B.J. Novak Makes His Long-Awaited Debut Film, Weekly Reel #25
Novak’s "Vengeance" is in theaters, Tarantino talks "Dark Star" in his inaugural podcast, a couple Frenchies, a David Lean classic, and del Toro continues to disappoint
News of the Week: after deciding to write an article on the James Bond film franchise, it quickly turned out to be a larger project than anticipated. It’ll now be a multi-part series, roughly corresponding to the eras of the longest-tenured Bonds, which I hope to deliver the first piece of shortly. Make sure to subscribe so you don’t miss those posts or share this post if you’re already subscribed!
Watch Now (Pick of the Week)
Vengeance was an idea conceived in 2015 by The Office wunderkind, B.J. “temp turned prodigy turned temp” Novak. After years of researching the premise of a blue-state podcaster experiencing a red state, Novak finally found funding and began production in 2020. This is a very film-of-its-time film: red state v. blue state, random hookups v. family, new media consumption, competing narratives and conspiracy theories. Nonetheless, the film feels like it’s of another era. It’s not a superhero franchise, there’s no toy company IP, only the ambitions of a talented writer. Novak directed, wrote, and starred as a Brooklyn Millennial working as the staff writer for The New Yorker, who attends the funeral of a girl he hooked up with a few times. The girl’s brother, Ty Shaw (Boyd Holbrook), lassoed him in out of guilt, who floats the idea that they should avenge her death; Novak, who’s looking for his magnum opus, great American story for a Serial-like podcast, plays along and records everything. The story follows many of the big city kid finding himself in the rural town clichés, learning lessons along the way, but with Novak’s distinctive dark humor, elevates the bored, revelatory tropes of cattle-noir mysteries and makes it relevant for right now (or maybe five years ago): the social media, post-Trump age.
The hiccups in the film come from the weightiness of a long-time writer finally directing. Whereas Tarantino is an actor’s writer-director and PTA is a director’s writer-director, Novak is a writer’s writer-director. Novak had a story that he had to tell; it was merely convenient that he could also direct, which felt secondary to the script. The story is a summing up, from a subjective (coastal elitist) point of view, of what national events appear to reveal about others, which is just a form of projection. Novak riffs on the Americana version of Plato’s cave, giving us the kind of film that confronts the platitudes of power that are normally the confronters behind the scenes. He bends the stereotypes of each side until reaching the point of bouncing back, which when it comes back around makes us all feel a little more naked. A rare glimpse for a film in our saturated age of escapist IPs in media empires, This American Life, and pre-Civil War narrative America. Focus Features released Vengeance in theaters on July 29.
Save for Later
Dark Star (1974) is the first film discussed on Quentin Tarantino’s new podcast with Roger Avary, co-writers of Reservoir Dogs, True Romance, and Pulp Fiction, called, The Video Archives Podcast. Dark Star was the USC student film of John Carpenter, who added an extra forty-five minutes or so to make it a full feature. Dan O’Bannon (future writer of Alien and Total Recall) co-writes, edits, acts in, and does the production design and special effects. Basically, Dark Star is the hippy parody of 2001, but also adds a lot of new tropes to the genre that then influenced many future science-fiction films—notably Star Wars and Galaxy Quest. The film is about a four-man crew, with long hair and beards, on the Dark Star ship, which is on an intergalactic quest to blow up planets that they think will get in the way of their space colonialization efforts. It’s a B-film in all the best ways, clearly showing that Carpenter and crew stretched the sixty-thousand dollar budget—an impressively low amount for the amount of special effects and production design—allllllllll the way. They have fun with the alien monster concept, the sound design—done with just voices?—and the malaise inflicted upon any young crew stuck in cramped quarters for years without a leader. I don’t want to reveal any of the gags, which are hilarious. The film is streaming, for free, on most of the ad-supported streamers (Roku Channel, Tubi, Plex, etc.). And don’t forget to also listen to the podcast episode!
Summer Hours by Olivier Assayas is the kind of film we can all relate to: childhood memories slipping away with the loss of parents or grandparents and the house—or estate—that built those memories. Three siblings, including Assayas’s GOAT regular, Juliette Binoche, must decide what to do with their inherited French estate, which includes priceless museum pieces and the works of a popular great-Uncle artist, after their mother dies. Since two of them live outside of Europe, they cast the majority vote to sell and donate everything. As is usual for an Assayas film, and the reason I find his storytelling mesmerizing and more interesting than contemporary filmmakers, he builds a train of dialogue that covers different terrains of intersections to explore ideas through a kind of Socratic (okay that might be going too far) dialogue; for instance, this film deals with inheritance, artistic relevance, private v. public objects, childhood (avec parents), and adulthood (sans parents). For Assayas, conversations about art are always connected to the lives of those making its arguments and practicing it.
One of his early indie hits, Irma Vep (1996), explored this topic so much so that Assayas remade the story into an HBO Max miniseries that just released its final episode this week. (A triple-feature review of the film, mini-series, and original French film, Les Vampires, is forthcoming in a standalone post). Once Assayas was able to throw off the baggage of his pre-Irma Vep, La Nouvelle Vague inspired youth romps, he hit this unique cinematic stride that has continued ever since. Summer Hours is available to stream, for free, on both Kanopy and Tubi—though I highly recommend avoiding Tubi because of its awful ad placements.
The Confession is an adaptation of the memoir of Czechoslovak communist Artur London, who Soviet advisers put on a show trial in 1952 while he was deputy minister of foreign affairs. Directed by Costa-Gavras, the film deals with the for some reason little-explored political prisoner subject with an editing style that disorients time and space as much as the solitary confinement of London. Without explanation, the secret police force arrests London and he spends two years languishing through sleep and nutrient depravation, only receiving them once signing a “confession,” something the inquisitor had written. His confessions, along with the other prisoners, are no truer than an actor reciting his character’s lines. All this time, the Soviet advisors are building a treason case against the entire Czechoslovak high command. Most receive the death penalty, the others, like London, receive life in prison. But the authorities released London three years later because of the death of Stalin and Beria, which exposed the inquisitors political, rather than criminal, motivations. After years of political rehabilitation, London and his family move to France, where he wrote his autobiographical account of the Prague trials. Along with Z, Costa-Gavras proves his expertise in commanding a politically-themed film without reverting to lame anticommunist or antifascist tropes. Like Orwell, his narratives are against totalitarianism and authoritarianism in general, not communism or imperialism in particular. The Confession is available to stream, for free, on Kanopy.
Brief Encounter is an early David Lean film based on a one-act play by Noël Coward. Popular for its use of an imaginary confession voice-over, Brief Encounter is about a married woman having a brief affair with a married man. Almost a pre-In the Mood for Love, Lean explores the intricacies of a middle-class, extra-marital affair in a non-judgmental way, where requited cheating is appropriate when done for the ideals of romance against the condition of family-building. Although the story strongly favors the former, it doesn’t belittle the role of family that modern films tend to disparage—at least on the side of the married women, since we never see the married man’s family. The strength of the story is in its narration, which film study courses still use as a voice-over standard. Lean is now mostly known for his epics, The Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago; but with Brief Encounter, he shows that something as small as brief encounters at the railway station (back when that was a thing) can have epic emotions. That, although looked down upon and hidden from gossip, hopeless romantics can have their moments.
Pass
Cronos, yet another Guillermo del Toro film to leave me disappointed. Gott sei Dank that it was fifty-eight minutes shorter than Nightmare Alley. The film’s premise offers a promising story: a religious antique dealer comes across a 450-year-old device that gives you immortal life in exchange for vampiric qualities. But like del Toro’s other magical realism-infused horror flicks, Cronos fails in delivering the imaginatory value that magical realism readily produces because of its reliance on a horror framework that isn’t scary—the worst of both worlds, in other words. He tries to mix disparate elements of religion, vampires, immortality, and Egyptian artifacts, which play a game of three-card Monte until your legs start to cramp. The film was even confused with its choice in language. Ron Perlman, the only non-native Spanish actor, switches between both languages rather than settling. His co-stars understand the English, I think, but respond in Spanish. Presumably, del Toro was looking to enter the international market with this debut film. But he did so by clumsily borrowing from Latin American narrative traditions until eschewing those for conventional American film genres infused with his own elements of horror. Although he did well in camouflaging these lackluster genre-interpretive gestures in critical hits like Pan’s Labyrinth and The Shape of Water, Cronos displays these deficiencies in full-focus. The word itself, cronos, is of confused origins that mythmakers of each era re-interpret. Del Toro gives us his interpretation, which doesn’t clarify to any better.
Thank you once again for checking out my Substack. Hit the like button and use the share button to share this across social media. And don’t forget to subscribe if you haven’t already done so.