I want to talk about Shane Carruth but first I need to talk about David Lowery. Here are some statements about David Lowery:

1. He’s bald.
2. He’s the director of Pete’s Dragon, Aint Them Bodies Saints, A Ghost Story, the upcoming The Old Man and The Gun, and his first feature was something called St. Nick.
3. He came out of the Dallas independent movie scene, which is kind of unusual, and his non-feature pre-breakthrough credits are kind of standard for someone who was helping out on his friends movies however he could: some editing, some DP-ing, etc.
4. Before making ATBS (his first real movie, with like famous people and stuff), he was the editor of Upstream Color, the second feature of one Shane Carruth, who is also from Dallas, although his debut, the cult classic Primer, was made with basically no help from anyone and he was not, at the time, a member of the Dallas independent movie scene.
5. He has made two movies in the past with Casey Affleck, and does not appear to have any qualms about doing so in the future, considering he’s currently making another one, and Affleck and Rooney Mara were in super low-budget ATBS and A Ghost Story so it kind of seems like they’re friends? Although conclusions about who’s actually buddy buddy with each other just based on the people they work with all the time isn’t necessarily accurate. You can draw your own conclusions from the facts on the ground, but I think at this point it’s at least noteworthy.
6. Sometimes he has a big mustache and sometimes he has a kind of groomed all-over stubble.
7. After directing ATBS he got called up by Disney to direct their Pete’s Dragon movie which disappointed financially but had a somewhat surprising critical following.
8. He’s currently in-development with Disney on the Peter Pan live action remake, which probably makes you roll your eyes now, but I’m guessing when it comes out it will be hailed as a thoughtful meditation on childhood wonder and innocence and possibly even story-telling itself (??). Just calling my shot there.
9. I’ve only seen A Ghost Story and I thought it was pretty good, although for some reason I’ve spent a year trying to convince myself not to like it, I don’t know why. It’s inventive and ambitious and very strikingly “weird” which is always something I approve of. There’s something about the philosophical matter of the movie that just feels both navel gazing and a little shallow to me, although I like generally like the way that’s executed. There’s also this essay, which I don’t think is entirely on point but isn’t wrong, either, and is at least great fun to think about. This is just to say that I have neither the expertise nor the inclination to say that, actually, David Lowery is a hack fraud and should be exiled back to Texas, and that’s not what this is about.

Okay, let’s talk about Shane Carruth. Here’s what I think about Carruth: he’s maybe the only working director interested in accurately interpreting and reflecting the condition of life under post-modernity or late capitalism or whatever it is you want to call the state of society in which we live and his work is both “important” and incredibly affecting in the way that things called “important” usually aren’t. He became well-known when Primer, his first movie, won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 2004. This is all the more exceptional when you remember that Primer, a) was made for about $7,000 dollars, and a lot of that probably went into shooting the movie on film (there’s at least one scene in the movie that’s completely fucked up because they exposed it wrong or stored it wrong or something) b) absolutely no one famous is in it, which was less of a rarity for Sundance in 2004 but is absolutely unthinkable now, and c) Primer is legendarily, beautifully, unintelligible.

Unintelligibility is the quality that comes up most often when talking about Carruth. Usually people say his movies are “confusing”– almost the same thing, but I think calling something confusing implies accident or incompetence, so I’m going to stick with unintelligible even though it’s a mouthful. Primer is famously complicated, a fact which has fueled its cult following and spawned a ton of graphical explanations and charts, absolutely none of which make the film any easier to understand. You are, of course, not supposed to understand what’s happening, because the main characters of Primer, Abe and Aaron, two garage scientists who invent a primitive form of time travel, don’t understand what’s going on either (no spoilers here, but you should really watch it).

Carruth, by his own statement, makes movies about subjective experience, in which the drama of the film comes from characters trying to understand the unexplainable and unintelligible events happening around them. Maybe the most exemplary scene in Carruth’s two-movie oeuvre is in Upstream Color (you should also watch that, I think it’s on Netflix), when the two protagonists played by Carruth and his wife, Amy Seimetz, are being psychically tortured, essentially, but someone they’ve never met in a way they don’t understand. They pace around anxiously, get in fights, look for something they think they’ve lost, and eventually are reduced to cradling each other in a bathtub, terrified and devastated for reasons they don’t understand, other than that they’re both feeling it together. Carruth’s movies, likewise, try to put the audience in a place of feeling without understanding.

And that, I think, is what makes Carruth’s a more clear-eyed and honest observer about the present in a way that no one else, other than maybe David Lynch, to whom he’s often compared, really is. Our lives are shaped by factors that are not only beyond our control, they are so completely arcane as to be indistinguishable from total chaos. The strings of the world are pulled by people we’ll never meet and have probably never heard of. National politics has descended into either complete farce or irrelevant sideshow, yet is somehow more important to our lives and emotions than ever. There is one basic phenomena central to Shane Carruth character’s, Shane Carruth audiences, and every single one of us all the time: the feeling that something very bad is happening, but we can’t understand what or how. In Primer I think the link is clearest. In theory it’s possible to map out the plot completely, every time loop, every Doppelganger, every replay, but to do so is to almost to be made completely insane and obsessive through the act of deciphering. the people making plot charts just as unintelligible as the movie itself might as well have cork boards of strings connecting the Bilderberg Group to Leonardo Da Vinci to the Freemasons.

If in a Shane Carruth movie, absolute knowledge or understanding is unattainable, the only way forward is emotion and instinct. The audience must become guided by the forces by which his characters persevere (okay here are actual spoilers). In Primer, it’s the conscious-bound Abe listening to his deteriorating body and his lingering sense of ethics to break with the mercenary Aaron and try to shut down the original machine and undo what’s already gone wrong. Aaron, meanwhile, leaves the country and is last seen constructing a massive version of their machine in a foreign country, for purposes that remain stubbornly unknowable to both the audience and Abe. And in Upstream Color it’s the couple, Kris and Jeff, following the clues of their unexplainable personal impulses to track down and kill the man who trapped them in the cycle to begin with. In a world where objectivity is impossible, an embrace of subjectivity is the only escape. It’s a perspective that could be nihilistic or hedonistic, but, as I think the end of Upstream Color demonstrates, is ultimately hopeful.

But the thing about Shane Carruth, the final layer of irony, is that he, himself, is basically doomed by the vicissitudes of the Hollywood. Carruth is famous for writing scripts that are basically un-produceable. Between Primer and Upstream Color he worked in Hollywood on a project called A Topiary. The script was an inconceivable 245 pages long and nearly every line of dialogue was chock-a-block with ellipses, uhs, ums, and all the other filler they drill out of you the first week of screenwriting class. Now he’s supposedly in development on a movie called The Modern Ocean about “trade shipping routes on the ocean.” The list of attached above-the-line talent is incredible. Keanu Reeves, Daniel Radcliffe, Anne Hathaway, Jeff Goldblum, Tom Holland, Chloe Grace Moretz, and Asa Butterfield are all attached. I do not believe this movie will ever be made. It’s been “in development” since 2013, and given Carruth’s noted idiosyncracies, the prospect seems dim. To be honest, I understand. If I was seeking a return on investment of several million dollars, I would not give it to Shane Carruth.

Because this is the entire sliding doors tragedy of Shane Carruth and David Lowery. Because despite coming from the same city at similar times and achieving similar (but slightly different) kinds of indie-filmmaking success and critical acclaim, one will go on to have a long and successful career balancing big-budget Disney remakes and star-studded indie features and the other will be trying to convince financiers to fund his unintelligible, epistemological allegories. Whether it’s true or not, I’ve come to think of Carruth as a kind of savant; he’s a director that is not only unwilling to make movies the normal, regulated, Hollywood way, with clear cause and effect, 110 page scripts, relatable protagonists, but perhaps unable to. His limitations are his art. Lowery, on the other hand, succeeds through his flexibility, making mumble-core thrillers for no money, making CGI heavy family films for a lot of money, and then back to shooting 16mm art pieces.

As the avenues of advancement and success in Hollywood become more and more monopolized and ossified, that quality of flexibility will become the only thing consistently rewarded. “One for me, one for them” will become the only way to make anything “for me” at all. And some directors will never want to, or be able to, make one for them. I think I resent Lowery somewhat for having the will and the ability to pull off what Carruth hasn’t. Something about knowing that the road to A Ghost Story only goes through Pete’s Dragon is so disheartening it taints the entire endeavor for me. I could call Lowery all sorts of things like “careerist” or “sell-out” or “upjumped journeyman” but my heart just isn’t in it. After all, I liked A Ghost Story, well enough. In a good mood, I might even find it in me to hope that his success will help some of his more un-civilized peers find their own niche. After all, he produced Alex Ross Perry’s Listen Up Philip and Dustin Guy Defa’s Person to Person (Defa’s another hard case, but I’m at 1700 words already). And hey, look at who got a credit for additional editing on A Ghost Story, who David Lowery credits with the “greatly liberating discovery” of the film’s flexible, some might even say subjective, experience of time: you guessed it, Shane Carruth.

Still from Upstream Color, 2013

I wanna say some nice things about a very despised character. As we’re all aware, I’m sure (please do not read this if you are not aware), Supreme Leader Snoke, the shadowy, oft-holographic big bad of Star Wars–The Force Awakens is dead. Chopped in half Darth Maul style by his protege/victim Kylo Ren. A lot of people hated snoke, and thought his whole deal, the menacing voice, holographic projections, vague identity, was corny as fuck. Presumably some people were really interested in Snoke, and wanted to know who he was or whatever, but I certainly don’t know any of these people.

But nearly everyone seems to think killing off the presumptive big bad of the series in the second installment of the trilogy is a good idea. I agree! But where i disagree is that Snoke getting killed off was necessary because Snoke sucks, or because we don’t know who he is. Rian Johnson actually does a lot over the course of The Last Jedi to rehabilitate Snoke, at least to me, starting by doing away with the whole “giant projection” gimmick that proves he’s an actual guy who hangs out in a bitchin’ throne room. But I also think Johnson left subtle hints, bread crumbs on a trail to determine who the Supreme Leader really is. This may be baseless speculation, but I think I’ve pieced enough together to figure out Snoke’s true identity. Are you with me? Okay, here it is: Snoke is the Galaxy’s biggest asshole.

Seriously, he’s just the worst guy in the fucking universe, a dick of truly epic proportions, and I love him. What I think makes him interesting is not that he’s evil. Palpatine was evil; it’s been done. He’s a personal kind of asshole, a bully. He has the perfect way of digging at Kylo Ren, first with the wonderful “take off that mask” bit (side note: that phenomena, where you adopt an affectation you think is cool, but then someone makes the slightest offhand crack about it and you become so self-conscious you decide you hate it and never do it again, is so common and true to life I’m shocked that I’ve literally never seen it in a movie before) but then also when Ren brings in Rey, saying that he was “too weak to understand my manipulations” or something bitchy like that. I’m reminded of the classic RedLetterMedia description of prequels-Palpatine: “I guess I really like Palpatine so much because he’s the only character with any kind of passion to him: he’s fucking evil and he loves it.”

But to dig just one layer deeper, I really do think that Johnson does a great job of allowing us to construct a backstory for Snoke: because in a really clever way Snoke’s backstory is what the whole movie is about! Remember the little kid from Canto Bight who uses the force to move that broom? Okay, Snoke is that kid. Not literally (duh), but I think Johnson, throughout the film, wants us to think about the force as something that exists apart from the Jedi (and especially apart from the Skywalkers). What’s important about the kid at the end isn’t that he’s going to be a Jedi master or something, but that eventually the force is a part of him, and will be something he understands and uses in a way that’s completely wild and untaught. On this, Kylo and Luke make the same point: the force doesn’t belong to the Jedi or the Sith: let something new happen.

Snoke is an incredibly powerful force user, and probably grew up in a rough environment somewhere in the outer rim (where the First Order started). I imagine he was kind of scrawny weak, but he realized he could manipulate other kids, or hurt them when they threatened him. He lusted for power, at some point got his face all fucked up, and in the power vacuum after the fall of the Empire, used the skills he’d developed all his life to become the Snoke we all know and love. Where the kid in Canto seems like a good and pure little moppet, Snoke was always a little touched, and eventually, without guidance or instruction, things spiralled. If this sounds familiar, it’s also because it’s the story of Kylo and Rey! Wheels within wheels! Clever!

So it’s very late at night, and you’re driving a van or an old truck, and you are very far from home, and everyone else in the car, if there is anyone, has been asleep for hours, and on this highway, you keep seeing dead dogs. That’s where Soft Sounds From Another Planet, the second album by Japanese Breakfast (aka Michelle Zauner and some dudes) starts. It’s not the first line, no, but that’s where the whole album is set–hurtling down a deserted highway in the early morning, with nothing else to do but think about what lead you here, and where you’re going.  Soft Sounds is my favorite album of the year, and it’s not even close. It’s at the point where the question isn’t even worth thinking about. Given the amount of time I’ve spent listening to it, and the emotions I still have every single time, to even consider any other album would be ludicrous.

The exact same basic bio is in every critical piece on Zauner, so to get it out of the way she’s the Korean-American musician whose breakthrough was last year’s also very good Psychopomp, an album largely about dealing with the drawn-out death of Zauner’s mother from cancer. So what is Soft Sounds From Another Planet? I like to think of it as a vortex of memory, that’s hurling us through a slew of images and scenes, as feelings of regret, love, loss, and desire, rush past us and hit us all over again, until we eventually collide with where we started, but unfortunately with less understanding than ever. I think I like it because it’s album about moments, moments that turning points in a life, as seen from a position where they’ve already been distorted, but distilled, by memory.

But back to the van. A gauzy voice, Zauner’s breathy register, drifts out of a steady guitar pulse. “I wanna be a woman of regimen/a bride in her home state/a diving woman of Jeju-Do.” This is the dream. Jeju, off the coast of Korea, is notable for its women divers, who harvest conch, abalone, etc. from the coast, but there’s so much implied in just three lines. To be a woman of “regimen,” a serious woman, contented, un-frivolous, in opposition to being well, a touring modern indie musician. “A bride in her home state,” not only feminine and tethered, in a societally sanctioned way, but in a homeland distant and probably alien to the bi-racial, Oregon-raised, Zauner. Basically, she wants in her life everything inaccessible to her now. It’s, I think, a common sentiment to urban creative-types, the idea that this life is a curse, and we would all be less anxious, less depressed, in a pre-modern society where we could do simple rewarding labor in a society that’s liberated us from the freedom of choices we have in our lives. “I want it all” comes in and repeats, increasingly processed, before being swallowed by guitar noise.

Zauner’s vocals come back in, but not so arrhythmic or as reverby. This is where she is. Driving… somewhere. “The men have gone and left again/and no one’s shocked or blames them” is the pragmatic answer to the dream of Jeju-do. It’s another wasted day on the road, and another dead dog, the third, Zauner tells us, she’s seen on this highway. “When I get back there baby/gonna make it a home,” she tells someone who can’t hear her. The chorus returns, except this time it’s “you’ll have it all,” the dream of self-actualization replaced with the drive to provide that for someone else. There’s a whispered “I’ll have it,” that’s cut off by a swirl of guitars, as a long instrumental outro takes us back in time.

That long instrumental outro is replaced by a funky night-time pulse. We’re still driving, because the song “Road Head,” is about road head. Zauner’s lyrics, on Psychopomp and here, are often sexual in a way that catches people off guard. See “when we wake up in the morning, will you give me lots of head,” from “Everybody Wants to Love You.” But on this album (especially “Boyish,” which I’ll get to later), pleasure is a one-way street. “Last ditch desperate/like a makeshift siphon,” Zauner objectifies herself to save something she can see now was doomed. Check out the way the bass, synths, and double or triple tracked vocals punch in right after the first verse, turning the words “going home” into a plaintive smear. “‘Dream on, baby’/ where his last words to me,” and then Zauner is gone on another highway, the shared setting providing the bridge between “Diving Woman,” and “Road Head.”

The next song is called “Machinist.” I don’t really like Machinist. There’s a ton of speech-to-text effects and auto-tune on Zauner’s voice here, which should be a crime, and the allegorical concept makes the whole thing a little less emotionally immediate than the rest of the album. But there’s a slightly funny sax-solo that I enjoy, and the lyrical matter continues the theme of “having it all,” this time with the kind of easy metaphor being in love with a robot as being in love with an emotionally unavailable man, which is punishing even if you’re both trying. It was the lead single, but I don’t know why. Moving on.

“Planetary Ambience” is the come-down from the disco-pop of “Machinist,” then we’re into the title track,  the next milestone in Zauner’s memory tour of lost love. This pairing is more tragic than anything. Zauner want to keep her partner from “abusing [him]self for no reason at all” while she promises to “show you the way to hurt me.” A harsh burr interrupts the song’s gentle waltz. “In search of a soft sound from another planet… searching for goodness while the cruel men win.” Fittingly, it’s a kind of mission statement for Soft Sounds, a moment of realizing, in the present, when you first realized something in the past.

“Boyish” closes out side A with our last failed relationship. Zauner pitches herself the most lyrics on the album so far, and knocks it out of the park. I think Michelle Zauner might be the best Indie musician working at singing the word “me.” Listen to the indignant, piercing whine of “you’re embarrassing meeeeeee” that opens “The Woman That Loves You,” it’s multiple appearances on “In Heaven,” and then the pre-chorus of “if you go to her/don’t expect to come home to me” on “Boyish” and try to find someone better. It has a slightly resigned sigh, mixed with impotent, pleading, anger. “I can’t get you off my mind/I can’t get you off in general” is the star couplet here, calling back to “Road Head”‘s sexual self-loathing, but the humor of the line masks Zauner’s deeper insecurity. “Here we are we’re just two losers,” goes the next line, “I want you and you want something more beautiful.” Suddenly the meaning of the title snaps into focus.

The next verse lets Zauner turn some of her frustration around, with an “if you don’t like how I look then leave,” but when the chorus comes back they’re still together, in a restaurant where Zauner’s boyfriend can’t stop checking out the hostess’s lips while Zauner runs her “ugly mouth.” At the end, Zauner’s reduced to pleading “love me” with increasing desperation.

Our hero is at her lowest point, but things get better in “12 Steps,” kind of.  This is the song where real-life Zauner meets her husband, but unfortunately, she’s with someone else at the time. “12 Steps” captures the conflicting emotions of  when you know you’re doing something bad to someone else, but you’re too happy too feel the appropriate amount of guilt. It also just fucking rocks! It’s so catchy, and if I was trying to hook someone on J-Brekkie with one song it would be this one, for the pre-chorus guitar bridge alone. As Zauner, explains things to her soon-to-be-ex, she pleads for absolution: “so tell me ‘I don’t blame you/he’s the one that you wanted… I can’t blame you/it’s just our love ran it’s course and it’s a love that’s long gone.” Who knows if she gets it, but, as Zauner tries to explain to both us and her ex, the relationship wasn’t worth saving all that much anyway, and she’s got something else to look forward to.

I like, but don’t really have much to say about “Jimmy Fallon Big!” and “The Body Is A Blade.” “The Body Is A Blade” looks back, one year later, at the same era as Psychopomp, stirringly evoking the feeling of stumbling through life after trauma, while “your body is a blade that moves while your brain is writhing.” It’s really good, I swear, just not as good the two songs after it.

“Til Death,” is kind of, as the title implies, a wedding song. It’s not about a wedding, but it’s a love song, to the guy we met in “12 Steps” and who Zauner is still married to. And this is where the album makes the leap from good to great, because I don’t think there’s a better portrait anywhere of 21st century pomo millennial than this song. It’s a song to dance to at your wedding. “Til Death” is, swear to go, basically a Disney ballad, except with mature (as in emotionally mature and adult) lyrics and filtered through Indie studio production. I could just list every great line from the song (“I don’t deserve you but I’m giving it my best”) or try, again, to describe the way Zauner’s voice strains and belts out each one, but it’s useless. The important thing is the way the final show-tune key-change  and wedding bell backing contrast Zauner’s cooed list of traumas, fears, and mental health issues. “Teach me to move ,” she says to her partner, “teach me to breathe.” We may all be irrevocably fucked in the head, but with love, it can all get easier. I can’t think of anything more touching.

When I evangelize this album to people, as I have been to basically everyone I know for the last two months. I usually tell them, by way of recommendation, “I cried.” And the part that I cry during, invariably, is this last song, “This House.” I feel a little pavlovian welling at the opening guitar chords, but then, every single time, at the line “what if one day I don’t know you,” I just lose it. Since I first heard this album I’ve lied in bed at night giving myself chills just thinking about this song. The other day I was working from home and listening to the album on my ipod. When this song came on I sat on my couch and outright bawled for two minutes. My body and my mind simply cannot take it.

When I first started planning out what I was going to write about Soft Sounds From Another Planet, I thought about doing this whole multi-paragraph exploration of like, my particular emotional situation and how it might inform my love of this album. I was going to hide it here at the bottom after 1,700 words about an album only a couple people I know actually care about because I feel like it, I don’t know, shows weakness. I’m about a year and a half post-grad and I think my life has settled into kind of a status quo.  Since high school, I tend not to be a person who does a lot of things. In college it was kind of the same, but I was very, actively, sad about that. Now it’s all just pretty okay. I don’t do activities; I don’t “go out;” I don’t meet a lot of new people; I don’t really have sex. I mostly read stuff on the internet and watch movies. My opportunities to feel a strong emotion, over the course of a standard day or week, are pretty few and far between, which means it’s less terrifying lows and dizzying highs, a lot of creamy middles.

This is fine. I mean it could be a lot worse, and if I really wanted to live my life differently I could. But I think think get kind of… backed up, and when something, usually a movie or piece of music, gives me a reason to feel something very strongly, I think my response is kind of disproportionately intense. The only reason this paragraph is here is because it would bug me if I didn’t acknowledge to you that I know how this might be coming off (let you know I’m “in on the joke,” so to speak), or head off things that you might be thinking right now. Maybe given enough time, this era will start to worry me, and I will work to bring this epoch to an end. But it’s more like keeping an eye on a weird mole than say, coughing up blood. Sincerely, I thank you for reading this far. So maybe I’m just bored, and living vicariously through someone else’s experiences, or maybe you’re reading this and thinking that I’m seriously depressed (a suspicion which is likely about to intensify). Honestly, I don’t know.

Anyways, if “Til Death” is as close as an actual living 20-something can come to a fairy-tale ending, “This House” is what you think about when you haven’t seen your partner in weeks and it’s late and you’re alone on the highway and wondering if you made the right choice. It’s a song about how we’ll always be a little unsettled in our relationships. How we’ll always be second-guessing ourselves, always worried about the future, and how ultimately we’ll have to learn to be comfortable with the ambiguities, and with the unanswerable question of whether a human relationship is ever as “real” as we perceive it to be, or whether it’s all only “timing and championship” and if it is, the maybe that’s actually enough to be whatever it means to be happy. Jeju-do is where we want to be, but we will always live in “This House.” Unsettled and confused, but learning to accept what we can and continue anyways.

“Here Come The Tubular Bells” is the next song and it’s an instrumental. Then the album is over.

You’ve got to hand it John Wayne that a guy 67 years old, who’d spent at least 40 of those years on a six-pack-a-day smoking habit, and already sick with an eventually-fatal case of stomach cancer would still be kicking himself over losing out on a prime role. That’s the legend behind the oddball 70s movies McQ (1974) and Brannigan (1975) apparently the product of Wayne’s remorse over passing on the script to Dirty Harry and knowing what a loose-cannon crypto-fascist can do for a personal brand. One of these films succeeds much more than the other (at cultic John Wayne legacy-building, at least. Neither was particularly commercially or culturally impactful), but they’re both fascinating case studies in Wayneology.

In McQ, it’s painfully apparent that 67-year-old John Wayne is no 40-year-old Clint Eastwood. Dirty Harry is a great movie, and Eastwood is a perfect Dirty Harry. He’s strong but willowy, ageless, beautiful, vaguely androgynous. The pure incarnation of an unfeeling and all-seeing law (for those who haven’t seen DH in a while, or ever, it contains multiple scenes in which Harry Callahan is so distracted by looking in people’s windows that he fucks up some kind of law task. The lawman as voyeuristic perv is the freaking text of the movie!). Seeing John Wayne hobble around Seattle as the titular character is just depressing, a fact not helped by director John Sturges’s strange fixation with shots of Wayne walking through doors out of scenes, alone, and shot from behind. Sturges did great work with an also pretty old Spencer Tracy in the classic Bad Day At Black Rock, but a Q&A session with supporting player Clu Gulager reveals that, well, he may not have been trying that hard.

McQ is a pretty generic police thriller. There’s the dead partner, McQ handing in his badge and gun, a sleazy shipping magnate, corruption in the police department, etc. To be fair, that handing-in-your-badge-and-gun scene is actually pretty funny, if only because the hapless sergeant McQ throws his stuff at reacts like McQ is a puppy who just started pissing on his desk. McQ drives around a lot, and Wayne’s scowls during car chases like he’s midway through a heart-attack. Everyone else in this movie is also old, so much so it’ll make you, yourself, feel closer to the grave. In another movie this might be a treatment of aging, retirement, and irrelevance. McQ can’t muster up enough spirit to be about anything at all.

It’s not all dreck. There’s some nice photography, especially of Seattle’s rarely seen blue/green color pallette. There’s a car chase at the end that feels, in the best possible way, like they went to the prettiest beach they could find and just drove cars all over it. In an obvious attempt to bite Harry‘s magnum gimmick, McQ buys a Mac-10 machine gun about halfway through the movie, and seeing an actor most known for his six-shooter work gun down baddies with an SMG is kind of perversely entertaining, but other than that there’s not much here.

Brannigan on the other hand, is a study of what you can do with this kind of movie if you want to have a little fun with it. Though made later than McQ, canny shooting makes Wayne seem five years younger. Introduced kicking a door down (not open, down. like literally off it’s hinges) and delivering a one-liner, Jim Brannigan is the curmudgeonly, badass Chicago cop you always want to see but rarely get in such undiluted form. After busting a counterfeiter, Brannigan is taken straight from crime scene to O’Hare, handed a suitcase by his put-upon CO, and shipped straight to London, where vaguely mob-affiliated bad guy Ben Larkin is hiding from the law and about to make the jump to South America.

Where McQ is sloggy and familiar, Brannigan is fleet, creative, and most of all funny. The plot is complicated when Larkin is kidnapped by some British goons, who want to ransom him from his slimy accountant, but really what you’re here for is a slobs vs. snobs comedy in which Brannigan shows those limeys how to do police work, Chicago-style. There’s a car-chase with a jump over London bridge, a hitman who tries to kill Brannigan with an exploding toilet, and a blonde lady-cop Brannigan has a strangely flirty, paternal relationship with. The real highlight here though is a bar fight scene that lasts about as long as the famous They Live fight, and rises to levels that can only be described as Pythonesque. I promise you that an elderly John Wayne beating the crap out of a bunch of British stereotypes while barely moving is exactly as fun as that sounds.

Wayne is as fun to watch here as he is in any of his classic Westerns, and the camera worships him. Douglas Hickox, a director I know nothing about, takes the admirable tactic of pretending that this is the third or fourth, Brannigan Goes London instalment of the much beloved Brannigan series, and it pays off in spades. The movie almost convinces you that you know Brannigan, you love Brannigan, and goddammit, here’s Brannigan!

Wayne would go back to westerns for the last two movies of his career before dying of Stomach Cancer in 1978, and its easy to understand why he wanted to round things out with something familiar. But after one misfire, Wayne finds his groove and a director who could work with his limitations. Maybe not for introductory Wayneology students, but advanced scholars should could write term papers on the string of Brannigan movies they could have made if only they’d started in, oh, 1963.