Matt Johnson
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Despite the copious references to Pulp Fiction, The Usual Suspects and Elephant, Johnson stresses that violent films don't create psychopaths, though they do provide reference points to the steps that will eventually tip them over the edge.
We meet them in the opening scene hard at work on their project, a violent revenge fantasy that’s equal parts Being John Malkovich and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, although it’s mostly Pulp Fiction, at least when it comes to language and violence.
Matt’s idea seems like a goof at first, an excuse to riff on Pulp Fiction and The Usual Suspects and screw around in his basement room on the computer.
Matt, who has a basement full of movie posters, has stuffed his debut auteur effort with swaths of dialogue from Pulp Fiction and obscurer references to films like Irreversible .
It’s also a film about the new breed of mass murderers, depicting Matt as a typical teen who’s been desensitized by shoot-’em-up videogames and movies, to the extent that he appropriates the dialogue and attitudes of Pulp Fiction and The Dark Knight Rises without considering their real-world implications.
It’s like The Bear on steroids.
Tony just feels like watching four mid-season episodes of The Bear without context, wondering why you’re watching these irritating people without a compelling reason to like them…
…practically laid the groundwork for stories like The Bear…
…they also take their work seriously, and the kitchen carries the pressure-cooker intensity of The Bear.
However, in the wake of recent shows like "The Bear" and films like "Marty Supreme," there is a sense that Johnson's film is, to use a popular food-related phrase, reheated nachos.
1975, Jaws at the drive-in theatre…
…a place that is pretty similar to Amity Island in Jaws, which is showing at every drive-in…
At one point, there’s even a scene featuring a drive-in theater screening JAWS.
…including allusions to Jaws and the stagnating 1970s…
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
influenced Operation Avalanche (2016)
Themes
Operation Avalanche is in many ways a Dr. Strangelove tribute, a found-footage Sixties caper wherein a team of CIA spooks infiltrate NASA and fake a moon landing to help win the Cold War.
The film owes much of its bite to the spirit of Doctor Strangelove, and it behooves one to remember that film became more, not less farcical as the stakes got higher.
Not only does the film visit the Shepperton Studios set of 2001 and get his autograph, it starts with a mention of the CIA investigation into whether he was a spy after Dr Strangelove pointed out the absurdities of the Cold War.
They are helping investigate Kubrick and Dr. Strangelove — an actual thing that the CIA did back in the day — when they finds out their employers are planning to send an agent into NASA to hunt down a possible Soviet mole.
If you're a fan of other period coming-of-age movies with killer soundtracks like The Wackness or Adventureland, Tony is going to be a tasty dish.
Still, the film's heart lies closer to coming-of-age stories like Adventureland (2009) and The Way, Way Back (2013)…
In visual style, tone, and structure, Tony is an entertaining, warm, hangout flick that feels spiritually aligned with Dazed and Confused and Everybody Wants Some!!
It’s a feel-good guy movie in the vein of Richard Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some!!, another college period piece that similarly gazes backward in time while immersing you in its testosterone-drenched escapades…
Whereas Gus Van Sant’s Elephant tried to skirt the issue and present it in very black and white terms (although suggesting everything from bullying to homophobia to video games to incessant piano concertos), Johnson makes no qualms about suggesting that school corridor bullying is to blame.
The subject of bullying is convincingly depicted, and there's an attempt to grapple with the transition from class clown to killer, but this lacks the depth, emotional clout and (oddly enough) empathy of Gus Van Sant's altogether superior Elephant.
Imagine Gus Van Sant’s Elephant laced with meta-movie mischief and the result might resemble Canadian first-timer Matt Johnson’s promising but patchy provocation.
Gus Van Sant's "Elephant" might be the high water mark for artistic meditations on the conditions that lead to teen massacres, but Matt Johnson's "The Dirties" exists outside of those expectations.
After all, most biopics are not-so-secretly odes to their subject's greatness, and that subtext has disturbingly become text in the wake of "Bohemian Rhapsody" and this year's "Michael."
This makes Tony closer in spirit to James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown, which peered into a relatively small window in Bob Dylan’s life, than Antoine Fuqua’s more expansive, Jackson estate-stamped Michael.
This makes Tony closer in spirit to James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown, which peered into a relatively small window in Bob Dylan’s life, than Antoine Fuqua’s more expansive, Jackson estate-stamped Michael.
Even James Mangold's underrated "A Complete Unknown" managed to subtextually weigh Bob Dylan's legacy against the couple years over which that movie takes place, while "Tony" and its look at Bourdain feels oddly too incomplete, even generic.
Inasmuch as Tony wants to be a scruffy, 1970s-style antihero drama, in the manner of The Last Detail or Scarecrow, it has the right face for it…
Inasmuch as Tony wants to be a scruffy, 1970s-style antihero drama, in the manner of The Last Detail or Scarecrow, it has the right face for it…
In visual style, tone, and structure, Tony is an entertaining, warm, hangout flick that feels spiritually aligned with Dazed and Confused and Everybody Wants Some!!
Banderas — in tune with Johnson’s allergy to anything that might resemble “Good Will Hunting” — gives Chef enough space to suggest that his life won’t be defined by teaching a young Anthony Bourdain how to shuck an oyster.
The restaurant staff shares the brotherly camaraderie and playful prankster dynamic of workplace comedies like Waiting... (2005)…
If you're a fan of other period coming-of-age movies with killer soundtracks like The Wackness or Adventureland, Tony is going to be a tasty dish.
It also wouldn’t be a stretch to call Tony one of the only films to truly understand and recreate what made The Social Network tick: the energy of naïve youth, no matter how destructive.
And The Dirties is a suspense film, in the tradition of Targets , The Day Of The Jackal, and Day Night Day Night, tracking the anxious days of careful preparation leading up to a potential crime.
After all, most biopics are not-so-secretly odes to their subject's greatness, and that subtext has disturbingly become text in the wake of "Bohemian Rhapsody" and this year's "Michael."
It’s the kind of logic that worked for Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate…
Stavros Halkias, Michael Jibrin, and Monica Raymund help round out the kitchen staff with a jocular, blue-collar vibe that seems modeled after the crew of the Nostromo (if you’ll forgive the anachronism)…