Robert Pattinson, never stop being weird
10 things that turned me out in March, like a star performance in 'Mickey 17'
This month, we dragged the Oscars acceptance speeches in general and Adrien Brody in particular, curated anti-ominous portents, and fired off lightning round SXSW Film & TV Festival reviews.
Also, I turned 36. Happy my birthday to all.
Now: Here are 10 more things that turned me out in March.
Lady Gaga’s ‘Mayhem’
Album track ranking, from best to Bruno Mars: “Abracadabra” > “Killah” > “Zombieboy” > “Perfect Celebrity” > “Shadow of a Man” > “Don’t Call Tonight” > “LoveDrug” > “Garden of Eden” > “How Bad Do U Want Me” > “Disease” > “Vanish Into You” > “Blade of Grass” > “The Beast” > “Die With a Smile”
‘Greener Grass’
Jocelyn DeBoer and Dawn Luebbe wrote, directed, and starred in this 2019 candy-coated dose of psilocybin. Plenty of filmmakers hock loogies at suburbia, but “Greener Grass” deploys its surrealism with such a straight face that I couldn’t resist its charms. It helps that the cast includes comedy ringers like Beck Bennett, Mary Holland, and D’Arcy Carden.
I can lob some tonal comparisons, yeah. “Too Many Cooks,” “Three Busy Debras,” and “Strangers With Candy” are obvious. Perhaps the film is the mutant child of Tim Robinson and a Stepford wife. Several Letterboxd reviews compared DeBoer and Luebbe’s style to David Lynch’s disturbing disintegrations of the Normal Rockwell aesthetic. That seemed like a stretch, until I noticed direct homages to “Lost Highway” and “The Straight Story.”
But “Greener Grass” is its own world, where ego death lurks under every manicured lawn. Is it insane? Yes. Is it evisceratingly American? Look at the material. You can stream it on a few platforms, including Kanopy, Mubi, and AMC+.
‘Big Boys’
“Derry Girls” hive, face front. Dylan Llewellyn, who played hapless English transplant James on that series, stars in this U.K. import about a pair of late-blooming college students. Excuse me — uni students.
“Big Boys” is based on the autobiographical works of writer Jack Rooke, who narrates the series, but that means nothing to me. I just love a tragicomic coming-of-age show. Plus, Jackie from “Doctor Who” plays Llewellyn’s mom, and that’s fun.
The first two seasons are streaming on Hulu. I eagerly await the third, which already came out across the pond.
Doechii’s ‘Anxiety’
Y’all were way too mean to Gotye. “Somebody That I Used to Know” is haunting, infectious, and deliciously of its 2011 time. Keep that opinion in mind when I say that I’m obviously addicted to the Doechii new track that samples it.
It’s not a subtle musical loan, like a borrowed guitar riff or a soundbite. “Anxiety” finds the swamp princess rapping over the unmistakable (and basically unaltered, to my uneducated ear) instrumental track of “Somebody That I Used to Know.” But her delivery and lyrical content couldn’t be more different from Gotye’s song. I know you were so, so worried it would be the same.
Doechii rides the nervous energy that always lurked in the original, colorfully examining what it feels like for your brain to tell you that the world wants you to die. A favorite verse:
“Court order from Florid-er/ What's in that clear blue water?/ No limits, no borders/ What's in that new world order?/ Marco, Polo/ Negro run from popo/ That blue light and that rojo”
And the chorus is, dare I say, catchier than the Gotye hit.
‘FML’
Each new issue of “FML” reminds me how much I love both comic books and Portland. My favorite Oregon outpost is the setting for this Dark Horse Comics series by writer Kelly Sue DeConnick and penciller David López, with colors by Cris Peter and lettering by Clayton Cowles.
This puppy’s got it all: a teenage metal band, an ex-riot grrrl in the thick of a mid-life crisis, a monstrous transformation, witchy mysteries, unearthed secrets, and pitch-black satire about what ails today’s teens (a burning planet, the police state, so forth).
The art in each panel is a CMYK explosion of cartoon chaos — like bathroom graffiti shocked to life with a car battery. DeConnick also ends every issue with a few zine-style pages that include personal essays, reader submissions, and more. The vibes are great.
Four issues of “FML” are out now; the fifth issue comes out in July.
‘Freeway’
Reese Witherspoon is so cute, so foul in this 1996 neo-noir directed by Matthew Bright. As a teen runaway from the wrong side of the tracks, she’s snake venom poured over Pop Rocks.
Bright confronts you with a nasty, trashy, snarky fairy tale world. Folks like Kiefer Sutherland and Brooke Shields — playing a clean-cut serial killer and his stuck-up wife — tap into something more wicked than they usually do. Alanna Ubach and Brittany Murphy also show up as prison inmates who befriend Witherspoon’s Vanessa. It’s all very grindhouse.
“Freeway” is streaming for free on Tubi, The Roku Channel, Pluto, and more platforms.
Robert Pattinson in ‘Mickey 17’
Bong Joon Ho’s first post-“Parasite” feature walks and talks like one of his joints. Righteous disgust at capitalism and authoritarianism. Industrial sci-fi design. Cute, fat creatures. “Mickey 17” is very nearly marvelous, if not for some avoidable flabbiness that makes ya wonder who else at Warner Bros. was stirring Bong’s soup.
Some cast members go garish to uneven results: Mark Ruffalo does a Trump impression a la “The Great Dictator,” which is most effective when it’s least obvious, and an officious Toni Colette eats Tilda Swinton’s “Snowpiercer” nachos. But Robert Pattinson is a fucking miracle in this thing.
Playing the titular, expendable clone and the others in his genetic lineage, Pattinson constantly tinkers with his own mannerisms, like a Victorian scientist driven mad by mercury fumes. Each clone’s personality is distinct, yet still part of a whole. Pattinson makes so many fun, weirdo choices in the smallest moments. Each eyelid operates independently of the other. He comports his body not unlike string cheese. Best of all: He does this while acting against his inserted-in-post self.
And as we all know, Pattinson loves to do a wacky voice. Wacky voices are revered in Turning Out’s critical calculus. Through the years, Pattinson talked like a New Yawk loser in “Good Time,” a bird who is Don Rickles in “The Boy and the Heron,” and a Batman in “The Batman.” In “Mickey 17,” he sounds like Meowth from “Pokémon,” if a talking cat could be clinically depressed.
I hope award season remembers Pattinson. (It won’t.)
‘RuPaul’s Drag Race’ Season 17, Episode 10
This season of “Drag Race” started strong, and then things started to get baffling. Frontrunner Lexi Love’s momentum and goodwill took a nosedive. Lana Ja’Rae, probably a very nice lady, stuck around past the point she served any televised purpose. The once-promising drama from design queen Arrietty curdled into unchecked unpleasantness.
That is, until “The Villains Roast.” In 62 glorious minutes, “Drag Race” delivered an insta-classic episode. For one thing, this roast was a perfect comedy challenge: genuinely funny at its peaks and mouthwateringly bad in the valleys. But the episode transcended its season when a uniquely malicious Arrietty went mask-off, betrayed her best friend, and crashed into a smear of lipstick by the end. Television!
Chappell Roan’s ‘The Giver’
Finally, Chappell stopped playing in our faces and released this thing. Sounds like sweet tea and sapphism. She gets the job done; just takes her a while, like a general contractor.
‘Ninotchka’
A recent rewatch of a childhood favorite. Director Ernst Lubitsch’s 1939 romantic comedy was nominated for best picture at the Oscars along with “The Wizard of Oz,” “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” and winner “Gone With the Wind.” Greta Garbo plays a deadpan Soviet envoy sent to retrieve jewels from an expatriate Tsarist, but instead, she learns about love, laughter, and ugly Parisian hats.
Genuinely funny, super swoony, and not as much of a Western supremacist nightmare as you’d imagine from the premise! “Ninotchka” is available to rent or buy wherever you do those things.
Outbox
Hyperallergic’s Maya Pontone reported on a new work by Mexico City artist Chavis Mármol, who “dropped a nine-ton replica of an Olmec head onto the roof of a blue Tesla Model 3.”
As far as political art goes, this third piece in Mármol’s “Neo-Tameme” series has a Wile E. Coyote-meets-”Jackass” quality I find appealing. The artist told Hyperallergic that he wanted to crush the automotive symbol “with another iconic element from the oldest culture in America — a beautiful archaeological piece of which, at least in Mexico, we are very proud.”
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For the official DC Comics blog, writer Alex Jaffe catalogued the pioneering women credited as pencilers during the publisher’s first half-century. The tally produced only 14, which isn’t surprising, but it’s still eye-poppingly low. Jaffe acknowledges the likelihood that some women worked under male pseudonyms or went uncredited.
From 1935 to 1969, only five credited women drew comics for the company: four cartoonists who contributed work the very first books in the ’30s, and then the legendary Ramona Fradon, best known for her long tenure illustrating Aquaman’s classic adventures. (Fradon also co-created one of my favorite DC characters, the Brazilian hero Fire.)
Read about these legends here.
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Country singer Orville Peck talked to The New York Times’ Erik Piepenburg about doffing his signature mask to play the Emcee in “Cabaret” on Broadway. Read the interview here.