The Films of 2022

[Finch]

Michael Mann's remark on how modern action films bore him was breathlessly reported across social media and this film only seems to bolster his argument. Pity given the talent involved. I dread how busy and overstuffed John Wick 4 might turn out to be since 2 and 3 were already abandoning the simplicity of the first. A bit depressing that only Furiosa seems worth looking forward to...

[DarkImbecile]

There's definitely a certain amount of mileage that legendary visual effects guru Phil Tippett's loooong-gestating feature directorial debut, Mad God, automatically earns out of the particular appeal of its practical stop-motion animation, which lends it an earthy tangibility so rarely seen in animation the last couple of decades. But it's the deliberately alienating, disturbing, and often flat-out gross ends to which Tippett uses his now-archaic skill set that made this one of the more unique and oddly pleasurable cinematic experiences I've had in a theater this year.

The closest thing to a protagonist is a gas-masked operative dispatched by a god-like ruler to strike the lower levels of the nightmarish world Tippett reveals, a kind of multi-tiered post-human dystopian cesspool; his descent takes him past intricately-designed creatures and architecture, miniature societies buckling under the weight of fascistic social controls, and other unidentifiable horrors and creatures. The nearly dialogue-free sound design is just as distinctive as the visuals, packed with shrieks and groans, squishes and drips, inhuman gibberish and unearthly music.

The directions the film goes from that setup are similarly grotesque and bizarre, but for me the experience reaches a kind of odd grandeur toward the end through both the remarkable technique on display and the commitment to a singular vision. This is the kind of abrasive experience that I don't know I'd recommend to everyone or throw on for fun, but I'm quite glad I got to see it in a surprisingly packed screening at one of our small art-houses; the reaction to the film seemed unsurprisingly mixed, but it held everyone's rapt attention throughout, even if some grumbled about it on the way out. The film appears to be streaming on Shudder and available to rent on Amazon, but I'm not sure there's been any physical release beside the Kickstarter rewards program that got the film finally finished a couple of decades after Tippett first began work on it.

[DarkImbecile]

Michael Mann's remark on how modern action films bore him was breathlessly reported across social media and this film only seems to bolster his argument. Pity given the talent involved. I dread how busy and overstuffed John Wick 4 might turn out to be since 2 and 3 were already abandoning the simplicity of the first. A bit depressing that only Furiosa seems worth looking forward to...

To further underline your point, Bullet Train wasn't even the worst action movie I saw last week!

Lured by the promise of swole Ryan Gosling, my wife cajoled me into watching Netflix's $200 million summer blockbuster The Gray Man with her, which somehow manages to waste all that money and a lot of acting talent on a bleak and pointless genre exercise that doesn't even rise to the speed-bump-sized heights of 2020s action cinema. The word that kept coming into my head while watching Joe and Anthony Russo's latest failed attempt to prove that they deserve a career outside of Disney franchises was "pointless": pointless slaughter of nameless goons, pointless camera movements swirling around characters but showing nothing of interest, pointless action sequences utterly devoid of dramatic tension or stakes, pointless rehashing of the Bourne formula with not even a detectable fraction of the stylistic or political sensibilities that made those films interesting.

I've never been one of those who rejected even Ryan Gosling's notoriously blank performances in his Nicolas Winding Refn films, since those choices actually seemed related to the characters he was playing, but I was actively repelled by the vacuous, self-satisfied portrayal of a wronged CIA assassin he gives here. The fact that the usually luminous Ana de Armas also feels totally replaceable in her role as a wronged CIA assassin points to the failure of the directors to utilize the talent they have, though Chris Evans does seem to understand his assignment as a comically villainous CIA assassin. Billy Bob Thornton and Alfre Woodard, as higher ranking CIA assassins, similarly do the best they can to be interesting plot mechanisms, but ultimately can't overcome the vapidity of the script and the thoughtless filmmaking.

One of the reasons the Bourne movies that so clearly inspired this monstrosity were successful was the way Liman and Greengrass were able to create a visceral sense of danger, where even if we suspected Bourne would find a way to survive, the damage he and those around him might sustain was serious. The Russos somehow manage to make car chases, shootouts, plane crashes, and all but a couple of hand-to-hand fight sequences feel totally perfunctory, completely fake, and utterly free of consequence — the exception being a pair of scenes with Bollywood actor Dhanush, whose lithe physicality and charismatic presence somehow overcomes the anchors dragging the other actors down.

Decent action films should be really easy to make: think up a halfway decent reason to spend $30 million dollars having athletic people beat the shit out of each other, wreck a few cars (actually wreck them, not in a computer), and maybe blow up a building for the finale. It boggles the mind to imagine how much the Russos spent on the centerpiece tram sequence in Prague, which makes no sense and feels distractingly fake for almost the entirety of the roughly 15-minute set piece; probably enough to make an entire feature a couple of orders of magnitude better (like Leigh Whannell's Upgrade) three or four times over.

[Persona]

Michael Mann's remark on how modern action films bore him was breathlessly reported across social media and this film only seems to bolster his argument. Pity given the talent involved. I dread how busy and overstuffed John Wick 4 might turn out to be since 2 and 3 were already abandoning the simplicity of the first. A bit depressing that only Furiosa seems worth looking forward to...

I'm very game for Gareth Evans' HAVOC.

[brundlefly]

The ultimate lesson of The Gray Man for future AI script programs is that, if you make 30% of the second-half of the film consist of callback lines, you only have to come up with 85% as much dialogue.

(Unsure of the exact math on this, the computers will be better at that.)

[Finch]

I'm very game for Gareth Evans' HAVOC.

Good call. That's heading to Netflix, no?

[Persona]

Yes.

[DarkImbecile]

As a fan of inventive small-scale horror, I very much wanted to love Zach Cregger’s Barbarian… and for the first hour or so I very much did. The premise is wonderfully creepy and disturbing: a young woman (the very good Georgina Campbell) visiting Detroit for a job interview arrives during a midnight rainstorm at the Airbnb she booked, only to discover that a man is already staying there, claiming he also booked the home. Unable to identify an alternative on short notice, she reluctantly agrees to stay and share the house… and that’s when things start going sideways.

The patient accumulation of unsettling details about our heroine’s situation — some red herrings and some very much not — is remarkably effective, such that I was still entirely on board when the real madness starts and

Spoiler

the focus shifts to Justin Long’s previously unintroduced sleazy actor for a good 20+ minutes. Unfortunately, once his strand joins with the main narrative, the increasingly schlocky horror elements and the initially amusing and then overly broad characterization of Long’s character combine to deflate the goodwill established by the opening.

There’s also an undercooked undercurrent of toxic men and the abuse and disregard of women that takes up a lot of thematic real estate but never really lands anywhere compelling; I thought this movie might be going in a very different direction for the first two-thirds based on some of the pointed conversations around this topic, but its ultimate interests are considerably less socio-political.

There are still some amusingly demented moments in the back half of the film that are quite fun to see in a crowded, squirming theater, but Barbarian ultimately asks for a little too much leeway from its audience to be fully successful. Still, Cregger’s solo feature directing debut points to a capacity for blending suspense and cringe that would serve him well with a slightly tighter script.

[Finch]

The People's Joker looks more fun to me than anything Todd Phillips makes. Hopefully it does get a release (it might even be a future Vinegar Syndrome partner label disc!).

[Mr Sausage]

Bodies Bodies Bodies discussion moved here.

[brundlefly]

Dual (Riley Stearns)

Despite being heavily indebted to the work of Yorgos Lanthimos, Riley Stearns' sci-fi adjacent black comedy Dual ends up having enough interesting ideas — and, maybe more importantly, being funny enough — to keep it from being written off as merely derivative of that style. Karen Gillan plays both Sarah and Sarah's Double, a clone generated by a company offering dying people a chance to leave behind a reasonable enough facsimile of themselves to keep their loved ones from missing them too much… Gillan carries her roles well, as does Aaron Paul in a supporting role as a personal trainer trying to prepare Sarah for the resolution to her situation; their deadpan, emotionless line delivery will feel familiar to those who are familiar with Lanthimos' direction, but fits well enough in the cold, pitiless world Stearns is presenting to feel justified.

"For originals who are very sad, every day is a struggle."

I’m on the side of any project out to ridicule anything as arrogant and insistent as the survival instinct. This is a movie about not wanting to be alive, much, yet feeling you must keep on for no good reason. The end of each breath a new promise, every sunrise a fresh failure. I love it probably more than I should.

To repeat and expand what DI said: Dual is heavily indebted to the work of Yorgos Lanthimos, especially the first three features Lanthimos wrote with Efthymis Filippou. Dogtooth (2009), Alps (2011), The Lobster (2015). Alps is one of Stearns’ favorite films and in some ways the very concept of Dual could be seen as a glitched riff on that. Stearns shares Lanthimos’ brutal and absurd worldview and, as DI notes, favors a similar deadpan, clipped delivery. They manufacture conversations from lists of factoids and secret code; undressed exposition in the manner of textbooks and instruction manuals; speeches from a mix of too-obvious statements and opaque and particular metaphors that make sense to no one but the speaker, who then has to explain them.

In those three Lanthimos/Filippou films, as in Dual and Stearns’ The Art of Self-Defense (2019), characters list tastes in music and food like robots reading online dating profiles. How many facts does it take to make a human being? What exactly forms our identity and what bonds us to others? (Perhaps it’s as simple as this: “Humans wear shoes.”)

Here are some things that occur in both Dual and The Lobster:

Spoiler

• The joke “That would be absurd/ridiculous” is used to wave off a random absurdity in the midst of plainly ridiculous rules to highlight how arbitrarily lines are drawn between sense and non-.
• People are forced to abandon the use of their dominant hand. In The Lobster, it’s to make single people appreciate how life is easier with two things; in the Dual support group scene, it’s so survivors can appreciate their deceased double. (Also, fighting with one hand behind your back is a handicap courts dole out to people who default on clone support payments.)
• In discussing blindness (Lobster) or being blindfolded (Dual), it’s noted that the other senses are/would be heightened.
• A dog is killed. Dogs are killed in both Dual and Self-Defense; in his Dual director’s commentary, Stearns says he is a dog lover but that these deaths were good jokes to him because of Dual’s misdirection and Self-Defense’s dog-avenging-dog scenario.
• Suicide (discussed, attempted)

Here are some things that occur in both Dual and Alps:

Spoiler

• Again, the very concept: A service offers substitutes for the recently dead, supposedly for the benefit of grieving loved ones.
• A replacement that refuses to leave.
• Someone is locked out of a house in which they feel they belong; they circle around to the back of the house and are shut out by blinds(Dual)/a security door(Alps)
• A fake-out about transactional sex. (Stearns had one of these as far back as his first meh short “Magnificat” (2011), and again in Self-Defense (“Just know that every one of them… had to do this at one point.”) Lanthimos/Filippou have actual transactional sex in both Dogtooth and The Killing of a Sacred Deer.)
• Suicide (attempted)

Here are some things that occur in both Dual and Dogtooth:

Spoiler

• A domestic animal is killed.
• Comically awkward dance scene.
• Dialogue about how men age better than women.

(I have not seen Kinetta or any films Filippou has written with/for other directors except Chevalier, which is too gentle and slight to be discussed in this company.)

Stearns clearly feels enough kinship with the Lanthimos/Filippou works, outlook, and manner to sidle up and, if not wholly ape them, at least walk that way. It is frankly difficult to not mimic the style after attentive exposure. Like how when you exit a Pinter play you may find yourself talking for ten minutes about how nice the nice fried bread is. (It’s very nice.) L&F are not Stearns’ only influence, though, when it comes to dialogue and delivery. When Jesse Eisenberg raises his voice to a bark in Self-Defense It becomes clear the short, simple sentences are meant to recall dubbed martial arts films. And though Dual wasn’t conceived there, basing its production in Finland either lent or highlighted a droll Nordic tone.

Lanthimos’ style can feel both like an appropriation and a very good fit.

Stearns is making fundamentally different films; they are easier and somewhat more traditional than the Lanthimos/Filippou works. He’s using enough subversion to confound, not enough to unsettle. Both consider cultures with bizarre rules. But Dogtooth and Alps start from a place of immersive mystery where the viewer has to figure out rules and roles and an eventual story through observation. Stearns courts sympathy from the audience and provides easy entry by having leads who are looking from the outside at systems of belonging – masculinity in Self-Defense, happiness and basic human connection in Dual – they do not understand. (Lobster has more of Column B than Column A, but then it does have three separate subcultures to define; Stearns’ first feature Faults (2014) is less willing to spell out its background rules, but that fosters a sense of growing sympathetic confusion with its lead.) He’s far more interested in sympathy and entertainment. He shares Lanthimos’ cruel sense of humor but makes more accessible a heart; he’s more willing to abandon absurdity for silliness. Take the shared gag in Alps and Dual where

Spoiler

it’s implied the lead character is being asked to trade sex for a favor. In Dual, “some sort of arrangement that is mutually beneficial” is planted early to give Aaron Paul’s personal combat trainer’s deadpan a mildly threatening edge. After Karen Gillan’s Sarah brings it up later, a few ominous beats are quickly subverted by Lil Jon & The East Side Boyz and an awkward bout of hip-hop dance instruction. Wags a finger at our thinking, adds a sense of both maturity and innocence, gives Sarah a flash of confidence. Also just plain funny.

In Alps, Angeliki Papoulia’s nurse is willing “to do anything” to get Johnny Vekris’ coach to allow the gymnast he is coaching to choose her own music. We cut to him taking his shirt off in an apartment in her presence. But she then shampoos his head and gives him the haircut he has not had since his barber died. Not more than a quick snort at subverted expectations, but there is a lot going on emotionally and thematically. It shows the messy stew of the nurse’s motivations, as she’s both doing a favor for her co-Alp gymnast (who just tried to kill herself), helping her co-Alp coach move on from a loss, and spending even more of her free time taking the role of someone recently passed. And then Lanthimos reinserts and redefines the sexual danger, cutting to the nurse, mostly naked on a bed with the mostly naked coach, showing them awkwardly simulating sex for a blind client. Prankish whiplash, more blurring of boundaries.

Both takes foster an intimacy between their duos, just not the ones we expect. Stearns goes to the window, Lanthimos & Filippou go to the wall. (If you’re going to pay for the song, you use it.)

Dual even shares some of Alps’ palette, though a lot of that involves hewing to common color temps, Dual is more stylized, less reliant on natural light. Like the Lanthimos films, Stearns likes static shots – suits the humor, when it’s not being pushed to cringe – and zooms, and plies thrusts of handheld camera where you’d expect. The motion control shots used for the twinning feel impressively natural. The cutting is crisper, there’s little inclination for withering long takes.

Lanthimos soundtracks his films with catalog classical and existent pop. Stearns hires composers. The score in Self-Defense evolves with its lead character from aggressively whimsical pizzicatish tripe to a dark buzz; Dual lives in Emma Ruth Rundle’s electric guitar drone, sometimes cranks that to a rumble. He also uses bursts of incongruous aggro music – metal, hip-hop – as both shock and joke.

Stearns has other tendencies throughout his features. They all give the main character breakdowns behind the wheel of their car as if it’s the only place they can be emotional. (Dual has three.) He likes to show fake media-within-movies. He likes to see objects and bodies smoothly dragged off as if they were failed performers suffering a vaudeville hook.

*

“Why aren’t I crying?”

What makes Dual great is its dedication to its depression and how that leads to frustrating dramatic expectations. The Art of Self-Defense grafted its outsider affectations and Stearns’ love of martial arts comradery to a tidy character arc. Not so Dual, which opens

Spoiler

with an action sequence – one that, once we know the premise, seems to point to the climax. The whole midsection of the film is built around training for that climax. It’s in the pun in the title of the film. (Easily the worst thing about the film is its title.) And though what eventually happens is well-seeded and technically fulfilling, the movie just sorta wanders away from the promise of ferocious Amy Pond v. Amy Pond action. When death comes, the method is, as described by the film itself, “slow to act and not visually exciting.”

That open and a subsequent dream sequence are high-key tonal fake-outs; movie’s not even blatant about being a comedy until you’re more than a quarter-hour in. (Sanna-June Hyde’s gastroenterologist is a treasure.) Which makes it sound like it’s not a very good comedy. But you have to let despair sink in before you’re ready to laugh at it.

There are science fiction trappings. The new rules of an adjacent near-future universe, the excited elaboration and complications twinning inspires. Recent cinema and television are overstuffed with compounded busywork. But this is not a universe of possibility, it’s one of error and frustration. (The replacement service’s promotional video is mostly an admission of failure. It focuses on a double who can’t get his dominant hand right – his original even has to remind him which to use when he goes off to masturbate. It’s hosted by a replacement who creeps out his adoptive family. And of course it features suicidal imagery.) There’s the history of fictional doppelgangers, a trap there’s to be some sort of theological rumination or antagonistic psychological compare-contrast/back-forth. Encouraged by that title. (Easily the worst thing about the film is its title.) That’s led some to lay down terrible takes and I’ll admit I first thought the movie was moving in the direction of Harlan Ellison’s “Shatterday,” where the universe summons a competent replica/replacement for someone who’s failing as a person. People coming to Dual hoping for that or Gemini Man or Dead Ringers or a goateed Spock are doomed to disappointment by something determinedly single-minded, something more in line with Seconds’ take on Wherever You Go, There You Are.

Dual’s best fake-out may be that there is a feel-better path here and we are on it.

Sarah is miserable. She binge eats. She sad-faps to haunted house porn. She drinks enough that it’s the only thing her doctor warns her about. She and her live-in boyfriend can’t summon a conversation much less the desire to be in the same room. (The movie doesn’t force them into one until ten months after her death sentence.) She cannot stand her mother, who seems to be her only living relative and is lonely and is very interested in still being a mother. Sarah does not seem to have any friends. Or interests. She has a job that rates no mention. (Perhaps at Hampton DeVille.) She has two good options to escape her joyless existence, change her life or end her life, and she’s too passive to do either.

Sometimes it’s nice when life makes our choices for us.

Spoiler

There’s evidence to be had that Sarah has been made miserable by her circumstances and that being forced out of them by her double has been an awakening. She’s escaped the denigration of her boyfriend and the relentless guilting of her mother. Extended time living Sarah’s life moves Sarah’s Double from chipper sponge to the same broken place we met Sarah. (A process echoed by another double in the survivor support group: “I don’t like the people you forced me to live with. It makes me depressed. I want to kill myself too.”) They even force the double to perpetually and unnecessarily hide her only unique physical attribute – her eye color – under contact lenses. Meanwhile Sarah is actualizing herself in a way close to Stearns’ heart, though physical combat training. (Not sure if “Motion to Stay” would be a better title than Dual, but it is more meaningful wordplay.) The training has forced her to curb bad habits, watch terrible movies, and forge some connection with another human being (her personal combat trainer Trent, the only one who ever offers her an unforced compliment). It’s inconsistent and largely dependent on time of day, but the film’s visual tone goes warmer when Sarah asserts herself, oranges finding ways into the personal combat training sessions. She’s moved on, she tells her double. She is making a new life.

However the entirety of that new life is built around winning the upcoming duel. Which sure, would represent a symbolic triumph over her old self, her old life. But also: The only thing that has made her come alive is a contrived opportunity to kill herself. Trent’s program to inure Sarah to the effects of violence is also preparing her to confront her own death. She visits a corpse meant to look like her. She’s ordered to kill a dog that shares her hair (and eye) color.

Sarah’s death reveals the limits of her ability to change, the limits of people to accept change in others. Thirteen months of concerted training and Sarah still gets the final question on the test wrong. When she first meets her double, she brightens, excited by the double’s interest in her; she cools as soon as the double starts to express her own tastes and an openness to things outside Sarah’s inclinations. Sarah’s Double is not the secret sharer she thought she’d adopted. But a year later Sarah is still desperate enough for connection that, despite initial resistance, she drops guard and allows the double to play on that. Meanwhile, Sarah’s boyfriend and mother are complicit in Sarah’s Double’s plan. They would rather help murder a loved one and keep the replacement they hope will perform their desired functions as girlfriend/daughter than accept a Sarah who may find a life outside theirs. (Then again, Sarah ostensibly ordered her double for them without consulting them. It’s implied she does it because she wants to be remembered and gets angry when it turns out they instead want her to be replaced.)

Perhaps they see it as assisted suicide. Perhaps it is.

Suicide is such a thorough suggestion in Dual there should be a hotline number on a crawl throughout. Sarah’s terminal disease is a manifestation of her depression (“everyone is having a hard time believing there were no signs or symptoms leading up to this;” “it will be painless, but it is killing you”). The whole world is a reflection of her depression. Everyone is miserable. Doctors are depressed. Trent’s dog, who looks adorable and content, is “suffering. He’s in an immense amount of pain.” When Sarah tells a clerk that she’s “looking for an outfit to die in,” it’s surprising there isn’t a devoted department and a long line at its register. Outside of casual introductions and the first blush of new relationships, smiles are scant. The no-frills networking interfaces designed for the film are as joyless as the interactions they host. (The second-worst thing about the film, after its title, is the “Poor Connection” buffering message. Too on-the-nose, perhaps only redeemed by literally appearing over someone’s nose.)

The replacement program is supposedly only for people with proof of terminal illness, and certainly terminally ill people commit suicide, but when someone hangs themselves in your promotional video you’re saying something about your target demo.

The replacement process – more offhand and speedy than a Fotomat drop-off – is pitched as “a gift for your love ones. Can you put a price on them not having to be sad?” But of course this new lease on life – as with a lot of late-stage life-extending medical procedures in our fiercely capitalist country – passes on a generation of debt while providing a questionable, temporary stopgap. (There can’t be doubles of doubles. We all know that.) Doubles aren’t even technically alive until they assert their rights; they aren’t killed, they’re “decommissioned.” And the only legal corrective should both living beings want to continue living is to have them fatally sort it out amongst themselves as public entertainment. Life is very expensive but has little value.

Originals who win duels wish they were dead. Doubles who survive their originals wish they were dead. Sarah screams on the ride home after her doctor tells her she’s not dying.

Sarah’s Double’s plan is so obvious and she is so preposterously obvious while executing it that it is hard to think Sarah has a blind spot that large or has dropped her guard that low. Sarah entertains her knife before she leaves, decisively puts it down; she’s done fighting. Parked at the end of the road, drinking too much from the labelled water bottle her rival handed her, she sets off with meager preparations and depleted resources. She finally reaches the woods everyone stares longingly at on their walls. There’s no suspense, no tension. Natural sounds creep in, the score opens, brightens. She’s with a supportive friend who catches her when she falls, who agrees sympathetically with the last thing she says. If not a subconsciously shared plan, it’s a pretty good way to go. Even if it is slow to act and not visually exciting.

There’s a final fake-out, that Sarah’s Double has replaced Sarah not only in life but as our hero. That we end with the inescapability of her circumstances. But this isn’t a tragedy, it’s a comedy, and Sarah has triumphed. Look at that final shot. When we revisit Sarah as the credits roll, everything seems so natural, satisfying, peaceful. We should all be so lucky.

Eventually we will be.

Karen Gillan is revelatory in a way designed to be highlighted yet easy to overlook. She’s as good if not better than Colin Farrell’s great showy unshowy turn in The Lobster. Instead of channeling her energy into not doing things she injects a world of bland desperation into hints of numbed expression. The miss-them facial tells: Sarah’s Double’s uptick at the corner of her mouth when Sarah compliments her eye color; Sarah’s incremental eyebrow flash at the climax in the woods, barely caught by slow-motion. Her attempts to smile politely without actually smiling. Stearns often feeds actors line readings so they can mimic tempo and inflection, freeing them to express character elsewhere, and Gillan’s vocal tone cuts a wide swath of grays. She’s playing the double as an entitled child, but also a learning machine programmed to emulate Sarah, and by the time we reach a late period exchange between the two there’s not only an imitative similarity to her but a prideful ambiguity. Gillan goes loud a few times and doesn’t always make it fit, and it may be a too delicious when she lets Stearns’ deadpan slip into sarcasm. And she’s certainly never had problems going minimal as an actress before. But here she more than meets Stearns’ level of consideration and control.

Spoiler

(The feature Gillan directed, The Party’s Just Beginning (2018), is also drenched in suicide. It’s more an “Edward is Deadward”-style survivor’s story that displays some playful ideas and keen Inverness locations (and a terrible Lee Pace accent) before overextending itself in a way that makes band-aids necessary. But it’s an invested project that shows Gillan’s not flippant about the subject.)

*

“I don’t know, it looks haunted.” “But look, there’s a pool!”

Bears repeating: This is a very funny movie! Not just in effort to counteract miserabilism, and not just because all humor is gallows humor. But because in its muted tone Stearns makes pervasive his absurd outlook and maximizes his awkward dialogue to exacerbate mundane despair and mock attempts to stave off the inevitable. Attacking particulars of his own ridiculous concept exposes a world where life has been rendered meaningless through technology, through language, through living. It’s hilarious what we’ve done to ourselves.

Applying flat, officious delivery to the sly craft of a phrase like “they sometimes would prefer to continue to live” works euphemistic reverberation into dark giggles.

Spoiler

My favorite line, which I’m eager to recite at robocalls selling tax debt relief: “Between the personal combat training, clone support, and hip-hop dance classes, money has been a little tight recently.”

And shout-out to the pitch black throwaway about kidnapping trauma.

What happens when you suspect the world is better off without you but get the math backwards? Who wins when two people are fighting for a life no one wants? I’m not pretending everyone will sink in and chuckle along. The delivery system might make Dual seem one thin note held too long; I might envy those who can casually look up from it. And there’s room to find it alien and frustrating and dull and pointless. As Sarah sees life. It may promise action, and it may look sharp and move crisply. But this a march. It is a wallow. It is a mood piece and its mood is the sound of the last laugh. There are people who will love this movie the way they love their sadness and I hope for them they find it.

Since this was purchased in one of Sundance's larger deals, I assume it will be widely available enough soon for someone to offer some insight:

Major spoilers

Why would the double's plan — which Sarah's boyfriend and mother are aware of and supporting — be to pretend to be the original Sarah? It seems to unnecessarily complicate things when she could have easily arrived at the duel as the double, be declared the winner, and take over the life she wanted without having to fake anything.

I guess a big deal at Sundance will now get you shuffled off to a second-tier streamer like AMC+ after a token release.

Spoiler

Strange this didn’t bother me on first watch as the wind-down is a couple ticks too long (irony noted) and that would have saved those. fwiw, Stearns does not address this in his commentary. I don’t have any problem imagining his world includes extra-weird specific rules about the punishment being worse for doubles murdering originals, histories of doubles being treated as second-class citizens in the court of law, etc. For me, the bigger hurdle is that there has to be an easy biological way to find out if she’s a replacement. There’s also a missed opportunity to re-involve Trent, who I’m sure has been paying attention to the news, but that would just drag things out further and may show more of a connection between him and Sarah than Stearns wants there.

But I think the reason the deception didn’t bother me is that Sarah’s Double’s whole purpose is to become Sarah. The very first directive the replacement technician gives her after introducing her to Sarah is that, “When you replace her, you’ll take her name.” As the opening scene shows, doubles who win duels are given their originals’ identities on the spot. So having essentially won an off-site duel the title is her goal and her right, something she’s eager to claim, and then something she realizes by becoming every bit as miserable as Sarah ever was.

So I guess my guess is: Because she wanted to. And having the fallout of getting something you thought you wanted be a trial of unnecessary complications and then also misery lines up pretty well with this world.

[hearthesilence]

Frederick Wiseman's A Couple is screening one more time today at the NYFF, with Wiseman joining Alice Diop for a public conversation tomorrow as well.

It was really great to see Wiseman - he's 92 but still in relatively good shape, and still warm, funny and very intelligent. The star and co-writer of this film, Nathalie Boutefeu, also joined him for the Q&A yesterday, and it led to some amusing moments since they didn't have a translator.

I didn't realize Wiseman had a history of directing theatrical productions, and he did point out that one of his previous films also featured an actor or actress (I forgot which but I have not seen it yet - maybe someone else can identify it?), but even though it's centered around a sharp performance that brings written words to life, these are also words taken directly from real-life correspondence. (Translated with some tweaks to modernize the language, but otherwise these are real, personal exchanges.) So in many ways like a documentary, its power is rooted in reality, and with that context in mind, the film becomes all the more harrowing.

FWIW, Richard Brody wrote the following about this film just before the festival:

Wiseman, who lives in Paris, delivers something of a male artist’s universal confession. There’s no reason to think that he’s reproaching himself but, rather, reproaching European artistic culture at large—but, to do so, he also conveys the grand audacity of filming European artistic culture as such, in one mighty cinematic gulp. Perhaps, with Jean-Luc Godard’s recent death, I’ve got his films on my brain, but what “A Couple” most reminds me of, in style and tone, is Godard’s film “Nouvelle Vague” (which played at the N.Y.F.F. in 1990 but has never been released commercially here), in which a couple (Alain Delon and Domiziana Giordano) play out their power struggles, and the large-scale historical conflicts of money and art, on a sumptuous lakeside estate, in dialogue composed largely of literary quotations and references. Wiseman’s movie approaches such themes and tones with a documentarist’s concentrated focus on one person giving voice to her experience. Where Godard brings history’s voices to the fore through the iconographical composition of his highly symbolic characters, Wiseman restores the single voice of a single historical character and, in the process, renders her symbolic, emblematic, iconic.

It's a great read of the film, and I think it certainly plays out that way. During the Q&A, I think Boutefeu was asked why she wanted to do this film - she understood the question but decided to have Wiseman translate her response. Wiseman told the audience that the film dealt with Leo Tolstoy's inability (or really refusal) to conform to his wife Sophia's hope of a normal, domestic life, to which an amused Boutefeu shook her head. Wiseman then compared this to a law professor he had who would get irritated at long answers he didn't like and respond with "let me PARAPHRASE what you just said" before giving an answer he liked that did not reflect what the student said. Later an audience member actually translated what Boutefeu said, which is that she was interested in how Sophia wanted to insert herself creatively into Leo's work/life and how that was not possible.

[knives]

Frederick Wiseman's A Couple is screening one more time today at the NYFF, with Wiseman joining Alice Diop for a public conversation tomorrow as well.

It was really great to see Wiseman - he's 92 but still in relatively good shape, and still warm, funny and very intelligent. The star and co-writer of this film, Nathalie Boutefeu, also joined him for the Q&A yesterday, and it led to some amusing moments since they didn't have a translator.

I didn't realize Wiseman had a history of directing theatrical productions, and he did point out that one of his previous films also featured an actor or actress (I forgot which but I have not seen it yet - maybe someone else can identify it?), but even though it's centered around a sharp performance that brings written words to life, these are also words taken directly from real-life correspondence. (Translated with some tweaks to modernize the language, but otherwise these are real, personal exchanges.) So in many ways like a documentary, its power is rooted in reality, and with that context in mind, the film becomes all the more harrowing.

FWIW, Richard Brody wrote the following about this film just before the festival:

Wiseman, who lives in Paris, delivers something of a male artist’s universal confession. There’s no reason to think that he’s reproaching himself but, rather, reproaching European artistic culture at large—but, to do so, he also conveys the grand audacity of filming European artistic culture as such, in one mighty cinematic gulp. Perhaps, with Jean-Luc Godard’s recent death, I’ve got his films on my brain, but what “A Couple” most reminds me of, in style and tone, is Godard’s film “Nouvelle Vague” (which played at the N.Y.F.F. in 1990 but has never been released commercially here), in which a couple (Alain Delon and Domiziana Giordano) play out their power struggles, and the large-scale historical conflicts of money and art, on a sumptuous lakeside estate, in dialogue composed largely of literary quotations and references. Wiseman’s movie approaches such themes and tones with a documentarist’s concentrated focus on one person giving voice to her experience. Where Godard brings history’s voices to the fore through the iconographical composition of his highly symbolic characters, Wiseman restores the single voice of a single historical character and, in the process, renders her symbolic, emblematic, iconic.

It's a great read of the film, and I think it certainly plays out that way. During the Q&A, I think Boutefeu was asked why she wanted to do this film - she understood the question but decided to have Wiseman translate her response. Wiseman told the audience that the film dealt with Leo Tolstoy's inability (or really refusal) to conform to his wife Sophia's hope of a normal, domestic life, to which an amused Boutefeu shook her head. Wiseman then compared this to a law professor he had who would get irritated at long answers he didn't like and respond with "let me PARAPHRASE what you just said" before giving an answer he liked that did not reflect what the student said. Later an audience member actually translated what Boutefeu said, which is that she was interested in how Sophia wanted to insert herself creatively into Leo's work/life and how that was not possible.

Sounds like you’re referring to his Holocaust drama The Last Letter.

[beamish14]

Frederick Wiseman's A Couple is screening one more time today at the NYFF, with Wiseman joining Alice Diop for a public conversation tomorrow as well.

It was really great to see Wiseman - he's 92 but still in relatively good shape, and still warm, funny and very intelligent. The star and co-writer of this film, Nathalie Boutefeu, also joined him for the Q&A yesterday, and it led to some amusing moments since they didn't have a translator.

I didn't realize Wiseman had a history of directing theatrical productions, and he did point out that one of his previous films also featured an actor or actress (I forgot which but I have not seen it yet - maybe someone else can identify it?), but even though it's centered around a sharp performance that brings written words to life, these are also words taken directly from real-life correspondence. (Translated with some tweaks to modernize the language, but otherwise these are real, personal exchanges.) So in many ways like a documentary, its power is rooted in reality, and with that context in mind, the film becomes all the more harrowing.

FWIW, Richard Brody wrote the following about this film just before the festival:

Wiseman, who lives in Paris, delivers something of a male artist’s universal confession. There’s no reason to think that he’s reproaching himself but, rather, reproaching European artistic culture at large—but, to do so, he also conveys the grand audacity of filming European artistic culture as such, in one mighty cinematic gulp. Perhaps, with Jean-Luc Godard’s recent death, I’ve got his films on my brain, but what “A Couple” most reminds me of, in style and tone, is Godard’s film “Nouvelle Vague” (which played at the N.Y.F.F. in 1990 but has never been released commercially here), in which a couple (Alain Delon and Domiziana Giordano) play out their power struggles, and the large-scale historical conflicts of money and art, on a sumptuous lakeside estate, in dialogue composed largely of literary quotations and references. Wiseman’s movie approaches such themes and tones with a documentarist’s concentrated focus on one person giving voice to her experience. Where Godard brings history’s voices to the fore through the iconographical composition of his highly symbolic characters, Wiseman restores the single voice of a single historical character and, in the process, renders her symbolic, emblematic, iconic.

It's a great read of the film, and I think it certainly plays out that way. During the Q&A, I think Boutefeu was asked why she wanted to do this film - she understood the question but decided to have Wiseman translate her response. Wiseman told the audience that the film dealt with Leo Tolstoy's inability (or really refusal) to conform to his wife Sophia's hope of a normal, domestic life, to which an amused Boutefeu shook her head. Wiseman then compared this to a law professor he had who would get irritated at long answers he didn't like and respond with "let me PARAPHRASE what you just said" before giving an answer he liked that did not reflect what the student said. Later an audience member actually translated what Boutefeu said, which is that she was interested in how Sophia wanted to insert herself creatively into Leo's work/life and how that was not possible.

Sounds like you’re referring to his Holocaust drama The Last Letter.

Seraphita’s Diary is also a work of fiction. Never released on video/DVD by him

[hearthesilence]

I liked Cristian Mungiu's R.M.N. quite a bit. I actually went in fresh, not knowing anything about it (the festival actually gave away free tickets to Film at Lincoln Center members who RSVP'ed for them), and I was surprised that it was based on a real-life incident that happened right before the pandemic. In fact, the climactic town hall meeting is taken from real life - supposedly a complete video of it may still be on YouTube, but the story itself blew up when that video went viral. (As seen in the film, it's one long unbroken take, and it's masterfully done, all the more impressive given how many people are packed into the scene - it doesn't feel rehearsed and plays out very naturally.)

Mungiu made a lot of thoughtful remarks that I wish came from those in public office, though to be fair a politician would make them sound like calculated statements whereas from Mungiu they were completely sincere. Basically, he believed the townspeople IRL were green - they did not believe anything that so many elsewhere already (and wrongfully) did, but they did not have the calculation and foresight to realize their honesty would carry far and bring on condemnation. In telling the story, he didn't want to push his own political beliefs or make judgment - he was more interested in keeping his distance and examining the complexities that brought this community to act and think in this way. He then mentions that the limitation of political correctness is that there's no profound change in people - more likely they're trained to be more careful in what they say rather than reconsider what they believe, and that result only lays the groundwork for surprising election results.

When Mungiu completed the film, he went back to the actual town to screen it, and he said they were very anxious because they felt like the film would be a continuation of the unforgiving media attention they received. After the screening was over, he asked how many had been present during the incident that was portrayed, and there were quite a few who were. Apparently they showed up, ready to angrily defend their actions, but it was clear from the film that Mungiu was more interested in dialogue and not a straight condemnation.

[knives]

I’m a huge fan to begin with, but Ken Burns’ second film of the year, The US and the Holocaust, is arguably his best film ever. It’s a thorough and complex weaving of America’s history with humanity. It highlights how the country’s worst tendencies lived in symbiosis with Germany’s even down to WWI propaganda leading to skepticism of news coming out of Europe. Even matters sacred to the left leaning audience such as student protests are revealed to have a connection to America’s unwillingness to engage with the holocaust. Most shocking is how I’m the last ten minutes he argues we continue to ignore it and the symbiosis has reached a point wherein we could become Germany at any moment.

[DarkImbecile]

A fun cast does all they can to imbue See How They Run's slapstick meta-whodunit with the right energy, but Tom George's uneven direction and a self-satisfied script keep it from being more than a forgettable bauble. Set around the early London run of Agatha Christie's "The Mousetrap", this too-cute deconstruction of the murder mystery keeps nudging the audience about how self-aware it is — to the extent that it becomes difficult to actually invest in the characters and events — but at the same time isn't clever enough to actually deliver the goods of the genre. The plot's red herrings and dead ends are pretty easy to see coming, and the heavy-handed foreshadowing of the structural jokes minimize their impact.

The actors seem to have been left to their own devices as to the right amount of arch wackiness to bring to their roles, so Sam Rockwell's sluggish detective, Saiorse Ronan's hyperactive constable, David Oyelowo's foppish screenwriter, and Adrien Brody's sleazy American director all seem to be performing in different films (I liked Brody's the best, for what it's worth).

Light and easygoing enough that it's hard to muster up strong feelings toward it one way or the other, but the fact that I kept wanting to like it more and felt actively deterred from doing so grew increasingly irritating as the conclusion rolled around.

[DarkImbecile]

Despite its unique setting and several very good actors stretching into more action-oriented roles, Gina Prince-Bythewood's The Woman King is too wedded to the tropes of the middlebrow historical epic for its own good.

The solid opening act establishes the West African kingdom of Dahomey in the early 19th century and the political and strategic situation that leads John Boyega's king to rely on the deployment of a unit of all-female warriors (led by Viola Davis' weary and hardened General Nanisca) to fend off a larger neighboring empire as he attempts to navigate relations with Europeans slavers. Lashana Lynch and Shiela Atim are both standouts as veterans who support Nanisca and take a lead role in training a new group of recruits, including Thuso Mbedu's Nawi — an impetuous young woman whose father offers her up as a soldier when she refuses his attempts to marry her off. The novelty of these characters and this era — particularly the narrative around Nawi's efforts to become a member of the Agojie army, the dynamics of the clashes with the rival kingdom, and the political machinations within Dahomey — make this portion engaging enough even when the writing and direction is too straightforward.

It's when the narrative enters more conventional territory that it stumbles: removing an unnecessary romance subplot (or making it more steamy than the PG-13 rating allows) and putting more emphasis on the relationships between the core women would have made both the emotional and action payoffs of the last act more satisfying. Perhaps most disappointingly, the impulse to provide a too-neat resolution to the messy issues around the kingdom's involvement in the slave trade and its impact on the core characters is unconvincing and unsatisfying.

The presence of several extremely charismatic actors (Lynch probably foremost among them), South Africa-based locations, solid production design, and the largely effective staging of battle and training sequences combine to ensure that the film isn't a chore to sit through, but the emotional elements didn't land memorably enough to make it worth revisiting.

[Pavel]

I’ve been going to a local film festival and while most of the things I saw were moderately pleasing (like Living or The Eight Mountains), I wanted to share some thought on Florian Zeller’s The Son, his very disappointing follow-up to The Father.

The Son is comprised almost entirely of two types of shots: zoom-ins on a concerned face (more often than not Hugh Jackman) as the diegetic background noise fades out and “sad music” starts playing; and shots of Hugh Jackman answering his phone and going “What? Are you sure?” and likewise looking concerned. 
I think that Florian Zeller, as still mostly inexperienced in the field of film directing, indulges in his hackiest visual instincts and most shallow ways of trying to engage the viewer emotionally (you know things aren’t great when visual choices in a film this serious and bereft of any lighter scenes make you laugh). But for all his good intentions he’s also working with a weak screenplay here, one with no real emotional or psychological insight into any of the characters, mapping out and telegraphing the same beats for two hours until it reaches its inevitable conclusion. There are interesting and important questions the film presents that are answered (or not answered) in the clumsiest of ways.

[therewillbeblus]

After the barely-competent Booksmart, it was mildly heartening to find Wilde's technical skills as a director to be the best aspect of Don't Worry Darling. More expectedly is that Pugh does a fine job with the scraps she's given to emote off of, but the material sucks. It's a lot like the latest season of Black Mirror in its unnecessarily earnest and extended milking of winking, unidimensional ideas, here exemplifying Gaslighting 101. Everything is just so overstated and superficial in its topical grazings that any actual relatability to the vulnerable core of emotional abuse is blocked by the armor of the high concept. I also can't help but feel like Wilde's interest in the script is simultaneously serving as a vanity project to pander to a zeitgeist she feels a part of, and repurpose another's work to tell Her Story regarding personalized trauma from her divorce with Sudeikis. He implicitly aired his own struggles regarding their separation and shared child custody in the first season of Ted Lasso, with more care and less pointedly manipulative or obvious grievances (not that he doesn't have them... serving custody papers at a public ceremony isn't subtle, which may count for more than subtlety in Art!) but maybe this isn't a one-upsman-show, or a profession to be seen. Maybe content this reactive, on-the-nose yet vapid, just feels that way at its baseline.

Anyways, speculative reflexiveness aside, Wilde's film falls apart on itself in its last act in so many ways I couldn't keep count. In what should be the dramatic crescendo (and could certainly double as an opportunity for ego-feeding, given Wilde's own maneuvering into center-stage participation in it), I don't even know what her own character's disclosure means for the intended thematic payoff. The film can't figure out what it wants to say about the most interesting questions embedded in the psychological dilemmas presented by Wilde's self-casted spotlight moment: on the value in objective vs subjective reality, and weighing the importance of emotional vs philosophical drives; i.e. prioritizing selfish individual needs for erasing pain and achieving emotional security, or overriding these consolations in favor of a rational utilitarian position, both of which can be inclusive of empathy. Or what this dilemma -to latch onto tangible holds that can alleviate fear-based dysphoria with momentary doses of delusion, or to patronize those harmfully solipsistic Me and Mine attitude-adopters with democratic rage about the greater good- has to say about not only our current sociopolitical climate, but the inherent traits a person has within them to exert the more comfortable act for their personality, rather than moralizing the action divorced from the person's nature and default conditioning. Or what the ultimate reveal says about the timeless pressure of gender roles on both sides of fence, perhaps encouraging a split focus of compassionately lending perspective to consider who is providing for who, and how those expectations serve, isolate, and oppress both principals in a set.

There's a wealth of text begging to be unpacked at least a little bit, with all the blatant signifiers on the page and visualized with heated passion being regurgitated into voids, but Wilde doesn't explore anything here. She plays things frustratingly safe, and the film is insulting for it. Also, yes Harry Styles is awful and doesn't sell what he needs to sell, but the character is so underwritten that I had a difficult time picturing Shia LaBeouf in the part. I think he could've potentially done some nifty things in the role, especially in the last act, but it would've been a completely different movie - a raw, messy one, and probably something very different than what Wilde is comfortable doing, i.e. risking a few cents to see the flop on a decent hand. I'm not surprised at all that Shia had other ideas and was interested in creating some perverse dynamics on set to turn this into... something (anything?) but the most exciting takeaway from Don't Worry Darling is musing on what those ideas actually were, and how the film could've been bettered had his collaboration been welcomed and informed script changes, to literally any degree

[DarkImbecile]

While the Sundance documentary Riotsville, U.S.A. was sold on the basis of its unique footage from the military training grounds where soldiers prepared to battle urban unrest in the late 1960s, its scope is a bit broader and its formal qualities a bit less conventional than expected.

The film drifts from from queasily off-putting images of officers on viewing stands applauding soldiers rounding up other soldiers pretending to loot and burn American cities to public television current affairs programming on the Kerner Commission (shoutout to former US Senator and, more importantly, former DarkImbecile college professor Fred Harris) to extended radicalized-graduate-student narration over distorted and over-magnified frames of anger and oppression.

Riotsville's strongest element is in its use of rarely seen footage — but not only or even primarily of the playacted rioting on sloppily fabricated main streets on army bases in the South. The standout sequence is the closing one, set around the 1968 in Republican National Convention in Miami Beach and its unavoidable echoes of those training sequences. The violence there didn't achieve the visibility or notoriety that still clings to the Democratic convention in Chicago that year, but is more representative of what was happening across the country that decade — and how a new generation of American rulers would go about ignoring it.

Ultimately doesn't quite have enough new or compelling to reveal about the era of American urban rebellion for me to recommend without caveats, but I did appreciate that director Sierra Pettengill avoids the more well-tread pathways of the material in order to poke around some of the under-explored corners of the turbulence of the late 1960s.

[DarkImbecile]

Chinonye Chukwu's Till is a film that doesn't do enough new with the historical drama format or dodge its pitfalls quite as often as necessary to be great, but Chukwu's direction features enough deft formal touches in capturing a stellar central performance to be good enough to recommend.

With most of her work prior to this film limited to television, Danielle Deadwyler isn't an actor to whom I've had much exposure, but perhaps those who've seen Atlanta, Watchmen, and Station Eleven already knew that she was capable of a performance as strong as this one. In addition to channeling the undeniably gut-wrenching maternal grief inherent in the story, there's a subtler conveyance of awakening anger and resolve when the realities of life in Mississippi that adds complexity to what easily could have been a one-note portrayal. Chukwu repeatedly and rightly prioritizes the subjective experience of Deadwyler's Mamie over all else, literally shifting focus away from racists lying in court or the strategizing of prominent civil rights activists to keep Deadwyler's face foregrounded.

If the film's conclusion is a too falsely inspirational and triumphant or if the need to maintain a PG-13 rating undercuts the thematic point of not looking away from the brutal consequences of America's commitment to white supremacy, these failings don't fully undermine the baseline talent and clarity devoted to telling this story. One of the key dynamics the script gets right is in portraying American racism as not just cruel and bullying, but fundamentally self-pitying. The unparalleled ability of a large subset of white Americans to actively imagine themselves as the eternal victims of the American story and to fabricate conspiracies and constructs working against them to justify and excuse their reactionary violence is illustrated multiple times here, where lesser dramas covering this era (Hidden Figures, The Help, etc.) cling instead to the myth of white ignorance — and therefore a comforting shred of innocence.

[DarkImbecile]

So Regal's been doing a couple of "Mystery Movie Nights" recently where they charge $5 for a Monday evening advance screening of an upcoming title; the first, which I did not attend, was Apple's Greatest Beer Run Ever, which didn't bode well for the quality of the last night's film. But then word began to spread that the mystery feature would be a PG-13 film releasing this month with a runtime of 151 minutes — exactly the length of Spielberg's The Fabelmans, set to be released nationwide Thanksgiving weekend! Maybe this promotional screening would be worth catching after all!

Or perhaps the crafty bastards at Regal put that runtime out there to goose ticket sales for a sneak of another Apple project, a Christmas musical with Will Ferrell and Ryan Reynolds called Spirited, which this sucker didn't know existed until last night at 7PM as the film started. I almost walked out, but I had already missed the closest runtime of the other movie I was planning on seeing, so I sat through it, and... I guess it wasn't terrible?

I'm an awful judge of these kind of movies, since as my wife regularly reminds me I'm a grumpy curmudgeon who hates holidays, silliness, and fun in general. That said, there was just enough PG-13 rudeness and cynicism to this Christmas Carol-adjacent supernatural holiday redemption story to keep it closer to the watchable mediocrity of something like Scrooged than the death by treacle I initially feared. Reynolds is maybe the exemplar of the classic one-note star who runs the same persona out there every single time, so one's mileage with this likely depends on how tolerant you are of his fast-talking smarm machine character.

Anyway, a couple of decent gags, a tongue-in-cheek attitude toward its songs, more morbid than I would have anticipated — could have been worse, I guess, though I'm sure I'll have to watch it again with the family over the next six weeks and may have to revise this evaluation when it doesn't have the benefit of clearing exceedingly low expectations.

[brundlefly]

With most of her work prior to this film limited to television, Danielle Deadwyler isn't an actor to whom I've had much exposure, but perhaps those who've seen Atlanta, Watchmen, and Station Eleven already knew that she was capable of a performance as strong as this one.

The Station Eleven episode centered on Deadwyler's character is great and she's so quietly confident through it that it sent me running to her imdb page. There's a moment where she lets loose, then swallows, an unguarded laugh, and it makes you fall for her character and the actress in ways necessary for the episode to work. She's the reason I want to see Till, having assumed there wouldn't be much to offer (as you confirm) beyond the standard historical drama.

[therewillbeblus]

Agreed, I didn't even realize that was the same person who played Tami in the NYE "Drake" party ep of Atlanta, but she's absolutely hysterical in it