18 1/2: A “historical fiction Watergate thriller/comedy"
Plus ID reboots, BS genre sexism, and the Bay Ridge blotter
the true crime that's worth your time
The crime
Watergate.
The story
18 1/2 isn’t really a true-crime docudrama. It’s just about every other genre, as the film’s own press site notes, calling it a “historical fiction Watergate thriller/comedy,” but if you go in expecting a dramatic reimagining of the fall of the Nixon White House, or a thin POV slice of the story involving the titular eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap in the notorious Oval Office tapes, you won’t get it. 18 1/2 is the story of an executive-branch transcriptionist, Connie (Willa Fitzgerald), trying to do the right thing with the missing conversation she thinks she unearthed elsewhere by handing it off to a Times reporter, Paul (John Magaro). Cloak-and-dagger hijinks ensue, until it’s no longer hijinks, and along the way there’s hippies maybe building a bomb in another cottage in the same motel complex our heroes have repaired to, and also Richard Kind in an eye-patch. Like most of the rest of the cast, he’s great (his line reading of “I’m not for everyone” is an all-timer).
But you also won’t get a particularly well-paced feature. 18 1/2 moves right along in the first third, then gets bogged down in a handful of stagey set pieces. I wouldn’t say the movie feels longer than its 88 minutes, and it does have its diversions along the way, but as I said, it’s often stagey, in the narrow sense of that word. Director Dan Mirvish, a co-founder of the Slamdance film fest, does what he can to keep Daniel Moya’s script from feeling like a converted one-act — buuuut it feels like a converted one-act. And ain’t nothing wrong with a one-act! But between the shaggy-dog-story nature of the series of reveals in the last act; a couple of sequences — like the maybe-cultist (Sullivan Jones) and his soliloquy on Wonder Bread — that have that “this should have been the first overworked ‘baby’ to be killed in rewrite” feeling; and the final “gotcha” about Paul, which Connie and the audience learn about via a radio broadcast while Fitzgerald has to do a bunch of unmediated trauma-sobbing that isn’t sustainable, 18 1/2 overall feels like it’s in the wrong genre or at the wrong runtime.
It’s a shame, too, because Magaro and Fitzgerald have a sneaky partner chemistry that works well with the dialogue, and each actor does deft set-up work with the guns that have to go off later in their short con on fellow travelers Samuel and Lena (Vondie Curtis-Hall and Catherine Curtin). Fitzgerald should really become a bigger name pretty soon; she has a “what if Kaitlin Dever, but less hunted” organic fine-tuning to her performances that’s very approachable. Magaro has a somewhat thankless job here, particularly given the aforementioned reveal, and it’s not easy to play a Watergate-story reporter post-All The President’s Men without shortcutting it, but he’s good, as is Curtis-Hall. Curtin…well, look, I think the script doesn’t leave her a lot of room with the choices that don’t go anywhere, but the accent is not great, and she does well with the red-wine-monologue slide from paranoia into sentimentality, but that doesn’t exactly pay off either.
In the end, it’s frustrating, this movie — it’s not bad, it’s just a little off. I get why it didn’t get made as a short; among other things, I don’t know that you can get guys like Bruce Campbell and Jon Cryer to voice Nixon and Bob Haldeman if the pitch feels too student-y. (Well, Campbell would probably do it. He’s the gamest.) I also get why 18 1/2 won a handful of awards at festivals, because it has some nice performances and a rakish energy, and even when it stalls out in spots, it’s not taking itself too seriously. Like, if they go back and make a sequel that’s just from Jack’s perspective, with the homemade eye-patch and the passing the time with Famous Ghost Stories, I’d watch that happily. 18 1/2 is just in the wrong runtime “body,” IMO. I don’t regret watching it, but I don’t quite recommend it, unless it comes to streaming.
18 1/2 premieres next Friday May 27, I think only in Los Angeles; for more info on the film, the cast, the tapes, and to watch the trailer, go here. — SDB
The tweet above is from my councilman, datelined yesterday morning — JB’s third consecutive day of updating his constituents on bomb threats phoned in to Fort Hamilton High School here in beautiful Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. I’ve mentioned FHHS here before; it’s not especially close to where Exhibit B. and I live, but it’s where I usually vote. And I’ve noted it here before because it has a true-crime history; the property figured prominently in the frustrating denouement to a child kidnapping that was probably considered if not the, then A crime of its century.
Local commenters on socials and Nextdoor (yeah, I know I shouldn’t go on there but sometimes I need advice on pea gravel, envy ye my glamorous existence) seemed to feel it started with pesky kids who want out of class now that the weather’s finally bearable, and then copycats took over. We may never know for sure, but we got this update minutes ago on an alleged prankster:
This is a micro-local story of the sort we don’t generally focus on — this isn’t a literal blotter/Stupid Crime Tricks blog (although the local rag’s police-blotter section is reeeeally something) — but I mention it because coverage of it, and other stories like it, is germane to Best Evidence. The brief is “true crime that’s worth your time,” but immediately behind that is the why of that worth, and behind that is the how, how docs and recreations and longreads and straight-up crime reporting frame these stories for us, and whether that framing is…just. Bay Ridge is a Blue Lives redoubt in the city’s only red congressional district, and said city is in its first year under a former cop who sometimes seems like he’s micro-dosing. The FHHS bomb threats followed a day-drinkers-vs.-unpermitted-march dust-up last Sunday.
That’s quite a bit closer to us. My sources reported a very visible police presence, but little concept of what NYPD was even responding to. Certainly the idea that anything got “defunded” would be hilarious if it weren’t so depressing.
This is a neighborhood where everyone’s got at least one “those people”; the way true crime, and particularly law enforcement, narrative is created looks a bit different, and various criminal-justice-adjacent situations and statistics sometimes seem to exist in a different language from the lived experience. It’s something the 11209 thinks about, consciously or not, most days, true-crime stories kind of colliding with each other on the sidewalk, and worth keeping in mind as we work our way through the genre. — SDB
CrimeReads dropped an essay Monday headlined “ASKING WHY WOMEN LIKE TRUE CRIME IS CONDESCENDING.” Novelist Caite Dolan-Leach had me with that hed, though I don’t entirely agree — I think assuming the reasons women have for liking true crime, or anything else, as though we operate as a single organism is not just condescending but an outright error. I received the semi-snotty subhed, “So maybe…don’t do it?”, the same way; there’s a difference between the combative, -ist, “my question is more of a comment” approach, and a sincerely curious query as to why specific women might find specific subgenres or media compelling.
Then Dolan-Leach started to lose me.
I know I’m not the only person who likes reading about what the worst of us can do––true crime is hardly a new genre and is certainly not an unpopular one. If anything, it’s having a moment.
Oh, word? …I mean, not to get semi-snotty my own self, but the “moment” started in like 2012, come on.
And wrapped within a strange sort of feminist security blanket, I feel… reassured that the genre is typically consumed by women. Put another way: if it were just me and a bunch of white incels obsessing over John Wayne Gacy on Reddit, I’d be a bit more worried. Not that me and the Chardonnay-sipping soccer moms that make up the core consumer group of true-crime aren’t capable of profound evil––I’m fairly sure we are–– I’m just relatively secure that the violence we’re engaging with is primarily psychic, confined to the nasty reaches of imagination.
The first couple sentences of the graf land a little glib, and I don’t think “feminist” is quite the word Dolan-Leach wants here, but once I got past a knee-jerk reaction to what seemed on the surface like a superfluous #girlboss recasting of interest in true crime, I had to admit there’s an interesting assertion here. Liking true crime is and creates a safe space? O…kay, yeah, could be!
But then Dolan-Leach empties both condescending barrels with “Chardonnay-sipping soccer moms,” like, couldn’t an editor have circled back with her on that, let’s face it, bitchy locution? Because either she’s trying to make a point about how true crime is often marketed, and stereotypes about the “core consumer” that get folded into that, ones we’ve bemoaned many times around here, in which case she needed a couple sets of quotation marks or some kind of modifier indicating that that’s pop-culture merchandising’s take on the demo, not hers; OR she really does see the rest of us as tipsy squealers, clutching our stemless Etsy “wine and crime” glasses with extra-reverse-Frenched fingertips and “admitting” that we “would” with Ted Bundy, which, talk about “so maybe don’t do it,” dang!
She goes on from there to talk about the ways letting her mind lie fallow with non-fiction crime accounts lets her crime-novelist mind recharge and find new narrative attacks in her fiction — in fact, the piece is really an op-ed/book sales pitch, and: fine! So maybe…just do that, and title it accordingly? So maybe…don’t slap a faux-combative headline about a different issue entirely on the thing and then slam your fellow “consumer” with tired and imprecise labeling? But Dolan-Leach did that, her editor let it through, and what might have become an intriguing process discussion, about a title that’s tempting to me based on its stated goals re: unpacking celebrity and genre-audience parasocial attachments, ends up feeling like an SEO bait-and-switch instead.
I like CrimeReads a lot; I find a lot of cool stuff to read and think about over there; this is beneath them. — SDB
Kassie King ranked the ten best documentary features on Hulu right now for MovieWeb. I haven’t seen everything here, but I liked her high ranking for The Painter & The Thief. Any thoughts, or docs that should have made the list instead? — SDB
ID and discovery+ dropped their upcoming slate/s yesterday. Lots to look forward to and/or eye-roll here, including
a nineties-nostalgia four-top slated for August with
“a fresh look at the shocking trial of Erik and Lyle Menendez for the murder of their parents in MENENDEZ BROTHERS: MISJUDGED?”;
MARY KAY LETOURNEAU: NOTES ON A SCANDAL, and I will again register my objection to calling felony assaults “scandals”;
yet another Biggie/Tupac “deep dive”;
and the unappealingly titled THE KILLER NANNY, on the murder trial of Louise Woodward
as well as new content like
“HOUSE OF HAMMER (wt), which chronicles the deeply troubling accusations leveled against Oscar-nominated actor Armie Hammer and the dark, twisted legacy of the Hammer family dynasty”;
MURDERER NEXT DOOR, which I feel like Oxygen already has 2-3 iterations of, but okay;
and WILD WICKED WEST (working title)
AND, rebooted “by fervent viewer demand,” both WHO THE (BLEEP) DID I MARRY? and DISAPPEARED.
I was just thinking about Disappeared the other day when we mentioned Never Seen Again. If any true-crime programming ever understood what “core consumers” find both soothing and intriguing about the rhythms of these by-numbers shows, it was Disappeared.
Friday on Best Evidence: Eve confronts Our Father. (Who is…not the Zodiac.)
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