The Killer dropped on Netflix this past weekend and I updated my prior review, raising my score to an 89 and moving it up my yearly rankings. It’s a damn good film and absolutely worth watching – and rewatching, to appreciate the details and just how dryly funny it is.
And now on to new business.
The Holdovers (2023) – ***½
I’m in a tricky position with The Holdovers. It’s shaping up to be one of the major players of the awards season, a crowd-pleasing comedy-drama from a respected director, with three awards-friendly performances and a period setting that might allow for Production and Costume Design nominations along with nods for Picture, Original Screenplay, those performances, and the direction. Obviously, we’re a long way out from the Oscars, but the general response to the film is encouraging, not just from critics but from people I know who’ve seen it.
And then there’s me. Now, I’m certainly not going to say I don’t get it, or that the acclaim is utterly unwarranted; I give it ***½, after all, and a higher-level ***½ at that. It’s not a crowd-pleaser like Green Book or CODA that actively falls apart on closer scrutiny, even if, in my view, it has issues worth analyzing. No, to me, The Holdovers is quite a good film with very good acting, solid writing and direction, and effective period detail. But it never quite clicked for me in the way it seems to have clicked for others; I never fell in love with it.
Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti) is not very popular. He teaches ancient history at Barton Academy, a New England boarding school he attended as a youth, and is mocked for his amblyopia and body odor, and disliked for his haughty attitude and refusal to go easy on his students – even those whose parents’ donations keep Barton afloat. In December 1970, he’s pressured into taking responsibility for the titular holdovers – students who are unable to go home for the Christmas vacation.
Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa) isn’t very popular either. He’s been kicked out of several schools before ending up at Barton, he clashes with the other students – especially the arrogant Kountze (Brady Hepner) – and he finds himself stuck at Barton when his mother (Gillian Vigman) opts to go on a delayed honeymoon with Angus’ new stepfather (Tate Donovan). He is one of Hunham’s better students – a low bar to clear – but he’s dismayed at being stuck with the man for two weeks.
Mary Lamb (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) is perfectly well liked; she runs the cafeteria at Barton and is a friendly, if no-nonsense member of the staff. But it’s a difficult Christmas season for her; her son Marcus, who’d attended Barton, was killed in Vietnam earlier that year. Staying on at Barton and cooking for the holdovers at least keeps her occupied.
Initially there are five holdovers, but after a few days, most of them are rescued and taken on a ski trip, while Angus is stuck at Barton as his mother and stepfather cannot be reached. Paul, Mary, and he are left to face the holidays together, and it should come as no surprise that they warm to each other, share some painful secrets, and find a way forward they might never have considered.
There are no great surprises in The Holdovers; the biggest revelation isn’t that huge of a shock, and allows the film to comment on how mental illness was stigmatized at the time, while other reveals simply give us room to understand the characters and their struggles a little better. Otherwise, we have a reliable pattern of friction and friendship – a film about people being kind and kinder to one another and themselves.
As noted, the performances are quite good. Sessa, in his film debut, is remarkably assured at playing the smartass misfit who really just wants to be loved. His byplay with Giamatti is most entertaining, as Angus is clever enough to match wits with Paul, but he’s just as effective in the scenes of vulnerability; his key monologue in the third act is an obvious showcase, but he fully earns it with his poignant deliver. To me, he’s the standout; Giamatti is lovably irascible and sympathetically awkward, and Randolph is warmly witty and utterly convincing in a scene of drunken despair (the more effective for how underplayed it is), but he simply didn’t dazzle me, and she gets sidelined a bit too much by the script.
David Hemingson’s script might be the issue for me. There are plenty of witty and heartfelt moments, but there are some clunky bits (the dialogue between the students is especially iffy) and there’s a fundamental tension between the loose, character-driven approach the film tends to favor (in line with the 70s character dramas it emulates) and the predictable, well-oiled-machine approach the film keeps slipping into. (And on a more personal note: do we really need more movies about boarding schools in 2023?)
Alexander Payne’s direction guides the actors well and Eigil Bryld’s cinematography, in league with the sets and costumes, evokes the early 70s subtly without feeling affected. It’s a pleasant looking film, in line with the generally pleasant vibes it gives off – the moments of personal conflict notwithstanding (Carrie Preston, as the good-natured Lydia Crane, seems to embody that vibe more than anyone) – and the soundtrack, mixing period songs with a few original themes by Mark Orton, only adds to the effect.
And yet, most of the way through, I was aware that I wasn’t quite connecting to the film the way the rest of the audience was. Maybe it was just me, or the mood I was in. But as much as I recognized what the film does right – and it does most things right – I never felt that extra bit of magic that would lead me to join in singing its praises. More’s the pity.
Score: 84
Divinity (2023) – *½
In the case of Divinity, I find myself in a difficult position not because I want to like the film more than I do, but because it’s such an utter mess that I’m not sure how best to explain why I hated it. I most certainly hated it, getting a sinking feeling early on as the murky opening scenes failed to coalesce into a coherent narrative. I only grew more confused and despondent as, while there was obviously visual skill at work, it was in the service of material that wasn’t worth the trouble – and then came the climactic twist which pushed it all into sheer distastefulness.
Sometime in the future, large portions of humanity are dependent on Divinity, a drug based on the work of Sterling Pierce (Scott Bakula). Sterling failed to save his own life, but his son Jaxxon (Stephen Dorff) perfected Divinity, which has tremendous regenerative powers and keeps the user in a state of perpetual youth, often granting them enhanced strength as well. Jaxxon lives in a desert mansion with his mistress Lynx (Emily Willis) and is preparing to release a new batch of Divinity when they’re rudely interrupted during an intimate moment.
They’re interrupted by two aliens who take human form (Moises Arias and Jason Genao) and tase Jaxxon with a ray-gun, then tie him to a chair and hook him up to a stream of undiluted Divinity, which he claims will kill him. Lynx runs naked into the desert and is found by operatives of Ziva (Bella Thorne), who appears to be leading an extra-dimensional feminist collective. The aliens (or Stars) discover the sensory pleasures of human existence, hiring Nikita (Karrueche Tran) to show them a good time – which includes a massive feast before hitting the sheets. (That’s a stomachache waiting to happen.)
The rest of the film follows events as Jaxxon is slowly mutated by the Divinity, Nikita is drawn into the Stars’ efforts to put a stop to the drug, a party is thrown in Jaxxon’s mansion (no one notices his absence; seems they’re all drugged out), Ziva hangs out in her liminal space with her friends, and we eventually learn the hideous secret of Divinity. Oh, and there’s a fight between Jaxxon and one of the Stars that’s depicted with stop-motion animation.
That last part has been cited as a highlight of the film, and as a fan of stop-motion I’d like to agree, but it hardly registered for me because I was so far past caring about anything that was going on. I certainly wasn’t invested in the outcome of the fight – which in any case is undercut by a remarkably feeble dispatching of the villain, albeit capped by a decent sick joke – so while I appreciate the effort, I’d have appreciated giving a shit more.
I appreciate a lot about the look of Divinity. I’m not sure if it was shot in true black-and-white or desaturated color, but the best images have the depth, the stylized richness of true monochrome. The shadowy depths of Jaxxon’s mansion, the desolation of the desert, and the white void where Ziva dwells all look quite good – especially the former, which becomes the stage for a sci-fi/horror noir as Jaxxon’s humanity is warped past recovery. I haven’t been able to find out if the mansion is a real location or a set, but it’s fascinating nonetheless, looking a bit like a lobster shell with ribs from the outside, filled with vaguely retro equipment, dramatically angled walls, and huge windows through which we see a sky full of vividly fake stars.
There’s also impressive makeup, especially on Dorff as Jaxxon becomes…well, let’s call him “Yotta-Chad,” and a solid score by Dean Hurley and DJ Muggs including the end credits song “Divinity 2 Infinity.” Add in the strange costumes and the deliberately lo-fi touches which evoke the 90s for some reason, and you’ve got a film which tends to fill the eye.
But there’s also an ugliness to the film, amplified by the inability to really understand what’s going on or care about the characters. The male gaze dominates, from the sex scene between the lithe young Lynx and the schlubby Jaxxon; one guess as to who shows more skin. We do get some beefcake courtesy of Jaxxon’s brother Rip (Michael O’Hearn) and his fellow Speedo-wearing meatheads, but it’s still obviously a man’s vision at work.
There’s a vaguely dated air about the whole film which brings to mind the ugly mid-Aughts futurism of Southland Tales (another film which was saying something about where the world was heading, but damned if I knew or cared what), and there’s a tacky, even sleazy quality to parts of it which, combined with the black-and-white photography, reminded me of the awful Escape from Tomorrow. That film promised a shot-on-location story of a nightmare at Walt Disney World, but ended up being a dreary, distasteful, feature-length bad joke.
This film is certainly dreary; the characters are either too thin to register or too off-putting to care about. It’s also quite tasteful, especially when the big reveal arrives and pushes the film into Q-Anon/pro-life-propaganda territory, though the ample nudity and grotesquerie on display would likely drive away the latter faction. And the final scenes definitely push it into the realm of a bad joke; I’m sure writer-director Eddie Alcazar was laughing harder than anyone.
He made it without a script, a rather stunning concession to a filmmaker whose previous feature (2018’s Perfect) was critically shredded. That film was also executive produced by Steven Soderbergh, whose faith in Alcazar, at least as a narrative filmmaker, is hard to fathom. But then, in Side Effects and Unsane at least, Soderbergh has hinted at a mistrust of pharmaceuticals and psychiatry which make me wonder about him. Those, however, were infinitely better films, because they had characters you could care about and stories you could follow. There’s really no substitute for those.
Score: 38
Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever (2002) – *½
The best thing I can say about Ballistic is that, for a film which still holds the record for having the most reviews of any film to score 0% on Rotten Tomatoes, it’s not an all-time bad film. It’s a bad film, make no mistake, but it doesn’t plumb the depths of incompetence or repulsiveness the way truly horrendous films have. It’s a heap of lazy schlock anchored by two remarkably indifferent star turns – but it could have been worse.
The plot has something to do with a little boy named Michael (Aidan Drummond), whose father, Robert Gant (Gregg Henry), is a director of the DIA; in an example of the film’s murky storytelling, I thought Gant was an international criminal until pretty late in the film, though if you want to get technical, he absolutely is. Anyway, Michael is taken from the custody of his mother Vinn (Talisa Soto) by Gant’s agents, but as they take him to his father, they’re waylaid by rogue agent Sever (Lucy Liu) who takes Michael into her own custody.
FBI agent Julio Martin (Miguel Sandoval) approaches Jeremiah Ecks (Antonio Banderas), once one of his best operatives, now a depressed alcoholic after the supposed death of his wife. Martin claims that Ecks’ wife is still alive and asks him to find Michael – as well as a piece of nanotechnology which went missing from Berlin days earlier, which Gant is suspected of stealing. Gant is also determined to get it back, putting his own best man, Ross (Ray Park) on the case.
Both factions attempt to corner Sever at a shopping center in Vancouver, but she holds them off, causing the DIA considerable embarrassment, and leaving Ecks in police custody after Martin is shot; in an example of the film’s murky storytelling, he never reappears, so it’s not clear if he’s alive or dead. But Sever then rescues him from police custody and reveals that Gant knows where Ecks’ wife is. Surprise – Vin is actually Ecks’ wife Rayne, and the explosion each believed killed the other was orchestrated by Gant.
This also means that Michael is actually Ecks’ son, and we learn that Sever had a son of her own, who was killed by an airstrike meant for her, I think. Now that they both want Gant to pay, and now that Ecks has his family to protect, they arrange a final showdown which involves bullets, bombs, balletic fights, a few dry one-liners, and a final ironic comeuppance.
There are moments where Ballistic comes close to being a serviceable action film, or at least one so over-the-top it manages to be giddily amusing. A scene where a DIA agent falls from a roof in slow motion and we follow him as he plunges onto a car, somehow sending one of its tires flying into another agent, hits the right note of ludicrous invention. And the shopping center confrontation, with the incredibly outnumbered Sever holding off her opponents with ease, is at least decently choreographed.
But a few passable set pieces don’t really matter when you can’t be bothered to care – and how could you, when the stars of the film seem so thoroughly bored? Banderas’ charisma can’t help flickering through at times, but he mutters his lines so passively they’re hard to understand. Liu, for her part, may have been aiming for stoicism, but she’s so deadpan she seems anesthetized. Henry’s smarmy smugness livens things up a little bit, and Park balances his arrogance with his own skeptical professionalism, but it’s not enough.
The film tries to gloss over the terrible writing (which might have been going for minimalism but ends up being laughably threadbare) with sheer cool, but all the characters walking away from explosions, zipping around on motorcycles, firing high-tech weaponry, slowly emerging from shadows or clouds of smoke, and tapping away on computers to access supposedly secure databases leave one only with the semblance of cool – and it’s all the more damning how narrowly it misses the mark.
But director Wych Kaosayananda (credited as “Kaos” in one of the most early-Aughts touches in this very early-Aughts film) can’t light the necessary fire under the film’s ass; there’s a weirdly underpowered feeling to the film, even the chases, exacerbated by the drab Vancouver locations. The film cost $70 million, a sizable sum for the time and hardly peanuts today, but aside from the sheer scale of the set pieces, it looks and feels cheap. Not quite cheap enough to be funny, just enough to further undermine the air of cool, slick entertainment.
Don Davis’ cheesy techno score does what it can to pump up the excitement (and 21 years on make this even more of a blast from the past), but to no avail. According to Kaosayananda, both production and post-production were troubled (the film was originally to be shot in his native Thailand but was obliged to shoot in Vancouver to save money) and the finished film was not his vision; that doesn’t make the film I saw any better, but it validates my not being a little harder on it. It’s an unhappy piece of work for all involved, but we can leave it to the past.
In any case, it’s not even the worst film of 2002; for now, I’d give that honor to The Adventures of Pluto Nash.
Score: 29
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