Movie: Don't Look Up (Adam McKay, 2021) (Netflix).
Book: William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, ed. Kenneth Palmer.
TV: Holiday Wars: Champion Cake Off (Food Network); Landscapers: Episode Four (HBO Max); Station Eleven: Hurricane (HBO Max).
If a couple of friends whose taste I trust hadn't praised Don't Look Up I might not have watched it. My local newspaper critic gave it a rave and even put it on his top ten list for the year, but he and I don't always see eye to eye, and his opinion of Adam McKay's film was out of the mainstream. Don't Look Up currently has a 55% "fresh" rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and the negative critics used words like "leaden," "sluggish," "slapdash," "smug," "bombastic," "frantic," "laborious," "toothless," "messy," "smarmy," and even "disastrous" to describe it. Several compared it unfavorably to Stanley Kubrick's 1964 similarly apocalyptic satire Dr. Strangelove. But this time audiences seem to be out of step with the critics: Not only did my friends praise it, but negative reviews like Peter Bradshaw's in The Guardian have been met with a barrage of online comments from people who thought the movie was brilliantly effective in its satire on the Trump era, social media, capitalistic excess, and journalistic ineptness. The movie also made the top position in viewership on Netflix, contradicting George S. Kaufman's observation that "satire is what closes on Saturday night" -- i.e., after opening on Friday. Okay, I enjoyed it, too, especially Meryl Streep's take on what Donald Trump would be like if he were a woman, and Jonah Hill's merciless parody of Donald Jr. I don't think it's the best film of this or any other year, but it hits the mark more often than not. I'm one who doesn't wholeheartedly worship Dr. Strangelove, for the reason I set forth on this blog: "It may be that reality has outstripped satire. Who could have invented Donald Trump?" All too often, our public figures, our politicians, our business leaders, our media darlings seem to be satirizing themselves. Who could have invented Marjorie Taylor Greene, Elon Musk, or Tucker Carlson, either? Who could have foreseen a time when people would be taking horse dewormer for a viral plague and calling for the head of Dr. Fauci? I credit McKay with a lot of insight and wit in even daring to take our common plight and sink his teeth into it.
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| Jonah Hill, Leonardo DiCaprio, Meryl Streep, and Jennifer Lawrence in Don't Look Up (Adam McKay, 2021) |
Landscapers ended last night with its characteristic surreal embroidery on the crime of Susan and Christopher Edwards, imagining the two, as they sat on trial for murdering her parents, as characters in a Western movie -- an echo of their love of films like High Noon. I appreciated the series' attempt to go beyond a mere restaging of the crime and the trial, and the work of Olivia Colman and David Thewlis in portraying the couple, but I'm not sure the story demanded four hour-long episodes.
Station Eleven made another switch in time and place to tell the story of Miranda Carroll (Danielle Deadwyler) and her affair with Arthur Leander (Gael García Bernal) at the onset of the pandemic. I don't know how the episode links with the first two (except for Arthur's death in the first one), or what Miranda's graphic novel has to do with anything (I expect a lot), or even why the episode is called "Hurricane," but I intend to stay tuned to find out.
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