It’s a bit of a weird week in terms of new releases. Transformers One hits theaters, but the review embargo actually lifted last week (in case you missed it, here’s my review). There are some smaller releases out, but our family is in the midst of baseball and soccer season and other obligations, so I haven’t been able to make it out to screenings. Plus, last weekend I was felled by some health issues that kept me largely on the couch.
But rather than release nothing this week, I thought I’d do a quick digest of some movies, TV shows and books I’ve consumed lately. As we head into the back months of the year, I’m sure I’ll be doing more of this, especially as I begin to catch up with the movies I missed earlier in 2024. We’re about to head into the busy season with reviews – year-end releases and catch ups, plus Halloween and Christmas movies. This slow week is an anomaly; there’s a lot more coming soon!
Rebel Ridge – Now on Netflix
When I first saw the trailers for Jeremy Saulnier’s Rebel Ridge, I was a bit disappointed. Saulnier delivered a great one-two punch last decade with Blue Ruin and Green Room, the latter of which is one of the most unrelenting and intense experiences I’ve had in a theater. Rebel Ridge looked like any other straight-to-Netflix dad movie, a spin on First Blood or Jack Reacher.
I’m far from the first to make those comparisons, and they’re definitely apt. But what sets Rebel Ridge apart from the typical drifter vs. local law thriller is Saulnier’s confident direction and the film’s thoughtful themes. Aaron Pierre plays Terry Richmond, a former Marine who heads into a small town to pay his cousin’s bail; he’s pulled over by local cops who exploit a legal loophole to take the $30,000 from him. Terry tries to play nice with the cops, but soon finds their corruption runs deep, ultimately pitting him against the town sheriff.
Saulnier knows what kind of film the audience is expecting. He leans into current attitudes toward cops and systemic racism, and builds exquisite tension, letting the upper hand shift from scene to scene. You think this is going to be a movie that builds to a climactic, bloody finale. But while the climax satisfies from an action standpoint, it delivers a more surprising and thoughtful payoff and is more interested in the battle of wits between Terry and the sheriff, played by a wonderfully oily Don Johnson.
This is genre fare done to near perfection, taking the Jack Reacher/Rambo premise and then subverting our expectations. Yes, the film hits on institutional racism and police corruption, but Saulnier’s more interested in the power of one rotten individual over others who think they’re doing right by staying silent. As Terry, Aaron Pierre gives a career-making performance, playing the smartest man in the room, and alternates between calm calculation and explosive rage. This was a great surprise and continues to prove no one is making better thrillers than Jeremy Saulnier.
‘The Dark Tower’ by Stephen King
As a constant Stephen King reader, I’d long avoided the Dark Tower series. I knew the seven-book series was a long commitment, and I’m not traditionally a fantasy person. To be honest, I had traditionally assumed the series was a hobby that King’s publishers allowed him to indulge so long as he kept cranking out the horror hits.
I finally relented and purchased the entire series of novels early in the pandemic and, for the last few years, I’ve been slowly making my way through them. But it hasn’t been because they’re a slog but because I fell so in love with this world and these characters, and I wanted to savor it.
I recently finished the seventh and final book, The Dark Tower, and my view on this series has completely changed. These aren't piffles or disposable text. They’re essential for any fan, telling a ripping yarn while also allowing King to examine the power of storytelling and the reason why he writes.
I won’t recap the series; this is supposed to be a short entry after all. But I’ll just say that I adored this mix of fantasy, Western, science fiction and horror. The first book, The Gunslinger, is a bit of a rough go – it was written when King was pretty young – but if you get through that, you’re rewarded with The Drawing of the Three, which finds King’s storytelling and character work at his most muscular. After that, I was hooked, and I found myself loving this series more as it continued. King indulges his every interest, shifting genre and tone several times within a book. He tosses in references to his own stories and other beloved tales; in its back half, the saga becomes one of the most epic pieces of metafiction I’ve read. The best entry in the entire series is actually a love story, a prequel that helps explain crucial backstory to Roland and sets the stakes for the rest of the series.
King has a reputation for fumbling his endings (although I’d say his batting average is better than he gets credit for), and I initially worried the final book was going to drop the ball. It takes a few chapters to tie up the loose threads from the previous story and find its new direction. But once it gets going, it’s one of the most gripping, suspenseful and heartbreaking things King’s written. I fell in love with these characters and this ka tet that Roland pulled in from various eras of New York City. I cried when key heroes died. I gasped at some reversals. And I thought the ending was brilliant.
King is by far my favorite and most-read author (it helps that he’s so prolific), and reading this ranks up there with my absolute favorite novels of his. It’s as epic as anything in The Stand, as beautiful and terrifying as anything in It. It’s fantastic, and I’m glad I saved a short side story, The Wind Through the Keyhole for later so I have an excuse to go back and visit Roland and friends again down the road.
‘You Like it Darker’ by Stephen King
I wasn’t going to jump right from The Dark Tower to another Stephen King book, but my wife got me this collection of short stories for my birthday and I couldn’t resist plunging into it once I finished Roland’s story. This 12-tale collection was a good palate cleanser after spending so much time in Midworld, and a reminder that King can do brevity as good as he can do epics.
You Like it Darker is a solid collection. I wouldn’t say it’s as classic as, say, Night Shift, Skeleton Crew, or Nightmares and Dreamscapes, but there’s still good stuff. “Two Talented Bastids” is a good sci-fi tale about the origin of two artists’ powers. “Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream” marries a tale of precognition with King’s recent interest in detective novels. “Finn” is a nasty little spin inspired by “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” that feels in line with earlier King shorts like “Quitters, Inc.” And “Rattlesnakes” is a sequel of sorts to Cujo, although saying that along with this story’s title might make you think there’s a bit more animal menace at play in what is actually one of King’s more chilling recent ghost stories.
It’s interesting to read King’s stories as he ages. His protagonists are now older men and women, often aware that they’ve arrived in the final act of life and mulling over mortality and regret. He’s a little more sentimental; while his stories don’t always end with a happy ending (“The Fifth Step” ends with a gruesome little punchline), he’s mostly more interested in more existential terrors than visceral ones. And it’s interesting to read these stories and see the COVID-19 pandemic so prominent in several of them; it’s a reminder that King, just like any good artist, is incorporating his daily life and concerns into his work.
A lot of great artists lose their fastball when they age. King’s been doing some of his best work in recent years. Billy Summers, Fairy Tale and Holly are all great reads, and this collection proves he can still work the old magic when he sits down at his typewriter. I can’t wait to see what he has in store next.
‘Wise Guy: David Chase and the Sopranos’ – Now on Max
Another piece of essential pop culture I started a while back and finished this year was The Sopranos. I began watching it in 2019, when the show hit the 20th anniversary of its debut. I finished it earlier this year. It took me a while to get through because I had to take several breaks; hanging out with these characters too long makes you feel dark and dirty.
But that’s not to suggest I didn’t like The Sopranos. On the contrary, I think it’s possibly the greatest drama series I’ve ever watched, and I’d go as far as to say James Gandolfini’s work as Tony Soprano is one of the best performances I’ve seen in any medium. The show was funny and shocking, with several episodes that rank among the best of television. What I wasn’t prepared for was how philosophical, sad and even spiritual this show could be. Yes, it’s a story of a mobster trying to balance work with family. It’s also about America and curdled capitalism. It grapples with the question of whether we can change our natures, and it doesn’t provide easy answers. Death and mortality haunt every corner of the screen. It takes place in a world where the spiritual exists and has several episodes set in what might very well be Purgatory. It’s a towering achievement.
When I went through the show, I used The Soprano Sessions by Alan Sepinwall and Matt Zoller Seitz as a guide, reading their commentary on each episode as I finished. And so, when I sat down last weekend to watch the two-part Max documentary Wise Guy: David Chase and the Sopranos, there wasn’t much about the show’s lore I wasn’t aware of. Alex Gibney’s doc is centered around a long conversation with the show’s creator in a mockup of Dr. Melfi’s office, and it covers Chase’s earlier television career, the inspiration for The Sopranos, as well as an exploration of the show’s themes and the impact of Gandolfini’s death.
Like I said, there’s not a ton new here for people who already know their Sopranos history. You’re probably well aware already that Chase’s inspiration centered on his tense relationship with his mother, that every network turned them down, that HBO was nervous about showing Tony kill a man in cold blood early in season one, and that the cut-to-black final shot was controversial. But given the greatness of The Sopranos, I really don’t care. It’s fun to watch the scenes again, and I appreciated hearing the cast talk about their time on the show, even when it wasn’t the easiest working environment. Chase and the other interviewees are open about how difficult the show was on Gandolfini, and there’s always fun in watching Chase get prickly when probed. There’s a lot of fun production footage, including a montage of actors who auditioned for the key roles. And I appreciate that the doc confronts the “less yakkin’, more whackin’” toxic fans and delves into some of the serious themes the show explored. And even if its final gag can be seen coming a mile away, it’s still a great button because it ties into its most divisive moment.
What We Do in the Shadows – Streaming on Hulu
Given that I spend a lot of time with movies or books, I’m notoriously slow at moving through TV shows. My wife and I still have about three episodes left of the latest season of The Bear, I’m an entire season behind on Ted Lasso and THREE seasons behind on Only Murders in the Building. And these are all shows I love!
I needed to decompress at the end of the day with a comedy and found that there was an entire season of FX’s What We Do in the Shadows that I’d neglected to watch. This wasn’t intentional; I absolutely love this show. I think Taika Waititi’s movie is the funniest of the last 10 years, and somehow the half-hour series that spun off from it – a documentary focused on a household of Staten Island vampires – more than holds its own. Given that the show’s final season starts next month, I figured now was a good time to make this a way to laugh off the stress at night.
Not much to say about this except that if you’re a fan of the show’s first few seasons, I can’t imagine not enjoying this one. It’s as funny and gross as anything else the show’s done. The last season ended on a cliffhanger, with familiar Guillermo asking a friend to turn him into a vampire because he was frustrated about his master, Nandor’s, dilly-dallying. This season handles that fallout as Guillermo seeks an answer as to why his abilities aren’t coming in and keep his secret hidden from Nandor, who has said if his familiar turned without his assistance he’d kill him, himself and all the other vampires in the house. There’s a lot of great humor and some fun ideas as the vampires discover a local mall, Matt Berry’s Lazlo tries to find solution for Guillermo’s predicament – in the season’s best episode, he creates a species of cuddly vampire hybrids that he then tasks Guillermo with putting down. And energy vampire Collin Robinson run for Staten Island comptroller. It’s all silly and bloody good fun, punctuated by Matt Berry continuing to give the best pronunciations on TV. Can’t wait to see what’s in store for the final run of episodes.