Movie diary: Disclosure Day, Tuner, Showgirls

Hello, Scumblettes! We begin today’s newsletter with some business. First up, I interviewed Rachel Sennott for Emmy Magazine. We talked over Zoom while she walked around the Warner Bros. lot, where she was working in the writers’ room for the second season of I Love LA. Then she returned to the office to heat up some steak and potatoes in the microwave, continuing to chat while I (which is to say, the phone) sat on the counter. Not to be overly familiar, but it was kind of like FaceTiming with my sister. I hope you enjoy our conversation, because I certainly did.

Second: If any of my D.C. people want to play hooky this afternoon, I’ll be moderating a post-screening Q&A with the director of The Siege of Paradise. The documentary, part of the DC/DOX festival, looks at the tension between the roughly 4,500 residents of Cinque Terre and the 3.5 million tourists who descend on the idyllic cluster of Italian villages every year. I’m excited to ask filmmaker Gar O’Rourke how he balanced social critique with the fact that any movie about seaside Italy is going to make it look really freaking enticing. (To quote Alex, paraphrasing Truffaut: “Is it actually possible to make an anti-vacation-in-Italy movie?”)

Business concluded. Now it’s time for my movie diary from the last few weeks, including this weekend’s biggest release: Disclosure Day.

Terminator 2: Judgment Day

On Memorial Day, Alex and I went to my beloved AFI Silver Theatre for back-to-back showings of Terminator 2 and When Harry Met Sally. As it turns out, this is a well-balanced double feature. They’re both heavyweights in their respective genres — so neither feels like it’s playing second banana — and despite their thematic differences, they’re both fun, which means that four hours in the theater zips by. Obviously you have to start with the blam-blam end-of-civilization picture and finish with the smartest, most perfectly constructed rom-com ever made.

I had not seen any of the Terminator movies before our screening. (As a child of the ’90s, I did know enough to slip into an Austrian accent when telling Alex that I was going to the restroom and would “be back.”) My review is that T2 is great and James Cameron is so good at big set pieces! It helped that the theater was packed with a particularly enthusiastic crowd, who were stoked to be seeing one of the only two extant 70mm prints from the film’s original theatrical release.

Given my present circumstances, I couldn’t help but read T2 as a “boy mom” movie. I can’t say that Sarah Connor seems like an amazing mother at all times, especially in terms of how she talks to her kid while they’re getting shot at in a moving vehicle, but she’s clearly dedicated to him, so I’m probably not giving her enough credit. (In general, we don’t give stressed-out, overburdened moms enough credit. See: If I Had Legs I’d Kick You.) I was also, of course, impressed by her pull-up game. Something to keep in mind as I consider my postpartum strength-training regimen.

When Harry Met Sally

AFI has been doing a Rob Reiner series, which makes me sad but has also been really nice. We went to The Princess Bride a few weeks ago, too. I hadn’t seen that one in decades — unlike When Harry Met Sally, which I watch two or three times a year — and it landed for me in totally new ways. I always enjoyed Westley and Inigo’s sword fight banter, but I never appreciated just how much chemistry Cary Elwes and Mandy Patinkin had. (If The Princess Bride had been made in 2026, they would have kissed.) But the real MVP was Peter Falk, whose performance I had never thought that much about. There’s a small moment at the end of the movie that I adore. As he’s getting ready to leave his grandson’s room, he pats himself down to make sure he’s got all of his stuff, going, “Okay… okay… okay… all right… so long.” It’s such a well-observed little moment.

Anyway: When Harry Met Sally. We had just enough time to hit the restrooms and grab popcorn before it started, which was important because you can’t watch that movie hungry. (Too many food scenes.) I figured it would be a fun palate cleanser after T2, but seeing it with a live audience drew my attention to jokes that I usually gloss over. You may recall the scene in the bookstore when Harry sidles over to greet Sally, who is “browsing” (more like chatting and people-watching) with her friend Marie. Sally turns to introduce Harry to Marie, but Marie, sensing an opportunity to push Sally back into the dating pool, has vanished. Cut to Marie smiling and waving goodbye from the top of the stairs. Perfect physical comedy from Carrie Fisher.

Tuner

In Tuner, Leo Woodall (doing a pretty credible American accent) plays a piano tuner who discovers that his hyper-sensitive hearing makes him a natural safecracker. The movie is a crime thriller, but there’s an alternate reality in which it’s a really good rom-com. Woodall (charming) and Havana Rose Liu (a star) have great chemistry in the first portion of the movie — it’s your classic prickly-girl-meets-slightly-arrogant-but-sensitive-boy scenario — and I would have been thrilled to watch the continuation of their romance, sans gunfire and mayhem.

For what it is, though, Tuner is a lot of fun. It’s not perfect: The back third is a bit messy, and I didn’t buy that a guy as smart and thoughtful as Woodall’s character would make the missteps that he does. All of that’s to say that you can start to feel the plot driving the characters, and not the other way around. Still, the movie has style, swagger, and heart, and I look forward to seeing what director Daniel Roher (already an Oscar winner for the documentary Navalny) is cooking up next.

Heavy Metal Parking Lot

We returned to AFI for a special 40th anniversary screening of Heavy Metal Parking Lot, the cult documentary short that Jeff Krulik and John Heyn filmed outside a Judas Priest concert in Landover, Maryland, in 1986. It was cool to see the short on a big screen, but this was truly a movie screening as a social experience. Landover is less than 30 minutes from Silver Spring, where AFI is located, and the Maryland pride in the room was palpable. Alex and I were among the few millennials in the crowd, which was full of Gen X fans of the movie (and Judas Priest), people who had been at the concert, and several of the revelers featured in the documentary. (The bare-chested, suspenders-wearing bassist from the movie now runs a local violin repair shop and a BBQ rub company.)

Krulik and Heyn emceed the evening in jovial and chaotic fashion, first showing the short film and then offering color commentary while playing all four of the tapes they collected on that afternoon in 1986. As we were walking out of the theater, I told Alex that they reminded me of a friendlier version of Statler and Waldorf. Instead of heckling the onstage performers, they heckled themselves.

Showgirls

I watched this as part of my research for an upcoming story about Maddie’s Secret, John Early’s directorial debut, which you should absolutely go see when it comes out next week. Maddie’s Secret wears its references on its sleeve — Early even teamed up with Metrograph to screen a bunch of the movies that inspired him — and Showgirls is one of its primary touchstones. Having somehow never gotten around to Paul Verhoeven’s 1995 erotic drama, which is both beloved and maligned, I was excited to have a reason to prioritize it.

The movie is insane. Aesthetically, it looks great. The production design and dance numbers are fantastic. At times, I struggled to lock into Elizabeth Berkley’s famously over-the-top performance, but she’s so committed to the bit that I couldn’t help but respect it. All that said, I never want to go to Las Vegas.

Disclosure Day

*Minor spoilers ahead*

I know I’m an easy cry, but I don’t go into most big action movies expecting to get choked up. That’s what happened during Disclosure Day, though.

Initially I had a hard time pinpointing why I found Steven Spielberg’s new film (opening wide today) so affecting. For the first two hours or so, it’s a good, if not transcendent, action-thriller. The U.S. government has been concealing the existence of extraterrestrials for the better part of a century, and a young whistleblower named Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor) has stolen the evidence, with the intention of sharing the news with the world. The stunts and set pieces got my pulse racing — particularly one heartburn-inducing sequence involving a train — but the plotting is mushy and the dialogue is often clumsily expository. Who needs a story crafted like a Swiss watch when you have an alien device that can solve every plot hole for you? (Well, not every plot hole. A crop circle appears in a field at one point. Why? We never find out.)

What did feel specific, original, and nuanced was Emily Blunt’s performance as a weather forecaster who has suddenly developed the ability to speak multiple languages and to see, with great empathy, into strangers’ minds. God bless Spielberg for giving the talented Ms. Blunt an opportunity to do some capital-A acting! Her character is wonderfully contradictory: She’s simultaneously flummoxed and unbothered by her new powers, and she appears both dazed and hyper-focused as she sets out to find Kellner. (They have never met, but she has a gut feeling that their paths are meant to cross.) She’s funny. She also has one of the most realistic panic attacks that I’ve seen onscreen.

In the final 30 minutes, Disclosure Day makes the leap from solid action flick to something revelatory. I won’t share too many details because you should experience it for yourself, but there’s a profoundly moving sequence in which a newscaster gets thrown a breaking story and struggles to process it alongside the millions of people watching. Wesley Morris wrote beautifully this week about Spielberg’s ability to transmit a feeling of awe to his audiences, and that’s exactly what happened here: I, too, felt like my reality had been shattered. Cue the waterworks.

We are not alone,
Eliza