MOVIE DIARY 2023: I'VE BEEN AROUND THAT TRASHY BEHAVIOR ALL MY LIFE, I'M GETTIN' TIRED OF PUTTIN' UP WITH IT
Hey hey ok! We’re here again! I’ve got a great first time special guest writer for this time around, Nicholas Russell! I’ve been a big admirer of Nicholas’ writing for a while now, so it’s very cool that I get to welcome him to MOVIE DIARY 2023. Man, now that I’m thinking about it, we’ve been rolling rolling with some solid first time special guests this year… shoutout to the MOVIE DIARY 2023 first time special guests!
Drumline (2002) - dir. Charles Stone III
SPECIAL GUEST WRITER: NICHOLAS RUSSELL
It is, of course, a historical fact that Drumline is a movie released in 2002 and subsequently seen by many, many people since then. The problem is, Drumline is also a film that can only have been created from the deepest, most foundational elements of my childhood. This is attachment as identification. This is what it feels like to take overbearing, delusional ownership of a beloved artifact. Which is to say, some movies feel grafted to you and others feel as if they were your first memory before you were even born.
I know there’s a lot of cultural signifiers being picked up and analyzed by younger generations these days. Kids are buying CDs again. They’re discovering “Get Low” because of some stupid movie. Some are like, really into phrenology and not putting on sunscreen. In a world as overstuffed, loud, fast, and consequently discombobulating as ours, eventually this terrible churn will cough up something from the past and briefly put it back into the spotlight. This has not happened with Drumline. Even though it continues to be shown on premium cable, as so many essential video store draft picks are. Even though it was Nick Cannon’s first major leading role. Even though it is one of the premiere examples of well-made, mid-budget, crowd-pleasing fare.
Drumline is a movie everyone has seen at least once. If you’ve seen Rocky, you’ve seen Drumline. If you’ve seen Miracle, you’ve seen Drumline. If you’ve scrolled through the “enemies to lovers” tag on AO3, you’ve seen Drumline. If you know even the bare minimum of what A Beautiful Mind is about, or you’ve just seen the Sherlock mind palace meme, you’ve seen Drumline. It is a film built up out of the most tried-and-true sports tropes (cocky underdog, humble roots, storied but past-its-prime institution, asshole leader, rich rival, humbling teamwork, rousing training montage, showstopping clincher), with neither slavish devotion to them nor tongue-in-cheek irony. Unlike most recent entries into this genre (though Drumline troubles the line between sports movie and musical), it uses its tropes as tools, as building blocks for character, as a graduated ruler for expectation and payoff.
In brief: Devon Miles, a talented drummer from New York, goes down to Atlanta to attend the prestigious (fictional) Atlanta A & T drumline after graduating high school. He’s a whizz on the snare, he can copy even the most complicated solos by sight alone, but, crucially, he can’t read music. For most of the film, he hides this and eventually the omission blows up in his face. Meanwhile, dance major Laila, an upperclassman played by Zoe Saldana in true “oh my god she’s so young” fashion, falls for Devon, who, again, is a freshman, so, every boy’s dream. Sean Taylor, played with simmering though entirely unintentional homoerotic ire by Leonard Roberts, is leader of the line’s snare troupe and also the film’s resident hardass, immediately clashing with Devon due to Devon’s bad attitude and superior skill. Orlando Jones leads the Atlanta A & T drumline as Dr. Lee. There is a cadre of actors indelible to my childhood and Jones is one of them, half because of Drumline and half because of a dumb little sci-fi comedy starring David Duchovny called Evolution; Jones does a lot of high-pitched screaming, it’s fun.
There are some memorable, geeky friends for comic relief and moral support, including GQ (that’s the actor’s name) as Jayson, one of maybe two white guys on the line who nonetheless has heart, talent, and, in one of Drumline’s funniest little asides, an abiding love for black people. This is an integral facet to Drumline. It is simply but crucially a black film. Unlike, say, Barbershop or Soul Plane, Drumline has little to no self-consciousness about its blackness. That isn’t to say that self-consciousness equates anxiety or shame. More that, while some mainstream films from the early to mid-aughts catered to enthusiastic black audiences with narratives turning on the visibly positive and culturally specific, Drumline is a more a wholesome dream of college life in the South than a representational offering. There’s maybe half a scene of hazing and, later on, the politest send-up of Greek life initiation ever.
No, Drumline exists on a very specific spectrum, a movie aiming to do what it sets out to do well, a movie primed to be remembered as an artifact and no worse for it. The music the line plays on football fields and in stadiums is entirely of its time, Jennifer Lopez and Petey Pablo and Nivea, interspersed with the funk and old school R&B (Earth, Wind, and Fire, The Jackson 5) that such artists sampled. The emotional stakes are eternal: impressing your girlfriend, skipping class, meeting new friends, making your enemy fall in love with you. I have seen Drumline at least 20 times over the course of my life.
Recently, I rewatched it with the visceral and completely random fear that, for whatever reason, it wouldn’t retain its spark, that it would finally burn out in the light of my newfound cinematic acumen, that it would be just fine. If nothing else, I knew at least that Drumline has one of the best final showdowns of any sports movie, an impressively executed and thrilling montage of music and choreography on a truly massive scale.
Ha! Drumline, the whole movie, still rules. Yeah, cinema is made up of the finer things. But it’s also made up of enjoyable shit you need in order to kill a couple hours, to commune with your younger self, to link you to your father, to show to your patient girlfriend, to assure yourself that, in the rare but important instances, some things are as good as you remember.
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Nicholas Russell is a writer and editor from Las Vegas.
Game Night (2018) - dir. John Francis Daley, Johnathan Goldstein
It was fine. Solid jokes, funny performances, some clever shots. There’s a lot of things to like. I guess a lot of my problem with this was mostly just being able to see the seams of comedy, and it doesn’t help that Jason Bateman’s whole deal is sort of like, sarcastically pointing out those seams of comedy. I don’t know, maybe I’m not explaining this right, or maybe this is the kind of thing that you don’t really give a shit about, and you can just blissfully waltz into a comedy without having the wheels in your head turning about improv/sketch comedy principles. What’s that like? To see something funny and just go, “Hahaha!” unburdened by this type of extremely annoying neurosis? jkjk
Mostly I loved Jesse Plemons and Rachel McAdams in this. Plemons plays the stoic, recently divorced cop neighbor, and he’s just perfect. Here’s this sort of simple character of weird divorced guy who just wants to be included in the game night group, which is already a funny starting point, and Plemons is just having so much fun with it. The delivery of all his deadpan lines, his physicality, the way he just looks like he’s just a wrong word away from either bursting into tears or strangling someone, it’s impeccable. He steals every scene he’s in.
It’s also just really great to get to see Rachel McAdams doing a comedy. She knows how to do funny! Everything she does while she’s holding that gun that she thinks is fake (it’s real and it’s loaded) is hilarious. I loved the bit where she’s googled how to remove a bullet from a gunshot wound and she’s doing a very rough improvised surgery on Jason Bateman’s arm, all that stuff is gold, and they get a lot of mileage out of McAdams being cheerfully down to do something extreme. If you want to take it further you might be able to read some sort of inner darkness into her and Bateman’s characters, this overdeveloped drive for competition being an indicator of some level of psychopathy. Now that I’m thinking about it, I would have preferred that over this arc for both of them about wanting a baby and accepting that being washed is cool in its own way (it’s not).
The Last Picture Show (1971) - dir. Peter Bogdanovich
Have those conservative small town fetishists ever seen this movie? I know I have big city coastal elite privilege, but people want this? People want to live in small towns? No fucking way. I don’t believe that for a fucking second. Just look at the small town of Anarene in The Last Picture Show. This town sucks. Everyone’s depressed, and everyone who’s not depressed is just some asshole who’s given up and doesn’t care that they’re going nowhere. There’s like four places to go in this town: 1) the pool hall that usually has a smoky and depressing vibe (and not in a glamorous pre-Lust for Life Lana Del Rey way) when some dipshit teenagers aren’t hooting and hollering in there all night, 2) the one high school that you went to when you were a kid, where you’ll watch your old high school friends’ dumbass kids plays sports against other small towns with nothing going for them, 3) the one movie theater in town (but to be fair they’re only playing bangers in that theater, you gotta hand it to Sam for that), 4) the diner that seems to only serve well done burgers. The only time we hear about people having fun that doesn’t involve hurting or humiliating someone in Anarene is when Sonny and Duane drive out to Mexico for a weekend. You literally have to leave the country to have a good time if you live in this town, and even then when you head back home to Anarene you’ve got a long drive ahead of you, you probably have diarrhea, and you’re coming back to find out that the only cool person in town, Sam, the movie theater and pool hall owner, is dead. RIP Sam, at least you don’t have to live in Anarene anymore.
The Last Picture Show is about wanting to find an escape from this town, an escape from your depressing life, an escape from the expectations of your community, an escape from yourself. It’s also about how most of these characters can’t escape any of that. It’s bleak. The only people who do manage to leave town are Duane, who joins the army and will probably get shot and killed in Korea, and Jacy, who ends up going off to college in Dallas. For Duane and Jacy, it’s an open question about how it all ends up for them, but at least there’s a question there, some room for possibility. For Sonny, there’s no question about what happens to him— he’ll stay behind in Anarene like everyone else.
I’m sort of being unfair and ungenerous here, but the point is that Anarene is a bad place, and that the characters of The Last Picture Show know it’s a bad place. We can see that Anarene maybe at one point was an embodiment of that quintessential, tightly-knit, idealized American small town, but the golden age of Christian prosperity that came from the oil fields that brought up this town has dried up, and we find Anarene deep in its decline. We can extend this to being about the almost mythic idea of a quintessential American small town. That idea has since passed, and was never really a reality to begin with. What we’re left with is real people stuck in this town, and still clinging to that false dream of the perfect small town as everything slowly crumbles down around them.
It’s a great movie, and there are a couple genuine moments of light fun buried in there, but ultimately it’s sort of depressing watching these characters and knowing that it won’t get better for them. Maybe what’s most heartbreaking is when you see that they are doing something for themselves and recognizing deep down that it won’t amount to anything more than a moment that they’re going to feel bad about later. Mostly I’m thinking of Sonny carrying on his affair with his basketball coach’s wife (for both parties involved), but it’s true of every impulsive thing Duane does, and it’s true of almost everything that Jacy gets up to as she tries to climb the high school social hierarchy just to stave off her boredom and dissatisfaction with this entire town. These characters are all just looking for some sort of escape from the rot of this town. You feel for them because you know that they can’t do it on their own, but they can’t even manage to find that escape in each other.
Four Daughters (1938) - dir. Michael Curtiz
Really funny and cute, then it turns into this almost operatic melodrama. I really enjoyed it. The movie follows the four daughters of the Lemp family, and their romantic pursuits. They’ve each got their suitors: the quick witted and pragmatic Thea has Ben, a rich older man who’s kind of a doofus; the responsible eldest sister Emma has Ernie, a sincerely dopey delivery guy who she’s not that interested in (but he’s nice so they let him hang around); Kay is a dedicated singing prodigy so her boyfriend is her pursuit of a career in music; and Ann has the classic problem of having two boyfriends— Felix, a charmingly pushy composer and flirt who’s working with her father, and Mickey, a brooding, sad sack pianist (played by MOVIE DIARY 2023’s star of the summer, John Garfield!).
Four Daughters is really a delight to watch, I just had a great time with it. The dialogue is really zippy in that 1930’s way, and it’s fun to get caught up in the Lemp sisters’ drama. Each of them have such distinct personalities, and it’s a real treat to watch the family play off of each other. Claude Rains is wonderful as the beleaguered, yet still loving father. Just a perfectly lovable grump. Personally, I think the movie could have had more Kay. I loved her whole blasé, cool lesbian Taurus-coded attitude.
The boyfriends were all fun too, but John Garfield is the standout. Four Daughters starts as a funny little wholesome family comedy. We get some sweet “Do they like each other?” “Are they gonna kiss?”-type drama, and it’s all very cute, but then things really start heating up once John Garfield comes on the scene. Up to this point in the movie, the courtship is all very tame, but once Garfield’s Mickey casually waltzes in with his cigarette and his rumpled suit and his tipped hat, he completely alters the chemistry of the movie just by simply looking like he’s even heard of sex. This whole atmosphere that surrounds him seems almost alien to these characters, and it’s interesting to see how it moves the movie from wholesome family comedy to pulsing melodrama.
The love triangle between Mickey, Felix, and Ann is very clearly is at the heart of this movie, and it’s cool watching how that love triangle changes Ann. Ann starts as the doe-eyed, unserious baby of the family, talking about how her dream is for her and Emma to become old spinsters together. When Felix comes onto the scene, there’s clearly an attraction there, but it’s very safe and childish and playful— they flirt by swinging on gates and racing their bikes (from what I understand, dependable flirts for both pre-texting 12 year olds and adults in the 1930’s). Then when Mickey comes in, the vibe completely changes. There’s some classic bad boy energy emanating off of Mickey. He’s hurt, he’s vulnerable, he’s hot, and he’s lashing out at the world around him. Ann’s never been around someone like this, and she’s drawn to him. Ann goes from someone who sees the prospect of love in a childish, simple way to someone who has to seriously weigh the consequences of making a choice between two very different men who both love her very deeply.
She first chooses Felix, but she later runs out on their wedding day when she learns that Emma has had deep feelings for Felix that she’s hidden from Ann this entire time. Ann leaves the family and runs off to New York City to marry Mickey. Everyone finally sees each other at Christmas (minus Kay, who’s off in Philadelphia where she’s going to sing live on a national Christmas broadcast, hell yeah she’s living her dream!), and it’s about as awkward as you might think, but Felix is a good sport about it. Ann leaving him for Mickey is water under the bridge, and he’s going to move to Seattle after this Christmas party to take a new job as a professor of music, so really it’s all good. It’s good. It’s actually fine. It’s really what he’d wanted all along. Yes. It’s fine. Felix joins in the festivities like nothing happened, but Mickey finds himself standing off to the side, feeling like a perpetual outsider with this family. (Sidenote: After Ann left Felix, Emma ended up giving dopey Ernie a chance because he really stepped up to let all the wedding guests know that the wedding was off! Can you believe that! Now Felix is all on his own! It’s fine!)
Mickey has been doing all he can to make Ann happy, but it’s clear that there’s something eating at him. He offers to give Felix a ride to the train station, and they really bro down and work it out. Felix is gracious and he actually does seem happy for Mickey and Ann, and he gives Mickey some cash with instructions for him to buy something that’ll make Ann happy. What a guy! It’s so devastating to have your chief romantic rival be a decent man. There’s this incredible close up of Mickey’s face as Felix’s train leaves, the light of the train flashing over his face as his ongoing personal struggle plays out in his intense stare. Mickey heads back on the icy roads, and he purposely gets himself into a wreck, accelerating on the slippery roads and landing in the hospital where he dies in Ann’s arms. I think he gets into that wreck because at some point on that drive back, the guilt of how he and Ann ended up weighing too heavily on him, and Mickey convinced himself that there’s no way that someone like him could ever make Ann happy. Mickey reasons he’s never been happy himself, so how could he really make Ann happy? Better to spare her a miserable life with him by ending his life now.
Ultimately I’m not really sure if the choice that Ann makes is right, and I think that’s perfect because it’s clear that Ann herself is never really sure. Both men loved her, but she just couldn’t shake the passion that she felt for Mickey. If Mickey hadn’t ended his life maybe things would have been different, but we’ll never know. Felix eventually returns to the neighborhood, where he and Ann seem to pick up where they left off, but I’m sure both she and Felix will always have Mickey on their minds. It’s played off as a happy ending, but there’s this undercurrent of melancholy that goes with it, another way that Mickey’s character looms over this family and this movie.
The third part of the blog, where I plug the MOVIE DIARY 2023 Discord
A lot of great stuff from former MOVIE DIARY special guests to link to this week!
My buddy and former MOVIE DIARY special guest Tony Wilson has been making a new animated series called Brian Moves to the City, and the first two parts are up on YouTube! I did the voice of Brian!
Another project from a former MOVIE DIARY special guest! Meredith Gran’s been working on her new game, Perfect Tides: Station To Station (a follow up to the wonderful Perfect Tides). Go ahead and add Perfect Tides: Station To Station to your Steam wishlist now!
You can now stream filmmaker and former MOVIE DIARY special guest Caroline Golum’s first feature film, A Feast of Man (2018) on Fandor! I love this movie, and I wrote about it way back in MOVIE DIARY 2018!
That’s all for now! See you next time!