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.

Biosphere (2023)

Director: Mel Eslyn

Cast: Sterling K. Brown, Mark Duplass

Have I Seen It Before: Nope. In a supreme twist of fate, Lora talked me into going to see a movie I had yet to hear about.

Did I Like It: I mean this in the best possible way. This movie is very strange. Go ahead, watch the trailer real quick before we begin. I’ll wait.

Pretty strange, right? Here’s the thing, it’s far stranger than anyone will tell you before actually starting the movie. It’s more than just strange. It’s a perfectly functional buddy comedy, a tragedy (depending on how you read that ending, and how long has it been since I’ve really had to think about the ending of a movie?), and a surprisingly thoughtful deconstruction of what we collectively think about gender now.

You read that right. A lot of that isn’t in the trailer.

On spec, the film appears to be a micro-budget sci-fi piece the kind of which we haven’t really seen since Cube (1997) (one might want to point to Moon (2009), but even that film had to spend a fair amount of money to make the audience believe Sam Rockwell was marooned on ). Then again, maybe independent studios are making this kind of film all the time and this like most of those others will disappear into hazy, incomplete memory all too quickly.

But I really don’t think this one will slip into obscurity, assuming enough people get eyes on it. I for one won’t readily forget the Duplass playing a one of the last men on earth/the President of the United States who is likely—by all accounts, almost certainly—responsible for this sad state of affairs, while Brown plays his boyhood best friend/top aide/last-rational-man-on-the-planet-long-before-the-shit-went down. As “life finds a way” (they both appear to be roughly my age, as their references are just so) their relationship continues to develop, even in the face of their own extinction.

I’d tell you more, but that would be ruining most of the truly surprising parts of the movie. Go see it first and then find me. I’d love to talk about it.

The Predator (2018)

Director: Shane Black

Cast: Boyd Holbrook, Jacob Tremblay, Olivia Munn, Sterling K. Brown

Have I Seen it Before: It’s a brand new type of movie for the series, but I can’t say it’s anything brand new in the entirety of film.

Did I Like It: It’s agreeable enough, except for in those parts where it goes out of its way to not be so, so I can’t really say I recommend it.

I complained that Aquaman (2018) was so mired in a retro aesthetic that it keeps me thinking about all of the stylistic choices and wanting me to exist in the movie. The Predator deals in a similar milieu, and yet feels more successful, or at the very least more natural in that regard. 

Perhaps this is because James Wan and company are imitating what they had seen and enjoyed when they were younger, making the whole exercise a little derivative, whereas Shane Black was at the forefront of the aesthetic he is reaching for in this film, and so it feels more like a return to form than an homage.

And yet, can one now even approach liking a film that is so gleefully mired in misogyny and in narrow minded views about the mentally ill? Is it possible to enjoy a film with an almost purely tasteless sense of humor, as long as I acknowledge that it is, in fact tasteless? That might be possible, but it would need to more strongly commit to its various sins than what is on display here. The mentally ill are regularly mocked, and yet the film wants us to think it believes that people on the autistic spectrum are not disabled at all, but only does so when it is either convenient for the plot, or there’s a real danger we might find one of its leads unlikable. It can have things both ways.

And it often does try that, attempting to be an Amblin-esque story about a mop-headed child of divorce turning out to be the most cosmically interesting being in the solar system, while at the same time being a mental-illness-based rehash of the Dirty Dozen, accept this time they are fighting a pair of extraterrestrials in dreadlocks.

If the film could decide what it wants to be, I might be more inclined to decide whether I like it. Other films might attempt to straddle such wildly divergent attitudes or genres, but if I’m spending the entirety of the film thinking about these seems and not enjoying the movie—especially when the movie has such a preposterously breakneck pace as this one—it probably tells you something about whether it truly succeeds or fails.