MOVIE DIARY 2023: RETIREMENT MADE YOU SOFT.
Hello! Today’s post is a special one as we’ve got our first new special guest writer since 2018 on the blog! My old friend Dav Yendler is making his MOVIE DIARY 2023 debut, and I’m absolutely pumped about it. Dav is a great artist and a tremendous performer, and he hosts a monthly showcase called Show And Tell, where he features artists showing off their latest works. It’s a grab bag of art, film, poetry, music, dance— anything creative, and an all around good time. This month’s Show And Tell is happening this Sunday, March 12th at the Permanent Records Roadhouse in Los Angeles, so get over there if you can. Get inspired, man, check out some beautiful art and performances, get fired up and make something yourself and then talk to Dav about signing up to perform at the next Show and Tell. That’s how this all works, baby.
Osmosis Jones (2001) - dir. Bobby Farrelly, Peter Farrelly, Tom Sito, Piet Kroon
SPECIAL GUEST WRITER: DAV YENDLER
Osmosis Jones is a good animated movie and a bad live action one. Frank (played by live action Bill Murray) is a gross hedonist zookeeper trying to be a good father to his daughter Shane, who, bless her, is just trying to get dad to eat carrots. They’re both rocked by the off-screen death of Shane’s mom and it’s implied that Frank’s terrible eating is a symptom of his grief. Maybe this woulda been more interesting if the connection were explicit! All the eating felt weird otherwise!
Under Bill Murray’s perpetually greasy skin lives the massive bio-city of Frank, population: 78,899,293,934,872,302,829,287,438. This animated city, teeming with microbial life, is protected by an intrepid police force of white blood cells, a.k.a. “Immunity”. One white blood cell cop, a down-on-his-luck Osmosis Jones (Chris Rock’s first animated role), tries to foil a terrible plot by rogue virus Thrax (Laurence Fishburn, hot and nasty) to kill Frank in 48 hours.
This movie inside of Frank rules. All the character and environment designs are rounded and bubbly, popping with organic energy. The city-as-body analog just works: Frank’s stomach is the city airport. His nerves are the power lines. Frank’s love handles are the city’s #1 growing community. Hair cells have recently been laid off from the scalp. Through it all, the corrupt neuron and Mayor of Frank (a drippy William Shatner) is just trying to get re-elected. He dismisses Osmosis Jones’s concerns about Frank’s health and commands Frank to swallow a cold pill. Enter Drix (David Hyde Pierce, hilarious), Osmosis Jones’s reluctant partner.
The rest plays out in the most boilerplate 90’s buddy cop way, and it’s great. Osmosis and Drix tool around the City of Frank looking for Thrax. They muscle their informants, visit (and make a mess of) The Zit, the hottest new club on Frank’s forehead, and eventually save the day.
Unfortunately it all gets bogged down by live action sequences (directed by the Farrelly Brothers oy vey). The movie’s animation had been finished way before they were able to secure a live action star and director, and this development hell shows. When The Zit pops, it pops in real life all over Molly Shannon’s mouth (who does the best she can, love you Molly). It’s unredeemably gross.
There are so many interesting and weird parts to this hybrid film! Maybe it woulda been better if the Farrellys had understood the assignment, e.g. carry the animation. Instead we get a ton of good ideas that are smothered by gross Bill Murray. Watch if you can, ignore the live action parts, and stay for the animated puns (“Peace in the Middle Ear!”).
Dav Yendler (he/him) is an illustrator and organizer in Los Angeles. You can see his work online at www.davyendler.com and on IG: @davyendler. Stop by Show and Tell, his regular variety show, on March 12 at Permanent Records Roadhouse!
All Quiet on the Western Front (2022) - dir. Edward Berger
I imagine that if you are the type of person who can roll with two and a half hours of “war is hell”-core cinema, then this absolutely works. I am sometimes that person. On a craft level, this movie is pretty impressive and innovative. However, besides new ways of turning a shooting location into a genuine hellscape, none of this is new. Despite all that, I still found a lot of it impactful, if a little bit of an easy feat of emotional manipulation.
We’re faced constantly with the seemingly cyclical nature of war, never-ending. After a horrifying opening sequence of a man named Hienrich running into machine gun fire and watching his friends die, we then meet our boys, Paul, Albert, Ludwig, and Franz. Boys with high spirits, eager to join the war effort and prove themselves as men. When they’re issued their uniforms, Paul finds that his still has the name Hienrich stitched into it. Paul and the rest of his group have signed themselves up to die out there like Hienrich, far away from their homes and everything they’ve ever known. The boys will not be back in town.
After the brief introduction to our German boys, the rest of the movie piles on the brutality, driving home the idea that no matter what these boys do, they will die and it will be cruel and it will be senseless. We see it all and it’s all bad. Mortars, machine guns, mustard gas, snipers, mud, dirt, infections, shitty food, no food, they’re surrounded by danger and death, and the meaninglessness of it all very quickly begins to take its toll on them. There’s some genuinely nightmarish imagery in this movie. The one that sticks with me is when we see them encounter enemy tanks for the first time, and as we see these machines plowing through soldiers and running over trenches, we find the German soldiers being unable to do anything but scream in terror before the enemy foot soldiers come in to finish them off with flamethrowers.
Every scene works to make you feel like no one should be out there on these battlefields. We spend time with these soldiers and see how war breaks them down to the point where some of them cannot even dream of a world where they’re not in the army. We see most of this movie through Paul’s eyes, and it’s a tough experience to spend this violent wartime watching the light in his eyes fade to emptiness over the course of the movie. The scene where he’s stuck in a dirty mud pit is an awful turning point for him. The French army is marching past, and Paul’s hiding in this mud pit after he’s stabbed an enemy soldier to death. But it’s a slow death, and Paul is trapped there while he waits for the French army to pass, forced to listen to this man gurgling for breath through lungs full of blood. Paul tries to turn away, but now what he sees is no longer an enemy French soldier, but simply another man, just like him. Paul tries frantically to show compassion, desperately trying to stop the man’s bleeding, and we get the sense that this was something deeper than killing a soldier. To Paul it was also a struggle to save himself and his sense of compassion from the toll of a life in war. In fact any time we see any of the enemy combatants up close, we see that they too are just unfortunate men who've found themselves in the middle of a battlefield just trying to survive.
Maybe the biggest threat to these soldiers is one they don’t even see on the battlefield— their commanding officers and politicians who are advocating for the war to continue despite not having any real skin in the game. They’ve survived lesser battles a lifetime ago and they only hope to reclaim the long past feelings of pride and victory for themselves, under the guise of wanting to glorify the Fatherland. Daniel Brühl (popular cinema’s current go-to German) is the lone counterpoint to all that violent patriotism as his Erzberger is the only politician who is pushing for a ceasefire while negotiations for Germany’s surrender are happening. Erzberger might be the only hero in this movie, and it’s both moving and upsetting watching his mission to end the war as quickly as possible despite the calls for Germany to hold out on the negotiations so that they might end their war with honor. “Honor? My son died in the war, and he doesn’t feel any honor!” Erzberger is the only one of these men away from the front line who understands that honor won’t bring back the millions who died during the war.
I don’t know, I’m not sure I really know how to write about my experience with war movies as someone who primarily sends emails and blogs. I typically feel like they all kind of work similarly. War is hell, then we must figure out whether it is noble despite it being hell. What I liked about All Quiet on the Western Front is that it is firmly in the camp of “War is hell, and there’s nothing noble about it. And fuck you for even asking that.”
Creed III (2023) - dir. Michael B. Jordan
SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS
It doesn’t really take a lot to make these Creed movies passable, but I think that Creed III is kind of just that. It’s mostly just bare minimum sports movie stuff, which is fine with almost any other movie, but I think Creed (2015) set the bar pretty high and the following sequels just haven’t been able to reach that height.
Creed III isn’t all bad, it’s just a little light. The stuff with Donnie’s mom all feels a little bit forced, and then when we come to her death at the top of the third act, it doesn’t really seem to have that much impact on Donnie’s actions. All of that wouldn’t really be too big of a deal, but the big problem is that the boxing portion of the movie isn’t enough to compensate for the other shortcomings. Michael B. Jordan puts in some neat touches and there are some moments of visual flair to it that I really liked (I’m thinking particularly of Felix’s introduction in his fight against Dame, and the locked-in psychic dreamscape that takes place in the middle of the final fight between Donnie and Dame), but there could have been more boxing overall, and the big training montage, which is usually a highlight of all of these movies, is kind of tame.
It makes kind of the same mistake that I thought Creed II (2018) fell into, which is that the villain’s story is so much more interesting than Donnie’s. Most of the movie is spent with Donnie navigating post-retirement life in the boxing world, which is sort of interesting, but it’s a lot of navel-gazing. Just like in Creed II we again find Donnie at a crossroads, trying to find a reason to keep fighting. Donnie’s story is absolutely not where the action is. We’re supposed to see Donnie’s plot as the emotional core of this movie, watching his relationships with his wife and his daughter and his mother come under strain with the introduction of this figure from his past, but it’s just not as hard hitting as Dame’s story.
The real excitement and heart of this movie is with Jonathan Majors as Donnie’s old friend and current rival Dame. Jonathan Majors is incredible. The man’s got it. He’s a star. The scenes with Dame are the best. His mere presence is the engine that drives this movie to the point where even when he’s not around, the idea of him colors a lot of what Donnie is doing. Majors plays Dame with such pain and vulnerability and hurt. There’s this one scene where he and Donnie are hanging out after dinner at Donnie’s mansion, and Dame good naturedly asks him if he remembers the bed bugs back in the group home they used to live in together. Donnie says he tries to forget that, and Dame gets quiet and sort of laughs it off, but the hurt behind his eyes is there. You can see that he was bringing it up to try to connect with the Donnie he once knew, and when Donnie tells him that he’s forgotten that, you can see it cuts Dame so deeply. Dame is a raw nerve and his anger at the world is ready to spill over at any moment, and you’re left holding your breath, bracing yourself for what he’s about to do, but at the same time you feel for this man who’s been left behind and who’s now trying to get back what he feels he deserves. He’s a true underdog in this story, and years of Rocky and Creed movies have taught us that you gotta root for the underdog.
The Cathedral (2021) - dir. Ricky D’Ambrose
SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS
I was really into this! The Cathedral is a meditative movie that shows a lot of effective restraint and a deep interest in a very specific time. It’s a semi-autobiographical film about writer/director/editor Ricky D’Ambrose and his family in Long Island (here depicted as Jesse and the Damrosch/Orkin families). I was really impressed by how well-remembered and how real all of this felt. It’s very interesting to see a movie about growing up in the 90s and early 00s by someone around my age and seeing common visual and historical touchstones. The historical moments are recognizable, coming in the form of old commercials, news reports on the World Trade Center bombing, Bill Clinton’s state of the union speech, a morning news broadcast happening hours before the first plane hit the north tower on 9/11 playing in the background of Jesse getting ready for school. They give us little benchmarks for where we are in time and are a nice look at how a young person of that time like Jesse would remember these big events (ie, via TV noise). There were these moments of real recognition for the aesthetics of that time period that I found sort of refreshing because I think that we are currently in a moment where we are seeing a romanticized look back at 90s/00s aesthetics, especially in fashion. That always just feels a little bit off or misremembered, and it makes me feel crazy sometimes, like “am I the one not remembering what things looked like in 2001?” The specificity of everything from the clothes to the furniture to the suburban restaurant food felt very authentic and affirming to me.
The Cathedral is driven largely by the family drama, and I thought it was handled in a very interesting way. The drama and conflicts between family members exist on the periphery of Jesse’s memory, and rarely is Jesse ever seen at the center of these conflicts. Most of the context of what we see of the family conflicts is introduced by narration, and given the fact that we learn that Jesse later takes an interest in film at age 13 and starts obsessively recording footage of old family photos and heirlooms, I think what we are seeing in The Cathedral is a composite of what Jesse can piece together from the bits and pieces that he’s learned about his family history from the 80s through ~2005ish. I think I’m mostly so moved by it because I don’t think I have that ability to remember much of my family drama from when I was growing up. I’m not going to get into all of my own hangups on my fucking movie blog (if I did I’d paywall it lol), but I am impressed by what D’Ambrose is doing with The Cathedral because it demonstrates a both a deep fascination with his family’s history and his willingness to make himself vulnerable to his audience. I’ve been thinking a lot about semi-autobiographical movies this past year, I guess mostly because of movies like The Fabelmans (2022) (weird movie, we can talk about it on the Discord sometime if you want) and Armageddon Time (2022) (had it’s problems, but I liked it) being such a big part of online film discourse. I think The Cathedral should absolutely be included in the conversation about great semi-autobiographical films.
Links
Here’s former MOVIE DIARY 2018 special guest Fran Hoepfner in THE NEW YORK TIMES on Jacqueline Holland’s The God of Endings. Is one person enough for me to claim a MOVIE DIARY 2018 to NYT pipeline? I say yes.
And here’s Fran again with the latest FRAN MAGAZINE on Operation Fortune: Ruse DeGuerre (2023). FRAN MAGAZINE is absolutely my favorite newsletter out there, so please help support Fran and FRAN MAGAZINE with a paid subscription!
Friend of MOVIE DIARY 2023 Zach Fleming is a producer on the upcoming movie Sleep Training! Contribute some tax deductible funds and read more about it here.
I somehow just saw this video of Snoop on Celebrity Wheel of Fortune and I’ve been repeating “AIRPORT TEACHER” in my head over and over for the past week.
Did you know that New Order once rewrote the lyrics to “Blue Monday” to be about Sunkist?
I worked just the right amount of time on this shitpost about All Quiet on the Western Front (2022) so you must look at it.