"Accomplishments"
In theaters: I don't know very much about Anthony Bourdain, but it wasn't required to enjoy Tony, which I facetiously called The Holdovers II: Cape Cod Vacation. a coming of age story that tracks a pretentious young man's summertime web of lies to the man he will eventually become when he stops pretending. Matt Johnson (and Dominic Sessa might as well be a younger Matt here) doesn't make his biopics feel like biopics and that's why I appreciate them. You can easily forget this is about a future celebrity chef and enjoy it as a dramedy about a total screw-up digging himself into a hole, claiming to be a writer even as he secretly falls in love with cooking, dishonestly pursuing a girl (Emilia Jones is just gorgeous in this), all set to a great score and soundtrack. If you DO know a bit about Bourdain, you might know him as a no-BS media personality who wears his opinions on his sleeve, and that enhances the film some, because it makes a promise about this lead who is ALL BS. Getting from A to Z is a hard road with many missteps, and you can't BS your way there.
In I Saw the TV Glow, director Jane Schoenbrun created an impressive amount of lore about a television show that never existed. In Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, the same is done with a slasher film franchise, once again putting a nice fandom to work as a "closet" for her main character who, though openly queer, is nevertheless timid about sex. So while Schoenbrun is here again interested in transformation, it's not as coded with trans identity (despite the heroine remaking a horror franchised steeped in transphobia) as it is the female orgasm. The absurdist monster is called Little Death and when it comes, well... Camp Miasma explores the thrill of the slasher genre. When you watch (and presumably, enjoy) one, do you fantasize yourself as one of the promiscuous victims, as the lucky/unlucky last girl, or as the killer itself? Perhaps different characters depending on the moment? This is the transformation at the heart of Camp Miasma's existential metatext. Fascination with film translated into an obsession with both the first film's star, exuberantly played by Gillian Anderson, and with movie snacks which play a ridiculously large role in the film. But as with TV Glow, that's just one of the codes to be deciphered, and the opening alone will merit freeze framing once the film is out on Mubi and elsewhere. And it's funny, too, with lots of references for slasher mega-fans to pick up on (my own percentage is probably middling, if better than average).
At home: An anxiety casserole sure to give me nightmares, The Bear is about a struggling Chicago eatery willed to a top chef after his brother's mysterious suicide. His attempt at making changes and turning The Beef into The Bear is initially met with resistance and lots of screaming, though some will be inspired, too. Grief and repression are the order of the day; explosions are always imminent. If working in a kitchen is stressful, then the show definitely captures that feeling, and that of "smoke breaks" where time slows down and the dialogue feels improvised to the point of mumblecore (that's my heaviest criticism, I'm otherwise really into it). Season 1 has everything falling apart, and Season 2 has the crew rebuilding the restaurant as high-end joint, with tight deadlines keeping us in a manic state. By this point, big name guest stars are dropping in to play previously mentioned family members, and the show has perfected the art of the food montage (of the montage, point blank), with episode 1 of the third season being JUST montage as we settle into getting the restaurant afloat after opening. I'm already halfway through, but the pace is furious and I'm keeping up with it, so I'll let you know how the back half goes.
I love space program stuff and Proxima actually films in a European Space Agency training center and in Star City, rather than spring for sets and special effects. Eva Green is a French astronaut who gets her first shot at space as a last-minute replacement, something she's wanted all her life. The only hiccup is her young daughter, who feels abandoned as her mother embarks on the last few weeks of training before a year-long mission. Obviously dedicated to all the mothers who had to do the same in various space programs, but it's a more universal story about any parent who had to leave a child behind to do something worthwhile, whether it's something prestigious like (I'm sure) making movies, or very much more down-to-earth like going to another country/region to send money back home. Director Alice Winocour explores the difficulty of "cutting the cord" with as much procedural detail as she does the space training, and makes us wonder if Green will make it up to the International Space Station after all, or choose to remain in a closer orbit.
The alternate version of the 1964 Democratic Party primary in The Best Man plays like it's the actual election because whoever wins is sure to become president. Maybe the Republicans are in total disarray, but it doesn't matter, because one of the candidates is a Red Scare con man who definitely uses the conservative playbook. Cliff Robertson's Joe Cantwell is indeed heralded as a "conservative" within the party, and loses the outgoing POTUS's favor when he starts bribing and extorting delegates and other candidates to secure the nomination. Up against him is Henry Fonda, a compassionate progressive called William Russell (funny, in '64, I thought he was playing a companion in Doctor Who). If the political satire carries on to today, it's that he really is a progressive in the modern sense and Cantwell is the establishment neo-liberal choice, i.e. right of center. An early quote bandied about questions the wisdom of the electorate in preferring a stupid person in a leadership position over a smart one, and those chickens have definitely come home to roost since. As the convention ramps up, Russell will have to decide whether corruption is a necessary evil in politics, and whether he can hold his moral center and still become president. I like his solution. Bantery in a West Wing kind of way - a possible/probable inspiration for Aaron Sorkin's hit show - The Best Man keeps a good case and its politics haven't aged very much.
A definite outlier in David Lynch's filmography, I guess he was passionate about the true story behind The Straight Story. And while he's often explored rurality, and even in this film sometimes makes you think things might go in a strange direction (the lady who kills deer, for example), he's never made something as positive and wholesome as this. Richard Farnsworth is beautiful as an elderly man who insists on mending fences with his estranged brother and so drives his lawnmower hundreds of miles to visit him, in a picaresque where various meetings slowly unfold his story and teach us about the important of family (insert Fast & Furious joke here). It could so easily have turned out cheesy, but Lynch rather achieves sincerity, and turns his ability to create mystery away from plot ambiguity and towards things simply left unsaid, but understandable by all, as that last scene entirely encapsulates.
There's no film about suicide like Abbas Kiarostami's Taste of Cherry. Stark in its approach, it follows a man looking for someone to bury him in the hole he dug for himself, hoping someone will be desperate enough to accept money for it. We don't find out why he would want to do this, and we hope that he'll find something to live for through his conversations with people who are certainly less well off than he is. And we keep asking "is this it? this argument, this image from nature, this reaction?", a participation from which we are only released at the end in an astounding way. Up until that moment, everything seemed deathly realistic, with no "movie" explanations. A man committed and resigned does not offer them. The finale, which is very Kiarostami so not an absolute shock if you've seen a few of his films (though, 'til then, it simply evoked Where Is the Friend's House's naturalism, what with its zigzagging road), is a big question mark leaving the audience to decide just what happened and in doing so, perhaps finding their own reason to keep going in the face of adversity.
STOP. TOUCHING. THE ICE CREAM. WITH YOUR HANDS! Sure, there's some goofy gore in 1995's Ice Cream Man, but the health code violations are more upsetting than the slasher murders. Definitely part of the "who is this FOR?!" cinematic universe, it's shot like a kids' movie, an overblown Goosebumps episode, with bike-riding friends with silly nicknames (including one called Tuna they badly padded to be "the fat kid") who act as the only line of defense against a brain-damaged ice cream man - played by Clint Howard basically doing the "dim" from that one episode of Deep Space Nine which came out earlier the same year - who kills people and perhaps even kids. And even if it has that silly kids' direct-to-video vibe, there are still beheadings and sexual content. Annoyingly, the most straightforward kill shot is on a character that didn't deserve it, just after withholding one for the one you've been rooting to die since his first scene. We might also ask what actors like Olivia Hussey, David Warner and Jan-Michael "Airwolf" Vincent are doing in this (the later seems so bored as one of the cops, it turns into an extended bit where he walks away from a crowd of violent lunatics very, very slowly - it's the best part by far). The director also dragged in baseball player Steve Garvey and The People's Court's Doug Llewelyn (with a relevant gag). But gosh, it's a mess, and while we hoot and holler at al the good "bad parts", it's really mostly boring and badly acted. But still apparently a million percent better than 2026's unrelated film (but there was sequel bait RIGHT THERE, Eli Roth!).
A cheapie but an amusing cheapie that knows its Shakespeare, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Undead drops new vampire lore on us, establishing that the historical Hamlet was a vampire who managed to free himself from the curse and his best vampire bud Horatio puts on a version of the play periodically make more vampire and feed, attracting Hamlet back to the theater in a cycle of bloodshed. Jake Hoffman plays loser hired to direct the play, unknowingly putting his best friend and his ex (Devon Aoki) at risk, unless a secret society can help them avoid their fates. Ralph Macchio and Jeremy Sisto are also in this in comedy roles. Replete with lines from Shakespeare repurposed for other scenes, and full of Bardic jokes, R&G Are Undead is a goofy affair, but pretty entertaining and interesting twists. I'm not a big vampire fan, but we can agree that, at least, it's better than if it were about zombies.
One Film for Every Year Since Film Existed[1993] The Joy Luck Club: Wayne Wang's most well-known film about the Asian-American experience, The Joy Luck Club explores the gap between mothers born in China and daughters born in America, creating a multi-generational tapestry that can also look further back or forward. I'm not big on narration, and the novel's adaptation has a lot of it, but as each new voice came into focus and lending is important access to the characters' interiority, I ended up forgiving the device, and the often theatrical dialogue. Because despite the artificiality, it still a heart wrecker. I don't mind telling you there was a lot of sobbing to be had. China is presented as a place where girls and women are culturally disposable, and the mothers in the story are desperate to make their daughters know they're not, but will the sins of the culture be somehow transferred to the younger generation anyway? And is China all that different from other places, once your remove the cultural accoutrements? Or are such mother-daughter dynamics universal in the context of the 20th century's variable emancipation of women? Powerful, intimate and touching.
[1994] Bullets Over Broadway: Woody Allen's satire of theater people stars John Cusack as a playwright with artistic ambitions in the 1920s who is emasculated at every turn by his collaborators who mean to change his play for their own ends and ultimately silence him. It's a relatable part of "being an artist" since this is a declaration more than a job you can apply for and definitely get. So how do you know if you really are one? Cusack is surrounded by zanies, i.e. a hugely entertaining and recognizable cast that includes Dianne Wiest as the vampish Nora Desmond type star, Jennifer Tilly is the terrible and delightfully dumb actress foisted on him by his financier, Chazz Palminteri as the money's hired gun who might be a better writer than him, and in smaller, eccentric parts, everyone from Tracey Ullman to Jim Broadbent to Rob Reiner. We see the play evolve along with the writing process, the relationships and the production realities, from a pretentious intellectualism to an emotional truth, until it's no longer the playwright's work. But then, theater (like film) is a collaborative work and it's perhaps silly to give the director (or in theater, the writer) all the credit. I don't know what Allen thinks of his own thesis here (if you're chugging through the problematic director's oeuvre, be sure to finish your drink when adultery saves a relationship), but one wonders whether the actors were as free as their onscreen counterparts, or if this takedown of actorly demands kept them in their place.
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