Zola, No Sudden Move, and Succession trailer bitch!!!!

Getting way in over one's head, plus the spit that rang throughout the land

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Jul 13, 2021

Hello! We’re back from a quick break with a nice, long episode!

On this week’s episode of Criticism Is Dead, we discuss Zola and No Sudden Move, two films about getting sucked into very criminal goings-on.

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03:08 Zola, now out in theaters(!), has a hard job of hitting the right balance between dark and larger-than-life wild, and it veers a little more toward dark.

The Twitter thread that started it all.

The Rolling Stone feature that turned it into more structured IP.

And now, the movie.

It’s really good at capturing a few things: the darkness and danger beneath the absurdity, the increasingly strained relationship between Zola and Stefani (especially great at portraying the early stage of infatuation, that high of text messages, the feminine pinks and sparkle), Zola’s silent skepticism. But in trying to shade out more of the dark undertones, the film takes away a little bit of the bombastic voice that was so integral to Zola’s original yarn on Twitter. It’s a tough line to walk, and I’m not sure they quite pulled it off. But it’s nevertheless a decent movie, definitely something I would have loved to watch in a packed Alamo Drafthouse.

23:24 Crime caper No Sudden Move, streaming on HBO Max, is akin to a fast car: you don’t know all the parts and how they work together, but it’s definitely moving!

No one really knows what’s going on! Even the characters! There’s so much at play here, with twists and double-crossings and double-double-crossings. You have to pay attention (and turn on subtitles) to try to keep up, because this ride is going to keep zooming along with or without you.

But what a cast. What a director (Steven Soderbergh, Pelin’s favorite). What this film captures, like lightning in a battle, is the energy of Detroit in the 1950s at the height of the auto boom. It’s American capitalism at its peak, opportunism at its most distilled. No Sudden Move is actually better when it goes for the vibe and the speed than when it tries to contextualize and give it more historical grounding, which it does through an info dump closer to the end.