Welcome back to the Ambassador Almanac! This we are all about vibes and the spread of positivity because boy howdy movie culture is UP. Obsession and Backrooms are smash hits at the box office I get the sense that Scary Movie will keep the vibes going. This is of course leading into a new Spielberg movie later this month so I wanted to spend what is ultimately a bit of a short week for just sharing my thoughts on what’s been happening at the movies plus another one that I saw and a new entry into the collection.
So the YouTubers might have saved movies. I joke but I was listening to my movie pod of choice today and when they broke down the numbers that Kane Parson’s Backrooms and Curry Barker’s Obsession are doing its actually nuts. A combined $284 million globally between the two movies at the time of this writing goes to show that we’ve reached a level of sensation that is genuinely rivaling a Star Wars movie right now.
There are two clear factors playing into it. The first being that Backrooms is built off of the Youtube series and already has a tremendously large fanbase. I’ve talked about it already but it’s sort of IP in its own right. I have seen a number of people reject the movie for not diving into the lore deep enough – something I complimented the movie on in my own review. The point being that there is already a dialogue happening in the threads around the movie going in.
It feels like with Obsession on the other hand it’s the opposite. Granted, Barker does have a viable Youtube presence and certainly had some fans. But I have to assume that most of the movie going public wasn’t coming in with the same level of YouTube baggage. Instead this is the ultimate word of mouth movie of the decade. I can’t begin to tell you how many crazy, spooky, exciting, inspiring, or just awesome movies I see and tell people they need to go. Man they never get back to me! People don’t follow through on that stuff very often but in this specific case it’s certainly happening. Why you may ask? I think the great concept of the movie mixed with the showy performances has done wonders for the movie. I think we all knew leaving the theater that this was destined to be a meme instantly:
It’s the kind of thing that immediately is entered into the lexicon of horror movies forever. And it does the thing all the great other lasting images do, within the context of the film it works perfectly and is taken seriously. As a meme…find me a better one the movie year. And it’s not just this one photo it’s the entire Inde Navarrette experience. It doesn’t take much time online to see clips and other stills from her performance and it certainly has drawn more attention to the movie. Also throw in the teaser trailer for the movie that showed Bear calling the sort of customer service center. One of the better scenes in the movie and really what a trailer should be. It mustered up a lot of interest but by no means gave too much away.
It’s a watershed moment for people who have been grinding out the movie slates of the 2020s and longing for an opportunity to push cinema back into the center of the conversation. I personally remain skeptical if this is a moment where everything changes. There has been a lot written and said about how the strength of these movies could spell doom for the holders of legacy IP…it’s wishful thinking to me. I’m throughly loving this moment while we are in it but it can go as quickly as it came. There is plenty of stuff coming the rest of the way and the end of year box office tallies will be interesting. But despite the enthusiasm I wonder if this narrative will survive the summer. Either way we gotta take the W’s while we can so keep making the memes and keep going to the movies.
What I Watched This Week
There was an interesting quirk with the movie calendar that ended with me writing about Saving Private Ryan before I went to see the new movie Pressure brought to us from director Anthony Maras. One is a sort of prequel to the other in a way. I don’t think Private Ryan is a complete dad movie though it is dad movie coded. It still has a good amount of action and adventure elements that I think at the very least make it a top shelf dad movie.
Pressure is full blown dad movie and it is proud of it. That’s not a knock either there is a real place for this in a movie ecosystem. Or at least I feel that way. I’ve been saying this all week but I believe it to be true. If you are one of the major studios and you see a script for a World War Two project come across your desk please just make it. If you can get real actors in it I don’t even care what it is or what its about or of its based on a true story or not. World War Two movies will never go out of style for me and I say keep them coming.
When it comes to Pressure the set up is pretty simple. Andrew Scott plays the best meteorologist from Britain, James Stagg. He is appointed to the head of the Allies weather division by General Dwight D. Eisenhower. In the lead up to what is supposed to be the June 5th invasion of France there is serious conflict amongst the weather teams for the US and Britain about what the conditions will be on the day. If they go and the weather sucks the results could be beyond costly. That is pretty much the movie.
I will use this opportunity to workshop a war film idea that is completely pointless. I wanna know about the quality of war films relative to a new stat I am call “MMR” or Man to Map Ratio. I wanna compare the number of characters we deem main to supporting vs the number of maps we get. Because my LORD there are an insane amount of maps and charts in this movie. Of course we get the classic BIG MAP that this up on the wall and has all of northern France on it. Plus those big ole arrows you have to have those. But we also get all the weather maps they are working on. They are rolling in maps for the big ole meetings. This is a crazy map count movie.
Brendan Frasier plays Eisenhower in it and while I think he is horribly miscast in a movie that is trying accurately portray the man, this weird character version of him is pretty compelling to watch. He has a moment that reminded of Matt Damon in Oppenheimer when he was like “THIS IS THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD”. But in this Eisenhower is constantly reminding Stagg that if he is wrong many will be killed. Cool! I do appreciate Scott’s performance because he is a kinda a dick for most of the movie but also is really portrayed as the only one who knows how the weather works. Wonder who made that note. Nevertheless he does hold it together despite having to listen to Americas grill him about how wrong he is for most of the runtime. Ya know I can kinda see why the Europeans aren’t always the most fond of us. Anyway eventually he does snap and it he went completely unconscious in his performance. Like Brunson in the 4th quarter of a Knicks playoffs game. I suppose actors are just like regular dudes – ya get old and you yearn to read about and discuss the ins and outs of the Allied war plans. They just get to play dress up for insane levels of money. So, thats cool for them. I have to read books on my lunch break and catch looks from my NPC coworkers.
Hard pivot to the other movie I wanted to highlight this week. From director Daniel Goldhaber comes Faces of Death. I missed his first film but in 2022 I saw How to Blow Up a Pipeline and was instantly tapped in. That movie is in my humble opinion the movie of a generation that hasn’t totally discovered it yet. I think it is vastly under seen by the people who will connect with it the most and I hope as time goes on things swing more its way and its talked about it the regard it deserves because I think its an excellent movie.
His follow up has some similar DNA but is a little different. Faces of Death follows Margot (Barbie Ferreria) who works for a social media company with the job of reviewing online videos and determining if they should be removed from the site or not. She spends her days being exposed to all sorts of grizzly content. When she comes across an execution video that seems just a bit too real she falls down a rabbit hole online that puts her in the crosshairs of a serial killer.
Both movies are speaking pretty explicitly to contemporary problems and both have younger characters working on their versions of the solutions to the issues. I think that Goldhaber has successfully identified something about younger people that I notice with my peers. Many of them are incredibly gifted and talented people whose exposure to the internet mixed in with the false promises of the last generation and the nation at large has them pretty angry. Trump in the White House doesn’t help but even before he was reelected you could see it. Pipeline is a movie that is all about rage while Faces of Death is more about empathy. I think Gen Z is filled deeply with both. Sure some of their ideals are a little misguided and maybe naive at times. But I don’t think you could find a generation more ready to go to bat for their peers than this one.
This manifests itself in the movie by Margot doing insane levels of research with the help of Reddit threads to track down the killer that IS real. Shoutout to physical media because she learns more about the murders he’s doing off an old movie on VHS tape that he is recreating. Like David Fincher, though not as effectively, the movie does something that where it shows you all the ick and the filth that we put in front of our faces when we doom scroll online. There is a knowingness to how it’s shown in the movie and it wants to remind us that we will be watching videos on our phones when the movie is over.
I think the movie is probably a bit stronger in concept than actual execution but it has an enough nuance working with in it that I still got a lot out of it and had a good time.
The Physical Media Pick Up:
Now when I talk about the movie I snagged this week you might wonder if the only reason I did was because it features a commentary track with people I like. And to that I say, yes. But I did watch the movie not only did I dig The Haunting (1963) but it also opened up a lot of interesting thoughts and conversation around the director of the movie Robert Wise.
What an interesting movie this is. When you hear people talk about movies especially a lot of New Hollywood guys it’s clear that The Haunting was a an important movie in terms of the influence it had on the next generation.
Robert Wise is a fascinating director when you look over his filmography. A lot of quality in a lot of different kinds of movies and real a steady hand for years in the studio system.
As for this movie I mean it’s just wonderful. I think what really got me was reading after that interiors were shot on stages and not in the house. Makes sense when you think about it but all the detail in the rooms make it feel very lived in. It’s beautifully shot and the camera allows for the viewer to find the scares for themselves. There is a traditional one in the movie but for the most part it’s about mood and Wise tricking the audience into looking for scares that aren’t coming.
I think Julie Harris was very good in this. It’s a hard part because ghosts or no ghosts (the movie won’t tell us for sure) we do know that it’s a movie about the mind of a woman collapsing in on itself. Those parts will always make or break a movie like this.
That’s all for this week. I have few ideas for what I want to do next but I haven’t gotten everything sorted quite yet, Just know that involves a big ole shark. See ya next week.
The Ambassador Almanac 