What to Watch This Week
Prey, Surface, Three Streaming Gems, and One of the Twentieth Century's Best Short Stories
Prey
We live in an age of enthusiasm, in which a large part of people's online lives seems to be devoted to a contest to see who can come up with the most glowing praise of whatever it is that catches the public eye. This is particularly true in film criticism. So Rolling Stone describes Hulu's newest entry into the Predator franchise as "something close to a B-movie masterpiece, a survivalist thriller-slash-proto-Western-slash-final-girl horror flick." The Guardian launches its own heavy-duty adverbial fireworks: "stylishly violent, stickily graphic, impossibly tense," and CNET declares confidently that the plot lines come together in a "visceral sequence that'll sear itself into every fan's memory forever, and the movie grabs you by the throat from that moment on as [director] Trachtenberg goes all-out on the action and gore."
Unfortunately, as the narrator from The Big Lebowski once noted of Los Angeles, I didn’t find it to be that, exactly.
Before we get to why, though, let's get something out of the way. We're dealing with a movie that's about a race of space aliens with dreadlocks who are fond of coming down to planet Earth to hunt human beings. A realist tale about the dramatic depths of the human experience this is not. The first entry in the franchise, however – in which Arnold Schwarzenegger and some muscle-bound army friends fight a Predator in the jungles of Central America in 1987 – is something of an action-flick classic. This is due to a few factors: an entertaining script with a novel idea, wonderfully camp-adjacent performances, and the superb direction of John McTiernan.
The newest entry in the franchise, despite all the hype, seems to me to be a 50th percentile movie. It's neither worse nor better than half the films out there. On the plus side of the ledger is lead Amber Midthunder, who turns in a really good, emotionally and physically convincing performance in the face of a script that may potentially have been written by an AI attempting to mimic human storytelling structures, and in a role that demands the kind of physical chops it takes to be an action movie star, which is a thing that many actors simply do not have. But she does.
Midthunder plays a young Comanche woman named Naru in the year 1719, whose skills as a warrior are doubted by her tribe because she's a girl; the appearance of the Predator then gives her the chance to prove herself in battle. Along the way, lots of people and animals are killed, there's a fair amount of sprinting, some ululating, and the realities of things like gravity and geography are, par for this course, conveniently ignored.
Also on the plus side is the fact that it's a Predator movie, and if you're a fan of this kind of stuff, as I am, you know in advance that you're not getting Antonioni. Which is to say, we're just sitting down to watch some good, old-fashioned action sequences, maybe with a clever quip or two thrown in, and hopefully with a plot twist or two that make us say, "Wow, that's pretty cool." And we get some of this in Prey. Our old friend the Predator - or, really, not our old friend, but one of them, since it's a different member of the species each time – is back, and it's fun to see him up to his usual shenanigans: turning invisible, steaming the flesh off of skulls, and blasting people with an array of high-tech gadgets. There's one pretty good hand-to-hand fight scene between people, and if you like the way the larger-scale action sequence has come to be imagined in the era of the superhero movie – lots of flying projectiles killing three people at once, slow-motion shots of people leaping high in the air to land on one another, and cleverly-staged decapitations – you'll like the larger-scale action sequences between the Predator and his victims here.
On the negative side, there are some definite issues. First off, the movie is really poorly structured. The first act is a slog, composed of a couple of flimsy attempts at giving us some idea of 18th Century Comanche culture and an extended hunting sequence that feels like it came out of an internet screenwriting manual section called "Part One: Giving Your Character An Obstacle." Then, some antagonists show up, and we hit another big snag. Without giving up too much, I'll note that there are some CGI animals…and they are awful, borderline cartoonish in a way that seriously undermines the film's attempt to be engaging. And finally some French Canadian trappers appear, and if you can watch them without being struck by the idea that they'd fit perfectly in The Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, you're a better viewer than I.
Finally, there's the question of how the Predator himself is set up as being a badass. You may recall that in the 1987 film he killed and skinned a team of elite American special forces troops before we ever saw him, thus establishing his horrific bona fides; here, he starts by killing…an unsuspecting snake, in what the film seems to want us to think is an impressive moment. But, you know, and I hate to be the guy to point this out, but if he couldn't kill a snake, and a couple of the other denizens of the animal kingdom that he dispatches, he'd be a pretty wimpy Predator. (I will refrain from going on a tangent about the film's anti-environmental tendencies, which are subtle but nasty.) Why not set up the Predator as a badass by having him wipe out a Comanche war party, or a band of (non-ridiculous) trappers? Your guess is as good as mine. But the result is a movie that feels a bit like a PG-13 adventure film with a lot of implied violence (most of it takes place just off screen), which is at the same time a bit squeamish about frightening younger viewers too badly, or perhaps doesn't know how to accomplish that task.
As far as the Predator franchise goes, for this viewer Prey falls towards the head of the rather undifferentiated mass that makes up everything after the first two films (and perhaps Shane Black's 2018 reboot, which is another story altogether). If you're a fan of the franchise, or just looking for a way to turn your brain off for a couple hours, definitely give it a watch and let me know what you think. Stuff like this is all about having fun, after all. But if you're looking for more than middle of the road, you may be disappointed. Available on Hulu.
Surface
There's a certain allure, both to writer and viewer, in the mystery story that features a protagonist who has lost their memory, which is what lies at the heart of the new AppleTV show Surface. For the writer, this approach offers a chance to dance around in that easiest and most delicious of areas, where anything is possible. Because the protagonist has no memory, any character who approaches them might be who they say they are…and they might not. Any event from the past – and virtually all mysteries deal with the attempt to understand the past, even if it's the very recent past – might be what it seems to be…or it might not. All of which is fun for the writer because it gives you the ability to send things in any direction you can think of. For the viewer (and this viewer in particular), there is a thrill in entering this world, being confused, following the false leads, and then, hopefully, having everything come to a satisfiying resolution.
It's the "hopefully" in that last sentence that makes me unsure about Surface. Because it's not clear to me at all (the show is being released weekly and I haven't seen the end yet) that it's going to be able to find a resolution that comes remotely close to addressing all the ambiguous mysteries it raises.
It tells the story of Sophie (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), a wealthy yuppie in San Fransisco who believes that she tried to commit suicide by jumping off a ferry several months before the action begins. But she's not sure, because her memory is gone, and there are some things in her life that she's realizing don't quite add up. Is her husband on the level? How about her best friend? The cop who claims to be investigating irregularities in her suicide? Her therapist? Or, are some of them, perhaps even all of them, lying to her about what happened and who she actually is?
This is definitely juicy stuff for lovers of mysteries, and in its first few episodes, Surface manages to keep us guessing. I wouldn't say that I'm deeply interested in the show, but nor have I turned it off yet. At the same time, though, it also just gives off the feeling that it may come together in a way that either makes sense or doesn't feel like it's cheating.
If you're someone who loves mysteries, or who watches shows (as I sometimes do) just to see whether they can pull off what they're attempting, as you might watch a gymnast attempt a particularly difficult dismount, then you might give this one a look. But if you're someone who tends to be crushed by disappointment, it might be better to give it a pass. Available on AppleTV.
Three Streaming Gems
Day of the Beast (1995, Álex de la Iglesia)
So a priest, a heavy-metal record store clerk, and a psychic have to team up to defeat the anti-Christ. Sounds like the opening line of a joke, right? Actually, it's the plot of this lovable Spanish madcap horror/comedy flick. Sure there are some issues – does the ending make any sense at all? Maybe? But probably not? – but it has some panache, and does really well in creating characters that pull you into the story. And it takes place at Christmas! Give it a look if this kind of stuff appeals to you. Available on Kanopy (Free!)
High Fidelity (2000, Stephen Frears)
Remember when broody John Cusack was one of the biggest things there was? And when Jack Black was just a zany newcomer? And when in-jokes about Belle and Sebastian could make the audience chuckle? And did you remember that this one was directed by the guy who made Dangerous Liaisons and The Grifters? Journey back to that time, my friends, with one of the definitional movies about the Nostalgic '90s. Cusack plays a record store owner trying to track down his ex-girlfriends and come to terms with his love life, Black and the tragically underrated Todd Louiso (remember his role as the jazz-loving au pair in Jerry Maguire?) are his clerks, and the whole thing is a gentle joy. Available on HBO Max.
Ball of Fire (1941, Howard Hawks)
You're not getting out of here without me trying to make you watch an old classic. Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder wrote this gorgeous little screwball comedy in which Gary Cooper plays a nerdy professor and Barbara Stanwyck plays a nightclub singer on the lam from her mob-boss boyfriend. They meet, sparks fly, silliness ensues, and there's an absolutely dynamite song and dance sequence in which Stanwyck tears it up and the legendary Gene Krupa plays drums with a pair of matches and a matchbox. As the kids say online when they're proposing ridiculous sports-team trades: Who says no? Available on Kanopy (Free! I tell you, Free!)
One of the Twentieth Century's Best Short Stories
"The Aleph" by Jorge Louis Borges, starts as follows:
On the incandescent February morning Beatriz Viterbo died, after a death agony so imperious it did not for a moment descend into sentimentalism or fear, I noticed that the iron billboards in the Plaza Constitución bore new advertisements for some brand or other of Virginia tobacco. I was saddened by this fact, for it made me realize that the incessant and vast universe was already moving away from her and that this change was the first in an infinite series. The universe would change, but I would not, I thought with melancholy vanity. I knew that sometimes my vain devotion had exasperated her; now that she was dead, I could consecrate myself to her memory, without hope but also without humiliation…
I mean, c'mon. This is tremendous prose, ornate and seemingly intellectual while at the same time nakedly funny and full of ironies both serious and silly. Borges was an Argentinian writer who took inspiration from people and things like Poe, Kafka, Jewish mysticism, and his own country's tradition of gaucho tales and created one of the 20th Century's crowning literary achievements: short stories that are in turns comedic, absurd, labyrinthine, and deeply interested in the very materials of existence itself.
"The Aleph" finds him at the height of his powers, conjuring a vain, petulant, and fantastically un-self-aware narrator (reminiscent of some of Nabokov's characters) who discovers a portal, called an Aleph, that allows him to see everything in the universe at the same time. The only problem? It's in the basement of a house owned by his arch-nemesis, the annoying cousin of the woman he pledged his undying loyalty to, whether she wanted it or not.
Read the whole thing here. (It's the third story in this article - the other two are wonderful as well, by the by - so you'll have to scroll down.)