Boy Movies #14

The January doldrums issue (idk… Plane…)

You’re reading Boy Movies, a weekly newsletter about boy movies. I’m actually not sure what the deal is with today’s issue, but usually it’s about boy movies. Consider subscribing and telling your most famous friends — I want sponsorship already!!! And most importantly, congratulations to Academy Award nominee Austin Butler.

It’s literally Plane

On Friday, Alexis and I saw what could perhaps be our last movie at the imminently closing Regal Union Square (this is a travesty btw): the new Gerard Butler joint, Plane. Plane, along with the extraordinary M3gan, are ideal January movies, because January is a month where I am in desperate need of big, stupid distractions and want to engage in critical thought as infrequently as possible. Unlike M3gan, Plane is a boy movie through and through, a schlocky action thriller with a runtime under two hours that is full of explosions and dudes fighting and ricocheting bullets.

Plane is like if Speed, Flight, and Captain Phillips had a weird baby. It is gloriously easy to describe, and you already know exactly what happens, start to finish, even without watching a single trailer: A perfectly cast Gerard Butler is the pilot of an aircraft that crashes in a lawless area of the Philippines during a trip from Singapore to Tokyo, tasking Butler with getting himself and his passengers home safely. To accomplish this, Butler’s character, who is obviously a widower trying to repair his relationship with his daughter, teams up with Mike Colter’s character, for no reason I could gather other than the fact that they’re the two biggest guys in the group. Fine by me. It’s Plane.

Colter plays a man who is aboard Plane’s plane because he’s on trial for homicide and is being extradited to the U.S. His criminal status has very little influence on the plot, which is for the best, because Mike Colter has the blindingly white teeth of someone raking in ViacomCBS streaming money and the vocal gravitas of a Shakespearean trained thespian. I simply don’t buy him as someone who has murdered. But who cares… it’s Plane. Plane was directed by Jean-François Richet, someone I’d never heard of before Friday, and yet for the rest of the evening Alexis and I could not stop saying, “Come on, Jean-François!” He did it… he made the perfect January movie. Boy Movies endorses Plane. You should see Plane. We should all see Plane. Plane. Plane!!!!!!!!

She looks as though she wants to weep but can’t

Daniela and I saw Corsage on Sunday, a movie that is the exact polar opposite of Plane in just about every way. It is so wholly, deeply a girl movie, a period piece that stars the inimitable Vicky Krieps (girl actor if there ever was one) as a fictionalized version of Empress Elisabeth of Austria, set during an increasingly hopeless period in her life. Her husband sucks, her kids are narcs, and girl, she just turned 40. She leads a lonely, unfulfilling existence that has led to a troubling obsession with her weight. Director Marie Kreutzer gives the film a punk rock spirit, swerving away from the dreaded girl power trope in favor of painting a portrait of a rebellious woman in search of a type of modern fulfillment she never stood a chance of finding. Vicky Krieps is 1. mother, and 2. a luminous, singular talent — I fell in love with her, as we all did, in Phantom Thread, one of the greatest girl movies to ever do it, but she’s impressed me just as thoroughly in everything I’ve seen her in since. (Including Old! “There’s something wrong with this beach!!”) I loved the film, but it’s Krieps’ powerhouse performance that lifts it up, her every micro expression so sensitive and layered.

Watching those micro expressions while surrounded by the elderly cinema-going public of the Upper West Side is what gave me the idea for this issue, if I’m honest — a mixed bag edition, a tale of two very different movies, inspired by the odd despair of January. Plane is a film for the side of my brain that is totally smooth, Corsage is for the side plagued by hysteria. Girl period pieces¹ are always great January viewing, because girl period pieces usually center around people going insane due to yearning and their inability to express it. It’s been raining on and off for weeks in New York, and I keep getting bad news, and T*ylor Sw*ft is going to be on the new National album. Things are bleak. I yearn for a way to talk about it in a way that sounds normal, but it’s hard. Of course the quiet, mournful repression of a girl period piece spoke to me.

In Corsage, Krieps yearns less for someone to love her than she does for the actualization of self-love — I promise, the film is less corny about exploring that than I just made it sound. There are tons of stories about women’s relationships to their bodies, and “restrictive clothing as a metaphor for oppression” is nothing new, but I was still moved watching Krieps doggedly, repeatedly demand to be cinched into a corset. With wariness re: “writing about my body” and with full awareness that discussing “body image” during such a “the diet starts tomorrow” type of month is a minefield, I’ll just say this: Desiring thinness over comfort is an illness, and a lifetime of hating yourself because of the way you look causes permanent damage to your psyche. It makes you think and do crazy things. I say this from experience.

Corsage reminded me of this YouTuber whose horrible posts and boring life I can’t look away from (please leave me alone…), and the minor scandal she recently got involved in after posting a photo of her flat abs with the caption, “What baby?” (For context, she just gave birth.) Some people were mad, others started railing on about how “body positivity extends to thin people,” and the YouTuber eventually compromised by deleting the caption. I’m in favor of body positivity in the sense that I would love it if there were less people starving themselves, but I think we lost the thread once it became normal to start arguing about a woman’s right to post her rockin’ bod on Instagram. Body positivity is a classic case of something that began with good intentions but has since been warped and co-opted by the most annoying people on the planet. Personally, and not to sound like a hippie, I’m trying to reach a state of body neutrality — my body is neither good nor bad. It neither is nor isn’t. It is simply the body I’m in, a mere matter of fact.

The ending of Corsage purports that the only way through all of this is out. It’s an extreme reaction, but January is a time for extremes. Whether you’re a Scottish pilot fighting your way out of the jungle, or an unsatisfied woman trapped in a palatial nightmare, or a sentient doll doing TikTok dances. Do whatever, man. It’s fucking January.

• Not to ask you to download something, but the BOY MOVIES CHAT is now open to subscribers on the Substack app! It’s actually been open for weeks, I just kept forgetting to make an announcement. I don’t really know what the “chat” function is “for,” but from what I understand it’s a space where the Boy Movies community can come together to have intellectual discussions about, idk, Colin Farrell being an actress, which now that I’m saying it I realize is a huge dream of mine. Come hang out!

• Fran Magazine, one of the very best newsletters, did an issue all about appreciating the January movie way back when.

• I have been getting this question constantly so I’m going to use this space to answer it once and for all: Yes, you should watch The Last of Us. Even if you didn’t play the game! (I sure didn’t, I’m too weak of heart.) It’s good. Pedro Pascal is someone I have loved forever despite never watching anything he’s in because he is so rarely in stuff for adults. I’m happy to see him shine here (that butch voice he’s doing… slay mama), and even happier to see Murray Bartlett back where he belongs: on the HBO Sunday night line-up, baby.

1. Girl period pieces are often about the hell of courtship, while boy period pieces are often about the hell of going to war.