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  • 16. Smash Mouth, “All Star” (1999)

    Alternative rock spent the decade teaching outsiders they belonged. Smash Mouth told them they might win.

    David, why Smash Mouth?

    Why not Wheatus’s “Teenage Dirtbag”? Or The Cardigans’ “Lovefool”? Or New Radicals’ “You Get What You Give”?

    That New Radicals one always bothered me. Gregg Alexander clearly wanted to write an inspirational anthem about rejecting phoniness and choosing your own life, which is a fine idea. Then, at the end, he starts calling out Beck, Hanson, Courtney Love, and Marilyn Manson for doing fashion shoots and running to their mansions. Their biggest crime was fashion shoots? What fashion shoots was Hanson doing? And Beck? Hanson? Beck Hansen? It is a clunky idea, ending a song meant to inspire people to be better with a specific kiss-off to four beloved pop underdogs of the moment.

    He only listed those four because they were famous at the time and completely different from each other. The rhythm worked. The names scanned. It did not matter who they were. That is the problem. If you write a song about sincerity and end it by naming random celebrities because they fit the rhyme scheme, you have not committed to your own theme.

    “Lovefool” is awesome, and The Cardigans are awesome, but it exists largely as an alternative-rock anomaly. It sounds like nothing else from the era, and it does not sound like anything in the many years since either. It got airplay, and it has only grown more beloved over time, but no one ever wrote a song and said, “This is what I’m going for.” It is a perfect little object floating in space.

    “Teenage Dirtbag,” meanwhile, seemed to luck into a million-dollar song without much else to follow it up with. The song is now loved because it is unabashedly cheesy: a strange little anthem about Iron Maiden fandom sung by a guy who sounds like Alanis Morissette. The music video helps. No one saw Loser, but Jason Biggs and Mena Suvari are people everyone still likes, and they actually showed up for the video shoot.

    So just being a song that became famous later does not mean it was important. Cultural afterlife alone is not enough. That is how you get every half-ironic karaoke song being retroactively promoted to masterpiece status.

    So why “All Star”? What does it have that those other songs do not?

    For starters, Smash Mouth understood the assignment better than almost anyone else in this corner of late-’90s rock. The song is not merely catchy. It is not merely a nostalgic meme. It is a fully committed underdog anthem from a band that somehow made optimism sound sarcastic enough to be tolerated by alternative radio.

    Alternative rock spent most of the 1990s teaching outsiders that they were allowed to exist. “All Star” went further and suggested they might actually become the hero of the story.

    That was a bigger shift than people give it credit for.

    Let’s start with the sound. When looking for a playlist of songs by ’90s one-hit wonders—though Smash Mouth are technically not one-hit wonders, but try explaining that to anyone at a party—Smash Mouth might be the most enjoyable band to revisit. They did not seem revolutionary at the time, but their sun-soaked sound felt legitimate. There was brightness, but also detachment. They were positive without sounding like they had fallen for positivity. That is a difficult balance. Katrina and the Waves made “Walking on Sunshine” sound like someone winning a free vacation on a game show. Smash Mouth sounded like someone who knew the vacation package had hidden fees but went anyway.

    That is why “Walkin’ on the Sun” is important to understanding “All Star.” Songwriter Greg Camp seemed fascinated by sunshine as both image and trap. “Walkin’ on the Sun” feels like a rebuttal to sun-drenched naivete. If you like walking on sunshine so much, you might as well try walking on the actual sun. Enjoy the optimism. Try not to die.

    “All Star” takes that same brightness and removes just enough of the sneer to make it sincere. It is still slightly amused with itself. It still has that late-’90s layer of sunglasses-at-night irony. But underneath all of that, the song believes what it is saying.

    That is the key.

    The lyrics are much smarter than their reputation suggests. Greg Camp writes in compact little bursts, like he is trying to smuggle actual thoughts into a children’s cereal commercial. The second verse moves from weather talk into environmental anxiety using the bizarre phrase “meteor men,” which probably means meteorologists, or at least how a normal person might refer to scientists talking about the weather on TV. I always liked the phrase because it sounds like a mock-superhero team from Mystery Men, which is probably not why the song ended up on that soundtrack, but it could not have hurt. “Meteor men” sounds like the name of a group of failed crime fighters who show up in matching bowling shirts and immediately get knocked unconscious.

    My favorite moment is the gas money verse. A stranger asks for help getting away from his current situation, and Steve Harwell responds as if he has been handed philosophical advice rather than a request for cash. That is what makes the lyric so funny. The narrator adopts a sort of Mr. Magoo-like obliviousness, mistaking a panhandler’s plea for gas money as a profound life lesson about personal growth. Harwell sells the line with perfect purposeful ignorance. There is no way this guy actually gave the bum any money, but he was inspired enough to write an anthemic ode to self-improvement. In Smash Mouth’s world, every inconvenience is a teachable moment.

    That is the joke of “All Star,” and a reason it works. The song is about uplift delivered by a narrator who sounds like he barely understands uplift. He is not a motivational speaker. He is not a Disney prince. He is a guy in wraparound sunglasses who has accidentally discovered the central idea of modern pop culture: being weird is not a liability if you can sell it with confidence.

    The arrangement is just as important. Greg Camp uses a standard pop foundation, but he keeps adding little wrinkles so the song never becomes as simple as it seems. The verse progression has a familiar, almost nursery-rhyme clarity. Then the hook starts pulling in stranger colors, including a diminished movement that gives the chorus a crooked smile. The syncopated phrasing of the “so much to do” run gives the song its forward shove. From there, the arrangement keeps tossing new ideas at the listener: faux-record scratches, percussive accents, handclaps, organ textures, bright keyboard stabs, and that whistling synth-and-glockenspiel lead that sounds like it escaped from a toy store. This is one of the few rock songs of the era where something interesting happens almost every second. A strange rhythm, a new texture, a clever lyric, an unexpected chord change—there is very little dead air in “All Star.”

    This could only have been produced in 1999. I do not mean that as an insult. There are songs that sound dated because the production choices aged badly, and there are songs that sound dated because they perfectly captured the moment right before the future arrived. “All Star” is the second kind. It sounds like the late ’90s discovering the early 2000s in real time: part ska-pop, part power pop, part novelty single, part sports-arena chant, part children’s-movie anthem, part internet meme before internet memes fully knew what they were.

    The funny thing is that it was not originally the Shrek song. It was first tied to Mystery Men, which makes much more sense. Mystery Men is a movie about losers with ridiculous powers trying to become real heroes. That is basically the song’s thesis with costumes. Shrek made it immortal, but Mystery Men understood it first.

    The association with kids’ media damaged the song’s critical reputation for years. Once a song becomes beloved by children, adults often start treating it like it cannot possibly be serious. This is vaguely stupid. Children are often better than critics at identifying melody, energy, and emotional clarity. They do not need a song to be cool. They need it to work. “All Star” worked so well that it eventually became almost impossible to hear clearly.

    But before it became shorthand for Shrek, memes, and ironic karaoke, it was a late-’90s alternative single doing something surprisingly rare: telling the outsider that triumph was possible.

    There have always been more movies about outcasts getting the girl than songs about it. John Hughes practically lived in that genre. Teen comedies had been telling nerds for years that the right haircut, the right party, the right accidental public performance, or the right romantic misunderstanding could turn them into winners. Rock music was much more reluctant to touch that fantasy. “You are cool because you are a nerd” was a little too on the nose for most nerdy bands to attempt. The idea of the awkward kid becoming an all star would have been considered very L for Lame.

    Then Nirvana happened, and the rules changed. Being an outcast became one of the coolest things a person could be. Alternative music moved from college radio and hip record stores to nationwide radio formats. Bands that once sounded like secret handshakes became arena acts. Suddenly, part of the promise of alternative music was that anyone could break through.

    But much of that music still treated outsider status as a wound. You were alienated. You were misunderstood. You were damaged. You were authentic because you suffered. “All Star” kept the outsider and removed the misery.

    That is why the song matters.

    It is not that there had never been inspirational songs before. Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” had already become the default American anthem for people who want encouragement without having to define exactly what they are being encouraged to do. Madonna’s “Express Yourself” became an anthem of empowerment too, even though the lyrics are basically about making a man communicate better. A useful message, sure, but it would probably fail the Bechdel test.

    Those earlier songs may have influenced “All Star” in the same way Pong influenced Diablo III. Technically, yes. Spiritually, not really.

    The difference is that “All Star” is not just about endurance, self-expression, or vague belief. It is about the weird kid winning. Not surviving. Not being understood someday. Winning. Getting the fireworks at the end. That was easy for movies, sports stories, and teen comedies to understand, but rock songwriting rarely embraced it directly. Rock preferred rebellion, alienation, lust, despair, swagger, or revenge. It was much less comfortable with “the weird kid wins.”

    “All Star” is the weird kid wins.

    That is also why it makes sense that “Teenage Dirtbag” arrived right afterward. I would not claim direct influence unless Brendan B. Brown said so, but the emotional territory is similar. A heavy-metal-loving nerd should not get the girl, but does. A loser becomes the romantic lead. It is the same turn-of-the-millennium wish fulfillment. The difference is that “Teenage Dirtbag” still sounds like an awkward confession. “All Star” sounds like the victory parade.

    The song’s influence on later pop is probably more thematic than musical, but that still counts. You can hear its emotional descendants in the big, bright, kid-friendly optimism of songs like Pharrell’s “Happy” and Justin Timberlake’s “Can’t Stop the Feeling!” You can see its fingerprints on the way internet culture learned to treat sincerity and irony as the same thing wearing different sunglasses. You can trace similar melodic density and bright synthetic textures through later Weezer, fun., Owl City, Passion Pit, and many other artists who understood that modern pop listeners like songs that keep throwing new objects at their heads.

    That helps explain why it has aged better than many songs people took more seriously. Modern pop is built for hyperactive listening. Gen X listeners often complain that contemporary music is too erratic, but younger audiences seem comfortable with songs that shift texture constantly. Charli XCX, Olivia Rodrigo, Post Malone, and modern Beyoncé all work in a landscape where surprise is not a garnish. It is part of the arrangement. “All Star” is not hyperpop, obviously. Let’s not get anyone arrested. But it does share a belief that pop songs should keep producing little jolts of novelty.

    Steve Harwell was not the songwriter, but he was essential to why the song worked. Greg Camp wrote the thing, but Harwell sold it. His voice had a deep, cutting, almost cartoonishly confident quality. He sounded like the cool uncle at a barbecue who might give terrible advice but somehow knows everyone’s name. A more polished singer might have ruined the song by making it too earnest. Harwell made it feel like sincerity wearing a bowling shirt.

    His performance is also why the song survived its own overexposure. “All Star” became a children’s movie anthem, a meme, a sports-stadium chant, a commercial cue, a punchline, and an all-purpose nostalgia button. Most songs would collapse under that much usage. This one somehow absorbed all of it. The more ridiculous the context, the more the song seemed to belong there.

    That is not usually how important songs work. “Jeremy” became too heavy to casually use. “Closer” became too charged. “Break Stuff” became shorthand for tantrum rage. “Enter Sandman” became sports intimidation. “Sabotage” became chase-scene adrenaline. “All Star” became something stranger: a reusable cultural battery. Drop it into almost any setting, and it instantly produces energy, irony, and recognition.

    The band paid a price for that. Smash Mouth became easy to dismiss because their biggest song became too available. Anything that children love, advertisers use, and the internet jokes about will eventually be treated as if it has no real value. Steve Harwell’s later years made the story sadder. He left the band in 2021 after health struggles and an erratic performance in Bethel, New York, and he died in 2023 at only 56. For a singer often reduced to a meme, he gave one of the most recognizable vocal performances of the decade.

    The song itself remains weirdly undefeated.

    That is the thing about “All Star.” It should have worn out its welcome. It should have disappeared into late-’90s novelty bins with swing revival singles and songs from soundtracks no one watches anymore. It should have become a trivia answer. Instead, it keeps coming back. Not always with dignity, but dignity was never the point.

    The point was possibility.

    Alternative rock spent the 1990s telling outsiders they were not alone. That mattered. But “All Star” did something that was almost embarrassing in its directness: it told them the world might actually make room for them. Not just as loners, not just as victims, not just as misunderstood geniuses, but as stars.

    Critics laughed. Kids understood. The internet understood even better.

    A joke can last a summer. A novelty can last a year. “All Star” has lasted because underneath the bright production, the goofy delivery, the whistling synth, the Shrek jokes, and the layers of irony, there is a real idea: being different is not merely survivable. It might be the thing that gets you through the door.

    Perhaps no song is more emblematic of the early 2000s, but that is only part of the story. “All Star” belongs on a list of essential ’90s rock songs because it caught alternative music at the exact moment outsider culture stopped asking for sympathy and started asking for applause.

    Smash Mouth did not invent the underdog anthem. They just made it safe for the weird kid to win.

  • Big Swings, Big Misses #1: Bill Murray and Passion Play (2010)

    The first film in my new series about the lowest rated movie by actors I love.

    Great actors make bad movies. Sometimes they make choices that result in merely disappointing films. Sometimes they make movies that hurt their careers for no real reason at all. And sometimes they make movies so strange, so fundamentally misguided, that you almost have to admire whatever thought process led them to say, “Yes, this is a good idea. Let’s make this.”

    That is the idea behind Big Swings, Big Misses, a series where I pick an actor I love and watch the lowest-rated movie on Metacritic that they were involved with. A Metacritic score below 30 is, in my mind, always unreleasable. Yet these movies get released anyway. It is the cinematic equivalent of accidentally replying-all to the entire company. You do not want one of these on your résumé.

    For Bill Murray, that movie is Passion Play (2010), a film that currently sits at the bottom of his Metacritic page with a score of 21 out of 100. It is also the lowest-rated movie on Metacritic for Megan Fox. Mickey Rourke has somehow managed to make two movies rated even lower than this. We may get to those movies at some point.

    Mickey Rourke plays Nate Poole, a washed-up trumpet player whose life is going to get worse very soon. He has to steal money from his boss’s poker game just to get paid for work he has already done. Shortly after that, he is kidnapped by criminals and taken into the desert to be executed. Just before he is killed, his would-be executioner is killed by a group of Native Americans dressed like baseball players. Or perhaps they are baseball players dressed like Native Americans. The movie never really clarifies. I am not entirely certain who they are or why they are there. The movie is not especially interested in answering those questions. Nate survives, walks through the desert, and eventually stumbles into the nearest town.

    This town contains a carnival. More specifically, it contains Megan Fox, who plays Lily, a carnival attraction with actual angel wings. Not fake wings. Not a costume. Real, feathered, fully functional angel wings growing out of her back. Nate pays admission to see her, becomes fascinated by her almost immediately, follows her back to her trailer, and somehow convinces her to let him in for a drink. The movie treats this as the beginning of a tragic romance. I spent much of the first act trying to determine whether the movie wanted me to take the angel wings literally, metaphorically, or both. The answer appears to be yes.

    Lily’s life is controlled by Sam, the carnival owner, who reacts to Nate’s presence by threatening him. This is the second time in the movie that Nate finds himself fearing for his life, and we can only roll our eyes at how quickly and conveniently these plot developments arrive. Lily eventually crashes a truck into Sam’s trailer, rescues Nate, and drives away with him. The two spend time together and develop a relationship, although “develop” may be too strong a word. It is a love affair of plot convenience rather than emotional conviction. The movie is constantly reaching for a dreamy, melancholy atmosphere, but it often feels as if entire scenes are missing between the scenes that actually made it into the final cut.

    Is Passion Play a parable about angels? You can tell the screenwriter watched Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire, although I am less certain that he understood it. What exactly is Lily, and why does everyone become so entranced by her almost immediately? Nate sees her and falls in love. Happy sees her and becomes obsessed. Wealthy patrons will eventually pay money just to stand around looking at her. Megan Fox spends much of the movie speaking softly and staring into the distance, yet she somehow becomes the gravitational center of the story. The screenplay treats her appeal as self-evident.

    Meanwhile, Bill Murray enters the movie as Happy Shannon, a gangster with a personal grudge against Nate. It turns out Nate once slept with Happy’s wife. Happy responded by having his wife killed, which is a comically disproportionate reaction. Nate attempts to save himself by telling Happy about Lily and her wings. This is where the movie takes a turn from strange to fascinatingly strange. Our hero falls deeply in love with a stranger and then almost immediately betrays her. Happy sees Lily, becomes captivated by her, and decides that her wings can make him rich. The exact mechanics of this business plan remain unclear throughout the movie, but everyone involved treats it as a completely reasonable proposition.

    This brings me to one of my favorite scenes in the film. Happy eventually sets Lily up in a theater and begins charging wealthy customers for the privilege of seeing her. The movie builds this up as if we are about to witness some extraordinary spectacle. What is the act? Does she fly? Does she sing? Does she perform miracles? The answer is no. Lily stands on a stage in a small plexiglass box. That is the act. She stands there displaying her wings while wealthy patrons watch. Bill Murray sits in the balcony observing the proceedings like a man who has finally discovered the perfect business model.

    I spent the entire scene trying to understand the economics of this operation. Are people buying repeat tickets? Is there a second act? Does anyone ask questions? How many times can a person pay to see Megan Fox stand motionless in a box before they begin demanding additional value for their entertainment dollar? These are the sorts of questions that occupied my mind while the movie was trying very hard to be profound.

    The movie is filled with moments like this. It wants desperately to be a tragic fantasy romance, but it keeps getting distracted by ideas it never fully develops. My favorite example comes when Nate attempts to find work. A character who I believe is connected to his former employer tells him:

    “You can’t bus tables. You can’t clean toilets. You can’t even buy a drink in here. Not here, or anyplace else.”

    How omniscient.

    This line is intended to be devastating. Instead, it raises a number of practical questions. Who is this man? What authority does he possess? Is he merely a bar manager, or does he somehow control employment opportunities throughout North America? The screenplay needs Nate to hit rock bottom, so it simply has a minor character announce that rock bottom has arrived. The effect is unintentionally hilarious. It is the kind of line that sounds dramatic while you are writing it at two in the morning and considerably less dramatic once another human being says it out loud.

    If Bill Murray had said this line, I might have taken it seriously. If the movie had established some kind of criminal blacklist, I might have accepted it. Instead, it comes from a character we barely know, and he delivers it with the confidence of a man who has personally surveyed every restaurant, bar, and janitorial department in the Western Hemisphere.

    The frustrating thing about Passion Play is that there is a better movie hiding somewhere inside it. The premise alone is bizarre enough to justify its existence. A washed-up jazz musician falls in love with an angel while a gangster attempts to turn her into a profitable attraction. That is not the plot of a movie assembled by market research. Someone genuinely believed in this idea. Someone thought this could be a great film.

    I cannot justify actually hating this movie.

    The screenplay is underwritten. Entire character motivations seem to disappear between scenes. Characters fall in love because the screenplay says they should be in love. Characters betray one another because the next scene requires a betrayal. The score often sounds like it was recorded in a spare bedroom after a weekend spent listening to Pearl Jam albums. Yet the movie never feels generic.

    I was rarely surprised by individual plot developments, but I never found the movie predictable. There is a difference. Most bad movies fail in familiar ways. They are bland, corporate, cynical, or lazy. Passion Play fails in its own unique way. It is reaching for something melancholy and mythic and romantic. It wants to be a noir fairy tale. It wants to be tragic. It wants to be profound. It simply has no idea how to get there.

    Should Bill Murray be embarrassed that this is the lowest-rated movie on his Metacritic page? Probably not. Actors who spend their careers taking chances inevitably end up with a few disasters. The same instincts that lead someone to appear in Lost in Translation or Rushmore can occasionally lead them somewhere much stranger.


    I suspect Murray did Passion Play for the same reason many odd movies get made in the first place: somebody he liked pitched him an idea he couldn’t quite say no to. Mitch Glazer wrote Scrooged, but this feels like his Gigli—a passion project that never figured out how to become a movie. Still, I can imagine Glazer at a Denny’s at one in the morning, talking excitedly about a washed-up trumpet player, an angel with real wings, and a gangster who wants to put her on display. Eventually, keeping the conversation going feels easier than ending it. “You know what?” Bill Murray says. “I’d act in this. Want another shot of whiskey in your coffee?”

    Rating: 2.5/10

  • Day 6: Evil Dead Rise (Lee Cronin, 2023)

    E is for extremely poor apartment safety.



    If someone asked me what Evil Dead II was, I would say it is one of my favorite movies, and I could even tell you why, but I could not, for the life of me, give you a clean account of what it is actually about. I remember Bruce Campbell in a cabin, with a shotgun in one hand and, eventually, a chainsaw where the other hand used to be. The villain is an evil first-person camera shot that leaps into people and corrupts them: an unstoppable force that nevertheless seems capable of getting confused. It is unleashed by reading a passage from a book out loud, I think. And years later, Sam Raimi would shoot Doc Ock’s tentacles in Spider-Man 2 as if they had learned how to move from the woods around that cabin.

    Evil Dead Rise is similarly polished, a tour de force of splatter-gore effects shots and set pieces, but I cannot say the story is as inspired. Of all the ways to tell this story, the movie chooses one of the strangest: it opens with an apparently disconnected scene that takes place after the main events. The synopsis promises a movie about two estranged sisters trying to survive an unleashed evil. The opening gives us two sisters who are obviously annoyed with each other, so the viewer naturally assumes they must be the sisters in question. They are not. They are two different sisters, almost entirely unrelated to the main storyline.

    Beth, played by Lily Sullivan, is the movie’s most promising human anchor: a guitar technician who makes her living on tour, tuning guitars and moving from show to show before anyone else takes the stage. She may not be famous, but she exists adjacent to fame, juggling technical proficiency and backstage fraternization in a way that prioritizes proximity over boundaries. The movie introduces her just after she learns she is pregnant, most likely by one of the musicians whose guitars she maintains. That detail immediately sharpens her character. Beth has spent her adult life trying to look self-possessed and indispensable, only to be confronted with a fact that makes her seem, at least to herself, like the cliché everyone has always been waiting to call her. The horror, before the demons even arrive, is that her life has suddenly become readable in the cruelest possible way: she can bury the secret and preserve her credibility, or admit the truth and risk being reduced to the oldest backstage stereotype in the book.

    Beth’s family is filled, at least structurally, with expendable characters, but Cronin gives them just enough intelligence to make their deaths feel cruel rather than mechanical. Her sister, Ellie, played by Alyssa Sutherland, is guilty of the greatest sin a person can commit in a horror movie: believing she has made all the better choices in life. She has built a home, raised three children, and settled into the kind of adult responsibility Beth has spent her life avoiding. Ellie’s children are smart too, but in the dangerous, unfinished way children are smart. Danny is technically curious enough to play the cursed record at full speed, turning his DJ instincts into an accidental summoning ritual. Bridget has the moral seriousness of a teenager who already thinks she understands the brokenness of the world, while Kassie has the imaginative resourcefulness of a child who can turn a doll’s head on a stick into both a toy and a weapon. None of them are idiots. That is what makes the family’s destruction more frustrating: they are not punished for stupidity so much as for curiosity, confidence, and proximity to the wrong object at the wrong time.

    The grotesqueness of the splatter gore that Cronin unleashes is the star of the show. Evil Dead Rise turns biting at the eyes, fire, broken glass, and kitchen utensils into instruments of punishment, including one moment of domestic-object body horror nasty enough to put Cabin Fever to shame. What makes the violence work is not just its extremity, but its horrible intimacy: Cronin turns the ordinary objects of a home into evidence that no domestic space in this movie can remain safe. Watching Evil Dead Rise may make you look around your own living room and wonder how, exactly, one child-proofs a home against evil.

    For the most part, Lee Cronin’s Evil Dead entry functions randomly. Whether one lives or dies here depends on smart decisions and good instincts, yes, but some of the most likely to survive are overtaken unceremoniously, as though they were in the wrong place at the wrong time and rolled a 1 on a Will Save. In other words, the movie often treats survival less like a matter of character or consequence than a cruel accident of timing.

    And, for the most part, this works. It increases the dread and makes the evil seem like an unstoppable force that can bypass anything. Going back to the RPG analogy, there is something called a “funnel” in the Dungeons & Dragons-inspired game Dungeon Crawl Classics, where each player controls four level-zero characters through a short adventure likely to kill most of them. Run away from a dragon and choose a house to hide in. The house might be a monster-house, waiting for its next meal. If all four characters go into the monster-house together, you just lost all four characters.

    The reason Evil Dead Rise feels so unsatisfying is that this is a funnel, not a story. That can make for a great origin story, but an origin story implies a promise: eventually, it will lead to something more complete, with characters who have grown, adapted, and actually seem to know what they are doing. I wanted another movie to pick up where this one left off.

    Watching a bunch of level-zero characters get killed off can be fun, but it is too easy to admire from a distance. There is a character or two who manages to seem like the “new Ash,” but not in a way that makes Evil Dead Rise feel like the singular achievement Evil Dead II was. This movie is gory and frightening, but often at the expense of character. I am invested enough in these people to want to see what happens in chapter two. Instead, Cronin has said he has no interest in making another Evil Dead movie, at least not a direct sequel. It seems like these characters will never continue on, and that the next Evil Dead movie will be a different origin story with entirely new characters.

    I am suspicious of Lee Cronin. The industry seems eager to turn him into a name before interest has built organically. There is a sense that studios are trying to “make fetch happen” with him, asking us to recognize his authorship before the general public has had much reason to know who he is. In that way, he reminds me a little of Gore Verbinski: a visually fluent studio craftsman whose early work suggested that, with the right material, he might one day deliver something enormous. Cronin’s greatest gift is that he can make a dime look like a buck. Evil Dead Rise is as glossy and well-produced as horror movies made for several times its budget; the fact that it reportedly cost less than $20 million is almost incomprehensible from the evidence onscreen. That explains why he is suddenly in demand, even if his work has not yet given us anything truly indispensable. Lee Cronin’s The Mummy proved the strange limit of that strategy: profitable enough to justify itself, but culturally invisible enough to make the title feel faintly ridiculous. The movie asked audiences to treat “Lee Cronin” as a brand, and audiences mostly responded as though they had never been consulted. He is excellent with texture, pacing, intelligent characters, and finishing touches. What he has not yet proven is that he can make the story itself feel as inevitable as his imagery. Before he is handed yet another franchise to revive, he may need to figure out how to finish one.

    6.5/10

  • Is This Thing On? (Bradley Cooper, 2025)

    Or: Dis We Finish the Script?

    I thought this movie was great when I logged it last night. Now I’m conflicted. I liked it while I was watching it, but the more I tried to write about it, the less I could justify its existence. It kind of fizzled away after the credits.

    Four men, all credited on the script, came together to write a female character meant to feel authentic and relatable. I might have loved the movie if Laura Dern had been given a chance to rewrite some of her dialogue, because as it stands, the perspective feels weirdly aloof. Too much of it lands in “women be crazy, am I right?” territory. Dern and Will Arnett both do strong work, but she is working against material that keeps treating her as an idea instead of a person.

    The poster/photo choice bothered me too. Having Arnett put up a picture of Dern that does not show her face may work narratively on one level, but it feels like a cheap solution for a mainstream Hollywood movie. It would have been more interesting, and more confounding for him, if the photo looked like another actress and Dern could simply say, “That doesn’t even look like me.”

    The bigger issue is that the main plot feels like a beat-for-beat remake of Ghostlight. That movie was hammy and overloaded with coincidences, but it had a stronger reason to exist. It said something true about losing a child, even when the movie itself did not always feel true. Is This Thing On? has truthful pieces, but not enough connective tissue.

    Every movie gets one coincidence, but Dern showing up at the exact comedy club where Arnett is performing is painfully contrived. Had it been the fifth date night between her and Peyton Manning’s character — a badly miscast role, by the way — I could have accepted it. As written, I had to invoke the “one coincidence” rule and move on, even though it made no sense.

    There are other shortcuts that feel like low-budget writing decisions. Arnett’s sexual conquest is written with almost no texture: foreplay as “I think we should have sex. We are going to have sex,” followed by her leaving for work and telling him not to let the cat out. That is not a character; that is a function. Likewise, we are told another woman will do a magic show for his kids, which sounds like a fun chance to give a supporting character a memorable moment, and then we never see it. It is setup with no payoff — not even a five-second shot.

    The frustrating thing is that there is a great idea for a script here, and the central storyline has truth in it. In some ways, the direction could not be better. I love the long takes, the stand-up routines are strong, and Arnett and Dern are surprisingly good with the material they have. But the movie also feels strangely amateur from a production and writing standpoint. This may be one of the rare cases where the dreaded Hollywood producer note would have helped: “Is there enough here to put in a trailer?” I usually hate movies built around that question, but maybe this one needed it. It needed a clearer reason to exist.

  • No Other Choice (2025)

    Quick thoughts on No Other Choice. Spoilers ahead..


    I am one of those people who thinks subtitled movies should only have a handful of lines of dialogue per minute, spoken slowly, with nothing else happening onscreen at that moment. When too much happens all at once, and parts of the text cannot be read because of white-on-white subtitles, I am often unsure what actually happened.


    No Other Choice is so that type of foreign-language movie.


    However, Park Chan-wook plays into that, because the film can make visual sense even if you don’t understand a word of it: a happy family man loses his job, then another job, shaves his moustache, and hangs out in a bar all day instead of looking for work. He decides to size up his competition for the one job opening that exists, and he finds five perfect, A+ applicants.


    They all must die.


    The best scene in No Other Choice comes when Man-su targets one of his first competitors: a once-perfect husband who lost his job and just gave up. His wife has moved on and started cheating on him, which only makes him more mopey. When our “hero,” Man-su, pulls a gun on him, the man’s wife happens upon the attempted killing and is about to clobber Man-su in the head with some sort of ornate piece of modern furniture. She holds back, seemingly conflicted over whether she wants to see her husband dead or not.


    Yes, you can read the subtitles to figure out what they are saying, but the music playing in the room is so loud that the dialogue can barely be heard. I was kind of amused, seeing a Park Chan-wook movie where people who spoke the language would have no idea what was going on for a change.


    This is one of those “anti-hero finds a cause worth justifying his awful actions” movies, as buying a $50,000 cello for a true prodigy was something none of his competitors needed to do. And thus, they must die.


    Once No Other Choice was over, I was truly delighted. I felt like I had seen one truly new story, one that could have worked regardless of the medium used to tell it. It was exciting, well-paced, and artistically rendered, with truly great music, both original and pulled from classic archives I had never heard before.


    The movie pulls so many different emotions and explores family solidarity and divisiveness in interesting ways. Seeing how different people react to the same situation — losing the only job they were qualified to have because of automation — makes vile actions seem arguably humane and necessary.


    This is obviously in conversation with Parasite in a lot of ways, but altogether different and, for me, more satisfying. I enjoyed so much of this movie. While Paul Thomas Anderson makes fun of movies that actually say the title out loud in the dialogue, I feel like even he would appreciate the balls on this one. I think I counted about seven times that No Other Choice either said the exact phrase “no other choice,” logically conveyed the notion, or used some variation of the idea. This is short-film-festival-competition writing, and for that, I applaud it. I wanted to stand up and clap.


    My second favorite movie of 2025.

    9.5/10

  • Day 5: Dracula: Dead and Loving It (Mel Brooks, 1995)

    I went to school and I got the big D.

    I started this entry with a different D movie in mind and almost immediately regretted it. For years, I had somehow convinced myself that the famous “April 25th (the perfect date)” meme came from Drop Dead Gorgeous, so I picked that for this series and wound up disappointed on multiple levels. It turns out the quote is actually from Miss Congeniality, which left me feeling like I deserved to wear a critical dunce cap for the rest of the week. Drop Dead Gorgeous had its moments, mostly because the cast seemed to be having fun, but it was sloppier, more grating, and more strangely offensive than I expected. Also, it should probably receive a special Razzie for worst sound effects editing of all time. I gave it a 3/10 and moved on.

    When Plan A crashes and burns, it is time for Plan B.

    Day 5: Letter D

    Dracula: Dead and Loving It (Mel Brooks, 1995)

    “Put him in a straightjacket and give him an enema. Wait—give him an enema first, and then put him in the straightjacket.” [self-satisfied smirk]

    Considering how little I tend to like vampire movies, I sure have seen a lot of them. In my imagination, I think I love the trope of vampires because it takes me back to childhood, when my older siblings would tease me by playing up my Transylvanian heritage. They would say, “I want—to suck—your blood, bleh bleh…” and I would get scared and go cry in the corner. I keep watching vampire movies, but I think the only ones I truly like, I can count on one hand: Fright Night, Let the Right One In, What We Do in the Shadows, Only Lovers Left Alive, and the 1922 Nosferatu.

    Even though I do not think they are great movies, I love Dracula movies for all the tropes they carry forward from the early days of cinema. One of the most memorable shots in Murnau’s Nosferatu is the shadow of Count Orlok’s hand creeping into frame and clutching at the damsel’s heart. It looks cool, but I could not tell you what is literally supposed to be happening there. My best guess is that the shadow represents Orlok’s dark soul reaching for the purity in Ellen and crushing it like a candle flame. A trope was born, and ever since then Dracula movies have loved showing the vampire’s shadow interacting with the world in ways that reflect unconscious desire rather than the laws of light. Why should this make sense?

    The shadow is a central gag in Dracula: Dead and Loving It, and it delighted me because it gets at something few vampire comedies are willing to say outright: this lore makes no sense. Vampires may very well be ripe for lampooning, but most parodies still treat the basic mythology as something to preserve. There is usually an unspoken rule that you can joke around the lore, but not puncture it completely. What We Do in the Shadows, for example, mostly plays vampire rules straight. Its humor comes from mixing immortal creatures of the night with the awkwardness of an Office-style mockumentary. The joke is not that vampires are incoherent as a concept; it is that these vampires are ridiculous people. Dracula: Dead and Loving It goes further. It keeps nudging at the idea that the whole mythology starts to fall apart the moment you examine it too closely. I suspect that is one reason audiences resisted it at the time. In movies, Santa Claus and vampires occupy the same strange category: they simply must exist, and the moviemaking spell breaks the moment anyone suggests otherwise.

    What definitely works in Dracula: Dead and Loving It is that it is a Leslie Nielsen vehicle, and I am happy to go along with it. Some of its best scenes run on absurd comic logic delivered with total seriousness, which at times reminded me of the Marx Brothers. That is one of the highest compliments I can give a comedy, though I will stop short of putting it in their league. I can easily imagine Groucho making a meal out of Dracula’s ridiculous Coppola-inspired hair, treating it like some bizarre hat he wore around the house for no reason. Groucho, however, would never have repeated the joke in the third act by literally checking it in at a party and calling it a hat. That moment really stinks, and it contributes to the sense that a tug-of-war was happening behind the scenes. Every so often, certain bits feel as though they survived less because they were the funniest choices than because somebody in Hollywood worried the trailer needed a few easy visual gags. More than once, I had the strange feeling that I was not supposed to be liking this as much as I did.

    I think the biggest reason Dracula: Dead and Loving It was such a dud at the time was its grotesque, hard-R violence, which reaches too aggressively for laughs through shock imagery. I cannot think of another vampire movie this explicitly gory besides the Blade films and Renfield, and those all came later. In my mind, the classic vampire belongs to a more quaint kind of horror, though I may just be projecting my own ideal version of vampires onto the screen. I want the horror to come from the idea of the vampire itself. I do not need a splatter cannon spraying blood at me. That sort of thing always makes me think, “Okay, I understand. Your movie is rated R. Congratulations.”

    While Leslie Nielsen is borderline great here, Mel Brooks casting himself as Van Helsing remains a baffling choice. Brooks’s comic persona is too rooted in cocky idiocy for the role to work. He carries himself less like a master vampire hunter than like a blowhard who wandered into the wrong movie. My guess is that Brooks may once have pictured himself as Dracula, but handed that role to Nielsen because Nielsen was more bankable numbskull, while Brooks was never going to convince anyone he could sell the picture as its title character. Even so, it is hard not to wonder whether the movie might have worked better with the roles reversed. Nielsen had much stronger “smartest guy in the room” energy, especially before The Naked Gun turned him into a patron saint of deadpan stupidity. He is very good as Dracula, but he might also have made Van Helsing into someone worth rooting for.

    If Dracula: Dead and Loving It is a bad movie, it is the kind of bad movie I would gladly watch whenever it turned up on cable. I was smiling and laughing out loud for probably 65 percent of it, because when the jokes land, they land with sharp comic timing. Had the film been a little less graphic, and had its reputation not become so tied to the amount of blood it spills—or rather, spurts—I can easily imagine it becoming a minor Comedy Central staple in the late ’90s and early 2000s. Instead, it slipped into a strange obscurity, even though it is less hokey and far more faithful to the spirit of its source material than Robin Hood: Men in Tights. I more or less hated that one, and came away thinking, “Mel Brooks, no more.”

    What is most surprising is that the failure of Dracula: Dead and Loving It seems to have ended Brooks’s directing career altogether. And yet, improbably, in 2026 he has completed the ultimate hat trick: Spaceballs: The New One has finished filming, entered post-production, and even coaxed my favorite actor, Rick Moranis, out of retirement. Even when everyone inevitably tells me this one is terrible too, I am still going to see it. At this point, I am old enough to know better than to take a Mel Brooks-directed comedy for granted.

    6.5/10

  • A Ghost Story (David Lowery, 2017)

    A sheet, a pie, and a lot of waiting

    David Cross once called Alvin and the Chipmunks 3: Chipwrecked “the most miserable experience of my life.” He only did it for the money, as he wanted to find funding for some of his own passionate projects. Sensing utter desperation, a producer coerced David into conditions he felt were pointless. In one scene, he wore a Pelican mascot costume, for real, for days worth of filming during extreme humidity. A stunt person or extra could have been in the costume instead, and, even worse, his character was not even supposed to actually be in the costume. The audience was only supposed to think that he *might* be in the costume.

    I thought of that while watching this haunted little movie. Apparently, Casey Affleck was always underneath the sheet in A Ghost Story—a lot more than he ever needed to be for the experience to be, I’d say. Sometimes, hiring a major actor for a role where you can’t see their face qualifies as stunt casting, especially when they are given so little to -do-.

    .

    The visuals are the primary draw here. Everything is impeccably framed, with a little bit of vignette on the outer corners of the frame. It’s as though a ghost is remembering their past as if they were watching a vintage home movie. There is a Tsai Ming-Liang level of action happening onscreen here. I feel like I need to research more about the house where this was shot. Whereas in Goodbye Dragon Inn, Tsai focused on a movie theater’s final days before it was shut down, focusing on all of the grody little details that still existed there: the leaky roof, the cruisiness of its usage by gay men. I felt like Tsai looked at the theater, saw it was going to be demolished, so he gave an assignment to himself. How can he capture the majesty of a theater, it’s downfall, and somehow preserve it. Goodbye Dragon Inn was a movie about the very worst days of a once majestic theater.

    A Ghost Story’s backstory is a little less noble. Yes, the house was condemned, but the story came first. David Lowery found a house from a list of buildings that were to be torn down and used the film’s budget to fix it up to make it look more livable as a family home before its eventual destruction. Whereas in Goodbye Dragon Inn, Tsai incorporated a character who moved extremely slowly with one leg that couldn’t move so you could really take in the atmosphere of the theater, there are shots in A Ghost Story where nothing happens for almost no reason. The most memorable scene in A Ghost Story comes when Rooney Mara grabs a dish left for her on a table, sits at the wall for some reason, and pierces the fork right in the center of the tin. I thought “Are we going to watch her eat this entire pie in one shot?” There is nothing else to look at. There is a ghost and a piano. Old, undecorated suburban houses are not that interesting to look at, so we just watch her, chomping away.

    I liked the pacing of A Ghost Story. It was like Tsai Ming Liang or Apichatpong Weerasethakul without the purpose. There is nothing that makes me roll my eyes as quickly as the idea that a ghost might be haunting an old house, but I do love the folklore tradition of ghost stories. There is truth in that aspect, that ghosts are more bound by a location than by time. I understood the main point of the movie: someone who believed in his own love so deeply that, once he died, he becomes his own self-fulfilling prophecy. “Wait… I have been haunting myself for years? Why?” Tsai makes slowness feel like observation; Lowery makes it feel a little like homework.

    7/10

  • Day 4: Caught Stealing (Darren Aronofsky, 2025) Review

    Letter C is for criminal cat-sitting confusion.

    The idea behind this A–Z Film-a-thon is to find movies that seem underrated and that I might end up loving unequivocally. At this point, I would settle for a movie I think is even slightly underrated, as opposed to one that was already given every possible benefit of the doubt at the time of its release.

    With Caught Stealing, I felt like I understood exactly what Darren Aronofsky was going for from the second I heard the premise: when his neighbor asks him to take care of his cat, a former baseball prodigy turned bartender finds himself in the middle of gangster chaos without knowing why. I read that and immediately thought: this sounds like After Hours.

    Not because the stories or the characters are especially similar—they are not—but because it suggests a hard, gritty realist director trying to make a true comedy in the only way that would feel natural to him. In other words, by placing an ordinary man inside the absurdities of a criminal after-party that seems to have started slightly off camera and will continue whether he understands it or not.

    “Without knowing why” is the key phrase. That is the feeling the movie is after. The criminal world in Caught Stealing is not presented as orderly enough to be fully explained. It has rules, grudges, alliances, and weird little side dramas that seem to have been in motion long before Hank Thompson stumbled into them. The movie trusts that this confusion can be funny, suspenseful, and strangely immersive all at once.

    This may be the first outright “fun movie” Aronofsky has made. It is still a hard-R, very adult movie, one with shocking deaths, ugly violence, and an almost gleeful willingness to make the audience squirm, but its energy is playful in a way his films usually are not. The closest thing in his filmography might actually be mother!, which was “fun” only in the sense that its escalating insanity became perversely exhilarating. Caught Stealing is less subversive than that, but it has a similar confidence in its own nastiness.

    What kept coming to mind while I watched it was how many movies rush emotional stakes in order to get the plot moving. Recent examples like Novocaine and Marty Supreme both revolve, in one way or another, around a man losing the woman who has suddenly become central to his life. Caught Stealing handles that much better. Hank Thompson, played by Austin Butler, does not lose someone he met yesterday after one especially magical night. He loses someone who has been in his orbit for years, someone who has quietly been on his side while he was too drunk, distracted, or self-involved to notice what was right in front of him.

    That history matters. Even though Caught Stealing only unfolds over a couple of days, nothing feels expedited or emotionally synthetic. The movie is wall-to-wall incident, but it never feels like it is frantically skipping steps to get where it wants to go. The relationship at its center has weight, which gives the surrounding chaos something to push against.

    It is also, simply, a fun and darkly funny movie. The Charlie Huston source material makes perfect sense as the basis for something like this. Huston has the look of an aging punk rocker—shaved head, tattooed sleeves, gender-non-specific clothes—and that sensibility comes through in the movie. Caught Stealing has the feel of a story written by someone who finds criminal stupidity, physical pain, and bad luck not merely dramatic, but fundamentally amusing.

    (Bad Bunny is in this)

    My partner pointed out that one reason the movie works as a period piece is that it has to exist in a version of New York just before airport security and modern surveillance would make parts of the plot harder to swallow. That sounds like a small point, but it matters. The movie needs the slightly grimier, looser feeling of the late 1990s to sustain its momentum. It wants a city where terrible decisions can still snowball in private for a little while before systems begin closing in.

    The soundtrack, by IDLES, is one of the movie’s stranger choices. Their sound is anachronistic for the setting, and the film more or less knows it. Matt Smith plays Russ, a mohawk-sporting punk whose taste in music one assumes must be excellent, and there is a sense throughout that if IDLES had somehow existed in 1998, he absolutely would have listened to them. The music mostly works, though it is used in a relatively muted way. That creates a strange tension: if the soundtrack is going to be this historically out of place and this subtle in the mix, one starts to wonder what the point of the anachronism really is. Still, it contributes to the film’s mood more than it hurts it.

    Austin Butler is very good here. This is a role that understands what he is good at: looking beautiful, dazed, a little damaged, and not fully equipped for the world he has wandered into. Hank is decent to the point of near-sainthood by the standards of this movie, but he is still flawed in ways that matter. He is not a blank audience surrogate. He is a man whose passivity and self-medication have left him vulnerable to both bad people and missed chances. Butler gives him just enough sadness and self-disgust that the character remains interesting even when the plot is throwing new disasters at him every few minutes.

    A movie like Caught Stealing—the kind willing to maim, torment, or metaphorically cut the fingers off all of its main characters just to keep the audience uncomfortable—lives or dies by the quality of its ending. This one has a great one. It delivers a kind of 1990s twist ending, the sort that makes everything rearrange itself without ever quite going where you think it will. Even if you have seen this kind of mechanism a hundred times before, Caught Stealing keeps finding ways to avoid the most obvious and irritating choices.

    It does not add up to profound art. That is fine. Not every good movie needs to. What Caught Stealing does offer is the pleasure of watching a filmmaker and writer navigate a familiar kind of story while making a point of dodging cliché at every turn. It is the kind of movie that could be studied in a film class called “Avoid Cliché. Avoid Mistakes.”

    When I turned it off, I felt a little more punk rock for having watched it.

    7.5/10

  • Day3: Bad Taste (Peter Jackson, 1987) review

    A-Z “Hidden Gems” Film-a-thon Day 2

    “One day, when you are famous and everyone knows your name, people will see this and laugh at you.”

    “Good. I hope they do. I am quite happy with how it turned out.”

    That was an exchange I once had with my sister about one of my own early creative projects, the album Mad Cow Disease by my high school musical group, The Cadets of Temperance. My college-era zombie movie, Oh, No! Zombies!!!, inspired similar reactions from older relatives who seemed less charmed by my artistic instincts than I was. Other people involved had supportive families. Mine sometimes looked at what I was making with the expression of people being asked to admire a live electrical fire.

    So I feel a certain kinship with Peter Jackson’s Bad Taste.

    Watching it, I kept imagining Jackson showing this thing to his family at age twenty-four while they tried to process what exactly they were seeing. “What is this?” “Why do the aliens have human disguises that still leave their giant butt cheeks exposed?” “Why does the man with the head wound keep putting his brain back into his skull and carrying on?”

    To my disappointment, Jackson never seems to have offered a great canonical explanation for the aliens’ protruding rear ends. But with a title like Bad Taste, perhaps he felt no obligation to. If anyone questioned the exposed buttocks, he could always point to the marquee and say: I warned you.

    The plot, such as it is, concerns a group of men battling grotesque aliens in rural New Zealand. The creatures look a bit like something Jim Henson might have designed on weekend during a high degree fever. One character, Derek, suffers a catastrophic head wound early on and spends much of the film scooping fallen brain matter off the ground and stuffing it back into his skull. At one point, he even seems willing to supplement his own supply with alien brain. This is not a movie in which medical distinctions matter.

    What struck me most was not the story, which barely qualifies as one, but the brute fact of the movie’s existence. I watched it on Plex without subtitles, which did it no favors. The accents are thick, the sound often resembles dialogue captured inside a coffee can, and the image has that faded, fragile look common to low-budget productions. And yet the camera, while shaky, is never hopelessly amateurish. The movie may not be polished, but it is recognizably a movie. That already puts it ahead of many ambitious homemade projects.

    Bad Taste is less a world than a continuity exercise. Nothing in it feels fleshed out enough to support a larger mythology, and Jackson does not seem especially interested in coherence for its own sake. What he is interested in is getting the shot, finishing the effect, solving the problem in front of him. That is the real subject of the film.

    Jackson plays Derek, the memorably concussed hero, but he also seems to play half the surrounding population. So many characters look suspiciously like Peter Jackson with slight variations in beard, wig, or voice that the film begins to feel like one man arguing with himself across New Zealand. From a strict continuity standpoint, it is not impressive. I noticed missing details, shifting visual elements, and the usual evidence of a production held together with stubborn improvisation. But Jackson was operating under absurd constraints, including the small matter of having to act in multiple roles while also making the movie.

    And that is why Bad Taste matters.

    Not because it is a great film on its own terms. It is not. The writing is thin, the world-building is nonexistent, and much of the humor depends on the audience finding sheer excess funny. But the movie proves that Jackson had the one quality no school can really teach: full commitment. He shot the thing over four years, beginning with a self-financed budget of 25,000 New Zealand dollars before receiving further support from the New Zealand Film Commission to complete it. He had no film-school polish because he had never gone to film school at all. He left school young (age 16), taught himself by doing, and turned this movie into his education.

    In that sense, Bad Taste was his film school. Cheaper, too. The only thing he really missed were the writing classes.

    I made Oh, No! Zombies!!! the summer before my senior year of college and used its music for my final project. My presentation got honors largely because the professors laughed constantly while I explained how the movie had been made and how all the pieces fit together. I had been inspired by Ed Wood and by the worst zombie films I could find. What inspired Jackson here is harder to pin down. Bad Taste does not feel fully enough formed to be parody, and it is too odd to read as straightforward homage. It feels instead like a prototype for the grotesque brilliance he would later achieve in Dead Alive/Braindead: the early, unstable version of a sensibility not yet fully invented.

    I tried to watch Bad Taste when I was a junior in college and gave up. At that age, time felt too valuable to spend on something this ragged. I should have stuck with it. Watching it now is a little like seeing an early bicycle built by the Wright Brothers and asking why it does not fly. Of course it does not fly—that was never the point. The point is that it moves at all, that someone figured out how to make it work, and that they carried it across the finish line. Bad Taste is that kind of movie: less impressive for what it achieves on screen than for the fact that it exists, undeniable ragged—but overall complete.. Most movies, even now, never get that far.

    4/10

  • Away We Go (2009) Review – A-Z “Hidden Gems” Film-a-thon Day 2

    Day 2: My A Movie

    I went through my giant 4,600-movie watchlist trying to find this week’s pick. I found three strong contenders: Atom Egoyan’s Ararat, one of the few narrative features about the Armenian Genocide ever to get any real attention; Sam Mendes’s Away We Go; and John Huston’s 1982 version of Annie. Ararat felt too heavy for the moment, and Away We Go seemed slight enough to ease into. My partner suggested the 1999 made-for-TV Annie with Kathy Bates, which is probably the “good” movie version anyway: closer to the Broadway tone, and without Carol Burnett seeming determined to prove how drunk a person can act on camera.

    Since I had just watched a kids’ movie, 8-Bit Christmas, I decided to keep things relatively light. Better, I thought, to start with lighthearted fare than go straight to the Armenian Genocide. So, away we go to…

    Away We Go (2009)

    The theater where I used to work played Away We Go during my time there, which meant that for a few weeks I saw the end of it over and over while cleaning during the closing credits. The song over those credits, “Orange Sky” by Alexi Murdoch, is by far the best thing about the movie. It is so good, in fact, that I can almost imagine Sam Mendes hearing it and deciding he needed to build a film around the feeling it gave him.

    That may sound flippant, but it gets at the problem. Away We Go feels less like a movie with something urgent to say than a movie assembled around a mood. Mendes, working from a script by Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida, seems to want to make a lightweight road movie about an expectant couple drifting through America in search of home. There is nothing wrong with that in theory. In fact, it sounds promising: a small, funny, observant movie about adulthood, parenthood, and the panic of trying to build a life before the baby arrives.

    For a while, it almost works.

    Burt and Veronica, played by John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph, learn that Burt’s parents are moving to Belgium just when the couple had apparently assumed they would have family nearby for support. That premise is good enough to launch a movie. The trouble is that the script never quite makes the couple’s situation cohere. Did they move to Denver specifically to be near his parents? Were they already there? Was the pregnancy planned, half-planned, or an accident they are calmly absorbing? The movie wants the looseness of real life, where people do not always explain themselves in neat dramatic terms, but it never finds the confidence to make that vagueness meaningful. Instead, it often just feels underwritten.

    That becomes clearer as soon as the couple begins visiting the various people who are supposed to show them different models of adult life and parenthood. On paper, this is a strong structure. In practice, it produces a series of half-finished sketches. Catherine O’Hara and Jeff Daniels are amusing as Burt’s foolish, self-involved parents. Allison Janney, meanwhile, arrives like she has been dropped in from an entirely broader comedy. Her character Lily is one of the most obnoxious people I have seen in a movie in quite a while, which could have been funny if the film understood her as a grotesque. The problem is that it seems to want us to accept her as someone Veronica would plausibly choose to spend time with.

    That is where Away We Go repeatedly loses me. The script wants characters to have relationships because the scene needs those relationships to exist, not because the story has made them believable. Veronica laughs with Lily, chats with her, and appears to enjoy her company. Fine. But why? What is the shared history there? What quality in Lily once made her seem worth keeping around? The movie never shows us. It simply assumes that because these two women are in the same room, we will accept that they are old friends. I did not.

    The same problem applies elsewhere. Maggie Gyllenhaal’s LN is memorable, certainly, but she does not feel like a person so much as a satirical parenting exhibit. She breastfeeds older children, co-sleeps to an absurd degree, and generally behaves in a way that is plausible enough to be recognizable but so exaggerated that she stops being useful as observation. That is the movie in miniature: it wants the authority of realism and the comic payoff of caricature, and it keeps straining itself by trying to have both.

    The first half of the film, at least, has enough oddity and momentum to keep a person engaged. The second half simply runs out of gas. The later stops on the road trip blur together, and the movie begins introducing dramatic material so abruptly that it feels less like life unfolding than screenwriters throwing fresh obstacles onto the road. Burt’s brother suddenly appears with a devastating marital crisis, and instead of deepening the movie, it feels imported from another draft. I do not object because bad things are unrealistic. I object because the screenplay has not earned this degree of melodrama. A movie about ordinary, mildly confused people can absolutely contain pain, but it has to arise from the emotional world the movie has built. Here it feels like the film panicked when it realized it had very little left to say.

    That, more than anything, is the disappointment of Away We Go. It is filled with the appearance of insight. It has tasteful music, shaggy dialogue, quirky side characters, and the outline of a human-scale story. But it never cooks any of it through. It gestures toward conversational wisdom, emotional honesty, and slice-of-life ambiguity without ever turning those qualities into drama. By the last stretch, I was no longer annoyed so much as bored. The movie had spent so much time pretending to be observant that it forgot to actually observe.

    The final emotional turn is where Away We Go really loses me. Veronica reveals that she never wants to have a wedding ceremony because her parents died when she was in college, and she cannot bear the idea of getting married without them there. Fine. That is sad. It is also, at some point, something a partner is allowed to find exasperating. The movie even gives Burt a scene where he is allowed to raise his voice, but he goes through the motions about something comparatively inane, as if the script wants credit for letting him yell without making him confront the one thing actually worth yelling about. Why is he not allowed to say the obvious? If Veronica does not want to get married, then she should admit she does not want to get married, instead of hiding behind the fact that her parents will always be dead and therefore can never attend the wedding. Veronica herself says they do not fight enough. Exactly. Happy couples fight. They especially fight about things this unreasonable. The movie’s refusal to let that argument happen is one of its most infuriating evasions.

    I went in hoping that Dave Eggers’s involvement might lead to something sharp and emotionally cumulative, if not exactly heartbreaking. Instead, Away We Go feels half-raw: all premise, tone, and suggestion, with very little finished thought underneath. You can nibble at the crispy edges and survive. But as a meal, it is about as satisfying as reheated hamburger.

    4/10