Catching up with pop culture
Talking ‘The Black Phone,’ TV vampires, Chicago restaurants and FIRE, FIRE, FIRE.
So, good news everyone, I think this newsletter is back in business. I’m still surprised how much my brief foray into another career field sapped my energy and motivation outside of work, but really happy to see how that’s returned as I’ve gone back to something more fulfilling. Rather than collapse at the end of the day, I have more energy to stay up and watch things or write, and I’m finding ideas for this newsletter come flooding back to me.
There’s some good stuff on the way. Early next week, I have an audio interview posting that I’m really excited to release. And I’ll have a post Wednesday that’s a bit out of the ordinary, a mingling of personal/movie-related reflections attached to a bittersweet anniversary. Not sure that we’ll have anything next Friday, but I’ll be launching Sundays with Spielberg on Sunday, Sept. 4, and then starting Franchise Friday back up on Sept. 9. Perry and I have already started tossing around a really fun idea for our next We’re Watching Here; plus, the slow theatrical release schedule is going to make this an ideal time to catch up on 2022 releases as we prepare for the end-of-year stretch.
In the meantime, I wanted to briefly run through some movies, TV and books I’ve been enjoying in the past few months that I just haven’t had the time to write about. I’d love to hear what you’re reading/watching as well, so feel free to leave a comment!
The Black Phone
I’d wanted so see the latest from director Scott Derrickson and writer C. Robert Cargill on the big screen, but only just got around to catching it on Peacock. I think Derrickson and Cargill have a great partnership, stretching back to Sinister and including Marvel’s Doctor Strange. I was also a fan of the short story by Joe Hill on which this film’s based.
The Black Phone is a suspenseful and well-crafted horror-thriller, centered on Finney (Mason Thames), a boy in the 1970s who’s abducted by a masked man the news has called The Grabber (Ethan Hawke). Confined to a dingy basement, Finney begins receiving calls on a disconnected landline, and they’re coming from the young boys The Grabber has previously killed.
It’s a killer premise, and Derrickson and Cargill are faithful to Hill’s story while expanded its world and teasing more out of its supernatural subplots. I wouldn’t call it overly scary; it’s extremely suspenseful and unsettling in places, but the violence is fairly restrained for this type of movie, and the film is more interested in building its scares through atmosphere and environment. It’s a thoughtful film, almost anti-nostalgic, looking back on growing up in an era of nearly ever-present danger at home and in the streets. The Grabber’s old-school drama mask, which can be adapted to fit his emotions, is one of the more iconic images I’ve seen in recent horror.
Derrickson gets a strong performance from Thames, and while Hawke gets less screen time than I’d originally thought, he makes the most of it and creates an effective, unpredictable and emotionally volatile villain. Jeremy Davies is equally chilling as the monstrous father Finney has waiting for him back home, and I really liked Madeleine McGraw as Finney’s sister Gwen. The film is at its most gripping when it’s confined to the house, as Finney must depend on his wits and a bit of supernatural assistance to outwit the grabber. It’s less successful when it tries to cobble together Gwen’s own supernatural escapades, which rope in a pair of cops who seem a bit too ready to believe in a pint-sized psychic. I also think the film’s final note, in which Finney’s plight earns him attention with the ladies, is a bit of a weird place to end it.
Still, it’s a solid adaptation of one of Hill’s best short stories. I think Derrickson continues to be one of the most technically proficient, and I love that he continues to use the genre as a place to explore ideas of spirituality and humanity.
What We Do in the Shadows
I hated the idea of a What We Do in the Shadows TV show. Taika Waititi’s original film was one of my favorite films of 2015, and the vampire mockumentary is still one of the very few comedies I can return to time and again, finding new laughs.
A series seemed like it would run the idea into the ground, but for four seasons, the FX comedy has been one of the most consistently delightful and purely hilarious shows on TV. I’ve come to like spending time with Lazlo, Nadja, Nandor the Relentless, Colin Robinson and Gizmo (sorry, Guillermo) just as much as I liked hanging with the film’s ensemble. And the show has found a perfect way to combine centuries of supernatural myth with the mundanity and banality of modern life.
This fourth season is, somehow, the show’s strongest yet, a nonstop parade of episodes that deliver the biggest (and most delightfully filthy) laughs on TV. Last season’s cliffhanger, which saw energy vampire Colin Robinson (Mark Proksch) dying and then reborn, has led to some of the funniest sight gags and jokes of the season; it’s never not funny to see Proksch’s middle-aged head on a toddler body. Likewise, Nadja’s goal to open a vampire nightclub (like in Blade!) has been a source of reliable humor, and Nandor’s encounter with a djinn has also provided steady laughs. The show isn’t afraid to go for dark humor or to ladle in just a bit of heart, but it always makes sure that silliness is the first priority. And let’s give it up for Matt Berry, who can get me to belly laugh just by the sound of his voice (the four-season running gag that he shouts “Bat!” before transforming into a bat always makes me laugh).
Beavis and Butthead
I wasn’t an avid Beavis and Butthead fan as a teenager, even though I was the right age for it. Like I’ve said before, I was that pious jerk who thought that stuff was beneath him; I rolled my eyes at my brother and his friends for watching Beavis and Butthead.
But as I grew older and a bit less priggish, and especially as I realized Mike Judge is a genius, I began to appreciate the two dim-witted dolts and their mix of satire and stupidity. Earlier this summer, I turned on the new Paramount+ movie Beavis and Butthead Do the Universe to help me get through folding laundry, and found myself laughing much harder than I’d anticipated. Turns out Beavis and Butthead translate just fine to our era, and there are some really clever moments of the two encountering modern culture (Beavis falling in love with Siri is fantastic). I’d thought bringing the characters back for today was a huge mistake; it would appear I’m wrong (heh-heh, I said “wood”).
Mike Judge’s Beavis and Butthead debuted last month, also on Paramount+, and this continuation of the MTV series feels like it hasn’t missed a beat. Each episode has two cartoon vignettes, in which the dunder-headed duo ventures to new levels of stupidity. Sometimes its satirical, other times, it’s just really, really dumb. And yes, there’s fire (fire! fire! fire!). But it’s all good-natured, and while this might be a weird thing to say, there’s an innocence to the crassness. Judge wisely doesn’t take advantage of streaming’s content possibilities and keeps everything rated TV-14, because Beavis and Butthead saying f-words just wouldn’t be funny.
But the main draw of the reboot is how it brings back the best part of the original show: Beavis and Butthead sitting on a coach making fun of music videos. And yes, those still exist. But even better, the show has the duo watching YouTube or TikTok, and it’s possible that, in TikTok, Beavis and Butthead have finally found something dumber than they are. Clips of them discovering ASMR or Beavis becoming a BTS fan are delightful, and I’ve been pleasantly surprised how much I’ve laughed at the return of these two idiots.
Severance
I mentioned this Apple TV+ series a few months back, and it took me a while to get through it. That’s not a quality issue, though. The Ben Stiller-produced sci-fi thriller is one of TV’s best shows, and a timely meditation on our relationship with work. It’s a slow burn, and I have to admit that watching it during a period when I was also beginning to dabble in the corporate world made it an uncomfortable watch.
But having gotten to the end, I can’t wait until season two. Severance is a refreshingly original bit of science fiction, and I love the deliberate way it opens up its world just a bit more as the season continues. The production design is some of the best I’ve seen, and there’s so much to be said about our relationship to our jobs, the way corporations mythologize themselves and try to to install an almost religious devotion among their employees, and how maintaining balance between work and home requires us to create separate selves. But the show’s never preachy; it’s thrilling, suspenseful and funny, and powered by one of the best ensembles on TV. And its season finale is an all-timer, an almost excruciatingly tense bit of work that breaks open the show’s world and dangles tantalizing possibilities for the next season without losing the series’ focus on questions of work, balance and what it means to be human.
Easily one of the year’s best.
The Rehearsal
I have no idea where to start with this one.
Nathan Fielder is a genius. He may also be a monster. That’s not a new concept; it occurred to me several times when watching his Comedy Central reality show Nathan For You, in which the comedian would purport to help a struggling business, only to introduce a labyrinth series of fake outs, loopholes and surreal requirements that often made his subjects the butt of the joke (but Fielder himself, with his cringe-inducing persona and need for connection, was always in the crosshairs as well).
The Rehearsal, his HBO reality show that just finished its first season, opens with a can’t-miss premise: people come to Fielder for help with a personal encounter they must undertake. For example, in the first episode, the subject needs help preparing to tell his trivia team that he doesn’t have the master’s degree they all think he possesses. From there, Fielder builds elaborate sets, brings in actors and goes to extreme lengths to help the subject prepare for every possible scenario that could arise.
But that’s just where the show starts. Throughout its season, Fielder abandons the premise as he helps a woman prepare for potential motherhood by building a house for her to live in three months, where she will experience what it’s like to raise a child from infancy to adulthood. Due to child labor laws, this requires constant switching out of children, and there’s also a stretch where she attempts to find a single man to join the experiment with her. But things get even more surreal when Fielder joins the experiment, and begins to hijack the rehearsal to deal with his own hangups and neuroses.
The Rehearsal is part Nathan for You and part Synecdoche, New York. Like Charlie Kaufman’s film, reality is fluid. Even having seen the entire season, I’m not sure how much of this “reality” show actually is real, and how much is an elaborate fake-out on Fielder’s part. That’s much of the point; Fielder’s a trickster, and from the start he plays with our perceptions of what’s part of the rehearsals and what’s deception. The show’s universe folds in and out of itself, which is most interesting in the first three episodes, particularly one in which Fielder starts an acting class that then goes down several of its own rabbit holes. As the show continues to focus more on Fielder and the child actors, though, it becomes deeply uncomfortable, and there are several ethical dilemmas that flow out of this show, based on what might or might not be staged, particularly in the show’s final episode.
It’s an uncomfortable experience, and I’m not sure how much of that is by design. And yet, as messy as The Rehearsal gets, it’s always fascinating. As a person prone to social anxiety, I was endlessly intrigued by Fielder’s interest in preparing for every social situation or, in the final episode, getting a chance to replay errors to see what he could have done differently. And the show is very often just as funny as it is uncomfortable, usually at the same time. There are even moments of emotional catharsis, although much of that depends on what’s real and what’s being manipulated. I don’t know what a second season of this show even looks like, but I’m very curious to see what other shenanigans Fielder has in store.
The Bear
I’m still making my way through this FX on Hulu program, but right now it’s hard to imagine a better show this year.
Jeremy Allen White heads a phenomenal ensemble as a former chef at New York’s best restaurant who takes over his family’s Chicago restaurant after his brother’s suicide. He brings with him his dedication to excellence and attempts to turn the surly and lackadaisical kitchen staff around, while also keeping the lights on.
I’ll admit I almost didn’t make it past the first episode of The Bear. From the start, it’s a stressful show. It perfectly captures the constant anxiety of high-intensity jobs and the constant in-fighting between the staff, and the go-go-go pace of the pilot made it an almost unbearably tense watch. But White’s performance was compelling enough and the world realized so well that I stuck with it.
And it’s been a reward. I went from pacing myself on episodes to spare myself stress to pacing myself in order to savor each visit to The Original Beef of Chicagoland. The show quickly lets up the intensity just enough to flesh out its characters, who go from being shrill punks in the pilot to nuanced and well-drawn individuals. I particularly like Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), the family friend and manager of the restaurant who is a quick-tempered blowhard but also revealed to have a soft side when it comes to his daughter. And Ayo Edebiri is doing award-worthy work as Sydney, a young and ambitious chef who quickly gets more than she bargained for; watching Sydney come into her own and serve as a partner for White’s Carmy is a joy.
It’s not for everyone. As I said, it moves at a relentless clip, and I imagine anyone who’s spent time in a high-stress environment may have a visceral reaction to some episodes. And it pushes the limits for language, particularly for an FX show. And yet, if you give it time, it’s a gem, drawing out wonderful characters and their relationships in the midst of the pressure. The food looks amazing (they’re opening a Chicago beef place down the road from me, and watching this show has made me mightily impatient). And it’s worth noting that too many reviews don’t note how funny the show is; sometimes the laugh come to keep from crying, but I think Richie might be one of the funniest characters on TV, and an episode in which Carmy and Richie head to the suburbs to cater a kid’s birthday party draws some big laughs.
I’m glad to see people responded well to this show and it’s getting a second season; this is a world I love to come back to.
The Island by Adrian McKinty
Speaking of Hulu, Adrian McKinty’s latest novel The Island was recently announced to be getting a limited series adaptation on the streamer. Having recently finished the book, I can see how it might make a gripping TV show. In fact, that might be a better fit for it.
The book is a solid beach read about a family on vacation to Australia. While sight-seeing, they pay some locals to ferry them out to their private island so they can view some of the wildlife that seems to be evading them on their travels. While there, there’s a horrible accident, and the family finds themselves running for their lives.
It’s a great set up, and McKinty lets the story unfold at a breathless pace. Once disaster strikes, the story doesn’t let up, and it’s equal parts survival thriller and horror story. The family has to outwit not only a tight-knit community out for blood, but traverse the dangerous Australian wilderness and the scorching son. It’s a suspenseful read, and McKinty knows his way around a chase sequence. There’s at least one sequence here that I found horrifying, and I have to imagine it will be scaled back in the adaptation, but it’s a truly visceral moment. I also found the story’s main character, a young woman who endured a cult-like upbringing and married a kind but controlling older man, compelling.
But McKinty’s a bit too fond of plot twists, and throws a few too many reversals at his readers, particularly in the book’s final 50 pages. One in particular feels like one card too many placed atop a house of them, and it threatens to make everything collapse. McKinty’s depiction of the clan out to get the family is also a bit uncomfortable at times, a bit stereotypical in its depiction of Australians living far from community. And the attempts to tie the story in to white people’s treatment of Australian natives is admirable, but feels a bit too heavy-handed in places.
Still, as a light read, it’s quick and fun. And I have to imagine it will make for an entertaining series.