Yeah Dude, Okay

Film Collection: Brighton Beach Memoirs

August 29th, 2026

Directed by Gene Saks
Written by Neil Simon
1986 | 110 minutes | English
VHS

Jonathan Silverman, Blythe Danner, Bob Dishey, Judith Ivey, Brian Drillinger, Stacey Glick, Lisa Waltz, Alan Weeks, Jason Alexander, James Handy

What it’s about: It’s 1937, Brooklyn, and the memoirs are those of Eugene (Silverman), a basically good kid of nearly 15 who is wrestling a wise-ass streak and some raging hormones amidst the chaos of the rest of his family. His mother Kate (Danner) is wound tight, trying to keep everything together: her widowed sister, Blanche (Ivey) is a shy, withering woman who might have a chance with the Irish man across the street (Handy) of whom Kate doesn’t approve. Blanche’s elder daughter Nora (Waltz) is pushing for an opportunity to audition for a Broadway show, even though it would mean missing school. Eugene’s older brother, Stanley (Drillinger) is struggling to find his way and contribute to the family, as their father Jack (Dishy) is overworking himself at two jobs to keep everyone afloat. And Eugene’s younger cousin, Laurie (Glick), who’s heart has a palpitation, is wryly observing it all.

Reflections: Contemporary reviews suggest that this film adaptations blunts some of the edge of Simon’s original play, but in my experience with it now, that’s its primary charm. There is a coziness to it, a nostalgic innocence, decades removed from my own childhood, but which fed into it from older generations. Eugene, as a narrator, is sweet but not saccharine–equally fascinated to learn about masturbation as he is concerned about the larger things of life. The stakes are serious–concern for family in an increasingly tense Europe, the economic anxiety of carrying the family through the Depression era, familial roles that unfairly shape responsibilities and regrets–but nothing is ever completely dire. There is a slightly artificial sheen, a neatness to everything, that ends up feeling a little bland, but also weirdly comforting.

As a film, the theatrical origins bleed through a bit–characters talk in long, often emotional exchanges, peppered with callbacks, witticisms, and colorful phrases. Danner and Ivey are the standout performances, grounding their characters and falling into the “golly-gee” tone of the script the least. The design and look of the film are soft and warm, which fit neatly into the overall wistful feeling, and when the action does open up slightly–Eugene charging down the street, running a milk-bottle like a football, for example–there is some fun to be had in the movement.

As I was watching it, I couldn’t help but think that it came out the same year as Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, another film with a teenage boy breaking the fourth wall to explain his life. But where John Hughes’s film is grounded in its (then) modernity, a young voice speaking forward, this one is the voice of someone older looking back. It’s not really that things were simpler, then–as Eugene observes, there always comes a moment where childhood ends. But there is a sense of reassurance in looking back, having grown up, and that’s the exercise of this. It’s a mild, old-fashioned mac-and-cheese kind of movie, but that’s not a criticism–those have their place, and I had fun with it.
Film Collection: Wages of Fear

August 29th, 2026

Directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot
Written by Henri-Georges Clouzot & Jérome Geronimi
1953 | 148 minutes | French, Spanish, English, Italian & German
Criterion DVD

Yves Montand, Charles Vanel, Folco Lulli, Peter van Eyck, Véra Clouzot, William Tubbs, Dario Moreno

What it’s about: An isolated South American oil town, only accessible by plane, has collected a disgruntled cadre of drifting foreign laborers–unable to find work or afford the airfare out. Among this wayward group are Mario (Montand), affable but disaffected, especially to the affections of the local cantina girl, Linda (Clouzot); Jo (Vanel), a blustering and conniving fellow Frenchman and one-time gangster; Luigi (Lulli), a hot-headed and big-hearted Italian; and Bimba (van Eyck), a closed-off German survivor of Nazi atrocities. When a remote derrick blows and the only way to put it out is with nitroglycerin charges, these four desperate men are hired for the high-paying but incredibly dangerous job of transporting a large amount of the highly unstable substance in two trucks across hundreds of miles of mountainous desert, decaying roadways, and their own inner terrors.

Reflections: Based on the 1950 novel by Georges Arnaud, this is a classic thriller and remains, even seventy-odd years later, one of the tensest, most uncomfortable experiences in cinema this side of a Safdie film. Clouzout draws out the tension–the movie is long and slow, spending nearly its first half building the atmosphere in the town before the proper adventure kicks off. At first, we see these different men process and react to the purposeless dead-end in which they find themselves. Personalities and prejudices grind against one another as all the different exploitation simmers around. Once the trucks get rolling, though, the stakes become immediately more existential, and the pretensions and ambitions that were built up in the first half are rapidly stripped away.

The sense of doom and mortality in this second half is constant and escalating. The story lingers for achingly long stretches in moments of potential disaster and, even when they are narrowly averted, something unexpected will go wrong instead. The audience is rarely given a chance to breathe, and when they are, the space is filled with the character’s–especially the melodramatic Jo’s–own reactions. As Jo, Vanel convincingly embodies the way his confidence and power is stripped away as a sham, and Montand is sad-eyed and aloof, becoming visibly harder and rawer the deeper into hell he goes.

The film is dark and dour, full of muck and grime both visually and spiritually. It’s also undeniably exciting and shows a mastery of form that put “the French Hitchcock” on the international map, won a bunch of festival prizes, and has been cited as one of the best European films of all time. And watching it now, I’m struck by the salience of its questions about economic survival in desperate circumstances, oil as a corrupting force, and commitment to the dream of a better life, even in the face of deadly insanity.
Film Collection: Underworld: Rise of the Lycans

August 29th, 2026

Directed by Patrick Tatopoulos
Written by Danny McBride, Dirk Blackman & Howard McCain
2009 | 92 minutes | English
DVD

Michael Sheen, Bill Nighy, Rhona Mitra, Steven Mackintosh, Kevin Grevioux, David Aston, Elizabeth Hawthorne, Craig Parker

What it’s about: Based on a story by Danny McBride (not that one), Robert Orr, and Len Wiseman, the third film in the Underworld series is a prequel to the original, telling a backstory of the struggle between the lycan Lucian (Sheen) and the vampire elder Viktor (Nighy). In a vaguely medieval period, not long after the start of the conflict between werewolves and vampires, Viktor created the Lycans–werewolves able to hold on to their humanity, rather than becoming mindless beasts–to serve the vampires as a slave class. Lucian was the first and most favored of these new creations, but he began to overstep himself, calling out the unjust treatment of the lycans and becoming involved with Viktor’s daughter Sonja (Mitra), leading the lovers into conflict with her tyrannical father.

Reflections: This is not a “good” movie. It unironically contains the line “But father, I love him!”–that’s the level we’re working on here. Visually, the color palette is almost non-existent, lighting is a somewhat foreign concept, and the fight scenes are over-edited and full of awkward CGI werewolves that just look silly at this point. Every story beat is exactly what you think it’s going to be, played out with a relative minimum of personality. It’s all very stupid. But this also not a movie that’s really supposed to be “good;” this is a movie you watch because it’s very stupid–the mall-goth vibes and melodramatic teen angst level of storytelling are kind of the point. And on that level, it somewhat works, if not as well as the previous films.

Most of that is down to Nighy and Sheen reprising their roles in the franchise, the former stalking around and glowering like he was made for it, and the latter bringing what energy he can to the tropey role he’s in, and kind of working it against type as the sweaty, brutal hero figure. Rhona Mitra is fine; nobody else has that much to do, but things do occasionally indulge in a particularly sweet bit of action choreography or an especially metal shot of the castle where most of the action takes place and drop enough breadcrumbs of cool to see it through.

If you give in to it, there is a certain cheesy sweep to the “I’m gonna swordfight your evil dad”-type horny vibes, but the change in setting means it doesn’t quite have the “Kate Beckinsale shooting dudes while doing flips in leather” kind of rizz that’s the reason I picked up the box set in the first place. I don’t know that I’ve actually watched the last two (yet), but that lack makes it the least fun of the first three. It’s not offensively bad, but not necessary to seek out unless you’re really getting into the franchise.
Film Collection: Seven Psychopaths

August 28th, 2026

Directed by Martin McDonagh
Written by Martin McDonagh
2012 | 110 minutes | English
Blu-Ray

Colin Farrell, Sam Rockwell, Woody Harrelson, Christopher Walken, Harry Dean Stanton, Tom Waits, Brendan Sexton III, Abbie Cornish, Olga Kurylenko, Long Ngyuen, Kevin Corrigan, Gabourey Sidibe, Michael Stuhlbarg, Michael Pitt, Željko Ivanek, Linda Bright Clay

What it’s about: Martin (Farrell) is a screenwriter, struggling with his most recent project, a thriller called Seven Psychopaths. He’s drinking too much, his relationship is on the rocks, and the script isn’t going anywhere. This is of great concern to his friend Billy (Rockwell), a ne’er-do-well type who is involved in a scheme with Hans (Walken) to kidnap dogs for ransom. Without consulting his partner, Billy snatches the beloved dog of Charlie (Harrelson), a violent gangster who starts obsessively pursuing the kidnappers. Martin and Hans are roped into the aftermath as the three of them, together, fend off the threat while trying to hammer out what kind of story Martin wants to tell.

Reflections: Like 8½ and Adaptation before it, this is a film that is, abstractedly, about itself. And that is a fundamentally navel-gazing exercise: not for nothing is the main character named Martin. McDonagh seems to be working through a kind of toxic-masculinity–the aggressive, violent impulses and the fascination with them, alcoholism as a coping mechanism, disconnection in relationships with women, and so on. His self-insert in Farrell is flanked by Rockwell’s id-driven Billy, constantly trying to wrestle control of the movie, and the older and more reflective superego in Hans, to whom Walken brings a kind of authoritative serenity. Meanwhile, Harrelson provides a counterweight: the violent man with a weird sensitivity to Martin’s sensitive man with a streak of violence.

Mixed into this core are a whirl of recognizable faces in strange side stories. Tom Waits (clutching a rabbit) tells a story of being part of a serial-killer-killer couple, with nods to real historical killings (such as the Texarkana Moonlight Murders). The main trio discuss and rework the story of a Vietnamese fighter (Nguyen) taking revenge for America’s actions in the war. The characters reference action film tropes and interrogate quotes from Ghandi or Buddhist philosophy. The allusions and fragmentations are trying to push the inward quality of the film into a larger social context–they’re not always successful, but they are entertaining, weird, and sharply written.

A self-obsessed, very dude-oriented movie is not going to be everyone’s cup of tea, and that’s fair. And I would say it’s easily the weakest of McDonagh’s four films so far, which never quite rises to the hallucinatory heights of the aforementioned similar works. But the cast is great and all giving strong performances. And it’s interesting as a glimpse of a the kind of stories we were telling in a particular moment, as we began, in the early 2010s, wrestling with some of the more toxic aspects of 2000s culture. It’s maybe a little too clever for its own good, but there is still intelligence to it and a kind of shaggy-dog charm that makes it worth watching.
Film Collection: The Pink Panther

August 28th, 2026

Directed by Blake Edwards
Written by Maurice Richlin & Blake Edwards
1963 | 121 minutes | English
VHS

David Niven, Peter Sellers, Robert Wagner, Capucine, Claudia Cardinale, Brenda de Banzie, Colin Gordon, John Le Mesurier, James Lanphier, Guy Thomajan, Michael Trubshawe, Riccardo Billi, Mari Welles, Martin Miller, Fran Jeffries, Gale Garnett

What it’s about: Hapless Parisian inspector Jacques Clouseau (Sellers) has been on the trail of notorious jewel thief The Phantom for twenty years. Unbeknownst to him, his wife Simone (Capucine) is taken up with The Phantom, bachelor playboy Sir Charles Lytton (Niven), behind his back. Furthermore, Lytton’s American nephew George (Wagner) has come to Europe and seems to be running some game of his own. All of them converge on a ski resort in Cortina, also hosting Princess Dala (acted by Cardinale, dubbed by Garnett), who just so happens to be in possession of the world’s most fabulous diamond, the eponymous Pink Panther.

Reflections: If I’ve seen this before, it hasn’t been for decades. In my mind, I thought of it as a goofball comedy caper film, and it is that, but it’s also very effective as a thriller. There are pratfalls galore, wry dialogue, delightfully absurd situations–the gorilla car chase, a hallway routine acted out on the streets of Rome, stands out in mind–but they exist around a pressure-cooker plot that mostly plays it straight and ends on a surprisingly dark (and code-breaking) note. The best moments of the film play into both these instincts simultaneously–an extended sequence in which Simone has to juggle multiple men in her hotel room wrings tension out of physical comedy in a sharp and cackling way and is incredible to watch.

It also drips with an undeniable ’60s style, starting with that iconic theme music by Henry Mancini and a playful, energetic cartoon title sequence. Niven oozes charm, Sellers walks the line between big-hearted and tightly wound, both Capucine and Cardinale play up their characters as sharp and sexy in different ways. By modern standards, the pace is slow and the gags somewhat restrained, but it gives both the jokes and the various traps and schemes of the characters time to breathe and leaves room for the complexities of each relationship to sink in.

Given that it spawned seven sequels, two reboots, multiple animated series, several television specials, and even a handful of video games, there is clearly a special sauce here that tapped into pop cultural consciousness. Watching it now, it feels like classic entertainment, giving off a certain nostalgic, family-friendly feeling but without sacrificing a naughtily winking edge. A movie that goes as well with a cocktail as a cup of cocoa, and a delight either way.
Film Collection: Legend

August 26th, 2026

Directed by Ridley Scott
Written by William Hjortsberg
1985 | 114 minutes | English
DVD — Director’s Cut

Tom Cruise, Mia Sara, Tim Curry, David Bennent, Alice Playten, Billy Barty, Annabelle Lanyon, Robert Picardo, Cork Hubbart, Peter O’Farrell, Kiran Shah

What it’s about: Child of the Forest Jack (Cruise) takes his sweetheart, Princess Lili (Sara), to see the unicorns, embodiments of the world’s light and magic. But an impulsive Lili touches the animals, forbidden for mortals, and allows the forces of the Lord of Darkness (Curry) a chance to assassinate one of them, tipping the world onto the verge of eternal night. Separated in the ensuing chaos, the two young lovers must right the situation: him with the help of the mischievous Gump (Bennent) and his band of faeries, and her by resisting the temptations of Darkness.

Reflections: Of the big ’80s fantasy films, this is one of the dreamiest and weirdest. The director’s cut–which adds 24 minutes–moves at a languid pace, the characters are mostly flat archetypes, several important plot mechanics basically boil down to “it’s magic, it’s fine”–this is a movie that operates on vibes more than logic. But the director’s two previous films were Alien and Blade Runner–Ridley Scott can nail a vibe. Everything is suffused with an opulent and increasingly gothic design, storms of petals or clouds of bubbles dance around in the frame, there is glitter all over the place. The dialog veers from weirdly stilted (“Kill her! Forget her! Think of the unicorn!”) to bumbling-sidekick shtick (“Aye, tis no sight for a sober man.”) and nothing is ever really explained, but the texture of the whole thing is easy to get lost in.

More than that, though, I remember seeing this movie around middle-school age and there was something hypnotic about it. Watching it again as an adult, there is a thick undertone of coming-of-age sexuality to the whole thing that I think registered subconsciously–it feels like a fever dream, but it is doing something. There is also a lot of campy humor to it–just the way the goblin Blix (Playten) delivers a “Wow.” to an overreaction from the supreme evil is funnier than most of the actual “jokes.” But no one is working harder to sell this thing than Tim Curry (RIP, sir). Setting aside the wild design of his character, his performance is magnetically weird, over the top in exactly the right way, and he ends up carrying the whole film (just look at the box art).

I’m not surprised this flopped, which it did. It’s a really eccentric turn and still not really like anything else Scott has made. It doesn’t exactly make a lot of sense, but film–art in general–is not a totally intellectual experience. This feels more like it’s trying to tap into something more mythical–serving up sumptuous images and pulling together a mishmash of things from folklore and the collective unconscious. I kind of love this movie for that, but it also got me at the right age and it’s one I’d recommend cautiously; one’s mileage may vary depending on one’s patience for its oddball nonsense.
Film Collection: The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas

August 26th, 2026

Directed by Colin Higgins
Written by Larry L. King, Peter Masterson and Colin Higgins
1982 | 114 minutes | English
VHS

Dolly Parton, Burt Reynolds, Dom DeLuise, Charles Durning, Jim Nabors, Robert Mandan, Theresa Merritt, Lois Nettleton, Noah Beery Jr., Barry Corbin, Raleigh Bond

What it’s about: The town of Gilbert, TX exists in harmony with the Chicken Ranch, a old-west brothel on the edge of town that has become a local institution, currently being run by Miss Mona Stangely (Parton), who enjoys an ongoing tryst with the town sheriff, Ed Earl Dodd (Reynolds). But this harmony is disrupted by Melvin P. Thorpe (DeLuise), a shit-stirring, fame-seeking investigative journalist from New Jersey by way of Houston. Thorpe’s manufactured outrage reaches a fever pitch after a party at the Chicken Ranch with the Aggie football team, drawing attention from the Governor (Durning) and presenting an existential threat to the future of the Chicken Ranch and perhaps Mona and Ed Earl’s relationship as well.

Reflections: RIP Dolly–pouring it out for a real one. I have a sentimental attachment to this film; it’s weird, a little leaden in places, and was apparently miserable to make, but it’s also some genuine country fun. The songs are great, Burt Reynolds has a little bit of an edge to his grumpy comedy, and Dolly has enough charisma to carry the whole thing, even if it doesn’t fully let her let loose. Dom DeLuise does an awkward boot-scoot in a weird little cowboy outfit and a pageboy haircut. That’s… certainly something to see. Charles Durning got an Oscar nomination for this. It’s very sex-positive and not weird about it. There’s a lot to enjoy.

And while it is absolutely meant to be broad entertainment, there is a certain resonance in it. Underneath the musical coating, you have the archetypal western story: modernity upsetting an older way of life that there’s no going back to. And that modernity reflects ultimately the same late ’70s/early ’80s anxiety in something like Network–Thorpe even tells Ed Earl he and his television show represent the new kind of justice. For all the chuckles and cheery attitude, there is a melancholy to it, and one of Dolly’s best songs gets the heart of that moment (“I Will Always Love You,” written well before the film but repopularized by it).

But more than that, there is an earnestness to the silliness, a kind of old-fashioned, cheesy quality that modern comedy is too self-aware to really replicate, but which still holds up. It’s the kind of movie one wants to watch on a cozy afternoon–light and cheerful, spilling over with star-power, some pathos, but it all turns out all right. Even one of the authors of the original play admitted the work wasn’t exactly Shakespeare, but it’s got heart and charm and is worth watching if you haven’t seen it or revisiting if you have.
Film Collection: Damien — Omen II

August 24th, 2026

Directed by Don Taylor
Written by Stanley Mann & Mike Hodges
1978 | 107 minutes | English
Blu-Ray

William Holden, Lee Grant, Jonathan Scott-Taylor, Lucas Donat, Robert Foxworth, Nicholas Pryor, Lew Ayers, Sylvia Sidney, Lance Henrikson, Lucas Donat, Elizabeth Shepherd, Allan Arbus, Meshach Taylor

What it’s about: Seven years after the events of the first film, Damien (Scott-Taylor) is now a middle-school aged kid, living under the care of his uncle Richard (Holden) and aunt Ann (Grant) and attending a prestigious military academy with his cousin Mark (Donat). But Damien can’t escape the fact that he is the Biblical Antichrist, surrounded by forces working both for and against him, and as he wrestles with the truth of his identity, his uncle is forced to reckon with the fact that the turmoil in his company and the increasing feeling that something is wrong with his nephew may be connected.

Reflections: The horror of this movie is the horror of adolescence from two different perspectives. On the one hand, you have Damien beginning the film as a kid who knows there’s something different about him, coming to realize that he actually is the monster every pubescent kid fears they must be at one moment or another, and having to come to terms with what that means. And on the other hand, you have Richard as the parental figure, playing out the nightmare of realizing that the child you’ve raised is growing into something you don’t recognize, something that may even be dangerous. That’s a really interesting concept, and this movie is trying to do a lot with it.

The problem is, while it’s a fascinating situation, it doesn’t have a lot of forward momentum. Despite a lot of really interesting scenes, the movie never feels like it’s headed toward anything; the ultimate stakes aren’t ever really clear. There are a lot of interesting ideas floating around: corporate expansionism as a tool of evil in a friendly guise, an environmental awareness, the fact that the Antichrist thrives in military culture, the paranoia of a destructive conspiracy at work in all levels of society. But the script never quite follows through on any of them. The performances, atmosphere, mis-en-scene, etc., are all firing, but the film doesn’t do anything resolute or satisfying with them.

Which isn’t to say it’s not a good watch. Some of the death scenes are fantastic–the reporter Joan Hart (Shepherd) being mauled by raven and flung into a truck is a particularly campy highlight. As I was watching this, I was trying to come up with comparable films, and it’s kind of a combination of Dead Poet’s Society, We Need to Talk About Kevin, and Final Destination. Like a lot of first sequels in horror franchises, it’s not as strong as the first film, but it does take the premise into some more personal and experimental territory, and it’s worth watching for that.
Film Collection: Veronika Voss

August 23rd, 2026

Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Written by Rainer Wenrer Fassbinder, Pea Fröhlich & Peter Märthesheimer
1982 | 104 minutes | German
Criterion Blu-Ray

Rosel Zech, Hilmar Thate, Cornelia Froboess, Annmarie Düringer, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Doris Schade, Erik Schumann, Günther Kaufmann

What it’s about: In 1955, West Germany, an affable sports reporter named Robert Krohn (Thate) comes across a distressed woman in the rain. The woman turns out to be Veronika Voss (Zech), a star of 1930s cinema who has fallen out of the limelight in the years since the war. Despite already having a girlfriend, Henriette (Froboess), Robert is bewitched by Veronika, but soon discovers she herself is under the the spell of Dr. Marianne Katz (Düringer), a neurologist running an eerie clinic who may not have Veronika’s best interests at heart.

Reflections: Inspired by the life and death of the German actress Sybille Schmitz and cribbing its notes from a bygone era of noir and melodrama–notably Sunset Boulevard–Fassbinder, struggling with his own drug addiction at the time, wraps a bleak and angry story in a sugary coating of nostalgic weepie kitsch. The politics of the film–part of the director’s BRD Trilogy, which each take the life of a 1950s woman as a microcosm of the German postwar consciousness–seem to revolve around this juxtaposition: a criticism of his era’s simultaneous denial and aestheticization of the recent past, but I’m not an expert on German cultural history and can only take stabs at that kind of interpretation.

What’s left is a kind of strange anti-love story. Robert can’t explain–doesn’t even seem to want–his fascination with Veronika and is ineffectual at either rescuing her from anything, achieving justice, or getting the truth. Veronika claws at the walls of her cage, but also plays a willing accomplice in her own destruction. Henriette’s affection and openness are the pathway to her doom. Nothing is truly resolved, no catharsis takes place, and Dr. Katz, disinterested in any real emotion, is the only one who doesn’t lose. Yet Fassbinder uses all the tropes of high emotion–the gorgeous black and white cinematography and noirish lighting, the sparkle of opulent movie star glamor, a soundtrack that mixes classical European film scores with American country and swing–to deliver a story that ends up feeling all the more cold, sharp, and nightmarish that way.

This was a first-time watch, and it left me with an impression I’ve gotten from all the Fassbiner work I’ve seen: a restless talent with a keen intellect, a firm stylistic vision, and a relentless energy being swallowed up by his dreams. The film won’t be for those who don’t like a bit of a sour taste, but the electricity of the filmmaking is intoxicating.
Film Collection: W.

August 23rd, 2026

Directed by Oliver Stone
Written by Stanley Weiser
2008 | 129 minutes | English
DVD

Josh Brolin, Elizabeth Banks, Ellen Burstyn, James Cromwell, Richard Dreyfuss, Jeffrey Wright, Scott Glenn, Thandiwe Newton, Toby Jones, Noah Wylie, Jason Ritter, Stacey Keach, Michael Gaston, Robb Corddry

What it’s about: The rare biopic of a sitting president, Stone and Weiser juxtapose the time around George W. Bush’s (Brolin) 2003 decision to invade Iraq with his rise from a 1960’s Yale fratboy failson to the office of the presidency. In the parallel stories, Bush wrestles with insecurity and uncertainty, struggling to earn the respect of his father (Cromwell) as a younger man and to demonstrate he’s earned his place as an older one, but not quite savvy enough to do either, culminating in disaster.

Reflections: What a movie to watch in 2026; there is a moment where Dick Cheney (Dreyfuss) gives a presentation about controlling the Strait of Hormuz that gave me chills. I remember seeing this film at the time and finding it the kind of unsubtle political critique I’d expect from Oliver Stone: Brolin, as Bush, never seems to quite know what he’s talking about, Dreyfuss is practically twirling his moustache as Cheney, Scott Glenn’s Donald Rumsfeld talks like an alien pretending to be human, Toby Jones plays Karl Rove as a weird, spidery little hanger on, etc. There is a scene where the cadre of them are walking-and-talking on a ranch road, only to realize they don’t know where they are, which was a little on the nose. And so on. But seeing it again now, in the context of current political discourse, I have kind of shifted my opinion on its restraint and its overall success because of that.

The dark joke of it is the way its played in earnest–the emotional anxieties of an entitled rich kid have the arc of a tragic struggle because they actually took on tragic consequences. But in structuring it that way, Stone and Weiser are forced to give their subject some empathy; George does have a gift for connecting with people, even if he’d honestly rather be drinking a beer with them and watching baseball than trying to understand complicated things like foreign policy. The failure of the situation came from a system of people trying to act decisively, willing to compromise on ideals, and overeager to protect their reputations more than any personal, nihilistic avarice. Stone holds back as a filmmaker also–tipping his ironic hand a little with his needle drops, or indulging in an overwrought dream sequence here or there, but without the kind of showy indulgences he does admittedly well in his most famous films.

And in retrospect, all of that means it’s trusting its viewer to recognize it in a way that a film like this probably couldn’t anymore. And the events it depicts were a flashpoint in the societal erosion that led to where we are now. Which does make it kind of tragic, even beyond the perspective it presents knowingly, and an interesting piece of cinema as cultural history.