Weekly Report from the N.T.A.B. Division of Media Review

Minx/The Adam Project/Quentin Tarantino

Director’s Note: While the whole staff here at the DMR is personally thrilled for Mark and Janice’s impending nuptials, we are professionally very concerned about the potential problems this places from a Human Resources standpoint, particularly regarding inter-department, interpersonal relationships of a romantic nature. As that is not our department, we have elected to distract ourselves with the following choices.

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Minx (HBO Max)

Another filthydirty grown-ups only series just dropped the first two episodes, looking to recapture that Thursday night spot in your heart; a high-spirited series about a woman trying to publish a truth-telling magazine that will change the world, only to find herself publishing a porn mag aimed at women. It doesn’t sound very funny, but trust me, it’s light years away from some of the other shows set in the 1970s and 1980s these last few years.

It's perhaps a good thing that I just got back from Greece, easily the most phallocentric place I’ve ever experienced, because seeing racks upon racks of brightly painted wooden phalluses (phalli?) that are sold ostensibly as bottle openers was the perfect tonic for the scene in the first episode where a series of potential male centerfolds are, um, auditioned, and we are treated to a montage of penises the likes of which, I’ll warrant, have never been seen before on Cable Television. It also really made me miss Greece.

Not knowing what the collective noun is for a group of male genitalia, I’m going to just assume it’s a patriarchy of penises and go on with my life. Ophelia Lovibond plays Joyce Prigger, a no-frills kind of college intellectual, trying to get a magazine produced called, no kidding, The Matriarchy Awakens. Jake Johnson, an actor I always manage to confuse with David Krumholtz, plays a successful magazine publisher named Doug Renetti, and do yourself a favor and freeze the picture on his business card and marvel at the magazine titles in his publishing empire. My particular favorite, the one that made me laugh out loud, is Feet Feet Feet.

How the magazine goes from The Matriarchy Awakens to Minx is the journey, and it works for two different reasons: the uptight stick-in-the-mud, saddled with all of the loosey-goosey, wacky characters, is a time-honored comedy pairing. But that cliché hides some interesting messaging (insofar as there have been two episodes and it’s probably an 8 part show, at least). The take-away might be as simple as “don’t just a (porn) book by its cover,” but in 2022, it comes off as something north of “don’t let perfect be the enemy of good,” and somewhere south of “when an ally offers help, learn to say yes.”

If a desensitizing amount of male frontal nudity doesn’t scare you off, watch the first two episodes of Minx for yourself and see what you think. I’m certainly up for the first four or five, and maybe all eight...man, that sounded so filthy...

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The Adam Project (Amazon Prime)

I give up. Ryan Reynolds wore me down. That guy, boy, I tell you what...

I don’t know how to tell you about the plot of this movie. It’s a time travel story, and about all I can say that won’t mess something up for you is that adult time pilot Ryan Reynolds boom-tubes back to 2022 and has to deal with his 12-year old self. There’s a bunch of other stuff that happens, with punches and lasers and bullets and all of that hoo-ha. That’s all kinda secondary to the fact that this movie feels like going through the tunnel in the office in Being John Malkvitch right into Ryan Reynolds’ head. If you love his whip-crack wise-ass sarcastic little asides, then today is your lucky day, because every character in the movie talks exactly like him. That there is a reason for it is nice, but also beside the point. This is 100% market penetration for Reynolds’ brand.

That being said, the very idea of having to deal with your own self as a tweenager is pretty horrifying. I know what kind of kid I was, and I wouldn’t want to have to deal with my dumb `ass. Now imagine that kid was baby Ryan Reynolds. That’s one punchable kid, I’m telling you. The casting for the child actor isn’t so much “does he look like young Ryan Reynolds?” (he does not) but rather, “Does he have the same vocal cadence as Ryan Reynolds?” (he does).

In addition to Deadpool, the movie stars Gamora, Elektra, and BannerHulk, and they are all great. The scenes with Mark Ruffalo and Reynolds in particular are very strong. But enough actor/casting nonsense, the most important question is this: does the time travel hold up?

I think so. They make a point of answering every technical question the script calls for and even anticipate some of the questions the audience has by explaining them before they get to the problem area. As such, you’re able to sort of sit back and enjoy the vicarious thrill of watching adult Ryan Reynolds argue with his child-like self. That’s pretty funny. The whole movie is pretty funny, and strangely works for me. After Deadpool, this is my new favorite Ryan Reynolds movie.

Amazon is marketing it as a family movie, and that’s fine, if your family is one that lets your kids say “shit” and “asshole” and at least one dinner a week is a box of Pop-Tarts and a Diet Coke. If that’s y’all, then yes, it’s family-friendly. I prefer to think of it as an action-adventure movie with lots of clever dialogue and a surprising amount of heart that doesn’t ever teeter over into sugary-sweet.

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The 2022 NTAB Directorial Culture Exchange Update: Quentin Tarantino

This particular entry was intended to be something of an island, since both of us like Tarantino’s movies. It was a built-in win, because no matter what movies we picked, we’d like them. That was the plan, at least. Then we found ourselves on an international flight with a weirdly large library of digital titles. We decided to roll the dice and see how close we could get to Michael Curtiz or Frank Capra (the airplane had several of each director’s films in their classics session). The roll, however, landed squarely on Tarantino, and as it just so happened, there was one of his movies on the plane: Pulp Fiction. So we started with that. And as it just so happened, the only QT movie Janice hadn’t seen was Inglourious Basterds. Problem solved!

Tarantino’s second movie. The follow-up to Reservoir Dogs. An all-star cast. High expectations. All these years later, as much of a time capsule as it is for me, that movie is still quite watchable. Tarantino’s comment about what kind of storage his garage is and isn’t has not aged well—it showed up on life support to begin with (at the Austin premiere, Tarantino got called out for it from an audience member, so it was never okay)—but aside from that, there is a lot to enjoy, from the non-linear plot construction (a thing we take for granted in long form television these days) to the massive amount of subtext baked into the movie in every story. This movie was the last movie Tarantino would make until Kill Bill that had a secondary story going on behind the scenes. It’s a style of writing he returned to with Once Upon A Time in Hollywood, and one of my favorite things about his work. And the discussion points! What was in the briefcase? Was Fabienne pregnant? How the hell did Brett and his crew get mixed up with Marcellus? And what the HELL was up with the Gimp? No matter what anyone thinks about the rest of his movies, Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction earned their place in the American film canon, regardless of any controversy that may cling to them.

Inglourious Basterds, on the other hand, is Tarantino at his most self-indulgent. I say this in an appreciative way; this movie wouldn’t have gotten made by anyone else. It’s a war movie that appears after Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan and Schindler’s List, both of which made an impact, changed some hearts and minds, and so forth.

QT isn’t after all of that. He wants to see Eli Roth pulp a Nazi’s head in with a baseball bat. And, as it turns out, so do we. There is, if you don’t know, a kernel of truth to the movie (the real story is in some ways better,  and in some ways not so much, compared to the screenplay). But the movie we got is a nail-biter that uses explosive, horrifying violence to defuse long, excruciating build-ups of tension. It’s like a Howling Commandos movie, minus Captain America, written by John Milius and directed by Sam Fuller. Probably the most controversial thing about it was the deviation from history, shadowed obliquely by the title card, “Once upon a time in Nazi Occupied France...” This is not my favorite Tarantino movie, nor is it my least favorite Tarantino movie, but it’s solidly in the middle of the pack.