Hello, Genius—Your Weekly Recs Await!Hollywood Rediscovers Original Storytelling—Plus: Penn Badgley, Daisy Edgar-Jones, Katherine Ryan, Coco Jones, and More…
I got into this because I love movies, but now I have this fear that my job is to ruin them. Dear Wags, You might recognize that line from The Studio—the AppleTV+ cringe comedy about Hollywood’s decline. Matt Remick, the suit played by Seth Rogen, is a movie geek drawn to the industry by the artistry of Chinatown and The Deer Hunter. But as president of Continental Studios, he’s fighting to save his job by cranking out a slick, dumb juggernaut starring the Kool-Aid Man. How mortifying and how true. Rogen says Steve Asbell, now president of 20th Century Studios and a veteran of the wars between art and commerce, said those words to him back in 2003. The actor and his partner, Evan Goldberg, were pitching a teen sex comedy set in ancient Rome called Generation CCX. Asbell was giving notes and, at some point, gave in to a tidal surge of despair. Movies have a way of doing that to people. Hollywood conquers the souls of its servants—and crushes them. The idea of being paid good money to manufacture fantasies is deeply alluring. The reality is increasingly grim. Unlike New York, which has long been about the commodification of art produced somewhere cheaper, Los Angeles was, until recently, a working dream factory, drawing seekers to make the most glamorous product in the world. Not just execs, but screenwriters, actors, directors, makeup artists, set builders, camera operators, and even journalists. What they found there—well, you’ve seen the movies. With each passing minute, the idea of Hollywood as a genuine place, as opposed to a metaphor for a challenged industry, fades to black. The business, such as it is, is now sprinkled across the globe, and film production, despite strenuous efforts to reverse the process, has migrated along with it. The same afflictions that plague other creaky 20th-century industries plague show business. That mythic pilgrimage west—on a Greyhound bus, to sit in Schwab’s drugstore or for a screen test on some darkened backlot—needn’t happen anymore. It can all be done far more cheaply outside Atlanta, or on Zoom. What can Los Angeles say in its defense? That when you drive down those allées of palms in a convertible, things still look dazzling? In the battered hub of show business, the industry reliably mirrors the fictions of The Studio. The highest-grossing picture of the year to date is A Minecraft Movie, fast closing in on $1 billion worldwide. It’s another hit that smacks of IP desperation, based on the Swedish-born video game beloved by kids and containing no built-in narrative. Minecraft can be anything—or nothing. It appeals to kids, former kids, and parents desperate for a break. Amiable but block-headed in every way, it demands little more than a passing familiarity with whatever already lulls us on tiny screens. But last week, it was ousted from the top box office slot by something altogether different: Ryan Coogler’s vampire juke-joint musical Sinners, which raked in $48 million domestically and more than $63 million worldwide. That’s the highest domestic opening weekend for an original film since Jordan Peele’s Nope in July 2022. Forecasts for Sinners were all over the place, but it delivered as both a critical and commercial success. At least some of that has to do with the durability of horror as a genre and the dependability of African American moviegoers, who came out in force to see Michael B. Jordan and a mostly black cast do battle with the undead. But let’s not overthink it. Sinners is masterfully made and wildly entertaining. In a season of reheated leftovers, it’s something new. “I had the gift of the opportunity of making a film inspired by my family and my ancestry,” Coogler wrote in an Instagram message to moviegoers. “But it was always a film that we wanted to make for audiences, in theaters. [We] felt a deep responsibility to entertain you, and move you in the way only cinema can.” That’s refreshing. It was also a double-coup for Warner Bros., the studio behind both A Minecraft Movie and Sinners (no. 3 at the box office was the Christian-themed animated film The King of Kings from Angel Studios, feeding another underserved but hungry demographic). It would be too much to say that the industry will find creative courage after Coogler’s hit, but it’s encouraging. Meanwhile, the industry continues spelunking deep into the lithosphere of old scripts, excavating ideas nobody was particularly attached to the first time around. Last weekend, there was Rami Malek in The Amateur, a remake of a forgotten 1981 Cold War thriller. This weekend brings Ben Affleck in The Accountant 2, a sequel to a 2016 action film wiped from the memory bank. Who will be lured from the couch by this tale of a numbers nerd turned avenger? Maybe laid-off IRS employees. Summer is nearly here, and we’ll go back to the well again and again. Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning, Fantastic Four: First Steps, Thunderbolts (both from the Marvel factory), 28 Years Later, Lilo & Stitch (a live-action remake), Happy Gilmore 2, Jurassic World: Rebirth, Superman: Legacy, and Ballerina (a John Wick spinoff) are all looming. Among the brighter prospects, Joseph Kosinski’s F1, starring Brad Pitt as a Formula One driver making a comeback, and Pixar’s Elio stand out as fresh ideas. Original or not, some of these movies may well be worth the trek to the multiplex. But chasing the next Kool-Aid movie is proving to be the road to long-term irrelevance. The success of Sinners offers a more exciting Plan B. If Hollywood’s leaders really do love movies, maybe they should stop making it their job to ruin them. Yours ever, Sarah Brown
 It Had to Be You…Again!You (Netflix). We really must get over making the serial killer the hero of the story. How’s the glamorization of sociopathic behavior working out for us in real life? The final season of You returns us to New York City, where we first met Joe Goldberg (Penn Badgley), a self-styled knight in shining armor to various unsuspecting dream girls—whom he inevitably murders, along with anybody else who gets in his way. Watching Joe’s delusions can be diverting, but five seasons in, it’s not surprising, and it might even be depressing, in a Smart Women, Foolish Choices sort of way. After slicing and dicing his way through an English university, Joe has settled down with a billionaire (the reliably sharp Charlotte Ritchie of Call the Midwife and Grantchester). He’s ready to nest among the plutocrats—until a waifish playwright improbably named Bronte (!) (Madeline Brewer) strays across his path. Running interference are his wife’s nettlesome twin sisters, played by Anna Camp (who knows from camp). The plot twists this way and that, flinging bodies every which way. —Martin Burney  Galaxy QuestAndor (Disney+). Cinematic universes are becoming oppressive—what with their endless sequels, prequels, spinoffs, reboots, origin stories, alternate dimensions, toys, and pasty conventioneers in unflattering costumes. But then there’s Tony Gilroy’s visceral addition to the crowded Star Wars canon, starring Diego Luna as dashing Cassian Andor—who, as all the nerds know, will ultimately die stealing the plans to the Death Star in Rogue One, which itself is a prequel to the Star Wars movie even non-nerds have seen. This is exactly the kind of dense exposition critics love to mock about a galaxy far, far away. But Andor’s adventures stand alone as a gritty and riveting parable about resisting authoritarianism. Also, Ben Mendelsohn, as the baddie, is having so much fun. —Roj Blake... Continue reading this post for free in the Substack app
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