But I
will indulge myself a moment, because today I watched Robert Zemeckis's
Here—the boldest Goddamn movie of the year, in its way, just a real achievement, and one that
deserves a full review—but perhaps just as importantly, I also watched
I Saw the TV Glow, the third feature (second anyone's heard of) from Jane Schoenbrun, the follow-up to their torturously boring and bad
We're All Going To the World's Fair; and, in tandem, they very briefly restored my faith in the state of cinema, one being a fearless late-style swing from a tottering master that does some truly new shit, the other being the kind of redemption I genuinely want to see from a filmmaker who might've burned me terribly in the past, but is willing to evolve towards good, exciting work. And this feeling was shattered, because 2024 now bears the ineradicable stain of producing
Anora as America's putative
Best Picture of the year, and now it's all just a bunch of morbid considerations about that whole "state of cinema" thing: the possibility that Zemeckis might never make another movie (because hardly anybody's seen
Here and I do not think its reputation will grow going forward); the possibility that Shoenbrun's literal physical well-being could be jeopardized, let alone that of their career; and the certainty that Sean Baker is going to go on to keep making
the worst motherfucking movies in the world for decades and decades to come.
Anyway, we'll get to I Saw the TV Glow, but I also watched Marielle Heller's Nightbitch, and now they're together, because they're both obtuse horror movies or something. I'd say it's because they're both about nighttime, but I believe Nightbitch takes place mostly, like at a 3:1 ratio, during the day. Oh, whatever, it's fundamentally arbitrary.
It's not clear whether it was
Nightbitch source novelist Rachel Yoder, or its writer-director Marielle Heller, or its coterie of producers, but clearly it was decided that what women needed was their own 1994's
Wolf, though I certainly can't tell you what all these women thought women must've done to
deserve that. And, somehow, the results are even less impressive: both
Wolf and
Nightbitch are using a story of canid transformation as a means of actually pursuing a fantasy about middle-aged rebellion and rejuvenation, and, as we weigh each film against the other,
Nightbitch ought to have an advantage, because it's at least not
embarrassed of being a fantasy movie like
Wolf was; yet it's counter-intuitively
interested in being a fantasy movie even less; and while
Wolf is surely not
good at "being a werewolf movie," and does not deliver on the genre pleasures which a movie about Jack Nicholson playing a werewolf has blatantly promised, at least it did have Jack Nicholson fucking a woman half his age and pissing on his corporate rival's shoes, whereas
Nightbitch isn't concerned with the genre pleasures of either the werewolf movie
or those of the middle-aged rebellion story. For the long, repetitive middle half the most Amy Adams's (oh boy) unnamed mother (credited thusly, though I could've sworn she received a name) ever gets out of being a human dog, or a rebellious middle-aged woman, is... well, I guess let's just say that Heller must actually hate cats, but at least the storytelling in the corresponding sequence of
Can You Ever Forgive Me? suggested she understood the
concept of not hating cats. Her movie's "nighttime" photography isn't as risibly bad as Mike Nichols's. Let's give Heller that much.
