Everything I Watched While I Was Sick For a Week

Apple TV movies and Michael Jordan

I was down and out for most of last week, which is why I didn’t grace your inbox Friday with my usual nonsense.

I lit the beacons to forewarn of this catastrophe, but the range is limited to Substack’s version of social media. Imagine if Gondor signaled for aid and only reached Amon Dîn.¹ That’s the range we’re dealing with here.

I briefly considered sending a very short email Friday, basically “sorry bruh,” but that seemed like a waste of your attention on what is clearly a trivial matter. Meanwhile the days have gone down in the west. Behind the hills, into shadow.

I can picture you, standing listlessly, morosely, locked in a bout of poetic fatalism as your personal bodyguard / butler dresses you for the day.² Your inbox besieged by an unending tide of spam; Eastern European brides swarm your walls, lucrative offers breach your gates, Viagra prescriptions batter your doors. What can readers do against such reckless opportunities?

I return now, 5 days later—look to the East!—arriving when all hope is lost.³

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I spent most of the time I was sick watching movies. This post will therefore be a bit High 5-ish, though I’m not constrained to 5 things.

In case you’re curious—and not at all because I’m aiming for sympathy—I had some kind of respiratory virus. Stuffy nose, soar throat, headache, unbelievable exhaustion. It was not Covid. I checked. I caught it from my wife because she couldn’t keep her lips off me.⁴ She was sick for a full week and, as of today, I have been too. At this point it’s mostly stuffiness and a burning sensation when I think about The Rise of Skywalker.

Usually I skew toward known entertainment quantities when I don’t feel well. There’s comfort in the familiar, and also I don’t have to worry about closely watching Back to the Future or Lord of the Rings. But time’s running out on my free 3 months of Apple TV, so I decided to check out the movies clogging up my Apple watchlist.

All comments are spoiler-free, so read deeply. Greedily, even.

The Instigators

Apple TV

Eric’s log line: Matt Damon and his BFF’s little brother doing Boston accents in Boston while doing a Boston caper.

Damon plays a former Marine who needs to come up with $30k, and little Affleck is a degenerate with a rap sheet. Criminal masterminds, these guys are not. They’re bumbling, and incompetent, but never bumblingly incompetent.

Imagine if The Town was about amateurs doing crimes—a bit farfetched and therefore comedic, but played straight. The movie doesn’t reach for laughs, but you will laugh, because these guys are idiots. Well-meaning idiots, which undercuts the idiocy.

Watching The Instigators is like being lost while buzzed—disoriented, but not too worried about it. The movie meanders a bit and feels unfocused, but I had a good time.

Greyhound

Apple TV

Eric’s log line: Tom Hanks + WWII genre = Reliably Good Shit.

Greyhound is about a US Destroyer called—wait for it—Greyhound that is part of a 4-ship escort ferrying cargo freighters across the Atlantic to the UK. The movie is based on real events, in that German subs really did lurk underwater and feast on the fat tanker ships passing by, necessitating the use of escorts. Captain Tom Hanks and Greyhound are factitious, if informed by history.

The movie is a far better version of the board game Battleship than the nostalgia cash-grab movie Battleship, which was meant to somehow evoke afternoons spent calling out E7 and I9 but only served as another nail in the Taylor Kitsch movie star coffin. Greyhound has a level of hunting and finding that I’ve not seen since playing hide-and-seek in the 3rd grade. It’s genuinely great.

Even better: Greyhound comes in at an impressively svelte 91-minute runtime, practically unheard of in the war movie genre. This movie flies by. It’s all meat, though it still manages to include a completely unnecessary love story that serves no purpose other than to make us want more Elisabeth Shue.

Finch

Apple TV

Eric’s log line: Post apocalyptic Castaway.

Greyhound is Tom Hanks doing Tom Hanks things; his supporting cast is mostly there to set him up for spikes. That’s not to say Hanks is a selfish actor so much as to comment on the interchangeable, disposable nature of the other characters. Downside of the economic runtime—there’s just no time to develop anyone outside of Hanks’ character. Everyone else is largely invisible.

It’s fitting then that the next film I watched was an actual one-man show. In Castaway, Hanks washes up on the shore of a deserted island after his plane goes down; in Finch, Hanks washes up on the shore of a deserted future after the world goes down. It’s not a perfect mirror, but it’s damn close. I don’t think we get Hanks in this movie without him first proving the theorem in Castaway.

This time around, Wilson is a self-aware robot Hanks creates because he has responsibilities and not because he’s desperately lonely. To say more would spoil the plot, which I don’t think is terribly important in this case, but you might. Finch has some fun moments, but never reaches the summit it’s so clearly stretching for. Frankly I think it would’ve been better if the robot had leaned harder into the Johnny 5 vibes.⁵

On the Rocks

Apple TV

Eric’s log line: Bill Murray.

In On the Rocks, Rashida Jones thinks her husband is cheating on her because the preponderance of evidence has reached critical mass and shattered the walls of her delusion. To confirm her hunch, she enlists her father in doing the proper due diligence. In addition to being Bill Murray, her dad is something of a philanderer. He knows how the game is played and where the skeletons are hidden.

What results is an unfunny comedy but also an unserious drama, which is still kinda fun? It’s a weird movie. I enjoyed myself, and don’t regret the time spent with Jones and Murray. But the entire time I was sorta sitting forward in anticipation of jokes that are never told.

Cheating, as a premise and foundational text, is front and center. Rashida is reliving trauma that was deeply informative of her own origin story, but that angle mostly exists in the shadows of subtext. We know it’s there, and the film knows we know it’s there, and there it’s mostly left.

I enjoyed On the Rocks, but also felt vaguely unsatisfied.

Echo Valley

Apple TV

Eric’s log line: Mothers, daughters, and the things we do for love.

I settled into Echo Valley expecting one kind of movie—the official log line talks about a troubled daughter coming home covered in someone’s blood—but what it actually is is something quite different. In fact, the sensation of the film finding itself—or, rather, us finding it—is part of what makes this a fun watch. Where On the Rocks doesn’t have a clear PoV, Echo Valley knows what it is. The slow revelation is the majority of the thrill.

I’m not going to say much else because this is a journey best taken with the surprises still stocked on the shelf. Just be clear—we’re not talking M. Night Shamalamadingdong kinds of WTF. It’s more like a dawning realization. Which in my experience is the most accurate kind of knowing. Maybe I’m just dense.

I will say though that the very end—the epilogue, or the coda, if you will—legitimately pissed me off. Not what it says, or how abruptly it comes, but in how it evokes the end of Inception. All of Schrodinger’s cats are in play. But Echo Valley isn’t an exploration of the thin veneer between dreams and reality, so the hanging chad of endings is completely out of place. Leaving the only question worth asking unanswered at the end isn’t brave. It’s certainly bold, and probably generated buzz. But it’s also an abdication of the story to the audience.

Maybe I’m alone in this, but I don’t watch movies to decide how I think they should end. I want to slip into another world and see how other people respond to life’s challenges. To be robbed of that felt like a slap in the face.

The Last Dance

When people see I’m watching The Last Dance again. Image: ESPN

Eric’s log line: Documentary about the 90s era Chicago Bulls dynasty, with ample Michael Jordan faces.

In the 5 years since The Last Dance was released, I’ve probably watched it 5 times. Which maybe doesn’t sound impressive until I tell you it’s an 8-part series, and each episode weighs in around 50 minutes. Basic math tells me that’s 400 minutes of TV, or the equivalent of a mid-sized movie trilogy. Not huge numbers, but pretty big considering I grew up a Detroit Pistons fan and hating the Bulls.

There’s just always been something about Jordan that I can’t quit.

I can’t quite articulate it. Partly it’s the voyeuristic thrill of watching someone so clearly at the very top of their game—who is and remains the greatest basketball player ever—and who possesses a talent that transcends geographic loyalties. Part of it is Jordan’s uncompromising pursuit of excellence, which is aspirational regardless of where your talents lie. And yeah, I also just love watching him make faces when presented with video evidence of what his contemporaries said about him.

The Last Dance has become a comfort watch. When I first got sick, my wife made a joke about finding me watching it at some point. She wasn’t wrong.

1. Amon Dîn is the first of the beacons.

Always a good sign when you need a footnote to explain why a joke kills.

2. The scene in question, in case all these LotR references are passing you by. I once wrote a piece about how Theoden is the best LotR character, and it’s entirely because of his fatalistic eloquence.

3. What began as a quick joke about Gondor beacons ended up taking on a whole life of its own because nothing is funnier than a gag that overstays its welcome.

4. Point in fact, I initiated the kiss, without thinking. When you’ve been married a long time, you sometimes do that sort of thing unconsciously, like closing the garage door after you back out.

True story: Every time I leave my house, I wonder if I shut the garage. I’ve actually turned around to double-check more times that I’d like to admit.

5. Resemble, Steffanie!