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Red rocket sean baker9/2/2023 ![]() ![]() What Saber says and how he says it often elicits chuckles, but the real laughs come from the aftertaste Rex provides, with looks and glances that search for reinforcement of his grandiose façade. Red Rocket isn’t the kind of work that condemns or implores-not explicitly, at least-but Rex lays everything on the table, from Saber’s basest desire to his most complicated self-delusions, while Baker (who also serves as the film’s editor) refuses to let punchlines have the final word. It’s a delicate balancing act, though one that Rex and Baker walk carefully together the former breathes life into a uniquely challenging role that mixes sincerity with insecurity, while the latter crafts a piece that observes and explores every facet of that performance, no matter how many goofy layers conceal its nuances. Saber is, at once, a sympathetic charmer down on his luck, and a middle-aged narcissist whose actions border on (and sometimes, cross all the way into) predation. Before long, he finds a potential path to spiritual salvation, in the form of a local 17-year-old donut shop cashier named Strawberry (Suzanna Son), with whom he falls head-over-heels. But he also revels in his own ego, and he knows full well that his doe eyes, his alluring smile and his gorgeously chiseled physique can help him get by. Saber is both a victim of his own stardom, and a victim of expectations and systems that fail to catch people when they fall. have crumbled, to his estranged wife and former scene partner Lexi (Bree Elrod), who begrudgingly lets him move back in, and Lexi’s no-nonsense mother Lil (Brenda Deiss), who demands he pay rent, despite his porn star status making it difficult for him to find work. However, everyone in the film is too caught up in their own leg of a pitiless rat race for this lack of cohesive politics to matter-from Saber, whose career and reputation in L.A. This ever-present backdrop rarely amounts to much, beyond the vague and somewhat uninspired connection between Saber and Trump as seedy Hollywood conmen. News items about Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump play constantly on TV screens, though no character in the film seems actively concerned with the outcome. Starring: Simon Rex, Bree Elrod, Suzanna Son The film, while not set in the year 2000, unfolds at a similar precipice of American change with major domestic and global ramifications: the buildup to the 2016 election. ![]() ![]() Its appearance in the first scene not only offers a humorous contrast-the film’s toe-tapping, propulsive soundscape feels wildly disconnected from its exhausted protagonist-but also sets a very particular tone, since the track might immediately bring viewers of a certain age back to the turn of the century. Where some filmmakers might use the boyband hit only as a nostalgic throwback, Baker turns it into a strangely poetic motif that returns in several iterations, from a taunt hurled in Saber’s direction, to a thoughtful reprieve (whose poignancy Saber can’t quite grasp), to a twisted exclamation point. ![]() That said, Baker’s latest is hardly a bore or a wasted effort, and it’s bolstered by a hilarious, self-reflexive performance by Simon Rex of Scary Movie fame, who plays a manipulative, washed-up porn star trying to get his life together and failing to get out of his own way.īefore its hoodwinks and hijinks begin, the film opens with the sounds of N’Sync’s “ Bye Bye Bye ” scoring dreary images of a battered and bruised Mikey Saber (Rex), en route to his dilapidated neighborhood in Texas City, Texas after decades away. It isn’t as exciting or emotionally exacting as those aforementioned films-in part, because it isn’t trying to be-though it does leave a lingering sense that it could have, and perhaps should have, dug a little deeper into its setting. A24Īfter stunning audiences with Tangerine, an authentic iPhone opus about Los Angeles’ transgender sex workers, and with The Florida Project, a hard-hitting Orlando motel drama led by a six-year-old, Sean Baker returns to boutique studio A24 with Red Rocket, a Texas-set comedy that unfolds at a similar nexus of American poverty and American hustle. ![]()
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