Hello, happy Fri-YAY, and don’t talk to me until I’ve had my coffee, welcome back to another Friday Post here on Trauma Response. As some of you may remember, my second post on this Substack was about movies, specifically how every movie I’d seen recently was pretty shitty. At the end of that newsletter, I expressed hope that perhaps my mind would be changed, and that some of the upcoming movies on my watchlist looked good and I hoped for the best. As of posting that newsletter, I have seen six movies in theaters: David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future, Scott Derrickson’s Black Phone, Taika Waititi’s Thor: Love and Thunder, Dean Fleischer-Camp’s Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, Jordan Peele’s Nope, and Halina Reijn’s Bodies Bodies Bodies. The average rating for those six films based on my Letterboxd reviews is an amazing four stars out of five (huzzah!). While I found Crimes of the Future to be amazing and gross, Black Phone to be very tense and wonderfully simplistic, and Thor to be good enough by Marvel standards (though I think I was just really really happy it was nothing like Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness), for this week’s Friday edition I will only be talking about the latter half of movies I’ve seen since my movies post. Without further ado…
In my movie article, I criticized a lot of current releases for being a little too cerebral and much too wide in scope, many movies I’d seen were lacking an emotional core or heart that I feel is necessary to a good movie. No movie is a better antithesis to that than Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, a mockumentary-style comedy-drama about an anthropomorphic seashell (who, as the title suggests, does wear shoes) named Marcel, voiced by Jenny Slate, who makes a desperate bid to find his lost family. The film takes place almost entirely inside of one house, and with Marcel and his grandmother Connie (Isabella Rossellini, wow!) being so small the house is practically a world of its own. I’ve long said of film, ask anybody, that if you can’t make a movie in 90 minutes, you don’t deserve to make a movie that’s two hours long, and, at only 90 minutes in length, Marcel the Shell is able to competently tell a wholesome, down-to-earth, and adorable story without any added filler or fluff. At the heart of the film, obviously, is Marcel, and while the cast does expand significantly in the last 20 minutes of the film, Marcel could’ve carried this movie all the way on his own if he needed to. What I loved about this movie was that it was built entirely around Marcel, it was his journey that we followed, his lens that we saw the world through, and his world that we got to know. We spend the most time with him, so it’s him we get to know the most, and by the end of the film you don’t want it to end and you want more of him because, by that special movie magic, in some way you love Marcel, and that is what you want out of a movie.
The next movie I saw in theaters was Jordan Peele’s Nope, which I realize is not his most popular movie of the three he’s made, but for me it was my second favorite. Let’s face it, probably nothing he does will be better than Get Out, that’s just a fact, it was a pretty revolutionary movie for it’s time, and it’s able to stand up to this day, so everything else he does is basically a race for second place. I saw his second movie Us in theaters when it first came out and I distinctly remember leaving the theater confused. Confused by what the movie was trying to say, confused by the internal horror movie logic it used to convey whatever it was trying to say, confused by where all of the doppelgangers got the scissors, it was all just very confusing and muddled. The only thing I knew about Us was that Lupita Nyong’o was a star. When I saw Nope I found it to be a healthy balance between story, spectacle, and message. It’s a fairly grounded story (like Get Out) that, save for a handful of scenes, pretty much just takes place at a horse ranch, but it’s a bit more gratuitous when it comes to its sci-fi elements and showing “the monster” (more like Us), but unlike Peele’s previous movies it doesn’t rely that heavily on deeper message, and I think that worked to its benefit. Get Out was heavy on message, and that was the point and a big part of what made it great, Us similarly was heavy on message, but, as I said before, I felt that the meaning of the film was overshadowed by the incoherent internal logic they used to convey said meaning. While I’ve read articles explaining to me how the message of how Nope is about “Hollywood chewing you up and spitting you out,” or something to that effect, it’s able to stand on its own two feet regardless of whether or not you understood the message the film was trying to send. I appreciated a film that allowed story to take precedence over message and one that also provided a healthy amount of spectacle that makes me want to rewatch. Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer are amazing, and it was especially nice to see Keke Palmer getting the spotlight once again. Needless to say, Nope was a Yep from me!
The final film I’d like to talk about, and the one I saw most recently in theaters, is Bodies Bodies Bodies directed by Halina Reijn. Marketed as a slasher, but more akin to 1985’s Clue than Scream, Bodies Bodies Bodies is probably what I would show to aliens if they came down to earth, broke into my home, and demanded I explain to them what Gen Z is like. Yet again, this movie is one that takes place entirely at one location, providing another grounded and insular examination of characters in one space. Many movies, too many movies nowadays, try to pretend like they understand how “the youth” of the day interact with social media and the internet, but Bodies Bodies Bodies is one of the very few who truly get it right. Though it was critiqued in the New York Times as a “95-minute advertisement for cleavage,” it is actually a thorough and hilarious examination of how Twitter-pilled young adults react when thrown into real-life, mature situations of crisis. The trailers did this movie very dirty and made it seem rather vapid and stupid, but rest assured this movie has a lot to say for itself, while also being a fun and enjoyable piece of cinema. In a similar way to how Wes Craven’s original Scream movie (a personal favorite of mine) turned the slasher genre on its head for people in the 90s, so too does Bodies Bodies Bodies for the digital age.
When I wrote my first article about movies, I was extremely frustrated. I’d seen a lot of bad ones around that time, and even more that were just mid, so perhaps I misjudged. I’m big enough to say that maybe I judged the state of film today a bit prematurely, maybe. The past six movies I’ve seen in theaters have been really good, and the most recent three have been above board, and I’m happy to see that! In the end, what this probably comes down to is a question of taste. I absolutely hated Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, so you’d imagine my surprise at finding out a lot of people actually enjoyed specific things about the movie that I loathed. Not everyone liked Nope, while I thought it was excellent and fun, and that’s okay. What I’ve realized is that everyone has different tastes in movies, not everyone can have as good of taste as I do, and I am at peace with that.