capitalism and everything it’s created (including filmmaking and anti-American capitalist revolutionaries), while also being damn funny and inventively shot. The faux-commercials it features are perhaps only rivaled by ROBOCOP (1987) or the best of Adult Swim. For instance:
I need to note that this is an incredibly insensitive film in ways I haven’t quite managed to personally reconcile — after all, it’s a film written and directed by a middle-aged white man about a Black man breaking the system — but it is also endlessly fascinating.
(VOD)? FLASHFORWARD was a post-LOST high-concept ensemble show (based on Robert J. Sawyer’s novel of the same name) helmed by David S. Goyer (who has penned everything from DARK CITY to BATMAN V SUPERMAN). Due to reasons that are (very slowly) exposed over the show’s first season, every human in the world blacks out for 137 seconds which, as you can imagine, was very unfortunate for anyone in an automobile or airplane at the time. However, the majority of folks encountered a vision of what appears to be their life in six months, hence the title of the show. Notably, some people didn’t see anything, and some of those people believe that means they won’t be alive in six months, and more than a few of those folks -do not- react reasonably to that thought.
It features Mark Benford (Joseph Finnes, popular for the best-forgotten SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE) as focal character FBI agent investigating ‘the incident’, and he’s also a recovering alcoholic. (In his flash-forward, he’s fallen off the wagon). Mark’s FBI partner is Demetri Noh (John Cho, HAROLD & KUMAR, the rebooted STAR TREK films, and also pops up as Billy Eichner’s boyfriend on the previously recommended DIFFICULT PEOPLE). Courtney B. Vance (THE PEOPLE V. O.J. SIMPSON) plays the FBI director overseeing Mark and Demetri, and Mark’s wife is surgeon Dr. Olivia Benford (Sonya Walger, one the best parts of LOST). LOST’s Dominic Monaghan portrays a scientist (which is a bit of a stretch, James Callis (the rebooted BATTLESTAR GALACTICA but also the previously recommended 12 MONKEYS TV series) is peppered into a few eps as are Gabrielle Union and Annabeth Gish. Also, sadly-departed magician Ricky Jay brings his skills to a handful of episodes.
So, FLASHFORWARD has an intriguing concept, a versatile storytelling engine, a fantastic cast, and a significant budget, so you probably expect me to write that it’s an underrated one-season wonder.
You would be wrong.
This is not a great show. It spends too much time spinning its wheels, the characters are extraordinarily one-dimensional and uninspired, and the dialogue is very clunky. It’s not a terrible show, but it never finds its footing, and I doubt if it would have even if it had been renewed.
So, why am I recommending it? I’m recommending it solely for one supremely stupid recurring exchange between husband and wife Mark and Olivia that is clearly intended to be a sarcastic-but-cute inside joke:
“I hate you.”
“I hate you too.”
I have no idea whether this is in the original novel. It does seem like a lift from WHEN HARRY MET SALLY but, when I watched the series with my wife, we had forgotten about that comedic bit. The same exchange also occurs between Alain Delon and Ann-Margret in ONCE A THIEF (1965) and — when delivered by them — it’s comedic and even sexy.
Fiennes and Walger — while normally being very winsome actors — can’t pull it off. Sadly, they have little romantic charisma together, but also it’s just poorly framed because they aren’t complex characters.
To the show’s credit, it’s worth noting that Olivia’s flash-forward is that she’s with another man, so it’s a bit of unsubtle foreshadowing, but it still rang hollow when we watched it when it was first broadcast.
Since then, my wife and I often jokingly bring up that poorly executed exchange so, in a way, it was inadvertently effective writing. While it’s an exchange that has been handled far better in more memorable works, it’s FLASHFORWARD’s use of it that’s become our inside joke.
(Pluto/VOD) There are movies that have musical moments, there are musical movies, and then there are film musicals. I find that differences are somewhat slight: musical moments are films that have a handful of scenes where the characters burst into song, usually to a well-recognized pop culture song, to underpin whatever emotional state they’re feeling. (Think the jukebox moment in SOUTHLAND TALES when Justin Timberlake lip synced to THE KILLERS’ -I Got Soul- which I both love and hate that I love.) Musical movies are adaptations gussied up to conform to the needs of the film viewer. (I’m trying to keep to modern references, so: Tom Hooper’s LES MISERABLES or, uh, CATS* but also previously recommended, and non-modern, THE MUSIC MAN.)
Then there are film musicals, which aren’t adaptations, and often are labeled as ’rock opera’, despite often being neither. They follow the scripted structure of a musical, and then they just film it. It’s too grandiose to fit within the required guidelines of a Broadway music, but the creators -love- traditional musical narrative structure, and are dead-set on realizing their creation. They’re rarer because they’re often fan efforts. For every ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW, we also get five REPO! THE GENETIC OPERAs**.
ANNA AND THE APOCALYPSE definitely falls in the latter camp, and emphasis on camp. It’s based on the short film ZOMBIE MUSICAL (but I’ll warn you that it’s definitely an early draft of a feature film) — and it toys with the format, including one musical number well-worth the price of admission where lead Anna (a very elastic DICKENSON’s Ella Hunt) and her best friend John (Malcolm Cumming) obliviously sing through zombie anarchy due to a transformative evening which, yes, cribs from SHAUN OF THE DEAD and Zack Synder’s DAWN OF THE DEAD but manages to do its own thing. I do wish the music was stronger though — the songs are fine but, apart from a few exceptions, they’re mostly forgettable — but it’s a fun time, especially if you’re into both comical horror and musicals.
Lastly, if you’re interested in musical narrative storytelling, Jack Viertel’s THE SECRET LIFE OF THE AMERICAN MUSICAL is a revelation. He does an amazing job of deconstructing how musical narratives work in ways that will blow your mind.
Trailer:
* Sorry not sorry, but I find the film far more watchable than the stage production, even though Tom Hooper should never have been given this project.
** For what it’s worth, I do admire the hard-scrabble pluck of REPO!. I sat in on a Q&A where the writer and director went into detail as to how they finagled specific SAW sequel scenes just so they could film specific REPO! scenes for free, and good for them for realizing their vision through whatever means necessary!
It’s a sad day: Richard Donner has passed away. While he’s rightfully best known for SUPERMAN, he spent -a lot- of time directing television, including an ep of previously recommended ROUTE 66, eps of TALES FROM THE CRYPT, even eps of THE LORETTA YOUNG SHOW, but most memorably, some of the best episodes of THE TWILIGHT ZONE. Consequently, I’m re-posting a slightly tweaked version of my prior recommendation of one of his lesser-known THE TWILIGHT ZONE eps:
(Hulu/Paramount+/VOD) This episode of THE TWILIGHT ZONE is rarely included in best of lists, which is fair — even if it’s the last-filmed ep -and- directed by Richard Donner — as its story is a bit strained, even by TWILIGHT ZONE standards. Floyd Burney, known as the “Rock-A-Billy Kid” (Gary Crosby), is on the prowl for a new song in a small, unnamed town. He overhears a woman singing and follows her voice as she repeats the refrain: “Come wander with me love / Come wander with me / Away from this sad world / Come wander with me”
The woman introduces herself as Mary Rachel (Bonnie Beecher) and is reluctant to part with the song, but Floyd is insistent. Matters escalate quickly as the rest of the song is revealed.
While the episode is a bit clunky, it’s the song that makes it memorable. -Come Wander With Me- is a brilliantly haunting ballad and, even though the song was never written or recorded in full, a number of musicians, such as Émilie Satt and British Sea Power, have covered it over the years.
