Summer is over, and so are my days of leisure. I’ve been fortunate to have an abundance of free time to sink my teeth into some solid pieces of entertainment, some in new territory, while others a return after years apart. The good thing about summer break is that it gives me room to experiment. My personal time isn’t so precious, and so to “waste” it isn’t as much of a gamble. And so, what you’ll see here are works of art in different mediums and genres, sharing the same quality of excellent craftsmanship.
Godless (2017)
Hollywood is embarrassed by its past.
Once it's primary source of success, the "western" genre in the 2010s and 2020s is about as barren as the plains of the Midwest. Westerns can occasionally shine in the indie market, such as 2015’s Slow West, but the days of cowboy epics topping the box office seem as tangible as a faded memory. Godless is so exceptional because it is essentially a seven-hour film, written and directed by Scott Frank (of Logan and Minority Report fame), combining the stillness of the genre's past with the reflective commentary of its sparse present. The initial episodes may try one's patience, but when bullets start to fly and the body count piles up, those once meandering scenes can be sympathetically recalled as beloved characters get picked off in a fury.
Godless is an ensemble series, focusing on a mining town which has recently suffered a tragedy. After the mine’s abrupt and devastating collapse, most of the men in the town perished too, leaving but a few elderly folks, a cowardly sheriff, and his competent, if not naive, deputy left. Fortunately, from businesses to law enforcement, the women in town are more than capable of running operations, lacking only the strength to remove the rubble from the mine so that they may put its resources back on the market. Undermining their agency, flocks of investors swoop in, looking to steal the fortune from the ladies who have maintained it. Meanwhile, an infamous gang approaches, searching for one of their own gone rogue after finally having his fill of senseless murders. Tragedy, love, struggle, and bloodshed ensue, creating a grounded western with a romantic heart.
The central mining town houses a lucrative economic source, flimsy power structure, and complex relationships from house to house. Jack O'Connell (who recently enjoyed a career renaissance as the Irish vampire in Sinners) shines as a John Marston-adjacent cowboy on a path toward redemption, while Jeff Daniels gives the most underrated performance of his career as a self-righteous posse leader who reveals shades of compassion in the least expected moments. Godless has been more or less forgotten by the general public, and considering Netflix's recent philosophy of bowing down to viewers who'd rather be on their phones, a work of art that demands your attention like this is seemingly as dated as the Wild West.
As an aside, my Persian wife, who normally resents violence in movies, shouted “Go Ladies! Kill them!” during the final episode’s climactic shootout. Godless ends with one of the COLDEST moments in its genre, and it’s a shame this mini-series doesn’t live in infamy along the likes of Unforgiven, The Man with No Name trilogy, and other pillars of the gritty western subgenre.
Rating: 4.5/5 Stars.
Ad Astra (2019)
The definition of an awesome, creatively driven work of cinema that could've been an all-time classic in its genre if not for studio interference. With that said, James Gray's talent and thought has crafted a film that is otherwise sorely lacking in the 2010s and 2020s. Get this: an intelligent sci-fi film that came out in the last 10 years! Who'd have thought? Starring Brad Pitt in a role way out of his normal orbit, the film follows Roy McBride, an astronaut living in a future where space travel has been normalized and corporatized. Haunted by the legacy of his space-wandering, superstar father (Clifford, played by Tommy Lee Jones), Roy is a solemn man who has seemingly inherited all of his father’s negative traits except for the pride to overlook the consequences of isolation, obsession, achievement no matter the cost, and the fundamental rejection of love.
Assumed dead years ago after his expedition’s disappearance while trying to discover extraterrestrial life, recently unveiled evidence may have pinpointed Clifford’s location, and now his emotionally bereft son is tasked with going out into uncharted territories to communicate, and maybe retrieve, a father who abandoned him for personal glory so many times before. In a cold and empty galaxy, the possibility of alien life is somehow more likely than father-son reconciliation.
Purely by coincidence, I'm doing a Kubrick ranking project, and so 2001 is fresh in my mind. In many ways, Ad Astra feels like its spiritual successor. More approachable to general audiences, Ad Astra provides its audience an endless space to dwell on the meanings of achievement, masculinity, and how any of these matter in a vast and empty universe. Brad Pitt’s commitment to a sour, quiet, and resentful astronaut with more Daddy issues than there are stars in space provides the perfect lens from which we explore this thematically and technically rich but literally empty setting. From the grainy cinematography to the "NASA Punk" visual influences, Ad Astra is a great movie, and one I long to be more popular in a genre obsessed with visual spectacle yet narrative simplicity. If not for an utterly dreadful voice-over forced upon the film by studio interference, Ad Astra might just be a sci-fi masterpiece. But when considering that “other” sci-fi classic that suffered a similar fate, it’s not bad company to be in.
Rating: 4/5 Stars.
Slow Horses (seasons 1 and 2)
I love spy thrillers, even though most of them disappoint me.
For every Three Days of the Condor, there’s one hundred more Argylle’s. I prefer my spy dramas serious and gritty, dealing with complex domestic and international issues, and the morally gray characters trying to control chaos or create it. Just look at the James Bond series and the ratio between “realistic” films and bombastic ones, and that summarizes the quality of spy thrillers across the cinematic medium. When I gave Slow Horses a chance, statistically speaking the odds of enjoyment weren’t in my favor. However, this was a gamble that paid off.
Following a team of demoted MI5 agents operating in Slough House, where the bottom of the barrel of the UK’s espionage employees collect dust, an incident involving a white nationalist hate group, a rising politician who may or may not be funding them, and a young Englishman of Pakistani descent going to the chopping block for a Crusades-inspired beheading, forces this team of failures into the scathing spotlight of a domestic travesty. As the date of execution approaches, tensions escalate, the body count rises, and the unexpected competency of Slough House ends up turning them against the same towering agency which employs yet holds them down.
What makes Slow Horses season one so compelling is its relevancy, mainly the controversial issues it confronts head on. Of course, the rise of nationalism and Christianity is as popular today in real western politics as it is in the art reacting to it. The white nationalist terrorists who are the main antagonists of Slow Horse’s first season feel as if their government favors outsiders over its “real,” ancestral citizens. To them, the UK has generated a society that allows the discrimination of Christians but prohibits that of Muslims. And to be exceptionally prevalent, this wrath circulates within the realm of jokes and comedians. Tackling equality, Islamophobia, and the dubious morality of our own government agencies, Slow Horses is as powerful a thriller as it is a look at our own societal standards through the lens of a sniper’s scope.
A Casebook of Crime and John & Andrew McAleer
Author John McAleer lived a life that exceeds fiction. A World War II veteran, English teacher at Harvard and Boston College, and celebrated and Edgar Allen Poe Award-winning author of crime and detective fiction, a recent uncovering of a lost manuscript has brought new mysteries to this famed author’s already extensive bibliography. Dating back to the 1930s, Henry von Stray, the brilliant detective of A Casebook of Crime, joins the ranks of beloved crime-solvers in the Golden Age of Detective Fiction. Though just one of John’s lost manuscripts was uncovered, this collection is reinforced by several stories written by his son and fellow novelist, editor, and teacher at Boston College, Andrew McAleer.
Set in London and following a narrative structure akin to Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes series in which the enigmatic detective is observed by his slightly more grounded but no less charismatic assistant, A Casebook of Crime sees Great War veteran turned detective von Stray navigate mysteries involving a legendary spy and baroness of the Crown, the murder of an heiress uncovered in a locked wine cellar, and the demise of an infamous bank president. As someone who admittedly is not well-read in the mystery/detective fiction genre, A Casebook of Crime has opened me up to the rich subgenre of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction. Though a majority of the stories were written by Andrew McAleer many decades after his father wrote the initial von Stray adventure, the prose, characters, and plots capture the magic of a bygone but beloved era of fiction.