I Saw the Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare Glow

Reviews of 'I Saw the TV Glow' and 'The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.'

Let’s do some quickie reviews of two prominent recent releases, shall we?

I Saw the TV Glow

As I’ve said a billion times before and will likely say a billion times again, genre is the teaspoon of sugar that helps the medicine go down, a way of storytellers talking about something without explicitly talking about something. Case in point: I Saw the TV Glow, the new film from writer/director Jane Schoenbrun, is overtly a psychological horror film, but covertly a story about the trans experience.

Set predominantly in the late ‘90s and mid-aughts, I Saw the TV Glow’s threadbare plot follows a young suburban introvert named Owen (played as a 7th grader by Ian Foreman and as a high schooler and adult by Justice Smith). Owen lives with his mother, Brenda (Danielle Deadwyler), and his homophobic stepfather, Frank (my mortal enemy, Fred Durst, in a clever bit of casting: no one personifies turn of the century toxic masculinity more than the dude from Limp Bizkit). At his school, Void High - where the walls are lined with militaristic slogans like “Pain is weakness leaving the body” - he bonds with an older student, Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine from Bill & Ted Face the Music), over a mutual love for a Buffy the Vampire Slayer-esque television show called The Pink Opaque. Maddy, whose father is physically abusive and whose peers torment her for being a lesbian, tries to persuade Owen to leave town together - but Owen can’t go through with it. Then Maddy suddenly disappears without a trace, after which… well… things start getting bizarre, to put it mildly.

Those looking for anything resembling a traditional narrative will feel sorely let down by I Saw the TV Glow. Moving at roughly the pace of a snail caught in a glue trap drowning in quicksand, it operates under the same kind of dream logic as David Lynch movies like Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive (both of which came out during the era I Saw the TV Glow takes place), although it rarely engages in the absurdist levity of those movies: there is exactly one funny line of dialogue in this whole film, and it doesn’t arrive until almost the end. I Saw the TV Glow is a mood as much as it is a movie; Schoenbrun’s goal, I’d wager, is to convey the feeling of feeling trapped in the wrong body, rather than to tell a story that is literally about feeling trapped in the wrong body.

There’s a lot of striking imagery in I Saw the TV Glow, and Schoenbrun certainly has great taste in music: the soundtrack includes King Woman, Phoebe Bridgers, and Sloppy Jane, all of whom also appear in the film (King Woman perform their song “Psychic Wound,” which certainly seems appropriate).

What Schoenbrun doesn’t have are peaks and valleys; every performance in the movie in sedated, and every character speaks in a kind of detached monotone. I understand that Schoenbrun is saying something about alienation, and I understand that the understated nature of 99% of the movie is meant to make the 1% where characters do get worked up all the more powerful… but we don’t go to the movies to walk across a flat mesa. I Saw the TV Glow may be a little too emotionally chilly for its own good.

The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare

The British director Guy Ritchie desperately wants his latest movie, The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, to be Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds. And, hey, I get it. I, too, would have liked for The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare to have been Inglorious Basterds; then I would have sat through a masterpiece, instead of this slop.

The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is one of those “inspired by real events” movies (read: don’t depend on its historical accuracy). It’s basically a “men on a mission” movie in the same vein as The Dirty Dozen, The Guns of Navarone, Where Eagles Dare, etc.: there’s a ragtag team of soldiers who have to go on a dangerous assignment to thwart the villains. In this case, that assignment is to blow up an Italian boat stationed a Spanish island so as to stop German submarines from patrolling the Atlantic Ocean.

The titular team is led by Gus March-Phillips (Henry Cavill), whose characterization is limited to a funny mustache, a mostly told-and-not-shown aversion to authority, and a proclivity for making a metal face when he kills Nazis.

March-Phillips may seem woefully underdeveloped as a character, but he’s practically one of the Brothers Karamazov when compared to the other members of his team. These fellas are distinguishable from one another solely because of their accents (British, Irish, Danish, different British) and specialities (boats, bow and arrow, blowing shit up, being in the background). Three of them are played by well-known actors (Alan Ritchson, Henry Golding, and Alex Pettyfer), one of them is played by Ralph Fiennes’ nephew (Hero Fiennes Tiffin), and none of them have personalities. Like, truly, other than their nationalities, I could not tell you the difference between Ritchson’s character and Golding’s character. There are members of the team in Inglorious Basterds who are never really fleshed out, but in The Ministry of Blah Blah Blah, NONE of the characters are fleshed out.

This includes an actress and singer, Marjorie Stewart (Eiza González), and the proprietor of an illegal casino, Heron (Babs Olusanmokun, who you’ll recognize from his small but pivotal role in the Dune movies). They spend most of the movie on Fernando Po, the aforementioned Spanish-controlled island, making preparations for the rest of the squad’s arrival. This largely involves having Stewart, who is half-Jewish, seduce an especially unpleasant Nazi officer, who is played by actual Inglorious Basterds cast member Til Schweiger. Marjorie and Heron are a thousand times more interesting than March-Phillips and his bland commandos, if for no other reason than that they’re involved in espionage, not just shooting people over and over and over again. Their sections are more akin to “Operation Kino,” the part in Inglorious Basterds where Michael Fassbender goes undercover as a German soldier (come to think of it, Til Schweiger plays a prominent role in that part of the movie as well).

In addition to its banal characters, The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare suffers from repetitive action sequences (the heroes walk into a room where the Nazis are not expecting them - they casually shoot all the Nazis, providing a vaguely humorous contrast between their violent acts and their cavalier attitude towards those acts - they do it all over again) and few obstacles to potentially obstruct their objective (every time some potential hurtle does arise, they figure out a way around it in five to ten seconds, max). It’s hard to imagine a more bland telling of such an exciting story.