In Which Michael Shannon Cooks An Elaborate Dinner

The Projectors

by ETHAN PETERSON

Frank & Lola
dir. Matthew Ross
88 minutes

There was a Times article a few years ago about the apartment Michael Shannon rented in Red Hook with his wife and daughter. It reminded me of that MTV Cribs episode that visited Redman's home in Staten Island. Not because Shannon lived in any kind of squalor – just that the reporter found a lot more than she bargained for, and did not even know it. Shannon went on for a while about how much he hated claustrophic spaces, and compared himself to the main character in Martin Scorsese's The King of Comedy. He sounded like a very wild person.

Then again, Michael has the propensity to talk a lot – the actor's bizarre rant against elderly Trump voters was relatively unsurprising. No two people could be more dissimilar than Michael Shannon and Donald Trump. The mercurially talented Shannon is a complete chameleon, whereas the president-elect can only ever be one thing.

Or maybe that is the wrong spirit animal. Recently, as he enters middle age, Shannon has started to look more and more feline. In Frank & Lola, the brilliant directorial debut from Brooklyn resident Matthew Ross, Shannon has no careful costume to obscure the fact that his head is a great deal larger than his torso, an aspect of all large cats. Even though he is not a very large man, Ross is the first director to insist that Shannon loom massively in the frame, like a smudge you cannot wipe off. As Frank, a Las Vegas-based chef, Shannon even throws in a New York accent.

Frank meets Lola (Imogen Poots) and in short order she has his name tattoed just above her waistline. He is intrigued at this level of devotion, but soon it seems like merely a lever on him. Shannon does not have much in the way of chemistry with Poots, but it is sort of the point that these two are not exactly right for each other. Sensing Frank's underlying anger and self-hatred, Lola explains that she was raped by a European man she knew. Upon learning of this tale, Frank barely considers his girlfriend for the rest of the movie except in the context of being a victim.

Normally, this would make for a very dark turn, but Shannon is able to save us from that, too. Ross makes a point of deepening our understanding about Frank through knowledge of what he does for a living. Frank and Lola depicts the confusion some of us have with food: whether it should serve merely as basic nourishment or as a component of some cosmic reassurance depending on how thoroughly we enjoy making or consuming it.

As Frank cooks for people he barely likes or respects, Ross weaves a light allegory of writing for more well-known but less talented people than himself. It is sort of shocking how jaded Hollywood has made him at the tender age of forty, and the same is true of Mr. Shannon, who sometimes throws parties for his daughter Sylvia. She and her friends like to watch movies on the projector.

Frank & Lola was originally set in Brooklyn. This makes a lot more sense because both protagonists seem relatively alien to Las Vegas, and we never get a real sense of the city as a place to live in. (The only reason Ross moved the film west was financial.) Frank is way too innocent for Las Vegas, but his basic gullibility is just right for Brooklyn, where a tragic possessiveness is as natural as water. Ultimately I felt Poots was the weak link here, mainly through no fault of her own. In one key scene she appears entirely in reflection, and we get a basic sense of how slight she is. Her meandering, mealy-mouthed way of speaking is right at home in other roles, but it is hard to imagine Frank being captured by it: he craves refinement, both stylistic and physical.

Cannily, Ross displays Poots topless in the first scene of Frank & Lola, as if to give us a basic functioning reason for Frank's desire. He refuses to penetrate her on a first date, so they settle on cunnilingus. She asks him, while he has his mouth on her, to hold her down, and he cannot help but crack some kind of joke about this. The moment quickly gives over to pleasure, and this elasticity of feeling is devastating.

Frank takes a number of trips to Paris where he meets up with Lola's rapist. Ross plays these scenes very carefully, relying on the possibility of violence and rage versus the presence of either. It would be easy and therapeutic to watch Frank enact vengeance, but Ross is telling a much more sensitive story. Denying us catharsis is so risky, especially in a debut, but Ross' devotion to how he sees these characters approaches the devout. He wants to know exactly how they do a thing at the moment they are called to do it.

Ethan Peterson is the reviews editor of This Recording. He is a writer living in New York. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here.

In Which Our Father Is Ashamed Of Our Abilities

Pretend Time

by DICK CHENEY

Man of Steel
dir. Zack Snyder
over a thousand minutes

So I watched Superman the other day. It was a complete and total disaster. He drinks beer and watches football. Lois Lane is constantly saying, and this is verbatim, "Where are the toner cartridges?" (She can't operate a printer because she's a woman is the subtext there.) I guess they were trying to humanize him, although considering there's a 40 minute prologue based on Krypton, you would think at some point they would realize he's an alien.

In another scene (there are many scenes, Man of Steel is over six hours long, did you think Watchmen was long? Man of Steel makes Watchmen look like Un Chien Andalou) Lois Lane goes to her editor. She tells him she has an unbelievable scoop about this guy who healed her wound in the Arctic. Her editor is like, "Nah." She's like, "I quit," but he says she's under contract so she takes it to a rival blog. The blog is a loose parody of Talking Points Memo or maybe I Guess I'm Floating, not entirely sure? The blogger wears nerd glasses, because you see, he works on the internet. The actor playing the blogger is probably Jon Snow.

"you agree this looks like complete shit, right?" "yep"

In this prologue, Russell Crowe plays Superman's father. His mother is so gross they mostly focus on Russell. There's a governmental coup that is turned back, but that's beside the point since the planet is dying anyway. Russell has some bad blood with one of the actors from Boardwalk Empire, I think the guy who played Nucky Thompson or maybe the guy from The Wire who portrayed the gay drug dealer so tenderly? The Wire was a great show, a much better show than Man of Steel.

an inauspicious beginning for the career of young Dylan Sprayberry

In another scene (I think this came after the scene where Clark Kent first learned of interracial dating) some bullies came up on Clark. (This is all in flashback, because.) He's reading Plato. What the fuck would Superman read Plato for? Can you honestly think of anything less relevant to a man not of this world than the work of Plato?

But back to Lois Lane. They had a perfectly good Lois Lane right there, playing Tiffany Superman, Superman's mother. Her last name was even also Lane:

hopefully the subplot about her having unprotected sex with antonio banderas will appear on the blu-rayWhy Clark Kent couldn't have been interested in Murphy Brown, I'll never know. This was a casting fuck-up of major proportions. An older Lois Lane also would have made it easier to kill her off eventually — she could just die of old age and marriage wouldn't really be an option.

she reminds me of a human-sized grasshopper wearing an ugly wig

I don't want to say all these things in my head about Amy Adams. You already know how I feel about Isla Fisher, I'm pretty sure you can just apply that broadly to Amy Adams. Here's the thing — with Isla Fisher if I was maybe locked in a room with her, I'd grow to appreciate her personality. With Amy Adams, I know that's not going to happen, because all she cares about is toner cartridges. I would have accepted Teri Hatcher in this role, even if she now looks like your fingers do after you soak in the bath for an hour.

someone actually thought to themselves, "you know, this face should be seen by one or two other people"

Doing the Superman story in flashback is so fucking dumb, I don't even need to explain, do I? The only fun part of Superman is when he casually uses his abilities when no one knows about him. I was praying I did not have to watch the inane scene in the bar where the guys come up to the Terminator. Did you know James Cameron gets royalties every time this occurs in any fiction, even if you have a dream about it in the privacy of your own home?

"lois, your bangs are completely ludicrous and your reporting is substandard at best."

The actor who plays young Superman is also terrible, he looks gentile. The whole point of Superman is that he was Jewish, you can at least read wikipedia before making a movie about a super man. There's this super hokey scene where Clark saves a bunch of his classmates from a drowning on a school bus. They couldn't think of anything better than that and they were prescreening The Sweet Hereafter because they wanted to be reminded of what an actual creative project feels and sounds like.

you know he's in the media because he doesn't take care of his body and he can't dress himself

There is one black character in Man of Steel, J. Jonah Jameson. You didn't realize he was black? Do you even know how dumb it is for Superman to care about football, even if he was just pretending to have the same interests as his erectly dysfunctional human father? Even the score of this movie is like beyond saving, it's so bad.

"son, start dressing like riffraff. no one will pay the slightest bit of attention to you then."

I guess the scene in Man of Steel that probably bothered me the most is when Clark's really concerned human father, Jon Bo Superman (Kevin Costner), tells him that it is best he hide his abilities from the world. "Can't I just keep pretending to be your son?" is what Clark says in response. "You are my son," Jon Bo tells him, which is a lie. But worse, he doesn't even bestow the slightest praise on the teen for saving a bus full of his neighbor's friends. He doesn't care about them any more than he cares about Clark.

Superman is supposed to make us feel selfish for wanting to be all powerful, and wanting no one else to share in our new abilities. For if they did, then we would not be so unique and different from the rest of the middling, maddening crowds. But who would even desire to be this person? His girlfriend looks like she got picked up at a 7-11, his alien and human families aren't all that welcoming to him and he's a Raiders fan. To use a superhero as wish-fulfillment, he should probably have something we want.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording. He is a writer living in an undisclosed location. He last wrote in these pages about Arrested Development. 

"Seven Hours With a Backseat Driver" - Gotye (mp3)

"Thanks for Your Time" - Gotye (mp3)