WRB—July 2025 Film Supplement

The South Philly Scheme

When I was young, I thought Managing Editors managed to edit. What did I know? I was a working guy, a business agent for Teamster Local 107 out of D.C. One of a thousand working stiffs, until I wasn’t no more. And then I became a Managing Editor myself.

Links:

Reviews:

• In The New Yorker, Katy Waldman reviews Anora (2024) and Materialists (2025):

  Both Materialists and Anora seek to uncouple love from materialism, but they go about it differently. In Song’s film, Lucy (Dakota Johnson) achieves the romantic happy ending without the money—once she discards her fixation on personal finance, she’s able to appreciate her cater waiter’s heart of gold. Ani (Mikey Madison), though, must learn a harder lesson. She hasn’t transgressed in wanting nice things or in negotiating an economic arrangement with Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn), but in falling for the fairy tale. The metaphor of stripping is never far from our minds: Ani is exposed; she has let down her guard. When Ivan takes her shopping, she spins unself-consciously in front of a full-length mirror, eager to see herself as valuable. She’s foolish and starry-eyed enough to quit her job, and, later, to believe that a marriage contract could protect her against the whims of the super-rich. If Lucy is censured for her coolly transactional approach to love, Ani is chastened for her innocence—for not being cynical enough.

• In the TLS, Muriel Zagha reviews Jane Austen Wrecked My Life (2025):

  Making a bilingual film about how difficult it is to communicate is an interesting choice, but in Jane Austen Wrecked My Life, much has become lost in translation. Piani has neither embraced the French tradition of romantic comedy—often highly literate, occasionally experimental, and ranging from Michel Deville, Éric Rohmer and François Truffaut to Jean Eustache and Jacques Demy—nor successfully appropriated a different set of tropes belonging to American and British cinema, inflected by limber screwball comedy with witty, quickfire dialogue. As for the film’s flirtation with Austen’s world, it remains frustratingly half-hearted. For example, in a ballroom scene in Georgian costume that is a direct reference to similar scenes in Austen film adaptations, there is only a brief glimpse of the old English dances that are so effective at having the protagonists circle each other and come face to face. Similarly, Piani’s film features two maisons de famille, but remains on the surface of their history and significance, gliding over the textures of wallpaper, hessian and lace.

  [The film’s engagement with Austen is mostly window dressing, although I will give it that, if you are going to make a romantic comedy, putting “Jane Austen” in the title is a good idea. The shallowness is clearest at the end—to reconcile with the female lead, the male lead quotes, inexplicably, from Darcy’s first disastrous proposal. Neither of them comment on this, and the film as a whole plays it earnestly. —Steve]

• In The Ringer, Manuela Lazic and Adam Nayman review Step Brothers (2008). Nayman:

  Both of these references take me back to the halcyon summer of 2008, when hope was audacious, I could see all my friends tonight, and McKay was still funny. I’ve written before about this once brilliant filmmaker’s steady—and, in its way, extremely compelling—fall from grace, yet I’m not remotely tired of contemplating the paradoxes of his work, which you already hinted at. Step Brothers’ greatness is indeed bound up in its stupidity, which is total and liberating, and like you, I have my favorite bits of sublime idiocy. I suspect that long after I have forgotten my children’s names and all of the formative experiences of my adolescence, I will still remember Reilly telling his therapist the plot of Good Will Hunting (1997) (“Yeah, anyway, my best friend is Ben Affleck”). But I also think that Step Brothers was the last one of McKay’s movies that was at least willing to risk being seen as actually stupid (as opposed to strategically stupid) and that, in a way, threading this particular needle turned McKay into a victim of his own success. Critics began pointing out, more and more frequently, that McKay was not a maker of stupid movies but a smart director taking stupidity as his subject, and I feel like this idea became aspirational—an invitation to have his dog shit and lick it, too.

  [The problem with smart people making stupid art is that, once they nail it, there’s no real way to develop the art any further besides moving away from the stupidity. Even the Ramones ended up doing political commentary—get back to sniffing glue! —Steve]

Reviews of books:

• In The Atlantic, Hillary Kelly reviews Bruce Handy’s history of teen movies (Hollywood High: A Totally Epic, Way Opinionated History of Teen Movies, May):

  Handy does not underrate the bleak fallout in teen films of “our current wretched century.” He also rightly identifies the rise of “girl power” as a force in teen culture, and the popularity and quality of girl-centered movies, even as old-school sex romps (the American Pie franchise) never disappear. Tina Fey’s 2004 film, Mean Girls, is near the top of his list of best teen films, as it is of mine, and he embeds it in a discussion of articles and parenting guides (Fey drew on Rosalind Wiseman’s Queen Bees & Wannabes (2002)) that sounded the alarm about aggression and insecurity in the world of American girlhood. But in emphasizing bullying’s links to the usual teen-film theme of high-school tribalism, Handy stops short of recognizing the portrayal of it, both comic and horrifying, as part of a larger shift toward incisive psychological probing that skewed dark: When Fey watched the movie with test audiences, she took note that girls were responding to it less as a teen movie and more “like a reality show.” They weren’t “exactly guffawing.” Recently out of high school myself at the time, though I laughed, I also remember wincing at the no-safe-spaces aura of the cruelty.

  [Anyone interested in this shift from adults being afraid of teens to adults being afraid for teens should watch the original Mean Girls (which is already well on its way to this shift) and then the musical remake (2024), paying attention to which jokes get cut. I think they were cut not so much because the teens no longer say such things but because it would freak out adults to hear teens say such things.

  (Also cut from the remake is Gretchen Wieners’ “We should totally just stab Caesar!” speech, which really only works as a joke if the audience has some familiarity with Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. What the decision to cut that indicates is left as an exercise for the reader.) —Steve]

• In our sister publication on the Thames, Bee Wilson reviews Al Pacino’s memoir (Sonny Boy, 2024) [An Upcoming book in WRB—Oct. 12, 2024; we linked to an excerpt in WRB—Sept. 2024 Film Supplement.]:

  Pacino’s​ primary mission in [Looking for Richard (1996)] was to bring Shakespeare to the American masses and to demonstrate that once you “tune up” your ear, as he puts it in the film, these are “not fancy words.” There are vox pops with random people on the streets of New York, including an amiable and chatty man who tells Kimball and Pacino that he likes Shakespeare even though he’s never seen any because it’s not on TV. One young person tells him that Hamlet “sucked” while another tells him that Shakespeare is “boring.” “As Americans, what is it . . . that thing? That gets between us and Shakespeare?” Pacino asks at one point. He has an array of actors elucidate the question, including Kenneth Branagh (who suggests that Shakespeare may be taught in a dull way in schools), John Gielgud (who fears that the reason may be that Americans don’t go to “picture galleries” as much as the English), Derek Jacobi (who thinks that Americans have been made to feel self-conscious and inferior when it comes to Shakespeare) and James Earl Jones who, contrary to Pacino’s thesis, says that he first encountered Shakespeare in the fields of Michigan when his uncle, a “black northern guy,” suddenly started narrating Mark Antony’s funeral oration from Julius Caesar.

  Why did Looking for Richard mean so much to Pacino? As he writes, he wanted to “exorcise” the criticism leveled at him when he played Richard III on Broadway in the 1970s. One reviewer then wrote that “Pacino sets Shakespeare back fifty years in this country.” The hurt of this remark lingered. “I wondered why they didn’t say a hundred years.” But Looking for Richard didn’t get big audiences; Pacino says “it was in the marketing where it all fell apart” and still feels so angry with the responsible studio exec that he won’t name him (“If he reads this book, he’ll know who he was”). Many years later, at a party of movie types and celebrities in LA, Pacino was upset to discover that no one had heard of Looking for Richard.

  [The appeal of Shakespeare’s Richard III is that he is an actor who lets the audience in on the act—here’s what I’m going to do, here’s why I’m going to do it, here’s why I’m making these particular choices as an actor. —Steve]

• In The New Republic, Scott W. Stern reviews Mark Goble’s book on slow motion (Downtime: The Twentieth Century in Slow Motion, June):

  Yet slow motion is no longer confined just to the silver screen. In the broader culture, it has become part of the stock vocabulary of trauma. Not only survivors of vertiginous falls but also drug users, victims of violent attacks, individuals pushed to their physical limits, even those who witnessed 9/11—all have invoked the feeling of seeing, or sensing, in slo-mo. This technique of filmmaking, in other words, has given us a new way of articulating—perhaps even perceiving—the world around us.

  Slow motion, Goble argues, is the perfect effect for our imperfect age. It captures “time as we experience it in the modern world: variously uneven, punctuated and accelerated, dragging and expanding, beautiful, traumatic, endless, and commodified.” Since the industrial revolution, some observers have suggested that history seems to be accelerating. (“Time has now become so fluidly rapid,” one German novelist wrote to her friend in 1809. “It is not possible to keep up; between one mail day and the other lies an entire historical epoch.”) But, in Goble’s telling, the speed of events seemed to achieve a new momentum in the late ’60s, when in a matter of months, slo-mo suddenly transformed from a “minor” aesthetic approach present in a handful of commercial films to the dominant, omnipresent special effect of the next half-century.

N.B.:

• “The Origin of the $80 Popcorn Bucket”

• An investigation into the “Coke and beer” Dakota Johnson’s character orders in Materialists. [Celine Song cites the German “diesel” as the inspiration, which is Coke and beer mixed together. But the movie never shows them mixed together—Lucy just happens to be drinking a Coke and a beer at the same time. —Steve]

• Initial reviews of Jaws (1975).

• Rebekah Del Rio died on Monday, June 23. R.I.P.

• Michael Madsen died on Thursday, July 3. R.I.P.

Critical notes:

• In the Financial Times, Danny Leigh on originality in summer blockbusters:

  As movie fans know, this summer also marks the 50th anniversary of Jaws. That, of course, was the movie that first turned the season into a box office feeding frenzy. It also made a god of the High Concept: the story idea it took just a nanosecond to sell. (Alien (1975)? Jaws in space—and so on.)

  But even the High Concept would end up swallowed by another predator. In fact, the film that changed the movies was less Jaws than Jaws 2. Released three summers later in 1978, it was deeply mediocre: unambitious, uninventive, dull. It also enjoyed what was then the most successful opening weekend in US box office history, before going on to gross $208 million, against a budget of $20 million.

• In

  The Bulwark
  ,
  Sonny Bunch
  on originality in animation:

  You make a movie, you put it in theaters, and you hope to recoup your advertising budget. The movie then, hopefully, becomes a hit on streaming, turning into something they watch over and over again (the Encanto (2021) path) which you can, in the future, potentially monetize with sequels, spinoffs, merch, and, in the case of Disney and Universal, theme-park experiences.

  Sure, you could forgo theatrical entirely—advertising ain’t cheap—but I still think putting a movie in theaters makes it “real” to people in a way that straight-to-streaming simply does not. And it makes it harder to justify dropping a sequel in theaters where it can earn Moana 2 (2024) or Minions: The Rise of Gru (2022) money. Yes, that takes time; sure, it takes the ability to absorb some losses on stuff like Elio (2025) or Turning Red (2022). But eventually, hopefully, the investment pays off and you land a unicorn.

Movies across the decades:

The Irishman (dir. Martin Scorsese, 2019), The Phoenician Scheme (dir. Wes Anderson, 2025)