You there! Hello! It was the week Robert Eggers dropped the teaser trailer for his upcoming film, which at least on paper looks like the (filmmaker + subject) equivalent to (chocolate + peanut butter). It was the week a divisive Doctor Who season finale felt less-than-final, and left fans wondering Doctor What, Where, How and Why? And it was the week the much-vaunted long tail of the internet got suddenly shorter. Let's get to it.
Thank you, mood
During the taping of our discussion of the new film Kinds of Kindness for Pop Culture Happy Hour this week, NPR movie critic Bob Mondello said something I agreed with (I'm paraphrasing): The art you value most is that which takes you someplace you didn't expect to go.
For the record, Kinds of Kindness, from director Yorgos Lanthimos (Poor Things, The Favourite, The Lobster) takes you to that unexpected place, not once but three times (it's an anthology of three stories). The PCHH panel all had thoughts about how effectively it does that, but we agreed it dropped us off someplace very different than where it picked us up.
But it wasn't lost on me that, for that very reason, Kinds of Kindness is one weird movie to release in the summer. It's a lot of things that one doesn't associate with summertime, when the livin' is, famously, historically, easy: It's weird, bleak, dark, long, difficult, scathing and, often hilariously, cruel. That's why I'm calling it the summer movie for all of us who hate summer.
Jesse Plemons in Kinds of Kindness Atsushi Nishijima/Searchlight Pictures
Think about it: This weekend, you could be watching a movie that was explicitly made for the summer – Inside Out 2, say, or A Quiet Place 3or Bad Boys 4, movies that exist to take you to a place you know you've been before, and are only too entirely happy to return to, thank you very much. And you could theoretically nip out to pee, only to mistakenly wander back into Kinds of Kindness, just as Emma Stone is [redacted] through her [redacted] with a [redacted]. What a time to be alive!
The more years I spend as a professional critic, the more often I find myself worrying that experiencing so many films, shows, books and games leads me to overvalue novelty and difficulty in what I'm watching, reading and playing. Something I've never seen before in all my decades of consuming and discussing culture, something that upsets me, that hits too close to home – there's an electric charge to it, an intensity. It lingers in the body, and in the memory, much longer than something that seeks only to go down easy, checking dutiful boxes all the way, without leaving a trace.
It matters, because unlike most of the other people who'll be consuming any given piece of culture, I don't decide when and how I'll consume it. It's my job. If a movie or TV show is coming out, and I have access to a press screener, I watch it. (The decision I do make comes later, in collaboration with my editors and producers – whether or not to write or record a podcast about it.)
But it's never really about what mood I happen to find myself in. For everyone else who might consume that same piece of culture, however, mood is the single determining, or at least overriding, factor in what gets watched, and how they react to it.
It's been a long day, and you're tired. Do you want to watch something that sets out to disquiet you by remorselessly interrogating dearly held assumptions about your place in the moral universe? Or would you rather just see if this or that Housewife has gotten the apology she's been waiting for? Nameless, inchoate, existential dread, or a lipsync for your life? A shattering drama that might hold a dark mirror up to your relationship and place your marriage in jeopardy, or Double Jeopardy? The role that mood and choice play in what people consume, and how they receive it, is something that critics like me can too easily undervalue or even dismiss.
And look, I get it. Given the array of comforting options available to everyone, I find it tremendously heartening that a film like Kinds of Kindness has any audience at all, much less an audience willing to join me in parsing and puzzling over the scene where Jesse Plemons full-on [redacted] his [redacted] so he can try to [redacted] Emma Stone.
Of course, as in pretty much everything you care to name, it's not and has never been a question of either/or, but of balance. Who says you have to choose? Especially now, when there's room in everyone's cultural diet for both monster movies, and for scabrous, scathing satires of unexamined lives – for both A Quiet Place 3, and for quiet desperation.
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We Recommend
The AMC series Interview with the Vampire is wrapping up its second season, and was just renewed for a third. If you haven't checked it out yet, give it a shot. Be assured it makes big, sweeping changes to the Anne Rice book series – every one of them for the better, as far as I'm concerned. It's leaner, smarter, funnier, sexier and, somehow, even queerer. I'm particularly taken by the way the series employs dialogue. On so many other shows right now, characters are simply mouthpieces – they only speak to reveal absolutely every last damn thing they're thinking at that particular moment, or to thuddingly advance the plot. But IwtV's characters are all hiding their own agendas, so they don't just talk – they deploy language in a rich, multilayered way to test each other, tease each other and wound each other.
The director McG's film oevre doesn't often overlap with my personal-taste oeuvre, but I stumbled across his 2017 slasher-comedy The Babysitter on streaming recently and ate it up with a big ol' spoon. The plot? Kid has a hot babysitter who seems to really get him, but one night he eavesdrops on what happens after she sends him to bed and invites her hot friends over. Turns out? Things get bloody. The script is clever, the jokes are funny, and Samara Weaving plays the babysitter – she made this movie right before she made 2019's Ready or Not, another nasty little gem of a horror-comedy in which she shines.
Okay I'm recommending this next thing, but with an asterisk. Alice in Borderland is an ultraviolent Japanese thriller series about a bunch of people who find themselves in a mysteriously abandoned Tokyo; they're forced to play survival games based around a series of playing cards. The asterisk is to let y'all know that this show won't be for everyone – it features mass shootings, sadistic violence and heartbreaking deaths. Okay, now that I've winnowed out the "No, Thanks" folks, let me assure those of you who are still curious – it's compelling as hell. The two leads keep the stakes real and grounded, the whole playing-card mechanic is fascinating and satisfying, and there's this one dude who can make his face look so much like the manga character he's based on that you'll convince yourself he's a living deep-fake.
This has been a very dark and bloody newsletter, so let me switch things up by recommending something dark and cute-y. The game Hauntii is available for Steam, Xbox, Playstation and Nintendo. In it, you're a ghost who's tootling around Eternity, trying to ascend to a higher plane. To do so, you have to talk to folks, battle enemies, and solve puzzles – typical stuff. What sets it apart is your ability to haunt (read: inhabit, and take control over) various objects and characters. Also the look of this thing is bleakly gorgeous – its monochrome but beautifully stylized character art and backgrounds mean that even if you find yourself wandering aimlessly, as I did – a lot, a tremendous lot – there's always something cool to look at.
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And Linda wrote up season 3 of The Bear with all the insight you've come to expect from her. (I was fine with reading it before watching the season this weekend, because she points out themes and connections that will help me place the season in context. I didn't find it spoilery in the slightest, but the militant, I-wish-to-be-a-blank-slate spoilerphobes among you might want to hold off.)
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