Christopher Schroeder

Category: international

  • More Than That Please

    I saw Send Help, which is more aptly titled than I realized.

    Linda Liddle (Rachel McAdams), who is a useful and reliable if also awkward employee, has been promised a VP promotion by the CEO who has recently deceased. This promise, which was known to other senior employees, is broken by the CEO’s son Bradly Preston (Dylan O’Brien), who assumes his father’s position.

    The company needs help however with a merger, so Linda is asked to accompany these senior employees and the new CEO on a trip to Bangkok. She can according to Bradley teach his former frat bro Donovan (Xavier Samuel) what she knows and then be reassigned from their corporate headquarters to a satellite location.

    Linda is drafting a merger memo on the flight while Donovan plays her survivalist reality show video application for the rest of the group. She eventually realizes why they’re laughing and then deletes her draft just before the plane in an unexpectedly graphic scene begins to disintegrate after an explosion and crashes, and sinks, into the ocean.

    The only other survivor besides Linda is an injured Bradley, whom Linda rescues and helps recover. Her survivalist hobby obviously becomes relevant, and affords her an advantage, as does later her former marriage to an abusive husband whose death she stopped preventing.

    Linda, who cannot save Bradley from a two-dimensional caricature, ostensibly develops her heretofore type character with this account of her part in her late husband’s demise, which could influence the last third of the movie but remains underdeveloped at best. As a result, it seems like an add-on, or an empty gesture in this survivalist horror thriller, which is how it is described.

    Linda’s motivation remains a mess even at its end. Why would she sabotage their rescue even if she was relying on the resort home she had discovered? And could the conclusion reinforce an impression that she has parlayed her time stranded on this island into the self-serving career that she despised, and we presumably are to despise, in Bradley and his bros?

    Critical consensus nonetheless is quite positive. More than 260 offer sufficiently positive reviews for example to earn it a Rotten Tomatoes certified fresh film status. Those who recommend it consistently cite the director Sam Raimi, the entertainment value of this movie, and its professional validation for those with bad bosses in their generally positive reviews.

    Surely these reviewers, and the industry, think more of audiences. Or maybe that explains why the movie menu is so often filled with so little appealing.

    We need more than that.

  • Theater Today

    I attended the final production of Manual Cinema’s The 4th Witch this past weekend, and was elated at the outset.

    I had forgotten how thrilling live performance can be. I unfortunately had sufficient time throughout the rest of the performance to contemplate the relative absence of theater in my life.

    Its presence dramatically diminished once I left a theater awards organization. For eight years, I had been a theater judge, and was seeing more than one hundred, and sometimes more than two hundred, different productions each year.

    I left the organization as a result of its lack of professionalism, and its resistance to professional development, and its leaders’ lack of integrity and ethics. I was also was concerned about the amount of time that I was spending at less than noteworthy productions, which were hours of our lives another judge reminded me that we’d never get back.

    For the first year or two, I resumed my theater subscriptions, which meant that I was attending fifteen to twenty performances a year. That effectively reduced my attendance rate, which allowed more space and time for other activities, but inadvertently increased the costs, which now included money. A single theater subscription, which could include four, five, or six performances, could cost several hundred dollars a season even for preview performances or midday matinees.

    These increased costs I admit could have highlighted the diminished quality, or could have made it more salient. Such a trend had been evident when I was still a theater judge, especially after the pandemic when theaters rushed to respond to the loudest calls for a more woke world.

    Such calls could have been coming from those who were first to return to theaters, or the ones who most often attended shows. Regardless, these calls seemed to pressure theaters into featuring the same systemic racism themes that had a long presence even before the 2020 “We See You, White American Theater” missive.

    Theater as the most synthetic of art forms has a tradition of featuring such themes, and pushing social and artistic boundaries. Such a tradition is evident in the United States, as illustrated for example in August Wilson’s call for tradition and change, and even here in Chicago, which has made numerous contributions to theater both across the United States and around the world.

    Post-pandemic American theater however seemed more concerned about placating patrons, and in so doing became too timid. Too often, snapping, and easy laughs, rippled across too many darkened theaters in response to one intellectually and emotionally insulting scene after another.

    Most theaters, or at least the ones I had long been attending, seemed to reinforce mainstream liberal mentalities, and to refuse to reckon with the never-been-woke realities of too many social justice initiatives. So I stopped subscribing.

    I still cannot rationalize these costs, especially now that I’m retired. Maybe I wondered this weekend I never will.

    The challenge confronting theaters is to some extent understandable, and a perpetual question in debates about the economics of art. Realistic answers require a careful balance of finances and function.

    Regardless, American theater could confront the political economies of theater today, and rebalance its approach in ways that don’t compromise accessibility and affordability and challenge and change. To this end, Chicago again offers ideas, such as the Hull House approach or the little theater movement in the early twentieth century or the little theater movement soon thereafter to the storefront tradition in the late twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries.

    These and other approaches offer accessible and accountable art, ones that theaters here in Chicago and elsewhere would be wise to consider. And these could mean more thrilling theater for me too.

  • Don’t Do It

    I thought that I could follow my friend’s recommendation to ignore other critics’ opinions, and would see Doin’ It, a new classroom comedy by Sara Zandieh, Neel Patel, and Lilly Singh as a result of its trailer. Maybe I was missing stuff by using aggregated critical opinion I mused that I’d otherwise be glad to have seen.

    This movie starts with Maya’s and her mother Veena’s return to the United States from India where they relocated when Maya was a precocious teen. Maya now thirty years old hopes to launch an app and her career but soon discovers her unfamiliarity with its demographic, which she can research according to her friend Jess by becoming a substitute teacher.

    Maya is hired to teach sex-ed, which is even more uncomfortable for her because she as a virgin is less experienced than many of her students. Jess offers to help her both complete her high school bucket list and develop her sexual experience, and their efforts are aided by the another new teacher Alex, a cafeteria worker named Barbara, and even her former infatuation, which also enables Maya to reconsider her app and even finding funding.

    The predicable plot includes a Dead Poet’s Society moment around sex-positivity, which both inspires Maya’s revised app and helps her regain her job. The stock characters include the tolerant and thoughtful lover, who is both the other minority (Filipino) new hire and teaches computer science, which offers them yet another connection and a potentially productive conflict.

    Maya had expected to teach computer science, so this rivalry could have added depth to their characters but does not. This missed opportunity is consistent with Maya’s larger lack of development. At no point does she reveal anything more than superficial satisfaction with her relationships, including her friendship with the mysterious cafeteria worker who befriends Maya, audits Maya’s class, reveals her hidden wealth, and ultimate funds Maya’s new app.

    Too many of the gags, which also appear in the trailer, aren’t that amusing, which doesn’t prevent them from reappearing. For example, the vibrator from Jess is misrepresented by Maya as a handheld blender, which her mother uses for their breakfast smoothie and later another for her love-interest neighbor. Its initial shortcoming only means that subsequent scenes are bigger failures.

    This movie I believe contains a larger story but never explores it. It could have been a narrative about sexual maturation in an Indian / Indian-American home or of an older or brown or older, brown woman. It could have considered emotional and physical intimacy in a continuum of relationships, especially as people migrate, age, or even relate to aging parents.

    Such a story could have offered insights about shifting notions sexuality that could be useful to anyone. None of that though and not much else appeared on the screen, which is why I slipped out of the theater as fast as I could once the credits started to roll.