Eddington - "Just Don't Make Me Think. Post It."

I like all of Ari Aster’s movies, but I have never wanted to watch any of them a second time, until Eddington. Aster’s work is unnerving and often unpleasant to watch (by design, I believe). He is capable of striking a tone in his work that I don’t want to revisit even though I can appreciate how effective it is. When I saw the first trailer for his Covid film, Eddington, I assumed it would be more of the same: fascinating and thought-provoking, but the recreation of the shitshow the world devolved into at the time (and still) would be miserable to sit through. But a funny thing happened as the credits rolled on Eddington: I wanted to immediately watch it again.

So what, right? A movie doesn’t have to be rewatchable to be good, but for someone like me, it’s a big deal. If a film creates a story or world that I want to visit again and again, then the filmmakers have done something right. 

It’s not that the world of Eddington is one I want to live in. For one thing, we all lived through that world and continue to do so. But it’s such an amusing (slight) exaggeration of that time that it makes me feel a little better about the world, even though that does not seem to be the goal of the film. It’s just nice to have this document that sums up our world better than I ever could. 

What first drew me into Eddington is the nonstop barrage of shit that comes at Joaquin Phoenix, a lot of which is his own doing. So many things are going on, like a mask mandate, and a tumultuous history with the mayor (Pedro Pascal), and a QAnon-type cult leader (Austin Butler) recruiting his wife (Emma Stone), and the Black Lives Matter movement, and the constant conflict with the Native American police, and the data center a shadowy corporation wants to build, and fucking social media, and fuck! Before anyone can even get all the details of the newest issue, another one pops up. It’s whac-a-mole, but with human suffering and mental illness. 

Phoenix’s character and performance holds it all together, even though he can’t hold anything together. He never really explodes when you think he might, and he has this oddly laid back line delivery that always feels accurately defeated. He can’t seem to finish his thoughts and sentences without drifting into other thoughts and sentences. He is very much the personification of doomscrolling. It’s a snippet about one issue, then it’s off to the next before you can even form a thought about the previous one. Most of the other characters are the opposite, but no less troubled. They are laser-focused on one issue and blind to all others. 

This has been happening for a long time, but the pandemic seemed to fasttrack our psychological demise as a species. Aster’s ability to recreate this isn’t all that impressive. It’s not that hard to throw a bunch of crazy shit at a character, especially when a lot of it really happened. What makes Eddington special is that it’s a fun watch. 

Though I am guilty of doomscrolling and feeling overwhelmed by the world at large like anyone else, I feel like I’ve done a decent job of being mindful of it from time to time and stepping away from it. Watching movies and writing meandering articles about them helps. And being a parent and no longer dealing with any kind of shutdown or anything has kept me distracted enough to think the world has reached some form of normal, or at least I’ve been conditioned enough to find it normal. 

So when I see this version of 2020 boiled down into one fucked-up small town that can also serve as a reminder of the country’s fucked up history with the native population, it’s oddly funny and comforting. Yeah, shit’s bad, but it’s not Eddington bad. And like Ed Tom tells Wendell in No Country for Old Men about laughing at a gruesome story: “That’s all right. I laugh myself sometimes. Ain’t a whole lot else you can do.”

Finding the humor in Eddington is the key to enjoying it. There is no real message to the film; at least, I didn’t come away with a message aside from: we’re fucked. If you go into this wanting to find your opinions on all the polarizing issues of the time vindicated, then you’ll end up more annoyed than entertained. Everyone comes across as a bit crazy here, and yes, just calling everyone crazy is a false equivalency. But if you’re looking honestly at the world in a condensed form like a movie, then people, even if they are mostly right, are going to look crazy. 

This movie is not a condemnation of mask mandates or BLM protests or QAnon conspiracy theories, but it’s not an endorsement of them, either. Any major social issue is going to be two-sided, and each side will have people who take things too far. Of course, there are degrees to this. A person wearing a mask for a Zoom meeting is taking things too far, but it’s not hurting anyone; but a person who decides to take a rifle to a protest in the hopes of possibly legally shooting someone sure as fuck is. 

Eddington isn’t about which side is worse or “right” or anything like that. We have our algorithms to feed us content to tell us we’re right. This is a movie that looks at that boiling point in our history and says, “Fuck it, let’s at least have a little fun with this.” Let’s have some silly, stupid people yell at each other and make a mess of their world, and let’s finish it all off with a big action set piece.

At one point, Phoenix tells an underling, “Just don’t make me think. Post it.” It’s a great line that sums up social media, and the internet in general, but it also encapsulated my viewing experience. Whether it’s trying to or not, Eddington didn’t make me think about any of the specific issues it portrays. It just gave me the world at large, and at that distance, it became entertaining instead of disheartening. I never would have pegged Aster as the filmmaker to accomplish that, but he did, and I plan on watching Eddington a third time soon.  

Random Thoughts

I feel like this whole article consisted of my random thoughts, but I’ll add a few strays here, I guess.

“My job is to sit down and listen, which is what I plan to do after making this speech, which I have no right to make!” As a white dude liberal, this one hit home, but I still find it to be the funniest line in the movie. 

Deirdre O’Connell never-ending drone of conspiracy theories makes her a human doomscroll.

Is it lame to use the term “doomscroll”? I’ve only recently used it a few times, and if I’m using a relatively new word, then it probably means it’s lame.

The spelling errors on the campaign materials was a nice touch.

Always nice to Clifton Collins, Jr., even if he is a Covid monster in this.

This makes for a good double feature with Lone Star. I’ve been meaning to watch it for years, and then I stumbled across it on Tubi literally a couple days after watching this. I’m surprised it’s not brought up more as an inspiration or at least a very similar film.

I take that back: after Googling “Eddington Lone Star” a few articles popped connecting the two. Anyway, if you liked this movie at all, you should check out Lone Star.

"Once Upon a Time...Inherent Vice."

*As always, I write these articles under the assumption that you’ve seen the film, so...SPOILERS. (This also applies to Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood.)

I’m still sticking with my current monthly plan of Van Damme, Oedekerk, and western, but getting a chance to see Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood inspired me a bit. That’s why I went ahead and wrote a review of that, but it also made me want to revisit Inherent Vice. Basically, I wanted to rewatch Once Upon, but that wasn’t a possibility for me, so I went with the film it most reminded me of with Inherent Vice. 

Once Upon a Time...Inherent Vice

There are some obvious connections between these two films (the setting, the Manson references, the comedic tone, etc.), but the main connection I found was both films’ theme dealing with the end of an era. It’s as if Inherent Vice’s world is what Tarantino wanted to prevent by changing history at the end of his fairy tale. That’s probably why Once is a much lighter, funnier film than Inherent Vice. 

In Inherent Vice, the overall point (as far as I’m concerned, anyway) was the death of the carefree ‘60s and the birth of the paranoid ‘70s. This is evidenced by the general tone, especially the music, of the film, but it’s pretty obvious with the plot, when you can follow it, that is. You see the co-opting of the hippie movement (Bigfoot playing a hippie in a commercial, Owen Wilson being planted within the community by a government agency), and the general fear of hippies and drug users because of Charles Manson (when the cop pulls over Doc with Dr. Blatnoyd, Japonica, and Denis he lists all the things they’re on the lookout for and Denis even namedrops Manson). You get the sense that within Doc’s own life things were simpler when he was with Shasta, but now things have changed and it seems like everything is controlled by sinister forces. So even when they seem to end up together at the end, Doc is still looking in the mirror behind him, as if someone might be following him. Things will never be the same. 

This is what Tarantino laments in Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood. He’s more specifically concerned with Hollywood (hence, the title) than the general culture, but it’s still about how the Manson murders helped put an end to a carefree era. You get the sense of foreboding with Once Upon anytime you see the Manson women (hitchhiking, dumpster diving, etc.), and it comes to the forefront when Cliff ends up at the ranch, in an amazingly tense, creepy sequence. Overall, things are kept fairly light because Tarantino’s film is a fairy tale, not only for the main characters of Rick and Cliff, but for all of Hollywood, as well. Tarantino’s film posits that stopping Manson’s followers could let that world stay the same. You could argue that stopping Manson’s followers would not have stopped the change in our culture, but it is a fairy tale, so in that world maybe it could have. 

This is why I think Inherent Vice and Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood make a great double feature. And it doesn’t matter what order you watch them in. If you go with Vice first, you see a more historically accurate change in the culture, and if you follow that with Once Upon, you get to what things were like before and how it could have been avoided. I think it works better with Hollywood first, though. In that order, you get to see this world and its alternate history, and Inherent Vice becomes this darker sequel about what would have happened if things went differently at the end of Hollywood. Either way, both films create a world I wouldn’t mind spending an afternoon in.

It’s weird feeling nostalgic for an era I never experienced.

Feeling nostalgic for the world of either film is strange since I wasn’t alive during this time. It’s nothing new to want to live in a fictional world that I don’t personally identify with (like, say, wanting to live in the world of Star Wars even if I would have probably just been a moisture farmer or nerf herder…), but to feel a bit of nostalgia for a real time period I didn’t experience is a strange feeling because it’s a world I almost experienced. 

I was born in 1984, so most of my childhood memories are late ‘80s/early ‘90s. To me, those were carefree times, but I’m sure they weren’t to adults who had grown up in the ‘50s and 60’s. So I think this feeling that the world changed because of one or more events is something that happens to every generation. For me, it’s 9/11. But that also happened during my senior year of high school, a common time for people to start thinking more about the world instead of their own silly lives. 

My generation is unique, however, in that we will be the last people to remember a time of landline phones, no internet (at least no internet in its current ubiquitous form[fun fact: Pynchon included a subplot about the beginnings of the internet in the book, so even that was covered to a degree]), no DVR, etc. I still remember a time when driving around was a thing, and people had to track each other down to hang out and make plans. We had to look things up the hard way, and the world could be more interesting and mysterious due to our lack of information. Now, with information both real and fake being presented at a nonstop rate, it’s easy to look back to my childhood, or an era like the ‘60s, and think, “Man, I wish things were like that again.” This is all ignoring the common issues with nostalgia, by the way, like the fact that no time period is ever as great or simple as you remember it, and odds are it was a terrible time period for entire groups of people different than yourself. But at face value, that’s where my nostalgia for an era I never experienced comes from.

That written, it’s not so crazy to feel like there was a time in my life that was similar to Inherent Vice and Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood. With Vice, the main thing that comes across to me is the generally hanging out feeling I get as Doc seems to randomly wander through the story. I feel like high school was like that a bit: just living in the moment, not worrying too much about the future. As for Hollywood, I feel like the movies I grew up watching aren’t really made anymore, so Hollywood has changed for me. Once again, I think this happens to every generation, and it has a lot more to do with getting older than it does with cults and terrorists. But who wouldn’t want to live in a fairy tale where these terrible things never happened?

Why do I own this?

It’s a Paul Thomas Anderson movie.

Random Thoughts

“Someone might be watching.” The foreboding beginning is brought full circle in the final moments of the film as Doc keeps checking his mirror as if he’s checking for a tail. The era of paranoia had begun.

Brolin in that commercial at the beginning is the most subtly threatening hippie of all time.

“So while suspect, that’s you, was having alleged midday nap so necessary to the hippie lifestyle…”

Doc watching Bigfoot eat that chocolate-covered banana…

Now that I’ve seen Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood, I get the joke Doc makes to the FBI guys about “missing” an episode.

“What’s a Puck Beaverton?” Reminds me of one of my favorite lines from Game of Thrones: “What the fuck’s a Lommy?”

“[F]rom a bass player turned record company executive, which trend watchers took as further evidence of the end of Hollywood, if not the world as they know it.” I think of this and Once Upon as films very much about the end of Hollywood and the world as people knew it back then.

“‘Gee,’ he thought, ‘I don’t know.’”

I kind of disliked/didn’t pay much attention to Sortilege’s narration the first couple times I watched this. Watching it now, I feel like her narration, while nonsensical at times (the astrology stuff, but maybe that’s just me), actually sums up a lot of the film’s themes.

“Are you sayin’ that the U.S. is somebody’s mom?”

The Last Supper image with the pizza is one of my favorites. It beautifully visualizes Owen Wilson as Christ-like (mainly in that he has returned from the “dead”), and I remember reading about it in the book and PTA captured it perfectly.

I never give this film enough credit for being a love story. That scene with Doc and Shasta looking for dope after calling the number from the Ouija Board is a great moment that effectively captures what it’s like to be in a great relationship during a carefree time. It is the perfect subplot (in a film that seems to be nothing but subplots) for the theme of innocence lost as paranoia sets in. In the film, that theme applies to the changing culture in America at the time, but it can also apply to Doc and Shasta’s relationship in the end. They seem to be slightly back together, but the innocent, carefree love of before is gone. Doc is driving forward, as is their relationship, but who knows where it’s headed now? And when did he start worrying about where things were headed? Perhaps that’s the real loss of the hippie culture of the ‘60s. People stopped living in the moment are started living in fear of the future. But what do I know? I was born in 1984.

“You know it?”

“Shakes a tambourine.”

I have to remember to start using that instead of “rings a bell.”

This is the first time I noticed that Japonica’s dad was with the Voorhees-Krueger law office. Of all the unexpected elements of this film, a reference to Jason and Freddy is pretty high on the list.

“God help us all. Dentists on trampolines.”

“Did I hit you?”

I guess I just have a soft spot for movies that are about an end of an era without being too obvious about it.

“So you guys been working for the Golden Fang long?”

In the end, Shasta references it being like the Ouija day, and it being “Just us.” But Doc looks suspicious of this now. 

“Under the paving-stones, the beach!” I forgot this text was at the end of the credits. I think it fits in with my general thoughts about the theme of the film, in that the corruption, drugs, and paranoia in general became the paving stones while enjoying a simpler life was the beach.

"The Sisters Brothers" and "Deadwood" - Children in the Wild West

*As always, I write these articles as if you’ve seen the movie, so...SPOILERS.

I’ve slowly but surely developed a monthly plan for this site. I begin each month with a Jean-Claude Van Damme movie, and this past month I wrote about a random comedy I own and decided to make that a monthly entry. Then, after thoroughly enjoying Powers Boothe’s performance in Sudden Death, I decided to look back at some westerns I own. (So for the next few months, expect at least these three types [Van Damme, comedy, and western], with other films peppered in here and there.) It would make the most sense to start with Tombstone, which featured a very fun Boothe performance. But it reminded me more to rewatch Deadwood since the movie is coming out this weekend. I didn’t want to write about an entire TV series (perhaps I will one day cover the entire series of Deadwood), so instead I watched The Sisters Brothers, a movie I recently added to my collection. As you’ll read, this choice makes more sense than you might think in regards to Deadwood.

The Sisters Brothers and Deadwood: Children in the Wild West

When I first watched The Sisters Brothers, I was a little disappointed. I was expecting something a little more traditional, but instead I got a very offbeat, surprisingly funny, modern western. Once I realized what the film was, I embraced, and it made my top ten list last year. I was mostly taken with the relationships in the film, mainly between the titular brothers but also between Riz Ahmed and Jake Gyllenhaal’s characters. These were grown men engaged in typically serious adult things (murder, greed, gold mining, etc.), but they treated each other like children, often getting into petty spats and talking of their feelings being hurt.

I found it funny and touching, which is why I liked it so much. Funny and touching is a difficult combo to pull off. I started rewatching Deadwood recently because of the movie, and I remembered what I loved so much about that show. While it also dealt with similar adult things, many of its characters were very childlike. Most of them simply want to make friends. A. W. Merrick getting giddy when he is able to walk and talk with Bullock, Star, and Utter; Calamity Jane and Joanie Stubbs (and Mose) finding friendship. Blazanov finding joy in acceptance in the camp. There are also multiple instances of characters getting their feelings hurt, and letting people know about it. The obvious example is E. B., who spends much of the series angry at being left out. But there’s also Dan, presented as one of the toughest characters, who nearly breaks down in tears when rebuked by Swearengen. And then there’s the fascination the characters have with children in general. Tom Nuttall (tragically) showing William Bullock his new bike. Mose and Jane’s interest in the school children. There’s certainly a metaphor there about how young our country was, especially in that time and place. But I think David Milch was simply using the western as a backdrop to show that no matter how serious our business gets, we are all still children in many ways.

The Sisters Brothers wholly embraces this. Charlie and Eli are killers, but they are also children. The brother relationship is an easy set up for this: teasing, fighting, etc. But it goes beyond that. Charlie basically has temper tantrums and is prone to hitting someone if he gets upset. Eli is more gentle, forming a bond with his horse, and inquisitive, as he is always amazed at new technology such as the toothbrush. With Hermann and Morris, it’s more the Deadwood route, as they embrace friendship over greed, although greed is steal a big part of their plan.

So what is it that draws me to such stories? I suppose, especially now that I have children, I am fascinated with how long a person can hold onto the simple feelings of childhood. I myself have taken to embracing my childhood love of dorky things rather than feeling too old for them. I find it amusing when an adult embraces their inner child, and I always find it touching when someone can admit they are lonely or their feelings are hurt and want to make things better. So a big moment that won me over in this film was the dinner fight between Eli and Charlie, and Eli’s confrontation of Charlie the next day. He was upset because Charlie hit him in public. The scene is emotionally effective, and it ends very humorously when the tension is resolved by Charlie letting Eli hit him for payback. That is why I love this movie so much. It makes me feel something and think about humanity, then it turns things around and makes me laugh.

Much like Deadwood, I think one of the messages of The Sisters Brothers is that despite out deadly serious actions, we’re all just kids playing and being adults. Just look at the ending. The brothers return home to be taken care of by their mother, and the final shot is a visual metaphor for the perpetual children theme: a grown man lying in his childhood bed, his feet now hanging over the end. It’s a very poignant ending, and it makes this western stand apart in my collection.

This is a weird western, but most are these days.

Once I accepted this as a modern, weird western, I enjoyed it very much. I love traditional westerns, but I’m also a big fan of films like this, which take expectations or tropes and shake things up.

The main aspect I like about The Sisters Brothers is how it shows elements of daily life not always shown in westerns. (Deadwood was pretty good about this, as well.) Some things I noticed included showing them cut their own hair, Eli’s aforementioned discovery of a toothbrush and his struggle to figure out how to use it, Charlie actually being hungover from drinking whiskey nonstop, how long it takes to travel from place to place, the dangers of sleeping outside (no scene made me cringe as much as when that spider crawled in Eli’s mouth), experiencing plumbing for the first time, and actually dealing with horses.

The Sisters Brothers isn’t the first movie to acknowledge these things, but there does seem to be a focus on them. Too often, westerns present this fantasy world, so I like it when one takes the time to show the mundane aspects of life at the time.

On top of that, this movie went in a direction I was not anticipating at all when the gold-finding chemical was introduced. The fact that it worked was one off part, but when Charlie dumped it all in at once and nearly killed everyone, the film took quite the turn. That is, in essence, what impresses me the most with films these days: the ability to surprise. More than that, the ability to surprise me without cheating. The Sisters Brothers is able to exist as a traditional western while also naturally going in a new direction with each scene. This is why I hold it in the same regard as Deadwood.

Why do I own this?

I consider this a companion piece to Deadwood, so in the future when I inevitably Deadwood again and again, I will also revisit this movie, so I should own it.

Random thoughts

Okay, the amount of production companies listed at the beginning is insane. Thankfully it's just on a single screen. If they each got their own title sequence the movie would be five minutes longer.

This movie made me wonder: would I instinctively know how to brush my teeth, or would I try it as John C. Reilly does?

I love how Phoenix keeps talking shit about the pretentious (and Western cliche) language of the letters they read.

"We can kill anyone we want here!"

I like how Phoenix announces that they are the Sisters Brothers when they go from place to place to see if anyone has heard of them. It plays on the Western trope of all these gunslingers being famous and known in each town they go to when the reality was most likely that a lot of hired guns and whatnot were never known.

I love the bluntness of Phoenix throughout the movie.

John C. Reilly and Gyllenhaal are toothbrushing buddies!

Jake Gyllenhaal is doing this faux fancy accent, and it works since Charlie constantly complains about how fake and pretentious he is.

This movie is darkly comedic to me because every time it seems like things are going to calmly, some violence ensues, usually instigated by Charlie. His dumping of the chemical that eventually kills Ahmed and Gyllenhaal is the most tragic example. That moment, among many others, shows how unpredictable this movie is.

Richard Brake is given about as much to do as Rutger Hauer.

"Have you noticed how long it's been since anyone's tried to kill us?"

And the most unpredictable showdown with the bad guy: stopping by his funeral to punch his dead body to make sure he's dead.

John C. Reilly punching the Commodore's dead  body is what really put me over the top with this movie. It just caught me off guard and made me laugh. The whole movie is so random, and that's why I love it.

That has to be the ancestor of Carol Kane's character from Kimmy Schmidt.

"With the participation of Rutger Hauer" That is the most accurate credit I've ever seen.

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