REVIEW: The Fall Guy

Someone show me another business as enthusiastic for its own self-deprecation as Hollywood.

From affectionate self-parodies like Singin' in the Rain to darker reflections of the movie business like Sunset Boulevard, Hollywood has kind of built its empire on ridicule of itself. And why wouldn't it? Who wouldn't want to pay admission to feel like they're in on the secret: that movie magic is just smoke and mirrors? That silver screen titans actually have the most fragile egos?

But these are not revelations, and I don't think they are intended to be. Hollywood doesn't really care about displaying its own pettiness and internal rot because it knows that all just makes for good entertainment. At some point, this all stops feeling like a joke that we, the audience, are in on. At some point, it all stops feeling less like a confession and more like gloating. At what point, then, does the joke turn on us, the enablers of this cesspool whose claim to ignorance dwindles with every ticket sold?

Anyways ... if I start my review of this Friday night action-comedy with a raincloud over my keyboard, it is because this film's subject matter is admittedly playing with some live ammunition. Ryan Gosling grumbling about how all you have to do to act like a star is to pretend "my actions have no consequences" is played like a joke, but it doesn't feel at all like a joke to an audience that is seeing so many movie stars and producers break free of the #MeToo cage that we were so sure was finally going to hold abusers to accountability. It's just twisting a knife.

But I also realize that it is not all on one movie to snuff out all of Hollywood's snake holes. Moreover, I want to give the movie its due credit as a vehicle for people who maintain some reverence for film as a source of communal renewal, both for the people making it and the people receiving it.

This film peels back the curtain of film business by following a recovering stunt man, Colt Seavers (Ryan Gosling), whose first job back sees him setting himself on fire in his ex-girlfriend's (Emily Blunt) directorial debut. Colt's used to taking the fall for the A-lister, and even for his ex, but his order gets a lot taller when the film's star disappears and he is the only one who can keep this project from falling apart. But as Colt finds out, he's not the only one who'll go any lengths to see that this film doesn't tank.

Without ruining the surprise, what follows is an elaborate exposé on the power economy of Hollywood padded by even more elaborate action displays which themselves are padded by a lot of flirtation between Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt. None of the film's revelations will come as a surprise to anyone who cares enough about the conversation to pay attention to it, but that's beside the point. And it's not like the politics of the film are entirely out of synch with the business' present needs. It is not lost on me that the story rests on a first-time woman director trying to plant her feet in this field, and I can see how that's a useful picture.

As a vessel of entertainment, this film really works. The plot elements congeal. The onscreen stars are all shining (special shoutout to Hannah Waddingham who sparkles even behind her character's seedy smirk). The spectacle is tethered to sound story elements. This feels like a crew of people behind and in front of the screen who love what they do tracing out the manpower required to get this engine running.

At the end of the day, it is that deference to entertainment that keeps this film shackled. This could have pushed some boundaries. Said the quiet part a little louder, that far from having bad-faith players forced on the system, Hollywood is actually merrily complicit in roping in these folks even after their transgressions have been known. Some will say that's not the business of blockbusters, and who knows? Maybe they're right. But I also think it's fair of us as audiences to ask who it is that's supplying that line of thinking in the first place.

--The Professor

Comments

"What Are Happy Endings For Anyway?" (II) - The Docks of New York

Yes, fellas. Your calendar is correct. We are, in fact, 10 years out from La La Land . My main point of interest in Damien Chazelle’s groundbreaking 2016 musical has historically been its role in helping set off the sort of stealth renaissance of musicals we’ve been experiencing the last ten years where we all try to see how big we can make the genre before anyone notices. Chazelle explained at the time , “Now more than ever we need hope and romance on the screen, and I think there’s something about musicals that just get at something that only movies can do. That idea of movies as a dreamland, movies as the language of our dreams and movies as a way of expressing a world in which you break into song, that emotions can violate the rules of reality.” The hook for this film, though, is very much the film’s ultimate rejection of the traditional happy ending for which musicals are so well known. That is the reason why...

REVIEW: Forgotten Island

It's fun to consider whether or not you chose your friends or whether they chose you, particularly when it seems you and your friends have nothing in common. That's certainly true of Raissa and Jo, the protagonists of Dreamworks' newest film, but they are nonetheless determined to keep hold of one another, and have been since one fateful meeting outside the principal's office when they were kids--even as Raissa's looming departure for college across the seas threatens to tear them apart. The night before Raissa leaves, forces beyond their control draw Jo and Raissa to Nakali, the Forgotten Island from the stories Jo's grandmother told them as children. It's a dream come true. But this island's magic is mysterious. Jo and Raissa wake up on the beach and realize they have approximately 12 hours unaccounted for. Moreover, they had a ticket home, but its location is buried somewhere in that time gap, in memories lost. Trying ...

How Disney Liberated the Musical Genre

Anytime I’m getting ready for a new musical film, I generally try to put off listening to the soundtrack until after I’ve seen the movie. It’s just my way of ensuring that I experience the narrative in its full context upon its important premiere viewing. Most of the time I’m good about sticking to this, but nowhere is this feat harder than with the arrival of each new Disney musical. I tried really hard with Encanto , but with Lin-Manuel Miranda writing for Disney, what can I say (except "You're Welcome"...) So, why am I talking about Disney musicals? W hen I premiered my Jungle Book essay earlier this year, I decided that going forward I was ready to expand how I talked about Disney. Owing to Disney fans constantly having to justify their fandom, a lot of Disney discourse tends to be purely defensive. Disney fans only ever get to use their platform to try convincing the cool kids that--for the last time!--it's okay for adults without kids to go to...

We're Back! a Dinosaur's Story - Getting Lost in the "Last Frontier of Imagination"

Last month, Variety ran a piece observing, “Hollywood Can’t Survive Without Animation. So Why Won’t the Industry Respect It?” by Clayton Davis, who reported , “In the nearly five decades that domestic grosses have been tracked, an animated film has finished the year as the No. 1 release just seven times, beginning with Disney’s 'Aladdin' in 1992. Now the medium is having an unprecedented run, with 'Inside Out 2' and 'Zootopia 2' topping the last two calendar years (a first for animated movies to lead the box office for two consecutive years) and the latter becoming the highest-grossing animated film ever domestically. 'The Super Mario Galaxy Movie' is leading 2026 so far and is the only film to cross $1 billion. Setting aside the 2020 and 2021 pandemic seasons, which emptied theaters of family films, animated features have made up about 20% of the year’s 10 top-grossing releases over the past decade. And yet, the artists who make these movies have rarely...

REVIEW: Disenchanted

Once Upon a Time, Disney's Enchanted reminded us that deep down inside, even the most cynical of us was pining for a fairy-tale. In those days, a musical rom-com featuring hand-drawn animation and overtly referencing films of the Disney animated catalog actually felt novel, even daring. But today is a different climate. Disney fairy-tales are unambiguously a popular presence in modern pop culture. They are regularly referenced, discussed, and abused both by their parent company and the public at large. Any sequel to such a film wouldn't have the same opportunity to feel revelatory or groundbreaking. But this proves to be an inadequate defense for this movie's shortcomings. Turns out, you can sing about fairy-tales for two hours without earnestly exploring what makes them so special to begin with. I say shortcomings deliberately because there's not a lot that's actively wrong with this movie. Almost everything about this movie could have worked if it had been pr...

REVIEW: Soul

Pixar's latest film, Soul , dropped on Disney+ Christmas day, another regrettable casualty of the virus. This time around, we follow a hopeful musician bursting with enthusiasm. Music is an oddly appropriate metaphor for the film: both certainly touch the outer rim of mankind's emotional faculty, but good luck summarizing the experience to your friends. Joe Gardner is a music teacher at a public school whose enthusiasm for music is spilling out of the walls of his classroom. Opportunity strikes Joe the same day that misfortune does, and a fatal accident lands him in a celestial plane of existence known as "The Great Before," where souls are developed and finessed before being sent to earth to experience human existence. Joe is saddled with mentoring 22, a soul sapling who has settled in The Great Before for several hundred years and has no intention of ever giving mortality a chance. But in 22, Joe sees a chance to return back to earth and fulfill his purpose if he ca...

REVIEW: COYOTE VS. ACME

The secret weapon of The Looney Tunes has always been their natural eloquence with meta-textuality. Seriously. Go rewatch "Duck Amuck." It's high art. That trick isn't really new here in a landscape where "self-awareness" is just generally baked into the fabric of most millennial media. But Coyote vs Acme nonetheless feels cut from a very different cloth. I don't even know if that's from anything extra this film does so much as what it doesn't do. This movie never feels like it's trying to prove how much smarter it is than the audience. It doesn't feel smug or self-promoting. Like, it takes a different kind of self-awareness to look at how many times a certain Wile E. Coyote has tried to get his hands around a certain speeding bird and ask if maybe the poor guy, who has literally tried everything under the sun, has just had the odds stacked against him. It takes a certain kind of movie to decide that this dude just needs so...

An Earnest Defense of Passengers

I've heard a lot of back and forth over what the purpose of film is and what we should ask from it. Film as a social amenity kind of has a dual purpose. It's supposed to give the population common ground and find things that people of varying backgrounds and beliefs can unify around. On the other hand, film also creates this detached simulated reality through which we can explore complex and even testing ideas about the contradictions in human existence. In theory, a film can fulfill both functions, but movies exist in a turbulent landscape. It's very rare for a film to try to walk both lanes, and it's even rarer for a film to be embraced upon entry for attempting to do so. Let me explain by describing the premise of one of my favorite movies, Morten Tyldum's 2016 film, Passengers . A key piece of this film ’s plot revolves around the main character, Jim Preston, a passenger onboard a spaceship, who premat...

REVIEW: Jungle Cruise

Disney has relied on branding for their box-office since Walt himself started using fairy-tales as a launching pad. Flash forward 80 years, and the branding wars have escalated not just within the Disney company, but the industry all around. Disney's Jungle Cruise walks the line between original and remix, and not just because it's adapted from a theme-park ride. This film, a pastiche of adventure flicks over the last 60 years, absorbs the best from its sources of inspiration but falls just short of congealing them into something truly groundbreaking. Tales a mythical tree of life have beckoned explorers since it bloomed into legend hundreds of years ago. This catches the interest of explorer Lily Houghton who makes it her mission to find the tree, first to distribute its gifts to the world and second to keep it from the hands of less benevolent seekers. Her success hinges on joining forces with the gruff Frank Wolff. He'll ferry Lily and her brother, McGregor, across th...

Hating Disney Princesses Has Never Been Feminist pt. 1

Because the consumption of art, even in a capitalist society, is such a personal experience, it can be difficult to quantify exactly how an individual interprets and internalizes the films they are participating in. We filter our artistic interpretations through our own personal biases and viewpoints, and this can sometimes lead to a person or groups assigning a reading to a work that the author did not design and may not even accurately reflect the nature of the work they are interacting with (e.g. the alt-right seeing Mel Brooks’ The Producers as somehow affirming their disregard for political correctness when the film is very much lampooning bigotry and Nazis specifically). We often learn as much or more about a culture by the way they react to a piece of media as we do from the media itself. Anyways, you know where this is going. Let’s talk about Disney Princesses. Pinning down exactly when Disney Princesses entered the picture is a hard thi...

Films and Feelings

Search This Blog