The Holdovers (2023)

Director: Alexander Payne

Cast: Paul Giamatti, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, Dominic Sessa, Carrie Preston

Have I Seen it Before: Nope. Kicked myself for missing it in the theaters, but Peacock is always there to pick up my self-imposed slack.

Did I Like It: I’ve been struck in recent years, and damn near feel like I’ve been choking on it in recent months, but somewhere along the line we absolutely lost all conception of what nostalgia means. I can’t remember the last time I went through any range of social media posts without some post algorithmically recommended to me that insisted the era in which Wendy’s served all of their food was the absolute pinnacle of western civilization*. Nothing was inherently better in those times; you were just younger then and weren’t terribly bothered by just how screwed up the world could already occasionally be.

That’s all to say that this film feels like perhaps the only object in years to understand the power of that wistful feeling we once properly identified as nostalgia. From its first moments dusting off the Universal logos that died with Back to the Future - Part III (1990) through opening credits that most people would see on TCM, the film manages to feel like a film that could have been released in some bygone year.

All of that is hard enough to do and more than enough to recommend the film. But it goes deeper than that. I may have never lived at a New England boarding school, but I did have a stunted view towards Christmas, and at least one teacher who might have thought I was bright but a little bit of a pain in the ass. There may be funnier Oscar contenders this year, but this one feels the most right.

*First of all, it wasn’t all that long ago. At least I don’t think it was…

They/Them (2022)

Director: John Logan

Cast: Theo Germaine, Carrie Preston, Anna Chlumsky, Kevin Bacon

Have I Seen it Before: Nope. Brand new!

Did I Like It: Nearly each—perhaps even every—moment of the film feels forced, mannered, and stiff. It’s truly a wonder that a directorial debut from an Oscar winning screenwriter would be forged of this much leaden dialogue. It’s an after school special at its core, even if it has its heart in the right place.

That doesn’t even begin to cover the perfectly obvious way in which the story unfolds. Movies like the recent <Scream (2022)> embrace the inclusivity of the moment, but also manage to make me invested and guessing about the mystery behind the violence on display. Here, I figured out the entirety of the plot by halfway through the runtime, and I think you will, too. It’s plot is on the complexity level of a police procedural, and not a very good one, at that.

The film also feels like a false bill of goods. Advertising points to the movie being a slasher flick wherein the horror of a gay conversion camp is what ought to be truly scary. It’s only kind of about that, and only in the last few fleeting moments of the film.

In short, I didn’t care for it.

And that’s okay!

Ungainly, mostly frustrating slasher movies fueled by heteronormativity are legion. It’s sort of encouraging that a film fueled by an honest attempt at inclusivity isn’t very good. It doesn’t need to be. I might be talking out of my depth here—but then again, more people may need to say it—but a bad movie will add to the normalizing of the LGBTQA experience. If this movie fails, it doesn’t mean that inclusivity—especially in horror—will wither on the vine and die.

Unless that’s where the discourse about the film leads. That would be the worst part about the whole enterprise, but it also would not be the film’s fault. It would be ours.