On the AV Club’s Film Club podcast this week, critics A.A. Dowd and Katie Rife spend 80 minutes talking about the art and ethics of negative reviews, and what it means for a critic to really go after a movie. Do you enjoy it when we do that? I admit that really unloading on a film that’s earned my enmity can be a purgative experience (I’m still a little miffed that I never got to write a proper review of the cat movie, though Glenn delivered an informed, entirely respectable pan) but for the most part, I don’t take much pleasure in that sort of work. Mostly I’m just mad that I sat through a bad film, and now have to lose even more time writing about it.
That’s why I really enjoy writing this newsletter. Recommending things is a lot more rewarding than dismissing them, and there’s enough misery in the world that I don’t need to add to it. So once a week I get to point at stuff I think more people should be watching, and that feels good. Is it working for you? Are you actually seeking out the titles I recommend here? Have you found any new favourites as a result? Let me know! I’d really like to hear about your experiences. And check out that podcast; Dowd and Rife are very sharp critics and engaging conversationalists, and their exploration of whether it’s possible to write criticism without malice is a good one.
And now, to positivity.
Top streaming pick
Val Kilmer is an actor I’ve enjoyed watching for almost 40 years now, ever since I first saw him play Nick Rivers, the heroic idiot at the heart of Jim Abrahams, Jerry Zucker and David Zucker’s Top Secret! in 1984. (It’s heresy, I know, but I prefer it to Airplane!, thanks largely to Kilmer’s knowing, charismatic performance – and the songs. The songs are great.) Over the years, Kilmer’s gone from studio projects to Oscar bait to weird indies and back to studio projects again, his public persona always staying this side of eccentricity. (He’s also picked up a reputation as an actor who can be very difficult, and the stories from the sets of Batman Forever and The Island Of Dr. Moreau seemed to lock that in in the mid-90s.)
His career has been spotty, and not always by choice; people forget that Kiss Kiss Bang Bang was as much of a comeback project for Kilmer as it was for Robert Downey, Jr. But Downey cemented his own renaissance with Iron Man, and Kilmer… didn’t do much of anything.
Part of the reason for that is that his health has been patchy, as we learn in Val, a new documentary that dropped on Amazon yesterday, just weeks after its debut at Cannes. Kilmer has been recording himself over the course of his entire life, accumulating hundreds of hours of footage on every film and video format imaginable. Organized into a feature-length narrative by directors Leo Scott and Poo Ting, and written and produced by Kilmer himself with his son Jack reading his father’s words in voiceover – Val’s own vocal cords are no longer up to the job – it’s a film of startling intimacy.
All actors age on film, of course, but there’s something powerful about one specific actor owning his own deterioration. Kilmer was a singularly beautiful man in the first decade of his career, but he was also savvy enough about it to choose roles that pushed back against his built-in packaging. And in clips pulled from a lifetime of performance, we see that self-awareness over and over again, shaped in a tragic arc but not one that’s self-pitying.
I still don’t know if I understand Val Kilmer, and this documentary doesn’t rebut the stories about his professional behaviour as well as he might think it does. (Audio of an on-set argument between Kilmer and his Moreau director John Frankenheimer doesn’t paint either participant in an especially positive light.) But I see him as a person in a way that wasn’t possible before – flawed, frail, trying to be honest – and that alone makes Val, the movie, invaluable.
Val is available to stream on Amazon Prime Video Canada.
Buried treasure on Netflix Canada
I first stumbled onto J.G. Quintel’s Close Enough a while ago, chasing the high of Jason Mantzoukas’s voice work. Oh sure, some people think he’s overexposed, but they are simply wrong; as a voice actor, as in live-action, he’s the element that brings a project together: a cloud of genial, occasionally inappropriate chaos that affects everyone else in a scene.
Here, that energy is perfectly suited to the role of Alex Dorpenberger, an aging libertine who, with his younger ex-wife Bridgeitte (Kimiko Glenn), shares a house with Quintel’s thirtysomething slacker hero Josh, Josh’s wife Emily (Gabrielle Walsh) and their daughter Candice (Jessica DiCicco). It’s all cool, they’re just constantly in one another’s way.
Over the course of two seasons, Quintel – whose Regular Show offered a slightly more surreal take on the banality of everyday living – builds a totally enveloping world for these characters, whose lives are just cartoonish enough to justify animation, but also grounded enough in their conflicts to warrant our investment. Sure, there’s an episode where Candice parlays a windfall of hot-sauce packets into a side hustle at her preschool, but there’s also one in which Josh and Emily find themselves conflicted about a possible new pregnancy. Quintel and Walsh manage to slip a little wistfulness into the comic confusion, and Mantzoukas’s Alex is always available to complain about the injustice of whatever situation in which he’s currently found himself, which is the other reason you hire Jason Mantzoukas for stuff: he’s a world-class crab.
There are two seasons of Close Enough streaming on Netflix Canada.
Double Feature by Neasa Hardiman
This week, I reached out to the Irish filmmaker Neasa Hardiman – whose nautical horror movie Sea Fever gained additional queasy relevance between its TIFF premiere in 2019 and its arrival on VOD platforms in the midst of a global pandemic, and who subsequently directed three episodes of the new Netflix series Hit & Run – to pick this week’s pairing. And she reached back to the 70s to pick two stone classics: Sidney Lumet's Dog Day Afternoon and Michael Ritchie's The Candidate.
I love ’em both. Lumet’s film is a quintessential New York picture, featuring remarkable work from Al Pacino and John Cazale (and Charles Durning, and Chris Sarandon) in the incredible true story of a botched Brooklyn bank robbery that turned into a prolonged hostage situation on a stiflingly hot August day. And Ritchie’s is a barbed take on American politics post-Nixon, with Robert Redford playing an idealistic political scion who decides to run for the U.S. Senate as a stalking horse, hoping to raise the issues other candidates don’t want to confront, only to find his idealism compromised by the very process of running.
But it wasn’t until Neasa put them together that I realized they function as perfect mirrors of one another: “Two stories about social upheaval – one about a man at the bottom of the social ladder, the other about a man at the top – by two brilliant directors.”
Dog Day Afternoon is available to stream on Crave with a Starz subscription, and on Amazon Prime Video Canada’s Starz channel;
The Candidate is also is available to stream on Crave with a Starz subscription, and on Amazon Prime Video Canada’s Starz channel. (Both films are also available to rent or buy on VOD.)
Hit And Run is available to stream on Netflix Canada, and if you’ve been meaning to catch up to Sea Fever, it’s streaming on Crave and available to rent or buy on Apple TV.
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James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad is sucking up all the media oxygen this week, and rightly so: it’s a lot of fun, with Idris Elba, Margot Robbie, David Dastmalchian, Daniela Melchior and a whole bunch of very talented people running around occasionally remembering they have to stop yelling at each other and battle a world-conquering menace. But it’s only in theatres, so if you’re looking for a similar experience that you can watch at home, how about another movie where Idris Elba shouts at people until they help him save the world
That’d be Pacific Rim, Guillermo del Toro’s epic robots-versus-aliens film that plays like a comic book come to life, with clean-cut heroes from all over the world assembling to pilot giant mechs and battle the rampaging kaiju bent on trampling humanity to a pulp. Elba’s the magnificently named Stacker Pentecost, a veteran of the first kaiju war now trying to mentor young mech pilots – among them hotheaded Raleigh Becket (Charlie Hunnam) and Stacker’s adopted daughter Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi).
The drama is simplistic by design; Del Toro is bent on making a celebration of genre touchstones, and on its own terms Pacific Rim is a singular delight: a beautiful, artful take on the idea of a child’s toys realized on a massive scale. Eight years after its release, its eccentricities and ecstatic action scenes feel like a counter-argument to the sameness that’s crept into a lot of the major-studio action franchises. This one’s like nothing else on Earth – and Idris Elba is having the time of his life running around inside it.
Pacific Rim is currently streaming on Netflix Canada, and available to rent or buy on most VOD platforms.
Play us out
And those are all the words I can type this week. Literally: I’m filing this ahead of a scheduled hydro outage in the neighbourhood. But if you need more to read, there’s always the NOW movies section: you’ll find my reviews of Annette, Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain and Vivo in this week’s What to Watch page, as well as my quick take on Arrow Video’s glorious new 4K edition of The Bird With The Crystal Plumage; if you’re intrigued by my tease of the Fantasia festival, here’s a longer piece where I make a few recommendations from this year’s lineup. And if you’re down for a little good-natured foolishness, check out my chat with The Suicide Squad’s Nathan Fillion, who does not play Batman in the movie but kinda wishes he had. There’s video and everything.
My job is fun sometimes, you know? It makes up for the occasional cat movie.