What I'm Watching: A Real Pain, Poor Things, American Fiction, and More

Emma Stone, Poor Things, Searchlight Pictures

Here’s a quick rundown of everything I watched, read, and wrote about last week:

The shows:

• For years now my mom has insisted her favorite show ever is Hill Street Blues, but tonight we put on the pilot of NYPD Blue and she immediately realized she’d been mixing up their titles. As usual, mom’s got taste: ‘90s cop classic NYPD Blue is captivating and stylish right out of the gate, and even in its first few episodes alone, it already feels far more modern than the majority of its contemporaries.

The movies:

• Jesse Eisenberg’s sophomore directorial feature A Real Pain is the only Sundance film I caught this year, and I’m so glad I made time for it. The movie (which will be released by Searchlight at some point) stars Eisenberg and Succession star Kieran Culkin as a pair of radically different cousins who embark on a guided tour of Poland in honor of their late grandmother. The film spends a good chunk of its runtime as a smart, talky, “indie”-feeling story about family, suffering, and mental illness, before ending with a brilliant emotional gut check that I’ll be thinking about for a long time.
• Yorgos Lanthimos’ latest collaboration with acid-tongued playwright Tony McNamara, Poor Things, is an elaborate, incredible, and sometimes exhausting work of art. The movie stars Emma Stone as a sort of Frankeinstein’s monster discovering autonomy – and, eventually, more complex human concepts like commerce and patriarchy – through a distinctly gendered perspective. On a philosophical level, I adore this one, though I do think it could’ve been tighter in its edit. It’s by far the weirdest Best Picture nominee of the year, which is fun.
• The only thing I’ve really heard about Nyad is that it’s overrated, which is pretty ironic. At any rate, I found the film about real-life swimmer Diana Nyad’s quest to swim from Cuba to Florida completely engrossing. It’s a thrilling, painstaking survival movie made by filmmakers who know how to make audiences feel close to the action (Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi have until now been known for high-octane docs like Free Solo and The Rescue). Plus, how many movies do we get to see with crotchety sixty-something lesbians – played by two of the strongest performers of their generation – as the heroes?
• Bradley Cooper’s Maestro is such a strange bird. The movie about composer Leonard Bernstein has an obnoxious script and a penchant for focusing on all the wrong parts of its own story, yet it’s anchored by some visually splendid direction and a great performance from Carey Mulligan. I’m not a fan of this one, yet I eventually found myself reeled in by it, especially during the emotional climax.
• I’m not sure I could explain American Fiction’s shortcomings better than writers Kyndall Cunningham and Candice Frederick already have. It’s a funny crowd-pleaser that I keep wanting to describe as “nice,” but not necessarily in a good way. It also feels to me as if it’s only half a satire (see above links), and the empty space where the other half should be is impossible to ignore.
• Dumb Money puts way too much emphasis on the “dumb,” but Craig Gillespie’s often-grating take on the GameStop short squeeze certainly has a whole lot of spirit and love for the little guy. It’s not terrible, but it’s probably my least favorite work by the filmmaker – and I’m not just saying that because I’m still bitter that I got in on the stonks craze the same day Robinhood shut it down.

Odds and ends:

• Is anyone else hooked on the new iHeart podcast Murder 101? I know I could just Google the end of this wild true story – about a high school class in Tennessee that caught a serial killer – but I’m enjoying tuning in week to week for the long version. It’s a true crime saga told through the lens of teenagers learning about critical thinking, research skills, and the importance of standing up for marginalized communities. Media literacy isn’t dead after all!
• Also on the podcast front, I’m finally filling in a major blind spot: Dead Eyes. I imagine everyone (who listens to podcasts) has by now heard about Connor Ratliff’s acclaimed, 31-episode quest to discover why Tom Hanks fired him from the HBO series Band of Brothers, but if not, this is your sign to check it out. Eight episodes in, I’m not completely sold on Dead Eyes yet – the level of obsession on display here is both impressive and deeply uncomfortable – but I’m enjoying Ratliff’s curiosity-driven attempts at deconstruction, and the fact that he invites guests to talk about their own weird, disappointing Hollywood experiences.
• This week at Slashfilm, I wrote about the True Detective: Night Country corpsicle and one of the best, most spontaneous-feeling comedic scenes from Cheers. I contain multitudes.

If you’ve read this far, it means you’re probably a regular newsletter reader, so I want you to be the first to know about a small update. Starting next week, I’ll be coming to you live from Scotland, where I’m officially moving (yes, really) this Sunday. The next edition of the newsletter will almost certainly come a few days late as I settle in, and Hey, What Are You Watching might look a bit different in February, too, as I’m taking some legally advisable time off from paid writing to get my visas finalized (I really don’t want to piss off the UK government right when I get there)! To be clear, I’ll still be publishing the newsletter, I just may have fewer links to my own work for a few weeks before things kick back into high gear in March.

With all this in mind, I’m once again asking readers for podcast, audiobook, and movie recommendations for a long plane ride. What are you watching?