Digger
Whatever else you might want to say about Gonzalez Iñarritu, you can’t fault the man for bringing a sense of energy to the big screen. In Digger, which the director had been obsessing over for more than a decade and which he co-wrote with a team of other writers, he doesn’t disappoint – at least in that respect. His study of a man, oil magnate Digger Rockwell (played by Tom Cruise), is nothing less than a raging commentary about greed, self-gratification at the expense of humanity itself, the fatal internecine relationship between big business and government and society’s heedless, headlong race toward dystopia. Gonzalez Iñárritu captures all this in an exercise that plays with form, transitioning from what seems real to what clearly is a simulacrum, capturing its meaning in full post-modern irony. Whether that amounts to something serious likely will depend on each individual viewer. But this much can be said: Gonzalez Iñárritu always takes his audiences on one hell of a ride.
Verity
Colleen Hoover hit it big with her 2018 her novel Verity, which has spent 103 weeks on one New York Times best-seller list or another. This makes it had to understand why the movie adaptation, directed by Michael Showalter, adapted by screenwriter Nick Antosca and starring Dakota Johnson, Josh Hartnett and Anne Hathaway, is so bad. The film is shot competently enough, the setting – a mansion set in a scenic Vermont glade – feels perfect, and Antosca’s handling of Hoover’s plot reportedly unfolds pretty much as it does on the page, yet something is off. That’s partly due to Showalter’s casting of Johnson who pulls off another one of her trademark somnambulant performances, which is a drag on the energies of both Hartnett and Hathaway. But Showalter is to blame, too, for – central among other crimes against art – staging hilarious sex scenes that had some of us snickering just when we should have been swooning … or something.
The History of Concrete
Let’s now turn to something a bit more entertaining, and that would be the documentary The History of Concrete, directed by John Wilson. If you ever caught Wilson’s docuseries How to With John Wilson on HBO, you know how he manages to take everyday topics – New York city scaffolding, for example, or “How to Cook Perfect Risotto” – and uses them to explore larger existential issues in a low-key but wry and often hilarious manner. He does the same with concrete in his feature-length documentary, taking what would in most hands be a straightforward study and yet tackling everything from a 3,100-mile race in New York to his efforts even to raise funds to make such a film. Above all else, Wilson is a master of making a whole lot out of what would seem to be very little.
Movies 101 is hosted by Dan Webster, Nathan Weinbender, Mary Pat Treuthart and produced by Aaron Weer. Web support is provided by Anna Gyure Havlek.