The Watchers

The Watchers is an exhausting watch but not in the way…let’s say an Ingmar Bergman picture would be. Nope, it’s not utterly mind-ravaging in the way a well-executed but intensely cerebral avant-garde thriller from Europe would be. The Watchers is belligerently debilitating because at no point does any supporting character stop verbal diarrhea-ing clumsy exposition all over the place to give us something to care about. To call The Watchers inept would be an understatement. It’s a horror movie, but honestly, the scariest thing about it is that it feels like it was written by the same inhuman monsters the movie is about. At no point does it accurately capture something even remotely resembling the human experience. The characters don’t make sense (besides the protagonist — primarily due to Dakota Fanning‘s satisfactory performance despite having a real active kidney stone of a script.) What we’re left with is a bunch of dipshits we barely know, running around a forest frightened, and a mystery we don’t care about, unraveling slower than molasses come January.

Dakota Fanning is Mina, an American in Ireland who is overcoming personal family trauma by working at a pet store. Early in the movie, her boss tells her the animals don’t like it when they see her smoking outside. I laughed really loud cause that’s really stupid. At 6 minutes in, this was the last time I felt something during this entire movie. Shortly after, Mina’s car breaks down in the countryside of Ireland, so she journeys into the woods surrounding the road, searching for help. Unfortunately, she finds herself trapped. Apparently, she crossed over some mystical barrier or some shit, and that means the evil invisible monsters that live in the forest are gonna get her if she doesn’t high tail it into the dance studio located in the middle of the forest. In the dance studio, the old Irish lady with long, greasy hair tells Mina the creatures watch them like animals or pets cause the dance studio has one-way mirrors. She tells Mina to not upset them and never try to leave, or they’ll dismember her. Also, there are two more people in the dance class. Woman About Mina’s Age, played by Barbarian‘s Georgina Campbell, and Discount Angus Cloud but British, played by no one important.

After every character slowly adds to the convoluted mythology and the film pretends to end 35 times, the movie finally ends, and you’re allowed to go home. The series of endings gets worse and worse with each one, almost comically. It’s like that one friend at a party who puts his foot in his mouth and then keeps saying things that dig him into even more trouble. If that friend was a movie that friend would be Watchers. Of course, first-time filmmaker Ishana Night Shyamalan‘s father has made worse films. Not many, though. Grade: D (In Theaters)

Hit Man

I’m pretty surprised at the rapturous response Richard Linklater‘s good but fairly slight comedy, Hit Man, has been receiving. No pun intended, but it feels more like a for-hire job than something Links really wanted to do. I could be wrong, but it doesn’t have the raw authenticity of the director’s best work – The Before Trilogy, Dazed & Confused, Boyhood, even Everybody Wants Some!! to some degree. The dude is all about natural and lived-in representations of the human condition, and Hit Man is extremely schticky, almost into 80s sitcom territory.

This is a comedy loosely based on a true story of a New Orleans psychology professor (Glen Powell) moonlighting as a technician for the New Orleans Police Department to assist in sting operations meant to catch people who try to hire hit men. When the one cop who usually pretends to be the hit man in these sting operations (Everybody Wants Some!!‘s Austin Amelio) gets suspended for brutalizing teenagers, the cops have no choice (but not really) but to have Glen Powell do it. Throughout the movie, Powell uses his psychology degree to figure out what kind of hitman the people he’s trying to bust would respond to. This means a lot of Powell putting on various costumes and sporting different accents to become a new hitman. He also learns a lot about human nature and himself along the way. Eventually, he falls in love with a woman trying to whack her husband (Adria Arjona), and the two experience a real whirlwind romance.

The chemistry between Powell and Arjona is just outstanding and the only real reason I can understand why people are going cuckoo-shit bananas over Hit Man. I’ve known since Everybody Wants Some!! that Powell was a commanding presence, but with this, he solidifies himself as a bonafide movie star. Arjona is the real surprise, though; she’s fantastic. Golden Globe nominations are imminent, but they’ll probably both miss out on the Oscars. Of course, it’s written by Richard Linklater, so everything is a bit more detailed and off-kilter than your generic rom-com thriller-lite. There are some very good jokes scattered throughout, enhanced no doubt by the two central performances. However, there’s a lot of plot contrivances that come across more sloppy than quirky. Since this isn’t a spoof movie or even a movie that firmly exists in a foreign reality (like Bottoms or a Charlie Kaufman movie), it often clashes with the more grounded elements of the picture. Still, in a cinematic season that has been aggressively underwhelming, Hit Man is that rare ‘actually good’ movie. High praise, I know. Grade: B (Netflix)

Ren Faire

I’m not surprised at the rapturous response amongst critics and hip streamers for Ren Faire, a fascinating and painfully funny docuseries that bends the rules of what a documentary can be. Maybe I’m just sick of all these straightforward, first-person sitting interviews mixed with archive footage docuseries that when something comes along and actually has style and feels like actual cinema, I get a little movie nerd chub in my big dumb pants. Filmmaker Lance Oppenheim is sporting some serious Errol Morris energy, both in his atypical approach to conventional documentary storytelling and his fascination with off-beat fringe subjects. However, this is no Tiger King. You never get the feeling Oppenheim is exploiting these people. Like all great documentarians, he is just trying to get at what makes them tick – deep in the soggy bottom of their psyches.

Throughout three one-hour episodes, we explore a King Lear-esque power struggle at a Texas Renaissance Festival. George Coulam is the elderly owner of the festival grounds and even once served as mayor of the town where it’s located. He’s a total prick, a callous abuser so shrouded in loneliness that he lashes out at people when they try to help him. He’s isolated himself on his land, in his house that looks like some kind of demented Willy Wonka factory, equipped with weird nick-nacks and expensive artwork. He’s 86 years old but apparently hasn’t lost his sex drive. He makes his assistant run his “sugar daddy sites” along with their festival work, and every so often, he gets chauffered to the local Olive Garden to ogle over some 20-something-year-old. He’s sure to always ask them if they’ve had breast work, and if they have, he pulls the ripcord on the date. Sure, George proves himself to be a terrible misogynist in this docuseries, but it’s also indicative of how he treats everyone in his orbit. They are merely things he can move around occasionally and then completely destroy when it suits him.

Since George is getting old, he knows he has to leave the festival to someone before he dies. There are really two possible successors. The first is the most likable person in the show, Jeffrey Baldwin, the GM and former Entertainment Director of the festival. Jeff is an actor obsessed with nerdy acting stuff, like singing Sweeney Todd with his wife in the car after an anniversary dinner. He once played Shrek somewhere and has the pictures to prove it. However, Jeff isn’t the perfect successor. As personable and caring of a dude as he is, he needs to be better versed in the business side of things. Added to that, he made his wife the acting Entertainment Director of the festival, which, while it seems she’s fully qualified, pisses off Old King George, who frowns upon nepotism.

Jeff‘s challenger is a much more ridiculous character, Louie Migliacco, a long-haired middle-aged trust fund baby who owns the Kettle Corn stand. Think of a California Kendall Roy who compulsively chugs Red Bull. He wants to propose a buyout of the festival for which his family will provide the money. Apparently, it took a lot of work for Oppenheim to form his storyline because all that Red Bull made Louie flighty and hard to keep up with. The final player in this game is the most conventional of the three – Darla Smith – someone who knows the business of it all but so much the fun entertainment stuff.

Over 173 minutes, Oppenheim digs pretty deep into these people’s lives. I think it could have been longer and dove a little deeper, but what we ended up getting stands as the best docuseries I’ve seen since HBO’s Telemarketers. There have been complaints over how stylized the series is, almost to the point where it makes some of the “truth” seem fake. Oppenheim successfully gets the gist of the truth here, as much so or even more than a straight-on journalistic approach would. Grade: A- (Max)