Remember when you’d walk into a local music, book, or video store and there’d be an adorable section where the employees would recommend what they were interested in that month?
Welcome to our little version of it, called Remap Recommends.
At the end of every month, we'll have an edition of Remap Recommends focused on video games. But in the middle of the month, we'll have an edition focused on...everything else. It's a chance for the staff at Remap to let you know what they've been reading, listening to, or watching.
Patrick Recommends... Arcane
Streaming On: Netflix
Number of Episodes: 18 (nine in season one, nine in season two)
Hours I've Spent Playing League of Legends: 0
Why Aren't We Getting More Scavengers Reign?: I don't know, man
Let me be clear: I do not care for MOBAs. In fact, they irritate me because it means there is time and money being spent on building MOBAs when those people could, in theory, be making anything else. But this is the world we live in. People deserve happiness, even if I question whether one should find salvation within a MOBA.
Jokes aside, do not let the League of Legends branding scare you off. I almost let that happen, but doing so would've robbed me of one of the best animated shows...ever? I feel comfortable saying that. Arcane does not require one drop of experience with its source material, and entirely succeeds on the merits of the storytelling happening in the show. I'm sure there are easter eggs about, but it never humiliates you for not knowing a lick about League of Legends, and delivers a gorgeous and heart-pounding mashup of steampunk and politics.
Arcane is almost good enough to make me consider trying the game. Almost.
On, and like the Spider-Verse movies, Arcane suggests the Pixar and DreamWorks-ification of computer animation has been holding us back for decades. There's so much more than what we've seen so far.
Rob Recommends...Plus One
Streaming On: Hulu
Runtime: 1h38m
Who It's For: People who loved Before Midnight
Cooter Status: Out
This flew under my radar until we we were at a loss for what to watch last month and just grabbed something Hulu was pushing on our home page. On the off chance you never heard of it, I'll give you my pitch for 2019's Plus One.
Plus One is superficially about as by-the-numbers a romantic comedy as you can get. Two platonic friends are staring down the barrel of a wedding season from hell and decide to go as one another's dates for the entire year. Maya Erskine's Alice has just had a long relationship evaporate, and Jack Quaid's Matt is struggling with his fear that he will never meet anyone he can be confident in having a long, committed relationship with. You know what's going to happen next.
Except it happens about halfway through the film and most of the customary obstacles are dispensed with pretty quickly. An almost accidental casual hookup turns into a relationship with only a little tension and awkwardness... and then things go catastrophically and painfully wrong between Matt and Alice. Not in a cute way, not based on a simple misunderstanding that could cleared up with a conversation or a message. They go wrong because the ways Matt and Alice are messy and dysfunctional, though undeniably funny for much of the film, are neither harmless nor cute.
Most romantic comedies don't go this route. They keep their leads' flaws squarely in the relatable-but-harmless realm. The romantic pairing almost break-up because they just can't trust each other—and love itself—to open themselves up to embracing what is right in front of their eyes! The thing few of them get into is that love—or maybe the commitment part of it—really is scary. It can go bad. It will go bad. The question is what people decide to do next.
Plus One gives us two characters who are protecting themselves and each other from a lot of pain and loneliness at the start of the movie, and almost against their will they open up to each other and in the process start handing the other person direct access to all their deepest fears and doubts... and almost immediately they devastate each other. For bad, self-sabotaging, but entirely coherent and understandable reasons. Matt and Alice might be characters in a comedy but the script from writer-directors Jeff Chan and Andrew Rhymer takes them very seriously as people. Erskine is, as always, sensational and absolutely nails both the broadest comedic moments of the film and the most painful dramatic ones, but Quaid is well-matched as a someone who is slowly revealed to be the the worst kind of man-child, convinced of his own kindness and maturity as he takes a nose-dive into his own hidden pathology. Understanding and self-knowledge arrive late for him in the form of a beautiful and hilarious scene with his father, played by Ed Begley, Jr. who deftly pivots his character from being the film's broadest source of comic relief to giving its thesis on what it really means for a relationship to succeed or fail.
The rest of the film is similarly iconoclastic. The photography (by Guy Godfree) and direction form eschew the saturated warm colors and aspirational sets of most contemporary romantic comedies and go for location shooting with a cooler and almost documentary feel. Matt and Alice spend time in shitty hotel rooms, dire motor courts, and empty parking lots and alleys. One of the big romantic breakthroughs takes place at a resort hotel perpetually blanketed by a cloying marine layer. The two characters are lunging for a relationship as the last light is fading. As funny and at times bawdy as Plus One is, it invites comparisons with Linklater's Before trilogy, and it's a good enough film that the comparison isn't an embarrassing one.
Cado Recommends... Mubi
Streaming On: Mubi
Current Movies I've Watched on Mubi: 2
Movies on Mubi That I've Added to My Watch List: 6
La Jetée?: Yes
Me recommending Mubi is really a way to backdoor a recommendation for two movies that I think you should see if you haven't already because they both exist on Mubi, and as of this writing you can currently get a free month of the service thanks to the folks over at Paste.
And what should I do with that month you ask? First up, treat yourself to the aesthetic and emotional grandiosity of The Fall, which has just been remastered in 4k and screened at select theaters across the country. If you were unable to make one of these screenings, at least you've got Mubi as the (as of this writing) only place you can stream the 4k remaster at home.
Perhaps you're like me and are already missing the spooky vibes of an October that came and went too quickly. Well, Mubi's got you again with my personal favorite horror movie I watched this year, The Substance. Show up for the commentary on the treatment of women in Hollywood, stay for the absolutely wild body horror!
Aside from these two great films, I've also added a number of movies to my watch list to try and make the best out of this month of cinema. It's been too long since I've watched La Jetée, time for a refresher! Oops, I never saw The Godfather, might as well fix that! Who doesn't love a casual rewatch of Stalker?
Honestly, with the amount of interesting fresh-from-the-festival-circuit movies that exist, I'm already gearing up to need a little more Mubi in my life.