HOT PRESS 12/4/24: 2024 Catch-Up (Janet Planet, Juror #2), You Won’t Feel A Thing #1
Or: Three things I enjoyed this week.
Braving the gauntlet of tentpole events, off-the-radar releases, and a non-stop avalanche of movies, TV, comics, and other stuff that's bad for you is DoomRocket's HOT PRESS. This week: Our 2024 Movie Catch-Up continues with capsule reviews of Janet Planet and Juror #2, and I share my first impressions of Scott Snyder and Jock’s upcoming DSTLRY series, You Won’t Feel A Thing.
Hello! Hope it's warm wherever you are. I'm wearing a fleece-lined hoodie with a space heater humming at my feet — not the freeziest it gets in drafty ol' DoomRocket HQ, but it's not fun all the same.
As a degenerate Spotify user, I've been distracted by Spotify Wrapped all morning. I'm marveling at how little my musical tastes have changed over the years. Stereolab, for example, generally sits somewhere in my Top Artists leaderboard — this year, they were #1. (They're always #1 in my heart.) I don't know if this means I was regressing to my twenties even more enthusiastically in 2024 or if Spotify's algorithm is giving me musical tunnel vision (tunnel listen?), but one new resolution I'm willing to throw onto my ever-growing 2025 resolution pile is listening to more artists who weren't in their prime over twenty years ago. Open to recommendations.
I'm still plowing through all the movies I missed in 2024 as our YEAR IN REVIEW feature approaches, and it occurs to me that I haven't logged everything I've seen over the last twelve months on Letterboxd. It's nice to get a Like over there — I think it's more rewarding than having a Tweet pop off or getting any sort of acknowledgment on Bluesky (any, at all), though I worry that finding additional words for movies I've written about elsewhere is diminishing my enjoyment of posting on Letterboxd altogether. It feels like work.
I try not to be one of those pithy (or annoying) "this happened to a guy I knew" posters on LB. I honestly believe that if a stranger follows you on a review site and takes the time to read what you post, it's important to make it worth their while. But there are only so many hours in the day, and insights don't always fall into my lap — sometimes, sad as it is to admit, it can take me a while to draft a micro-review on Letterboxd. What to do. I may have another resolution: not being so beholden to the interactive buttons on my phone. I mean, we've only got the one life.
Thanks to all the new subscribers who've hopped on the DoomRocket train this past month. I hope you stick with us as general review coverage scales back in December. I still have some 2024 Catch-Up to do (see below and stay tuned), and I have a retrospective to publish sometime next week, not to mention a new dispatch from this very newsletter you're reading right this minute. As to our YEAR IN REVIEW? You'll have to wait until after Christmas for that — just think of it as a belated gift from us to you.
A cursory Google search reveals that Annie Baker orbits the same circles as Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach (she's married to Baumbach's brother), which, I suppose, puts her feature debut, Janet Planet, in deeper conversation with those filmmakers' disaster-zone parenting sagas starring children too mature for their good. While Janet Planet boasts a dramatic plumage similar to, say, The Squid & the Whale and Lady Bird, Baker parts company with an austere, almost forbidding approach to the material. You're less likely to call your folks after soaking up all the tricky vibes of Janet Planet than you are booking your next therapy session.
That's because Baker removes the clutter you'd find in a typical family dramedy, those sweet hits of sugar that help the emotional trauma go down easier in Baumbach and Gerwig's work: winking schmaltz, wistful pop soundtrack, hapless characters, gulp-sob revelations, they're all cast to the bin. She replaces them with the glassy-eyed perspective of 11-year-old Lacy (Zoe Ziegler), who observes her mother, Janet (Julianne Nicholson), hippie acupuncturist and single mom, as she pinballs from one calamitous relationship to another. (Janet's failed connections treat us to the awesome trio of character actors: Will Patton, Elias Koteas, and Sophie Okonedo.) Baker frames Janet's many poor life choices with distance and some sympathy, though from Lacy's rapidly maturing viewpoint (via cinematographer Maria von Hasswolf), all this instability sometimes comes off feeling like a horror movie. Janet's world can change so abruptly that the chapter titles (featuring the names of her would-be paramours) pop up like jump scares.
I appreciated Janet Planet for its frankness about the interior damage done to children forced to grow up fast and how it still found ways to wring empathy from Janet's wayward but well-meaning lifestyle. There's love in Janet and Lacy's funky home, though the peculiar diorama Lacy builds for a tiny toy family, which she structures attentively with bedtimes, suggests she's mourning the stability Janet so often denies her. What do we see in Lacy's gaze as her mother blithely attempts (and fails) to figure shit out? Whatever's hiding in our hearts, I suppose. As a psychological profile of a mother-daughter relationship heading for a disaster we'll never see but can easily imagine, Janet Planet devastates with a lingering and familiar ache.
8.5 / 10
Written and directed by Annie Baker.
Cinematography by Maria von Hausswolf.
Starring Julianne Nicholson, Zoe Ziegler, Elias Koteas, Will Patton, and Sophie Okonedo.
Produced by Dan Janvey, Derrick Tseng, Annie Baker, and Andrew Goldman.
Rated PG-13 for some heady shroom talk.
Some folks will talk about how Clint Eastwood makes films for the elder Clydes and Karens out there, a stodgy late-career filmography of generic airport novels, baloney sandwiches, and apple pie — creature comforts of Everywhere, U.S.A. If that's the case — and I won't argue against it because I enjoy those things, too — then thankfully Eastwood is director enough to pack thorny moral quandaries in his movies that, if nothing else, get our hard-wired grandparents to balance something more than their checkbooks, weigh something heftier than a Christmas ham.
Juror #2 is one such film, a story of Capital-B basic Americana that asks what we owe each other as neighbors in this complicated, messy nation. What we will do for the person next to us when it doesn't inconvenience our plans, and what we won't when it does. Nicholas Hoult stars as Justin Kemp, a recovered alcoholic and family man selected to sit on the jury of a murder case where he discovers — in a twist James Patterson would surely appreciate — that he's responsible for the death of the victim. Without giving away the specifics of this wild turn of events, because Eastwood's latest (and possibly final) movie is worthy of your grandparents' time as well as your own, this raises tough questions about the types of people to whom society gives a second chance and those lost causes it's only too happy to write off.
What makes me happy with Juror #2, aside from the sturdy pre-millennium craftsmanship Eastwood delivers that we used to take for granted and which now seems so novel (not to mention cozy), is how Jonathan Abrams' screenplay immediately ladles out the more salacious information to let us marinate with the moral implications of Justin's actions and inactions. Surrounded by an armada of terrific players — Toni Collette and Chris Messina play chummy if adversarial attorneys, Amy Aquino's no-nonsense judge presides over the case, and J.K. Simmons and Kiefer Sutherland pop in to add some additional if superfluous seasoning to this meal — Hoult's character frantically seeks footing in a losing scenario that becomes perilous for him and his family even after the verdict is read. Eastwood is reminding us of the value of duty and what happens to those who fail in theirs — social calculus for the dinner table.
7.5 / 10
Directed by Clint Eastwood.
Written by Jonathan Abrams.
Cinematography by Yves Bélanger.
Starring Nicholas Hoult, Toni Collette, J.K. Simmons, Chris Messina, Zoey Deutch, and Kiefer Sutherland.
Produced by Clint Eastwood, Tim Moore, Jessica Meier, Adam Goodman, and Matt Skiena.
Rated PG-13 for prickly closed-room deliberations and one crime scene shock effect.
Usually, these psychological thriller/serial killer jobs begin with the seasoned detective grousing about his rapidly approaching retirement before his One Unsolved Case comes back to bite him. Scott Snyder and Jock's You Won't Feel a Thing is novel in this regard: it begins at the end of the detective's life. Well, kind of. If it weren't for the baby's fist-sized lump growing in his brain, John, our retired gumshoe, might still be in his prime despite the gray and the paunch. But that lump is there, futzing with John's memories, distorting his sense of the present, bringing his ugly past to the fore — in short, it's killing him. But there's still so much work to be done.
See, John used to be one hell of a detective. Closed all kinds of murder cases. Now, with Lump dulling his brilliance, John's left adrift in an elder care facility called Harmless House in a chilly corner of Montana. Despite the onset of dementia, one cold case still haunts him, as they typically do in these situations: the case of The Chatter Man, a brutal serial killer with a ridiculous gimmick that feels transposed from a certain superhero detective comic. Despite Jack's best efforts, he couldn't prove Ol' Chatters' existence, let alone link him to thirty unsolved murders that took place over forty years. With their shared history (a disturbing plot point you should discover on your own), that doesn't sit right with Jack. And here's Carla, a Harmless aide exercising (exorcising?) Jack's memory with recall cards, opening doors to the past that might be best left shut.
I'm going to lay off speculating on the identity of the Chatter Man, as doing so might spoil some of the more engrossing aspects of Snyder and Jock's murderous terror tale. I will say that Chatters feels like a hat on a very nice haircut, a crudely marketable geek leering over what is otherwise a sturdy gumshoe yarn. I can't begrudge Snyder and Jock's use of the guy, though; in fact, the energy they're putting into You Won't Feel A Thing reminds me of the more salacious and farcical serial killer movies that paraded into video stores following the success of The Silence of the Lambs and Se7en. I have a soft spot for this kind of crud, and when the creators behind it bother to inject some smarts into it, so much the better.
The first issue of You Won’t Feel A Thing is plenty smart too, a moody, atmospheric story about life at the end, symbolized by a wintry backdrop and those flashes of history that purportedly dance before our eyes just before the lights go out forever. Here, Jock conjures imagery that exploits DSTLRY’s mag-sized format like some cracked sorcerer, working double-page spreads that test our ability to soak up crucial information while immersing us in an abstract sense of foreboding. If You Won’t Feel A Thing ends up suffering the same pratfalls as many other serial killer stories have before it — I both know and don't want to say why this kept reminding me of James Mangold’s Identity — reading it would have still been worthwhile because Jock's doing stunning work.
One last thing before I spoil the whole damn book: I appreciated Snyder’s use of irony in this issue (heavy-handed as it can be) because it so eloquently laid out the danger of his story. In his hands, even a place called Harmless can become an abattoir. The only question is when, and how, which makes me anxious to read issue #2. Oops, my knuckles have gone white.
7.5 / 10
You Won’t Feel A Thing #1 drops on January 15, 2025. To pre-order a copy, click this.
DSTLRY / $15
Written by Scott Snyder.
Art by Jock (with assists from Dom Reardon).
Colors by Lee Loughridge (with Jock).
Letters by Andworld Design.
That's all I got for this week. Read any good comics lately? See any movies? Drop your new favorites, recommendations, and questions (any at all!) in the comments or The Chat. Or, heck, just shoot me a line: jarrod@doomrocket.com.