Ian Thomas Malone

Friday

27

October 2023

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COMMENTS

The Deep End

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ITM has had quite the eventful stretch. With someone new in her life, Ian unpacks the nerves and calming effects of being thrown into The Deep End. As scared as she feels, the idea of having something worth feeling anything about is cause enough for celebration. The deep end isn’t such a scary place to be as long as someone remembers to throw you a paddle. 

Friday

20

October 2023

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COMMENTS

Effort

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ITM had a magical date last night with a woman. A major recurring theme of this show over the past two years has been ITM’s fleeting connection to her bisexuality. Ian unpacks her date and the value of bringing your best, earnest effort to new connections, to throw yourself out there in our vast scary world, eager and ready to savor that precious LGBTQ joy we all hold so dear to ourselves. Maybe she’s a little smitten with the sapphic bug, but isn’t that the whole point of this thing of ours (bisexual casa nostra)?

Wednesday

18

October 2023

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COMMENTS

Discretion

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We’re back! ITM delivers a case against one of her least favorite elements of LGBTQ life, that thing called discretion. A lot of people used to wish that gay people could keep things in the bedroom or the pesky closet. ITM doesn’t think that suits an adorable transsexual, and she’d like the era of discretion to come to a much-needed end. 

Thursday

14

September 2023

1

COMMENTS

Bottoms captures the zeitgeist of the queer high school experience

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There’s a beauty to the ugly chaos of high school that few are masochistic enough to appreciate. The coming of age genre often possesses a messy relationship with the high school setting, reasonable adults possessing enough sense to recognize that the rabid hormonal snake pit is not a very good place to come into one’s own skin. Some of the best high school comedies are the ones that don’t try for morals or learning or anything positive of the sort, except perhaps for the idea that hedonism is a virtue worth celebrating every once in a while.

Society has been slow to accept the notion that women deserve to live for pleasure too. The film Bottoms structures its narrative around a very simple premise. Two lesbians start a school fight club to impress their crushes and get laid, a timeless, beautiful tale that transcends gender and sexuality. Like most hormonal teenagers, PJ (Rachel Sennott) and Josie (Ayo Edebiri) are not capable of thinking through the ramifications of any of their batshit crazy ideas, instead letting their freak flags fly and rolling with the punches, quite often literally.

Director Emma Seligman, who co-wrote the screenplay with Sennott, quickly establishes a singular rhythm for her narrative. Rockbridge Falls High School is in many ways just like any other school. The principal is vapid and tyrannical, the teachers are aloof, and most of the students talk at each other without caring what anyone else has to say. PJ and Josie quickly draw the ire of the school football team, the latter at odds with star quarterback Jeff (Nicholas Galitzine) over the affections of Isabel (Havana Rose Liu). The natural clash between jocks and outcast lesbians is a beautiful dynamic rarely explored in film, something that Seligman and Sennott mine for comedy gold.

The script is laugh-out-loud hilarious, paired marvelously with the comedic timing of the cast. Everyone commits to the bit in this absurd, although not unrealistic, depiction of high school life. Sennott and Edebiri have a natural, often unspoken chemistry between the two. Veteran NFL star Marshawn Lynch puts in a masterful supporting effort as Mr. G, the faculty advisor for the fight club.

Perhaps the most impressive achievement of Bottoms is the narrative’s full immersion in the LGBTQ experience without ever pandering to the vapid idea of “visibility” or wasting its lean 88-minute runtime on lame gay-101 explainers that have bogged down the genre. Seligman’s work is the rare queer comedy that’s solely focused on being funny. The hero’s journey of PJ and Josie is eminently relatable to anyone who’s spent more than ten minutes in high school. This film deserves a lot of credit for being able to recognize that without trying to hold its audience’s hand.

Bottoms is one of the greatest high school narratives of the twenty-first century, a triumph of queer cinema. The discourse surrounding LGBTQ representation in film often paints the American public as needing to wade into the pool slowly, a promise of a more inclusive future that rarely seems concerned with ever living in the present. Seligman paints her portrait of high school as an artist who understands that we’ve always been there. Modern cinema desperately needs more filmmakers with her abounding sense of confidence. Bottoms is, quite simply, a masterpiece.

Tuesday

12

September 2023

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Classic Film: Summer Hours

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There’s a magic to summer as a child that never quite loses its touch as the years go on. The months of July and August carry a certain timeless aspect that hardly holds up against the chaotic realities of our world, except in memory. You can’t go back to the way things were in your youth, but a return to the familiar, seemingly immortal, settings of your summer adventures can certainly breathe life into the idea that you might.

The French film Summer Hours (original title L’Heure d’été) centers its narrative around the end of a family’s summer magic. Family matriarch Hélène Berthier (Édith Scob) spends the last few years of her life seemingly trying to put her estate in order, a lifetime of devotion to her artist uncle, Paul Berthier. Her oldest son Frédéric (Charles Berling) is mostly entrusted with preserving the estate, split equally with his siblings Adrienne (Juliette Binoche) and Jérémie (Jérémie Renier), both of whom now live abroad. The death of Hélène puts her idyllic wishes into jeopardy, as neither Adrienne nor Jérémie wish to keep the house in the family, exacerbated by the heavy estate tax imposed for its impressive collection of art.

Director and screenwriter Olivier Assayas crafts a rich narrative devoid of the typical family squabbling you’d expect when an estate needs to be broken up. There are certain sympathies reserved for the gatekeepers, namely Frédéric and Éloïse (Isabelle Sadoyan), the family’s longtime housekeeper, but the film doesn’t stretch to indict the very reasonable opinions of the siblings who accept the reality that their lives have taken them far away from France. Hélène’s own perspective of her legacy is deliciously murky, her delusions of grandeur toward her uncle surfacing on more than a few occasions.

Berling mostly anchors the narrative on the perpetually put-upon Frédéric, facing fire from three generations of his family. Frédéric is relatable, the through-line from the past to the present, thrust into a family-stabilizing role for lack of any other alternative. Berling does a fantastic job endearing himself to the audience through his abounding grace, eliciting sympathy for his rather privileged family.

Assayas keeps a comfortable rhythm to his pacing, matching the laid-back nature of summer with a slow burn that savors the quieter moments of its conflict. The film looks around for some padding to buff out the third act of its 103-minute runtime, but the narrative hardly drags either. The only true antagonist, beyond the estate tax, is time itself.

There are more than a few moments of genuine beauty hidden in Summer Hours’ quiet narrative. The film likely carries greatest appeal for people who can relate to the impermanence of our formative years, but Assayas doesn’t exactly lean on nostalgia to get his point across, always looking toward the future. Time only moves in one direction. Summer can feel like forever, until September and all the obligations of the real world come crawling around.

Tuesday

12

September 2023

0

COMMENTS

Classic Film: Made in Hong Kong

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There’s a certain timeless feeling to being young in a world that’s been raped and pillaged to the brink of destruction by the twisted wrought of capitalism. Film often sells its audience on the idea that we can break free of that cycle through a kind of a-ha moment, as if coming of age instills upon us new superpowers to transcend the limitations of our decaying planet. The 1997 film Made in Hong Kong, the first release after the region’s handover from the United Kingdom to China, explores the lives of a few teens living on the outskirts of society, barely scraping by, with no hope for the future.

Autumn Moon (Sam Lee) is a high school dropout working as a debt collector for a local gang run by Fat Chan (Chan Tat-Yee). Autumn is a feisty young kid, with spikey hair that matches his aggressive demeanor, but often displays a softer side as well. Autumn looks after Sylvester (Wenders Li), a mentally disabled kid who is frequently bullied, while being haunted by a love letter left behind by a peer Susan (Amy Tam Ka-Chuen) before she committed suicide. Autumn’s father left his family for a mistress, while his mother (Doris Chow Yan-Wah) abandons him early in the narrative.

The main action of the film centers around Autumn’s budding relationship with Ping (Neiky Yim Hui-Chi), who lives with her mother in a housing complex where Autumn makes his collections. Ping needs a kidney transplant she can’t afford, putting Autumn at odds with his employer, who controls her family’s debts. The memory of Susan ever-present in his thoughts, Autumn challenges Fat Chan’s grip on their community in a mostly futile effort to beat back the unrelenting tides barely letting any of them tread water above the surface level.

Director and screenwriter Fruit Chan crafts a beautifully bleak tragedy that’s bound to resonate with anyone who understands the natural primal rage that surfaces upon a realization that the cards will always be stacked against them. An ultra-low budget indie shot mostly on leftover 35 mm film, the cinematography possesses a natural feel that makes Hong Kong itself into a character within the slow-burn narrative. There’s a certain claustrophobia to the housing complex that perfectly explains the older character’s nihilistic outlook at their inescapable panopticon.

The film primarily uses non-professional actors, most making their feature-length debut. Lee brings such a raw chaotic energy to Autumn that you can’t help but root for him, even if he’s a little over the top for his own good. Chan mostly centers the 108-minute runtime on his characters, a gamble that pays great dividends in the third act. Made in Hong Kong is the kind of film whose emotional impact creeps on you, a subtly moving treatise on teen angst up against insurmountable odds.

The timing of the film’s release with the 1997 handover leads to natural comparisons, but the relatability of Chan’s work extends far beyond the geopolitics. Children are often told to work hard for the promise of upward mobility. The crony capitalism unleashed on the world has far different plans for the proletariat. Autumn lives his life like a kid with no future. He’s not exactly wrong in that regard, but the great power of the film manifests through the innate desire to root for him anyway.

Saturday

22

July 2023

1

COMMENTS

Futurama enters the streaming age without missing a beat

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Futurama owed its original revival to two elements of the television landscape that are very much no longer in play. Riding the same wave of Adult Swim popularity and DVD sales that saw Family Guy returned to network television, Futurama was originally resurrected as a series of four direct-to-DVD movies that were restructured to comprise a fifth season on cable network Comedy Central, which later commissioned two additional seasons (the exact number of Futurama seasons is a bit tricky to pinpoint). The streaming era has largely replaced both the DVD market and original programming on basic cable, a new normal that the industry is still very much figuring out how to navigate.

While television has changed quite a bit since Futurama aired its most recent finale in 2013, the adult animated comedy scene has largely remained the same. There’s a certain irony in the old cliché about The Simpsons being past its prime when shows like South Park, Family Guy, Bob’s Burgers, and American Dad! have all blown past the range of the former’s consensus golden age. Futurama, along with the recently resurrected Aqua Teen Hunger Force and the upcoming revival of King of the Hill, aims to defy the recent string of unsuccessful nostalgia grabs that has plagued live-action continuations of former hits shows.

The first six episodes of Futurama’s upcoming eighth season that were provided to critics demonstrate a show unflustered by the passage of time. Our world has changed a lot since the show introduced us to the 31st century, but the Planet Express team largely carried on in the year 3023 with business as usual, with a few key exceptions. Futurama has always conducted itself with a greater degree of sincerity than most of its animated contemporaries. Season eight gives its characters space to grow without compromising the core foundation of the show.

The episodes are a great blend of character-centric storytelling and the zanier adventures that defined the early days of the show. Topical subjects like streaming TV, cryptocurrency, and monopolistic capitalism are covered with varying degrees of success, in some cases the humor barely scratching the surface of the available material. The voice cast hasn’t lost a beat. Their banter constantly makes you smile like you’re in the company of old friends.

Futurama’s narrative approach lends itself well to the passage of time, with much of the humor tied to the situational comedy of the story rather than straight one-liners or popular culture references. Fan favorites such as Bender and Dr. Zoidberg receive plenty of jokes, but the show gives the entire ensemble plenty of time to shine as well, including many favorites from the recurring bench. The show pokes plenty of fun at itself as well, a well-deserved victory lap of sorts for those of us who have rooted for Futurama’s success over the years.

Season eight is not likely to garner many new converts, but Futurama still has plenty of gas left in the tank. Longtime fans who weren’t too fond of the Comedy Central years are probably best sticking to the original run. The streaming era carries no real mandate comparable to the finite amount of timeslots available for a programming block like Fox’s old “Animation Domination.” Futurama certainly has far less mileage than any of its contemporaries. Season eight might not be genre-defining television, but it’s great to have these characters back for another round of adventures.

Thursday

20

July 2023

1

COMMENTS

Barbie is a delightful summer film with slightly awkward messaging

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Modern blockbuster filmmaking continuously grapples with two conflicting truths. Hollywood has long struggled with diversity, even as it doubles down on franchises and major brands with histories rooted in the same societal structures much of the country is trying to move beyond. A company like Mattel has to put forth an earnest effort to appeal to everyone, without daring to stray too far from the formulas that defined a product like Barbie, including all the ideas that are now semi-safe to call problematic in the mainstream discourse.

Director and co-writer Greta Gerwig, who cut her industry teeth both behind and in front of the camera as part of the mumblecore movement, is uniquely suited to helm a film like Barbie. Mumblecore presented itself as raw intellectual angst, a sense of aimlessness that was never confronted with any pressing need to say anything interesting. Mumblecore is the allure of tapas and its endless possibilities, alongside the reality that you’re not actually going to consume anything that will fill your stomach.

Barbie is a very beautiful movie. Gerwig does a masterful job giving definition to Barbieland while always coloring inside the lines of Mattel’s world. Barbieland genuinely feels like big-budget childhood playtime, a warm and fuzzy encapsulation of the magic of pretend. You never lose sight of the walls of the panopticon, but it’s a confident world with an easy, natural draw.

As “Stereotypical Barbie,” Margot Robbie impressively walks an awkward line between lead character and train conductor, the latter constantly trying to pretend like this film is an ensemble piece. Mattel, Gerwig, and Robbie are all extremely sensitive to the negative societal structures that Barbie upholds, including fascism, body shaming, and an overabundance of whiteness. The fact that an entertaining movie managed to surface through all their defensive posturing is a legitimately impressive feat for a big summer film.

The plot is largely perfunctory and predictable. Barbie is forced to travel to the real world when she starts showing signs of aging, resulting in a lot of humor one could see coming from a mile away. Gerwig and her husband/co-writer Noah Baumbach’s script constantly winks at the idea of patriarchy while never digging beneath the surface of why these systems are in place. One might not be surprised that a film like Barbie would choose not to tackle these sorts of themes, except in the sense that the narrative opens all of these doors itself.

As with many blockbuster films based on franchises or well-known intellectual properties, Barbie struggles down the stretch of its third act. Robbie spends so much time playing second fiddle to other characters that her emotional payoff ends up leaning on audience nostalgia more than it has any right to. Her Barbie is everything, and nothing at all. There’s a vapid air to Barbie’s sense of inclusivity that the film and its 114-minute runtime simply can’t overcome.

None of this is necessarily an issue. Gerwig steers the ship toward heartfelt themes, even if the tides of Barbie’s corporate leviathan never allow for smooth sailing. Robbie is perfectly cast, with a delightful performance that leaves you wanting more. Ryan Gosling brings the ambiguous Rorschach test of a himbo known as Ken to life in a delectable fashion that comes close to stealing the show, though Gerwig is careful not to let a man upstage her quasi-feminist film.

Barbie is a delightful blockbuster movie, albeit one with a few predictable contradictions. The film is self-conscious that Robbie and Gosling, two beautiful white people, are its leads, but takes no meaningful action to alter that dynamic. Its themes of female empowerment contain as much depth as a slogan on a t-shirt from Urban Outfitters. Gerwig’s resume is used more as a shield to uphold the idea of Barbie’s feminist bonafides instead of meaningfully exploring them.

There is no denying that this is a fun movie with an exceptional cast that showed up to play ball. Some might be tempted to say that Mattel stepped on Gerwig’s feet, but her finished product lines up fairly well with her earlier mumblecore work that also struggled to present any genuine takeaways for its audience. The idea that a Hollywood film delivered a clunky take on intersectionality is hardly surprising, except for the fact that Barbie earnestly wants you to believe in its own ideas of empowerment. Maybe a good time at the theatre is more than enough.

Monday

10

July 2023

0

COMMENTS

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One is popcorn entertainment from a franchise that’s starting to show its age

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There is a certain irony in Tom Cruise’s mission to singularly save cinema, his marquee franchise itself owing its origins to television. Seven entrees in, Mission: Impossible bears little in common to either its 1960s small screen source material or its 1996 cinematic debit. The world itself has less space for the kind of spectacles Cruise likes to stage on the biggest screens possible, many preferring the cozy comforts that the original show provided fifty years ago to the kind of antics that require a trip to the box office. The last few Mission films have sought to up the ante, defying the passage of time itself not just through consumer trends, but the age of Cruise himself.

As its gravity-defying trailers suggest, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One brings all the action that have defined the series since at least its second installment, more carefully refined in the years since Ghost Protocol set the gold standard for blockbuster filmmaking. Ethan Hunt (Cruise) and friends, alongside new ally Grace (Haley Atwell), find themselves pitted against an experimental AI program called “The Entity,” capable of breaching all intelligence and defense networks in the world. Ethan and co battle numerous forces, including an enigmatic figure from his past Gabriel (Esai Morales) for control of a key that controls the computer aboard a sunken Russian submarine.

Director Christopher McQuarrie, in his third outing at the Mission helm, finds a weird balance between the previous two films. Dead Reckoning is tighter than the often-free wheeling Fallout, without the glamour and pizazz of Rogue Nation. The narrative isn’t exactly challenging to follow, but the script is so bogged down with exposition dumps that the audience is perpetually forced to confront its many holes. McQuarrie’s competent craftsmanship is perpetually at odds with the reality that this film isn’t as fun as it could have been, a frantic experience lacking the unadulterated joy of its predecessors.

Cruise’s supporting cast is largely comprised of returning players, including franchise mainstays Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames) and Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg) alongside newer additions Isla Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) and Alanna Mitsopolis (Vanessa Kirby). The weirdest throwback comes in the form of Eugene Kitteridge (Henry Czerny), last seen in the original film, stepping into the role of shady boss more recently occupied by Angela Bassett and Alec Baldwin, neither of whom returned. The bloated roster gives newcomers Morales, Atwell, and Pom Klementieff less time to shine, but the supporting cast does an excellent job working around Cruise, who continues to defy his age as a first-rate Hollywood action hero.

The film’s unwieldy 163-minute runtime is not exactly helped by the Part One in its title, a clunky overstuffed caper that does a lot less with its narrative than earlier entries managed. Dead Reckoning Part One exists in a peculiar space, a first-rate production that makes a strong case for the power of practical effects in the modern era, providing genuine spectacle in every sense of the word. Cruise’s broader mission to save cinema is on full display, a film that rarely pauses to take a breath.

Dead Reckoning Part One is excellent summer entertainment, one of the best cinematic experiences of the season. It is also the first Mission movie in over a decade with absolutely zero claim of superiority to the ones that came before it. To some extent, that might be expected. Cruise, Rhames, and Pegg are all showing their age in a way that hardly rang true the last time around, but the film often feels like it’s running on autopilot going through familiar motions. You can get the sense that the additions of Atwell and Klementieff were at least in part designed to inch the franchise toward a future without Ethan Hunt, despite Cruise’s intentions to continue with the character into his eighties.

The Mission: Impossible franchise has outlived plenty of industry fads over the decades. Part of the key to its success has been its ability to reinvent itself over the years. As its title suggests, there’s still a second half to the story of Dead Reckoning. Part One demonstrates that Mission still has gas left in the tank, but might be in need of a tune-up sooner rather than later.

Wednesday

28

June 2023

0

COMMENTS

The Flash

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Against all odds, The Flash movie was finally released. In spite of Ezra Miller’s best efforts to shelf the film with their awful behavior, Warner Bros. opted against the Batgirl treatment and set this trainwreck loose in the wild. Ian is joined by friend of the show Ed Carroll for a post-mortem on The Flash, and the DCEU as a whole. At least we got some Keaton, and another beloved DC figure in ITM lore. 

For more of Ed, follow him on Twitter @EdRevelator34

Ian’s review of the film: https://ianthomasmalone.com/2023/06/the-flash-is-an-embarrassing-mess-fitting-for-the-current-state-of-the-dceu/