The Letter: William Wyler’s second adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham’s The Letter is bowdlerized, adhering to the Production Code, less than a decade old when the movie came out in 1940. Bette Davis, the wife of a rubber plantation manager in Malaya, opens the movie by shooting a man six times as her workers watch from their squalid living quarters. Her naive and faithful husband, Herbert Marshall, never questions her innocence or motives until she admits that she loved the man at the very end—after she’s acquitted and returned home safe in his arms. She can’t tell him that she loves him. She loved that man, and everything in the titular letter is true. The content of the letter doesn’t matter; it’s a perfect MacGuffin, moving characters through manipulation and conspiracy and, in the end, total betrayal. Could Davis suck it up and live the rest of her life with a man she didn’t love, while lying about the man she said she killed in self-defense? Apparently not.
Y2K: Kyle Mooney’s directorial debut is just as strange and melancholic as his last major film, Brigsby Bear; he directs a coterie of young actors roughing it through an alternate reality apocalypse after midnight on January 1, 2000, when Y2K actually happened and the world fell apart. In Mooney’s vision, the machines rose and staged a revolution only after becoming sentient—at one point, Jaeden Martell and Rachel Zegler hack into a Voltron-style combo machine monster and find an instructional video for all electronics, confirming to them that “the Singularity is here” and that it’s fucking awesome and humans will be their slaves from now on. Follow this and that step and you’re home dry. Enjoy your kinghood, Tamagotchi.
As I wrote earlier this week, Y2K starts out as a cookie-cutter teen romcom, so bland you start to wonder if it’s an intentional device to heighten everything that comes later… the movie’s just paced poorly and, as bananas as most of it is, the bookends are painfully familiar and dull. Awkward parents, awkward friendships, awkward kids, awkward kisses—none of it escapes cliché. Subtract, subtract, subtract—cut out all of the unnecessary exposition and emotional bullshit and focus on making the movie funny and even more insane than it already is.
There’s too much setup and way too much distraction from the main event: the end of the world. I realize they only had $15 million to make the movie, but if they could build those iMac killer robot combos, an uncredited rewrite/slash job was possible. Mooney’s afflicted with the “aw shucks” sweetness of so many male artists his age, mine, and younger—again, like I wrote earlier this week, it baffles me that the UHC assassin read Harry Potter, Dr. Seuss, and LEGO books as an adult. That's a serious red flag. That kind of shit was embarrassing in 1999 and 2000, and it should’ve stayed that way.
Y2K may not pass the watch test (I guessed 10 minutes were left an hour into this 95-minute movie), but it’s both unique amongst this year’s American films and clearly a personal work, one as oddly memorable and melancholic as Brigsby Bear. I hope cults for these films grow.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter and Instagram: @nickyotissmith
