[Hot Tea] February 21st - March 6th
Serving #13
Readers, March has certainly come in like a lion, with eight(!) newly streaming films or series for us to discuss this week — including two Best Picture Oscar nominees, a pair of Silicon Valley dramas, and a dark comedy about a teenager’s wait for the results from an STD test.
If the e-mail distribution cuts off this post, because there are a few longer takes here, be sure to click through to the full website to read the entire episode.
West Side Story (2021)
HBOMax / Disney+ - Drama / Musical - Love & Violence
Synopsis
The chemistry between a young Latina and the White boy she falls in love with catalyzes a late-in-the-day reckoning for two rival factions in a working class neighborhood in 1950s Manhattan.
My take
Much applause has already been given to Steven Spielberg’s latest “audacious” venture, a reïmagining of the film classic West Side Story (1961), originally directed by choreographer Jerome Robbins and filmmaker Robert Wise. Now a 10-time Oscar nominee across all types of category (e.g., acting, directing, costumes, picture), the new film seems to have captured the attention of at least the voting bodies, if not also the broader public, perhaps even despite the familiarity of its story. Potentially like the seemingly generationally refilmed A Star Is Born (1937, 1954, 1976, and 2018), this musical, itself a reïmagining of Shakespeare’s (1597) Romeo and Juliet, has perpetual appeal: After all, will audiences ever stop being interested in a love story about two fairly milquetoast (read: broadly relatable) young people who reject the disapproval, however fervent, of their surrounding society? Unlikely, especially when it involves dancing. However, I ask you, reader, even if audiences do never tire of that kind of love story, are we really supposed to be satisfied with this particular West Side Story? Is it a story that even makes sense, let alone remains exciting?
Where the original West Side Story (1961) was a groundbreaking film because of its departures from both cinematic and musical conventions (see Be Kind, Rewind’s intelligent video on the topic), the new film was supposed to be a modern rethinking of that classic story, one that introduced smart revisions to the original screenplay’s plot points in order to make more sense of the seemingly instantaneous young love that somehow, despite its acutely brief and transitory nature, can withstand — spoiler alert (but really, people, it’s been out for 60 years…) — even a brother’s murder to contemporary (especially American) audiences, as well as one that corrected some of the racial casting decisions that the original mistook. While the casting decisions mostly speak for themselves, Kushner’s screenplay on the other hand still leaves much to be desired on the sense-making front. Where was this presumed excusing of how fast and how hard Maria and Tony fall for each other? How is a modern audience supposed to understand how, if not why, Maria sustains that love for Tony after he murders her brother? Better, how is a modern audience supposed to believe that Anita doesn’t just take Maria away from all the literally fatal craziness of their soon-to-be-demolished neighborhood for the sake of their very lives, so that Maria can grow up and calm down safely? THAT extreme response would at least strike a note of recognition from any modern American audience I know. O, but, no, we’re supposed to somehow indirectly translate Bernardo’s “new” career as a boxer into the quasi-accepting tolerance Anita eventually shows for Maria’s “love” despite the outcome of the rumble? Please. I guess that I just expected way more from the writer of Lincoln (2012) and Angels in America (1992) — and honestly, readers, the problems only begin here.
Spielberg complicates the difficulties when he, in trying to “reïmagine” the story, makes fundamentally atonal choices about setting and blocking. Take “Something’s Coming,” Tony’s opening song and perhaps most important tone-setting number in the entire musical. In the original adaptation from the stage, Robbins and Wise intelligently use the in-universe external environment to expand and render palpable the realities of the song, in direct keeping with its melody and lyrics:
Around the corner / or whistling down the river /
Come on, deliver to me. […]
The air is humming /
and something great is coming.
Actor Richard Beymer is literally outside, gesturing to the billowing blouses on the clotheslines above, tasting the air around him on his outstretched and quivering fingertips, and actively looking past the corner (albeit out of frame) before him. All of those things are real to him, and so they’re real to us. The lyrics aren’t imaginary; they’re tangible. We feel them as he does, and it bottom-to-top makes sense. Spielberg, by contrast, confines Ansel Elgort inside, in the motionless dead air of a closed-door shop, whose only door he opens well after the line about the “air” is sung and only to then a moment later shutter it back even tighter, with a literal iron grate against the outside world. What?! I mean, what?!! How does that arrangement make any kind of sense with the explicit point of the song? Tony is literally proclaiming his openness, his eagerness for whatever is out there. To literally bar the door is fundamentally nonsensical. I can’t imagine what Spielberg was thinking — or maybe he just wasn’t, not enough at least.
At least choreographer Justin Peck gets it. In the six spaces allotted to him, he uses the bodies of the actors to carve out shapes and patterns of movement that not only visually appeal but moreover tell the fundamental story, in clever adaptations from the original choreography by Robbins. So successful is his work, that I found myself explicitly wishing by the time the song “America” came around that the movie were a ballet instead of a musical, for it was really only out of the hands of fragile dialogue and direction and in the throes of Peck’s choreography that the actors truly succeeded in telling their parts of the story.
Ariana deBose, now the presumed winner of this year’s Oscar for Best Supporting Actress after her wins at both the Golden Globe Awards and the Screen Actors’ Guild (SAG) Awards, is no exception. Her performance as Anita was not, to me, the universally praiseworthy tour de force that marketing and hype would have me believe. It did stand out from the rest, yes, but only sometimes, mostly while dancing. I don’t blame deBose herself altogether; she did seem to have a feel for the basic notes of the character. Whether that basic feel could have translated into a complete performance on the scale of her 1961 counterpart, deserving then Oscar winner Rita Moreno (for whom for nostalgia’s sake Kushner carved out a special role in this new adaptation), is however completely ambiguous: The awkward cuts and crops deBose has to endure leave her on screen in moments when she shouldn’t be and off screen in moments when she probably should be visible, to advance her part successfully in the narrative. Keeping her in frame while others sing and argue around her only adds insult to injury, when being on screen compels her to hold a smile or a single expression in order to not distract from the focal action. Static expressions belying her actual participation in that action dramatically undercut the believability of her entire performance. It’s not as if I believe that she doesn’t know how to be “on stage” during moments when the focus is on others; deBose is a professional and, with her theater background I’m sure, is even used to remaining in view at those “awkward” times. It’s more that I think her training here perversely fails her; she can’t vanish into the shadows of the set or dodge away artfully into the stillness or the background motion, because there are no shadows or stillness or background motion as there would be on an actual stage, when the camera refuses to look away and instead fills her across a third (or more!) of the frame. Ultimately her performance just doesn’t hold it together for me in crucial, fundamental ways — ways that, frankly, I wish I didn’t have to count.
After deBose, the rest of the cast also delivers mixed performances, none approaching her level of compelling at its peaks but some suffering the same “on screen” issues she did. Moreno, for example, advises charmingly, but is offered little room or direction to present a fully realized character, jumping into a scene as if an animatronic, triggered to function whenever Tony and the camera appear in need of help. Mike Faist delivers the second best performance in the film, but comes off more playground than battleground to me — even in his most aggressive dialogue. And Elgort and Zegler somehow make their fundamentally simple Tony and Maria even less memorable than I thought they could be.
The sets and costumes alone, beyond Peck’s choreography, are the only virtues here; and for me, readers, seeing brilliant costumes whirl expressively around beautiful sets is truly sadly not enough to keep me thinking well of this burned pancake of a modern movie musical.
Temperature check
Tepid
Drive My Car
HBOMax - Drama - Getting there
Synopsis
A respected dramatist processes his emotions through his work, directing and acting on the stage.
My take
Hidetoshi Nishijima delivers an astounding dramatic performance leading Ryusuke Hamaguchi and Takamasa Oe’s quietly transcendent Drive My Car (ドライブ・マイ・カー). An exploration of intimacy, connection, and confession, the film succeeds primarily by training its eyes carefully and firmly onto the nuances of character that unfold its story delicately, like a dried tea blossom slowly blooming in hot water. The essence of this blossom is the stuff of human relationships, including especially a person’s relationship with the self: savory sweet, solemn, and faintly bitter with the personal accretion of heavy compromises and unspoken apologies over years and years. It’s a rare varietal, readers, and one I loved sampling.
Masaki Okada and Park Yu-rim turn in strong supporting performances as younger actors in the in-film production of Chekov’s (1898) Uncle Vanya, the play that thematically and materially backgrounds the central drama. Hidetoshi Shinomiya’s cinematography and Azusa Yamazaki’s editing also deserve special mention for their skill in keeping steady the tone and feeling of this unique story.
I’d say more, readers, but honestly I’d rather you just go straight to the source yourself. The experience of this film, like any top-tier work, will be far better lived than described, however intelligent the descriptor.
Temperature check
Steaming
Three Months
Paramount+ - Comedy - Forced Introspection
Synopsis
A young man makes an unexpected connection while waiting for the final results from an HIV screening.
My take
As I learned in a recent episode of Bowen Yang and Matt Rogers’ podcast Las Culturistas, Three Months was a labor-of-love film that, like many of its kind, almost didn’t get made. With ten years between its genesis and its recent release on Paramount+, the film is something like the proverbial engine that could, if the train yard dealt in rainbow track and emotional drama instead of lumber and coal. Self-admittedly a cultural descendant of Diablo Cody’s uniquely stylized (2007) Juno, Three Months is the slightly better than made-for-TV rom-com gay teens didn’t know they were looking for.
Middling praise, I know, readers. However, I can’t bring myself to say nicer things about what is genuinely an interesting and potentially endearing story in synopsis. Though I really wanted to like it, I just didn’t — not when we have Juno and Weekend (Haigh, 2011) and Beautiful Thing (1996) and Paris 05:59: Théo & Hugo (Ducastel & Martineau, 2016), among many others I’m sure I’m neglecting to recall in this moment, already out there, ringing those same bells. Three Months just wasn’t special.
I suppose, upon reflection, a world in which a new movie in which a pop star plays a teenager exploring the spectrum of same-sex attraction under the auspices of his grandmother, played by an Oscar-winning actress, can be considered “run of the mill” is a world I’d much rather live in than never know. However, gratitude and appreciation are two different things; however grateful I may be that the gears of our society have produced a film I’m sure I would have loved to see as a teenager, I can’t as an adult today appreciate the work for being below the level I truly believe it could have hit.
For a piece of writing expressly Juno-like in intention, the screenplay just doesn’t buzz or kick the way that original does, and everything else about the film just kind of falls flat from there. Judy Greer, for example, is execrable as the shopkeeper having a mid-life crisis; I just didn’t believe her, not for second. And, as much as I admire Ellen Burstyn, even she couldn’t bring to incontestable life the formulaic words she committed to say. In a way, I’m not at all surprised that it was MTV’s production team that help hoist this film dream into reality; the final product bears the unmistakable impression of the half-effective teenaged stories I’ve seen there many a time before.
Ultimately, readers, like the blue Slushee in Juno, Three Months may have been an attractive prospect to someone at the start, but cannot really escape being an urn filler once actually ordered and ingested – which for no one, save perhaps the Slushee manufacturer, is anything pleasant.
Temperature check
Cold
The Dropout (Series Premiere)
Hulu - Drama - Historical Fiction / Biopic
Synopsis
Determined to become a self-made billionaire, a precocious young woman seeks a way to turn her ambitious ideas into realities as quickly as possible, despite adversity.
My take
Amanda Seyfried was right to take on this new project. Fresh off her first and only Oscar nomination for her supporting turn in Fincher’s (2020) Mank, an actress who has clearly worked hard for the recognition she has only recently begun to earn needs a meaty leading project, wherever she can find it, as soon as possible, to keep her fire burning and her recognition alive. There exists in the common culture at the moment no role meatier for an actress like Seyfriend than Elizabeth Holmes, the audacious and embarrassed former biotech. entrepreneuse who claimed to have invented a way to expedite blood testing, using per patient just a single drop of blood. Through Holmes, I knew before I even started Hulu’s new The Dropout, Seyfried could find her way to the next level.
“Could” is still the operant word I’d use, after watching the premiere three episodes of The Dropout. The show is clearly a vehicle for Seyfried, but the road it travels on is a rocky one. At times heavy handed and dangerously close to caricature, at others planar and smooth like Holmes’ imagined future, the show is almost a de rigueur freehand sketch of the life we all now feel we know from its descriptions in the press and in documentaries like HBOMax’s The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley (Gibney, 2019). At the highest point in the range of possible outcomes, it’s this theme of verisimilitude that the show embodies through and through, that will carry it and Seyfried toward an interesting exposition of the illusory nature of proclaimed “truths” in our modern society — at which point it really doesn’t matter, how off-kilter the depictions are from each other or from what actually transpired in the real events they dramatize. At the lowest point, The Dropout is a failed representational effort aimed at capitalizing on the popular downfall of an outrageously egotistic tech. billionaire, catharsis for the many who protest the lives and actions of the likes of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. By my reading, the proper estimate lies squarely in the middle, and The Dropout will attempt to do its best to use the capital of popular attention in order to disseminate a cautionary tale about the dangers of unbridled ambition without training, with Seyfried as its precarious centerpiece.
I’ll watch, but as we have come to of the real Holmes I won’t expect great things.
Temperature check
Tepid
Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber (Series Premiere)
Showtime - Drama - Historical Fiction / Biopic
Synopsis
A bull-headed entrepreneur wages battle after battle in the war to establish himself in the billionaires’ venture-capital landscape of Silicon Valley.
My take
It’s always a pleasure to watch Joseph Gordon-Levitt act. Ever since I saw him take his career from quaint mainstream comedy to provocative art house film, I’ve been a fan of the man for his willingness to “go there” — whether “there” be the satirical denim of a New Jersey playboy, the prosecutorial garb of a federal official, or the streamlined suits of a dream-walking agent. So, when I learned that his next venture would be into the shoes of the founder of Uber on Showtime, I was ready to add an entirely new streaming subscription to my line-up in order to make sure I had a front-row seat.
So far, readers, I’ve not been disappointed. In Super Pumped, a purposefully dialed-up chronicling of the founding, rise, and tumult of Uber, Gordon-Levitt gives us a carefully mal-adjusted philosophical descendent of his playboy from his own Don Jon (2013), only one whose primary object is here not one dime but ten billion instead. Is the performance career-defining or rife with intriguing complexity? No, but it doesn’t need to be — not for me, nor for perhaps anyone who sees the show for what it is in our current cultural landscape, which is mildly obsessed with recounting in dramatic fashion the tribulations of the recent past.
Perhaps when WeCrashed (Eisenberg & Crevello [creators], 2022) premieres, I’ll start to really tire of these cookie-cutter tech. shows about the slash-and-burn histories of recklessly ambitious “visionaries;” but until that feeling really strikes I’ll personally stick with this new show, for its humanizing glimpse behind the curtain of an otherwise well-documented corporate adolescence.
Emmy winner Kyle Chandler and Oscar nominee Elizabeth Shue support as Gordon-Levitt’s metaphorical and literal parents, respectively.
Temperature check
Tepid
Our Flag Means Death (Series Premiere)
HBOMax - Comedy - A Pirate’s Life So Twee
Synopsis
A foppish aristocrat swells the high seas with a rapscallion crew he means to improve.
My take
Do you like What We Do in the Shadows (Clement [creator], 2019)? Do you wish the same dynamics played out at sea? Would you prefer it if the comically out-of-touch nature of the central character were both based on a real historical figure and dialed up to an 9.5 on the flamboyance scale? Look no further, readers; Taika Waititi and co. give you the maritime form of “bandits under a faintly leader who studied at the Percy Blakeney school for frivolous gentlemen and graduated with honours,” Our Flag Means Death.
I was bored, readers, but will you be?
Temperature check
Cold
The Tourist
HBOMax - Action - Forget Me Shots
Synopsis
Following a mysteriously motivated car accident, a man suffering amnesia attempts to recollect his past.
My take
Late this past year it felt clear, Jamie Dornan truly hoped to elevate his career in Belfast, Kenneth Branagh’s treacly awkward retrospective on his own youth in which Dornan plays aegis and father to the young protagonist and the rest of his family. That paternal role was a meaty one — meaty enough — for Dornan and, in a Branagh film, was a good sight toward transforming the man whom The New York Times once capriciously called the “Golden Torso” (2006) into an internationally respected actor.
However, it feels clear now, sight looked a bit far in this case, and professional elevation hasn’t really happened for Dornan, despite award pundits’ grumblings that it might. The actor is still perhaps best known for inhabiting the light BDSM world of 50 Shades of Grey (Taylor-Johnson [dir.] & Marcel [wri.], 2015) and, well, not much else. Despite a face that has continuously made many a moviegoer and moviemaker swoon — including Sofia Coppola, whose categorically underrated (but still non-excellent) Marie Antoinette (2006) first featured the actor in a supporting role as an extramarital love interest for Kirsten Dunst — Dornan has really yet to prove that he can act beyond looking pretty. And, to be clear, it’s not that he’s ever been terrible on screen in my eyes— though, admittedly, I can’t speak to his entire oeuvre; rather, it’s more that he’s just been unremarkable, at least so far as I and other critics and awarding bodies other than the historically star-blinded Hollywood Foreign Press Association (i.e., the awarders of the Golden Globes) are concerned.
And, I’m not exactly sorry to say, The Tourist, Dornan’s latest serial adventure now streaming on HBOMax, changes nothing either. Playing the cultural child of Guy Pierce in Memento (Nolan, 2002) and Johnathon Schaech in Welcome to Woop Woop (Elliott [dir./wri.] & Thomas [wri.], 1997), Dornan surprises only in that he is slow to rely on his sexuality to establish his character. Indeed, despite being written on the page as a sort of rival blank-slate fantasy man to Alan Ritchson’s Jack Reacher (Reacher, 2022), Dornan’s character reads upfront far more like an everyday man in crisis, not so dissimilar in essence from Bill Murray’s Bob Harris from Coppola’s brilliant (2003) Lost in Translation, though — yes — far less captivating.
Luckily for Dornan and the rest of the cast and crew of The Tourist, Danielle MacDonald chimes in an anxiously upbeat counterperformance as the aspiring young detective / probationary constable who through charity and an ambition she’d be reluctant to acknowledge takes on Dornan’s character’s unusual case and generally relieves the show of being otherwise monotonously languid. No Country for Old Men (Coen & Coen, 2007), a staple Western action film that more than capably rides the line between shoot-out and still, this is definitely not.
My advice, readers: Unless you have a tumor-sized hankering for a handsome amnesiac putting the pieces together à la a rustic and ignoble detective, save yourself the screen time.
Temperature check
Cold
Free Guy
HBOMax - Comedy - Escape the Machine
Synopsis
A non-playable character (NPC) in a massive multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) experiences an existential crisis triggered by an infatuation with a human player.
My take
Cultural descendant of Wreck-It Ralph (Moore [dir./wri.], Lee, Johnston, & Reardon [wri.], 2012), The Matrix (Wachowski & Wachowski, 1999), and most essentially Ready Player One (Spielberg [dir.], Cline, & Penn [wri.], 2018), Free Guy is definitely the Ryan Reynolds’ version of a “hidden talents” fable about the dangers of blind conformity. Reynolds’ character, the literally dubbed “Guy,” is the least dazzling, set-dressing excuse for a bank teller in a first-person shooter video game that you could imagine, but nevertheless regularly and calmly ponders his life’s big questions while conforming with the gun-backed demands of the game’s human player robbers.
This often ironic description of Free Guy should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with Reynolds, who has essentially made a career out of comically anti-hero-ing otherwise stock stories about male power in our superhero-insatiable common culture. Though of course he has dipped his toes into more reservedly dramatic waters (e.g., playing opposite Helen Mirren in the underregarded WWII-retrospective legal drama Woman in Gold; Curtis [dir.] & Kaye Campbell [wri.], 2015), no one really wants to see him there when he or she could have another Deadpool (Miller [dir.], Reese, & Wernick [wri.], 2016) or Pokémon: Detective Pikachu (Letterman [dir./wri.], Samit, Hernández, & Connolly, 2019). Acerbic witticisms delivered smirkingly from within attractive costumes — spandex or Pokémon — are, undoubtedly, the man’s public calling.
Free Guy is happily no exception from that history. Poking fun at and with “male” obsessions with power and violence in a way that smacks of “Bo Peep knows karate,” Reynolds and the rest of the cast paint an enjoyably kooky canvas — whose special effect overlays are in many ways the biggest stars of the show.
Indeed, wit and stunts aside, Free Guy could actually be a compelling sci-fi film, courtesy largely of its unique and careful visual effects. Sensitive renderings of digital on top of real photography are responsible for correctly calibrating the entire setting of the story, and succeed so well that I only passingly attended to them outside their occasional importance within the narrative. I agree with the Visual Effects branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences here, regardless of whatever the Visual Effects Society (VES) says: The effects are some of the best of this past year.
All in all, readers, I was entertained — not riveted, not amazed, but entertained.
Temperature check
Tepid
Retrospective
I think that, if you’ve gotten this far in this episode — by far my longest to date — readers, you might just be hankering for that retrospective I probably more often tease than actually offer, because of the length of the rest of the serving. So, I’ll do this: promise you a keen-eyed look to the past for our next meeting and, for now, once again encourage you to go watch Drive My Car.
Happy brewing!
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