As this season of For All Mankind proved, having irresistible outer-space premise not matter if story not give you characters or stakes you can care about or plot that make sense.
Me will say that Wrenn Schmidt did terrific job of acting older in small ways, and they took it easier on her makeup-wise. Me also love that to age up Dani, they just said "black not crack" and gave her a few grey hairs and left it at that.
Latina don't crack, either -- Aleida also still looked like a teenager! Whenever anybody asks about this show, I tell them -- it's not a good show, but for some strange and deranged reason, I can't stop watching...
Agreed. First season was good, second season was amazing, third seasons was good until the Danny/Karen fiasco, and the fourth season wasn't bad, either. Wrenn Schmidt is absolutely the standout from the series -- hands down she's my favorite character/actress. I'm hoping she'll come back in the fifth, though I have a bad feeling that the only one to come back will be Ed Baldwin, who'll be in one of the Futurama-esque cryo-heads...!
Gotta be honest, DuVernay has yet to make a movie that has clicked with me. Selma was a trite, bland biopic elevated to slightly above mediocre by David Oyelowo's performance, 13th felt like the most expensively produced college thesis project in existence, and the less said about A Wrinkle in Time, the better. So, Origin seems like a pretty safe skip.
I hadn't even heard of I.S.S. and that one also seems to be a stinker.
I liked SELMA a lot. I thought it was well-proportioned and intimate and had a strong point-of-view. And I also thought 13th made a sound argument, college thesis project or no. But these last two adaptations don't fill me with optimism. This isn't a WRINKLE IN TIME-level catastrophe, but it's a whole lot worse than the kind notices would lead you to believe, and there are a couple of moments when you really question her taste.
Happened to see the trailers for both of these before AMERICAN FICTION last weekend and they at least sold the idea well in trailer form. Until I started seeing reviews I was interested in both of them.
Saw the Origin trailer in front of Ferrari and wondered who thought that was a good idea. Complete silence during and after the trailer, except for one audible sigh when they showed the MAGA gear.
In retrospect, that was a dumb shot. There's a way to pull that off but hat + Nick Offerman is not it. Unless she hired him from the On the Nose Plumbing Co.
I saw a trailer for ISS the other day, having not heard anything about it, and thought it looked pretty dope. It's a cool premise! But it's also coming out in January, so part of me did wonder what was wrong with it.
I haven't seen SELMA since its theatrical run, may be worth a revisit.
I really wish I liked her movies because there is obviously a real lack of POC filmmakers (especially women POC) making films at the budget level she has.
It's like when GHOSTBUSTERS (2016) came out and I felt it necessary to clarify that I don't hate women, I just thought the movie was not very good. 😅
I got a lot out of THE 13th, but have had the same feeling in general. I never got why people fell all over themselves about SELMA, apart from the source events and lead performance. I don't know if it's because of being alive in the 70s during a golden age of well made TV movies about the civil rights era or even BOYCOTT, an early 2000s HBO film with Jeffery Wright as King and Erik Dellums as Bayard Rustin. SELMA felt like an ok TV movie directed with a slightly better eye than most. (And I love Tom Wikinson but someone needed to play him a tape of LBJ talking.) In my most cynical moods I've wondered in DeVernay's real talent lay in her original career as a PR agent.
I think everyone involved has the talent to get the voices right, but it's all odd casting. I never looked at Tim Roth and thought "now there's a George Wallace!"
Yeah it's a great example of how casting is not just "hire talented actor for part." See also: every President in Lee Daniels' THE BUTLER
Also, while we had to suffer through decades of snobbery from the Brits due to our actors just having different mannerisms and vocal inflections which were ill fits at times (looking at you, Keanu in DRACULA) there is also a certain American-ness that can be hard to fake no matter how much our British and Australian friends try. Look at Jon Bernthal. That guy just radiates American-ness. Whereas when Daisy Edgar-Jones and Harris Dickerson tried being American southerners in WHERE THE CRAWDADS sing it was just kind of an adorable failure. So yeah, Tom and Tim, you ain't exactly convincing as American southerners
But Dickerson comes back roaring in IRON CLAW so maybe it’s just direction.
My favorite bad American by a Brit is Branagh in DEAD AGAIN. His accent drips with condescension. “They talk flat and fill space between words with ‘ehhhhhhhhhh’” was the extent of his research.
"the film hardly waits a moment before letting one side make the first aggressive move"
That predicts my disappointment already if I ever choose to see this. (The trailer was well done so there was a chance.) If you can't string out the moment between the inciting event and the follow-through with tension and suspense then you picked the wrong movie to make. That could have been the center of an incredible thriller. The setup deserved so much better (based on the trailer).
My complaint with the trailer is that the nuclear volley we're shown is so massive that it's apocalyptic. It seems really dumb to be fighting over the ISS when there's no Earth to go back to and they're probably all just slowly starving to death. Alas, as many, many attempts have shown, it's really hard to do The Twilight Zone well, and part of Serling's genius is making it look easy.
I get that. I think it falls into the valley of needing to amplify things a bit to make it hit. I don't know. In a trailer it needed to get across the idea in a couple seconds so I can give that a pass. The rest of the movie being a drag gets no pass.
Yeah, fair. It is a shame to read this review- we don't get enough well done tight paced little thrillers, especially in January. I'm already rewriting this movie in my head: what if it's just a handful of nuclear blasts that only one of the scientists notices, but it causes havoc with comms so one group has more information that the other.... There are so many good places to take this!
I couldn't believe what I was seeing when that ISS trailer played before The Holdovers. I just think if a bunch of astronauts saw the earth consumed in a nuclear conflagration, they would absolutely not listen to any orders from the ground.
When I saw this trailer I was so angry at what a negative outlook on the human condition they were presenting. The snide comments about how scientists should be better than this felt especially pointed in this current anti-intellectual political climate.
I think it slipped through the cracks at the end of the year. Short version: I liked it, if not quite as much as I hoped. The family drama and satire sometimes seemed at cross purposes. But Wright's great. I always want to see what he does.
For those of you who have an open mind, unbound by dismissive pronouncements from a couple of middle aged white guys, I urge you to seek out ORIGIN and make up your own mind. Just in case it’s an unconventional masterpiece by a major filmmaker. 🙏🏼
This is a surprisingly reductive comment, considering you’re asking for potential viewers to be less reductive. It doesn’t need me to defend it, but this Substack has some of the most thoughtful commentary about movies, both from its writers and its commenters.
Thanks for commenting. Have you seen the movie? Perhaps I was trying to be too clever, but it’s not my goal to disparage the author of the review--only to encourage people to be undeterred from going to see it and make up their own minds as to its worthiness. I think it’s the best movie of the year and I don’t want people to miss out.
I saw Origin today, and I found it thrilling and absorbing. (And my girlfriend thinks it should be required viewing for white people.) Though I disagreed with Scott’s take this time, I know that he (and Keith) have a long track record of appreciating and championing films that wrestle with race, so I hope you won’t dismiss The Reveal over a reaction to one film.
Thank you for replying to my comment. I definitely understand wanting to get people to see a movie that you love. I haven’t seen Origin yet (I confess that since the pandemic essentially eliminated seeing movies in the theater for as long as it did, I’ve found it hard to go back). But I’m looking forward to seeing it when it’s available to stream.
Keith has not seen ORIGIN, so it's possible that he would not share my opinion of the film, which many people have liked. But in my defense, I have not been hostile to DuVernay's films in the past (me on SELMA, for example: https://thedissolve.com/reviews/1286-selma/). I just felt like there wasn't enough of an effort to make Wilkerson's book work as a movie. My main takeaway was that it sounded like a really interesting book, which is not ideal. I guess I'm curious: What was it about DuVernay's approach to the material that you found so compelling?
Thanks for replying. But I’m not sure I know how to answer your question. It’s like trying to say why I find a sunset compelling. It’s true that, like the protagonist, I’m a female intellectual who uses my life experiences in my work so I suppose that storyline compels me personally. I’m also a white American who tries to be an ally, so I treasure honest communications from othered communities. And finally, it’s true that I know Ava and I know that she’s poured her entire being into this film, and feels that everything she’s ever done has built up to this work, so it’s painful to hear someone dismiss it as “uninspired and banal.” But, that aside, as a white person, I’m disappointed in white people who close their hearts to the vulnerability and generosity, not to mention meticulous care and extraordinary artistry, of this film. I think it’s the best film of the year. (With Anatomy of a Fall coming in a close second.)
I appreciate your response and your personal connection to the work. And if my review is itself not substantive or glibly dismissive, that's a failure on my part. However, all I can do is be open to what a film is trying to do while being honest in articulating whether it works for me or not. Adapting a book like CASTE is a challenge for obvious reasons, but I fundamentally do not feel like DuVernay was able to make it work *as a film* without it feeling reductive, especially as it relates to Wilkerson's personal life as her character is piecing the material together. In a way, DuVernay is attempting something like what David Cronenberg did with the "unadaptable" NAKED LUNCH by infusing an author's biography with incidents from the book. But ORIGIN only comes to life for me fitfully, mainly when we step away from Wilkerson altogether and see her thesis expressed through montage, which is exactly what made THE 13TH so affecting. I wished for more of that but rarely got it.
But... I had the impression from your earlier comments that you haven’t read the book? So... how do you know the movie reduces the book’s ideas to something less than the original? Oh well, never mind. I started reading this Substack for the commentary about the Sight and Sound films, so maybe I’ll stick to those posts. Thanks for engaging. I do recommend that you see ORIGIN again, without expecting it to be exactly like 13th, which is a documentary, unlike ORIGIN, a narrative film.
I’m glad you’re passionate about the film—I look forward to seeing it myself!—but I think it’s unfair to imply (perhaps unintentionally) that by disliking it or critiquing it, viewers and critics are “closing their hearts.” It suggests that there is one, correct way of experiencing a piece of art, which is never true. The subject of the book is an important one, and I’m sure DuVernay’s intentions in adapting it were noble—but that doesn’t mean that criticism of the film is inherently ignoble. (I also don’t think reading the source material—for this or any other film—is a prerequisite to viewing or reviewing the adaptation. If it were, the last 15 years of mainstream film would have us all buried under a mountain of comic books.)
Don’t worry. I have even less confidence in my clumsy attempts to express my thoughts in writing than you do. I’m glad you’re planning to see ORIGIN. It’s something really special. I don’t believe one has to have read the book in order to have an opinion on the movie, and I don’t think that’s what I said--if I gave that impression, please forgive me. Have a lovely day.
I haven't seen Origin, nor read the book, but the idea of turning a work of hard scholarship into a story about the author's life seems like an incredibly odd take, and one hard to make work well. It inherently turns the focus away from the researched facts and into the personal emotional journey, which just encourages subjectivism.
Wow, my partner and I just came home from seeing ORIGIN, and I have to say I found it involving, challenging, moving, and mostly successful. It *did* remind me of ADAPTATION, in that it stepped outside the source material as a way of addressing its core unadaptability. In this case, it means following the author as she wends her way into her book’s complex thesis -- oversimplified here, but I still found it thrilling to watch a film that was so surefooted about putting across an intellectual argument. Maybe there were about two historical recreations too many, but I found the Trayvon Martin scene, playing out to a soundtrack of the actual 911 calls, harrowing and very effective. This is not a conventional movie drama, and I found I didn’t need a “story” to keep me engaged. Ava DuVernay took and big swing here, and for me it connected.
Is it weird that I could enjoy the movie so much while at the same time understanding why a lot of people wouldn’t connect with its approach to the material?
I was replying to Scott actually, or thought I was. (I’m not fluent in navigating Substack!) Of course, there’s no such thing as a movie that’s everyone’s cup of tea, but I haven’t seen negative reviews in the major outlets.
As this season of For All Mankind proved, having irresistible outer-space premise not matter if story not give you characters or stakes you can care about or plot that make sense.
But we'll always have that double hamburger moment between Margo and Sergei.
My wife and I were aghast at Joel Kinnaman/Ed Baldwin's makeup. We thought he could've doubled for Gollum...!
Me will say that Wrenn Schmidt did terrific job of acting older in small ways, and they took it easier on her makeup-wise. Me also love that to age up Dani, they just said "black not crack" and gave her a few grey hairs and left it at that.
Latina don't crack, either -- Aleida also still looked like a teenager! Whenever anybody asks about this show, I tell them -- it's not a good show, but for some strange and deranged reason, I can't stop watching...
It pretty irresistible premise. And me would argue it was absolutely good show through most of first three seasons.
Agreed. First season was good, second season was amazing, third seasons was good until the Danny/Karen fiasco, and the fourth season wasn't bad, either. Wrenn Schmidt is absolutely the standout from the series -- hands down she's my favorite character/actress. I'm hoping she'll come back in the fifth, though I have a bad feeling that the only one to come back will be Ed Baldwin, who'll be in one of the Futurama-esque cryo-heads...!
Gotta be honest, DuVernay has yet to make a movie that has clicked with me. Selma was a trite, bland biopic elevated to slightly above mediocre by David Oyelowo's performance, 13th felt like the most expensively produced college thesis project in existence, and the less said about A Wrinkle in Time, the better. So, Origin seems like a pretty safe skip.
I hadn't even heard of I.S.S. and that one also seems to be a stinker.
I liked SELMA a lot. I thought it was well-proportioned and intimate and had a strong point-of-view. And I also thought 13th made a sound argument, college thesis project or no. But these last two adaptations don't fill me with optimism. This isn't a WRINKLE IN TIME-level catastrophe, but it's a whole lot worse than the kind notices would lead you to believe, and there are a couple of moments when you really question her taste.
Happened to see the trailers for both of these before AMERICAN FICTION last weekend and they at least sold the idea well in trailer form. Until I started seeing reviews I was interested in both of them.
Saw the Origin trailer in front of Ferrari and wondered who thought that was a good idea. Complete silence during and after the trailer, except for one audible sigh when they showed the MAGA gear.
In retrospect, that was a dumb shot. There's a way to pull that off but hat + Nick Offerman is not it. Unless she hired him from the On the Nose Plumbing Co.
I saw a trailer for ISS the other day, having not heard anything about it, and thought it looked pretty dope. It's a cool premise! But it's also coming out in January, so part of me did wonder what was wrong with it.
I haven't seen SELMA since its theatrical run, may be worth a revisit.
I really wish I liked her movies because there is obviously a real lack of POC filmmakers (especially women POC) making films at the budget level she has.
It's like when GHOSTBUSTERS (2016) came out and I felt it necessary to clarify that I don't hate women, I just thought the movie was not very good. 😅
I could have run interference for you by saying I thought 2016 was roughly on hit-or-miss mid-level par with the original.
https://www.theonion.com/negative-review-of-a-wrinkle-in-time-peppered-with-cr-1823656342
I got a lot out of THE 13th, but have had the same feeling in general. I never got why people fell all over themselves about SELMA, apart from the source events and lead performance. I don't know if it's because of being alive in the 70s during a golden age of well made TV movies about the civil rights era or even BOYCOTT, an early 2000s HBO film with Jeffery Wright as King and Erik Dellums as Bayard Rustin. SELMA felt like an ok TV movie directed with a slightly better eye than most. (And I love Tom Wikinson but someone needed to play him a tape of LBJ talking.) In my most cynical moods I've wondered in DeVernay's real talent lay in her original career as a PR agent.
*A TV Movie in which all major roles are played by non-Americans, with all the issues that presents (Wilkinson being the worst)
I think everyone involved has the talent to get the voices right, but it's all odd casting. I never looked at Tim Roth and thought "now there's a George Wallace!"
Yeah it's a great example of how casting is not just "hire talented actor for part." See also: every President in Lee Daniels' THE BUTLER
Also, while we had to suffer through decades of snobbery from the Brits due to our actors just having different mannerisms and vocal inflections which were ill fits at times (looking at you, Keanu in DRACULA) there is also a certain American-ness that can be hard to fake no matter how much our British and Australian friends try. Look at Jon Bernthal. That guy just radiates American-ness. Whereas when Daisy Edgar-Jones and Harris Dickerson tried being American southerners in WHERE THE CRAWDADS sing it was just kind of an adorable failure. So yeah, Tom and Tim, you ain't exactly convincing as American southerners
But Dickerson comes back roaring in IRON CLAW so maybe it’s just direction.
My favorite bad American by a Brit is Branagh in DEAD AGAIN. His accent drips with condescension. “They talk flat and fill space between words with ‘ehhhhhhhhhh’” was the extent of his research.
Haven't seen Iron Claw yet so I'll reserve judgment.
Ha! to your Branagh point
"the film hardly waits a moment before letting one side make the first aggressive move"
That predicts my disappointment already if I ever choose to see this. (The trailer was well done so there was a chance.) If you can't string out the moment between the inciting event and the follow-through with tension and suspense then you picked the wrong movie to make. That could have been the center of an incredible thriller. The setup deserved so much better (based on the trailer).
My complaint with the trailer is that the nuclear volley we're shown is so massive that it's apocalyptic. It seems really dumb to be fighting over the ISS when there's no Earth to go back to and they're probably all just slowly starving to death. Alas, as many, many attempts have shown, it's really hard to do The Twilight Zone well, and part of Serling's genius is making it look easy.
I get that. I think it falls into the valley of needing to amplify things a bit to make it hit. I don't know. In a trailer it needed to get across the idea in a couple seconds so I can give that a pass. The rest of the movie being a drag gets no pass.
Yeah, fair. It is a shame to read this review- we don't get enough well done tight paced little thrillers, especially in January. I'm already rewriting this movie in my head: what if it's just a handful of nuclear blasts that only one of the scientists notices, but it causes havoc with comms so one group has more information that the other.... There are so many good places to take this!
I'm already on board for your version.
I couldn't believe what I was seeing when that ISS trailer played before The Holdovers. I just think if a bunch of astronauts saw the earth consumed in a nuclear conflagration, they would absolutely not listen to any orders from the ground.
I had a hard time shaking that thought too, which didn't help, though there are some turns in the film that kind of help.
When I saw this trailer I was so angry at what a negative outlook on the human condition they were presenting. The snide comments about how scientists should be better than this felt especially pointed in this current anti-intellectual political climate.
Are you guys going to review American Fiction?
I think it slipped through the cracks at the end of the year. Short version: I liked it, if not quite as much as I hoped. The family drama and satire sometimes seemed at cross purposes. But Wright's great. I always want to see what he does.
Hey I felt the same way! It's two movies in one and they're tonally very different. Oh and cop-out ending too
Yeah, I did not like that device. (Being vague to avoid spoilers.) But I did like the final shot, shades of HOLLYWOOD SHUFFLE.
For those of you who have an open mind, unbound by dismissive pronouncements from a couple of middle aged white guys, I urge you to seek out ORIGIN and make up your own mind. Just in case it’s an unconventional masterpiece by a major filmmaker. 🙏🏼
This is a surprisingly reductive comment, considering you’re asking for potential viewers to be less reductive. It doesn’t need me to defend it, but this Substack has some of the most thoughtful commentary about movies, both from its writers and its commenters.
Thanks for commenting. Have you seen the movie? Perhaps I was trying to be too clever, but it’s not my goal to disparage the author of the review--only to encourage people to be undeterred from going to see it and make up their own minds as to its worthiness. I think it’s the best movie of the year and I don’t want people to miss out.
I saw Origin today, and I found it thrilling and absorbing. (And my girlfriend thinks it should be required viewing for white people.) Though I disagreed with Scott’s take this time, I know that he (and Keith) have a long track record of appreciating and championing films that wrestle with race, so I hope you won’t dismiss The Reveal over a reaction to one film.
Thank you for replying to my comment. I definitely understand wanting to get people to see a movie that you love. I haven’t seen Origin yet (I confess that since the pandemic essentially eliminated seeing movies in the theater for as long as it did, I’ve found it hard to go back). But I’m looking forward to seeing it when it’s available to stream.
Keith has not seen ORIGIN, so it's possible that he would not share my opinion of the film, which many people have liked. But in my defense, I have not been hostile to DuVernay's films in the past (me on SELMA, for example: https://thedissolve.com/reviews/1286-selma/). I just felt like there wasn't enough of an effort to make Wilkerson's book work as a movie. My main takeaway was that it sounded like a really interesting book, which is not ideal. I guess I'm curious: What was it about DuVernay's approach to the material that you found so compelling?
Thanks for replying. But I’m not sure I know how to answer your question. It’s like trying to say why I find a sunset compelling. It’s true that, like the protagonist, I’m a female intellectual who uses my life experiences in my work so I suppose that storyline compels me personally. I’m also a white American who tries to be an ally, so I treasure honest communications from othered communities. And finally, it’s true that I know Ava and I know that she’s poured her entire being into this film, and feels that everything she’s ever done has built up to this work, so it’s painful to hear someone dismiss it as “uninspired and banal.” But, that aside, as a white person, I’m disappointed in white people who close their hearts to the vulnerability and generosity, not to mention meticulous care and extraordinary artistry, of this film. I think it’s the best film of the year. (With Anatomy of a Fall coming in a close second.)
I appreciate your response and your personal connection to the work. And if my review is itself not substantive or glibly dismissive, that's a failure on my part. However, all I can do is be open to what a film is trying to do while being honest in articulating whether it works for me or not. Adapting a book like CASTE is a challenge for obvious reasons, but I fundamentally do not feel like DuVernay was able to make it work *as a film* without it feeling reductive, especially as it relates to Wilkerson's personal life as her character is piecing the material together. In a way, DuVernay is attempting something like what David Cronenberg did with the "unadaptable" NAKED LUNCH by infusing an author's biography with incidents from the book. But ORIGIN only comes to life for me fitfully, mainly when we step away from Wilkerson altogether and see her thesis expressed through montage, which is exactly what made THE 13TH so affecting. I wished for more of that but rarely got it.
But... I had the impression from your earlier comments that you haven’t read the book? So... how do you know the movie reduces the book’s ideas to something less than the original? Oh well, never mind. I started reading this Substack for the commentary about the Sight and Sound films, so maybe I’ll stick to those posts. Thanks for engaging. I do recommend that you see ORIGIN again, without expecting it to be exactly like 13th, which is a documentary, unlike ORIGIN, a narrative film.
I’m glad you’re passionate about the film—I look forward to seeing it myself!—but I think it’s unfair to imply (perhaps unintentionally) that by disliking it or critiquing it, viewers and critics are “closing their hearts.” It suggests that there is one, correct way of experiencing a piece of art, which is never true. The subject of the book is an important one, and I’m sure DuVernay’s intentions in adapting it were noble—but that doesn’t mean that criticism of the film is inherently ignoble. (I also don’t think reading the source material—for this or any other film—is a prerequisite to viewing or reviewing the adaptation. If it were, the last 15 years of mainstream film would have us all buried under a mountain of comic books.)
Don’t worry. I have even less confidence in my clumsy attempts to express my thoughts in writing than you do. I’m glad you’re planning to see ORIGIN. It’s something really special. I don’t believe one has to have read the book in order to have an opinion on the movie, and I don’t think that’s what I said--if I gave that impression, please forgive me. Have a lovely day.
I haven't seen Origin, nor read the book, but the idea of turning a work of hard scholarship into a story about the author's life seems like an incredibly odd take, and one hard to make work well. It inherently turns the focus away from the researched facts and into the personal emotional journey, which just encourages subjectivism.
Gosh, I sure hope you’ll see the movie before deciding that it doesn’t work.
Wow, my partner and I just came home from seeing ORIGIN, and I have to say I found it involving, challenging, moving, and mostly successful. It *did* remind me of ADAPTATION, in that it stepped outside the source material as a way of addressing its core unadaptability. In this case, it means following the author as she wends her way into her book’s complex thesis -- oversimplified here, but I still found it thrilling to watch a film that was so surefooted about putting across an intellectual argument. Maybe there were about two historical recreations too many, but I found the Trayvon Martin scene, playing out to a soundtrack of the actual 911 calls, harrowing and very effective. This is not a conventional movie drama, and I found I didn’t need a “story” to keep me engaged. Ava DuVernay took and big swing here, and for me it connected.
I’ll be damned. This is such a wildly polarizing movie. It either really really works for you or it really really doesn’t.
Is it weird that I could enjoy the movie so much while at the same time understanding why a lot of people wouldn’t connect with its approach to the material?
I dunno about that. All the comments on this thread that are negative about ORIGIN are by people who haven’t seen the movie.
I wasn’t referring to the comments here. I was talking about the general hot-or-cold reaction among reviewers.
I was replying to Scott actually, or thought I was. (I’m not fluent in navigating Substack!) Of course, there’s no such thing as a movie that’s everyone’s cup of tea, but I haven’t seen negative reviews in the major outlets.
No, my mistake!