What I'm Watching: 3 Body Problem, Drive-Away Dolls, Shallow Grave on 35mm, and More

Margaret Qualley, Geraldine Viswanathan, Drive-Away Dolls, Focus Features

Here’s a quick rundown on everything I watched and read about last week:

The shows:

• 3 Body Problem, Netflix’s brainy adaptation of Liu Cixin’s even brainier novel series, is ambitious, compelling, dense, and sometimes baffling. I can’t speak to the series as an adaptation (I haven’t finished Cixin’s book), but the big budget Netflix release – also the first series co-created by Game of Thrones head honchos David Benioff and D.B. Weiss since that show signed off – has potential. Weird, complicated potential, but still. Come for a darkly comedic noir performance from Benedict Wong, stay for a reality-bending story about China’s cultural revolution, scientists playing video games, and logic puzzles of cosmic proportions.

The movies:

• I absolutely understand why some people hated – or entirely avoided – Soft & Quiet, Beth de Araújo’s nightmarish debut feature about a women’s white supremacist group gone wild, but personally, I found it to be one of the most impressively disturbing feats of filmmaking this side of Michael Haneke’s Funny Games. A queasy, shocking real-time descent into violence that’s at once sharply pointed and upsettingly heightened, Soft & Quiet is an unforgettable viewing experience – which is good, since I don’t think I can ever sit through it again. Note: whatever you do, do not go into this one cold. The MPA rating details are your best ally here.
• Film buffs should be ashamed of sleeping on the latest feature from one half of the Coen brothers, Drive Away Dolls. The new movie that Coen co-wrote with his wife, editor Tricia Cooke, is an offbeat riot in the tradition of classics like Raising Arizona and The Big Lebowski. It’s not perfect – it takes a while for the sweet-but-bawdy road trip comedy’s sense of humor to come together – but it’s still supremely entertaining. Don’t let review bombers (who have trashed the film with some of the most unintentionally funny responses I’ve ever seen) convince you this lesbian-centric story is part of some new agenda: Cooke and Coen reportedly started writing the unabashedly queer, gloriously ‘90s script over two decades ago.
• Shallow Grave might be last on the list this week, but all three of these films are winners and Danny Boyle’s feature debut looked especially great on 35mm at the Glasgow Film Theatre this week. The dark-hearted thriller about three twisted flatmates whose lives are upended by a dead man holds up very well; from Ewan McGregor’s fabulous breakout performance to Boyle’s flashy yet effective shot setups to an Edgar Allen Poe-esque sense of doom and destruction, the whole thing still feels fresh and original 30 years later.

Odds and ends:

• I got to live my cinephile dreams this week when Letterboxd stopped by Glasgow Film Fest and asked attendees to share their own top 4s. You can watch me read my list – which is composed entirely of women-directed films in honor of International Women’s Day – here or on their Instagram, and take a peek at some runners-up I almost mentioned here.
• I’m too much of an award season cynic by this point to have anything to say about the Oscars, but I will say that my favorite bit of relevant reporting from this week is this hilarious Vulture piece about trying to solve the Anatomy of a Fall mystery using Sims 4.
• I read the comic anthology Sensory: Life on the Spectrum when I couldn’t sleep the other night, and I found it to be a lovely and illuminating read about the wide-ranging diversity of experiences among folks with autism. It’s a compendium that’s fun, informative, emotional, and easy to read. Comics are magic!

That’s all for today – short and sweet, yet it took me three days to finish since I’ve been sick (I’m mostly better now!).

I’ll post a bigger official update soon, but for now, suffice it to say that as much as I love the idea of an email you can read like the newspaper over your Sunday morning coffee, What I’m Watching will officially be becoming a weekday newsletter soon. Hopefully you’ll still tune in, so to speak.

Thanks for reading, and thanks to everyone who reached out with Trek rankings, podcast episodes, and more last week.