Hollywood Shuffle

With the Academy Award nominations forthcoming, this Friday Five is devoted to stuff on your screens.

Beware the Listicle!

Steven Soderberg makes movies—pretty good ones. Some you’ve probably seen (Oceans 11, Erin Brockovich). Some you probably haven’t (Side Effects, And Everything Is Going Fine, Che). Since his big screen debut in 1989, he has pretty much made a movie every year—some years, he’s made several. A busy guy.

Steven Soderbergh

Not surprisingly, this impressive output requires a fair amount of input, which Soderbergh is kind enough to share. Every year on his website, Soderblog, he celebrates the new year by listing everything he’s seen and read, day-by-day, in the previous year. Perusing the 2023 list, the curious will find that he’s a fan of the Bravo reality series, Below Deck, as well as the novels of Chimamanda Ngozi Adicie. That he embraced the “How to…” genre, enjoying Sarah Bakewell’s How to Live: A Life of Montaigne along with the deadpan HBO reality series, How To with John Wilson. He watches oldies (the 1934 Robert Flaherty documentary, Man of Aran) and goodies (Sunset Boulevard). And “binges” on stuff that really catches his fancy (several books about Stanley Kubrick and The Shining)

Lists can be cool. Some of my friends take to Facebook every January 1st to catalog all the books they’ve read in the past year. Reading these and Soderbergh’s blog can seem a bit voyeuristic, but these are lists I can get behind. They are personal and idiosyncratic—a list of “I dids” rather than “you shoulds.”

By contrast, please release me from the lure of The Listicle, the clickbait phenomenon that has spread from its Buzzfeed origins to mainstream cultural journalism.

Every week or so, I get an email from the New York Times’s “Watching” newsletter that informs me of: “The 50 Best Movies on Netflix,” and “The 50 Great TV Shows on Netflix” and “The Best TV and Movies on Hulu” (there are 50), and “A Bunch of Great Movies on Amazon” (“a bunch” translates to around 50), AND “More Great Movies on Max” (yeah…about 50 “more”) AND “The 50 Best Things to Watch on Disney+ Right Now.”

Be Afraid. Be very afraid.

WHEW! Gee thanks, NYT. I’m on it! Two down and only 298 to go.

I suspect this is more a public service announcement than a display of critical acumen, a broad consumer guide offering a basic idea of what’s on and where. (“Here, peruse this list instead of aimlessly scrolling through the various streaming home screens for an hour.”)

So yes, it is nice to cruise through a dozen two-minute movie trailers. Or be reminded that you never did watch the final season of Saved By the Bell because you just couldn’t bear to see Mario Lopez flirt with another girl.

But what do you do if you want to find a piece of intelligent and creative storytelling. How do you get beyond the omnipresent marketing hype? Who do you trust for a solid recommendation on how to spend a couple precious hours? It’s a lot harder and more complicated than it used to be.

Does Whatever a Spider Can…

Ramonda, Mysterio, Dormammu, Sylvie Laufeydottir. When it comes to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, I’m afraid I don’t know my Asgard from a hole in the ground. If you’re like me, fret not. There are pleasures galore in Spider-man: Across the Spider-verse, a Marvel movie for the rest of us.

The story? Well, buckle up, friends. While blockbusters like the James Bond films spread their action sequences around the world, introducing each location with an aerial landscape and caption—”Cairo,” “London,” “Schenectedy”—the “Spider-verse” involves layovers in various universes, interconnected via “portals.” You know, real quantum mechanical stuff.

In these Spider-verses live several different, um, Spider-people: guy spiders, gal spiders, a heavy-metal spider, a Mumbai spider. They are all devoted to foiling “The Spot,” a scientist whose body was infused with portals after he got a little too close to a supercollider explosion. Bummer.

But not a bummer for folks who can feast on the movie’s off-the-hook animation. Forget the story and simply let it wash over you. This isn’t the elegant animated art of master’s such as Hayao Miyazaki. This is a frenzy of images and styles, visual speed-metal that shows you what all the animation tech wizards can do if they want to create something memorable. Inhale a sample here.

(Yes, we’ve come a long way from the “Spiderman” of my youth. Click on the screen above to reminisce. )

You Hurt My Feelings

Julia Louis-Dreyfus and writer-director Nicole Holofcener are a match made in heaven. Ten years ago, Louis-Dreyfus starred with James Gandolfini in the wonderful and knowing Enough Said, playing a massage therapist who is uncertain about the man she has just started dating. She tries to cajole essential info from his ex-wife, who happens to be one of her massage clients. As she hears more about him, she lingers on every peccadillo, obsesses about every quirk.

Tobias Menzies and Julia Louis-Dreyfus in You Hurt My Feelings.

There’s a similar crisis of confidence in You Hurt My Feelings, Holofcener’s latest. Here Louis-Dreyfuss plays a writer who has been happily married to a psychiatrist (Tobias Menzies) for 20-plus years. He enthusiastically supports her as she writes her new book, but two years into the project, she overhears him tell a friend that he just doesn’t like it that much. Cue the meltdown.

Of course, there ain’t no neurosis like a Julia Louis-Dreyfus neurosis. But with Holofcener, we’re no longer in the laugh-track territory of Seinfeld’s Elaine (not that there’s anything wrong with that!).

Here, the comedy is more Chekhov than Costanza. Holofcener has a light touch, but her characters are made of flesh and blood—and egos and insecurities—not merely punchline fodder. She throws (or gently nudges) all of them into minor crises of confidence. A married couple decides that four years of therapy hasn’t helped them, so they demand a refund from their psychiatrist. An actor loses a gig and needs his wife to assure him he’s not in the wrong profession. After years of telling their son that the play he’s writing is going to be absolutely great, he finally hands them a finished draft.

So the tension between loving support and brutal honesty plays itself out in a number of relationships. It ain’t always pretty, but it is wise and funny, a tender look at the complicated ways we humans need each other.

”Paging Doctor Frank”

Scott Frank

Scott Frank used to make up to $300,000 a week doing his “doctor work.” He doesn’t transplant hearts or remove brain tumors. He’s a doctor with “a very particular set of skills” (he didn’t write that Liam Neeson line but he could have). He’s a script doctor, the guy producers send in when a script needs…well, something: pumping up, calming down, zoning in. By one count, he’s “touched up” nearly 60 Hollywood scripts, including Saving Private Ryan, The Ring, and Gravity.

Clive Owen as Monsieur Spade.

For most of these projects, he is uncredited. For some, he’s right there on the IMDb page. He was the the sole writer-director of The Queen’s Gambit, the 2020 Netflix hit about a female chess phenomenon. He’s a credited writer on Minority Report, Marley & Me, and Get Shorty. Science fiction, canine tear-jerker, hard-boiled crime thriller: the guy has got some range.

Frank is the subject of a recent New Yorker profile by Patrick Radden Keefe that offers a fascinating peek inside the business and craft of Hollywood. It’s also a primer on good movie writing and a savvy catalog of the genre’s challenges. You’ll also read about Frank’s latest project, Monsieur Spade, a collaboration with Tom Fontana, one of the minds behind the HBO series, Oz, and Homicide: Life on the Street.

Mostly set in the 1960s, Monsieur Spade finds the hard-boiled Sam Spade (created by author Dashiell Hammett and made immortal by Humphrey Bogart) retired in the South of France. And wouldn’t you know there are bad guys there, too. Clive Owen is a huge fan of Bogart (watch his interview with Stephen Colbert), and he channels the Bogie spirit and rhythms graciously. Screenwriter Frank channels them as well. Monsieur Spade is full of film noir atmosphere and dialogue that will take you back to the golden days. It just began weekly episodes on AMC. I’m hooked already.

Mommy Dearest

Joséphine Sanz and Gabrielle Sanz in Petite Maman.

If your pre-Oscar viewing has kept you in the company of epic sagas, candy-colored homages, or hyperactive cartoons, take a deep breath and spend 75 minutes in the quiet company of Petite Maman, Céline Sciamma’s meditation on grief and motherhood.

Sciamma spins poetry from a simple premise. After her mother’s death, Marion (Nina Meurisse) and her family go to her childhood home, where her mother still lived. While her parents spend a few days sifting and packing her belongings, their daughter Nelly explores the surrounding woods and eventually meets another girl, Marion, who becomes her playmate. Nelly and Marion build a “fort” in the woods, they go to Marion’s house for snacks, and eventually the two spend the night with Marion’s family.

There’s a quiet magic in Petite Maman, the sort of filmmaking that finds richness in a simple premise and deepens it with every image and line of dialogue. As you might have guessed, there’s an otherworldly secret here, but it’s revealed in a series of moments that bring you gently into the movie’s world.

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The Friday Five will return in two weeks on February 2nd.