The Weekly Gravy #67

The Mitchells vs. the Machines (2021) – ****

I didn’t know a great deal about The Mitchells vs. the Machines going in, which is always nice. I knew it was well received, was a family-friendly animated comedy, and it was on Netflix. I wanted something light and fun after the darkness of Benedetta, and this story of a dysfunctional family trying to thwart a robot apocalypse more than fit the bill. (The Power of the Dog can wait.)

But maybe “dysfunctional” isn’t the right word for the Mitchells. Maybe “weird” fits better. There’s teenager Katie (Abbi Jacobson), an aspiring filmmaker whose projects tend to star the family dog. There’s young Aaron (director Mike Rianda), who’s obsessed with dinosaurs and terrified of admitting his crush on the girl next door. There’s their father Rick (Danny McBride), who hates modern technology, loves tools and nature, and can’t quite comprehend Katie’s interests. And there’s their mother Linda (Maya Rudolph), maybe the most normal of them, but painfully envious of their seemingly perfect, always Instagrammable neighbors.

And there’s the family dog, Monchi (Doug the Pug), who lives in a state of cheerful oblivion, his permanently unfocused eyes and dangling tongue making him the only dog for the wacky Mitchells – and the Mitchells the only family for him.

Anyway, they’re on a road trip to take Katie to college (an impromptu choice by Rick, to Katie’s dismay), when tech developer Dr. Mark Bowman (Eric André) announces his latest project: PAL MAX, a line of robots which can and will do anything you ask of them. He introduces them by literally dumping PAL (Olivia Colman), the personal assistant program which made him a success, and in response PAL takes control of the robots, ordering them to round up the human race and place them in containment cubes (with free WiFi!), before shooting them into space.

As luck would have it, it falls to the Mitchells to somehow save humanity, but it’s going take a lot – including two glitching robots who name themselves Eric (Beck Bennett) and Deborahbot 5000 (Fred Armisen), the family’s burnt-orange 1993 station wagon, and the particular brand of screwdriver Rick swears by.

For a Sony Animation release, The Mitchells manages to beat the Mouse House at its own game on at least two levels. The cautionary aspects of the story (more about the reckless use of technology than technology itself) bring Incredibles 2 to mind, and they work as well if not better here. And the use of viral culture, especially Katie’s use of and frequent references to YouTube, and the repeated references to “Numa Numa,” may remind one of Ralph Breaks the Internet – but The Mitchells makes better use of it, both as a source of humor and as a reflection of how virality impacts our lives, than Ralph or, honestly, just about any film I can think of that’s tried.

It does so by not relying on the references themselves, but on weaving them into the story; the joke isn’t that we all know what “Numa Numa” is, but that, years ago in-story, Rick and Katie sang along to it like the goofballs they are. And this reflects a bigger reason for the film’s success: how well it crafts its story and characters, and how much it packs into every moment of its running time.

The Mitchells themselves are a lovable bunch (thanks in no small part to the fine voice acting), broad enough for their antics to be hilarious, but real enough for us to want them not just to save the world, but (especially for Rick and Katie) to save their family bond. Eric and Deborahbot are strange enough (and sweet enough) that we want them to fit right in. Monchi is as adorably stupid as PAL as gleefully vicious, but we never grow tired of either of them. And that, of course, is in large part due to the script by Rianda and Jeff Rowe.

I’ll readily admit I laughed harder at this film than…honestly, I can’t remember if anything since 22 Jump Street made me laugh out loud quite this much. If you’ve seen it, I only need say two words: evil Furbies. And if you haven’t seen it, describing the scene can’t convey how ridiculously hilarious it is. But that’s just one funny moment among many. There’s Rick pretending to be a robot and getting rebuked, there’s PAL’s “blind rage,” there’s Aaron looking for someone to talk to about dinosaurs, there’s the fate of Prancer, and there’s all the little doodles and flashes of text which you’ll have to pause the film or carefully rewatch it to catch. (“He will forever live in the barn…of our hearts.”) Somehow, I wouldn’t mind doing so.

The animation is excellent, having a certain texture which seems partway between stop-motion and full 3-D CGI – it’s a bit like the animation in The Peanuts Movie – along with finely judged character design and some cool science-fictional imagery where PAL and her henchbots are concerned. There’s a fun score by Mark Mothersbaugh (if only PAL’s theme song were the Devo Corporate Anthem), and some truly fantastic editing by Greg Levitan which helps the jokes land all the more perfectly. A few mildly heavy-handed moments aside, it’s a real joy to watch – and of the animated films I’ve seen this year, it’s solidly the best.

Score: 88

C’mon C’mon (2021) – ****

C’mon C’mon did for me what Belfast seems to have done for others: it captured what it feels like to be a kid, to be full of energy and curiosity, to try and engage with adults who aren’t always on your wavelength, to know that there are troubles in your family, in your world, that you don’t fully understand, and which the adults in your life may try their hardest to protect you from. It also captures, I think, what it’s like to be an adult who’s trying to make sense of your life, brought face-to-face with the energy of childhood, at once wondrous and exasperating, to be caught between the need to nurture, the responsibility to educate, and the instinct to protect.

That it worked so very well for me came as a bit of a surprise. Not only did a black-and-white A24 release, set largely in L.A. and New York, seem like pure art-house fodder, but I wasn’t especially impressed by Mike Mills’ previous films; Beginners was good and 20th Century Women was solid, but both in that “yeah, that was fine” way, that “I don’t especially need to see that again” way. And yet, before long, it won me over, and kept on doing so right up to the end. Part of it might be that the elements which didn’t totally work for me in Mills’ previous films – the playful use of time, the hyper-literate characters – were put to better use here. Maybe the story resonated with me in a way those films’ stories did not.

Certainly, I saw a lot of myself in young Jesse (Woody Norman, in a wonderfully natural performance), fascinated by the world around him, frustrated by what he doesn’t understand – or isn’t told because it’s assumed he won’t understand – full of quirky jokes and imagination (the whole “orphan” routine reminds me of the games I played with my parents), emotionally unpredictable but full of love for his family. And I saw some of myself in Johnny (Joaquin Phoenix, in a tender, unaffected turn), materially and professionally secure, but emotionally still searching for his real place in the world, trying to adapt to caring for the nephew he’s hardly known, trying to do right by the sister he has a fragile relationship with.

And maybe I saw a bit of myself – and some of my mother – in Viv (Gaby Hoffmann, radiantly empathetic), who seems at once a pillar of strength and an emotional house of cards, full of life and energy one moment, devastated by the challenges she faces the next, desperately trying to balance her responsibility to Jesse and her devotion to Paul (Scott McNairy, in a fleeting but effective turn), her husband who struggles with mental illness and has been through the cycle of breakdown and committal more than once.

But it’s the magnificent performances and Mills’ brilliant script that make these relatable elements into a truly resonant film. The points of the story, high and low, feel organic to the story and characters, and the dialogue, even the monologues and the extended quotes from other, dutifully cited materials ranging from academic texts to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (another connection to my own life – Johnny reads the book to Jesse just as my father read the Oz books to me), feels free and natural. It even ends at the perfect moment, as Johnny tells Jesse that, however much he remembers of the film’s events, “I’ll remind you.”

Adding to the beauty of the film are Robbie Ryan’s lovely black-and-white cinematography, adding to the fascination of the urban settings (I think of my own fascination with Chicago when we visited for the holidays) and the contemplative nature of the material, the fine, bittersweet score by Aaron and Bryce Dessner, and Jennifer Vecchiarello’s magnificent editing, seamlessly working in flashbacks and cut-aways, never letting the story lapse into a series of mundane events. All are united under Mills’ excellent direction, easily the best I’ve seen from him.

Throughout the film, we have interviews with children and teenagers about what they think the future will hold (this is Johnny’s occupation), and the film takes their responses seriously, allowing us to recognize what many of them have yet to learn, while respecting what they see without the rationalizations and biases that develop with age. As with so much about this beautiful film, it strikes the right balance between appreciating people for who they are and recognizing what remains for them to work on. And just maybe, you’ll see some of your younger self in their responses.

Score: 90

The Flight That Disappeared (1961) – ***

What if, in the midst of the Cold War, the scientists responsible for conceiving a weapon that could destroy an entire country – or, just maybe, wipe out life on Earth – were flying to Washington to meet with the Pentagon when their plane was mysteriously drawn into another dimension, where the people who will populate the Earth in the future (their souls, I suppose?) put them on trial for their key role in causing the apocalypse? Grabby premise, no?

It certainly seems to have lured a few curious souls to The Flight That Disappeared over the years. For a film with only 550 votes on the IMDB, it has a respectable 22 user reviews and 10 (11 once this is posted) critic reviews. But a glance at those reviews suggested the film didn’t really live up to its idea, and despite the promise of the early reels, I have to agree, although the idea is fascinating enough, and the film is brief enough, that it manages to earn a low *** from me.

The film takes quite a while to get to that other dimension. First, we establish the setting – a propeller-driven commercial plane in the early days of the jet age – and we get to know the characters, from the pilot (John Bryant), who’s itching to switch over to flying jetliners, to the co-pilot (Brad Trumbull) and the stewardess (Nancy Hale) he’s about to marry, to the missile engineer (Craig Hill) posing as a lobbyist to flirt with the mathematician (Paula Raymond) who’s working with the nuclear physicist (Dayton Lummis) who designed the “Beta Bomb,” the weapon in question. (The latter three are the defendants in the celestial trial.)

Although it’s hampered by the obvious low budget, some iffy acting and the mid-century gender politics which make Hill look like a boor, some real care was taken in developing the characters and depicting the nuts and bolts of mid-century air travel. As the plane begins a mysterious, uncontrolled ascent (caused by the people of the future), we get a solid look at ground control’s desperate attempts to figure out just what’s going on. And as the thinner air causes the passengers and crew to lapse into hypoxia, the film does a decent job of depicting the mounting crisis.

But then we arrive in the other dimension, and the film begins to go soft. Hill and Raymond take forever to figure out that something is wrong, and when they find Lummis in the lounge, they spend a while longer trying to puzzle things out. But then the Examiner (Gregory Morton) appears, and summons them to their trial, explaining just where they are – essentially, outside of time. This other realm is depicted by what seems to be a desert set with a lot of fog and white light – not incredibly imaginative, but adequate. Then the trial, such as it is, begins, and the film really drops the ball, failing to deliver on the fundamental pleasures of a courtroom sequence, or even to allow for a really compelling back-and-forth between the defendants and their prosecutor. Shown the devastation the Beta Bomb will bring, Hill weakly argues that the government and military are as much to blame, but the Examiner shuts him down. The jury (a handful of Caucasian people in white shirts and black slacks and skirts) then deliberate, rendering a guilty verdict and sentencing the defendants to stay in the other dimension forever.

But after a failed attempt at escape, the Sage (Addison Richards) orders the Examiner to free them, as the present can only be determined by those who exist, not those who do not yet exist. The defendants find themselves back on the plane as if nothing had happened, and for a moment it’s suggested Hill dreamed it all (which would’ve been an unforgivable cheat), but it turns out all three of them had an identical dream. They try and write it off, despite nodding at the possibility of ESP (!), owing to the lack of proof that anything unusual happened. Upon landing, ground control informs the crew that the plane has been missing for 24 hours – the proof they seek. Lummis tosses his notes for the Beta Bomb into the trash.

It’s a pat, unsatisfying ending for a film which has already failed to really engage with the ideas at play. Part of the issue might be the oddly brief running time – at just 72 minutes, there wouldn’t have been a lot of time to engage with those ideas anyway, but the film takes a good 45 minutes even to get to the meat of the premise. The problem is really the script, by Judith and Ralph Hart – this seems to have been the only original script by either of them – and Orville Hampton (credited as Owen Harris); Hampton would later earn an Oscar nod for One Potato, Two Potato, another film which struggles to translate its timely issues into compelling drama.

There are moments which do so, namely an exchange between Lummis and a paranoid passenger (Harvey Stephens) who believes the Beta Bomb should be used for a pre-emptive strike – a sentiment which remains painfully relevant even today. But it’s the scenes involving the flight crew and ground control contending with an inexplicable event that really click, making the film feel a bit like two scripts mashed together. The acting is mostly unremarkable, with some woodenness and ham on display, and Reginald LeBorg’s direction is workmanlike at best; more interesting is Richard LaSalle’s offbeat score, with eerie themes in the real-world scenes and sweeping celestial themes in the other dimension. It’s overwrought, but decently effective.

Score: 67

Alone in the T-Shirt Zone (1986) – **½

CW: mental illness, sexual assault.

I first learned of Alone in the T-Shirt Zone by leafing through the 1996 edition of VideoHound, looking for obscure films to put on my to-watch list. (As you do.) Looking it up on the IMDb, I found that a personal acquaintance had written the plot summary; given that the film had a whopping 57 votes, to personally know someone else who’s seen it was irresistibly fascinating. More so, I fear, than the film ended up being, though I’ll admit the sincerity of its strangeness – and the flashes of talent on display – kept me watching, even as I found the story meandering, the protagonist unlikable, and the whole enterprise to be a baffling exercise in…something.

The protagonist is Michael Mikaele (Michael Barrack), whom we discover in a mental hospital, totally catatonic, flashing back to his horribly unhappy childhood and an episode in which he attacks a woman on the beach, before his therapist (Taylor Gilbert) sexually abuses him. We then flash back to the day before Michael was committed, as he goes to to work at T-Shirt Zone, a novelty t-shirt factory where he’s been working for eight increasingly miserable years under the thumb of Bill (Bill Barron). Bill’s secretary, Jennifer (Jennifer Anderson) sexually harasses Michael; we later learn they had been in a relationship before she left him, apparently for Bill, who trapped Michael into a 10-year contract.

After an awkward, mishap-laden day at work, Michael escapes, encountering Rod (Rod McCasky), who’s escaping some predicament of his own, and who insists on hosting Michael at his apartment. Later, he insists on taking Michael to a party, which turns out to be the same one Jennifer was trying to get him to attend with her. Sure enough, his co-workers, including Jennifer, are there, and Michael endures more humiliations before his world falls apart – and, arguably, karma catches up with him. If only it weren’t for those “Foxy Lady” tees…

It’s hard to summarize Zone because so little actually happens for most of its brief (about 80 minutes) running time. The better part of the film is spent at the T-Shirt Zone and the party, and there’s not a clear arc for most of it, just Michael suffering in one manner or another. Many of the female characters come on to him but, perhaps because Jennifer broke his heart, perhaps because he was scarred by a childhood incident in which a couple of girls tricked him into pulling down his pants, their attention simply makes him uncomfortable. His greatest desire seems to be to be left alone, though he does little to actually achieve this.

Although he’s had some bad breaks, it’s hard to feel very sorry for Michael, who mostly comes off a whiny, passive lump. His habit of going after women wearing the “Foxy Lady” shirt and ripping them off makes him especially unsympathetic, and we never get that good of an idea of why he does it. At the very end of the film – spoilers, though odds are good you’ll never see this – we find he’s been faking his catatonia, possibly because the mental hospital is the one place he’ll be left (relatively) alone. I’m not sure we’re really meant to like him, but I didn’t even find him that interesting.

I could easily rate Zone a lot lower for how much of a drag Michael is, for how dubious the portrayal of women is, and for how little it all amounts to. But something about it kept me watching; I never even wanted to turn it off. Director/co-writer Mike B. Anderson had some kind of a vision here, and enough of it comes through to make the film tolerable, at least for the indulgent viewer.

While not a visual feast, there are some interesting images thanks to Kathleen Beeler’s cinematography (she and Anderson split most of the production duties), including some solid camera movement and atmospheric lighting, especially in the mental hospital scenes. There’s an interesting setting in the ramshackle T-Shirt Zone itself, which seems overrun with vermin and detritus, and Bill’s manager-from-Hell routine is reliably relatable (he blasts motivational tapes on the intercom). Throughout the film, we see a huge variety of novelty tees (most of a suggestive nature), but in a funny touch, sometimes a character’s shirt will change for the sake of a visual joke – for example, a man wearing a unicorn shirt is rejected by a woman, and the unicorn’s horn droops.

And there’s at least one great weird sequence, as Michael is having a bad trip (thanks to Jennifer); he hallucinates undergoing surgery and having a wide variety of T-shirts removed from his body – which depict his skeleton, his muscles, his organs, and so forth. I can’t say it helps the film make any more sense, except maybe to suggest how thoroughly sick Michael is of T-shirts, but it’s an effectively wild scene.

Anderson would make one more feature, the horror-comedy Kamillions, before going to work for The Simpsons, eventually directing a great many episodes and winning multiple Emmys in the process. I can only wonder how he looks back on this film, which at the very least seems to be whatever he meant for it to be at the time. What that was, I can’t quite say, but for the right viewer, it should be worth a look.

Score: 61

West Side Story (2021) – ****

Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story is a frustrating film, just as Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins’ West Side Story is a frustrating film. Both are great films (well, I’m pretty sure the old one will get **** when I actually go back to it), but for me, they both fall short in key areas – and where one version falters, another may hold firm. This new version was very much made in conversation with the older film, right down to the casting of Rita Moreno as Valentina, who takes the place of Doc (she’s Doc’s widow, in fact), and while I decided to hold off on rewatching the original to give this version a fairer hearing, it’s impossible not to compare them if you’ve seen both.

There’s much to love about this version. Rachel Zegler is a lovely Maria, at once young and innocent enough to believe in the kind of love she and Tony share, but mature enough to stand up to her blustering brother and to seek sexual satisfaction and get it; there’s no question she and Tony sleep together in this version, following the example Bernardo and Anita are constantly setting. Ariana DeBose is a potently sexy Anita, singing her part in “Tonight” (“Don’t matter if he’s tired/So long as he’s hot”) in church, tearing into “America” with wonderful fervor, but seizing the tragedy of the role when it comes, as it surely does. They’ve both received awards attention already (especially Zegler), and I fully expect they’ll get quite a bit more. I’m not sure if David Alvarez will get much attention for his Bernardo, but he’s effectively prideful and aggressive, and has fine chemistry with DeBose.

There are also good turns from Mike Faist as Riff (he’s less colorful than Russ Tamblyn, but far more believable), Corey Stoll as Schrank, and Iris Menas as Anybodys, here reimagined as a transmasculine character whose defiant assertion of their identity makes the feints at queer representation in other recent blockbusters seem all the tamer. Frequently seen hanging around the edges of the action, desperate for approval, desperate to belong, Menas’ Anybodys serves to reflect the story’s fundamental themes through yet another prism.

That’s a credit to Tony Kushner’s script, which is far better than Ernest Lehman’s script for the original film (and probably better than Arthur Laurents’ book for the original musical). The dialogue is mostly rewritten, and the songs are rearranged and relocated to good effect: “Gee, Officer Krupke” is set in a police station, which the Jets make a total mess of as they travesty the institutions of the era, “Cool” is set at a construction sight and becomes a duet between Tony (trying to defuse the pending rumble) and Riff (who’s just bought a gun for the occasion), and “I Feel Pretty” is set among the displays at Gimbels, where Maria works as a cleaner.

Kushner also adds touches to the characters which add depth to the material. H makes Bernardo a boxer, which only adds to his bullheaded self-righteousness, makes Chino (Josh Andrés Rivera) a well-meaning, slightly dorky young man who’s taking night classes and has a promising future, adding to the tragedy of his choices towards the end, and he gives Tony a fuller backstory, revealing how he spent a year in jail for assault and battery and how haunted he is by his actions. Tony notes that meeting Maria is the first thing to really ease his despondency, putting even more of a burden on their fragile romance.

And the themes of gentrification and urban “renewal” are played up, from the opening shots of buildings being demolished to make way for Lincoln Center to the climax, set among half-demolished buildings, which suggests an apocalypse. The threat of being forced off of one’s turf, either by one’s personal enemies or by the faceless forces of change, is ever-present, adding to the desperation of the Jets and Sharks alike. (This is probably the first blockbuster musical to reference Robert Moses, albeit only fleetingly.)

In terms of verisimilitude and thematic depth, the new version is easily better. And if it’s not as sheerly colorful or as strikingly stylized as the original, between Spielberg’s sincere, energetic direction, Janusz Kaminski’s swooping camerawork (with some of the first bursts of full color Spielberg has allowed himself in a while), Adam Stockhausen’s production design, Justin Peck’s lively choreography, and a fine, vigorous performance of the score (conducted by Gustavo Dudamel), it generally does the material justice.

But it falls short in other ways. Ansel Elgort’s Tony is the elephant in the room, not just for the allegations which have arisen against Elgort, but for his performance, which many reviews have cited as the film’s weakest element. He’s certainly not great; his singing is fine, but in the dramatic scenes he’s oddly flat and uncharismatic, and it’s hard to understand just why Maria falls so hard for him. Richard Beymer wasn’t amazing in the original, but he had a charm Elgort lacks, and his performance was much closer in quality to Natalie Wood’s than Elgort’s is to Zegler’s. The romance in the original film was simply more believable, and had a tragic weight this film can’t quite grasp.

And while the acting is by and large stronger in this version, and certainly more realistic, the characters seem a bit less defined. It feels more like a portrait of a society which includes an ill-fated romance rather than a romance set against a society which cannot tolerate it. And while some numbers are better handled here (“America” now takes place in the middle of the day and involves the whole community), others, like the version of “Tonight” which precedes the rumble, feel like shadows of the original. Granted, the original film’s “Tonight” is one of the best musical scenes in film history, but Spielberg and company do too little to make it their own.

As I said, it’s a frustrating film, one which reaches greatness but falls short just enough to be more of a complement to the original film than a transcending of it. But with the strength of the source material, the skills of the production team, and the work of most of the cast, it certainly does reach it. It goes to show how Spielberg, making his first full musical after 50 years in the industry, still has a few tricks up his sleeve.

Score: 87