The Last Talented Action Hero
Issue #10
Hey FilmRunners!
This week, as usual, my reviews will be accompanied by reviews from Mason and Larissa from Turn and Smile! In addition, I’m joined by the other half of the Substack power couple—Enrico Banson! Like Maria, Enrico seems like someone I’d want to hang out with if we weren’t on opposite ends of the continent. Here’s a bio straight from the source:
Enrico Banson is a film, TV, commercial, and stage director who believes no story is too big, small, or weird to tell. When not wrangling actors and camera crews, he hoards Blu-rays and vinyl like a cinematic dragon. He writes Director’s Notes on Substack, offering insightful—occasionally contrarian—takes on film, TV, and theater. Fueled by coffee and questionable amounts of Yacht Rock, he keeps the cameras rolling and the stories coming.
You can find Enrico’s Substack here:
And Turn And Smile here:
The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999)
Picked By
Enrico Banson
Synopsis
In late 1950s New York, a young underachiever named Tom Ripley is sent to Italy to retrieve Dickie Greenleaf, a rich and spoiled millionaire playboy. But when the errand fails, Ripley takes extreme measures. IMDB
Director
Starring
Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jude Law
Runtime
2 hour and 19 minutes.
Trailer
Why
I chose The Talented Mr. Ripley because it embodies a fascinating era in cinema—one where prestige filmmaking and studio-backed productions still had room to intersect in bold, uncompromising ways. The late 90s and early 2000s saw a wave of daring, ambitious films that blurred the lines between arthouse and mainstream. Ripley stands out in this period as a film that dares to be sophisticated yet thrilling, meticulously crafted yet emotionally raw. It is a film that does a lot of things well, from its lush cinematography, gorgeous film score to its psychological complexity, making it an ideal choice for revisitation.
The Last Action Hero
Picked By
Jake
Synopsis
With the help of a magic ticket, a young movie fan is transported into the fictional world of his favorite action movie character. IMDB
Director
Starring
Arnold Schwarzenegger, F. Murray Abraham, Art Carney
Runtime
2 hours and 10 minutes.
Trailer
Why
This is another pick where I wanted more diversity of genre than anything particularly deep. I wanted some action, and this seemed like a perfect fit. A satire on the genre starring Schwarzenegger and directed by John McTiernan seems like a no-brainer. McTiernan has Predator and Die Hard to his name, and I think this is right around when Arnold starts to branch out into comedies. I’m going in as blind as I can for this one, as I think it’ll land better the less I know.
🎥 Reviews of Last Week's Picks
Caution, there may be spoilers.
Network (1976)
Picked By
Mason and Larissa
Synopsis
A television network cynically exploits a deranged former anchor's ravings and revelations about mass media for its own profit, but finds that his message may be difficult to control. IMDB
Director
Starring
Faye Dunaway, William Holden, Peter Finch
Runtime
2 hours and 1 minute.
Trailer
Guest Review
This is a major motion picture about the corporatization of mass media, the twenty-four-hour news cycle, rage-baiting, the outrage cycle, capitalistic takeovers of government, and audience burnout. This is the most relatable film not only to modern television, online creators, and working professionals alike, but it’s themes perfectly capture the zeitgeist of the modern North American cultural climate.
It’s not in movie theatres, it’s not on major streaming networks, and it’s even a challenge to track down and watch. The movie is called Network. It came out in 1976.
Network is about an exhausted reporter, Howard Beale, who announces on-air that he’s fed up with the state of network news and, to cap off his forced retirement, he will be shooting himself in the head live on his final broadcast. After this suicidal segment goes viral (or the 1976 equivalent of viral), the new department head decides to go all-in on Beale’s breakdown. Instead of taking him off the air and finding Howard a therapist, the network head gives him his own show to rant and rave about anything and everything.
It works. Howard’s show becomes the most popular thing on the air. As long as Howard is keeping people entertained and watching, the network is happy. They have no morals, only a lust for more revenue. They even go further, pacifying the audience’s zeal for accounts of extremist action by partnering with a group of radicalized socialist domestic terrorists for new programming.
The temptation for modern audiences might be to assume that the writer of Network, Sidney Aaron Chayefsky, was a paranoid doomsayer whose predictions proved to be startlingly accurate about our world in the 2020s. But no, that’s not it at all. This Oscar-winning movie was commenting on how things actually were fifty years ago.
Concepts like “if it bleeds, it leads” originated in American news media as far back as the 1890s. Journalists and newspaper magnates like William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer (yes, that Pulitzer) used sensationalism and other elements to great success in their newspapers and tabloid rags. Named after a particularly egregious campaign called The Yellow Kid, their style of glitzy and emotion-driven news reporting became known as Yellow Journalism. In fact, Pulitzer used these shady tactics to get himself elected to Congress. Hearst, meanwhile, inspired Orson Welles when he wanted to write about a corrupt media mogul with no discernible ethics in Citizen Kane.
By the ’70s, this type of Yellow Journalism was dominating the news. Chayefsky penned a satirical story mocking the sensationalism of the time with Network. His outlandish story proved to be hilarious—sometimes outright mad—to theater-going audiences. A review from A.D. Murphy of Variety said the film “pushes relentlessly past discretion through the barrier of intellectual credulity, making it so outrageous that it comes across as brilliant,” while Vincent Canby of The New York Times wondered if audiences would sniff at the “number of absurdities [that] couldn’t happen.” These include revolutionaries being more invested in self-chronicling their antics for TV than in their actual goals for societal change, a network executive willing to engage in murder if it means higher ratings, and a billionaire capitalist pulling the strings behind everything.
In 2025, it’s almost absurd that these things would be considered absurd. In 1976, Variety mocked a scene where “the revolutionaries, network execs and their respective lawyers scream at each other over syndication fees and overhead charges.” A few decades later, people were embarrassed about sharing KONY 2012 indiscriminately. Fifty years ago, murder-for-views was the ultimate atrocity. Today, our celebrities could include the likes of Gypsy Rose Blanchard, the Menendez Brothers, and Luigi Mangione. And the hidden figures of Network, the billionaires pulling the strings, connecting Saudi oil profit with audience viewership of the TV evening news… well, they are promoting their government coup on their privately owned social media network.
Chayefsky was goading the audience of Network into action. If sensationalism was bastardizing “eternal” or “absolute” truth into an “impermanent, transient, human” form, then people would not be capable of truth or even self-preservation. Clearly, the audiences of 1976 were not ready to take action on “the depression, and the inflation, and the defense budget, and the Russians, and crime in the street.” Our real news cycle has been pushed past discretion and through the barrier of intellectual credulity, and our government systems are outrageous.
Maybe in 2025, we are finally ready to get up, get out of our chairs, stick our heads out our windows, and yell: “I’m mad as hell and not going to take it anymore!”
Jake’s Review
⭐⭐⭐⭐ (four stars)
I went expecting this to be cynical, and it was, but it went in a much different direction than I had expected. Prior to watching it, I sat down expecting an exploration of the concept of the commodification of spectacle, not unlike Jordan Peele’s Nope. While it did have that in droves, it was a lot more nihilistic in its take on corporate greed. The writers of Network were downright clairvoyant about what was to come on American-style television.
There were some dated tropes in this and some aspects that didn’t age well. Despite that, I still feel it holds up really well. I particularly loved how the executives of the news network just really didn’t believe in anything outside of whether or not it generated ratings. This is the driving force behind the film and serves to erode away at anyone that has an ounce of integrity.
I found myself glued to the screen, despite my tradition since my daughter has been born that I watch a film in four sittings. Check this one out for sure.
Palm Springs (2023)
Picked By
Jake
Synopsis
Nyles and Sarah find themselves stuck in a time loop and living the same day over and over again. They are drawn to each other, but certain revelations threaten their budding romance. IMDB
Director
Starring
Andy Samberg, Cristin Milioti, J.K. Simmons
Runtime
1 hour and 30 minutes.
Trailer
Turn and Smile
There have been at least seventy-seven movies that have featured a time loop of some sort, starting back in 1969 with the French film Le 15 Mai and going to 2024’s Omni Loop. Palm Springs, written by Max Barbakow and Andy Siara, is one of them. Announced in 2018 and filmed in April 2019, the story is very smartly sparse with details—we, as the audience, don’t need them, as we’ve seen it all before. We are quickly introduced to Andy Samberg’s character Nyles, the boyfriend of a bridesmaid at a wedding in Palm Springs, who is caught in a time loop, forced to relive the day of the nuptials again and again, seemingly for no reason but with the memory of it all. When we meet Nyles, he has already been going through his time loop for so long that he’s forgotten more of what has happened than we learn from the movie itself. Demoralized and resigned to merely existing, Nyles has lost his sense of purpose and has forgone any overarching meaning in life or the universe.
The man’s so nihilistic that they had to name him Nyles.
It’s interesting that by the time Palm Springs was released in July 2020, it was consumed by an audience who could relate all too well to Nyles’s sense of meaninglessness while trapped in a stationary position, forced to repeat the same day over and over. By November 2020, in the peak of COVID anxiety, Palm Springs was one of the most-watched direct-to-streaming videos of the year.
This anxiety over entrapment was best conveyed through the film’s audience surrogate, Sarah, played by Cristin Milioti. The bride’s sister and maid of honor, Sarah meets Nyles at the wedding and, during one of his later loops, follows him into the unexplained sci-fi jibber-jabber and consequently gets stuck in the time loop herself. Unlike Nyles, Sarah chooses to take control of her destiny and even goes so far as to master quantum physics to learn how to escape. Nyles, for his part, realizes he would rather risk death with Sarah than be stuck in a comfortable and complacent immortal existence without her. Love is the missing ingredient for Nyles to make life worth living, which reinforces the modern adage from philosopher, author, psychologist, and Holocaust survivor Viktor E. Frankl that “The meaning of life is to give life meaning.”
And thus, the theme reveals itself.
The pandemic lockdowns are now a surreal memory. Since we have generally reintegrated as a society since our lockdown, we have experienced rapid changes to our culture. Perhaps Nyles and Sarah were feeling just as surreal reintegrating into continuous time. One can imagine them gleefully affecting change—any change—on tomorrow just because they could. Would they savor the subtle ways we impact the people and environment around us? Would they keep their bond with each other and their passion for life? Having been through something similar ourselves, we can only assume that they would. Globally, people are passionately affecting change. The ability to be a part of a community, affect change, and evolve with time is worth trading any isolated existence, no matter how comfortable.
As we were watching Palm Springs, it was difficult not to think of the Danny Boyle film Trainspotting. At the beginning of the film, Ewan McGregor’s Mark Renton narrates a monologue asking the audience to not just choose the comforts of a sober life, but to choose life—before undermining himself almost immediately and asking:
“But why would I want to do a thing like that? I chose not to choose life. I chose somethin’ else. And the reasons? There are no reasons. Who needs reasons when you’ve got heroin?”
Palm Springs seems to answer that question by showing us something we all know well now, thanks to the pandemic: circular monotony is a fate worse than hell. Fulfillment is possible, but we need to find it for ourselves.
There have been at least seventy-seven movies that have featured a time loop of some sort, starting back in 1969 with the French film Le 15 Mai and going to 2024’s Omni Loop…
Jake’s Review
⭐⭐⭐✨ (three and a half stars)
I knew I’d enjoy this, but this really was millennial bait. The nihilism crossed with some dark slapstick really nailed the formula for me. This film managed to deliver a fresh take on the time-loop trope with suffering from being overly ambitious. What really surprised me though, was as a 2020 release I had assumed this was a product of the COVID lockdowns. However, this actually was released prior to that (just barely). What I took to be a statement on how everyone felt during the lockdowns, is not actually the case. I think it’s more fair to say it was capturing the feelings of millennials becoming entrenched in the workplace and settling down. That’s not to say it didn’t take on new meaning after COVID. I’d actually go so far to say that now that there is some space between us and the lockdowns, it is far more relatable across demographics than it would have been otherwise.
Andy Samberg as Nyles, was for better or for worse, Andy Samberg. In my opinion this was a case for better. Cristin Milioti as Sarah was great and I’d like to see more of her in other features. J. K. Simmons as Roy was a treat and most of the scenes he was in are hilarious
Overall, I feel like this was great, but not memorable. It’s not going to be in any top 100 lists (unless there's a top 100 list of time loop films), but it should age well for anybody in their late 20s or 30s.
🖋 Closing Note
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