This weekend, I have been AT THE MOVIES. Summer movie preview coming later this week!
This week, we’re complaining about movies!
I don’t write often about things I dislike because: 1) It’s easy to be negative, and the global comments sections are doing enough already. 2) Why yuck someone’s yum? 3) I have but one precious life, and it is not in the Lord’s plan for me to spend it constantly watching things I hate! 4) There’s always a chance I will one day become besties with Phoebe Waller-Bridge and can you imagine if she then finds out I once said I would rather relive puberty than watch another second of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny?
Admittedly, at every moment and in every conversation, I am prepared to be WOWed. I WANT to be AGOG! I am rooting for a thrill!
But this bias towards “the good stuff” has led people to ask me if I just “like everything.” Absolutely not! I abhor many things with just as much zest as I adore others! e.g., Mushrooms Taste How Wet Feet Smell; Dua Lipa’s new album is mid; a lot of that Tom Brady Roast was homophobic! [Also see my rants on Poor Things, seasons 2 and 3 of Ted Lasso, the final season of The Crown, among others.]
So much content is so mediocre right now,1 the real challenge is in finding the wheat amongst the chaff. To that end, I do a lot of research before watching something, and I usually only press play if it passes the QC test, i.e.:
Top critics are liking it
My favorite creators are involved (writers, directors, producers, actors, studios)
It looks good (lol)
And on this Substack, I try to focus on those projects. This is a place for reviews, yes, but also gushing. It’s a place to share opinions, but also to fangirl.
ALL THAT SAID: This week, we’re gonna do the opposite and engage in a bit of fun, light-hearted bashing.
And I’d love to hear from you: What’s the worst thing you watched this year? What shows have you quit? Have you ever walked out of a movie? What’s your quality-control criteria?
Let us know in the comments!
First, Something I Loved
Because I cannot leave you with ONLY things I hated, I must share a comedy special that I fell madly in love with this week. It starts a little bumpy, but every joke is a hilarious, meaningful layer in the overall story he’s telling. It reminded me of Mike Birbiglia’s narrative comedy, and no surprise, Birbiglia is a producer on this one.
Now for the Things I Hated!
Let’s get critical!
Anyone But You — on Netflix
OK, y’all. It took me two tries to get through this one. First, by myself on an airplane, I made it 28 minutes before deciding silence was the better alternative. Next, I tried it at home with Ben, who had also watched part of it and thought it was great! [Ben’s aloofness is an act: He genuinely loves most things.] [Don’t tell him I told you.]
What I hated: You know how they say some hot people don’t have a personality? That’s this movie. It’s too focused on being hot than being interesting. It’s too pretty for its own good.2
I mean no disrespect to any human writers involved because I know a project can go sideways in countless ways, but I refuse to believe this script wasn’t written by AI — like, the free version. Dialogue strictly clichés, scenes that make no sense, awkwardly forced chemistry between the lead stars, cringey comedy.
The best comedies, even the most absurd ones, adhere to the logic of the worlds they build. Steve Martin falling into a pool to recover a stolen checkbook is ridiculous, but somehow it also makes perfect sense in the context. Sydney Sweeney accidentally enacting a diarrhea dump while trying to dry out the crotch of her jeans in a public bathroom? DID NOT MAKE SENSE! Why? Who?? How come?! In what universe!??
I also mean no disrespect to Sydney Sweeney. She’s great in Euphoria [dark drama], White Lotus [dark dramedy], Immaculate [horror]. She’s great at intensity, fear, and sadness. She made millions as a producer on this movie. Good for her! But I fear she is perhaps not built for comedy. She tried and did not pull off the klutzy Everygirl. Not everyone can be Goldie Hawn, and that’s okay!
What I kind-of-sort-of liked: Perhaps I am the proverbial boiled frog here, but the movie's second half was more fun, probably because I was watching it with Ben. It felt like one of Mindy Kaling’s lesser projects: The Mindy Project seasons 4-6 [which I quit]. Four Weddings and a Funeral [which I almost quit]. Season 8 of The Office [which I have never seen]. Late Night [which I watched but cannot remember].
A.k.a.: Not good, but you’ll keep it on for the vibes or visuals.
I also hate to admit it, but Glen Powell does manage to rise above the script. Sweeney, unfortunately, recites every line like she’s reading it for the first time and isn’t sure how she feels about it. Powell delivers the AI-freebie one-liners like they’re the most creative original thoughts that ever sprang into existence. I hate to give a point to the men but I must be fair.
And, of course, the real reason this movie went viral after bombing its first weekend in the theater: “Unwritten” by Natasha Bedingfield! It’s so good you get gaslit into having a nice time!
The Idea of You — on Prime Video
I recently saw a comment on Instagram describing a person as “a bucket of mid.” That is super mean to say about another human being, but a really great description of this film!
It was … fine. I hated it.
I was bored! Every character was a limp sandwich! There was no zing, despite the very overwrought sex scenes, which were also boring!
Is it the casting? Anne Hathaway is gorgeous and emotive but boy was she given nothing to do here. The guy is a glass of milk: He looks like Tom Brady before he got hot or, in Ben’s words, “If he weren’t English, he’d be so dopey.” Both performances were fine, but their chemistry was like my 4th-grade science fair presentation about oil and water. I think the filmmakers knew this because, in place of a convincing love story, they just had the characters constantly reassuring us they were, in fact, super duper in love, no really, we are.
“For the first time, I’m actually happy,” sighs baby-faced Tom Brady. Oh wow, how original! Is it a secret requirement of every romance that a man has been miserable his entire life until he met this anthropomorphized oil painting of a human woman? If I met a man who had never been happy, I would show him the door! Who needs that pressure!?
Then there’s just the overall incoherence of the plot. In the middle of the movie [slight spoiler] she finds out that he used a pickup line on her that he had *gasp!* used ! before ! and she — a 40-year-old grown-ass woman — is so upset about this perfectly normal fact that she compares it to the time her actual husband and the father of her child lied to her for a year about an actual affair.
I’m sorry, we’re supposed to take her seriously?!?
It’s very possible I’m just the 35-year-old version of a crotchety old man who grumbles, “They don’t make ‘em like they used to,” when “like they used to” just means that I cried my eyes out in P.S. I Love You — an objectively bad film — because I was still soft and vulnerable in 2007. Whatever.
An alternative: For a take on the older woman/younger man romance, how about 17 Again? How about Good Luck to You, Leo Grande!
[P.S. The only reason I didn’t quit this movie is because I was watching it with Ben, and — shocker — he liked it! lol]
Dream Scenario — on MAX
NOPE!
I wrote about my high expectations for this movie in my Fall Movie Preview. I LOVE a Nick Cage project. But, as I said then, “It’s a big swing, so if it misses, it will be a big miss.”
And a big miss it was! For me, at least.
This was kind of the opposite of Anyone But You and The Idea of You. It was a sharp, smart, creative concept, well-written, well-acted, and believable — both absurd and intensely relatable at the same time.
But it was also excruciating. In fact, “excruciating” is a light way of putting it. It was the Angel of Death.
Imagine a movie that is about a person who embodies all the parts of yourself that you most want to hide, the parts that feel most impotent, small, striving, nasty, invisible, ugly, embarrassing, unlikable, snivelly — wildly swinging from astronomical egoism to abject self-hatred — the part that makes you think you’re unworthy of even being noticed, much less being loved.
And then the movie just leaves it there, exposed and screaming like flayed-baby Blob Voldemort. There’s no beauty or kindness or gentle humor in this movie’s universe. The hopelessness of their approach, the meanness of it, left me so bereft — bullied, almost.
I’m sure this is the right movie for the right kind of person but it wasn’t for me! Took me hours to recover my mental composure!
An alternative: (1) The show BEEF, which was one of my favorites last year, also has this concept at its core: training an unflinching eye on the cross-section of our egoism and inferiority. But with BEEF, it was funnier, more stylish, and ultimately more hopeful. (2) For a surprisingly good Nicholas Cage movie that doesn’t get enough attention, try Pig!
That’s it for today! Coming soon: A breakdown of all the summer movies I’m excited about, including my review of Challengers and The Fall Guy, both of which I watched this weekend! I would LOVE to hear your thoughts and opinions on the movies above.
[James Poniewozik at The New York Times even wrote a deep-dive on it: “The Comfortable Problem of Mid TV.”]
[To be fair to this film, the source material itself, Much Ado About Nothing, is just The Silliest. Just hot people lounging about in the sun and being deeply stupid. So like: This movie in a nutshell.]
I’m still reading through this but HAD to pause on a couple things!! We just tried Anyone But You last weekend and quit like 45 minutes or an hour in (felt like a solid commitment to garbage!) and you NAILED IT:
“You know how they say some hot people don’t have a personality? That’s this movie.”
YES.
Also Natasha Bettingfield’s song gaslighting us into having a good time. 🤣🤣🤣🤣 Where’s the lie??