Robot Dreams (2023)

Originally published in Wildcat Weekly on September 27, 2024

My classes’ Question of the Day today was “How do you know if a person likes you?” It related to our lesson about inferring info from a derivative graph, but it was also fun to hear their thoughts. Unsurprisingly, most students who responded focused on romantic affection rather than platonic. That was fine, but it wasn’t my intention. We don’t celebrate platonic relationships with the same gusto. Romance gets an entire film genre. I get it.

 

Robot Dreams is a film that is romantic…about platonic connection. We see characters swept off their feet by the power of friendship. All the sweet things my classes chipped in that evidenced romantic likery we see between the protagonist and his pal. They glow in one another’s company. Each revels in the other’s joy. They dance together on roller blades like they’ve been listening to the same song their entire lives. It’s moving in the same way a good romance can be. I get chills when these two platonically hold hands the same way I get them when Anya Taylor-Joy’s hand finds Johnny Flynn’s in Emma. I hadn’t known that was possible.

 

More incredible than the chemistry on display in Robot Dreams is its construction. The film is hand-animated by an independent studio, and there are no spoken words beyond the lyrics in its soundtrack. The protagonist is an anthropomorphic dog; his new companion is a robot he orders off an infomercial during an oppressively lonely night. Likewise, the film is set in a New York from the past, and the animators create a living, breathing city that feels as real as the NYC in so many live action films. Robot Dreams teems with the grand possibility and diversity of the Big Apple. The film’s 2023 Best Animated Film Oscar nomination came before securing a domestic release; that’s the kind of response this humble piece generates.

 

I’ve watched Robot Dreams three times now, including once in a theater with a friend…and I’ve reacted with the same emotion every time. A wordless cartoon about a talking dog and his analog pal shouldn’t land with the force it does, but there’s nothing destructive or traumatic here. There’s platonic peril, sure, but Robot Dreams might be the most hopeful movie about connection I’ve ever seen. I wipe away moisture, but I feel optimistic and resilient when the credits roll alongside my tears.

 

I won’t say more, except that you should watch it. Robot Dreams is a crowd-pleaser suitable for all ages, and it’s finally available to rent for $5.99 on most services. You’ll take something positive from celebrating platonic potential for a change.

Sing Sing (2024)

Originally published in Wildcat Weekly on September 6, 2024

If I told you there was a movie about imprisoned men awaiting clemency in New York’s Sing Sing prison, you would justifiably expect a difficult watch. Certainly, watching a movie set in a state penitentiary stirs up numerous questions, and none have easy answers. When is a person rehabilitated? What penance qualifies as sufficient punishment for a violent crime committed thirty years ago? What does permanent incarceration do to a psyche as time passes and one’s greatest freedom becomes a small window facing outward?

Sing Sing doesn’t answer these questions; I’m not sure it even tries. This is a film about men in prison for the foreseeable future, and we see them bear the brunt of their circumstances as they pay for the transgressions of their former selves from the inside of an oppressive prison compound, but the film refuses to reduce these men to their circumstances. Sing Sing is the setting for Sing Sing but not its subject matter. Sing Sing is a film about men in a place that smothers hope and joy…but who find hope, joy, and purpose anyway.

The men in Sing Sing participate in a Rehabilitation Through the Arts program that puts on theatrical productions within the prison. The film follows the participants as they prepare to stage an original comedy. The story of their show is silly—it features Freddy Krueger, Hamlet, and an Egyptian prince—but their commitment to the craft is serious. They interview prospective cast members and discuss the power of theatre. They collaborate on ideas and encourage one another as they perform while waiting for life-altering legal decisions. They are a team committed to a cause, but they are also a family that leans on one another when things get rough—and they often do. It’s moving to watch their rehearsals and see these very different men set aside so much misery to entertain their peers and nourish their souls.

Leading the cast is Colman Domingo, who portrays the group’s leader, Divine G. Decades into a sentence for a crime he didn’t commit, Divine G is a playwright and mentor but also wounded by the time he’s served. Domingo is magnetic but understated, which matches Sing Sing to a T: there’s plot afoot throughout, but the film progresses so organically it rarely feels scripted. Helping that cause is the remaining cast, packed with no-longer-incarcerated alumni from the RTA program. These men mostly lack Domingo’s professional polish, but that reality elevates the film: every scene feels real because it represents what was real for them.

There’s more to say—I haven’t even mentioned Clarence Maclin’s contributions!—but I can sum up the rest: Sing Sing is excellent. It takes a special film to walk this delicate line between the darkness of incarceration and the joy of theatre, but Sing Sing achieves success on every cinematic level. You laugh, you cry, you feel.

If the film interests you, there are a few more showings this weekend at Tower Theater; that might be it for a while. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

 

Galaxy Quest (1999)

Originally published in Wildcat Weekly on August 30, 2024

If you’re a Trekkie, you watch because the movie gets you. It knows deep down that some part of you wishes Scotty would beam you up so Kirk or Picard could ask you to join his crew. You dream that the wide expanse of space is full of aliens with imposing foreheads that are dangerous enough for the music to crescendo, but not dangerous enough to stop you from boldly going where no one has gone before after narrowly escaping with a newfound appreciation for civilization and empathy. For Trekkies, Galaxy Quest is a wish-fulfillment romp with a cast cosplaying under original character names—but you get the reference. This one’s for you, Trekkie. It’s a love letter to you and your fandom.

If you’re not a Trekkie (or you are but you’ve got self-awareness about you), you watch because it’s funny. Actors pretending to be astronauts fighting with aliens who don’t understand the difference is situational comedy gold with a sufficient undercurrent of heart to lend it meaning. There’s slapstick humor, there’s dad joke wordplay, there’s send-ups of silly sci-fi tropes, and there’s a collection of super nerds saving the day at a comic convention. And the cast can’t be undersold: you’ve got Ripley from Alien boiling over subjugation, Snape from Harry Potter bristling over catchphrases, Monk from Monk dialing up the side-eyed weirdness, a young Sam Rockwell as the audience surrogate flailing his arms at the TV hijinks, and Buzz Lightyear playing “Shatner” with a generous helping of self-loathing heart. This cast is too good for a comedy about cartoonish space opera.

But Galaxy Quest is itself too good for its humble, silly premise. It’s the only film my family saw three times in theaters, and we laughed equally hard every time. I’ve watched it enough times that I can recite most lines with the cast. I usually prefer greater emotional nuance and provocation of thought, but Galaxy Quest is synonymous with fun in my family.

Activate the Omega-13 on your frustration with bland algorithm-optimizing Netflix slop. Watch Galaxy Quest instead. By Grapthar’s hammer, you shall be entertained.

Barbarian (2022)

Barbarian is a horror film that twists like few others. What starts as heart-pounding claustrophobic suspense pivots into what I will only describe as…other things…right at the moment that such turns would seem least appropriate. I knew this going in—Will Leitch’s phenomenal newsletter piece on that very thing convinced me to strain my schedule and squeeze seeing it in—but I underestimated just how engaging this presentation could be. 

 

I make this statement because, in the midst of a climactic scene with about fifteen minutes remaining in the film, something happened in our theater. The lights flashed brightly on the wall twice and then the screen cut to black before giving way to a translucent red hue. The audience was silent, sharing a collective curiosity over what had just happened. Phones came out, some muttered dialogue floated under the suddenly silent air conditioner, and a member from each of the two parties present with me—seven teens sharing three vape pens between them and a quiet couple in my row—left to speak with a manager. 

 

I, on the other hand, continued to munch on my popcorn. This is crazy, I thought with a grin so wide the others might have pegged me as a promotional plant for Smile. Will didn’t say it was interactive too.

 

It turns out: there was a power surge that caused everything to reboot. Ten minutes later, the film picked up again, and we all watched the conclusion that went over pretty well. In all seriousness, though, I assumed the cut and flashing were part of the movie. That speaks to the level of disorientation that Barbarian conjures at its finest moments. 

 

Dramatics aside, Barbarian is a masterwork of tension in the early going. Tess (Georgina Campbell) is in Detroit for a job interview, but her Airbnb is double-booked by charmingly awkward Keith (Bill Skarsgård). The two agree to share the tiny house for the night, with Tess in the locked bedroom and Keith on the couch, but Tess wakes in the night to the door open but Keith asleep in the other room. After her interview, Tess returns to explore the house, and the less said about what follows, the better.

 

Ultimately, there’s some very familiar horror stuff going on in Barbarian, but the film deftly evades ever feeling that way while watching. The pivots and twists are beautifully orchestrated, the performances are pitch-perfect all around, even if characters and motivations don’t always add up, and, as I said before, the effect as a whole is spellbinding. The set design, particularly the house’s interior, establishes an uneasy atmosphere that manages to imbue menace into the mundane in a way that screams “something is coming” but still subvert and toy with expectations. Barbarian feels confidently made and well-executed despite its many bold choices, and I’d say that all five principal cast members do well in their respective roles. 

 

If you’re looking for a fresh horror movie experience that takes some chances but mostly lands it, Barbarian is worth the price of admission. The experience of watching it is indeed remarkable, even if everything doesn’t entirely hold up under post-viewing scrutiny, and some of what it’s saying ends up pretty on the nose. As much as any genre, horror movies are about the visceral experience of watching them and the tangled web of emotions that flare up along the way. In that regard, Barbarian is a definite win.

Don't Worry Darling (2022)

No one can know what an intimate relationship is like from the outside. When friends or family members get divorced, someone always acts surprised. “I never saw it coming,” they say with misplaced incredulity. Even among the closest friends, there’s a sizable chasm between what an outsider sees between two people and what that connection is like in private. 

One of the elements I appreciate about Don’t Worry Darling, the new film from director Olivia Wilde, is that it willfully subverts this idea. The tight suburban world of Victory, suffocated on all sides by a deadly desert landscape, is predictable and familiar; it is the domestic sitcom sandbox Wandavision played around in where roles are clearly-defined and everyone waves in synchronized motions around the cul-de-sac when the hubbies leave for work and the wives buckle down for a day of cooking and cleaning. We are supposed to know what those marriages are like on the inside because they are archetypes we know.

But, of course, knowing what is happening inside leaves us uneasy. We aren’t supposed to know about the passionate love-making sessions Alice (Florence Pugh) has with her husband Jack (Harry Styles). We’re not supposed to believe such chemistry is possible! It is so perfect that we immediately question it, particularly while taking in an immaculate world that is an anachronistic terror of perfection, not unlike Pleasantville. Tension grows while we wait for Alice to catch up with us and finally question the apparent unreality of her heavenly, if decidedly antiquated, world. Punctuated by a haunting score full of musical throat-clearing and stomach-churning lines that sound sugar-coated by repeat and syncopate in grotesque and unnerving ways, the film urges Alice forward until she is literally trapped between a wall and a glass door and on the verge of suffocating under the weight of questions she has somehow failed to answer.

While Alice begins to question whether she, from the inside, truly understands her own marriage, the world around her grows increasingly sinister. A former friend Margaret (Kiki Layne) appears at lavish celebratory functions with dead eyes and claims of rampant lies. The optimism of best friend and doting mother Bunny (Wilde) clashes with the creeping, self-important guidance of development organizer Frank (Chris Pine) whose wisdom fills the airways between fun little fifties hits. We see a cult of sorts, or maybe aliens—the bizarre monolithic mountain the husbands enter for work each day certainly leans that way—but only Alice seems willing to confront it, and confrontation has costs.

If this all reads like glowing praise, it is: I really do admire what the film did well. Nothing here is truly new territory—you get shades of Luhrman’s Great Gatsby cocktailed with some Black Mirror vibes and a healthy note of Shymalan and the aforementioned Wandavision—but the construction that we see on film is powerful. Pugh elevates this even further, once again excelling at the center of emotional torture porn; for every moment when Styles doesn’t quite get there with the emotion of his Jack, Pugh nails three others with an intensity that confirms her dynamic abilities as a leading woman.

But, like everywhere in Victory, what meets the eye doesn’t quite match what gurgles under the surface. Don’t Worry Darling is so on the nose at times—the trailer scene of Pugh wrapping her face in plastic wrap meets a moment where her marriage is, would you believe, suffocating her—that the presentation borders on condescension, but the film is also so packed with characters and threads and ideas that it can’t possibly pay them all off. Without spoiling anything, for instance, there’s a high-intensity scene with Gemma Chan playing infallible Frank’s wife that plays on-screen with gravity matching the richest moments of Alice’s…but why? We’ve seen Chan in only a handful of scenes; our profile of her character runs directly counter to her actions here. The entire moment is a miscalculation—either that pr evidence that many embiggening elements got chopped from the final cut (I could believe this).

But this isn’t an isolated incident: the film is so dense with ideas that I had trouble tracking all of them. Foreshadowing lands flat; explanations work but under the weight of blunt reveals that again show so much that I worry Wilde and her writers think we are idiots incapable of internalizing nuance. The message of Don’t Worry Darling is unsubtle, which is fine, but in the place of a meticulous script is one with dozens of shiny things and ideas that Wilde goes out of her way to point to, only to leave to rust off-screen when we finally are sponged our answers.

I liked Don’t Worry Darling—there’s too much good stuff here with too much Pugh excellence to hate what is an aesthetically strong, well-made movie. I liked it, but I really wanted to love it despite its many unoriginal elements. It carried a potency throughout its runtime: maybe it was Pugh, maybe it was the similarity to Wandavision, or maybe it was the unbearable tension it gripped me from the moment the film began with raucous disorienting dialogue among six people spilling on top of itself. Hell, maybe it’s that I’d gone exactly two movie theater-less months since seeing Nope on opening night in July. (Or perhaps it’s the tabloid-level drama that had plagued the film’s promotion but kept its title in front of me for weeks.) Whatever the case, I have a definite affection for this film…I also know that it squanders a ton of potential by trying to do too much and insisting so hard on beating me over the head with a message and themes I’m already on board with.