Stopping by ‘Yuma County’

Plus: Stop reducing art to a checklist!

Assigned Viewing: The Last Stop in Yuma County (VOD/theaters)

Richard Brake in ‘The Last Stop in Yuma County’ (Courtesy: Well Go USA

The Last Stop in Yuma County reminds me a bit of two of my favorite Quentin Tarantino movies, Reservoir Dogs and The Hateful Eight, in that it’s an almost perfectly executed exercise in getting a bunch of people together in a room and remorselessly escalating the tension until there’s a momentary explosion of devastating, decisive violence.

The setup is fairly simple: a gas station in Arizona, the only one in a hundred miles, is out of fuel, so the folks needing a fill-up have to wait in the attached diner until the tanker gets there. First up is a traveling knife salesman (Jim Cummings), who grabs a booth once Charlotte (Jocelin Donahue) opens up shop. He’s quickly followed by Beau (Richard Brake) and Travis (Nicholas Logan), two rough-looking guys driving a beat-up Pinto matching the description of the getaway car from a recent bank robbery. The salesman tells the waitress, the waitress tries to call her sheriff husband, and the robbers put a stop to that: they’re all gonna sit here, real nice, until the gas truck comes or someone shows up with a vehicle that has enough fuel to get the robbers out of there.

Or until someone pulls a gun, I guess. And this being the southwest, everyone’s got a gun. Exceptin’ the knife salesman, of course. Who’s brought a knife—a whole set, actually, capable of cutting through cans and everything—to a … well, you know.  

That’s all I’ll say about that, and there’s a certain sort of person who will be annoyed by The Last Stop in Yuma County because “there’s a lot of talking” and “nothing happens.” This sort of person should avoid the film. Yes, there’s a lot of talking, but everything is happening, all these people’s whole lives have built to this, singular, specific, moment, and how they react, the choices they make, the words they say, the words they don’t say … well. It matters. Writer-director Francis Galluppi has crafted a masterpiece of escalatory anxiety.

It helps that the cast is just exquisitely assembled. Cummings, who also produced, brings the nervous twitchiness that made The Wolf of Snow Hollow so compulsively watchable to the fore here. And it’s always nice to see Richard Brake get a featured role: too often he just pops up for a moment, as in Barbarian or Mandy. He’s both steely and slimy, and the unsettling contradiction therein injects a sense of danger into the proceedings. I wasn’t as aware of Jocelin Donahue, but she’s just the right mix of patient and terrified as the diner’s waitress.

And the supporting cast is aces: Jon Proudstar, who has done some fine work on Reservation Dogs in recent years, blows in for a scene and kills it; Sam Huntington, who I’ve enjoyed seeing onscreen since Detroit Rock City, does the same; and horror vet Barbara Crampton has a nice bit part as the police switchboard operator. It’s just a bunch of great work from a group of accomplished actors. Casting director David Guglielmo did a fine job here.

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Links!

This week I reviewed The Fall Guy, which is a very fun movie. Just pleasing in the way that it’s pleasing to watch attractive people be funny and hot together on a screen. (This is also why Challengers is so fun to watch. Sure, the vibes of Challengers are different but they’re not that different, if we’re being honest.)

Speaking of Challengers, we reviewed it on Across the Movie Aisle this week. Peter, Alyssa, and I all liked it! We just like liking things, I guess.

The producer of The Pope’s Exorcist says The Pope’s Exorcist Two is coming, which is big news for Vespa-riding exorcist priest enthusiasts.  

I found Rani Molla’s piece on people who buy sets of AirPods repeatedly because they lose them to be kind of fascinating, mostly because I’ve never lost a pair myself? (Now that I’ve written this sentence, there is a 100 percent chance I will lose my pair of AirPods.)

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A Brief Rant: Checklists Are for Philistines

One of the best jokes ever told by Clickhole—the site created by The Onion to mock the rise of BuzzFeed-style click factories that rose to prominence in the 2010s—was a satirical piece titled “If Only Once, It Would Be Nice If Hodor Said ‘Women’s Rights.’”

“Game Of Thrones fans know and love Hodor as the large man with the heart of gold who helps Bran and Rickon try to find Jon Snow, which is why ‘women’s rights’ would mean so much coming from him,” the author wrote. “To hear the usually monosyllabic giant pause in the middle of a scene, look directly into the camera, and say ‘women’s rights’ would just be a nice thing that is well within the power of HBO and showrunners D.B. Weiss and David Benioff.”

The joke works on multiple levels: as a play on the sort of clickbait that passed for a think piece in the late-Obama era; as a jibe about the constant caterwauling of those annoyed that the show set in a medieval fantasy kingdom did not betray a modern progressive understanding of women’s rights; as critique of a certain kind of mindless media criticism that reduced every work to whether or not it aligned with the critic’s politics. It is a perfect piece of humor.

One couldn’t help but think of that Clickhole joke when confronted with this headline/subhed combo in Indiewire: “Only 32 of the Top Movies in the Last Decade Say Climate Change Exists — Study. Exclusive: Only 9.6 percent of 250 films analyzed passed a Bechdel Test created for climate change.”

In other words: If only once, it would be nice if Spider-Man said “Climate change exists.”

I don’t blame the environmentalists for taking this tack; their study, which looked at major releases over the last decade or so, is getting the buzz they hoped for. Placements in the Los Angeles Times, Hollywood Reporter, etc. “The Bechdel Test for Climate Change” is now a thing people are aware of, even if to mock it. My main objection to such a thing is less the specific policy than the general trend of reducing art to a series of boxes that need to be checked off to pass some sort of ideological smell test.

From USC-Annenberg’s long-running efforts to catalog various groups in various roles in various sorts of productions in Hollywood to the ridiculous (and easily circumvented, if you’re a big enough studio) diversity, equity, and inclusion requirements instituted by the Oscars for films to qualify for best picture, one of the easiest ways to grab headlines for your project is to say “well, only x percent of y roles meet z standard.”

Regardless of the intentions, however noble they may be, it’s a horribly numbing way to think about the world of art. And with the “Bechdel for climate change” test in particular, it leads to some funny consequences. Environmentalists often make handy movie villains, given the size of the problem they’ve concerned themselves with. Consider the inclusion of Kingsman: The Secret Service on that list. Yes, this is a movie that mentions climate change. Do you remember why it mentions climate change? I do! It’s because a billionaire madman is convinced climate change is going to destroy the world, so he creates a device that turns common folks into murderous rage machines so they’ll destroy each other and reduce the surplus population while he and his rich friends hang out in a mountain lair waiting to inherit the Earth from the not-so-meek.

Sure, the film addressed climate change; one wonders if that’s precisely the type of address the authors of this study were hoping for. Be careful what you wish for, I guess.