sterling k brown

Biosphere (2023)

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Mumblecore may be long gone as a moment in time, but the Duplass Brothers are still out there keeping its memory alive.  While mumblecore overachievers Greta Gerwig & Noah Baumbach made the highest-grossing film of the year—a feature-length toy commercial, no less—The Duplasses are still making low-key, low-profile indies, still putting together dependably entertaining pictures with limited resources.  Even so, their new sci-fi bromance Biosphere feels like a mumblecore throwback stunt in its limited scope, featuring only two actors on a single, sparse, Apple Store futurist set.  That scaled-down approach to movie production made more sense when they were making lockdown-era laptop dramas like Language Lessons, but at this point in on-set COVID safety protocols, it’s more of a flex than a necessity.  In cynical Gen-X 90s terms, the narrative would’ve been that Barbie was a sign that Gerwig & Baumbach “sold out” and that the Duplasses are somehow nobler artists for continuing to slack around on a condemned & abandoned mumblecore playground.  In these post-Poptimism times we’re living in now, though, there’s no such thing as selling out, and all that really matters is that Barbie is one of the best movies of the year, while Biosphere is just the latest example of what its producers have been consistently making for the past couple decades running.

That doesn’t necessarily mean they’re lacking in ambition, though.  Biosphere takes admirably big swings on its tiny playground, and it scores major bonus points for taking those swings early, so that it actually has to fully deal with the social discomforts of its premise instead of saving it all for a last-minute twist. Mark Duplass stars opposite Sterling K Brown as childhood best friends . . . and the only two human beings left alive after a nuclear apocalypse.  Every detail outside the bond of their friendship gets phonier & phonier the further the story spirals out from there.  Duplass unconvincingly stars as the Republican president of the United States and the main instigator of the nuclear shoot-out that ended it all, despite having more of an under-achieving court jester vibe.  Brown is slightly more believable as the politically progressive scientist who built the self-contained biodome they’re riding out the Apocalypse in, but the circumstances of when & why he built it get less credible by the minute.  That doesn’t matter nearly as much as the question of how two cisgender men are supposed to rebuild society without any outside collaborators for procreation, a question made even more uncomfortable by how their dorm-room college bro relationship is tested by their newfound need to be Everything to each other in a world the size of a living room.  Since the movie is most effective when it’s about the specifics of their evolving friendships, it’s probably for the best that there is no world outside their biohome.

I can’t say much more about Biosphere‘s premise without completely spoiling it, which I guess means that you should watch it with your best bro, so you have someone to talk it out with.  It’s thematically provocative in its discussions of the physiology & power dynamics of gender, poking specifically at the most sensitively guarded area of the topic: straight male companionship.  What does it say about the Duplasses’ filmmaking ambitions that Mark already starred in a movie about those exact bromantic sensitivities way back in 2009?  I’m not sure, but I do know that Humpday was received as a substantial entry in the mumblecore canon, while Biosphere feels untethered from anything especially urgent or substantial at all.  Even within the subgenre of movies contained in biospheres, it’s nowhere near as provocative as the eco-terror bomb-thrower Silent Running nor as memorably goofy & inane as the stoner bro comedy Biodome.  It’s just a Duplass Brothers movie that happens to have a sci-fi theme – the kind of low-key, oddly phony drama that makes you wonder why they didn’t just stage an off-Broadway play instead of making a movie.  I appreciate its ambition to challenge its audience in its thematic ideas, while I also question when The Duplasses are going to start challenging themselves with cinematic ones.

-Brandon Ledet

FYC 2023: Bad Boys of Literature

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Awards Season is traditionally the one stretch in the cinematic calendar when pro critics and Hollywood publicists are allowed to aggressively promote Serious Art instead of Tentpole IP.  Neither the rush to crank out Best of the Year lists before competing publications nor the wine-and-dine FYC Industry parties that secure Oscar nominations are the most dignified way of highlighting what’s new & great in cinema, but it’s the system we’ve got to work with, and I appreciate the rhythm of the ritual.  One of the sure-sign markers that we are deep in Awards Season territory right now is that distributors & publicists are starting to screen movies (the lowest of low-brow artforms) about literature (the highest of high-brow subjects).  Anytime an academically minded movie about the morals, politics, and commerce of literature breaks out of the festival circuit to earn theatrical distribution in the final month of the year, you can be sure that it’s being positioned as a serious Awards Contender worthy of critical & industrial accolades.  What’s fun about the two high-profile literary titles that recently hit my FYC inbox is that they’re not well-behaved, agreeable participators in that tradition.  They’re both political provocations determined to shake up the literary status quo – too thorny to truly be considered Awards Bait crowd-pleasers, to their credit.

The major contender in this pairing is the publishing-world satire American Fiction, starring Jeffrey Wright as a frustrated English professor who writes a deliberately shitty, racist novel to parody the worst trends of the industry that regularly rejects his pitches, only to be horrified when it’s a runaway success.  The film isn’t exactly Bamboozled-level confrontational in its satire of what white audiences want from Black art, but it isn’t far off, giving its fake in-movie novels titles like My Pafology and We’s Lives in Da Ghetto.  The movie is often very funny as a cynical skewering of NPR liberalism, even if it often feels like the call is coming from inside the house. More importantly, it might finally be the Jeffrey Wright showcase that graduates him from That Guy character actor to household name (the NPR household, at least).  He’s given plenty of space to rattle off humorist dialogue as a fast-talking catty academic, and there’s a surprising amount of sincere domestic drama that fills the space between his satirist jokes.  Maybe too much.  American Fiction commits the most common sin of adapting a novel to the screen (in this case Erasure by Percival Everett), in that it’s willing to feel busy & overstuffed instead of editing out characters & plot events for a more streamlined narrative.  The upside of that approach is that Wright is given room to interact with other greatly talented Black actors like Tracee Ellis Ross, Issa Rae, Keith David, and Sterling K. Brown, each of whom play characters as complicated as his grumpy cynic protagonist.  It’s a funny satire about the grotesque commercialization of “The African American Experience” in modern media, but it’s also just an emotionally satisfying family drama with an excellent cast.

The other literary provocation making the rounds right now is the trans-rights essay film Orlando, My Political Biography, in which philosopher-turned-filmmaker Paul B. Preciado praises & confronts the literary genius of Virginia Woolf.  In particular, Preciado stages a conceptually shaky rebuttal to Woolf’s novel Orlando, taking it to task for not holding up to the scrutiny of modern gender & class politics (while also effusively praising it as an artistic triumph with profound personal insight into his own life).  Dozens of trans & nonbinary performers announce themselves in the film as a living continuation of the Orlando character, who “changes sex” while asleep halfway into Woolf’s novel.  They mix readings from the text with personal accounts of their own lives in the current political push for trans rights, often with Preciado’s narration pushing back on Woolf for making transitioning sound so magically easy & carefree.  The performative artifice of the project reminds me a lot of the communal therapy in Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing or Kitty Green’s Casting JonBenet, which create academic playgrounds for real people to work out their real feelings in false environments.  Despite that playfulness in form, though, I just wasn’t fully convinced by My Political Biography‘s academic approach to literary representation, especially by the time it starts referring to famous trans women like Christine Jorgensen and Marsha P. Johnson as extensions of Orlando.  Woolf’s fantastical novel evokes themes of gender fluidity that might still be applicable to the modern world in abstract terms, but the way this project demands that it concretely speaks for the individual experiences of all trans & nonbinary people gets decreasingly credible the further the metaphor is stretched.

Even if I wasn’t fully convinced by the academic rigor of Orlando, My Political Biography, I still appreciated its daringness as a political & literary provocation.  The way it casually claims Virginia Woolf as “perhaps nonbinary” herself, proudly demonstrates hormone shots & top surgery scars as a form of “pharmacoliberation,” and bends every personal monologue from its contributors into an affront to “The Binary Empire” is admirably confrontational as political activism, even if it falls short elsewhere in marrying abstract concepts to individual experiences.  There’s also some wonderfully playful anachronism in its attempts to graft Orlando the character onto the modern world, especially in early scenes where a nonbinary performer is modernizing Woolf’s text on a laptop while dressed in football pads & an Elizabethan collar.  Likewise, American Fiction makes a few momentary missteps in its academic satire (particularly in its opening-scene parody of “safe space” campus culture), but it’s still admirable for being willing to throw punches in the first place.  The movie directly grapples with its own participation in marketing Black stories to apologetic white audiences, culminating in an indecision on how best to conclude its narrative without creating the illusion that the issue of Race in the publishing industry has been resolved.  Where it comes ahead as the better film in this pairing is that it manages to pose those kinds of grand political provocations without losing touch with the (fictional) individuals at its center, never speaking for an entire social class through a strict, prescriptive lens.  In either case, though, I’m just happy there’s something out there to talk about other than the latest Marvel movie or Tom Cruise actioner; I almost feel like I’ve been reading books instead of mindlessly watching a screen.

-Brandon Ledet

The Predator (2018)

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Everything about The Predator makes it sound like it’s exactly My Thing. Director Shane Black’s most recent feature, The Nice Guys, is one of my favorite comedies in recent memory. His 1987 collaboration with screenwriter Frank Dekker, The Monster Squad, was a personally formative introduction to classic horror tropes & monsters for me as a young child. The original Predator film (in which Black appeared as an actor in a minor role) isn’t exactly my favorite Arnold Schwarzenegger classic, but is still a wonderfully tense, over-the-top sci-fi creature feature with an incredible monster design. Black’s latest sequel to that action-horror milestone even participates in a suburban-invasion monster movie trope that I’m always a sucker for, making me far more forgiving than most audiences for little-loved films like The Lost World: Jurassic Park, Strange Invaders, and even Alien vs. Predator: Requiem. That’s why it’s so baffling that The Predator is likely the worst experience I’ve had with a movie all year, a total letdown.

After the laugh-a-minute slapstick violence of The Nice Guys, the last thing I expected from The Predator was to relive my discomfort watching the Deadpool movies. The same performatively #edgy, coldly sarcastic, Gen-X throwback humor that makes Deadpool so exhaustingly unfunny is rampant here, with Black & Dekker indulging in their worst impulses as provocateur humorists who believe they’re pushing the envelope of Political Incorrectness but at this point are only reinforcing the status quo. The difference is that watching Deadpool with a live audience is an alienating experience where everyone in the room Gets The Joke but you, whereas The Predator’s humor falls flat with the entire room. Jokes about “Assburgers,” Tourette’s, “loonies,” and men named Gaylord play to laughless, stony silence. An extensive bit where Olivia Munn must strip naked to escape death is only made more uncomfortable by extratextual reports of the actor’s anger over been tricked into working with an undisclosed sexual predator in the cast (in a since-deleted scene). The problem isn’t that this style of juvenile shock humor is too offensive or tasteless to be enjoyed in public. It’s that it has become so old-fashioned that it’s too hacky to be funny.

A UFO crashes, releasing a Predator at the edge of the suburbs. The government attempts to cover it up. Escaped mental patients feebly attempt to kill it. A precocious child (played by Jacob Tremblay, who might need the talent agent equivalent of Child Protective Services at this point of his career) saves the day through his autistic superbrain. It’s all wacky, disconnected nonsense barely edited together with any sense of linear coherence in service of franchise-minded worldbuilding. Some of the franchise set-up is admittedly fun – namely in the film’s conceit that the Predators are intergalactic travelers that purposefully merge their DNA with various species, leading to hybrid specimens like dog-Predators & gigantic mega-Predators. Mostly, though, it makes The Predator feel like an inconsequential episode in a franchise looking to reinvigorate itself for future follow-ups. In true Deadpool fashion, Black & Dekker even joke about that franchise-wide storytelling style in the dialogue, having a government goon explain that the Predators have arrived on Earth before in ’87 & ’97, “but lately visits have been increasing in frequency,” a blatant dig at projects like the Alien vs. Predator crossovers and 2011’s (totally fine, but mostly forgotten) Predators. The problem is, though, that like most of the film’s humor, the joke falls flat and only serves to question what we’re even doing here, why we’re even bothering – both as creators and as audience.

Not everything about The Predator is horrendous. Olivia Munn & Trevante Rhodes mostly escape with their reputations intact. Sterling K Brown is, despite the material, genuinely fun to watch as a scenery-gnawing government goon, making even the emptiest phrases like “Fuck yeah,” land with surprisingly satisfying humor. Jacob Tremblay & Keegan-Michael Key fare the worst, but can’t be blamed for the idiocy they were employed to recite, dialogue where phrases like “Shut the fuck up!” are considered the pinnacle of verbal quipping. Some of that failed humor is softened by the cheap-thrills payoffs of the film’s hard-R gore & creature feature delights, which are admirably dedicated to practical effects. Speaking as a shameless gore hound & a lover of over-the-top monster movies, though, there’s no amount of practical splatter or space alien badassery that can fully cover up the stink of a comedy that fails this disastrously to be funny. The jokes are plentiful here, but plenty unamusing – sucking all of the fun out of the room with each #edgy punchline. There have likely been worse releases this year, but none I would have seen on purpose, none with this amount of unfulfilled promise.

-Brandon Ledet

Hotel Artemis (2018)

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There was a long period of time where slick crime pictures with deliberately overwritten dialogue felt distinctly like post-Tarantino drivel. The post-Tarantino thriller was a far-too-common manifestation of macho posturing where fresh-out-of-film school cinema bros could indulge in style-over-substance “subversions” of genre flicks – mostly to their own delight. Now that the artform of the Tarantino knockoff is much less ubiquitous, however, it’s evolving into something much more adventurous. Free Fire remolded the overly-talky Tarantino formula into an absurdist meta comedy about how audiences should be feel bad about being endlessly entertained by gun violence. Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri (embarrassingly) attempted to graduate it to the level of Oscar Bait Melodrama™. Neither were nearly as satisfying as the post-Tarantino sci-fi comedy Hotel Artemis, which has evolved the medium into something I never thought I’d see it become: adorable.

Set in a near-future dystopian Los Angeles where Jodie Foster is clearly tired of your shit, Hotel Artemis details a single night of backstabbing, thievery, and bloodshed among chatty, professional criminals. A sprawling cast that somehow includes Foster, Dave Bautista, Jeff Goldblum, Jenny Slate, Sterling K. Brown, Charlie Day, and Zachary Quinto mingles in the titular art-deco-meets-steampunk hotel while a historically massive riot rages on outside. Stray references to a border wall and the exorbitant cost of clean water detail the general state of the decaying, overpopulated world outside, but Hotel Artemis mostly concerns itself with the John Wickian criminal society that walks its wallpapered halls. “Hotel” is kind of a misnomer, as the space these organized, warring thieves occupy is in fact an underground hospital run by Foster: a rules-obsessed nurse who does not suffer fools gladly. She and Bautista, who acts as her enforcer yet fancies himself “a healthcare professional,” struggle to maintain order on this particularly chaotic night at the Artemis. Various criminal members with barely-concealed agendas talk shit & start deadly fights throughout the increasingly bloody night, counteracting the hotel’s intended function as a hospital for critically injured reprobates. As the situation worsens by the minute, Foster seems more annoyed than disturbed, passing off the rules-breaking violence around her as just another busy Wednesday shift, her least favorite night of the week.

Unlike most overwritten, post-Tarantino crime thrillers, this film is genuinely, consistently hilarious. With the hotel setting and absurdist mix-ups of an Old Hollywood face, Hotel Artemis embraces the preposterousness of its exceedingly silly premise in a way that more cheap genre films could stand to. Foster & Bautista have the adorable rapport of a local news segment on a raccoon that made friends with a baby elephant. Foster shuffles down the hotel’s hallways with animalistic determination & a distinct old-lady waddle that might go down as the comedic physical performance of the year. Bautista brings the same matter-of-fact line deliveries that are so endearing in his role as Drax in Guardians of the Galaxy, somehow making lines like “I will unheal the shit out of you” endearingly warm despite the physical threat of his massive body. Even the general rules of the film’s world-building are treated as a kind of throwaway joke. Characters repeatedly exclaim their surprise at the hotel’s existence, claiming they thought it was a myth, despite the massive neon sign that reads “Hotel Artemis” on the building’s roof. The entire film plays like that, casually breaking with logical consistency for the sake of a gag, relying on the easy charm of its cast and throwaway action movie one-liners like “Visiting hours are never” to pave over any jarring bumps in the road. It’s a gamble that totally worked for me, as I watched the entire movie with the same wide, stupid grin throughout.

I don’t know that I would recommend Hotel Artemis for sci-fi fans specifically. Besides shallowly explored concepts like 3D organ-printing & medically employed microbial robots explained in lines like “Yeah yeah yeah, I know what nanites are,” the movie’s genre beats are more consistently defined by its old-timey hotel setting and its clashes between various criminal elements. There’s minimally-employed CGI and even less world-building exposition, so I’m not sure a true sci-fi nerd is going to get the genre payoffs they’re looking for. Similarly, fans of the Tarantino & John Wick aesthetics the movie superficially echoes in its chatty crime world setting are likely to walk away unsatisfied, as the movie lacks the macho energy of either influence (and is better for it, in my opinion). It’s hard to know who to recommend Hotel Artemis to at all, given its bafflingly low critical scores and the fact that I was the only audience member laughing in my theater (for the first time since . . . Spy? Chappie?). The joys of watching Jodie Foster waddle around the Artemis and lovingly tell patrons they look “like all the shades of shit” are very peculiar & particular, which means that Hotel Artemis will have surprisingly limited appeal for a movie with this objectively wonderful of a cast. That kind of highly specific appeal can be a blessing in disguise for a scrappy, over-the-top genre film, though, and I can totally see Hotel Artemis gathering a dedicated cult following over time. I hope that appreciation doesn’t take too long, though, as Foster & Bautista’s adorable chemistry in this picture deserves to be recognized as a Cinematic Event.

-Brandon Ledet