In this episode, Dara is looking for a pulse. After he and his daughter watched Adam Sandler’s 2004 romcom, 50 First Dates, Dara was reminded why he wasn’t a fan of the comedian’s factory line movies – there were too many moments and gags that were completely devoid of life.
He found something similar in the character played by Nicole Kidman in this year’s A Family Affair, a film in which Zac Efron’s manchild action star falls for his personal assistant’s mother, with ‘hilarious results’.* The insistence on Kidman being presented as a middle-aged woman who could be mistaken for being twenty years younger was more than Dara could bear. And why does Kidman’s upper lip epitomise the problem of the Female Beauty Industrial Complex?
Seeking a life-force elsewhere, Dara found it in two other films, both strong genre offerings. The first was Ti West’s retro slasher movie ‘X’ (2022) which was bursting at the seams with character and vibe and horrific thrills. The second was a brand new Netflix release, Rebel Ridge, a tasty corrupt cops thriller with two really good central performances from Aaron Pierre and Don Johnson, who gets better and better with age.
Dara continues pitting life against death in a concluding reflection on the connective tissue between acting and teaching. He wonders about the stakes, the idea of service, and the pain of ‘losing the room’.
*(Not hilarious at all. Dara forgot to mention Efron and Kidman’s first onscreen pairing in 2012’s The Paperboy, a much more successful serving of gaudy southern carnality and madness from Lee Daniels.)