Summer Backlog

Kinds of Kindness [2024]

Kinds of Kindness

A triptych fable following a man without choice who tries to take control of his own life; a policeman who is alarmed that his wife who was missing-at-sea has returned and seems a different person; and a woman determined to find a specific someone with a special ability, who is destined to become a prodigious spiritual leader.

Kinds of Kindness marks a return of sorts for Yorgos Lanthimos, or as I like to call him, "The Greek Freak of Cinema" (with all due to respect to Mr. Antetokounmpo). Coming out of what may be remembered as his poptimist period, a two-movie stent consisting of Oscar-friendlier projects in The Favourite and Poor Things, Lanthimos seems to have hit a creative reset and pivoted back into what is seemingly his truer-to-self, his default comfort zone – making people exceedingly uncomfortable. Throughout its gargantuan runtime, Kinds of Kindness goes out of its way to rub its audience the wrong way, to make every twist and turn feel like an annoyance. It's darkly hilarious, often unsetting, unapologetic in its sardonic tone and with an unforgiving depravity. It's unapologetic in its sardonic tone and has an unforgiving depravity. The surrealism at work both highlights and undermines its own designed provocation, and the deadpan reactions of its star-powered ensemble manages to dispel potential fear of any real life stakes... the whole thing feels like a quirky thought experiment where the performers are operating in some Earth-adjacent equilibrium or simulation of some kind. This both helps and hurts the film in my opinion. There's something off-kilter about how these characters act and interact with one another. I actually think that detachment effectively made the each exercise feel a little too safe despite all the danger going on.

While his last two films were collaborations with Tony McNamara seemed to explore and measure the potential scope of Yorgos' mainstream appeal, Kinds of Kindness is a different kind of exercise, for Yorgos and his creative team, to test his weirdo limits while still holding on to some elements of his newfound pop sensibilities. There is an messiness and particular fussiness to what he seems to be pursuing here. This is what you get when a freak gets fussy. A triptych fable you say? There's perhaps more than just a whiff of Wes Anderson's mannered idiosyncrasies at work here, maybe not so much in the overall style but certainly in the thematic layering and compartmentalization of its narrative structure. Do all three stories exist in the same world? It seems intentionally ambiguous, the sort of "don't overthink it at risk of undermining the exercise altogether" attitude that you don't think twice about because we're operating from Yorgos' absurdist purview.

After another viewing, I might be in a better position to tie together some overarching theme across the three stories, something about how desperate people go to extreme lengths to seek love, acceptance, or approval. And I'd muster something eloquent about how folly this pursuit is in some ways to Yorgos, even if it is an essential part of the human condition. But also, maybe there is less here than you might expect there to be. Maybe it's like I said earlier, just an exercise. I think it's fair to say that I liked Kinds of Kindness more than I was compelled by it or found it convincing in some way. It may be something of a minor work within his impressive filmography, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have its merits, especially for viewers who just like to see stars like Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, and Jesse Plemons playing around in Yorgos' playground (Plemons is so good I'll have to remember him come Oscar season). I'm all for a director experimenting for the sake of experimentation, but maybe this is just a smattering of Yorgos' leftover B-material. That said, I'll buy a ticket to go watch his sloppy seconds any day.

A Quiet Place: Day One [2024]

A Quiet Place: Day One

As New York City is invaded by alien creatures who hunt by sound, a woman named Sam fights to survive with her cat.

Making a prequel can often be a fool's errand. There's always a balancing act that comes with showing the audience something new while still giving them what they want, which is to recapture what they felt the first go-around. With original storytelling, this gets even dicier, because one false move and you can squash any hope of planning for more spin-offs. What's worse is that if the movie is truly a disaster, you run the risk off pissing people off to the point where it begins to undermine the past accomplishments of the original film.

One of the best storytelling choices from the first film in this franchise, A Quiet Place, is that writer-director John Krasinski and co-screenwriters Scott Beck & Bryan Woods drop the audience headfirst into the a fully-realized world. The stakes are communicated efficiently, and most of the exposition is shown rather than told. The sequel more or less follows a similar script, except it does broaden the scope of storytelling by getting its characters on the move and in new locations. A Quiet Place: Day One, a prequel I went into with tempered expectations, flexes a bigger budget and a grander story setting but manages to capture the same kind of intimacy and emotional stakes consistent with the first two films in this series. Director Michael Sarnoski, who directed his first feature film, Pig, a few years ago (which we enjoyed immensely) is particularly well-suited for helming a project like this where the big flashy action set pieces are juxtaposed against his brand of deeply felt, heartfelt moments between characters. He's a director who can handle the quiet (why didn't Paramount ask us to provide a tagline for the poster?!), and lucky for him he has two lead performers in Lupita Nyong'o and Joseph Quinn who are well-equipped to carry that sort of emotional heft. Both performers are incredibly expressive and their talents are maximized as the film often asks them to hold the screen for long, wordless stretches where their wide-eyed reactions often do most of the work.

What holds the film back are the big, noisy action set pieces, which are disorienting and hard to follow for the most part. They don't feel natural, and that might be because they were shot on a soundstage in London and not in New York City. I would've like for the film to make me feel the specter of living in a post-apocalyptic metropolis more so than it did. Shooting on location is still the way to go, but you have to remember that this film was made for $67 million not $167 million. So while I felt like Sarnoski lost his grip on some of those big ticket action sequences, I'm willing to forgive most of those pitfalls — the creatures and jump scares sell tickets but good storytelling holds your attention. As far as the other online criticism of this film I read (the predictability of the ending and the silliness of Frodo the Cat being such an obvious motif/proxy), I think that has more to do with audience expectations than anything. Take Rogue One: A Star Wars Story for example, another prequel with an ending that was predetermined and had to juggle the pressure of being both a sweeping epic war film and an ensemble piece with archetypal characters. Similarly, A Quiet Place: Day One finds its footing as a sequel because it manages to balance impressive world-building with nuanced character-building. Seeking out this prequel is not a fool's errand.

Deadpool & Wolverine [2024]

Deadpool & Wolverine

A listless Wade Wilson toils away in civilian life with his days as the morally flexible mercenary, Deadpool, behind him. But when his homeworld faces an existential threat, Wade must reluctantly suit-up again with an even more reluctant Wolverine.

Deadpool & Wolverine is the kind of team-up movie with slick one-liners and indulgent comic-booky fight sequences that must be the ultimate wet dream fantasy for 12-year-old boys of today’s youth. Sadly, for me, this brand of multiversal storytelling and self-referential comedy has become a bit tiresome. Shawn Levy’s latest film in the Deadpool trilogy (for now) takes aim at millennial blowhards like me and pokes fun at the last decade of fanboy movies. It’s a good bit until it becomes the whole things becomes a tinge annoying. I’m not above juvenile humor, but I’m also a grown man who cried at the end of Logan in the theater. Maybe I’m just mad because the joke is on me now.

For most of its runtime, Deadpool & Wolverine feels like it was made by and for Reddit, for those miscreants lurking on Letterboxd ready to roll with small opinions and a limited worldview. It’s a movie of antics, emotionally hollow IP-brand management, and a guide on how to reverse-engineer a movie around an actor, not the other way around. It likely doesn’t help that I’m not a huge fan of the Deadpool movies to begin with. Or maybe it’s more of a Ryan Reynolds problem – in this case, there is essentially no difference between those two things. Reynolds knows exactly what fans of this franchise are looking for, and he certainly delivers a lot of quippy jokes and knows a good gag when he sees one. Turning this into a buddy comedy and playing with the legacy of one of the more beloved characters in the broader superhero cannon was a savvy move, and luckily, Hugh Jackman still gives a shit and delivers an awesome performance (let’s hope he still has time to shed the claws every once and awhile to do other things). The co-leads play well off each other, and it was fun to spend time with them on the road together.

The movie is funny, but sometimes in ways it does not mean to be. What was funny for me is that the film works fine despite not having any interesting visual sensibilities or style nor does it seem remotely interested in exploring a fresh spin on comic book storytelling. That's almost hard to pull off! It instead settles for the low-hanging fruit, which is fine if you're just there for the memes and lolz. When a movie prioritizes things like being a meme machine, I can’t help but lose interest. Not every movie has to elicit earnest emotion, but at what point does a movie fall victim to its own insufferable self-awareness and hyperactive metacommentary with the world at large? For me, Deadpool & Wolverine manages to both overcomplicate and oversimplify things, which undermines any attempt at genuine critical appraisal in my opinion. All in all, I did enjoy the movie, but I have to remind myself that if I was 12 years old, I would have been a much bigger fan.

I was such a little dumbass dipshit when I was 12 years old.