Goodbye, summer vacation.
Movies
Even more so than its already-wild predecessor, Family Business is buck-wild cinema, but also tediously so at times. There are only so many out-there ideas (e.g. baby ninjas, extended Harold and Maude tributes, incestuous undertones, a dialectic reading of history with parents as oppressors and children as the oppressed—I could go on [and on]) you can stuff into a movie without giving any one of them time to develop beyond their one scene of introduction before everything becomes a numbing slurry that's hard to look at without your eyes glazing over. I'm still vaguely positive on this overall because it retains the first movie's manic obsession with cartoonish kineticism, stretching and squashing and zipping characters around in uninhibited movement with as much perverse glee as Chuck Jones and Tex Avery of yore. DreamWorks Animation isn't quite as inventive as it was back in the unprecedented innovation that gripped the studio in 2016/17, but this movie still handily slides into that legacy—a legacy I wish would cross-pollinate with some other animation studios, tbh. There are so many interesting things going on in specifically American animation right now, but there is never enough of those things happening in the same place to reliably create top-tier work. Grade: B-
Your mileage with this movie is probably going to vary as a function of how much you're willing to embrace the typical M. Night Shyamalan tics: stilted dialogue, precocious kids, off-beat humor, just a general feeling that the world depicted in his movies has been created by someone not entirely familiar with real human life. I mean, these are incontrovertible facts of Shyamalan's filmography by now, and whether or not you're into them is of course a personal choice. But this far into his career, I think the impulse some people have to act as if Shyamalan is trying and failing to make more conventional films is just ludicrous; the hump you have to get over to move from Shyamalan skepticism and Shyamalan respect (if not outright fandom) is acknowledging that he's doing these bizarre things on purpose, at least most of the time, and as long as you can buy into that, I don't think it's too far of a jump toward finding those habits actually really funny in a way that has us laughing with Shyamalan rather than at him—there's no way that you can convince me that, for example, having a rapper named "Mid-sized Sedan" isn't meant to be as hilarious as it is. The same goes for his more serious impulses—yes, the logic of the movie is... unconventional, especially once you get to the final piece of the movie where you see what's really going on, and even without that, "there's a beach that makes you age quickly" is kind of an inherently silly concept to take as seriously as Shyamalan does here (though in fairness, this concept was taken from the graphic novel he's adapting in this movie). But also, as off-kilter the journey is getting there, the movie does end up being a pretty engaging rumination on mortality and time and the ways that these two things intersect our bodies and our relationships, and I think there's an argument to be made that this rumination is so engaging precisely because of Shyamalan's off-kilter approach. There's just something about his dorky sincerity and sense of pacing and character that can click together at times into this otherworldly, even profound effect that I don't think I've seen in other filmmakers. And even putting all that aside, I just had a good time with this movie; I'm sure some people are going to be too busy rolling their eyes at the movie to enjoy it, but those people are missing out on a really fun, Twilight-Zone-esque chiller. This movie's good, is what I'm saying. Grade: B+
Technically, this is hypnotic: the droning score, the whispering sound design, the buttery-smooth camera movements, the dream-like lighting, the meticulously designed costumes and iconic location shooting—everything bubbling together in this thick, unsettling texture. Narratively, this feels in the vein of Neil Gaiman's screenplay for Robert Zemeckis's Beowulf (though the rest of the movie resembles nothing about that earlier film) in terms of how it takes a famous piece of very old English literature and wrenches it into a non-canonical left-turn that basically twists the story into being about itself: a hero narrative about the limitations of heroism, an Arthurian story that questions how we slot its characters into the archetypes that populate it, a myth about our own personal and cultural mythologies. There's some opaque stuff here that I'm still sifting through (I'm intrigued but ultimately nonplussed at Morgan Le Fey's role here), but it's the kind of movie that feels like it's going to open up with a little time rather than shrivel under scrutiny, which is always a good feeling to have walking away from a movie. Grade: A-
I found this to be dumb and undercooked, and for a significant part of its runtime I actively disliked it. Its '90s references are extremely surface-level (weird to see the Stranger Things treatment given to an era I can actually remember), the pacing is haphazard, and the characters have virtually no personality beyond their most basic identity labels: "the lesbians," "the computer nerd," "the comic-relief dummy," "the one who gets put through the bread-slicing machine," etc. That said, the climactic confrontation in the convenience store (wherein the aforementioned bread slicing occurs, among other insanity) is legitimately great, and it tempered my negativity toward the rest of this movie a good deal. Plus, I have it on good authority that the next movie is better, so I guess I'm continuing with this series. Also, there was this one part where a character starts puking, and at the very same time my infant daughter spit up in my lap, so I must say that I am intrigued by this new Netflix experiment in 4-D cinema. Grade: C
On a storytelling level, just a dull, dispiritingly corporatized SpongeBob; the usually delightful absurdity and silliness of the series is replaced by a mandatory-fun-esque set of lazy pop-culture gags and only theoretically absurd non-sequitur, and what's worse is that a significant portion of the climax is a backdoor pilot for the SpongeBob spin-off series Kamp Koral, which looks like the most excruciating thing imaginable to do to these characters. I suppose the animation here it technically impressive in the extent to which it manages to evoke the aesthetic sensibilities of the show with entirely computer-generated animation, but to what end? How in the world does it help anyone (including the studio, for whom computer animation is surely more expensive) to turn characters most familiar for their hand-drawn looseness into highly detailed 3D facsimiles? Is there a tie-in video game they are trying to create assets for or something? I would be in love with this animation if it were for a completely new world, but for SpongeBob, it just feels like a careless disregard for the sensibilities of the show, which I suppose is true of the movie as a whole, so points for coherence of purpose. Grade: C-
People say, "They made a whole movie out of a single conversation," and while that's 97% true, it does leave out Wallace Shawn's voiceovers at the beginning and end, which are absolutely key to what makes this movie so riveting and dynamic. The crux of Wally's rebuttal to Andre's pompous and privileged but ultimately sincere assertion that people need extraordinary experiences in order to find true happiness is that Wally insists that he doesn't need to "go to Everest" to be happy because he's happy where he is; there's beauty in the mundane of his own life, and happiness is in taking the time to realize that. But it's in the voiceover that we're given the context to know that Wally is, on some level, lying—whether to Andre or just to himself, it's hard to tell, but lying nonetheless. At the film's beginning, he rather miserably tells us how consumed he is with the drudgery of modern NYC life: the bills, the routine, the rejection, nostalgia—"When I was ten years old I was rich, I was an aristocrat, riding around in taxis, surrounded by comfort, and all I thought about was art and music. Now, I'm 36, and all I think about is money." And over the next hour and change, we watch him listen to Andre monologue about his travels, watch his face make these inscrutable little inflections that have such rich ambiguity. Is he bored? Impatient? Intrigued? Does he pity his friend, who, despite his telling tale after tale of transcendental enlightenment, is clearly sad? Does he envy his friend for his willful abandon of the very constraints that make Wally so morose in the opening voiceover? And then Wally finally says he's going to say what he's really thinking, and then gives his proto-"This Is Water" treatise, and the beauty of this unquittable movie is that it does nothing at all to clear up any of the previous ambiguity. Does Wally truly believe what he's saying? Is he merely trying to win points against this irritating monologuer with whom he didn't want to have dinner anyway? Has listening to Andre's own life philosophy in such detail clarified for Wally what's actually important? Has it merely made him believe in the intoxicating moment that it's what's most important, despite his deeper, material frustrations? In the movie's closing voiceover, Wally is no less wrapped up in nostalgia for the perceived comforts of childhood: "There wasn't a street, there wasn't a building, that wasn't connected to some memory in my mind." But is he any happier or more enlightened after his dinner with Andre? It's impossible to know, just as it is impossible for Wally (and we viewers) to know if Andre himself isn't pulling some kind of self-deluding facade about his own life philosophy. The whole film is this beguiling, fathomless investigation of the ways in which we struggle to know ourselves completely and then have to use that incomplete self-knowledge to try to understand even more unknowable others—how human connection is this delicate dance of shadows, grasping for meaning and belonging in the dark contours. "It is not good that the man should be alone," God famously says in Genesis, and yet that's how humankind is said to have come into being: alone, desperate for connection, not knowing that he is naked. Grade: A
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