Destroy All Neighbors (2024)

Director: Josh Forbes

Cast: Jonah Ray Rodriguez, Kiran Deol, Thomas Lennon, Alex Winter

Have I Seen it Before: Two weeks into the new year, and this is the first new movie I’ve managed to see. On that metric alone, it’s an early favorite for the best movie of the year.

Did I Like It: As a horror movie, it’s ultimately too cheap and bending over backwards to find justifications for its makeup effects to really love. Going beyond that, it’s more interested in being gross before it ever tries to be gory, and it really took me to get to this film before I realized that gross without gore is just gross, and it takes more than a little bit to offset the original imbalance.

I might get to the point where I actively dislike the film when I come to the inescapable conclusion that I actively dislike all of the characters, protagonist and antagonist alike. Vlad (Winter, also co-producing) is a finely-tuned creation of irritation, but William (Rodriguez, also also co-producing*) is the same kind of deeply frustrating person that makes life and the human experience may be designed to irritate only.

All of that would be an easy way to say that I’m thoroughly displease with the film, but damned if I didn’t find myself laughing throughout. It almost, almost (but not quite) repairs my diminished first impression Shudder left on me**.

But truly, I hate the title of the film. It’s something people would come up with for a bargain basement video game in the early 2000s. Honey, I Dismembered Vlad would have worked a lot better. Almost anything. Sophie’s Choice would have been a better choice for the movie.

*If others were involved with this movie, one would be hard-pressed to deny that the film would be right at home on a newer episode Mystery Science Theater 3000.

**Honestly, the thing is buggy with a heavily diminished library. It’s as if the worst impulses of both Netflix and Paramount+ were forged into a separate streaming service.

The Battle Over Citizen Kane (1996)

Director: Michael Epstein, Thomas Lennon

Cast: David McCullough, Orson Welles, William Randolph Hearst, Richard Ben Cramer

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, God Yes.

Did I Like It: Like is such a pedestrian term. There are few films—and certainly fewer documentaries—that so thoroughly injected itself into my DNA.

On its surface, The Battle Over Citizen Kane is an almost shallow examination about the beautiful, perfect wreck that was Orson Welles’ first feature motion picture Citizen Kane (1941). I’m one of the unusual people that might view this as a vice, but I can also sense that it is not an objective flaw, and certainly not a fatal one.

Really, the film was made at exactly the right time. Twenty years ago, plenty of people who worked with Orson were still alive and their memories incredibly sharp. It may have been one of the last opportunities to get first-person narratives of Welles during those early, heady years. All of the talking heads regarding Hearst are from historians or biographers, and while they have interesting insight, they are far less vibrant than the insights into Welles.

And then there’s that one shot at the very end of the film that—more than any other element in life—caused me to spend more time than I would have liked questioning a creative life. Orson puts it bluntly. Spending all of your time begging for the things you need to realize your vision was a terrible way to spend a life. He wished he could have done anything else.

As raw B-roll of an interview, the moment very well may have been an aside. It wouldn’t have been worthy of note other than a vague sense that Welles had a melancholy streak later in life. As the thesis of an entire film, it’s chilling. It is expert-level documentary filmmaking.

And yet, as I watch the documentary now, I’m struck by another talking head from the man himself. It appears to be from the same interview filmed just a few years before his death, and he seems amused by the scrambling train wreck that his life had become. That might be an important thing for me to remember, both as I keep telling my version of Orson’s story, and in my own life. It’s absolutely possible to be both amused and have regret fro the more seminal moments of ones life. There’s even an extra moment in that moment at the end where he says he can’t regret his regrets, because it was like staying married to a woman he might not have otherwise. He loved the movies, and it wasn’t that he couldn’t walk away from it. He wouldn’t.

Everyone wants you to think the story of Orson Welles is a tragedy. Sure, there is unrealized potential over the course of his life, but I’m not so sure he felt the whole thing was a tragedy. Not all of it.