Reel-Time Review | Movies you might have missed during Summer 2023
Welcome to Real Time Review. This is a weekly show tackling the latest new releases out in theaters and on streaming. I’m your host, Jess Nusman, and with me, as always, fellow film critic Jason Evans. Good to be here, Jason. Unfortunately for our audience, we’re not going to be talking about the Meg Two this week, which maybe that’s also great for us because I didn’t have to see the Meg Two this this week and and contemplate what else I could have been doing with my Tuesday night. But I thought a fun thing for us to do
is talk about some low key kind of under the radar movies that people might have missed this summer. You know, because there’s just there’s just more to experience out there than Spiderman and The Flash. Even though I like Spiderman absolutely 100%. I will say about the Meg Two, I’m a little surprised that they chose not to show it to film critics because look, we we know what the Meg One was. And and I actually, look, I’m not saying it’s cinematic art by any stretch of the imagination, but as monsters in this deep blue sea go,
I thought the Meg One was watchable, had some funny and amusing moments and such. How bad, how bad must the Meg 2 be that they were like,
the sort of like debut feature of the year on this woman. Celine Song wrote and directed it and it’s very, I think, loosely based off of an experience she had herself. It is basically about these two kids growing up in South Korea that become close friends, kind of get one of those sort of cute little like 12 year old crush romances and then the girl of the friends, her parents move her to North America. And the movie basically is set over the course of several decades. And these two friends sort of reconnecting at multiple points
in time, most notably towards the end in New York City when they’re both adults. And it really is this sort of meditation on kind of like the different fork in the road paths that our lives take and the sort of what if questions that might keep many of us up at night about like, well, what if I had stayed in this one spot? Would I have wound up dating this other person? And how would my life be completely different? It’s very similar. Like, it reminds me a lot of Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy. A lot of
it really is these two really interesting characters just sort of walking around New York City and you as an audience, feeling the chemistry with them and sort of sensing that kind of inner turmoil of not understanding like, OK, I feel like I have a connection with this person, but like my, I’m in a different place in life than I was when I liked them. It’s just a really sort of surprisingly moving movie that I I did not see coming this year and it’s it’s really been a pleasant surprise and has not been when I’ve stopped
thinking about since it came out. Look, every I unfortunately did not get a chance to see it at the critics screening and just been so busy with things. I haven’t had a chance to see it yet. I know that I will before the end of the year because every critic I talked to says The Past Lives is a truly special film. Let me ask you a question though, about it. Why do you think it hasn’t gotten more attention outside of Look, you and I run in a circle with people who do nothing but talk about
right? About movies and and and and great movies. And this is supposed to be one of them. Why hasn’t the public caught on to it more? I I think it’s just, you know, it’s a smaller movie and you know, tent we doing an episode like this because smaller movies tend to kind of fall through the cracks and the big noise of the summer, everyone’s rushing out to go see there’s a big new blockbuster every week. And so it makes it a little bit, you know, if this had come out in March, maybe it’d be giving
a little bit more attention. It’s actually done pretty good business for a small art house movie. But really it’s kind of like we’re entering these kind of like dog days, you know, for us as critics, like August and September can be kind of like rough months and like, yeah, at the movies. But this is an excellent chance for people to kind of like jump back in and catch up with something that I think people will be really surprised by and really unexpectedly move by. I’ve sort of, I saw it with a couple of friends and
all of us walked out afterwards and we’re like, I can’t believe that, you know, we’re like drying the tears off our eyes. There’s a really moving experience that I think is is kind of one of the richest films of the year. All right. So for my first choice, I’m going to go a little bit off the board. I’m not going to take a movie. I’m going to take a limited TV series. And it’s called a Small Light. It was actually produced by National Geographic and is currently streaming on Disney Plus or Hulu. So there are
many options for people to see it. It stars Belle Pauley, who was in the first season of The Morning Show, a really, really nice young actress, and she plays a woman named Meep Guys. My bet is you’ve never heard of Meep Guys. Most people haven’t. But when I tell you what Meep Guys has done, you will know who she is. She is the woman who hid Anne Frank and her family during World War Two and she is the woman who collected and saved Anne Frank’s diary so that after the Nazis were gone, this diary was
preserved for the world to to know that story. It is such a beautiful, wonderful production. They do a fabulous job of recreating Holocaust era Amsterdam. It’s eight episodes and every single one of them is incredibly compelling, will draw you in it. It starts, you know, before the Holocaust and and the Germans come in. It ends at the very end of the war. So you really get the the full span of what happened in Amsterdam and what happened to Anne Frank and her family during that time. Everything about it is wonderful. And I have to tell
you something, I am. I’m the cochair of the film evaluation committee for the Atlanta Jewish Film Festival. I’ve done this for more than a decade now. I’m someone who sees a ridiculous number of Holocaust dramas, Holocaust documentaries, probably dozens and dozens of them every year. So for me to sit here and say to you, this is one of the best Holocaust dramas I’ve seen in recent years. I’m a guy who sees a lot of them. So this one is really, really special. I will add it to the the queue to to watch. So the next
one I wanted to bring up wanted to go in a completely different direction than sort of like this sort of slow burn, very meditative romance movie. It’s a release from Australia that actually just recently came out. But I think if people are kind of looking for a a fun kind of freak out experience to have in the theaters, I would really encourage them to see Talk to Me, which also I believe premiered at Sundance. It’s this Australian horror movie essentially. The setup is this group of teenagers who it’s not really explained why, but come into
the possession of an embalmed hand and essentially spend their nights doing what what I’m sure many teenagers do. They’re sitting around and partying, but part of that partying also includes having to shake said embalmed hand, which lets spirits come into your body and not the best choice. Not good choices. And as expected, things go terribly awry and get really, really scary and really intense. But to me, it’s also this interesting horror movie that is is sort of plugged into youth culture in this really fascinating way. There’s an aspect of the movie that is kind of
tying this sort of like possession tail into kind of like when you see or hear about kids doing these kind of like viral tick tocks. Because at these parties people are sort of standing around with phones trying videotaping kids as they’re briefly possessed by these ghosts and demons and whatnot. And so it’s sort of starting from this place of their of kind of being this interesting allegory for kind of like the dangerous things that people participate in on social media in order to get a bunch of reactions and clicks. It kind of abandons that at
a certain point, but I still think is a very, very effective, like if if you’re in the horror movies at all, very intense. If you’re not a horror movie person, I would stay as far away from it as possible. It freaked me out a bit, but I I I had a pretty I I thought it was pretty effective. I can’t quite say I had a great time because I was pretty shaken afterwards. But if that’s what the experience you want to have at the movies, I would say go for it. I I’ve heard that there
are people walking out of it like in tears, shivering that it is so creepy and so scary. That is something truly rare and truly difficult to put together. And I love the fact that it’s a very low budget film. Not well known producers or or directors and no stars. Directors were guys who were making stuff on like YouTube before. This is it are really their first feature and it’s it’s pretty impressive debut I have to say. Yeah. And I just love it when we discover new talents in this kind of way. The stars as well
it’s not and like you said it’s it’s Australian. So for an American audience, it’s going all of it’s going to feel very new. And I just think that kind of thing is really cool when it happens. So your last movie that you wanted to talk about is one that I kind of had not stopped thinking about since I saw it. Why? Why don’t you get us started? Yeah. So I think a lot of people have heard of Asteroid City by Wes Anderson, but I’m not sure how many people have seen it. The box office numbers,
they’re pretty good for Wes Anderson film. But but look, I mean, I’m hoping that I’m sure they’re members of our audience who haven’t seen it yet. And I I cannot recommend it more highly. And the thing that I think is really interesting about it is I think it’s a little more accessible than most Wes Anderson films look. It’s still going to have the very stylized look of a Wes Anderson picture. It’s going to have that very stilted dialogue, none of which feels real. And I think that turns a lot of people off to Wes Anderson
films. But the the plot here, the story here involves several different families who were in Asteroid City A, a A city and remote New Mexico desert. And for a variety of reasons, they sort of get trapped there for several days and they have to interact with each other. I’m not, I’m not, you know, spoiling anything to say that there is a alien who visits them, which is part of the whole story. But I I think that that makes it a little more accessible to a mainstream audience. I mean, look, some of the Wes Anderson’s other
films take place mostly on a train or in a hotel and and I think this with with an alien, sort of a little bit of a scifi kind of twist to it, is maybe a little more accessible to a mainstream audience. One of the things that’s fun about it is, my God, the cast. It’s like unbelievable the number of people who just walked into this film. I won’t even try to name them all, but there are dozens and dozens of very famous, very recognizable, really accomplished actors and actresses, many of whom show up to appear
in only one scene. And I think it’s a testament to the the stature and the degree that they admire Wes Anderson that they’re willing to do this kind of thing. And I I just, I I want to urge audiences, please go check this film out. It really, it’s a good time at the movies. I laughed a lot and it is just fun to watch a great director cooking, which is what he is really doing in this film. Some of the shots, the framing, everything about it. There’s just no one else in Hollywood who’s trying to
do what he does, and we should, we should give him more love. It’s an interesting movie in his filmography too, because I feel like, I mean, there’s this whole other like meta aspect to the movie that we didn’t even get into, which I was almost borderlining, borderline curious about what? How is he going to explain the structure? You should tell people it is technically a movie about a TV show, about a play. I think that’s right, yes. And then the Asteroid City plot that you described is the play within the team, within the production, within
the TV show. I’m even getting my mind a little bit, but it and it it never becomes confusing. I think he always has a way of like making it very clear, sort of like again, sort of like an Oppenheimer, he uses different, different color palace, different film stock to to tell us what we’re looking at. And for the most part the characters are confined to where they are. Like Edward Norton plays the the playwright and he never appears in his own play. The actors in the play do appear. You know it’s there’s an interesting using
that, there’s an interesting aspect to where it kind of becomes this sort of like metatextual read on Wes Anderson’s whole aesthetic and has obviously all the sort of pleasures that people get from his movies. But you know is also in some ways I feel like him kind of addressing some criticisms of his style and making. I think this movie is like a movie about a sort of theater troupe trying to put on a Wes Anderson production is kind of a good way to think about it. And so they’re constantly like you’re having like people like
Jason Swartzman and Scarlett Johansson who are playing actors, but then also playing characters within this production. And you’re sort of seeing how they’re able to channel things that are happening in their own lives into the roles they’re inhabiting and how those things mirror each other. And then the way that those things become further and further blurred as the movie goes on. I’m excited to sort of see it a second time because I think it is arguably one of his richest movies. And I was almost a bit kind of, like thrown off the first time I
saw it. And just sort of like, this is so dense and not what I was expecting. But it’s kind of been a movie I haven’t been able to stop thinking about since I saw it a couple months ago. Yeah, I can’t imagine that it won’t end up on a lot of our top ten list at the end of the year. If not, I mean, I feel like it’s very possible could end up in my top five. And again, you know, my big thing, whenever I’m thinking about reviewing movies, I always want to say okay, who’s
the audience for this? I’m. I’m not as much into the art maybe of it as I am into, you know, how does it connect with people and and are there people out there who will enjoy it? And I feel like the reason I want to talk about it in this episode is I feel like Asteroid City is a movie that more people will enjoy than have seen it. And so I really want again I come back to the fact I think it’s more accessible. It’s easier to some extent than other Wes Anderson films that can
be, you have to like really focused to understand what’s going on. I think there’s there’s a bit more breeziness for this one that I really enjoyed. So one kind of like last question to sort of wrap us up. We know where exiting the summer season, we’re getting into the fall. What is kind of one title that you’re really looking forward to in sort of the the fall movie slate, assuming assuming it doesn’t get pushed back Because I was going to say we have this thing going on at the writers strike at the moment and the
SAG strike at the moment. That kind of makes everything in flux. But what’s what were one or two things that you kind of have your eye on for the. I mean I thought we were going to get Bradley Cooper’s Maestro, which is his story of, oh God, I planked in the name of the Leonard Bernstein. Leonard Bernstein. Thank you. I couldn’t come up with that. I look after after what he did with the Stars Born I’m I’m very interested in seeing where Bradley Cooper does net goes next in terms of starring and and directing and
and all the other kind of stuff. So I was really into that but the the word is it’s probably going to be delayed. I also think Doom 2 is the other one to me that I’m I’m just super excited for because I love the originals or the first one, part one so much. Yeah. For me it’s probably. I mean, the Martin Scorsese movie Killers of the Flower Moon, which is coming out in October, is probably like the thing I’ve most been looking forward to. Also as a big David Fincher head I’m really looking forward to
his new movie The Killer which just if you were to describe the plot of that movie it sounds like something that just like someone plucked out of my mind as a 16 year old sort of like Fincher’s doing a movie with Michael Fossbender about a assassin going through a sort of a mental breakdown. Be like I don’t that someone’s been reading my my diary entries as a teenager but look forward to I’m afraid. I’m afraid I don’t know how many you may not get many of these I think they’ve already I’ve heard that the Scorsese
movie is not moving off the table of that’s been delayed enough times to where like that’s coming out October. They’ve already had somewhat of a promotional rollout for it but as he kind of said everything else is kind of in flux. So we’ll kind of keep our fingers crossed that we. Yeah. And really fingers crossed that that the studios, the producers and the writers and actors can get together and solve the strike. Because whether it’s delaying these films or more significantly to me, delaying films that aren’t yet finished or aren’t even begun production, at a
certain point we’ll all be paying the price for for the not so much for the strike, but for the the delay overall. And and I happen to think that they need to and to figure out a way to to figure out streaming and AI and all this other stuff. Well, Jason, thank you as always and TuneIn future weeks as we’ll discuss hopefully more of these titles on Real Time Review.
