"The Holdovers" Didn't Make Me Want To Punch a Hole in the Wall. Why?
By all rights it should have
My least favorite kind of movie is the kind where privileged people struggle with life’s ordeals. Garden State and Lady Bird are that kind of movie, and so are the last several dozen Wes Anderson films. These movies usually feature a main character who has a complex relationship with their parents, which strikes me as the most “dog bites man” plot imaginable — doesn’t everyone have a complex relationship with their parents? Your parents, after all, were just two morons who had sex and — poof! — you showed up; they didn’t so much as pass an online certification course to have you. There are people in this world who have lost a limb; there are people who have had to flee a civil war. To make a movie in which the central conflict is that so-and-so’s dad didn’t fully support his decision to open an organic puppet store seems like the height of solipsism.