The Verdict: January Catch-Up
A hodgepodge of movies and TV shows I caught up with in January.
Welcome to The Verdict, a weekly column in which I recap all the film, television, and entertainment news I’ve been consuming by grouping them into one of three boxes: Underrated, Overrated, and Perfectly Rated.
The last two weeks at The Verdict have been pretty damn specific, so let’s broaden it back up. Over the last month, I watched 16 movies and 4 seasons of television (two of which—The Last of Us and Poker Face—I have yet to finish, because they have not yet aired). Here are some underrated gems, overrated hacks, and perfectly rated masterpieces from this month’s viewing.
Underrated: Tony Manero
Here’s a strange, absorbing, and disturbing drama that you can watch on Netflix until February 28. This film from director Pablo Larraín (Jackie, Spencer) is set in Chile in 1978—the year in which Augusto Pinochet’s milita dictatorship was at its height and in which disco classic Saturday Night Fever was released. Tony Manero follows Raúl (Alfredo Castro), a middle-aged man who is pathologically obsessed with—you guessed it—Tony Manero, John Travolta’s lead character from that film. Why is he so obsessed? The film never states it clearly, but it isn’t an accident that Raúl will do anything, including murder and steal, to emulate his disco-dance hero. At a time when a generalissimo president was installed into Chile through a US-backed coup, Raúl’s obsession with an American pop culture phenomenon is seen as twisted neocolonial fetishism.
Underrated: Funny Pages
Are you sick of saccharine coming-of-age stories in which annoying teenaged protagonists learn Big Life Lessons by the end? Then look no further! Funny Pages, the directorial debut from actor and cartoonist Owen Kline, follows extra-annoying teenagers who learn zero life lessons over the course of this film’s 86 minutes. And it’s great! Daniel Zolghadri plays Robert, a self-obsessed high school senior with dreams of becoming an Underground Comix genius in the likes of R. Crumb. His delusions of grandeur lead him to leave his parents’ home in Princeton, NJ for an uber-cheap apartment in Trenton—perhaps the single most disgusting domicile ever put on film. Robert’s seventeen-year-old stupidity lead him into hilariously stupid situations that will be famililar to anyone who wrongly thought that their teenaged brain was ready to handle the real world.
Overrated: Barbarian
Ever since it was released last September, I’ve been intrigued by Barbarian. Its hook is an interesting one: A relatively unknown director (Zach Cregger) makes his studio debut with a horror film whose advertising actively advises its audience to go into it without knowing anything? And Justin Long is involved?? Sounds like a wild, fun time! Now that I’ve watched it, I’ll confirm that although the film’s first half was captivating, with great performances from Georgina Campbell and Bill Skarsgård, the second half fell flat. This is where the monster is finally revealed, an unoriginal creature-feature bore into which some critics and audiences clearly found a lot of pleasure. I don’t get it. I also don’t get the excitement behind Justin Long, here playing a sitcom star with rape accusations. The monster nominally makes him face his true self, but it mostly rings hollow.
Perfectly Rated: Atlanta Season 4
If you haven’t seen Atlanta, Donald Glover’s innovative TV show about the titular city’s hip-hop scene, here is the best evidence that you should. Atlanta’s final season took the show’s core elements—its surreal atmosphere, textured characters, and wild unpredictability—and twisted them into an expectedly unexpected new form. Critics have rightly praised this final season for making the show into a unified whole—especially after Season 3, an abject failure of a season of television that nevertheless proved a fascinating experiment. If you’re looking for a new show to binge all the way through, Atlanta should be your next stop. Donald Glover has created a madcap masterpiece of a TV show, an endlessly layered text that deserves to be seen by the widest audience.
Appreciate the recommendation on Poker Face last week; I think it scratches a similar itch to Psych, which is probably why I find it so enjoyable (those were the days).