Hello once again, dear readers, and welcome back to the newsletter that has been called “VERY well written and funny…” by my father and a “blog” by many. Remember, you guys, this is a super serious and professional endeavor, so it is imperative that we call this creation a “newsletter.” That way people think this is all more important than it is and I can get a job. With housekeeping out of the way, I would like to thank you all for coming back for another edition of Trauma Response, the only Chicago-based newsletter run by a petite brunette homosexual, and made up of almost exclusively run-on sentences. The warm response to last week’s inaugural issue filled me with what can only be described as “gratitude,” a feeling I am not that well acquainted with as I’m usually a stuck up ungrateful spoiled brat with no manners. So, once again, thank you from the bottom of my heart for not only enjoying the first article and filling my Facebook notifications (as well as my mother’s, she enjoys the attention too) full of kind words, but also giving my ego a well-deserved boost.
After hours and hours of tossing and turning in bed one night in a futile attempt to try and fall asleep, the idea for this week’s newsletter came to me in the form of the Archangel Raphael. He descended from my ceiling on wings made of pure gold and wearing an effortlessly chic pure-white tunic. As he floated down from my ceiling he said unto me, “Holden Santi, writer of Substacks and purveyor of opinions, you must go where so few have gone before, and dare to talk about how all movies suck these days.” That is all, of course, a metaphor amounting to the fact that I was sleep-deprived and all of my best ideas come to me under extreme duress. So, without further ado, I will accept the Archangel Raphael’s challenge and get my hands wet with the blood of all of the shitty movies that I’ve seen recently.
According to my Letterboxd account, in the first five months of 2022, I have seen 41 different films, 16 of which have been either late 2021 releases or 2022 releases, and 10 of those I saw in the movie theater. It is fun to note all of which I also saw with my boyfriend (hello Caiden). The average rating for new movies I’ve seen in 2022 (and I’m sorry for all of the math language) is 2.75, with the pendulum just barely swinging into positive territory, but nowhere near a “Fresh Tomato” rating. Upon seeing a tweet the other day that read “Top 5 movies of 2022 so far? Share away!” the thought occurred to me, as I struggled to think of five decent movies that I’d seen in the past few months, that I just hadn’t seen that many good movies. Much like Lincoln in his prime, I enjoy going to the theater, but more often than not I’d find myself leaving the theater thoroughly unimpressed.
I’ll be gracious and give you all a small glimpse into my psyche, and tell you my three-ish movies that came to mind when I racked my brain trying to think of good movies in 2022 (and I say “three-ish” because I honestly could take or leave one of them). Of the new movies I’ve seen this year, the only ones that I felt deserved a spot on my list were as follows: Everything Everywhere All at Once directed by two men named Daniel that go, collectively, as “Daniels,” Scream directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, The Batman directed by Matt Reeves, and finally (the -ish) The Bob’s Burgers Movie directed by Loren Bouchard and Bernard Derriman. Why three out of those four movies needed two people to direct them when lone people have been directing movies all by themselves for decades I couldn’t tell you, but clearly they were onto something.
Allow me to explain my choices. Everything Everywhere All at Once, which I will henceforth just be calling Everything because that title is exhausting, is indeed everything. Action-packed, beautiful, complex, and heart-warming, this movie has it all. It’s hard to comprehend how this movie even got made considering its bonkers premise and relatively low budget, especially when compared to another movie about the multiverse (*cough* Doctor Strange 2 *cough*), but we’ll touch on that later. Nevertheless, Everything is the movie of the year in my book. Scream (the fifth one, not the first one) is easy to justify because I simply love the franchise. I’m a fan of the slasher genre and the Scream franchise is my favorite of the bunch. It feels fresh for the times and successfully evades sequel fatigue due to the relatively long wait between it and its predecessor. The Batman is three hours long, which is something I’d usually detest, and while it is hard not to cramp up a little in a dingy movie theater seat while watching something this long, I felt that it utilized all of its runtime effectively. I like Batman as a character, and I like how Robert Pattinson plays him as a goth freak weirdo, and I appreciated the ability of Matt Reeves & Co. to make The Riddler of all villains seem plausible in the real world with such direct homages to films like Se7en and Zodiac. At long last, we reach our “-ish,” The Bob’s Burgers Movie. I like Bob’s Burgers as a show, it’s delightful and optimistic and cute, so it’s only natural that the movie is the same. I rated the movie a 4.5 on Letterboxd because I thought it was all of those things. I enjoyed this movie, and I’d gladly watch it again and again, but it’s not necessarily one of the best movies I’ve seen. Dare I say including that movie on my Top However Many Movies List means I’m grasping at straws?
Now I’m not asking for all movies to strive to be the next The Godfather (which I’ve never seen but I’ve heard a handful of people say it’s pretty decent), but it seems that an overwhelming amount of movies these days are content with being solidly “meh,” if not just outright bad. Whether it’s one of the Disney Company’s million projects spewing out of the Marvel Cinematic Universe like pus from a festering wound, or a highly anticipated indie horror flick from critical darling A24, everyone is resting on their laurels and wants to take it easy rather than create good art. The worst part is that so many directors spewing out the garbage today have already made good art.
Sam Raimi created the cult classic The Evil Dead franchise and has made at least one good Spider-Man movie (depending on who you ask), and he goes from that to making a terribly CGI’d thinly plotted Doctor Strange movie for the bloated corpse of the Disney Company? How is it that Alex Garland, director of Ex Machina and, one of the best sci-fi movies based on one of the best sci-fi books of all time, Annihilation goes to making some weirdly too-message-y-but-also-somehow-not-clearly-message-y-enough movie Men? Movies like The Northman, from directors like Robert Eggers who have proved they have what it takes to make fantastic movies, feel bogged down by inflated runtimes that leave nothing for their characters to do other than basically chillax for an hour.
The scope of many movies these days seems to be too broad. Some of the more recent additions to the Marvel Cinematic Universe feel the need to tell stories beginning at the dawn of human civilization (Eternals), or stories that span multiple universes (Doctor Strange 2). While a big scope might not be a bad thing, they feel the need to ignore the more intimate moments between characters in favor of big ideas and grander implications. Everything Everywhere All at Once was a movie about multiple universes, yes, but at its heart, it was a story about a mother and a daughter and the lengths a parent will go to make their children feel safe and happy. Movies like Spencer (my favorite movie of 2021, thank you very much) might be almost two hours long, but is essentially about one single woman struggling to meet the exhausting demands of the institution she finds herself a part of. Generally, I don’t like movies over 90 minutes because, more often than not, the longer a movie gets the more it feels the need to be some giant epic masterpiece with huge ideas that far overshadow the characters meant to convey them.
How am I expected to engage with heady ideas and grand epic narratives when the characters, the very soul of these films, are shafted? All brain and no heart makes Holden a dull moviegoer. From what I see, all of the data I’ve collected, many movies are forgoing character-driven stories to pursue stories driven by big ideas and themes, and in doing so are giving up the emotional center that they so desperately need to engage with audiences. We can either be making movies, or we can be making art, but to make art you need that emotional core, that something to latch onto and make people feel something.
And maybe you don’t agree with me, maybe you think the movies these days have been great! To that, I say, “Start your own fucking newsletter then.” I don’t hate movies, and I’m actually excited for a lot of movies coming out later this year, David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future looks grotesque and beautiful, Halina Reijn’s Bodies Bodies Bodies looks like a slasher romp fit for a generation poisoned by TikTok and Minions: The Rise of Gru looks like it has serious awards season potential! All I ask out of movies, all I’ve ever asked, is for something to hold onto, not necessarily something that keeps me thinking, but something that keeps me feeling, and I have faith that I will see plenty more movies that make me feel soon enough.
Hopefully, this issue doesn’t just read as me complaining on end about how all movies are trash, and instead as a sort of love letter to film in general. Like I said above, I love going to the theater, buying movie tickets, handing the receipt over to my boyfriend because I’ve convinced myself they cause cancer, buying some Milk Duds, and seating myself for a movie I’m pretty sure is going to let me down in the end. I’ll gladly do it over and over again because I really just love going to the movies.
Once again, thank you so very much for joining me for another issue of Trauma Response, I am your dear writer Holden Santi and I have proved that I can write another one of these in only a week’s time, so I will see you all again next week.
FABULOUS!