Summer 2024 – Week 2 in Review

[Alderis]

Summer 2024 – Week 2 in Review

Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. This week I am sorry to announce that I watched some deeply obnoxious movies, which I’m sure sounds like a good time to all you vultures out there. I honestly do not pick out films intending to hate-watch them; I am always looking to be fulfilled, enlightened, or at least just entertained, while watching a bad movie to me just feels like being stuck in traffic for two hours, waiting for the journey to end so I can get on to something genuinely enriching. Nonetheless, a wide enough trawling of features will inevitably result in some stinkers, and this week my fearless embrace of any and all horror films resulted in some painful misses. Let’s break both them and one fantastic consolation prize down as we storm through the latest Week in Review!

Our first feature this week was Old People, a film that has the courage to ask “aren’t old people weird and creepy?” Melika Foroutan stars as Ella, a woman returning home for her sister’s wedding, only to discover that her estranged father has been reduced to staring blankly out the windows at an overcrowded retirement home. The old folks have had just about enough of this ungrateful treatment, and so that night they rise up like geriatric zombies, terrorizing the populace with their oldness and fury.

Seeing the trailer for a film like this prompts an immediate, agonizing question, an irrepressible wondering at how the feature in question will somehow rise above pure exploitation theater. This instinct is a liar, and you should not heed its curiosity, for the answer is almost invariably “it doesn’t.” So it goes for Old People, which makes laughable gestures towards questions of elder care and an aging society, but is clearly, solely interested in zooming and panning around actors in corpse paint acting like quasi-living zombies. With no creative kills to liven its proceedings, and no interest in genuinely exploring the contours of insufficient elder care’s tragic consequences, Old People mostly just feels hateful, invasive, and dull. An easy skip.

We followed that with another flavor of exploitation theater, checking out the recent Bodies Bodies Bodies. Amandla Stenburg and Maria Bakalova lead a cast of wealthy Gen-Z twenty-somethings who gather at their friend David (Pete Davidson)’s house for a hurricane party. After consuming a wide array of drugs and entertaining themselves with party games, a mysterious death and subsequent power outage send the group into a panic, accusations flying freely as the crew attempt to pin down the killer.

Slashers are often populated with casts of immediately dislikable characters, teens or twenty-somethings who are defined as so vapid and self-involved that it feels at least understandable, if not genuinely deserved when the killer comes calling. Bodies Bodies Bodies feels like an exercise in that concept taken to its furthest possible extreme, starring the most stupid, selfish, and just-plain-obnoxious group of characters I believe I’ve ever come across. These characters are the worst, each one a more noxious tar pit than the last, with only Rachel Sennott’s Alice rising above nails-on-chalkboard frustration into gleeful self-parody (“doing a podcast is a lot of work, you know!”).

With middling direction and no real point about class or identity to be made, Bodies Bodies Bodies proceeds like the most unpleasant party you’ve ever been forced to attend, as people who’ve never experienced a real problem or conjured a genuine thought unconvincingly accuse each other of murder. And given the film is structured as a murder mystery rather than a traditional slasher, we are robbed of even the satisfaction of seeing the cast meet their extremely timely fates; most of them just get themselves killed, which I suppose falls perfectly in line with their unwillingness to do one nice thing for anyone. I want the two hours of my life I spent with these people back.

We then checked out One More Shot, the sequel to Scott Adkins’ high-concept action thriller, once again taking the idea of a single unbroken camera shot to a ludicrous extreme. Honestly, everything I said about the previous film also works for this one; Adkins is a ferocious physical presence and reasonable dramatic performer, and the film’s inherently gamified premise lends itself to a variety of rolling shootouts and reasonably choreographed physical duels. With a whole airport to fight through, Adkins is given ample chances to demonstrate he is one of the last great action leads, resulting in an energetic yet unsurprisingly one-note roller coaster of a viewing.

My hunger for some Good Fucking Food was at last sated by The Menu, a recent black comedy starring Anya Taylor-Joy as Margot, a young woman who is invited to an exclusive high-class dining experience. Alongside fellow luminaries including young business moguls, film stars, and food critics, Margot is treated to an exclusively tailored meal designed by master chef Julian Slowik (Ralph Fiennes). However, Slowik’s mixture of abstract cuisine and odd mannerisms soon begin to trouble the stomachs of his distinguished guests, as the evening’s itinerary proves to include more than just some pretentious dining.

Oh my god, I had so much fun with this one. What a delightful, whimsical, and charmingly angry feature! The Menu falls more or less in line with our recent “eat the rich” wave characterized by films like Knives Out, Parasite, and Ready or Not, but its points are less pointed and embellishments more embellished than any of those features. This feature is here to provide you a full five courses of entertainment, all carefully curated by the enchanting and more than a little crazy Slowik.

Margot’s dining experience evolves from cloying twists on prestige dining like “bread without the bread” (a selection of dipping sauces with nothing to dip them in) to more personal and ultimately violent selections, gleefully fulfilling the expectations stoked by its title and contemptible supporting characters. But my lord, how much fun they have along the journey! The Menu is a testament to the fact that execution is everything, with Taylor-Joy and Fiennes both putting in marvelous performances from opposite ends of the dinner table. Fiennes in particular seems like he’s having the time of his life, relishing his role as an allegedly righteous yet clearly unhinged and deeply petty arbiter of the true nature of cooking. With the feature’s moral dimension taken as a given, The Menu is free to engage in all manner of ludicrous diversions, from “most dangerous game”-themed yard excursions to Fiennes’ theatrical, self-involved apology for preying on a young associate.

The film is absolutely overflowing with fun little flourishes, making the most of its strong supporting cast, and ensuring each new dish is an event worth waiting for. It favors spectacle over thematic specificity, and is far better for it – rather than offering a moral treatise that frames Fiennes as impartial judge and jury, it readily agrees that he is a petty tyrant of a different kind, yet still driven by a passion and humility that fundamentally separates him from his quarry. Margot’s growing understanding of his nature gives the film a sturdy emotional backbone to match its deviant surface delights, and their ultimate convergence on what it means to cook versus what it means to enjoy a meal is as dramatically invigorating as it is structurally graceful. Like the great meals Slowik strives for, every moment of The Menu is rewarding in its own right, and also a necessary contribution to a much greater whole. A film well worth savoring.

Source: Summer 2024 – Week 2 in Review