The latest movie I apparently didn't understand

If you didn't see the review I tangentially linked in Monday's post that was about something else entirely, I laid into Celine Song's Materialists with both barrels. I thought it was broad. I thought it was cliched. I thought it was shallow.

But then I read an article this morning that argued this was a satire of broadness. A satire of cliche. A satire of shallowness.

That's certainly what I would expect of Song after the astute observational skills she showed us in Past Lives, but I'm sorry, it just isn't up there on the screen.

Mild spoilers to follow, more about what the movie is doing than the plot.

I'm only two movies away from 7,000. I've got a big (and I mean big) viewing planned on Saturday to mark the occasion and you will hear all about it on The Audient. 

This is to tell you I've been around the block before when it comes to watching movies. I've seen a million (okay, maybe 500) satires and I know when a movie is trying to be a satire. (Usually.)

Materialists does not read to me as a satire. Not at all. It reads to me as a failure that can be discussed after the fact in the terms of "I meant to do that," in order to save the narrative around it.

The critical community disagrees with me. It has a 70 on Metacritic and an equivalent 7.0 on IMDB. That last is not critics, but it's exactly the same as the Metacritic mark so it suggests to me that both critics and audiences are feeling roughly the same way about the movie. A critic I respect, in fact a critic I used to write for when he was my editor, said that he would not see ten better screenplays than Materialists in 2025. 

Although it befuddled me, initially I dismissed this praise as a weird collective failure to see the true banality of a movie, akin to what happened last year when a lot of people liked Osgood Perkins' Longlegs and I ranked it as my worst movie of the year.

Then this morning, just after waking up and still in quite the fog, I read an IndieWire article by Samantha Bergeson that told me this was a critique of Hollywood and yeah, Celine Song knew exactly what she was doing.

Bullshit.

I mean, maybe. But still: Bullshit.

It does explain what seems like a total tonal failure on the movie's part, its excessive whiteness, its apparent existence within a 1990s, Sex in the City adjacent understanding of New York City.

But it is reasonable to argue, and I am currently arguing, that the experience of a movie you are having in the moment is key to whether the movie is successful or not. That's a rather obvious statement. 

But the premise of Bergerson's argument is that we are getting the movie wrong, even as "we" (not me) praise it. She argues that the praise for the movie comes from people who think of it as a successful romantic drama or a successful romantic comedy, modes the movie straddles quite awkwardly. (Because of the satire, Bergeson argues.) Praising it on that basis is even more absurd. At least a "she meant to do it" explanation is defensible about why the movie feels so weird. 

But Bergeson acknowledges that a straightforward interpretation of this movie is going to get it wrong, and that in fact many people have gotten it wrong. (In fact, this is the reason I clicked into the article in the first place -- I thought she was agreeing with me.) Which means the actual experience of it is unsatisfying if you are just looking at the broadness, the cliches and the shallowness. You have to have someone like Bergeson read more deeply into it to reveal its true meaning, and this feels like an exercise you'd only be inclined to do if you felt there had to be an explanation for why Song made this movie the way she did.

I don't want these thoughts to be confused as me wanting someone to hit me over the head with the satire. But I think you have to know at some point that it is intended as satire or else you are forced to take it at face value.

Materialists certainly has moments where it peeks its head out and says "This might be a joke" -- think about Pedro Pascal's comment "It's hard for me to believe this isn't the leg thing" -- but the film so quickly goes back into totally straight-faced mode that the moments don't strike us as part of a larger design. They strike us as colossal failures of tone management, and contribute to the heavily negative review already building in our heads.

Surely it is indefensible for our main character to tell her ex-boyfriend that she broke up with him because he was poor. But she does this in contexts where it is depicted as heart-wrenching. If Song wanted this to be satire, she buried it too deeply.

The thing I found even more of a stretch about Bergeson's argument, and a revisit might help with this, is that she considers it a satire not of the romcom, but of the movie industry in general. When Lucy (Dakota Johnson) talks about certain matchmaking candidates being a niche market, of course she is using the language of film distribution there. I'd argue that this has crept into general parlance enough that a real person might use it to talk about themselves or someone else, but Bergeson thinks it's an intentional deconstruction of the movie business. 

There is a chance I am wrong about all this and Samantha Bergeson is right. That's part of the reason I'm writing this. I am now uncertain enough of my 2/10 review (which translates to one star on the five star scale) that I want the current document I'm writing to exist, for me to point people to it. And say that at least I figured out that I might have been wrong.

But I don't know if this warrants a revisit. I'll have a number of long plane trips coming up between now and October -- something I should probably tell you about at another time -- and I could easily fit in a second Materialists watch on the plane. It times out perfectly to be available. 

But also I have to consider the most salient aspect of our response, critical or otherwise, to any film: I just didn't like it. A film can be doing this or that or the other thing, and it's possible that even if you know it's doing that, it doesn't make the film any better. You are still left with unlikable characters and cliched scenarios for nearly two hours, and that's no fun. 

Critics have to write their own response to a film, and often don't have the luxury of pondering that response for a full week. They certainly don't have the luxury of reading other critics and seeing their take on a movie, nor should they. You have to go in fresh, forming your thoughts only on what the film is giving you in those two hours. Only if you see something there do you dig into it further to find alternate takes that might make it better.

I did not see something there in Materialists, and until I read a more convincing argument to the contrary than the one Bergeson mounted, 2/10 is where I'll stay. 

Cheating on a movie theater, using its own popcorn

I had to say two things that were inspired by my viewing of How to Train Your Dragon on Friday night, but I think you'll agree my diatribe about the humans improbably surviving the improbably ineffectual dragon scourge was worthy of its own post.

This one has nothing to do with the movie, directly.

You may remember, but probably not, that the Sun Theatre in Yarraville, my regular theater, gives its customers a nice benefit, if they happen to attend the last screening of the night and they're still hungry when they get out. Instead of tossing their leftover popcorn in the bin (to use the Australian term for a trash can), they bag it up nicely in the individual bags they use when you purchase it, and leave it on the counter of the snack bar/ticket purchasing area for anyone who wants to collect it on the way out. There's no sign that tells you this is why it's sitting there, but there's no one else around, it's 11:30 at night, and it doesn't take much to put two and two together.

Sometimes there's just one sitting there. On Thursday night there were six. So naturally I did my part and grabbed one on the way out of Dangerous Animals.

Being good, I gave myself just a taste of the salty goodness with the faint butter taste, saving the rest for the next day. 

I figured I'd munch on it whenever the mood struck. I was going in for a rare Friday in the office because my longtime work computer, which I've had since 2020, was finally forcing my hand and requiring me to turn it in for a new one, something they wanted me to do at least two years ago. A piercing fan-whirring sound, which started on Wednesday, was too much for me to continue tolerating, forcing me to give up on the hardware that had served me so well. I hate change, but I have to say, the transition to my new computer, which also involved moving to Windows 11 for the first time, was pretty smooth. 

Anyway, being in the office may have preventing me from getting the idea to snack on it. While I can shove handfuls of movie popcorn into my gob when sitting in my home office, it tends to beg questions, or at least funny looks, when you do the same thing in the office. So even though only a very scant number of people I actually knew were in the office that day, I just let the opportunity go by the boards.

Which meant I still had more than half the bag remaining when I went to the movies again that night.

Ordinarily I don't get to movies on back-to-back days these days, but when my wife suggested I stay in the city to go to a movie after my rare Friday in the office -- a possibility that had been in the back of my mind anyway -- I'd already gotten the idea to go out to Dangerous Animals on Thursday night. My wife encouraged me to do both.

And I must say, it's been a long time since I've stayed in the city for movies after work. I used to do this with some regularity, maybe once every six weeks, but both of my usual days in the office, Wednesday and Thursday, now feature for me some obligation on the home front regarding my kids' sports trainings. It's my older son's second basketball team on Wednesday and my younger son's only soccer team on Thursday. Yes, my wife could take them to these on occasion, but it would be an inconvenience for her so I haven't claimed the benefit yet. Going in on a different day made for a great opportunity to take advantage. 

So that takes us to my 6:30 screening of How to Train Your Dragon at Village Crown, the first of two Village Crown screenings, followed by Materialists. (If you want to see how much I disliked that particular movie, my review is up here.) 

And even though I'd had an earlier dinner at my favorite ramen bar, I still found enough room in my stomach for the remainder of that Sun Theatre popcorn, given freely to me at one movie theater and eaten at another.

If it's actually cheating, it can't be a very serious case of it. Given my lack of viewings in the city lately, I am seeing about 90% of my movies at the Sun these days. They can't feel any serious envy. They know my loyalty is true.

Then again, they don't benefit very much from that loyalty. My tickets are always free due to my critics card, and I only rarely by a small packet of lollies (or so they are called here). I did buy a $3 small bag of mixed gummies for Dangerous Animals.

And if you think this was a betrayal of Village -- after all, I did bring in outside food -- I made up for that one later on. Before Materialists, enough of a hole in my stomach had opened up again that I could not resist the purchase of a box of their sweet and salty popcorn. Which, it must be said, was mildly disappointing next to the Sun popcorn.