Boy Movies #55

The Zac Efron issue

You’re reading Boy Movies. I will use this “above the action” section to remind everyone that BOY MOVIES STICKERS ARE STILL AVAILABLE FOR PURCHASE!!! You can grab them right here! Endless thanks to everyone who’s already bought some. I’ve had the pleasure of hand delivering them to some friends over the past few days and also sticking them to various surfaces. My graphic designer, Sarah, was perturbed that I didn’t put a photo of her hard work in the newsletter last week (sorry Sarah), so if you’re on the fence and find clicking a link to be too much work, here’s what the official Boy Movies stickers look like out in the wild:

Should I become a hand model y/n

They’re exceptionally beautiful on water bottles

They look great on sewing machines too

They would make a beautiful gift for someone you love or even a nice little prezzie for yourself.

What if we rewrite the stars…

[In the style of the George Bush meme] Zac Efron has received his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Can you believe it? I don’t really care about this; the Walk of Fame has become so long that it has become meaningless. It’s more about the ceremonies, during which famous friends of the celebrity being deemed Star worthy stand in front of an audience made up entirely of Getty photographers and give a funny little speech about how hard-working the celebrity is. Are you wondering if Efron said anything interesting at his ceremony? Well, he didn’t, though it might interest you to know that it was attended by his old buddy Miles Teller (of Top Gun: Maverick fame) and his new buddy Jeremy Allen White (of Showtime’s Shameless fame). High School Musical director Kenny Ortega was also in attendance, and Efron thanked him in his speech: “I’m just eternally grateful. I still think about it every day — I sing the songs in the shower.”

Some of you reading that may doubt Efron’s sincerity. Not me. During the height of the pandemic, two friends and I decided to use all our time at home to become Efron scholars, making our way through his filmography from top to bottom. He remains my most-watched actor on Letterboxd, right in front of Meryl Streep. (She’ll never be him…) That experience taught me things about him that I still remember and cherish, like his progression from twink (2006’s High School Musical through 2010’s Charlie St. Cloud) to twank (2012’s The Lucky One through 2013’s Parkland, a movie that Jeremy Strong is also in) to his current, and seemingly permanent, twunk era (beginning with 2014’s Neighbors). I suppose this is now called “twink death,” but we thought of it as more of a perpetual state of reinvention. I also learned that Efron is an incredibly sincere guy, a quality most prominently on display in his travel series, Down to Earth with Zac Efron. He has genuine enthusiasm for the world around him in a way that comes off as so earnest you have to laugh. But you can’t get your start doing High School Musical and not know how to take a laugh.

Taking that golden retriever earnestness and spinning it into a charming on screen persona is what Efron has always been good at. He’s versatile, with a Gene Kelly-like (yeah, I’m really fucking serious!) talent for grounding a big movie musical, a depth that gives him room to go dramatic, and enough of an awareness of himself to be funny. Few directors have figured out how to harness his particular combination of dashing and juvenile, though Ortega, Nicholas Stoller (who directed him in both Neighbors films), and Harmony Korine (who directed him in The Beach Bum) have all come close. But Efron rarely gets the opportunity to use every tool in his well-stocked box of skills at once, which has left him in a curious position. He is neither a superhero nor is he a magnet that auteurs flock to. It’s especially interesting to see him next to Jeremy Allen White, who’s following the alt hunk path by using his well-lauded performance on an It TV show as a stepping stone into films that are branded cool before they even begin production. This is pretty much the exact opposite trajectory that Efron had. Nothing about Efron’s career has ever been “cool,” but he doesn’t seem like he has a chip on his shoulder about it. Where White is leveraging his girl appeal to become a full-fledged boy actor, Efron has always seemed comfortable with the knowledge that he is, in fact, a girl actor in the body of a boy actor. 

He wouldn’t phrase it that way, of course. To be clear, the term “boy actor” is very stupid; “boy actor” often translates to “serious,” implying that girl actors are inherently less intelligent. Actually, I think all one needs to be a girl actor is to be misunderstood. As Efron has aged, his floppy hair and skinny frame have disappeared, replaced by a filled out face and a chiseled jaw, which has since been shattered and reshaped. (Efron claims he broke it while running around his house in socks — I have no comment.) Over the years, his body has fluctuated between frighteningly roided out and comfortably muscled, like a particularly fit guy you might see at the gym. This ability to change, and to harness that change, has informed many of his roles: In Neighbors, his action figure physique flusters both Rose Byrne and Seth Rogen; in The Greatest Showman, he’s lithe enough to leap off a balcony into Zendaya’s waiting arms. As Ted Bundy in Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile, he’s slim and slimy, his handsomeness a mask for darkness. The variety of these projects has sort of worked against him. After being correctly hailed an excellent comedic performer in Neighbors, he got slotted into total pieces of shit like Dirty Grandpa and Baywatch. After being correctly recognized as a capable dramatic actor in Extremely Wicked, he moved on to garbage like the better off forgotten Firestarter. (I saw it in theaters, obviously.) For Efron, one step in the right direction is typically followed by three steps in the wrong direction. I don’t know that this is his fault, but rather the fault of an industry that isn’t sure what to do with an actor like him.

Efron has so much potential, but his choices are unpredictable. The Iron Claw, the Von Erich family wrestling biopic, is frankly the biggest thing to happen to him in years. It has, as I mentioned, the cool factor that his career often lacks, courtesy of the A24 branding. When his jacked body was turned into a mean-spirited meme thanks to paparazzi pictures from the Iron Claw set, I minded my business in public and sneered about it in my group chat: “i’m not talking about this,” I wrote, adding, “ZEF WE HAVE BELIEVED IN YOU AND WE WILL NEVER STOP.” Whatever he did must have paid off; early reviews are heaping praise on him: “With a chest like two beef roasts and mammoth musculature bisected by ropy veins, Efron has reconfigured himself as a leading man, while the sensitive boy still stares out of blazing blue eyes that can’t be muscled over.” It’s his latest reinvention in a long history of reinventions, something he long ago proved himself adept at. 

After The Iron Claw, the projects on Efron’s horizon include a Netflix rom-com co-starring Joey King and Nicole Kidman, and an imaginary friend comedy co-starring John Cena. Somewhere along the way, he’s also supposed to star in a Three Men and a Baby reboot for Disney. Like I said: one step forward, three steps all the way back. That’s just what being a girl is about, I guess.

A few words on Leave the World Behind

I’m not proud of what I’m about to reveal, but I feel that it’s an important piece of information to keep in mind as you read the following: I am basically illiterate, which means that over the past few years I’ve finished reading only a small handful of books. That’s much of the reason why I’m still talking about Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind, which I devoured in one night back in 2021. (The rest of the reason is that it’s a great read.) I recommend this book — about two disparate families who find themselves stuck together in a vacation home as surreal, troubling events rage on outside — to everyone. I’ll recommend it to you if you haven’t had the pleasure of being thrilled and unsettled by it yet. I was excited, if apprehensive, about the film adaptation, directed for Netflix by Sam Esmail and starring Julia Roberts, Ethan Hawke, and Mahershala Ali (replacing Denzel Washington, whose exit from the project should perhaps have been a sign not to go through with it at all). Again, this is not something I often get to experience, as I do not know how to read. But I love having fully formed opinions on things, especially when I’m being a hater, and I have to tell you that I found Leave the World Behind the movie to be, well, pretty bad.

Let’s put aside the sincerely terrible script and the heavy-handed edits to Alam’s story. (Not one of Esmail’s changes enhances the narrative in any way. In fact, most of his edits bog it down, bloating a tightly written novel into an unnecessarily long movie.) Let’s put aside the random plot threads that go nowhere, the shallow characterizations that even three of our greatest talents can’t save, the way it keeps a white-knuckled grip on the viewer’s hand as it drums up useless explanations for every occurrence that Alam wisely knew were better left vague. Let’s instead talk about the words that flash across the screen during the bizarrely upbeat opening credits, which come after a completely unnecessary introductory scene that for some reason concludes with Julia Roberts giving a monologue about hating people (?): Executive Producers Barack and Michelle Obama.

Now, first of all: lol. I guess I could just say that and my point would be clear enough, but I have more. Look, I understand Leave the World Behind was famously on Obama’s reading list. I’m glad he liked it, so did I. But I personally think it’s wrong that a former U.S. president has a Netflix deal in the first place — go get a real job if you need to make money; grab a broom — and I think it’s an even worse look for a former U.S. president to be producing movies that aren’t, like, climate documentaries. (Sarah reminded me that Obama has said if he hadn’t been a politician he would’ve been a novelist… like, okay, why is that my problem?) Esmail has spoken about Obama’s substantial involvement with the screenplay, which is, I suppose, how you end up with a film that seeks international explanation for its apocalyptic event. The United States is under attack by, as Kevin Bacon’s gun-toting doomsday prepper character believes, Korea, or maybe Iran? It’s not exactly clear, but what is clear is that the U.S. needs MORE POWER amid this crisis.

Alam’s novel was clearly written from an American perspective about American characters experiencing a terrifying event in America. Toward the beginning, when the situation is still fresh, before the really bad shit starts going down and the whys and whos start to matter less, the characters speak in speculative terms about what countries they believe might be behind what’s happening, the way any frightened Americans who would proudly call themselves liberals in a more orderly world might. The film is much more explicit about this. You can almost imagine Obama’s emails to Esmail, encouraging him to double down that explicitness. The difference is that Alam’s writing is tongue in cheek — he knows it’s ridiculous for these “progressive” people to immediately jump to the conclusion, with zero information, that Korea might be behind a blackout in New York City — while the film obviously takes this threat seriously. Where Alam’s novel is interested in the ways people come to rely on each other in times of hardship, the film is more concerned with making sure Mahershala Ali gets to speak ambiguously about electronic disruption and propaganda. 

The whole thing left me with a bad taste in my mouth. The U.S. government is continuing to aid a genocide in Palestine and our former president just released a movie on the country’s most popular streaming platform about America being under attack by foreign entities. I would love to know how Sam Esmail, Barack Obama, and I could have all read the same book and had such wildly different interpretations of it, but I have no way of contacting them, so I’ll just keep click clacking away in my free newsletter as they continue to rake in money and Leave the World Behind continues to climb the Netflix charts. Listen, I don’t know. Maybe I’m being too sensitive, maybe I’m overreacting. I think a lot of people generally liked this movie, and that’s nice, I guess. I’d just like it if we could all think a little more critically, especially in times like these.

I guess the moral of the story is to forget how to read, because the inevitable adaptation of your favorite book will in all likelihood disappoint you. Amen.

• My personal favorite Zefron performance… a powerhouse.

• Tis the season for rankings, and TV Guide’s are OUT, baby. Here we are on the best shows, best episodes, and best performances of 2023. I wrote about Succession one last time, plus Barry and The Righteous Gemstones and Party Down and a bunch of other stuff. Good TV year imo!!!