The Weekly Gravy #177

Flamin’ Hot (2023) – ***

Oscar Nomination: Best Original Song (“The Fire Inside”)

Like Nyad, it may help to approach Flamin’ Hot as a story about determination, perseverance, and pride in one’s community more than a true story as such; sources like a Los Angeles Times article that’s stuck behind a paywall suggest that Richard Montañez had considerably less involvement – if any – in the creation of the Flamin’ Hot Cheeto than Montañez himself claims. Even if, as he suggests, his role has been minimized due to his lack of clout in the company at the time, the film’s frequently heightened tone and well-worn underdog narrative amply suggest the, shall we say, magic of the movies.

Growing up the son of migrant workers in southern California, Montañez (played by Jesse Garcia as an adult) struggles with his family’s poverty, his father’s drunken brutishness, and racism from his white classmates (whom he wins over by selling them his mother’s burritos) and the authorities (who assume he stole the money he made). With his beloved Judy (Annie Gonzalez) by his side, he grows up a petty criminal, but when she becomes pregnant, he determines to leave that life behind.

Easier said than done; he lacks a high school diploma and struggles to get even menial labor. Through a friend, he’s able to get an interview at Frito-Lay, and despite being caught lying on his application, he’s hired as a janitor. He throws himself into the work, but having a mechanical inclination, wants to become a machinist like Clarence (Dennis Haysbert), who wants to climb the corporate ladder himself – but the calcified corporate structure thwarts them both.

Years pass, the Montañez family grows, and a sluggish economy forces lay-offs and reduced hours at the Frito-Lay plant. Anxious to get out of his rut and motivated by a video featuring CEO Roger Enrico (Tony Shalhoub), he decides to literally spice up Frito-Lay’s products, thereby increasing their appeal to the Latine market. After much trial and error, he, Judy, and their sons perfect the Flamin’ Hot spice blend, and he personally calls Enrico to pitch the idea.

Enrico, who’ll be visiting the plant soon, agrees to meet with him, and despite the consternation of his manager Lonny (Matt Walsh) and his own persistent self-doubt, Judy helps him prepare a presentation which convinces Enrico, who’s already tasted and enjoyed the Flamin’ Hot prototype. After initial sales are slow, Montañez decides to go grassroots and give free samples to the community, driving demand through the roof.

He’s soon promoted to Director of Multicultural Marketing, remains happily married, and tips generously while dining out with Judy – after all, any of the waitstaff might be the next Richard Montañez.

Again, even if Montañez hasn’t exaggerated his role in the development of the Flamin’ Hot line, it’s pretty obviously a romanticized account, with fantasy sequences (including several where other characters “speak” Montañez’ narration), carefully regulated highs and lows, and quippy dialogue, especially from Montañez, who’s as good at selling himself as he is at selling Cheetos.

The film really lives and dies with Garcia’s performance, and he carries it well. Even when the dramatic beats are clunky (his relationship with his father is as predictable as it is underdeveloped) or the quips tip over into schtick, Garcia’s comic gusto and dramatic chops invest Montañez with a sincere charm and ambition that make him easy to root for, even when his spells of discouragement feel like the contrivances they are. Gonzalez is also quite winning as Judy; the script tends to slot her in the “supportive wife” role, but she brings enough verve and personality to compensate.

Eva Longoria’s direction has its inspired moments, especially when the film sets reality just off to the side. She doesn’t try anything especially new, but she handles the cast and the tone well and I’d be interested to see what she might do in future films (she’s been directing television for a decade); I’d also be curious to see her boxing documentary La Guerra Civil. On a technical level, the film is fully competent, the sprightly editing being the most outstanding element.

But the script, by Linda Yvette Chávez and Lewis Colick, holds Longoria and the film back. It falls back on the same tricks too many times, leaves too much underdeveloped (again, the relationship between father and son Montañez feels almost like it came from another film), and hits too many beats that we’ve seen umpteen times before. There are admirable elements – the fluent use of Spanglish in particular – but in snack-food terms, it’s all a bit stale.

And what about the Oscar nominated song? Well, it’s another Diane Warren song, making for her 15th nomination (and seventh in as many years), and while it’s better than last year’s “Applause” (from a film I still haven’t seen), it’s still a pretty forgettable bit of inspirational dance-pop. It won’t win the Oscar and didn’t need to be nominated, but worse films have made it into the Oscar canon on the backs of worse songs. Some of them by Diane Warren.

Score: 67

Sexy Beast (2000) – ***½

When I first watched Sexy Beast back in 2014, I didn’t much take to it. I rated it a 72 and wrote “it never quite develops into anything substantial…the script seems to be missing something at the center, and Glazer’s finesse doesn’t fill that void.” After seeing and being impressed by Glazer’s latest film (and Oscar breakthrough), my thoughts turned towards his first feature and whether or not I’d undervalued it.

Watching clips of Ben Kingsley’s Oscar-nominated performance further whetted my appetite to revisit the film (not on the Criterion Channel, where it’s currently streaming, but on my own copy), and I finally did – and, as you might have my guessed, my opinion improved considerably. I still think it falls short of true greatness, but I got far more out of it this time around.

On that first viewing, I compared the film to Glazer’s third feature, Under the Skin, noting that while both favored style over substance, Skin had the greater style and Beast had a bit more substance. I don’t know if I would appreciate Skin more on a third viewing – I think it’s technically magnificent but ambiguous to the point of opacity – but I undersold Beast on both fronts.

Glazer had directed a number of music videos before making Beast, and at times it’s easy to tell; a discreetly staged sex scene, for example, features distorted sound, fiercely textured imagery, and jarring shifts between under- and over-cranking. There, the heightened style works; not so much when the nightmare rabbit-man rears his head, being a vague symbol (of impending danger) and a borderline laughable sight.

But Glazer uses such flourishes to enhance the story, rather than to take its place. And the script, by Louis Mellis and David Scinto, has a good deal more weight than I once gave it credit for. It uses the genre of the British gangster thriller – full of violence, pop music, and profane patter – not for the usual vicarious excitement but for a study of human nature.

If there’s a running theme in Glazer’s filmography, it’s the analysis of what people do and why. Under the Skin was the most overt example, as an alien who took the form of Scarlett Johansson observed and absorbed the human beings around them, while The Zone of Interest observed the domestic life of Auschwitz’ commandant, showing how he and his family lived with atrocities occurring literally over the garden wall.

Here, we have three characters who represent points on the spectrum of hoodlum humanity. Gal Dove (Ray Winstone) is our protagonist, who is as sincerely retired from crime as he is sincerely in love with his wife DeeDee (Amanda Redman). All he wants is to eat, drink and sunbathe at his villa on the Spanish coast, and when he’s forced back into the life, we know exactly what he’s got to lose.

Then there’s Don Logan (Kingsley), the mere mention of whom strikes fear in Gal and DeeDee’s hearts, and who proves equally resistant to charm and reason. He dismisses small talk briskly, backs up his one act of generosity with a hint of menace, and ratchets up the pressure on Gal to take part in a heist until he’s literally screaming “YES! YES! YES! YES! YES!” If there’s anything in his life besides crime and the occasional act of mischief (as he proves when he lights a cigarette on an airplane), we don’t see it.

Finally, there’s Teddy Bass (Ian McShane), the mastermind of the heist, who feints at having outside interests – he gets invited to an orgy, after all, but seems bored until he meets a man who manages an exclusive bank – but is likewise most interested in crime. Compared to Don, who finds resentment around every corner and flies into rages at the drop of a hat, Teddy is cold, calculating, and resistant to bullshit. He knows the answers to his questions before he asks them; he’s more concerned with how his target reacts, and Gal is rightly terrified of him.

All three actors are excellent, but what really struck me, watching the entire film, was how different Kingsley’s performance feels compared to watching it in isolated clips. In clips, you can laugh at the outrageous profanity, the shrieking anger, the use of words like “insinnuendos” and lines like “No, you are going to have to turn this opportunity yes.” In the actual film, it’s a lot harder to laugh because Don is so intense and so implacably hateful.

His cruelty stands out all the more next to Winstone’s roughnecked charm, Redman’s relaxed glamour, Cavan Kendall’s lovably absurd ramblings as Gal’s friend Aitch, and Julianne White as Aitch’s wife Jackie, who crossed paths with Don before – and is visibly sickened at having to do so again. Even before he lashes out, there’s no being at ease around him.

It’s also notable that, when Gal reluctantly returns to London to do the job and finds himself surrounded by old cronies and comrades-in-arms, they’re portrayed not as colorful characters but as grotesque ciphers; the world of the mob holds no charm for him, and he just wants to get the job over with and go home – and we want him to.

Getting to that point, however, takes a lot of cross-cutting between Spain and London, between now and then (and a then within the then), and the editing is masterful throughout; the film runs a commendably brisk 88 minutes, and while there are times I might wish for a little more meat on its bones, there’s very little that doesn’t belong (really, only the scenes with the rabbit-man).

Per the film, “When there’s a will – and there is a fucking will – there’s a way – and there is a fucking way.” What makes Sexy Beast interesting – and gives one room to reflect on it afterwards – is that it cares more about the will than the way.

Score: 84

Origin (2023) – ***½

When we first see Isabel Wilkerson (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), she and her husband Brett (Jon Bernthal) are visiting her mother, Ruby (Emily Yancy). They help her get up, get dressed, and take her to visit the nursing home where she’ll spend her final years. Some of us have been there. Some of us will be. Some of us do what Wilkerson later thinks she should have done, which is take care of Ruby herself. It’s only after we’ve seen her as a person dealing with the near-universal challenge of caring for an aging parent that we’re introduced to her as a Pulitzer-winning writer.

It was a wise choice on Ava DuVernay’s part, because the film will later plunge so deeply into Wilkerson’s theories and research that we nearly do lose sight of the human being holding it all together. To some degree, that mirrors Wilkerson’s plunging herself into her work as the personal tragedies mount: Brett dies suddenly, Ruby slowly declines and passes away, and her beloved cousin Marion (Niecy Nash) develops cancer and eventually dies as well.

But the film does lapse into illustrated-lecture territory, especially when Wilkerson travels to India to research the caste system and learns about B.R. Ambedkar, father of the Indian constitution and a member of the Dalit caste – also known as “untouchables.” On one hand, what’s being said about Indian society and history is well worth saying – I knew little if anything about Ambedkar- but on the other hand, the narration from Wilkerson and Dalit academic Suraj Yengde (playing himself) feels like the history lesson it is.

Given that we’re already at least 100 minutes into a 141-minute film, one may find this section and the subsequent montage where Wilkerson drafts her book (Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents) more than a little tedious, given how well the early scenes balanced the personal and the philosophical, and it’s frustrating how Wilkerson’s personal journey fades into the background and Ellis-Taylor is given less and less to work with.

But there are still vivid episodes in the last section of the film, including a painfully understated sequence where Alfred Bright, a Black child in 50s Ohio, is excluded from a swimming excursion with his white Little League teammates, until the staff are pressured to admit him…first obliging everyone else to exit the pool, then obliging Alfred to climb onto a raft and be pulled around the pool by a lifeguard – with strict instructions not to actually touch the water.

It’s as powerful an illustration of the absurdity of segregation as any I’ve ever seen; the sheer amount of time and effort it took to accommodate Alfred – cruelly singling him out, but with all the attention one would accord a royal visit – is jaw-dropping. At least Alfred would grow up to be a noted artist and educator; the film opens with a scene we quickly recognize, without needing to hear his name, as the last moments of Trayvon Martin’s life.

Earlier in the film, we get scenes from the lives of Allison Davis (Isha Blaaker) and his wife Elizabeth (Jasmine Cephas Jones) as they attempt to carry out research in 1930s Germany, only to learn just how bad things are starting to get (they watch a book burning), after which they return to America and, with the help of married white colleagues, go undercover in a Southern town to study the racial politics of daily life (which would later become the book Deep South).

This, and the tragic story of August Landmesser (Finn Wittrock), a German who may have refused to salute Hitler and definitely fell in love with the Jewish Irma Eckler (Victoria Pedretti) help to establish Wilkerson’s theory that the racial policies of the Nazis – openly influenced by America’s Jim Crow laws – are part of a continuum that reaches back to the caste system in India and forward to the racial tensions of the present day.

The film’s sheer ambition in encompassing these scenes in addition to Wilkerson’s own journey would be admirable enough, but DuVernay’s direction, the acting (uniformly solid, with a particularly fine brief turn by Audra McDonald), and Matthew J. Lloyd’s excellent cinematography, shot on 16mm to give it the wonderful grain and glow only film can offer, had me hoping the film might hold together enough to reach ****.

It doesn’t; the info-dumps of the final act threaten to undo it (I also found the final scene, where Wilkerson walks past the spirits of the various historical figures mentioned, borderline hagiographic), and even before then there are scenes like Nick Offerman’s cameo as a MAGA-hat-wearing plumber (whom Wilkerson tries to find some common human ground with) which teeter on the verge of cringe.

But there’s more than enough of the film that works, both in showing Wilkerson attempting to get through a time of great personal trial and consolidate her ideas into a workable book, and in showing the passages from history that help to illustrate those ideas (what she calls the “pillars” of caste). At its best, it’s both informative and dramatically compelling. At its worst, by and large, it’s still informative – and visually engaging as it moves from America to Germany to India, from past to present, with a few side-trips into fantasy.

Score: 85

Argylle (2024) – **½

Argylle isn’t as bad as I’d feared, nor as good as I’d hoped, nor as tiresome as I’d dreaded. Nor is it as exciting as, say, the latest Mission: Impossible, as funny as Spy, or as cheekily edgy as director Matthew Vaughn’s own Kingsman – a gleefully hard R compared to this bloodless film’s PG-13. It is, in every sense, a second-rate film, yet it tries as hard as any film in recent memory to make itself happen. From the mysteries surrounding the tie-in novel (no, it wasn’t written by Taylor Swift) to those theater-lobby standies featuring the bubble-window cat-carrier backpack, to the in-universe popularity of the Argylle novels, to mid-credits scene establishing this as a parallel franchise to Kingsman, it does everything it can to convince you of its own popcorn significance.

Were it worse, it might be truly laughable; I’m reminded of how Vaughn’s old friend Guy Ritchie supposedly meant 2017’s King Arthur: Legend of the Sword to be the start of a six-film franchise…but that film’s utter dreariness and absurd budget ensured its failure, and the sequels never came. Whether Argylle will perform well enough to justify more films remains to be seen – since it’s an Apple production, it may have a lower bar to clear – but based on the film itself, I can’t see much reason to continue.

Elly Conway (Bryce Dallas Howard) writes the highly successful Argylle spy novels, featuring the suave Agent Argylle (Henry Cavill) and his comrades Wyatt (John Cena) and Keira (Ariana DeBose), but her own life is very quiet, and focused mainly upon her beloved cat Alfie (Chip). After completing the fifth Argylle novel, she sends it to her mother (Catherine O’Hara), who reads it immediately and suggests the current ending is too abrupt. Elly tries, but can’t think of a good way to continue.

Deciding to visit her parents, Elly boards a train (with Alfie in tow) and is soon confronted by Aidan (Sam Rockwell), who casually reveals he’s a spy and that she’s in mortal danger. He’s soon proven right, as the train is revealed to be full of goons. After a lengthy fight, during which Elly keeps seeing Argylle in place of Aidan, they’re able to escape. Aidan then reveals why she’s being hunted: her novels parallel the operations of an agency called the Division so closely it’s assumed she’s accessing classified information.

A globe-trotting journey ensues, full of violent set pieces, jokes, and twists big and small as Elly’s storytelling ability reaches truly uncanny heights. I won’t reveal what happens, but it’s hard to imagine anyone who’s actually invested in the story being very satisfied with what we learn – and it’s hard to imagine anyone being all that invested to begin with. There’s a decent idea at the heart of Argylle, but it cries out for a smarter, more character-driven approach than what we get.

I keep thinking of how much Argylle pales compared to the competition. In the past year, we had Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One and John Wick: Chapter 4, both of which had far superior action scenes, more lavish spectacle, more compelling characters, and more genuine entertainment value. And I think of the original Kingsman (the only one I’ve seen), which isn’t great by any means, but is rather better at setting up its characters and far better at delivering the thrills.

I really don’t know why it was decided to make Argylle PG-13, and a tame PG-13 at that, but it’s the reliance on greenscreen and CGI that really robs the film of any real excitement. The opening chase through a Greek village is ludicrous to begin with, but it looks so fake that the giddy thrill it should inspire is lost. The oil-slick skating scene is a cool idea, but as executed you wonder if there’s even a real person doing the stunts, let alone if Howard was even on the set. And the pas de deux of mayhem, combining loving looks through gas masks with colored smoke and heavy artillery, is likewise too patently artificial to be more than colorful.

If there was more to the characters or the story, it might matter less, but Elly’s books seem as generic and predictable as the plot she finds herself caught up in proves to be. The Division is just another shadowy agency, its director (Bryan Cranston) is another cold-blooded manipulator (even his accessory of choice, a shotgun named “Clementine,” feels obvious), and the secrets he’s trying to keep under wraps would hardly raise an eyebrow in the real world. The more we learn about Elly, the less interesting she turns out to be, and on paper Aidan isn’t much better; even Alfie, cute though he is, feels more like a gimmick than a vital part of the story.

To be sure, Rockwell’s offbeat energy and comic timing make Aidan rather more fun than he might have been in the hands of a more traditional leading man. Howard does what she can, but the script just doesn’t give her much to work with; Elly is just too timid and blah in the early going and too generic once the plot thickens. O’Hara has some amusing and (for her) unexpected moments; Cranston is always watchable, but there’s never a hint of a surprise in his character.

There are a number of big names in smaller roles, and most of them are wasted. Cavill is reliably refined but stuck with a (deliberately?) terrible haircut, Cena gets a good moment or two and no more, DeBose is given ridiculously little to do (though she does get to sing the end-credits songs, which are good), Sofia Boutella pops up for a single scene and doesn’t get to fight, and Samuel L. Jackson gets more screentime, but little actual character. Dua Lipa, as a femme fatale in Argylle’s latest adventure, gets as much to do and comes off as well as anyone.

Tolerable, but thoroughly uninspired.

Score: 63