American Fiction (2023)

Director: Cord Jefferson

Cast: Jeffrey Wright, Tracee Ellis Ross, John Ortiz, Sterling K. Brown

Have I Seen it Before: No, but by a strange quirk of the world I managed to see it twice before getting around to writing my review.

Did I Like It: There’s a moment of hesitation to offer anything either in praise or criticism of a movie like this. Even admitting that much runs the risk of not getting the point. I’ll accept any of those judgments. I understand that when it comes to a movie like this, I’m a guest. I’ll try to comport myself as such, if for no other reason than to act otherwise would be to surrender to being the butt of this particular joke. I may not be able to avoid it entirely, but it is worth trying.

The film is one of the best comedy/dramas I’ve seen in a long time. The laughs connect almost invariably. All of the satire may not hit everyone on a single viewing. There were certainly parts I laughed much harder at on repeat. The real relationships between these characters—frequently flawed and often unable to reach any kind of catharsis—feels real and lived in. Nearly every one of the characters is at time infuriating—at least those in the actual Ellison family—but never unsympathetic.

Wright—always terrific—is a revelation here, a torrent of frustration that is always trying to understand something (several somethings, actually) that brings him great pain. Brown—although I might have found his recent performance in Biosphere (2022) a bit more fully realized—is a perfect counterpoint to Wright. Where Monk is damaged, Cliff is brazen. Where Monk is self-assured, Brown plays Cliff like an injured animal. I’d almost forgive some idea-bereft fool (maybe even Wiley (Adam Brody)) for putting these two together in a buddy cop film at one point.

My only point of contention with the film is that for all of its brilliance, the turn where Monk’s secret anonymous novel ends up as one of the books considered for the literary award he has found himself judging feels so telegraphed as to almost feel perfunctory. Thankfully, for all the time the film ramps up to that moment, it doesn’t bother to dwell on how things escalated to this borderline-sitcom turn, and return quickly to the pristine satire it had offered before and after.

Asteroid City (2023)

Director: Wes Anderson

Cast: Jason Schwartzman, Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks, Jeffrey Wright

Have I Seen it Before: Nope.

Did I Like It: Anderson’s movies remain triumphs of immaculate art direction. The juxtaposition between the televised examination of the play we never quite see and the delightful weirdness surrounding the alien which visits them both is a delight. There are plenty of absurd laughs to be had, and he has really tapped into grief in a way that he hasn’t really managed to tap into since The Royal Tenenbaums (2001). So, before I get into the large meat of this interview, please know that I enjoyed the film immensely. It’s worth catch, and worth catching in the theater, especially as it looks like it will show up on streaming by the time I finish typing this review.

And yet, for every element in his work that is just as strong as it ever was, I wonder if something hasn’t quite been lost over the years. His early films, especially Bottle Rocket (1996), and the aforementioned Tenenbaums had a certain quality about them as if Anderson were convinced the powers that be would take away his ability to make movies. Now there is a serenity to his films which only servers to keep me at an (admittedly negligible distance. The early films had the vibrant energy of a someone not sure if they were going to get away with what they wanted to do. Maybe he is just in a bit of a slump on this front, and I may be having a reaction to this and The French Dispatch (2021). Maybe as Anderson has aged and matured as an artist, it is unreasonable to expect him to hold on to that rebellious spirit.

Maybe he just needs to work with Owen Wilson again. I’m honestly not sure why they don’t write together anymore. And I really don't know why he isn’t in this film at all. Honestly, as I type this, that may be my only real complaint.

The Batman (2022)

Director: Matt Reeves

Cast: Robert Pattinson, Zoë Kravitz, Paul Dano, Jeffrey Wright

Have I Seen it Before: Well, that’s the real thing, isn’t it?

Did I Like It: It’s actually taken me weeks to get around to this review. Part of it is a full plate. Part of it is the whole thing has been marinating in my head.

The Batman is quite good. It’s shot, cast, and mostly written well. It is the only Batman film to be fueled primarily by a legitimate, if uncomplicated detective story. We all know who the Riddler (Dano) is, and the secret identity of the Batman hasn’t been had an ounce of mystery to it since the concluding panels of “The Case of the Chemical Syndicate” in 1939. And yet, Batman uses all of his skills in equal measure here.

I am happy to report that at no point does Martha Wayne drop her pearls, and while (spoiler) The Joker (Barry Keoghan) does appear in the film, Reeves shows a remarkable amount of restraint in both not making the Clown Prince a central part of the movie, and cutting his far more interesting—if ultimately redundant—scene.

It’s third act becomes a little incoherent, which puts it in good company. The end of nearly every film—with the arguable exception of The Dark Knight (2008)—to feature the Caped Crusader buckles a bit under even mild scrutiny. Why was the Joker climbing up the Cathedral in Batman (1989)? How were an army of trained missile-armed Penguins supposed to help Danny DeVito get his political revenge in Batman Returns (1992)? How did Jim Carrey manage to get that massive lair to do… mind control? The fact that I’m still—a couple of weeks after viewing the film—still not sure exactly what Batman was needing to do as the with the electrical discharges in the arena, and the city of Gotham really only seemed flooded when there were interesting shots of Batman doing things among water, and dry as a bone when he and Selina Kyle had to have a parting scene in a graveyard. 

We’ve had good Batman films before. There’s really no excuse to not make one anymore. But there’s so much here we have seen before, and yet so much unexplored potential on screen for the character. What do I want out of a Batman film, now that I’ve had literally every part of The Long Halloween reconstituted on the movie screen? I want the Neal Adams Batman. I want a grey costume (with a yellow oval, so sit down, Mr. Snyder). I want a giant penny and an even giant-er T-Rex in the Batcave*. Really? I want it to be called The Caped Crusader. It’s entirely possible I may just want to watch <Batman (1966)> again. That’s always possible.

I may have to wait a bit longer. In the meantime, I’ll take as many stories in Gotham as Matt Reeves can dole out.

*I do not want to see Martha Wayne drop her pearls ever again in a movie or television series. So, good on ya, Mr. Reeves.

Casino Royale (2006)

Director: Martin Campbell

Cast: Daniel Craig, Eva Green, Mads Mikkelsen, Jeffrey Wright

Have I Seen It Before?: I had been aching for a proper adaptation of Fleming’s first novel ever since reading it. The multi-director comedy-adjacent Casino Royale (1967) need not be mentioned here.

Did I like it?: And so one might normally be unable to get over what the film could have been. An EON-produced version in the 60s starring Sean Connery, with Audrey Hepburn as Vesper Lynd and Orson Welles as Le Chiffre (the 1967 did get one thing right) would have been glorious. The rumored efforts of Quentin Tarantino trying to launch an all black-and-white version with Pierce Brosnan (and presumably Uma Thurman as Lynd, with maybe Samuel L. Jackson as Le Chiffre?) would have been bananas and also one of my favorite films of all time. 

So, it is a testament to the glories of this film that I like it so much despite what it could have been. The book is surprisingly faithful to the source material. One might scratch their head at the notion of turning The Big Game from Baccarat to Texas Hold’em Poker, but if anyone watching any of the previous Bond pictures claims they understood how the game of Baccarat works, they’re lying. After years of steeping myself in Bondanalia, all I’ve been able to absorb is the fact that it merges the most frustrating elements of both Craps and Blackjack. How hard is it to hit the number nine?

And yet it keeps enough of the Bond movie trappings to be that particular cinematic flavor one can only find in the Bond series. David Arnold’s score is resurrecting the best of John Barry, the extension to the plot make the adventure not nearly as claustrophobic as Fleming’s story kept matters. One might miss the initial gun-barrel sequence, before one realizes that the entire pre-credit sequence is the origin of the gun barrel itself. The film series has been notorious for playing things safe, but here, every risk pays off. I just don’t understand anyone who thinks things have changed too much or that Bond has become too much like the Bourne series.

As with the initial outing for all of the Bonds, one must take a moment to ascertain the qualities of the man himself. Every Bond with the possible exception of Connery make their strongest outing their first. There was a lot of skepticism from the public about Craig, mostly having to do with his flaxen hair. Here, he is more than equal to the task of taking on the 007 mantle, and with a quality far closer to the Fleming original in ways that were accepted by the public, when only twenty years earlier were scoffed at when brought to life by Timothy Dalton. As I write this review we are—depending on the behavior of a pandemic or two—approaching the end of Craig’s tenure, it’s sort of amazing that the weak links in the chain of his time at the wheel of the Aston Martin would have been considered the best films of many of the other Bonds. He is the second coming of Connery for which many Bond fans were always hoping, and I sit here anxiously awaiting No Time To Die (2020) and wondering how the series will recover from his loss.