Just Bs and Cs this week.

True Detective: Night Country

I had reasonably high expectations for a series starring Jodie Foster, produced by Moonlight‘s Barry Jenkins, and written and directed by talented filmmaker Issa López (Tigers Are Not Afraid). The biggest detractor for me was that Night Country was sporting the True Detective brand, which hasn’t meant much since the first and best season of the franchise. I immediately thought of poor Colin Farrell from Season 2, boozy-eyed and screaming at his obese, red-headed son about children defecating in his shoes. It couldn’t be that bad, could it? Early word-of-mouth was powerful, and I thought both the isolated community setting made up primarily of indigenous people and the fact it followed two female detectives, which would hopefully give us an inverse perspective from Rust and Marty’s POV from Season 1, were strong choices. However, with each new episode, Night Country got worse and worse, establishing and building supporting characters to never use them for anything impactful, and alternating from being so on-the-nose it made you groan to so obtuse you wanted to shout at Jodie Foster, “What’s your fucking deal, dude?” While True Detective: Night Country isn’t as bad as the almost unwatchable Season 2, it’s a far cry from good television and doesn’t even feel like a part of the franchise.

That’s because creator Issa López didn’t pitch HBO on True Detective Season 4; she pitched them on Night Country, but the top Max brass saw an opportunity to sloppily shoehorn Carcosa and “time is a flat circle” references into her narrative, creating a jumbled, incoherent mess in the process. For a show with the word “detective” in its title, there was very little detective work going on besides Jodie Foster frequently telling a little boy cop he’s “not asking the right questions.” They never seemed to make any breakthroughs, and the leads they got seemed to be pure flukes or given to them by ice ghosts. There was a two or three-episode chunk in the middle where the main plot was hardly progressing at all; instead, the show was trying to build out its two lead detectives (Foster and acting newcomer/professional boxer Kali Reis), their frequently contradictory dynamic and their strained relationships with family members and late-night hookups. The final two episodes of the series, especially the finale, felt super rushed and haphazardly slapped together, hinting that this season was supposed to be longer than just six episodes. The ending reveal makes very little sense not only because it’s full of plot holes (I will probably publish a later article breaking down and analyzing this limp dog penis of an ending) but also because it doesn’t resolve several of the personal issues in the lives of these two cops the show seemed to thinkk was critical enough to spend the majority of the middle episodes toiling over.

After every episode on Max, the watch-next option for Mare of Easttown came up, and every time I thought, “Fuck, that was a much better show! That was a show that explored many similar themes but in subtler and effective ways with characters that actually made sense.” True Detective Night Country is super ham-fisted as if it’s already conceded to having to compete with the audience member’s social media notifications. On top of that, it’s a flimsy mystery that continues to stumble until the end, where it absolutely falls flat and doesn’t pay off. The key to a compelling mystery is placing complex but decipherable breadcrumbs into the story from the beginning so you can connect the dots when you look back. Anything else is a cheat! True Detective: Night Country feels like it was improvised during a midnight Harold at your local Chuckle Bucket theater.

My pitch for True Detective Season 5 would be two cops investigating why critics and audiences loved True Detective Season 4 so much. The key to that mystery is realizing that Night Country attempted to explore themes and characters sadly lacking from the modern television landscape. A show about the interpersonal relationships between cops and citizens, whites and Inuit, seen through the eyes of two strong, dynamic female characters from a female writer/director of color. I think the problem is that HBO so clearly broke its fundamental rule of not interfering with the creative process and tried to wedge all this dumb True Detective Season 1 lore into a narrative that didn’t need it. HBO has been the undisputed king of prestige television for the last twenty-something years, but that isn’t entirely true lately. With many of the best shows on TV coming from other streamers, Succession ending, and The Last of Us postponed till 2025, HBO needed a hit. It got one, but sadly, at the cost of a talented artist’s vision I believe. It’s not worth it if you ask me. Grade: C- (Streaming on Max)

The Taste of Things

Best known for being the film France chose over Anatomy of a Fall to represent it in the Academy Awards’ International Film category, Vietnamese-born French filmmaker Tran Anh Hung‘s The Taste of Things is two movies at once. The first is a gorgeously filmed, almost silent meditation on the healing powers of cooking and the pride of serving friends, family, and clients edible love on a plate. The second and much less successful movie is a semi-cute love story between two likable middle-aged cooks that would be much more effective and emotionally resonant if we knew anything more about the characters other than that they loved cooking. Also, if just a soupçon of conflict had been injected into the story. This is 145 minutes of French folks moaning “oooh la la” while gorging themselves on food and then proudly presenting their butts to each other for sex. There’s a death in the movie, but I didn’t know the character enough to really care. Juliette Binoche is excellent despite everything, as Eugénie, the long-time lover and sous chef to Benoît Magimel‘s Dodin Bouffant, a celebrated chef guy people respect. The two take on a little girl protégé who is supposed to be so strong-willed in her love for food that it’s astounding, but the child actress is so mid we don’t get any of that. I will say that The Taste of Things joins the ranks of Big Night and Babette’s Feast in having some of the most deliciously filmed food preparation scenes of all time. The film’s best scene is the opening, an extended, nearly wordless preparation of a large meal involving fish stew, boiled crawfish, rib roasts, rich sauces, and a baked Alaska that made me exclaim, “They had ice cream cake back then?!” There’s also a line the chef man has that I want a tattoo of on my butt – “All conversation must cease when a truffled turkey arrives.” This is a very well-made movie, and I love food, but I guess I was looking for something just a tad more specific. Grade: B (In Theaters)

How to Have Sex

This is a typical debut feature from a talented new filmmaker in that it has a lot of great ideas but lacks the cohesive vision that usually only years of experience making movies will grant you. Molly Manning Walker‘s How to Have Sex is about three British teenagers who have just finished year 13 (basically a senior year of HS for all you Yankee doodles reading this) and go on a big party vacation to blow off steam at a resort in Malia, on the Greek island of Crete. There’s Skye (Lara Peake), clearly the ring-leader who is jealous, insecure, and not very nice; Em (Enva Lewis), their super bright and very nice lesbian friend; and Tara (Mia McKenna-Bruce), their funny and sort of aloof friend, who is generally the target of all their jabs. Tara is also the only virgin of the group, and the three make an effort to try and get her laid. They meet some boys, have some drinks, get super fucked up and disoriented, and some sex on the beach happens where consent is murky at best.

Although How to Have Sex is mostly critically acclaimed and was one of the big winners at this year’s British Independent Film Awards, which is basically what the Independent Spirit Awards used to be, there have been some vocal detractors that label it as overly didactic. Of course, the movie thinks sexual assault is morally objectionable, as it definitely should. Still, some elements are played a bit too on the nose in an after-school-special way that minimizes the complexity and authenticity of the central characters. The real power of this film is in its exploration of morally grayish areas, but towards the end, the movie jumps the gun and gives us a definitive, indisputable answer to something that would have been more powerful and sparked more necessary conversations about SA if left uncertain.

What the movie gets most right is the authenticity of the characters. They’re always loud, sometimes annoying, certainly naive, but they’re drunk 18-year-olds unchaperoned for the first time – of course, that’s how they’d be! Molly Manning Walker has a sharp eye for the nuances and details that make these characters seem real. The cast is uniformly solid but the clear standout is Mia McKenna-Bruce as Tara, who manages to run away with our emotions. Even when the film feels especially padded towards the middle and back end, it seriously feels like an hour of material stretched out to 91 minutes, McKenna-Bruce manages to keep our attention. The movie is good, but Mia McKenna-Bruce is great, and I can’t wait to see what she does next. Grade: B (In Theaters – streaming on MUBI soon)

Suitable Flesh

This a great example of how you can be entirely ready to write off a movie as dog poop twenty minutes in, but then, miraculously, each scene gets better as it goes along, and when it finally ends 99 minutes later, you think it’s a good movie. Such is the case with Joe Lynch’s Suitable Flesh. This movie feels like a parody of 90s goofy-in-retrospect erotic thrillers like Basic Instinct, Silk Stalkings, or The Last Seduction. Heather Graham, in her best performance ever, plays a psychiatrist who begins treating a teenager (an underwhelming Judah Lewis) who believes the devil is trying to possess his body. The two end up having an affair, and since in this movie, possession is sexually transmitted, Heather Graham ends up catching the devil. From there, shit goes off the rails, and the movie becomes this graphically violent live-action cartoon with Graham relishing every line of dialogue she has. I wish mainstream horror movies took swings this big. While Suitable Flesh isn’t always successful and takes a while to find its groove, it feels alive in ways a mainstream horror film hasn’t in years. Grade: B (Streaming on Shudder/AMC+)

The Doom Generation (1995) – Uncut, 4K Restoration

Unseen by many people at the time, and even then, only seen in its completely neutered R-rated version that appeased the homophobic religious zealots of the MPAA. Thankfully, times and attitudes have changed, and the folks at Strand Releasing are giving us an uncut and unrated 4K restoration of the movie available on both Blu-ray and streaming. Before this unaltered cut screened to a rapturous reception at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival, nobody had seen it in 28 years. Wow, what a treat. While certainly not a perfect film, Gregg Araki‘s The Doom Generation is a mesmerizing and compulsively watchable cult movie that really captures the fringe zeitgeist of the time and feels way more at home in today’s queer-friendly mainstream cinema movement. It opens in a flame-filled nightclub with a sign that says, “Welcome to Hell” and I believe we’re supposed to take that literally. We follow three teens – lovers Amy Blue (Rose McGowan) and Jordan White (James Duvall), who fall into the path of dangerous bad boy Xavier ‘X’ Red (Jonathan Schaech). The three go from liquor store robberies to a Jurassic Park-themed fast food restaurant to dealing with violent ex-lovers (Nicky Katt, Parker Posey) to dealing with neo-Nazis to having a bunch of three-ways in surreal-looking motel rooms. While this may sound ridiculously violent and subversive, it is, but it’s always executed on a camp-first level. All the blood looks like red paint and is dispersed in laughably over-the-top quantities. While not exactly Citizen Kane, The Doom Generation is one of the more fascinating artifacts from this period of filmmaking, lost for the longest time to outdated prejudices and social standards. Grade: B (Streaming on Criterion Channel)

Lover Stalker Killer

I guess the much superior and twisty American Nightmare spoiled me because I found Netflix’s latest true crime documentary to be quite the snooze fest from both a filmmaking and storytelling perspective. First off, none of these true crime docs Netflix churns out every week like hotcakes are “great pieces of art,” but we expect them to at least create a mild mystery for us. With Lover Stalker Killer, the killer’s identity is obvious in the first ten minutes…of 90. All due respect to the families and friends of the victims of this horrible sociopath, but Lover Stalker Killer feels like a 15-minute Unsolved Mysteries segment stretched out an hour because Netflix desperately needed content. The killer isn’t even still at large, so I can’t recommend it on the basis of doing your civic duty and maybe helping to identify/capture this creep. I guess the reason to watch this is to learn the lesson that you need to be careful when dating online, so I’ll save you the 90 minutes here – be careful when you meet people online. Grade: C- (Streaming on Netflix)