Boys State (Amanda McBain, Jesse Moss, 2020) — A-
Richard Jewell (Clint Eastwood, 2019) — D+
Panic Room (David Fincher, 2002) — A-
Summer Catch (Mike Tomlin, 2001) — C+
Lilies of the Field (Ralph Nelson, 1963) — B-
Valley Girl (Martha Coolidge, 1983) — B+
Sleeping Dogs Lie (Bobcat Goldthwaite, 2006) — B
S.F.W. (Jefery Levy, 1994) — C
Bad Genius (Nattawut Poonpiriya, 2017) — A
Work It (Laura Tarruso, 2020) — B
Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (Jake Kasdan, 2017) — C
Magic Camp (Mark Waters, 2020) — D+
Duck Butter (Miguel Arteta, 2018) — B-
Spoilers for the Apple TV+ original documentary ‘Boys State’
Boys State gave me an existential scare worse than any other movie I’ve watched this year. The documentary by Amanda McBain and Jesse Moss follows various Texas teenagers as they embark on a week-long political camp called Boys State. There’s apparently one in every state, plus a separate female-only Girls State, as well. The camp creates a micro-version of our society as the boys are split into two separate political parties — Federalists and Nationalists — then into smaller groups like cities. Over the course of the week, they have to choose elected officials, decide what their party’s platform is going to be, and gear up to run against the opposing party in the week’s biggest election — the governorship.
But what’s so unsettling about 17-year-olds learning about our political process? Well, the camp itself doesn’t seem set up to actually teach them about the process — or at least how the process should be. Instead it teaches them the worst of it. If there is any time when a staff member of Boys State steps in, it isn’t included in the film. The boys are basically left to their own devices. They are taught to treat politics like it is a game, something to be played. They want to win just because they want to win, in the same way that athletes want to win. It has nothing to do with making the world a better place or helping shape the future. It’s a dangerous concept because for some people, politics isn’t a game. It’s life. For many of the upper-class white boys in the film, who’ll grow up into upper-class white men, when they or their preferred candidate loses a political election, it won’t have much of an effect on their own lives. They’ll shrug and forget about it and come back and try again next time. For others, though, politics can have bearing on their day-to-day lives. We need only look at the fact that our current administration separates children from their parents and places them in cages to know how true this is.
The Boys State elections are entirely gamified. There is chanting, hooting, hollering; Instagram accounts created to run smear campaigns — which of course turn racist before the week is over; and some underhanded deceitfulness. There are no consequences for cheating, and so there are shady tactics abound. There’s nothing more unsettling than seeing a large swathe of the candidates admit to the camera that they are both pro-choice and for universal background checks on gun ownership. But they won’t admit it to the crowds.
This group of boys, which feels entirely like they gathered up as many soon-to-be-incels and inducted them into some sort of Republican indoctrination club, has a few outliers. The young man, Steven Garza, who runs as the Nationalist’s candidate for governor, is the soft-spoken child of Mexican immigrants who organized the March For Our Lives in Houston shortly after the Parkland shooting. Steven has to endure some racist attacks, a primary opponent who admits that Steven is entirely more qualified than he is, and when they find out about the march, he must defend that, too. He runs his campaign with as much integrity as the political machine of Boys State will allow, and when he loses, enough like-minded boys come up to him afterwards with words of pride and gratitude that he breaks down in tears. They were touched by his run, but the group as a whole wasn’t touched enough to vote for him over an arrogant, good-looking white boy who is frequently compared to Ben Shapiro and doesn’t have a stance on a single issue.
The filmmakers capture all of this expertly. Sometimes the beauty of a great documentary is that the subject doesn’t realize how their behavior is making them look. Perhaps the organizers of the Texas Boys State watched this film and thought, ‘yes, this is exactly our camp, thank you for documenting it,’ rather than feel the deep shame that it should have. Starting with the interview process and running through the final night’s election results, Boys State creates power-hungry, destructive young men who believe that politics is just another hobby they can take on, and Boys State reveals exactly that. Considering the lack of consequences and the ultimate election result, there’s nothing else they could take away from a week at politics camp other than to treat it all as something that must be won at all costs. It’s the same mindset that leads to an elected official dismantling the United States Postal Service during a stay-at-home pandemic because it will help him win.
- Clint Eastwood can still direct captivating, well-made, and interesting movies. It’s just baffling what he chooses to make them about. If Richard Jewell were fiction, it’d be a riveting and fun watch. But it engages so much with the real-life story it is telling through on-screen text at the beginning and end, real-life footage of the 1996 Olympics, and constant references, that it’s impossible to ignore when the movie plays it fast and loose with the factuality of the story. Eastwood and company are here to tell me why this overweight, over-aggressive cop-wannabe who found a bomb in Atlanta’s Centennial Park during the Olympics while working security and was initially the prime suspect is actually the good kind of law enforcement officer and the big, bad government agencies are the bad kind. Everyone thinks he’s too big and too dumb to be a true hero. In the film, Olivia Wilde’s journalist correctly reports that the FBI is looking into Richard Jewell. It also shows her trading sex for the story, something that has been widely acknowledged to be untrue — completely made up for dramatic purposes. I get artistic license arguments most of the time, but this is egregious. This is a movie about how a decent man did his job correctly and large American institutions looked at him, deemed him pathetic, and blamed him. But this is also a movie that inadvertently behaves exactly as one of those large American institutions did, taking a journalist doing her job, deeming her pathetic, and blaming her. Not to mention that the FBI agent, played by Jon Hamm, who is not based on any specific real person, is a false representative of that agency, at least in this particular story. There has to be a line somewhere that an artist won’t cross in order to make their point more clear, and with Richard Jewell, Clint Eastwood and screenwriter Billy Ray cross it multiple times.
- Watching Panic Room made me feel like ‘why did nobody ever tell me about Panic Room‘? This is a seriously underrated Fincher. Recently divorced Jodie Foster and her young daughter — a very early starring role for Kristen Stewart — move into a Manhattan brownstone with an elaborate security system and panic room and need to use it on their very first night. It’s a taught thriller that doesn’t waste a single second. Jared Leto is perfectly cast as the loud, brash, cornrowed leader of the break-in, as are Forest Whitaker and Dwight Yoakam as his crew.
- Summer Catch is a stupid 2000s romantic comedy, but it was an era before romantic comedies became huge over-worked studio monstrosities and could still be a little weird. The movie is trashy and vapid, the baseball-related conflict typically feels pretty contrived, and it’s two (very hot) leads are pretty wooden. Plus, there are at least two entire sub-plots that could be excised and the movie would be so much better for it. But the entire summer baseball on Cape Cod vibe of everything is right up my alley. As someone from a summer town that draws plenty of tourists, this movie gains an entire extra letter grade solely on “summer people, some are not.” Also, as an addendum: the cinematic energy of baseball, the beach, summer etc. all seem like a softball pitch for a kick-ass poster, and whoever made/chose the poster for this movie completely blew it.
- Lilies of the Field is a simple, by-the-numbers, let’s-all-get-along picture in which Sidney Poitier’s handy drifter is convinced to do work for a bunch of German nuns. Looking back on it, what’s crazy, though I suppose not surprising, is that the Academy gave Poitier his only Best Actor win for this movie — where he plays a black man who is tricked into working for free and ultimately has no issue with it — considering the performances he gave and the characters he portrayed in movies like The Defiant Ones, In the Heat of the Night, and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.
- You can see a lot of Valley Girl‘s progenies in its 100-minute runtime. Movies like Clueless, 10 Things I Hate About You, Mean Girls, Adventures in Babysitting, and She’s The Man all owe a little something to this high school-set retelling of Romeo and Juliet starring Deborah Foreman and a young Nic Cage as Julie and Randy, respectively. The opposing factions are not warring families but the class and clique difference between the bad boy from the wrong side of town and the good girl from the Valley. Some subplots and side characters get introduced and then get the shaft when it comes to any kind of resolution, but the movie is funny and ultimately pretty effective.
- Dark comedies are so hard. Bobcat Goldthwaite is fairly good at them, but even with Sleeping Dogs Lie there are some punches that just don’t quite land. The movie is about a woman who gives her dog a blowjob and then spends the rest of her life feeling bad about it. She has kept it hidden for many years, but when a boyfriend convinces her to be completely honest about things, she decides to reveal it to him. The movie examines how a past mistake can affect your life in massive ways — especially if you’re a woman and especially if that mistake is sexual in nature. It doesn’t look very good and the acting performances aren’t much to write home about, but the film is ultimately much more tender and contemplative than its premise.
- 1994’s hottest Gen X nihilistic movie is… S.F.W. It has everything…baggy flannels, a slow-motion walk to “Creep” by Radiohead, a general lack of purpose, and Joey Lauren Adams. S.F.W. — which stands for So Fucking What — isn’t as iconic or permeating as others of its ilk like Reality Bites, Natural Born Killers, or even Singles, but certainly has a place in the hearts and minds of nostalgic 80s babies. Stephen Dorff and a teenage Reese Witherspoon emerge from a 36-day nationally televised hostage situation as celebrities and deal with their newfound fame with varying degrees of success. The movie thinks it’s a lot deeper than it is, but it handles its critique of reality television and media propaganda better than Natural Born Killers did and has more narrative thrust than Reality Bites. Its finale ultimately feels hollow and contrived though, especially with more than 25 years hindsight.
- Bad Genius was the best movie I watched this week. It comes from Thailand and follows a group of high school students as they work to cheat on their tests and game the system. Although there is essentially no violence or action, the film treats the academic process like a caper, creating high tension, high-stakes situations out of an otherwise mundane activity. The movie is tightly scripted even as it surpasses the two-hour mark; it sets things up that it’ll later knock down with precision, all while delving into Thailand’s class system, injustices in the education system, and teenage relationships. Apparently, it was immensely popular in Asia, as it should have been everywhere; it’s in essence a perfect movie.
- Work It is like a low-rent, less funny, dance version of Pitch Perfect. Personally, I love dance movies. There’s some strange contrivances in the plot late in the game, but if you love dance movies, too, you’ll like Work It.
- Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle is kind of a perfect example of our current re-hash culture in a nutshell: it’s a pretty clever idea that could totally work on its own without the tie-in to the original movie but uses the name recognition to sell. Four high schoolers are sucked into a video game called “Jumanji” and have to defeat it in order to escape. It’s a good take on the original and allows for a whole series of video game jokes and references like non-player characters, fetch quests, and a bottomless item bag. But the whole thing would be stronger if it wasn’t beholden to the name and imagery of a 25-year-old movie. Your mileage will vary depending on your tolerance level for Kevin Hart and Jack Black — personally I love Black but can’t take too much Hart at once, a line that Welcome to the Jungle crosses a few times.
- Magic Camp is a long-delayed Mark Waters-directed dump on Disney+ starring Adam Devine and Gillian Jacobs. They’re both likable in their roles, but the movie is so formulaic and the performances by the children at the titular camp so Disney Channel-esque that it makes complete sense why it’s been shelved for four years and why it was unceremoniously dumped on Disney’s streaming service. Also, side note: magic doesn’t really work in movies — it’s not live and it can very easily be edited, so most of the thrill is deadened by this knowledge, no matter how impressive the trick is.
- Duck Butter lives entirely through its premise: two people meet and decide to microwave their relationship by spending an entire 24-hour period together, having sex once every hour. The movie was written by its star, Alia Shawkat, and director, Miguel Arteta and once it gets some indie-famous cameos out of the way, delves entirely into its two-hander in all its low-budget glory. The counterpart is played charmingly by Spanish actress Laia Costa, who just barely gets enough background coloring to keep her from feeling like a same-sex Manic Pixie Dream Girl.