DC falling, documentaries rising, ancient characters coming back from the dead, and two Hollywood superstars bombing like it’s 1941
How crazy is it that a documentary is doing this well at the box office. You Can See Everything is continuing to break records. If I’m being honest, I don’t know what records are being broken, but I keep seeing that people say that on the internet, so I’m assuming it must be true.
So, what’s happening here? Why is this movie in the weakest performing genre almost beating DC movies with 100 times their marketing budget?
Well, one of the things co-directors Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim said is they would shoot a scene, then afterwards everybody, them and the crew, would discuss it, and every single person had a different opinion on what had happened in the scene.
That’s when Nathan realized that there might be something to this. Because when he went into shooting, he wasn’t sure if there was a movie here. And even as he talks about it now, he says, “Even after we shot, we didn’t know if we had a film.”
But the film appears to be about the different perspectives people take from it. Because everybody’s having the same experience that Nathan and Lance and the crew had, where they watch a scene and they come away with two completely different perspectives on it.
Like in my review, I point out that Amanda Seyfried comes off as completely awful, and someone comments she comes off as the best thing in the movie. And people think that Elizabeth Holmes is lying a scene, then other people think she’s absolutely telling the truth.
The famous Who’s on First scene, people think she’s a master manipulator as she says that she has no idea why it’s funny, and I think it’s obvious she’s not hip to that kind of humor and just doesn’t get it.
But what’s happening is that the fact that people have such differing perspectives is creating conversation outside the movie, and that is extremely rare nowadays, that people really talk about movies after watching them.
Another neat aspect about the film is people believe there are all these hidden Easter Eggs that are telling you the truth about Elizabeth Holmes. They think that Nathan has hidden the answer of the film, because the film leaves you with no clear answer, but people now think Nathan has left these Easter eggs in the film and in the marketing that are revealing what he knows.
One Easter Egg I found, and I haven’t seen anything about this, so I’m actually very proud of myself for discovering it, is I looked at the poster up above and I was wondering why they decided to choose it. Cause I don’t think it’s a very good poster. Then I looked closer and I realized that a big part of the movie is Elizabeth Holmes’ big, bright, blue eyes. But when you zoom in on her eye there, you see that she’s wearing a contact lens, and the implication is that it’s a color-corrective lens to make her eyes very, very blue.
If she’s doing that, if she’s lying about the color of her eyes, then what else is she lying about? She’s probably lying about everything.
The funny thing is I don’t think she’s a liar at all. I think she’s no different from any other CEO of any other company. No CEO is going to walk into a financier meeting and say, “Oh, these are all the things that are wrong with my product.”
No, they’re going to hype the product. They’re going to tell you why it’s awesome and oversell it. That’s literally what all CEOs do all the time. And that’s all she was doing. And to claim that she was deceiving anyone, well then you got to put every single CEO on earth in prison, because all of them do the exact same thing for a literal living.
I think the movie’s great, though, and it’s really cool that this non-traditional movie is getting so much attention. It’s rare that this happens, and it’s fun to watch.
On the flip side, we have Klara and the Sun and the now confirmed completed downfall of Taika Waititi. I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone who was so high fall so far so fast. I mean, one day, he had all of Hollywood wanting to do whatever he wanted to do, and the next, he had Klara and the Sun.
I don’t think it helped his cause that he cast Jenna Ortega, who also flew too close to the sun and, like Icarus, fell to Earth. They both made their big mistakes that led to their downfalls around the same time. For Taika, it was Thor: Love and Thunder.
Which was, I mean, if you want to see a movie that shows why screenwriting matters and why you can’t just make shit up as you go along, go watch that movie, because it’s the perfect exemplification of very poor writing and a lack of structure and a lack of a plan and a lack of a foundation in the screenplay that you’ll ever see.
Jenna Ortega’s downfall was more self-inflicted. She had that press tour where she basically told everybody that she did everything. She did the writing, she did the choreographing, she told the cinematographer where to put the camera, she ran craft services. She did it all.
That is one of the fastest ways to make every single person who works on movies hate you. Because if you’re going to take credit for everybody else’s work, they will hate you.
And it used to be in Hollywood that you could get away with this. You could because the stars were so important to movies that on set people had to shut up and take it.
But nowadays, with social media and the fact that stars aren’t as big as they used to be, they don’t have the power anymore. And your star power alone, your fanbase, can’t shield you from all of that. And so that trickles down from your jobs to the internet and people stop going to see you.
And it’s too bad because I read Klara and the Sun and it was a good book, and it had this perfect balance of sweetness and sadness. Which used to be Taika’s brand. JoJo Rabbit is an excellent script and an even better movie. But the guy has lost his confidence or his mojo or something because all you need to do is watch 10 seconds of that trailer to know that they screwed it up. You can tell the movie doesn’t work immediately.
There are actually two movies I wanted to see this weekend but wasn’t able to. I wanted to laugh, so I wanted to see the Ali G movie. I realize we’re 20 years late on this movie have any buzz at all but I still think that the Ali G character is hilarious. And even if Sacha Baron Cohen is probably just doing it for a paycheck, it’s hard to find movies that make me laugh, and I knew this movie would. I mean, this jacket alone makes me laugh.
But it’s playing in barely any theaters! Luckily, I heard it’s coming out on Amazon Prime quickly, so I’ll be looking forward to that.
The other movie I wanted to see was Wildwood, which is the only movie out there that’s actually got better critic and audience scores than You Can See Everything, which is not an easy task.
But I had trouble finding this one as well. The only place it was playing near me, at the Grove, had very strange showtimes, to the point where I thought there was something wrong with AMC website. But I double and triple checked, and it was just weird showtimes. I guess this is the side of Hollywood they never talk about. When you have the tiny distribution company, you don’t get any of the good theaters, any of the good showtimes.
But this one, I mean, if you haven’t seen the trailer, the trailer’s amazing. It looks like the modern-day version of The Chronicles of Narnia, a real adventure.
And then finally you have Clayface, which made $24 million this weekend. It’s not looking good for WB or DC or James Gunn. Because he chose these movies. He chose these characters. And they’re not doing well.
You can see what Gunn’s vision was for the DC universe. It was, A, Superman – just get the Superman movie right. And then he asked the question, “What are the most interesting characters that I can build a movie around?” And let’s not go to the obvious candidates. Let’s find those stories that have the most interesting comic characters.
And when you look at Clayface, it’s no doubt a very interesting character on the surface. It’s Vanilla Sky, the Tom Cruise film from 2o01. You’re beautiful, and then you get this terrible face, and you fix it, but then it’s unpredictable when the ugliness is going to come back. That’s a very compelling character. So I understand what he was thinking.
Then Supergirl as well! Supergirl was all about this drunk woman who lost her family and stewed in her own misery and in her own substance abuse as she ignored the world, and then she’s tasked with saving it. And that too is objectively an interesting character. So I can see where he was coming from, from a screenwriting perspective.
But his whole thing was: ”We’re not making movies until the scripts are great.”
And both of these scripts don’t look to be great. Clayface got a 75% Rotten Tomatoes score. And that’s what it looks like. It looks like an average ass movie.
And the problem here is that, and what a lot of people who are playing defense for Clayface are saying is, “Well, it’s not a superhero movie. It’s a horror movie.” Well, okay. That’s fine. But if you’re going to be judged by the horror movie space, well, guess what? Resident Evil made $60 million its opening weekend. Backrooms made $80 million its first weekend. So you don’t really have an excuse here, because you’re not even scoring well in the horror department.
The reason I have no interest in seeing it is two-fold. And I sense that a lot of people feel the same way. One, the actor has a fairly weird face. It’s not a face I want to watch for 2 hours. And two, the movie looks off-putting. I don’t know how else to explain it. So, why would I want to feel put-off for 2 hours?
It sucks because if you take away all the Hollywood glitz and glamour and all the BS, I think you’re looking at a man in James Gunn who’s honestly looking for good stories to tell, for good characters to build movies around.
Unfortunately, it isn’t just about finding a great character and a great plot. You got to – and I talked about this in an article recently – you got to connect it together in a way where it feels like this well-constructed living breathing organism, rather than just something you plot out the beats for and then make your character change over the course of the story. That’s not enough. You got to make it something that we feel.
I know this because the script I get emailed about the most, by far, is Osculum Infame, and people are constantly asking me about it. They’re just obsessed with it and it’s because Bernd, the writer, he just… he wrote something special, and it just all connected, and it just all did everything it was supposed to do, and it found that way to not just be something on paper, but reach out and pull the reader into its world.
It’s so hard to do that.
Have you guys seen any of these films? What are your thoughts? In the meantime, I may just check out the first episode of Carrie tonight. Why not? It’s free on Amazon. The TV pickings have been so slim that if this doesn’t work, I’m stuck waiting another year for White Lotus Season 4 to come out!
