One of the reasons I feel like “film criticism as Consumer Reports” (assign a grade, watch/don’t watch) is an extremely limited approach is that a good/bad binary doesn’t really account for the wildly divergent tastes among readers. Think of people in your own life and think if there’s a single movie that every one of them would enjoy. Now try doing that for a faceless mass of readers, and saying, “This is good, you should see it,” seems presumptive and misleading.
My personal stance is that people should watch as many movies as possible. One of the key advantages of a movie is that even if you hate it, there’s a set time limit (although truly terrible movies have the ability to make time feel like it’s slowing down). I also feel like even bad movies typically have something to teach us, and that cinema only aimed for crowd-pleasing fare would be fairly limited and ultimately uninteresting (and also unsustainable, as the recent bust of the superhero genre has shown). So when people ask me, “What should I go see?” and my answer is, “Anything you think looks interesting,” I know that can be seen as unhelpful, but it’s really what I believe. I feel like good recommendations push you a little further as opposed to algorithmic recommendations, which simply observe what you like and attempt to give you more of the same.
This leads me to Sasquatch Sunset, the new movie by the Zellner Brothers (Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter), which almost seems designed to get unsuspecting patrons to walk out of the theater. The film is about a year in the life of four Sasquatches. Two of the Sasquatches are played by Jesse Eisenberg and Riley Keough. An unsuspecting filmgoer may think, “Oh, I liked Eisenberg in The Social Network, I liked Keough in Mad Max: Fury Road, and I like Harry and the Hendersons. This sounds like a movie for me.” They’ll buy a ticket, sit down, and proceed to watch a film with no dialogue, the actors completely covered in Sasquatch makeup, and pretty much every bodily fluid spew forth from the Sasquatches in addition to quite a few Sasquatch erections. To say that Sasquatch Sunset might have some difficulty at the box office would be an understatement.
And yet here’s the thing: I think Sasquatch Sunset is a good movie. It didn’t blow me away, and I can’t imagine rewatching it, but I think for all of its gross-out factor, the Zellners are telling a poignant story about the loss of the natural world with the challenge of accepting that the natural world isn’t always pretty vistas and majestic beasts. Sometimes it’s about a fully erect Sasquatch trying to put his penis through anything that has a hole in it.
The Zellners could have simply made a nature documentary if they wanted to capture wild animals being wild, but that would undermine the film’s thesis about human intrusion into wild spaces. So the movie, rather than making the wild come to the civilized, makes the civilized go to the wild, which means having actors dress up as mythical beasts and behave in a way that’s both physically gross yet emotionally resonant. The larger point the Zellners are making is that it’s easy to care for the world at its most photogenic. Will you still care if it features gross, fictional creatures losing their home? And if the answer is “Yes,” (and I believe the film absolutely gets to the affirmative), then you have to ask yourself, “Why do you care less about real creatures if they’re not always aesthetically pleasing?”
That’s the film’s odd beauty, and yet to get there, you have to see a movie where Sasquatches angrily defecate and urinate in the middle of a road. I can’t help but wonder about the moviegoer, munching on their popcorn, wondering when the funny guy from Zombieland is going to crack wise, and seeing this instead despite there being no bait-and-switch. Sasquatch Sunset is purposefully challenging its audience, and I wonder these days how many people want to go to the movies to be challenged since life is hard enough as it is.
And yet even in the face of such a challenge, I’d say that we don’t run away from everything that’s difficult. We don’t have a diet solely of candy, and we don’t spend our days lying in bed. We know that discomfort can be fulfilling in its own way, and if there’s a ground on which to recommend Sasquatch Sunset, it’s that not all movies are meant to be soothing, passive experiences. Art should never be limited to simply what is pleasing; sometimes it needs to be something else even if it’s not for everyone.
Sasquatch Sunset is now playing in limited release. It opens in Atlanta on Friday.
Recommendations
This is a good “follow the money” story. I’m still not exactly sure what problem A.I. is supposed to solve, or how it’s supposed to make life easier. In his latest, Dave Karpf notes that A.I. agents—essentially digital butlers who do all the tedious work you don’t want to do like setting up parties for your kid—could be a solution except there’s no money in it. The larger problem we’ve hit with A.I. as technology is that even if it’s useful (and there’s still not a lot of evidence that it is!), the people funding it expect some kind of massive return on their investment, and there’s not a lot of money in a bot helping you set up your kid’s birthday party.
Building off my Sasquatch Sunset comments, if you do want to see the world looking pristine and gorgeous, then you should probably pick up the 4K set of Planet Earth II and Blue Planet II for $24 from Amazon. At the very least it will give your 4K television a workout.
Note: I earn a small percentage of sales made through my Amazon Associates link.
What I’m Watching
Last night I saw The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, or as it’s easier to describe, Guy Ritchie’s Inglourious Basterds. Ritchie takes the same kind of violent World War II, Nazi-killing escapades peppered with spaghetti western influences, but doesn’t have Quentin Tarantino’s interest or patience in anything outside the violence (for example, like Shosanna (Mélanie Laurent) in Inglourious Basterds, Ungentlemanly has a Jewish woman posing as a gentile to get close to Nazis so she can kill them, but with none of the suspense or tension that Tarantino imbues his movie with from its opening scene). That doesn’t mean Ungentlemanly is a bad movie; on the contrary, I quite enjoyed it, especially Alan Ritchson as a burly Dane who kills countless Nazis by shooting them with arrows. But the film does invite a comparison to one of Tarantino’s best movies, so you have to always keep in mind that Ritchie only wants to take the fun bits. Thankfully, that still makes for an enjoyable romp.
In the past two weeks, I’ve seen some stuff on YouTube that had me howling with laughter. The first is Conan O’Brien on the season finale of Hot Ones. Conan’s comic genius is on full display here as he clearly went in with a plan that not only boosts what he’s plugging (his new travelogue show on Max, Conan O’Brien Must Go), but his brilliant construction of a comic arc within the short span of the common Hot Ones framework of questions while eating spicy wings. To say that Conan “went for it” would be an understatement, and I love his commitment here, especially when you consider that he’s been doing comedy his entire professional life, and could easily just phone it in (I also love his dig at Leno by referring to him as “the other guy.”)
While I feel that SNL is largely more miss than hit, they had a good episode with a game Ryan Gosling this past weekend. While the Beavis and Butt-Head and Papyrus 2 sketches were quite good and got the attention they deserved, my wife and I thought this country song parody about getting a guy back was the best sketch of the night:
What I’m Reading
I recently read The Norse Myths: A Guide to the Gods and Heroes by Carolyn Larrington as well as Gilgamesh: A Verse Narrative by Herbert Mason since I wanted to escape into some ancient stories. I appreciated The Norse Myths more as a God of War fan since I could see how the game’s writers were inspired by the myths and where they decided to make some changes for the story they were telling. As for Gilgamesh, it’s a lovely telling of one our oldest stories that emphasizes its themes of death, grief, and wisdom.
I am now returning to the present day by reading Doppelgänger: A Trip into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein. As someone who has repeatedly asked himself over the years, “Which is the Naomi that wrote The Shock Doctrine, and which is the one who’s the loon?” this seems like not only a useful book, but one that feels incredibly relevant to the divisions in our personal and national psyches (for those wondering, Klein wrote The Shock Doctrine, and Naomi Wolf is the loon).
In other reads:
Wife Sentences by Moira Donegan [Bookforum] - Donegan has a fairly eviscerating takedown of Lisa Selin Davis’ new nonfiction book, Housewife: Why Women Still Do It All and What to Do Instead. More than just a review of Davis’ book, Donegan cuts to the heart of the “Tradwife” movement by noting that it’s not advocating for the freedom to be a homemaker, but instead arguing that this is an inspirational and somehow empowering endeavor while ignoring both its dependency and insularity. Moreover, such an embrace ultimately reeks of capitulation as if men cannot be expected to share household labor. I’m not going to bother with Davis’ book, but you should always read Donegan.
A.I. Made These Movies Sharper. Critics Say It Ruined Them. by Calum Marsh [The New York Times] - I haven’t watched the recent 4K releases of True Lies, Aliens, and The Abyss (although interestingly, this article only uses screen captures from True Lies despite all three James Cameron movies being released on 4K at the same time and going through the same remastering process), but I feel like if these come out regrettable, then I can still kind of hang with them in a way that I find is more difficult for the Special Editions of Star Wars. Narratively, they’re still the same movies, and it’s Cameron’s prerogative on how he wants them to look. That may not be as good as the movies we remember (of course, for purity, you might have to go back to an actual film print projected on a big screen), but they are his movies for better or worse. To say they’ve been “ruined” feels a bit hyperbolic, but this article does get to some interesting questions about the restoration/remastering process.
Only Norm Macdonald Gave O.J. Simpson What He Deserved by Kaleb Horton [GQ] - It was kind of astounding last week to watch major media outlets peddle tepid O.J. Simpson obituaries by leading with his football accomplishments rather than his notorious trial. There are plenty of incredible football players! There’s only one whose trial was a media circus that highlighted numerous divisions in the American psyche. As the brilliant documentary O.J. Made in America (available on ESPN+) shows, O.J. basically discarded his race until it became a useful tool against the racist LAPD as if Simpson were no different than Rodney King. What made Macdonald’s mockery so good is that it cut straight through the BS to hammer home that Simpson obviously killed Nicole Brown and Ronald Goldman, and no amount of legal jiu-jitsu would change that fact.
What I’m Hearing
If Books Could Kill released the second part of their dissection of Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature, and as the hosts note, there’s a thriving industry of pseudo-intellectuals willing to stake out a centrist position regardless of how untenable such a position may be. Pinker’s argument in this book seems to be, bizarrely, that things are so much better than they used to be that we should reconsider any pushes for improvements in society. For example, the book argues that since rape has drastically decreased and been criminalized in the course of human history, aren’t we going a little too far with college campus security? That’s kind of a nutty position to hold as if rape declining overall is cause to shrug it off on colleges.
What I’m Playing
I’m reaching the endgame of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. It’s an odd place to be because it’s the kind of game where if I tell myself, “Okay, I’ll play for just an hour,” I find myself still at it two hours later. And yet I think I’ve also started to burn out on it a bit because there’s been so much to do. But when the story works, it absolutely works, and it’s not a game I can simply dismiss as “disappointing” or “bloated.” Anyway, I think I should be done with it by next week, and I can’t complain about a game that’s kept me occupied for over six weeks. That’s money well spent.