The Week That Was - February 24, 2025
A Frasier rip-off, two shows that make murder boring, and a very divisive Brat Pack flick
We caught up to the most recent episodes of Ghosts, Love Is Blind, and Reacher (which started dropping Season 3 suddenly) and started the new seasons of Mythic Quest and White Lotus. Unfortunately, all that means I don’t have quite as much to talk about this week because much of my watching hours were spent watching things that are not finished airing yet.
TV
Deadwater Fell - Jackie threw this on seemingly on a lark. I had no problem with this, as I generally like David Tennant and trust him to choose projects that are at least interesting, if flawed. This was a dull slog of a small-town murder mystery that REALLY didn’t earn its four-episode runtime. Brutally slow. If it had been more than four episodes, I’m sure I wouldn’t have finished it. AVOID. Tubi, AMC+
American Murder: Gabby Petito - Obviously Gabby Petito’s death was tragic, but the story was exhaustively covered for months, and this just doesn’t add much to the story. I guess it gives friends and family a chance to mourn her publicly, but that’s also kind of exploitative, no? This is just so rote that I’m not sure what the point was, other than to build a sure-to-trend for a few weeks with a three-part docuseries that helps Dr. Phil get his hands on some of that sweet Netflix cash. Netflix
Film
The Gorge (2025) - There’s an episode of Frasier in Season 1—“Here’s Looking at You” for those keeping track—where Frasier gets a telescope for his dad, Martin, who ends up getting into a relationship with a woman in a high-rise across the way, the relationship consisting of Martin and Irene scrawling notes to each other which are read by their respective telescopes. For basically the first hour of this movie (set-up excepted), this plays like that episode of Frasier, with Miles Teller and Anya Taylor-Joy doing dialogue-free tasks on their respective sides of the titular gorge and then getting to know one another by way of notes written back and forth on their notepads. Brad Hall (Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s husband) wrote that episode of Frasier. I know the Hall/Louis-Dreyfus household isn’t exactly hard-up for cash, but I hope Zach Dean cuts them a check, or at least cleared using the premise for half of this film with Hall.
As for the rest of the movie, it’s a low-rent sci-fi/horror flick from Scott Derrickson, who should be able to make that sort of thing sing, but it’s kind of DOA, unless you really love the quasi-rom-com it is for like 30 minutes before everything goes to hell in a handbasket. It’s the sort of film that you watch and you at least know it would have been easy to shoot, because half of it doesn’t have dialogue, and a huge chunk of the shooting schedule would have just been a day where you’ve got a star just resetting for the writing notes back and forth in a different day’s outfit on a soundstage with a massive green-screen backdrop. Or a day where Miles Teller or Anya Taylor-Joy are basically doing chores. But being easy to shoot and being fun to watch are two different things, and I think the latter ~35-40% of the movie doesn’t work that well. Apple TV+
Native Son (1951) - Part of the Argentine Noir collection on Criterion at present, this adaptation of Richard Wright’s 1940 novel based on the trial and arrest of Robert Nixon actually stars its author and co-adaptor (with director Pierre Chenal). Of course, Richard Wright was 42 when he was tasked to step in to play Bigger Thomas for Canada Lee, who was having visa issues. Criteron seems to be running the restored cut, not the original theatrical cut that had somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 minutes slashed from it to protect the delicate sensibilities of the American public. The cut isn’t the issue with this film. Wright is. Wright is not an actor. He’s also 42 playing a 20-year-old. It’s a rough go and strains credulity. He’s in the bulk of the movie, and his performance is unnatural and presence is jarring. It’s bad enough that I have to put his novel—which has been sitting unread on my shelf for well over a decade—on the back back back burner to try to purge the memory of the adaptation from my memory. Criterion, Kanopy
St. Elmo’s Fire (1985) - Oh, man, we did this one for Unkind Rewind (listen/watch) with best-selling thriller/mystery writer Chelsea Cain, and it’s maybe the most contentious episode we’ve done, in a way that I think is really fun and interesting. The Brat Pack movie that begat the term, Joel Schumacher writes and directs a film in which a bunch of 22- and 23-year-olds are nearly entirely loathsome and do terrible things to each other, the list including trying to force yourself on one of your friends in her jeep while parked in front of your house where your wife and child are sleeping, stalking a female doctor you went on one date with and threatening to do bodily harm to her roommate if she doesn’t tell you where she’s gone off to, and the attempted murder of one of your ‘friends’ by dangling him off a fire escape from a height that would all but ensure paraplegia at the very least—this happening while one of your other friends is trying to off herself via exposure by keeping her windows open in Georgetown. And this is just the lowlight reel. Three-sevenths of the main cast of characters commit felonies, mostly against one another, and we’re left to think that the worst of them is off to conquer New York with his saxophone and the rest will have graduated to brunch. The film is an abject failure and one of the biggest disasters I can think of. I’ve also seen it probably ten times. It’s a compelling train wreck. It’s bad, make no mistake, but there’s something fascinating about watching something as fundamentally and thoroughly misguided as this film. If this is what paying the exorbitant tuition fees to go to Georgetown would have gotten you, I’m glad I never bothered to apply. VOD or streaming on a sketchy Russian website that comes up first if you Google ‘st. elmo's fire 1985 full movie free’
Poolman (2023) - Chris Pine did his take on the Lebowski/Pynchonian Southern California stoner noir that got released last year (technically premiered at TIFF in the fall of 2023). This is a weird one because I know objectively that it’s mostly a misfire, but it’s also playing in such a specific sandbox that’s of particular and peculiar interest to me, that I still mostly liked it. It’s a tonal mess, but I love these weird paranoiac noir-tinged mysteries. It clearly owes a debt to Chinatown and The Big Lebowski in equal parts and likely draws inspiration from Inherent Vice, Vineland, and maybe even Mike Davis’s City of Quartz. Again, it’s a mess, but there’s something fun about it that appeals very narrowly to me, and maybe to me only. Hulu
We Live in Time (2024) - Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield get to do some decent character work here, but John Crowley’s disjointed meditation on “what if we did About Time and didn’t really change much, but he wasn’t a time traveler” ultimately veered over the center line into the treacly and gratingly melodramatic lane. It wasn’t AWFUL, but it wasn’t good, and it’s narrative structure was just a distraction that served to help them manipulate the audience’s emotions, which works better when you can’t see the strings that are being pulled because the strings are steel cable. Miss Flo was pretty good though. Max