MOVIE DIARY 2023: ANYTHING WORTH KNOWING ABOUT ME YOU CAN LEARN FROM LETTING ME MAKE LOVE TO YOU.
Once again this week, we are back at it! I’ve brought in two more pals of mine to join us: former MOVIE DIARY 2018 special guest Tony Wilson, and podcaster/amateur baseball pitcher Dan Gagliardi, and they’ve come through with some genuine heaters!
Rounders (1998) - dir. John Dahl
SPECIAL GUEST WRITER: TONY WILSON
Now here’s a movie that was made to be watched over two viewing sessions with commercial breaks! The more commercials the better. Sure, they’ll add another 30 minutes to an already too-long 2h1m runtime, but I wouldn’t have it any other way. Watching a movie like Rounders on PlutoTV is an act of transcendent self-immolation. Leave your body, ascend to a higher plane, confront the ultimate truth:
This movie is a stinky dinky! Pee-yew!
But it maybe stinks like one of your own farts, one that you feel like you could simmer in it awhile, even if it might kill you. A real hot tub of a fart.
What’s Rounders about? Can someone tell me? Don’t actually tell me, Geoff invited me here, so sit down and listen to me complain or he’ll be upset. Here’s what Rounders is about. Matt Damon (Matt Damon) and Worm (Ed Norton) traverse the New York City underworld gambling scene, inadvertently revealing to the audience how corny and lame it all is!
Is this movie trying to be subversive? Since gambling is typically portrayed in cinema as illicit and sexy and cool? The closest Rounders comes to making the gambling life seem exciting is when a vampy Famke Jannsen shows up at Matt Damon’s apartment and throws a free open-mouth kiss at him, and he responds (in body language at least) “No thanks, I’m a virgin twice over, my heart belongs to numbers, plus I have to get up early in the morning!” No one is getting laid, and no one is getting their ass kicked either, even when a couple characters get their asses kicked. Ed Norton gets punched in the nose by a bookie who looks like he only collects debts in order to buy rare Counting Crows pressings. His name is Grama, and it’s pronounced “Grandma”. I am not threatened! I am cozy! I’m simmering in the stink!
It takes until the second night of watching and like six commercial breaks in to get to the point of the movie: Worm gets into some bad debt and Matt Damon has to sacrifice his cartoonish nag of a girlfriend, passive aggressive law school colleagues, and damn near everything (no just those two things), in order to bail out his buddy out over a series of astoundingly tedious poker montages. Tension? Danger? Stakes? No thanks! Give me brightly lit rooms and math!
I’m basing this off of nothing, but I imagine that anyone who is into Rounders (and I hear they’re out there!) are also into fantasy sports. Do you like statistics? How about technicalities? I can’t even think of a third thing, I think that’s really just it. They should have dressed Matt Damon in an NFL jersey with Bicycle playing cards logos on it.
All the personality in Rounders hinges on John Malkovich as a Russian (?) mobster (?) named Teddy “KGB”. The movie really can’t decide whether he’s supposed to be threatening, or if his ludicrous moose-and-squirrel Russian accent is meant to make him the comedic relief. It’s really like the only direction he was given was “go so annoyingly affected with it that some dumb dipshit on the internet 25 years later will be bent out of shape about whether he’s allowed to enjoy it.” Who cares! While playing poker, he houses Oreos in a way that reminds me of any character in an early 2000s Guy Ritchie knockoff movie. It sucks.
I’ve always wondered what was up with the title. Rounders? It sounds like a fetish you find out about after spending too much time on the internet. Stuffers. Feeders. Rounders. Would this movie have been better if it was about stickman Ed Norton filling Matt Damon to the limit with chocolate pudding, bloating him like a Violet Beauregarde stretched to the limit with brown sludge? Sure, yeah, I don’t care. It can even still be about gambling—imagine him getting rolled into John Malkovich’s chinatown gambling hall gurgling and spewing pressurized streams of Snack Pack as he goes. There’s all the sex and violence the movie needs.
I had fun watching Rounders, six out of five stars.
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Tony is Geoff's friend.
Hellraiser (2022) - dir. David Bruckner
SPECIAL GUEST WRITER: DAN GAGLIARDI
Sometimes, on some barely incorporated scrap of land as foreign to me as another dimension, a small zap of electricity passes through a server farm, through a particular node, in a particular way. When it does, I’m forced to solve a puzzle before Google will show me my search results for “can sitting too much make you dizzy.” For reasons which I’ll die without understanding, I’m often made to complete several of these puzzles in a row. In these moments, the dissociative spell of modern life pauses, that I may agonize over the banality of the exercise and consider how much of my life is spent earning a computer’s trust.
These processes are dramatized in 2022's Hellraiser reboot, a movie which accurately describes the banality and cruelty of contemporary life. The demonic puzzle box now requires solving six different configurations, and even that is no longer enough to summon the cenobites: you must now also engage in two-factor authentication, drawing blood with a blade that pops out of the puzzle. I can’t recommend Hellraiser (2022) for its entertainment value. But as an allegory for late-stage capitalism and neoliberalism (colloquial) and the current state of the internet, though? Uh, yeah, I’m thinking it kind of works as that.
Criminal lack of Butterball notwithstanding, the reboot is largely faithful to Clive Barker’s original. Both films tell the story of sex freaks who play themselves. Both describe the perils of following compulsions to their extremes. But they differ drastically in their relationships to sexuality. To its credit, the reboot isn’t content to be an homage to the 1987 original, rehashing its exploration of hypersexuality. Instead, in Hellraiser (2022), sexuality is in various moments an abstraction, an aesthetic, and an afterthought, e.g. the cenobites themselves, specifically the Priest (nee Pinhead). The character has been gender-swapped and redesigned so that it is now more aesthetically pleasant (kinda smooth and glowy and white with blue undertones, like an Alexa or a frozen yogurt shop). But it looks less human, and the costume design is less indebted to BDSM culture (at least in this pervert’s opinion), swapping 1987 Pinhead’s strappy black leather ensemble for something more “Bodies Exhibit,” where skin and muscle are carefully flayed into something as constructed as a garment. She is effectively naked from the waist up, but also stripped of an element that gives the cenobites their sexual subtext. It is striking, though, and it speaks to the current phase of internet life, which is so much performing beauty and sexuality, in a way that is primarily aesthetic. It’s hard (for me at least!) not to be reminded of facetune filters, which give us that modern cenobite sheen and smoothness.
I’d also argue protagonist Riley’s arc is, to a degree, the story of someone becoming increasingly online in a doom-left way. The cold open shows antagonist Roland Voight, a billionaire of no particular industry, luring a sex worker named Joey to his death by having him play with the puzzlebox until knifed. This reveals the puzzle’s other new feature: getting knifed induces a psychotropic effect on the victim. Sound and vision get fuzzy, and the room feels like it’s spinning. It’s hard not to think of the seemingly endless real-world wealthy sex criminals who do approximately this, and in particular Ed Buck, who did exactly this. And there are multiple instances of Riley passing through a physical threshold to reach the next step in her rabbit-hole journey: first with a finger as she presses a key-button recessed in a face of the puzzle box, then again later as she breaks into Voight’s mansion through a Death-Star-exhaust-port-style hole in the complicated iron lattice cage encasing Voight’s mansion.
The cage speaks to the thing about this movie that makes it extremely tedious AND ring deeply true: this movie loves making rules. They’re the kind we generally associate with neoliberalism - rules determined by inscrutable, convoluted logic, designed to mete out seemingly random violence to those on the margins. There’s the technocracy of the puzzlebox having, again, six configurations. This seems unbearable even for the Priest (who I’ll remind you likes pain!), as at one point she gets impatient with Riley’s refusal to use the puzzle and just goes ahead and advances it to its next configuration through telekinesis. Then there’s the happenstance which marks multiple characters for death, be it Riley’s brother accidentally cutting himself while trying to provide first aid to his pill-addled sister, or Voight’s former assistant Menaker accidentally cutting herself on the puzzle during an unintentionally funny tug-of-war for the box at Menaker’s assisted living facility.
We also learn that not only does the cage around Voight’s mansion contains esoteric magic that cancels out cenobites magic (??? Fine!), but the cenobites themselves are not immune to being sacrificed to the puzzle. Driving the rules-forward storytelling are the cenobites, who I’d spend so much of their time explaining rules to various characters and then negotiating their terms. At one point the Priest veers hard into customer service-speak as Voight listens to her explain Leviathan’s return policy on the monkey’s paw-style “gifts” given to those who solve all six configurations: “Gifts cannot be ungiven, only exchanges can be made.” Store credit! In this moment, Voight the billionaire sadist is all of us who’ve at one point complained to a DoorDash customer service rep that they forgot the drink.
We are also given such a vivid window into Voight’s suffering, perhaps more so than any other character (save a minor character who has the honor of having the “explorers in the further regions of experience” schpiel delivered to her). Leviathan has inserted into Voight’s chest a gigantic mechanism which twists his raw nerves around gears at just such a rate that he never numbs to the pain. Voight’s plotline also bookends the film, which concludes with a sequence where he is in…let’s call it “mean heaven”...strapped to a crucifix, being flayed and transformed into a cenobite. And actually, if this framing is a sort of meta criticism of the means by which American media conditions the public to identify with people in power, it’s a fairly decent one.
It is hard to tell how much of this is deliberate and how much is just reality seeping in. The film is staunchly anti-subtext - when Riley rejects the gifts of the cenobites, the Priest warns that she will be left “Knowing everything you've done, everyone you've hurt and lost…You chose to live, to carry that weight, bitter and brief,” a very-special-episode beat dressed in prestige that feels like it’s becoming increasingly common. Writers Ben Collins and Luke Pitrowski’s previous feature The Night House was also criticized for getting bogged down in convoluted rules systems. But intentional or incidental, the boredom and horror of being alive right now is on full display in Hellraiser (2022).
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Dan Gagliardi lives in Philadelphia, where he is the begrudging co-host of King Me, a podcast about Stephen King's impact on film and television. He throws and bats right-handed.
American Gigolo (1980) - dir. Paul Schrader
A fun watch, and a mostly good movie. I’ve tended to fall on the side of thinking Richard Gere is just fine, but after watching American Gigolo, I’m starting to get it and I think he’s a pretty interesting actor. He plays our titular American Gigolo, Julian, a confident young hustler who’s gotten so good at what he does (romancing/fucking rich older women) that he’s cut ties with his former associates in favor of setting up his own jobs and keeping all of his profits. He’s smart, he’s savvy, he knows all the best spots, he’s got a cool car, a wardrobe full of hot looks, and literally everyone likes him and no one would ever want to frame him for a brutal rape, murder, and robbery.
Let’s do a quick aside here to talk about the soundtrack. Do you like Blondie’s “Call Me”? You fucking better because like 80% of the music in American Gigolo is playing different versions of “Call Me” to fit the mood. As a fan of Blondie’s “Call Me” and Giorgio Moroder, I must confirm that this fucking rules. I love when a movie has one song that they’re just gonna ram down your throat during the entirety of the runtime (see also: The Long Goodbye (1973)). The first time they play “Call Me,” it’s over a shot of Julian in cool-ass sunglasses driving his sweet Mercedes up the California coast. It’s evocative! It pumps you right the fuck up! This guy is fucking cool! “Call Me” comes back as a reprise with some slight modifications to tempo and instrumentation to fit what the scene calls for, and it works to add this sort of wistfulness or melancholy or darkness. Who knew that “Call Me” could be so versatile? Giorgio Moroder did, idiot.
Anyway, back to Julian. He’ll sometimes do jobs for his old contacts as a favor, and one of these jobs lands him in some trouble. He drives out to Palm Springs to do a job that involves a couple who are into the rough stuff (no longer on Julian’s menu, but he was doing a favor for a friend and his friend never mentioned the part about the rough stuff), and shortly after he gets back to Los Angeles, he learns that the woman that he met on this Palm Springs job has been murdered. Detective Sunday (Hector Elizondo) is on the case, and he’s very suspicious of Julian. Further complicating things is Julian’s recent involvement with Michelle, the wife of a hotshot California Senator. The two have a budding romance, an actual one, not the usual transactional ones that Julian typically deals in, and Michelle’s husband has caught wind of this. Julian doesn’t have an alibi, and none of the people who would vouch for him want to vouch for him because they don’t want to be publicly associated with a gigolo. In Michelle’s case, her relationship with Julian could ruin her husband’s political ambitions.
It’s fun to watch the tone change as the movie progresses. We start off with Julian looking like the coolest guy on the west side, but as the movie goes on, the glamorous sheen starts to wear off. By the third act, Julian is exhausted, he looks like shit, he’s had to rip up his luxurious apartment and his fancy car because he’s been looking for evidence that he’s being framed, he’s driving some shitty little rental car. He’s gone from arrogant and self-assured to pathetic and desperate, and it seems like there’s no way for him to get back to his former heights.
It’s a pretty compelling paranoid crime thriller that’s going on in this movie, and it works so well because for a good chunk of the movie, you’re not entirely sure whether Julian might have actually done the murder. We see him with the rough stuff couple in Palm Springs, but we don’t actually see what happens between the three. We just see the beginning of their night, then it’s a cut to Julian the next day back in Los Angeles. There’s a little bit of room for doubt on Julian’s innocence for a lot of the movie, and Richard Gere really lives well in that gray area of suspicion. He lends a certain quality of untrustworthiness to his performance as Julian. Julian’s confident and smart, but he’s self-serving and a little bit of an asshole. It makes him very intriguing and watchable, but it does make you think that maybe he could be capable of murdering someone if he felt he had the right reason to. Julian seems like a good guy with principles, but Gere plays him with a darkness that keeps you guessing, at least until we actually do learn that he’s being framed in the last act of the movie.
The reveal that Julian’s being framed does make some sense, and plot-wise I guess it works, but the movie is so much more entertaining during the stretch where we don’t really know whether to believe Julian. He’s certainly charismatic, and we want to believe that he didn’t kill that woman, but do we want to believe that just because he’s so handsome and charismatic? Are we under Julian’s spell just like any of the other women he so naturally seduces? It’s a fun razor’s edge that we walk with Julian, and when we finally do learn about what’s actually happening, the thrill dissipates and it feels a little disappointing to have our questions answered.
The third part of the blog
Big thanks to Tony and Dan for joining us today and making this a successful double post week with FOUR special guests! Was this the biggest MOVIE DIARY 2023 week yet? By my metrics* (*vibes), I’d say yes!
I know I said I’d have this on Thursday, but I blew it. I’ve been BuSy WiTh My JoB because I nEeD mOnEy FoR fOoD aNd ShElTeR. Isn’t it crazy how this is a struggle that’s unique to me and only me? It’s probably very fascinating and novel to you but for me this is my life everyday. Anyway, if any of you know about some rich psycho looking to buy an up and coming media outlet like MOVIE DIARY 2023 please point them in my direction and tell them to make me an offer. You can have them get in touch via email or the MOVIE DIARY 2023 Discord. SERIOUS INQUIRIES ONLY.