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.

Bumblebee (2018)

Director: Travis Knight

Cast: Hailee Steinfeld, John Cena, Jorge Lendeborg Jr., John Ortiz

Have I Seen it Before: No. What would possibly possess me to be in any kind of a hurry to watch a Transformers film?

Did I Like It: Okay. Well, here’s the confession. I kind of—sort of—like the first Transformers (2007). It has just enough of the influence of Spielberg where the film is more about a boy and his connection with his car (who happens to be sentient) than it is about the struggle between the Autobots and the Decepticons. 

Every subsequent film in the series that I had the misfortune to have been exposed to is so laden with exposition and an endless series of meaningless MacGuffins that each film became the equivalent of spending several hours reading the cardboard backing of an action figure. I gave up on Transformers: Age of Extinction (2014) long before its interminable nearly three-hour runtime. Transformers: The Last Knight (2017) was a non-starter for me long before the near-war crime of its 149 minutes was unleashed on an unsuspecting populace.

So it is with great relief that I report Bumblebee—a film no one asked for and no sane studio should have green-lit—is a delight from start to finish. The glip-glorps and whoozi-whatzis that propelled… plots?... in the previous films are stripped away, and all we know about the various Transformers in the context of this film are:

1)     The Transformers come from Cybertron.

2)     Cybertron is at war.

3)     Bumblebee is a good guy. To a far less important extent, so is Optimus Prime.

And that is all you need. Everything else is only of interest to people who have mint-condition Generation One Starscreams* hermetically sealed in their basement.

With the artifice of the franchise now stripped away, the human element that the first film hints at comes back in full force. Shia LaBeouf was sort of a wry, detached figure in the first film, and his affection for the alien car he lucked into never felt like a real performance. Much to Hailee Steinfeld’s credit, I believe the friendship between her and Bumblbee throughout the picture. Her character never becomes a cliché. She never once detaches herself from the proceedings, and one can easily imagine a less polished actor doing just that. After all, there are five films of evidence.

Who knew this series could find its resurgence by making a film actually about people? If the Transformers can turn things around like this, maybe there is hope for other big-budget franchises.

I reserve the right to revoke that optimism upon the release of any further Transformer movies, and probably will.

*That’s a thing, right?