The Moment

“The Moment” of Aidan Zamiri’s mockumentary satire refers to the long tail of success from British pop artist Charli XCX’s sixth studio album “Brat” and the cultural phenomenon that it spawned, one colloquially known as Brat Summer. That phenomenon, however, and the album itself, are never really explored or even explained in detail. No, true to its title, “The Moment” picks up at the point where the artist’s original intent, whatever it was, has been co-opted by the culture at large and turned into something out of the artist’s control. And so, the questions “The Moment” asks are: when, exactly, does a pop culture craze end, and how does it end, and why does it end, and who ends it? These questions have been asked before but even so, Charli XCX, who conceived the story that Zamiri and Bertie Brandes turned into a script, finagles creatively meta ways to ask them. Indeed, the question of when Brat Summer will conclude is literally posed aloud by none other than Stephen Colbert in an ersatz Charli XCX interview on The Late Show. I LOL’d. 

If Charli (we will refer to the character as Charli and the actor as XCX) seems ready to let the moment end, the surrounding industry types seek ways to prolong it, creating a Brat credit card and urging her to do what music stars have done time immemorial and make a concert film. In essence, that’s what “The Moment” is, the making of the making of the concert film as clueless handlers hire a director (Alexander Skarsgård) who cultivates an air of collaboration and openness while simultaneously practicing neither, seeking to transform Brat into a version of Taylor Swift’s Eras tour. No doubt this stems in part from the real-world tension between XCX and TayTay, but it is, nevertheless, hilarious to see Charli throwing herself on the mercy of the industry machine by dangling from a stationary harness.

The format might draw from “This Is Spinal Tap” (1984), but the titular band in the mockumentary godfather was all about delusions of grandeur while Charli is wracked with exhaustion and self-loathing and seeks to sabotage her own concert movie. That suggests “This Is Spinal Tap” less than the mockumentary styled “Curb Your Enthusiasm” HBO pilot as do Charli’s comically cringe encounters with various people that drop in and out of her orbit. XCX effuses nimble comic timing and a genuine skill at deadpan in these moments, like the one on her tour bus where she hesitantly peers around a corner to reluctantly allow the driver to drop some ostensible knowledge, evincing celebrity as forever walking on eggshells rather than living among the clouds. If I were writing a Letterboxd review of “The Moment” I might just write that Charli XCX gives the performance of the year as Larry David. She’s a misanthrope for the TikTok generation.

I know, I know. Letterboxd, TikTok, Brat, Charli XCX, what is any of this in the first place? And that’s the thing about “The Moment”: it fails to offer any entry point for anyone who is not completely plugged into current pop culture unless you are the rare middle-aged dude such as myself who happens to totally be into Charli XCX. (I was the oldest person in the theater at my showing.) Likewise, a non-Charli’s Angel might watch “The Moment” and come away thinking, “Well, who is Charli XCX?” Adhering to narrative rules that we get to know the character before the character loses all sense of herself would yield a more powerful closing punch, no? Except the point of XCX’s shape-shifting persona has always been obfuscation of the person, and even more than that, an awesome defiance of the fan service that has come to define so much of modern pop culture. That’s one of the reasons I admire her artistry so much. And if the extreme close-ups of Charli throughout “The Moment” evoke a desperate desire for the camera to peel away the persona, she pushes back at every turn, brought home in a dizzying denouement where she might as well put “Brat” in a burn barrel out back, pour some gasoline on it, and light a match. 

Friday's Old Fashioned: Missile (1988)

A sign affixed to the side of a building that we glimpse right near the start of Frederick Wiseman’s 1987 documentary welcomes us to Space & Missile Country. It put me in mind of the sorts of sign you might see in a tourist area, like one in St. Augustine, Florida, say, proclaiming Welcome to Fountain of Youth Country, or something. But this is not St. Augustine: this is Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, responsible not merely for safeguarding our nuclear missile supply but being prepared to launch those missiles in the event of American enemies launching at us. It is serious, not frivolous, and yet the tone of “Missile” is sober in a kind of prosaic way. Wiseman embeds us with the 4315th Training Squadron of the Strategic Air Command and so many scenes of these new recruits sitting and listening to instructors, the commonplaceness of it all, the little Styrofoam cups of coffee, the way there are couple eager beavers who answer and ask questions while most of them just sit there quietly, will take you right back to every first-week orientation of any job you have ever had, like going to work at America’s nuclear missile silo is akin to starting a job at General Mills. It’s humorous, relatable, and a little unsettling. 

“Missile” evokes such contradictory tones throughout its two-hour run time. Trainees are taught the launch angles of ICBMS while also being lectured on the necessity of keeping their workstation clean and not fraternizing with others. They go over the painstaking two-key turn system required to launch missiles and during one of the practice runs, a trainee struggles to insert her key. At one point we even see a trainee being given multiple choice test taking tips, as if examinations on ICBMs are the Iowa Test of Basic Skills. As was Wiseman’s preferred style, scenes like this are not embellished with talking heads, voiceovers, or even music; he lets them lie there for us to make of them what we will. That is not to say, however, that Wiseman (also credited as editor) is not deliberate in how he pieces together his many scenes. Near the beginning we eavesdrop on a classroom discussion about the moral implications of being ordered to launch missiles in which a senior officer stresses to the students not to merely function as unthinking robots. 

If this scene seems selected to impress a certain mental and moral weight on this crash course in nukes, it instead foreshadows a gradual sort of circular logic. Even if you are urged to contemplate what it means to be the last link in the intercontinental ballistic missile chain, you are just the last link in a chain, nevertheless, a riddle that can never truly be solved. Indeed, near the end we see a successful training exercise and when the ersatz ICBMs are launched, a small celebration ensues, like the new recruits have just earned the league title in bowling. True, Wiseman concludes with a speech citing deterrence as the main role of all these missile-minders, but at the end of the day, deterrence is just a solemn word for being prepared to bring about The Day After. 

Some Drivel On...Good Kill

The title of writer/director Andrew Niccol’s “Good Kill” (2013) refers to the prosaic confirmation issued by Air Force Major Tommy Egan (Ethan Hawke) each time he successfully terminates a confirmed target from above. He is not in a jetfighter when he does this, though, but piloting a drone from a desk chair in an air-conditioned cubicle outside Las Vegas thousands of miles away from America’s war on terror. Tommy pines for action in a real plane, asking his commanding officer, Lt. Col. Jack Johns (Bruce Greenwood), for reassignment despite being able to go home each night to his wife Molly (January Jones) and two kids. Whether dropping a bomb from an actual plane is more ethically justifiable than doing so via drone is glossed over, just as the absence of adrenaline in a desk chair as opposed to an ejector seat is never really addressed at all, illustrating “Good Kill’s” troubling blind spots. No, the core of “Good Kill” is drone warfare corroding Egan’s humanity and Hawke is up to the task. Normally such a lively, conversational actor, he reduces himself down to virtually nothing, echoing his own pale white skin to create something like a vampire who can be out in the bright Nevada sun.

As Egan and Johns integrate a new junior officer, Vera Suarez (Zoë Kravitz), into their team, so, too must they deal with increasingly morally ambiguous orders that are now being dispensed directly from the CIA (embodied in the voice of Peter Coyote), provoking Egan to emotionally shut down even more around his wife and drink heavily. These are familiar dramatic devices and, unfortunately, Niccol teases nothing new from them, the otherwise deliberately mechanical feel of his aesthetic trickling down in the worst way to his narrative. What’s more, his dialogue, especially between Egan and his colleagues, is never baked into that drama, tending more toward blatant point-counterpoint, as if we are watching a public affairs talk show discussing drone warfare. Greenwood, at least, in delivering a few monologues existing as much for our benefit as they do for those under the command of his character animates them with a kind of just-following-orders contempt that feels, at least, like something real rather than didactic points via the filmmaker.

It’s clear from several lines of dialogue that Niccol wants to demonstrate the muddle between drone warfare and video games, but then, that’s the problem, his script literally saying it only underlines how his filmmaking fails to evoke it. Tommy’s console, desk chair, and joystick look similar to a video game set-up, yes, but beyond that, “Good Kill” never approximates so-called game feel, it never blurs the lines between life in the room and the one on the screen. As if afraid of going too far or his message being misconstrued, Niccol refuses to reduce the onscreen killing to the point where we don’t feel anything at all.

Shelter

Unfortunately, the copious asses that Jason Statham kicks in his latest ass-kicking opus yield diminishing returns. “Shelter” starts well enough with Statham as a man of mystery who is not so mysterious because, of course, certain ass-kicking backstory is automatically baked into such a Statham character from the jump. In this case, his ersatz enigma Michael Mason is hiding out on an uninhabited island off the coast of Scotland and being delivered supplies that seem to consist entirely of bottles of liquor by a teenage girl named Jessie (Bodhi Rae Breathnach) and her uncle (Michael Shaeffer), a former associate of this strange hermit. If it might strain credulity that Jessie would take such an interest in the gruff, uncommunicative Mason, I kept thinking of the scene in “One Battle After Another” when teenage Willa asks Col. Steven Lockjaw in all oblivious earnestness why his muscles are so big. Teenagers are on a different wavelength, man. And so, when Jessie winds up injured and stranded on the island, she gradually breaks down his impersonal wall, which proves good and bad, especially when Mason’s ex-MI6 assassin background finally catches up with him and the semi-unwitting current MI6 chief Roberta (Naomi Ackie) sends a black ops squad across the sea to deal with him. 

The sequence in which Mason dispatches this death squad one-by-one with minimal fuss is promising. It subverts expectations by forgoing full-throated Schwarzenegger “Commando” mode for something else as Mason effortlessly pilfers and uses their own weapons against them, not quite taking them all out with his own bare hands but coming close. What’s more, Statham’s air, a small gleam in his eyes, suggests a thrill of the hunt, a thread too sinister for writer/director Ric Woman Waugh to pull. Indeed, as Mason and Jessie are forced ashore, bit by “Shelter” peters out. True, there is something refreshing in Statham allowing his character’s actions to convey his burgeoning affection for Jessie rather than laying the emotions on thick, but nothing is ever really made of the Jason Bourne-like black ops program (underlined in how Bill Nighy never gets to truly cut loose as the bad guy) and the action gradually loses all sense of creative sizzle. The climactic showdown in a dance club denotes how Waugh just starts pulling locations off the action-thriller rack. By the end, when Mason is dispatching the one pesky assassin that just won’t quit, that original gleam in his eye is conspicuously gone and he looked the way I felt: ready for it be over. 

Friday's Old Fashioned: JFK (1991)

Things in America have only gotten truthier in the decade since I originally posted this drivel on JFK and so, after the events of last weekend, I dusted the review off, revised it, and am reposting it.

In the 2002 review of “JFK” (1991) for his Great Movies series, Roger Ebert recounted that not long after Oliver Stone’s ultra-incendiary three-hour epic was released, he was excoriated by Walter Cronkite for extolling a movie without “a shred of truth in it.” That’s one way to put it. The invaluable Adam Nayman was a bit blunter in his assessment on Letterboxd in 2023: “this film was full of shit.” (Nayman’s review is much more nuanced than that.) I can understand Cronkite’s frustration. After all, “(t)he shadow of suspicion became a way of reading our history,” film critic David Thomson told The Wrap in 2013 regarding the ostensible conspiracy to assassinate President John F. Kennedy. “Once the mood set in, it became all too easy for any horrible event to just get fed into the hopper.” Huh. You don’t say? Of course, Cronkite admonishing Ebert and his colleagues for giving positives notices to a motion picture about the conspiracy is not the same as admonishing the conspiracy itself.  “I believe films are the wrong medium for fact,” Ebert wrote. “Fact belongs in print. Films are about emotions.” Post-truth was not declared the word of the year by Oxford Dictionaries until 2016, a quarter-century after the release of “JFK,” but few films have embodied the thorny, troubling emotions of our post-truth society quite like “JFK.”

Whether Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in killing John F. Kennedy, for the last sixty-odd years, the majority of Americans, by varying percentages, have believed that in some way, shape, or for, he did not. That, as Ebert wrote, has been “our national state of mind since Nov. 22, 1963,” and with “JFK,” Stone reflected that mood by concocting “a thick gumbo of truths, half-truths, unverifiable hypotheses, and pure rant...(ladled) out indiscriminately.” In writing those words for The New Yorker in January 1992, Terrence Rafferty meant to critique but I read them as a compliment, effectively summarizing the figurative stew in which we have been splashing around for the last decade-plus of exhausting American life. Rafferty might have argued that the movie’s “hysterical manner and slipshod handling of the facts actually have the effect of diminishing the credibility of the case for conspiracy,” but that is to suggest Stone is mounting a case in the first place. As Stone said repeatedly at the time and in the years since, he was not crafting a bootleg legal case nor reporting a story; he was presenting a counter myth. 

It is the counter myth that Matt Zoller Seitz and Kevin Lee considered when writing about “JFK” in 2008. “From the opening newsreel Stone presents a myth,” they explain, “one that pervades this stage of his career: government as oppressive patriarch, motivated largely by military and capitalistic interests and operating largely out of view of a public blinkered by patriotic propaganda.” Indeed, Stone seizes on the conspiracy theories peddled by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison (played by Kevin Costner in what is either a devious way to launder a real-life tinfoil hatter or to subvert the notion of a cinematic hero, depending on how you, the viewer, feel about it all) to incite propaganda of his own, promoting the idea that a coup d’etat within the utmost reaches of the government sought to bring Kennedy down.

Stone promotes this plot by injecting brief black & white flashback sequences, like Lyndon B. Johnson (Tom Howard) telling a room of conspirators that if they get him into the Oval Office then he’ll give them their damn war (as in, Vietnam). These invented flashbacks are often placed around actual archival footage, deliberately intended to muddy the viewing waters. In writing about Stone’s “seamless blend(ing) (of) documentary footage and re-creations” for Reverse Shot, Michael Joshua Rowin pegged it as a “smoke and mirrors act”, and that is true.

It can be argued that this smoke and mirrors act is intended to confuse the audience, to make it difficult to discern what’s real from what isn’t, which leaves everything in question. But while that it is an act of flagrant irresponsibility for some, to others, like me, it is, strictly from a filmmaking standpoint, propagandist or not, a commendation. As Randy Laist, an associate professor of English at Goodwin College, put it for a seriously academic treatise on the film: “More so than any particular theory about who shot JFK, the thesis of Stone’s film is that reality itself has been assassinated, under circumstances that we can only reconstruct out of a montage of images, ambivalently real and/or unreal – the fragments of a hyperreal mediascape.”

Hyperreal is a term credited to French theorist Jean Baudrillard, inevitably name-checked in Laist’s piece, who ascribed the difference between a modern and postmodern society as a “mode of representation in which ideas represent reality and truth.” In a postmodern society, he reckoned, “subjects lose contact with the real and fragment and dissolve.” That’s what happens as you watch “JFK.” If Stone’s previous films, as Laist notes, were born more a narrative realism, in “JFK”, he battered such realism to bits, primarily through ferociously kinetic, Oscar-winning editing by Pietro Scalia and Joe Hutshing, and via John Williams’s relentless harangue of brass and strings, a leitmotif for our national paranoia, an aesthetic so overpowering that it sweeps you up and pulls you into its myriad obfuscations and embellishments in spite of yourself. What’s real and what isn’t ceases to be the point; all you have left is the emotion that Stone deliberately engenders. You feel angry; you feel mistrustful; you feel like you have not been told everything; you feel like the government, that convenient catch-all, wants to keep you in the dark. “On that level,” wrote Ebert, “it is completely factual.”

Pitch Meeting: The Mall Detective

On a March episode of the invaluable Pressbox podcast, co-hosts Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker found themselves on a brief tangent about shoplifting and what they deemed store detectives even if they realized in the moment that they seemed to mean mall cops or mall security. Still, for one humorous moment, they imagined store detectives as an occupation and, reader, I was already one step ahead of them, imagining my latest ersatz movie production. “The Mall Detective” will be less “Paul Blart: Mall Cop,” more “The Kid Detective,” set during the peak of American malls in the early 90s, at the Southland Shopping Mall in Northfield, Ohio where we open with grizzled mall detective Gene Greim (Kevin Corrigan) interviewing Gadzooks clerk Rayanne (Olivia Rodrigo) about her possibly pilfering an Anthrax cassette from Musicland in his office which is not an office but a table in the food court when he is summoned to the Radio Shack. 

Radio Shack has been hit by a spate of recent thefts and store manager Doug (Burl Moseley), under pressure from the brass, needs Gene to get answers. Cody (Aaron Heffernan), the clerk coming undone in trying to meet impossible sales goals, becomes an obvious suspect, too obvious, declares Orange Julius manager Michelle (Jessica Williams), self-installing herself as his unlikely co-detective. She helps Gene navigate the various fiefdoms of the mall run by Barb (Abbi Jacobson), the big cheese of a vigilant band of mall walkers, the not-as-timid-as-she-seems manager of the B. Dalton Books, Chris (Hope Davis), and haughty Amber (Odessa D’Azion), in charge of the teen clique that congregates by the fountain in the atrium. All of them are left to their devices by property manager Gord (Alfred Molina), who seems most concerned about shepherding a deal for a new anchor store in the form of an electronics superstore that might just put a dent in Radio Shack sales. Meanwhile, Rayanne tells Gene that the Spencer Gifts run by Ted Klutts (Michael Shannon) that all the kids claim is a front for the occult has started peddling what seems like Radio Shack merchandise retrofit for nefarious purposes.

Cold Storage

“Pay attention,” a cheeky title card for “Cold Storage” declares, “this shit is real.” Well, it is and isn’t. In adapting the screenplay from his own 2019 novel, writer David Koepp has utilized the real-life 1979 incident in which the abandoned U.S. space station Skylab re-entered Earth’s atmosphere, burned up, broke apart, and scattered debris across Western Australia. Though all the remains were eventually collected, what “Cold Storage” presupposes is, what if it wasn’t? Written by middling thriller hall of famer David Koepp, adapted from his own 2019 novel, and directed by Jonny Campbell, this jovial horror/thriller/comedy hybrid begins with a biochemist (Sosie Bacons) and a pair of black biochemical op agents, Robert Quinn (Liam Neeson) and Trini Romano (Lesley Manville), investigating a leftover Skylab oxygen tank that has been transformed into a makeshift Australian museum and is now oozing some type of mutated green fungus. It’s a snappy opening defined by a dexterous camera that is always pulling back or craning up to both elicit surprise and dispense information. And because mankind can’t leave well enough alone, the group takes a fungus sample for study, subsequently transporting it to a federal cold storage facility in Kansas that via time lapse photography we see sealed off and mutated, itself, into an unsuspecting self-storage company.

That’s where “Cold Storage” mostly takes place, at the self-storage company, picking up 18 years later as security guards Travis (Joe Keery) Naomi (Georgina Campbell) settle in for the night shift. They are not slackers, exactly, just two people trying to get things together, and bonding from both desire and necessity when a faint beeping drives them crazy, sending them hacking through drywall to find the source and into a situation that spirals quickly out of control as the green fungus oozes amok. When it does, Quinn is summoned from retirement by Abigail (Ellora Torchia), a deskbound military bureaucrat ignoring the nothing to see here admonishment of her commanding officer (Richard Brake), a storyline that neatly splits the difference between big government proactivity and paranoia. Eventually, Quinn re-teams with the also-retired Trini to make haste for Kansas to help Travis and Naomi prevent an impending global calamity.

Neeson finds a sweet spot between Frank Drebin Jr. and all his characters through the years with names like Bill Marks and Mike McCann while Manville is wry in a way that is baked into the character rather than a wink at the audience. If anything, “Cold Storage” might have used more Neeson and Manville, though on other hand, just as the story ultimately turns on Travis and Naomi so does the movie turn on Keery and Campbell. They are going concerns on account of two popular TV shows, “Stranger Things” and “Black Mirror,” respectively, though I have seen neither, making this my first experience with them, and I have to say, I quite enjoyed their warm and amusing performances as two people having the time of their lives while having to stay alive. They find the perfect middle ground of never taking it all too seriously but never devolving into full-throated send-up, evoking the same B-movie spirit as “Cold Storage” itself, summarized in the climactic show-stopping moment when Quinn dispatches Travis and Naomi on a mission to, like, you know, save civilization: “You two may have started the night minimum wage guards,” he says, “but you’re a green light team now.” I was watching alone in my living room, but I stood up and cheered.