Thomas F. Cook

It’s hard to review a 4 chapter movie that’s only released its first part. But unlike the critics, I actually enjoyed this quite a bit, and in the audience I was with, there was a smattering of applause at the end. I checked rotten tomatoes and sure enough, the critics and public don’t agree.

There are many – and I mean many – problems with the movie. Characters aren’t introduced and as a result, for the first hour we don’t really know who these people are.

Horizon is the name of a town — or at least a potential town — on the bank of a river in the southwest — Arizona to be more specific.

This is Apache country, and because this settlement, which is being sold by someone named Pickering and sounds like a bit of a scammer, is being built exactly in the center of the Apache’s river crossing, it is under constant attack. The first happens when 2 men and a young boy attempt to survey the land and set up division lines. They are slaughtered and later found by a priest who buries them and leaves makeshift crosses on their graves. Apparently, some years later, a wagon train has arrived and set up mostly tents, plus one house on the opposite side of the river from the graves. They decided the grave-side of the river must have been the cause of the previous deaths, but we know that the first three were working on both sides of the river, and a bit later we learn why they were killed (they are driving away all the game).

The settlers have a dance and shortly afterward, the Apaches attack and burn the entire place down, including the wooden house. Mind, we still don’t know who these people are, including the First Peoples. (I prefer that Canadian term to “natives,” or “native Americans.” The word “native” always sounds insulting to me and I dare say, it will one day become an insult. Indigenous, which is the word one of the characters uses, is okay, and in my own family history I have come across documents which describe “negotiations with the indigenous people there.” (This was upstate New York.) But First Peoples doesn’t disparage second, third and fourth waves of immigrants. It just acknowledges that there was a group here who were first. Anyway, this long diatribe of words I like and don’t like has a lot to do with this movie, and its reception.

Simple minded people have written online stuff like, “Manifest Destiny, in 2024? You’re joking right?” “I don’t need to see the genocide of native peoples.” And so on. I think what Kevin Costner is trying to do — and the reason he called it a saga instead of a story — is not really bring back the magic of the western — but retell those stories in a way that is sympathetic to both sides of that war. It’s significant, in my opinion, that most of this movie takes place during the civil war, and there are a few nods to The Union. But this is like the story of the hidden war.

And then he did something quite extraordinary I thought. I was wondering how he was going to end Chapter 1 when we barely could remember the characters and knew almost nothing about them. But then as a team of scalp hunters rides off into the distance, suddenly there is this very long montage of scenes from the next movie. None of those scenes gave away the story, but with the music and a sort of whiff of the next movie, which comes out in a few weeks, it actually finished an open ended movie. Plenty of people were not satisfied with that ending, but I thought it was wonderful.

And the soundtrack is absolutely spectacular. It is beyond perfection. I’m a soundtrack fanatic and I had never heard anything by John Debney, and that’s probably because I would never go see the types of films he has scored. But with this I was constantly feeling the music.

Anyway, I loved it, except for the continuity which was very spotty, and the multiple story lines where I couldn’t tell, sometimes, where we were.

The preview for this movie makes it seem like this is going to be the biggest tear jerker in a long while, but it’s actually quite bizarre, and that makes it a rather special movie, I think.

Julia Louis-Dreyfus plays Zora, Lola Pettigrew plays her extremely ill daughter Tuesday, and Arinze Kene plays Death. Death, in this case, is a cockatoo of some kind. (Update: it was a macaw.)

The first scene is of the millions of voices of the earth, reflected in a globe and pulling back through clouds and such in the manner of the opening scene of Contact. But this time, we land not in a human eye but in the cockatoo. He is able to hear all the human suffering going on in the world.

Whenever a voice in pain cries out louder than expected, he makes his way over to that person, waves one of his wings over the person and that person dies. He does this for several different people, and then he hears the cries of Tuesday. He immediately flies over to where she lives in London and when he enters her room, she understands that he is Death and she asks, “Are you here to kill me?” He replies in the affirmative and she asks if he can wait until her mother gets home from work. He reluctantly agrees. He’s covered in soot and dirt so she fills up her sink and lets him take a bath. He turns out toe be extraordinarily beautiful. He can also shrink down to the size of a tear duct or expand, like Alice in Wonderland, to the size of a house. All of this becomes important in several aspects later in the movie.

When her mother gets home from work, she is very obviously avoiding the subject of her dying daughter because she tries to go straight upstairs complaining that things went south at work and they have to start some project over. Tuesday’s home health nurse (this is England where they actually have health care), begs her to stop in and say hello to her daughter. At this point, Death is hiding in Tuesday’s ear canal and her mother doesn’t know it, but at Tuesday’s insistence, death flies out of her ear and grows to a normal size bird. Like everyone in the movie who encounters this bird, Zora knows who or what it is, and on some denial-instinct, beats the bird and smashes it with her foot. Death hobbles out the door and into the garden, knocking over plants and things on the way and just before he can recover himself, Zora starts beating him again with a heavy book. Then she pours alcohol on him and lights a match and burns him until she thinks he is dead. While she’s digging a hole to bury him in, he says, “You need to let her die,” and suddenly with that comment, she grabs the bird — about the size of her hand now — and eats him and swallows him down.

Now, in what screenwriters usually refer to as the vast wilderness of Act II, the most difficult part of a script, the mother and daughter actually get to know each other, and it turns out there are significant secrets the mother has kept from the daughter, which the daughter knew anyway. Zora lost her job a long time ago and has been pretend going in to work and sometimes falling asleep on park benches. To get by, she has been selling all the belongings of the second floor of their house, including many of Tuesday’s favorite things, like dolls. Also, the city starts to become strange and weird. There seems to be an uncontrolled fire at St. Paul’s. There is a man with bloody stumps of legs dragging himself across the road, screaming in agony. Reports come over the radio of cows who were “bolted” in the brain (to become meat), just walking around like zombie cows. Eventually you sort of realize that because Zora “ate” death, nothing can die anymore and the consequences are horrible.

During an argument with her daughter about fixing a light, Zora suddenly grows to the size of the house. And then somehow, either her daughter or herself, she realizes that she has the power of death. So she straps her daughter to her back, grows to the height of the trees and starts walking all over the place, waving her hand to help the suffering people (and cows) die.

But this is a temporary illusion on her part — that she has become death. Because while at a beach with her daughter, she runs off to a secluded place to have a pee and suddenly, for the first time, she hears her daughter’s suffering and pain. This makes her run and eventually puke up the bird. They have an argument and from the daughter’s point of view, she can’t tell what they are fighting about. But whatever’s going on, the bird shrinks down and jumps back into her belly. But he says, “If you don’t tell her, I’ll rip you to shreds from the center of your body.”

And it turns out, all she needed to say was that she didn’t think she was going to survive after her daughter is gone. (That’s in the preview.) This scene did not turn out to be so awful after all, though it was indeed very moving. But what I liked about it is how hard it was for her to get to that simple statement, which seems so very true to all of us. I can’t remember whether the daughter dies at Zora’s wave of the hand or of the birds wave of his wing, but it’s irrelevant. Some time later, it’s clear that Zora is not holding on and is probably suicidal. But then death returns, not to kill her, but to see how she’s doing.

Anyway, it was a delightful movie I thought. I don’t normally look at Rotten Tomatoes for scores or anything like that because usually I think who cares, I’ll never agree. But this one has a hugely divergent rating between the critics and the audience 82 to 49%. I’m firmly with the critics.

Once again, the NYTimes has come out with another stupid review of a movie and this time it was Thelma. This review was by Jeannette Catsoulis, who appears to be on the movie staff and not just some rando “media” commentator.

Her big complaint was that it was increasingly absurd and unbelievable: “Barely more plausible than Sharknado,” is how she put it.

The absurdity of complaining about plausibility in Sharknado is is remarkable, since that movie was meant to be a kind of joke, like Snakes on a Plane. But I can guarantee that most people would not be thinking about the plausibility of this movie because it has some heart to it, and when people follow or listen to a story, it isn’t the plausibility they’re thinking about or relating to. Some people, more icey than most, go immediately to the question of “could this happen,” and it’s one of the reasons I myself can’t watch Bridgerton and never will. Additionally, almost all stories are preposterous and implausible. All fairy tales are practically drug induced animal/human dreams that are meant to expose our inner most fears that we are, simply, animals and vulnerable. 3 pigs and the wolf? Goldilocks and the 3 bears? Hansel and Gretel and the witch living in a house of candy? Even with Cinderella, the animals help her — at least in the Disney movie. I don’t remember the original story except that all her horrible sisters cut off parts of their feet to try to fit into the dainty glass slippers. Take another movie that was released this weekend: Kinds of Kindness. Plausible? No. Nobody is going to chop off their thumb and cook it for someone, or cut out her own liver.

This movie didn’t seem that difficult to swallow because there were times, for example, when Thelma, the main character, played by June Squibb, finds herself alone in an unfamiliar neighborhood. This stuff happens, especially to people in their 90s who may or may not be losing some memory. Or when she fell and couldn’t lift herself.

The other reason I hated this review and most of her reviews is that she specifically mentioned the exceptional cast and left out one person — probably the 2nd most important character in the movie — which was the stand in for the author Josh Margolin. This young, sort of rootless character, is played by Fred Hechinger who was first noticed in The White Lotus as the constantly brutalized little brother. He was outstanding. He conveyed love, concern, self loathing and self hatred, and, probably the very common issue of not knowing what to do in this world.

Instead she singled out the performances of, correctly, June Squibb who born in 1929 and will be 95 in November, and, also correctly, Richard Roundtree, who died in 2023 at the age of 81. But also Parker Posey, Clark Gregg and Malcolm McDowell. All of whom might be good actors, but have incredibly small parts. I think Gregg has four lines at the most. It was a slight. A way of saying she didn’t like Fred Hechinger without saying she didn’t like him or that he was miscast.

The movie isn’t a tear jerker, although there are some very moving parts and a woman behind me couldn’t stop sobbing — maybe she had just lost a grandparent. But as someone with a mom who got suckered into sending money to a scam place (she was able to get it back, but I think there was a bank fee involved), this reviewer seemed really clueless about the elderly and the issues they face, including being prey through no fault of their own, having to face the dreaded senior living facility; striving to remain independent; stubbornness and especially memory issues and not really understanding how the world works now. (Malcolm McDowell provides a tirade against Amazon.)

And it was extremely funny. So yes, rent it or, if you’re lucky enough to live where they might have a theatre that runs independent films from Sundance, go see it.

Most movies which are tear jerkers or weepers or whatever you want to call them, make you cry during the movie, at some point. This one I didn’t cry at all, until the credits started rolling. I think that’s a really remarkable achievement.

James Norton plays John and his problem is not a complex problem, but almost unbelievably difficult. He has a four year old, Michael, and he, John, has a terminal illness — presumably cancer but they don’t say and it isn’t important. The mother of the boy left them and went back to Russia, abandoning her husband and son, and in fact has cut them off completely.

In any event, as one of the adoption agents points out, it is already too late to try to reunite the son with his mother, even if he knew where she was. He has to find a family for his son before he dies, and to that extent he is working with an agency, and doing some fairly illegal things to boot, to interview various candidates in the hope that he’ll find the right one.

He’s a window washer, and there are innumerable scenes of him looking through windows into other people’s lives, and sometimes, weird constant reminders that he’s not going to be around much longer. The son seems to sense something going on with his father, but I think the main conflict in the movie is that John does not want his son to remember him. He wants his son to forget him and to grow up not knowing he was adopted by a new family. This is a little bit of pipe dream and the adoption agents keep trying to get him to realize that he must talk about it with his son (they have a children’s book called “How the dinosaur dies,” that he can use.) They also want him to create a memory box that the boy will be able to open at a later date, when he reaches the age where he wants to try to reconstruct an image of his father and mother. They remind him, that legally, Michael will be able to request the names of his birth parents when he turns 18. But John is one of those beleaguered world weary types who just wants to be forgotten. So it is essentially an internal conflict — or a conflict of what happens when the inner emotional reality bumps up against the outside world.

He interviews a total of five families, I think, and in the end, he picks the one I would have picked, so I felt like I had judged correctly. And that, ironically, is where the movie ended, the credits rolled, and I suddenly felt like I had a rock stuck in my throat. Very slow and beautiful. Really well done for someone who wrote, directed and produced his own movie.

and directed by Luca Guadigno.

I honestly don’t know what this movie was about. It’s about a 3 way relationship (2 boys and a girl) who meet… somewhere… a dorm of some kind or maybe it’s a tennis camp for teens. The 2 guys met at 12 at a tennis camp and they’ve been best friends forever.

Early on, Zendaya asks them if they’ve ever… you know. And they vehemently deny it. But then they admit to one teaching the other to jerk off and to think about girls when doing it. Later she initiates a 3 way kiss and pulls away to watch the two guys make out with each other. So that’s the whole homoerotic thing. In Call Me By Your Name, Armie Hammer knows he’s homosexual and Timothe Chalomet seems to change, but is pretty gay by the end of it. But for Hammer, (and you can see this if you look closely), his inner turmoil is their age difference. Elio is under age and Hammer is in college. In this, these two guys don’t question the fact that they’re making out, but they also have no inner feelings about being gay or bisexual and go on to lead mostly heterosexual lives. But anyway, the movie builds up this tennis match between the 2 at the age of 40. And at the end of the movie it goes on for so long and there is so much slow motion, I had trouble staying awake. Presumably we’re waiting to see who wins the tie break. But instead, because of an awkward attempt to stop an overhead lob, Josh O’Connor falls over the net and into Mike Faist’s waiting arms, and they hug each other. The End.

Yes, I was that confused. And as well as Zendaya has been doing — she’s currently the lead and the 2nd lead in two movies at the same time: Dune and this one — she’s utterly unbelievable as a tennis coach and even more unbelievable as a tennis player. Not well cast. I didn’t believe her as a mom either.

But since having thought more about this and at least one other movie Luca Guadigno has made, I tend to think that the fact that these characters have no problems with their sexualities indicates a rather superficial approach, especially in this movie when the two of them were thrown into a gay panic when Zendaya asks if they’ve ever… (had sex), and then suddenly kiss each other like there’s no woman in the room. I found it sort of fascinating in Call Me By Your Name, except there, until Armie Hammer’s arrival, Timothe Chalomet had been dating and fucking a girl. I don’t know what the actors do to make that leap, but it’s not in the writing.

Sometimes a film is just bad. But I went to see this anyway because I like Sam Worthington — or at least I feel bad for Sam Worthington because James Cameron’s promise that he’d become a huge star never happened. (Although he’s got a part in Kevin Costner’s new two part movie about the west and he also has all those Avatar follow up movie (3 more that I know of), so he’ll be working until at least 2031.

The only thing that kept me awake during this was my suspicion that there was some unspoken polemical ideas about white people.

And I think I would have said no, except for the fact that the only people who seem to have survived in New York City is this small black family and one day, two white people come racing up to their home with guns and equipment to get in. They want to study the father’s scrubbing system which keeps the air fresh inside the home and dumps the CO2 into the outside atmosphere. Gasp! Who wouldn’t believe them. Apparently, they live in a community in a former bomb shelter in Philadelphia, but their scrubbers aren’t functioning as well and they have only weeks to live. Now the word black or African American is never mentioned. The only reference is a book the grandfather gives to his granddaughter about Malcolm X. All of that was okay for me, but then toward the end, the granddaughter is on the radio with her mother and says, “These white people are crazy.” That’s when I realized this was a black paranoia movie.

Like one small example, with no water, oxygen and plant life, did the small family which initially consisted of grandpa, dad (played by Common), mom (played by Jennifer Hudson) and the granddaughter (played by I don’t know), think they could go on forever this way, as long as they had enough Campbell’s soup (product placement)? What did they think was in store for their daughter? These questions are more pressing and dramatic and necessary in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. And in fact a master work like that makes you think very deeply about what does it mean to be alive, and why should you try to keep doing it?

This never asks those questions. It’s more interested in showing how white people lie. Not even something I disagree with. But as a movie it was just terrible.