New week, who dis?
When you’re OOO but a Monday is still a Monday
An update from day 5 of TIFF: yesterday I had a pretty wild swing of Distancer/extremely not Distancer-friendly movies. The latter, Mexican dystopian film New Order, is the one I reviewed at /Film today. Had to play up some superficial similarities to Parasite for the clicks, though this is a very smart and ruthless class commentary in its own right.
The one I suspect you’ll hear me and others discuss more, though, is Chloe Zhaó’s Nomadland, a warm compassionate hug of a movie. It felt like a loving embrace from two things many of us have missed during the pandemic: forging community with strangers and feeling connected to a land greater than the narrow stretch we occupy and roam.
In honor of today’s recommendation (you’ll know soon enough), here’s the latest New Yorker dispatch from David Sedaris back from the hoarding season of the pandemic: “My Failed Attempts to Hoard Anything At All.”
And folks, the best PSA of COVID-19 has arrived courtesy of my spirit animal Paul Rudd!
Now, what you came for…
DAY 186: C.O.G. (available on Amazon Prime)
Had I not known C.O.G. was based on a David Sedaris story prior to viewing the film, my reaction would probably have been less enthused. I might have chided it for being slight and meandering, simply jumping around a bunch of mini-stories without ever settling.
But because I knew, Kyle Patrick Alvarez’s C.O.G. made for a most enjoyable watch. Humorist and essayist Sedaris (perhaps the single biggest non-film critic influence on my writing) has gifted the world with quite the treasure trove of stories to adapt for the screen, and this film marks the first out of the gate with his source material. Alvarez, and actor Jonathan Groff as Sedaris surrogate Samuel, set the bar high for anything to follow.
Perhaps the highest praise I can lavish on C.O.G. is that it perfectly replicates the joy of reading Sedaris on the page. (Yes, I said page because I’m old-fashioned and prefer the feel of paper running through my fingers.) The sardonic wit and dry observational comedy flows effortlessly from the film’s two key architects as Samuel, fresh out of Yale, ships out to rural Oregon in order to encounter some real, salt of the earth humans.
He gets just that in his encounters with pickers at an apple orchard, factory workers, and some rather pious churchgoers. Groff plays Samuel as a good-hearted person who cannot help but look down on the folks with whom he half-heartedly tries to integrate. No matter the scenario, be it an unwanted advance by his affable colleague Curly (Corey Stoll) or an instructive message from devout Martha (Casey Wilson), we can see the wheels turning in his head that will eventually convert life into prose. It’s to Groff’s immense credit that he can play a character who’s both slippery to those around him and embraceable to us as the audience.
In some sense, the payoff is knowing that everything leads to what we see on the screen in C.O.G. And given how well Alvarez keeps the observations and clever comedy in tact, it feels worth the time.
P.S. — TIFF means you’re getting a reprint, more or less, of my 2015 review. Not sorry now, and wasn’t sorry when I programmed this portion of the newsletter 10 days ago!
Be good to yourselves and to each other,
Marshall