MOVIE DIARY 2023: THE BODY REMEMBERS. IT STORES IT ALL.
We’re back like we usually are, with another great MOVIE DIARY 2023 post! This week, I’ve got my longtime internet pal Lorin Kozlowski joining in to help bring MOVIE DIARY 2023 into the summer blockbuster season! I can’t remember how long Lorin and I have been following each other, but I’ve always appreciated his enthusiasm for talking about movies online, so it was a lot of fun to get Lorin to talk about movies for longer than a few tweets at a time.
Fast X (2023) - dir. Louis Leterrier
SPECIAL GUEST WRITER: LORIN KOZLOWSKI
Fast Five, Furious 6, and Furious 7 approached action movie nirvana, threading the needle of absurdity and awe. Considering the death of Paul Walker, Furious 7 is some kind of miracle. It’s been diminishing returns in the last two installments, 2017’s The Fate of the Furious and 2021’s F9, owing to what is reportedly to be friction between The Rock, Justin Lin, and Vin Diesel. That is because Vin Diesel is a total weirdo. Diesel is on some Jeremy Strong/Kendall Roy action in regards to Dominic Torretto. You can tell he thinks he is this guy the moment he puts on that tank top and silver cross. Vin Diesel looks at the boy playing his son and you know that Vin thinks of that boy as blood. The Rock and Justin Lin just aren’t about that life the way Vin is. The Rock thinks he’s better than this franchise and yet he came limping back when Black Adam ate shit. Justin Lin probably realized that Vin Diesel was gonna be in his texts demanding more scenes where he unleashes godlike fury (see F9) and tapped out. New director Louis Lettier is here to get the trains to run on time, but rest assured, Vin is making the schedule.
With Fast X, we have the most egregious retcon yet, with a restaging of the Fast Five finale to now include Jason Momoa’s villain Dante, a performance built on the idea “What if the Joker was sorta gay but not really but maybe?” Fast X can’t commit to this, but it flirts very hard with the idea, coming closest to true derangement when Dante has some one sided banter while he paints the nails on two decaying bodies of some grunts who used to work for him. Easily easily EASILY the grossest and weirdest thing that’s ever happened in any of these movies. I don’t know if Fast 11 is going to expand on that, but it caught my attention. Momoa gets some good lines in and he is certainly game, but he’s not quite Eric Bogosian in Under Siege 2: Dark Territory.
Unlike just about every other action franchise, F&F is built around the idea of the dumbest people alive as the only thing standing between us and annihilation. I have to confess that I haven’t really been clocking “The Agency” that keeps popping up in these movies, but I sincerely love the idea that this shadowy agency looks at the problems that show up on their desk and make the call “Get this to Tyrese and Ludacris!” Roman and Tej peaked in F9 when they went to space so it is a bit of a wash this time around. An extended “comedy” sequence with Pete Davidson is probably the most egregious scene in the entire franchise, a collision of bad decisions saved only by the fact that Tyrese thinks he is CRUSHING. They should let him sing in the next one.
All this text and I haven’t talked about the action! All the hand to hand sequences in Fast X actually rule. Charlize Theron and Michelle Rodriguez have a one on one throw down for no reason, doesn’t make sense for the plot, just someone on set said “these chicks should throw”. John Cena shows up and kills a whole house of special agents, throwing them through floors, copious headshots, just glorious! Cena plays this completely against his established character from F9, instead playing him as John Cena doing a Make A Wish visit, if the wish was incredible murder. Later, he takes Torretto’s son to a secret hideout where he has a car modded with missile launchers, which he lets the kid help load and launch. If you are nine years old and you see Fast X it will be your god.
Vin Diesel keeps all the best moments for himself, as is his right. He kicks a mini-nuke around Rome with an uncrushable Dodge Charger (pretty sick), uses a car door as a shield during a machine gun attack on a bridge (very sick), drops his car out of a moving plane and destroys the vehicles he lands on (tremendously sick), smashes some helicopters together that had fired grappling looks into his car doors (insanely sick), and drives his car off an exploding dam(disgusting). If these are all decisions Justin Lin was going to fight about with Vin Diesel, well, I’m glad he lost.
This all ends with a cliffhanger, Dom and his son facing certain death; Tej, Roman, the now useless Han and Ramsey apparently dead in a plane crash; Letty and Cipher somewhere in the Arctic with a miraculously alive Gisele. Oh, and the Rock begrudgingly returning to cap this thing off. Oh man, you can tell he is soooo unhappy to be back. It is eating at him. Dwayne, you need to channel. Bring it to the surface, make it inform your every move. Luke Hobbs once double tapped Dante’s dad without even looking at him. Bring that guy back. Be a legend.
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Lorin Kozlowski is the host of the original nu-metal podcast Roach Koach. He lives in Indiana with his son.
The Card Counter (2021) - dir. Paul Schrader
Rough one for me, I think. I didn’t really care for this one that much, and I was kind of disappointed, knowing that this was coming off of the heels of First Reformed (2017), which I loved. I guess I just had high expectations. The story is in line with Paul Schrader’s whole deal, and I think it does work as a thematic follow up to First Reformed, but something about it felt so stilted, and kind of unnatural, and not in an interesting Brechtian way or anything like that.
Oscar Isaac plays William Tell (an obvious alias, but also, lol) a professional gambler with a mysterious past who finds himself working for La Linda (Tiffany Haddish), playing in poker tournaments and sharing his winnings. He meets Cirk (he keeps reminding everyone that it’s “with a C”) (Tye Sheridan), after Cirk has recognized him from his past, pre-William Tell life. Before he was our titular Card Counter, William was a soldier who brutally tortured prisoners in Abu Ghraib. After an investigation, William was one of the very few who were imprisoned for their war crimes. Cirk’s father was at Abu Ghraib with William, and after returning home, the trauma and guilt that he felt from his role in torturing prisoners drove him to kill himself. Cirk wants to avenge his father’s death by torturing and killing Major Gordo (Willem Dafoe), William’s commanding officer at Abu Ghraib, who taught him and the other soldiers how to interrogate and torture their prisoners. Gordo was never prosecuted for war crimes and he’s gone on to live a rich life as a private security consultant.
I think the central questions of this movie are about forgiveness— who gets to forgive, how much forgiveness can actually fix, what are the limits to forgiveness. Just as in First Reformed’s Reverend Toller, William leads a solitary, regimented life that has come from a deep guilt within him. His cloistered life is a sort of penance, but it’s not enough to remove the guilt from his heart. And how could it be? We get flashbacks of William’s time in Abu Ghraib, and it’s hell. And on top of that, it’s a hell in which William took a very active role. The flashbacks are unpleasant in every way. Harsh metal music plays loudly throughout the prison, men are being kicked and beaten while dogs aggressively bark at them, everything’s covered in dirt and shit. It’s also shot in this horrible fish eye lens, amplifying how dizzyingly unpleasant all of this is.
Part of what I found so frustrating about this movie was that while I found Schrader’s interrogation of the concept of forgiveness to be very compelling, I don’t think the main characters’ involvement with each other made that much sense. I’m not sure why William, who is a very solitary and particular person, would start getting so close to La Linda and Cirk. I guess we’re supposed to take William’s involvement with La Linda as something that starts because he needs the money. Also he’s attracted to her, and he doesn’t quite know how to express it outside of making a professional arrangement with her? Unclear. And with Cirk, I really don’t think that William, given what we know about him and why he is how he is, would willingly introduce so much potential for chaos by letting Cirk tag along with him. William tells us (via his journal) that he’s doing this to help Cirk out and to try to keep him from making the mistake of heading down the path of revenge, which I guess works, but I just don’t think someone like William would even put himself in this position.
On the other hand, now that I’ve typed this all out, maybe it doesn’t really have to make all that much sense as long as it’s in service of Schrader’s interest in the question of forgiveness, which can be extended to Schrader’s obsession with a man finding redemption, typically in a woman (More on this in the next section on The Master Gardener). Maybe part of my frustration lies in the performances. Oscar Isaac does really well, I like him as another self-examining Schrader protagonist, but Tiffany Haddish and Tye Sheridan just didn’t do it for me. I thought it was a good effort from Haddish, but she’s clearly out of her element, and her performance didn’t really match the tone. It felt a little amateurish, but I don’t know that that’s necessarily bad. I think in some spots it did come off as charming, but that was fleeting. Sheridan likewise feels like a tonal mismatch, but his being out of his element sort of works for his character since Cirk is frequently in over his head without realizing it. These performances feeling kind of out of place undercut the impact of what we’re supposed to feel for William, since so much of William’s arc as a character hinges on La Linda and Cirk.
As a movie on its own, I think it doesn’t exactly hold together, but in the context of Schrader’s “Man In A Room” trilogy, I think The Card Counter is an interesting expansion on First Reformed’s idea of life-altering actions coming from a place of guilt and a quest for redemption. First Reformed grapples with the guilt of knowing that you haven’t done enough to make the world better and that anything that you do now may be too little too late. We wonder if God can ever forgive us. The Card Counter takes this to a different place, giving us a look at someone who has actively made the world worse. William will forever be haunted by guilt over the atrocities he committed, and he hopes that by dissuading Cirk from a dark path, he can redeem himself in some way. Ultimately it doesn’t work, and William is drawn back into the violence that he was trying to escape and he kills Gordo, but vengeance is not the same thing as redemption, so William must still carry his guilt and the death wish that comes with it, but he finds hope in his new relationship with La Linda. With The Card Counter, thematically we’re moving from seeking God’s forgiveness to seeking a way to forgive ourselves. I think that’s an interesting shift in focus, moving from those grand concerns about God and our role in the fate of the planet to the more personal scale of one man reckoning with the evil that he’s done.
The Master Gardener (2023) - dir. Paul Schrader
SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS
Oh man. Weird, wildly uneven movie, but I think I ended up liking it more than I did The Card Counter, despite how messy this one was. Joel Edgerton plays Narvel Roth, a gardener and horticulturalist who manages the landscaping team for a big estate owned by Norma Haverhill (Sigourney Weaver). Norma’s an old money white Southern lady, and she’s tasked Narvel with taking in her estranged grand-niece Maya (Quintessa Swindell) as his apprentice. Norma had a strained relationship with Maya’s now deceased mother (Norma’s niece), but Norma takes Maya in out of a feeling of familial obligation. She keeps Maya at arm’s length, supposedly because she was ashamed of Maya’s mother, and Maya is a living reminder of that. Also, Maya is biracial, and we can infer that part of Norma’s contempt for Maya’s mother comes from her racist feelings about Maya’s father.
Maya’s being biracial is important not in just revealing the inner darkness of Norma, but also because, unbeknownst to her, it also will impact her relationship with Narvel. Much like Oscar Isaac in The Card Counter, Narvel has a dark past that he would prefer to keep to himself. Before he came to work on Norma’s estate, Narvel was part of a white supremacist gang. Narvel ended up helping the FBI by informing on his old gang, which landed him in Witness Protection, and that’s how he ended up working as a gardener. After years of living in this new identity, Narvel has found a kind of peace in the daily work and routine of his job. He’s learned that he’s good at gardening, and it’s given him a sense of pride and satisfaction that he never had in his old life.
That peace won’t last as Narvel and Maya get fired after Norma sees Narvel pulling up his pants as he walks out of Maya’s room. He and Maya kissed but he put a stop to it as she was taking off his shirt because he didn’t want her to see his gigantic white power tattoos. Narvel explains it’s not what she thinks, but Norma kicks them off the estate in a rage, and Narvel and Maya hit the road. The two grow closer as Narvel helps Maya detox (she’d alluded to the fact that she casually uses drugs, but it isn’t until they hit the road that Narvel realizes she’s an addict) and takes her on some tours of botanical gardens. Unclear what the aim of this road trip was, or what Narvel’s plan was. I suppose it was a way to leave the clutches of Norma and to rescue Maya from her dealer who beats her, but I’m not really sure what the end game was here. All that aside, it’s a good opportunity to get these two together and really get into the meat of their weird relationship. Of course, their growing connection hits a huge roadblock when Maya eventually sees Narvel’s white power tattoos and she’s understandably pissed. She feels betrayed/lied to and she storms off, but later in the night she comes back to his hotel room and they fuck. I guess she forgives him? Seems fast. It’s a really strange moment, bordering on the nonsensical, and their fucking is shot like maybe it didn’t happen, like maybe it’s some kind of fantasy. There’s also this other fantastical scene where the two are driving around in the night and suddenly everything blooms around them into beautiful flowers, which is absolutely a metaphor about their euphoric feelings of freedom, but that was definitely an artistic vision. The fucking definitely did happen, and it was weird! The rest of the movie is kind of a blur of Schrader conventions and tics that are overshadowed by this completely left field development in Narvel and Maya’s relationship.
There’s a lot of good in this movie, and there’s also obviously some painfully bad in this movie, but I think overall I liked it enough and it definitely held together better than The Card Counter for me. As the conclusion to Paul Schrader’s trilogy, I think The Master Gardener does such a nice job of continuing the theme of forgiveness and redemption, but there’s also a kind of finality to it that I think is really interesting. The Master Gardener continues the more personal scope that we experienced with The Card Counter. Both deal with a man reckoning with the evil that he’s done, but Narvel seems to have ended up in a better place with it than William Tell. First Reformed is about earning God’s forgiveness,The Card Counter is about trying to find a way to forgive yourself, and The Master Gardener is about trying to earn forgiveness from others. It feels like Schrader has been wrestling with these themes for so long, even since before this “Man In A Room” trilogy, and with The Master Gardener it feels like he’s reached a satisfying thematic endpoint. There’s a kind of hopefulness and tenderness to it that I don’t think I recognized in those other movies. Maybe Schrader’s gotten more in tune with his more sentimental side as he’s gotten older. It works for me, and it’s sort of refreshing to see this from a Schrader movie.
The stuff that doesn’t work in this movie for me is the same sort of stuff that doesn’t really work for me in other Schrader movies, particularly Schrader’s approach to his protagonist’s relationships with women. On top of all that, The Master Gardener throws in the additional wrench of trying to confront racial issues. It goes about as well as you might think a 76 year old man deciding to talk about current racial issues could go. It’s rocky territory to try to depict a blossoming love affair between a biracial zoomer and a 50ish year old former white supremacist, but it’s made worse by the fact that Schrader tends to only depict women as either hard nosed employers or the means to achieve a spiritual redemption. Narvel carries around his guilt from his past life of being a white supremacist, and while he’s convinced that he’s moved on and that he’s a different, better person, he still must keep that part of his life a secret. He may have been able to forgive himself, but what good is a life when the people around you can’t accept you for who you are, flaws and all? In Maya, Narvel sees a path to acceptance and thus redemption for his past sins. I think that this sort of makes sense thematically, but the added layer of race makes this a little more difficult to square. Something that could have worked as addressing a spiritual guilt now gets eclipsed by white guilt and the imposition of a white man’s need for acceptance from a person of color, and I think that kind of undercuts the whole thing.
Throughout the movie, we get a lot of Narvel reading from his journal. There’s a lot of talk about gardening, gardening techniques and philosophies, the history of gardening, and I honestly wish there was more. I thought it was super interesting! There are two lines that stuck out to me though.
“Gardening is a belief in the future. A belief that things will happen according to plan.”
This is Narvel’s ethos, and it’s sort of the driving the philosophy of this movie. It’s kind of an obvious, eye-roll inducing metaphor, but Narvel nurtures Maya the way he would a garden. It might be obvious, but I was moved by how hopeful that is, especially from a Schrader movie. I think that’s also why I was so put off by how Narvel and Maya’s relationship turned into them fucking and maybe (?) being in love. The instant that they fuck, it totally changes their relationship and this sort of parallelism that they’ve been establishing between caring for a garden and caring for a young, curious person as both being beliefs in the future sort of doesn’t work as well.
[I’m paraphrasing this next one because I can’t remember the exact quote, but this is the gist of it:]
“This journal used to be so helpful to me. Now I only see it as a burden.”
I think this line is in Narvel’s last journal entry that he reads to us, and I think it says a couple of things. It’s an indication that Narvel is ready to let go of the obsessive self reflection that he’s relied on for all these years, and that he is finally ready to reveal himself to another person. He also does this by finally showing Maya all of his tattoos that he’s kept hidden from her. By exposing himself like this, he’s open and vulnerable, revealing his shameful past to Maya. Putting aside how strange it is for her to do this, Maya’s acceptance is a full acceptance of Narvel’s past. It’s a belief in his future as a good man. The line about the journal is really interesting on a metatextual level as well. Schrader’s known for his journaling protagonists, and this line from Narvel’s journal is effective as Schrader’s last word on this trilogy or this era of his films. I read it as Schrader’s own comment on his journaling protagonists. He’s gotten a lot of mileage out of using a protagonist’s journal as a framing device, but now it’s run its course and he’s ready to move on from these Men In Rooms and their constant grappling with themselves and their place in the world. I think it expresses a hopefulness for the future despite the rottenness of our past, and a desire to look forward rather than to be bogged down in the muck of the present. It’s kind of nice that it all ends on a somewhat positive note, and I just hope that ol’ Paul Schrader is happy.
The third part of the blog, where I plug the MOVIE DIARY 2023 Discord
I’ve recently discovered Allison Picurro’s substack, Boy Movies, and I’ve really been enjoying it! Allison takes a look at Boy-coded movies, and sometimes she will write about Girl movies. I think she’s really funny and her posts are super entertaining, and I think it has the same spirit of what I’ve tried to do with MOVIE DIARY, except much more polished. I’ve never met Allison, but Allison, if you’re reading this, please come on MOVIE DIARY 2023!
Some good links going around the movies internet this past week! Really loved this one from Steve at Element X on… well it’s about a lot of things. Film programming, film criticism, the role of a critic, lists and rankings, and whole lot of other stuff going on. It made me kind of want to take a look at what I’m doing with MOVIE DIARY 2023, and I think it might be good for me to kind of take stock of what I’m trying to do with this blog.
I love and respect serious film criticism, but I’ve never touted MOVIE DIARY, 2018 or 2023, as serious film criticism, and I’ve never seen it that way. I see MOVIE DIARY as exactly that, a diary where I am trying to put down my feelings about movies that I’ve seen, sometimes in an extremely self-indulgent way, and I think that works for me. If I stumble on some good insights about film, its context in history or the current moment, etc., then great! I love that for me! I’ve never liked the idea of coming up with rankings and lists (I agree with Steve on a lot of those points in his piece), and I never want MOVIE DIARY to be about that sort of Rotten Tomatoes-brained approach to watching movies. It’s all about experience, and it’s all about vibes, and thankfully I’ve had the support of readers and special guests who feel the same way!
(If any brands or media corporations with lucrative partnership opportunities are reading this, please know that I am open to changing any of this for money. I can add in a little 5 stars rating system at the end, letter grades, rank full filmographies, whatever you want man, I love that stuff and I respect your company).
Anyway, read Steve’s piece, it’s really good. MOVIE DIARY 2023 will continue to keep on trucking in the same dumb way it has all year, don’t worry. I just wanted to let you all know where I’m coming from.
Also don’t forget to join the MOVIE DIARY 2023 Discord! Currently Lily is getting pumped about the new JUSTIFIED series, and I’m thinking about rewatching Sorry To Bother You (2018). Let us know what you’ve been up to, what you’ve been watching, help Pasxalle find a copy of Full Moon In Paris (1984)! It’s all on the Discord!