1. Pain Hustlers
Directed by David Yates
Year: 2023
Language: English
Shaun’s Score: 1.7/5 ★
Before Watching:
America’s Ass has been busy since The Avengers petered out. First Knives Out, then whatever The Gray Man was, then that weird meet-and-greet with Father Time, and now the most flagrant attempt to rip-off The Wolf of Wallstreet (2013) and The Big Short (2015) in recent memory? Look, I understand the genre’s appeal: unflinching biography of ruthless entrepreneurs turns pseudo-documentary chronologizing their downfall sounds riveting. Scorsese and McKay aren’t even the only filmmakers to put out success stories in this line—Molly’s Game (2017) was also an accomplished release, as was Hulu’s limited series The Dropout. But Yates falls a few pills short of the prescription, pumping out a rushed glob of true crime that seems to only answer the question “what if Emily Blunt were a Floribama shore bitch?”
Liza Drake (Blunt) is a struggling stripper, relying on her sister and mother (Catherine O’Hara), but this takes place 13 years before she can vent about it on an Elmo Tweet. One of her sleaze-bag patrons (you guessed who) offers her a job at his pharmaceutical “company” selling cancer pain meds to local doctors. As is axiomatically predictable from the very fact that this story is now a movie, she starts pushing paper like Jim Halpert, they get in over their heads, and God’s Plan dictates that Drake’s pharma empire fare about as well as Jussie Smollett‘s Empire empire. You’re welcome to put this move on in the background as you doomscroll or do (hopefully better) drugs.
Pain Hustlers premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, and is now available to stream on Netflix.
After Watching:
Sorry, but where is the creativity? At least the movies I mentioned above had their own ideas, and decent writing. The whole we’re narrating via black-and-white interviews post facto motif is hackneyed beyond saving, and the film speeds through any interesting parts of the story (i.e. pretty much everything after Drake’s first sale to Dr. Lydell). I’m not saying you need Margot Robbie1 in a bathtub explaining subprime mortgage bonds, but at least make the production cogent enough for the audience to forget that they already know how the story ends (not with a bang, but with an “are you still watching?”).
2. Society of the Snow
Directed by J. A. Bayona
Year: 2023
Language: Spanish (Original title: La Sociedad de la Nieve)
Shaun’s Score: 2.6/5 ★
Before Watching:
Could the abundance of recent plane crash content be securities fraud for Boeing? Considering that 1) everything is securities fraud, and 2) this content was filmed and slated before the recent barrage of air travel woes, I’d say probably.2 At least this flick (while mildly disappointing) is better than Gerard Butler’s Plane or Dennis Quaid’s On a Wing and a Prayer. Still, the film pays insufficient attention to many of the interesting moral quandaries faced by the survivors, not even addressing the lasting, irreparable changes this trauma caused.3 Bayona instead spends screentime on gore and grotesquely overdone cinematography and music choices. It’s a shame that the Academy Awards threw themselves at All Quiet on the Western Front last year, now Oscar-bait foreign flicks think obnoxious color grading and FX body horror is an automatic upgrade to Delta One.
The film follows the 1972 Uruguayan airplane crash4 in a desolate, inhospitable corner of the Andes. The surviving passengers (members of a young rugby team and some of their families) face impossible choices and challenges on their path to rescue. I admit the film is acted, shot, and edited with passion; I just wish they had better allocated resources in adapting a months-long ordeal into 144 minutes. If I just wanted to see conventional vapid conversation smothering forlorn youth, I’d switch over to Love Island.
Society of the Snow premiered at the 80th Venice International Film Festival as the closing film, and is now available to stream on Netflix.
After Watching:
Society of the Snow has one critical thread that most other survival flicks don’t bother harping on: cannibalism. Bayona does a decent job of portraying the moral divide in the group, as well as the mindset transformation that some of the boys go through in “giving their bodies” to their friends. But after the choice has been made, the film disregards the consequences. We’ll see how the film fares at the Oscars, where it’s nominated for both International Feature and Makeup/Hairstyling; after the drama surrounding Anatomy of a Fall’s lack of submission, the former category could be anybody’s race, but this is the weakest film on the roster in my eyes.
3. Nyad
Directed by Jimmy Chin & Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi
Year: 2023
Language: English
Shaun’s Score: 2.3/5 ★
Before Watching:
Power couples rule the world—Jay-Z calling out the Grammys after they snubbed his wife Beyoncé, Travis Kelce reaching the Superbowl just so Taylor Swift can complete her psyops mission to rig the U.S. election,5 whatever the hell Timotheé Chalamet and Kylie Jenner are doing at any given moment… Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi are the documentary world’s equivalent of a power couple, collaborating on many of the past decade’s best action outdoorsy stories like Free Solo, Meru, and The Rescue. If your Tinder date has an aluminum RIMOWA suitcase, he’ll have a near-religious fascination with these releases. Nyad is their first venture into feature-length dramatic reënactments, casting superstars Annette Bening and Jodie Foster to play the power couple6 of Diana Nyad and Bonnie Stoll.
At age sixty, former marathon swimmer Diana Nyad decides to pursue (again) an accomplishment that eluded her in her youth: a nonstop, “unassisted”7 110-mile swim from Cuba to Florida. And I thought that Ke Huy Quan had an inspiring later-in-life comeback story. She recruits her friend (and former lover) Bonnie Stoll to coach her, then the two build a team and head to Cuba. And hey, what would an overcoming-obstacles story be without multiple failed attempts? (*cough* The Fabelmans?) The film is delicately inspiring and beautifully acted, but Chin and Vasarhelyi struggle in the transition from documenting real life to recreating real life, including treading through lots of choppy emotional waters. Nyad’s tone is uneven and rushed, its narrative depth perfunctory—this renders the film more The Way of Water than James Cameron could even dream of.
Nyad premiered at the 50th Telluride Film Festival, and is now available to stream on Netflix.
After Watching:
Did I hallucinate it, or did they really have John Bartlett cough and then immediately announce he was terminally ill? This is emblematic of the film’s just random pacing, which unravels during their attempts to incorporate Nyad’s childhood abuses and that whole Taj Mahal thing. Jodie’s really giving us Foster’s Home for Imaginary World Landmarks.
Beyond this, however, the film seems to ignore much of the controversy around Nyad’s accomplishments—she (like any talented queer person) is famous for lying and for mocking her competitors,8 and there were stretches of her successful swim where her speed picked up without any evidence how. The Times’s review is right that Nyad didn’t pity herself, and the film (to its credit) doesn’t waste time pitying her, but it also refuses to engage with the truth of the woman behind the accomplishment. Instead, we just get a standard issue “I was a jerk in the pursuit of my dreams, help me cross the finish line because I apologized” arc. I celebrate queer accomplishments, but for this film, I can’t (like those damn lambs) be silent on its shortcomings.
In case you haven’t yet seen the Tweet proving we are living in a simulation… here you go.
Not legal advice 🥰
Some lore posits that their time in the Andes rendered the survivors “post-human,” but the film insists on a happy ending…
The crash scene is as gruesome as Saw III. Look away if you don’t want nightmares.
Did we really need this article, Wired? Is this how you’re drawing a line in the sand?
Well, as the movie clarifies, they only dated once “a million years ago,” and now they’re just good friends. But who said good friends can’t be a power couple?
Including two other swimmers who actually beat her to this feat, but using shark cages. Nyad used a sonar shark field, which maybe wasn’t even available for those earlier swimmers, so can she really claim to be the first?