this review might strangely come off as a defense and i want to clarify that i really hated this movie but in a way that i think is productive to talk about, especially in the context of what popular music is now and it’s intersections with what popular cinema is too. and i do think it’s strangely being misread, if not from a shults auteurist perspective (does he even have one? lol) then at least from a weeknd one.
abel “the weeknd” tesfaye is one of the most interesting pop artists of the 2010s and 2020s, to me. not a high bar per se considering the general decline in originality and sincerity we see in a lot of western artists. and i wouldn’t even say abel is particularly different - much has been said about his voice’s similarity to mj, for one thing, but i’ll also get into his more repetitive tendencies later - but there’s a level of self-critique that’s always been a part of his aesthetic, literally from his origins as this total enigma when he first burst onto the scene, pure hedonism coursing through that first trilogy and nothing else. music so aware of its repetitive hollowness and misogyny that it becomes deeply sad. those early songs were so influential, with their dream pop samples and glossy but moody surfaces single-handedly kicking off the minimalist r&b sound that came to define the 10s and popular music trends as a whole. hell, even drake took a lot from his collaborations with abel (crew love… song of the life). and that voice was such a contrast to the subject matter, so angelic, so sexy (to be frank, i think abel is super hot, and i don’t usually find men that hot). he was very unique when he first started off, no matter his similarities to the king of pop (and his dirty diana cover is fantastic of course).
as his stature grew, and his image became more readily available, his ascendancy to stardom was also really fascinating, as that insular world he created began to define most people of my generation’s world. the detachment and this strangely antisocial socialization we experience all the time is what the weeknd’s sound is all about. and so as he began to broaden the appeal of his music, working in those funky, groovy sounds, even at times bringing in other pop trends of the time like ed sheeran’s urban outfitters aesthetic, the contrast between that and his consistent depiction of such detachment and isolation always kept him interesting to me. becoming more popular even seemed to enable him in that regard. more money, more drugs and unattached sex, more toxicity, more lack of normal human relationships, more stories to talk about. and he seemed to be aware of this in his writing! makes sense artists like lana del rey and future became constant collaborators of his, similarly very much making art about the hollowness of their own image, directly echoing american pop culture stalwarts of the past, but with a new generation’s sadness, and also a sadness that they are continually being celebrated.
abel got some massive hits around this time. the hills, earned it, love me harder, low life, and most importantly, the one-two punch of can’t feel my face/in the night and then a few years later the daft punk collaborations. he leaned further into the throwback dance sound but with that distinctly modern alienation still fully a part of him. he struck gold there, as i’d frankly credit the 80s revival trend to him. he started years earlier working with kavinsky, but then after daft punk it was gesaffelstein, during that period where his high-profile relationship with bella hadid fell apart and he made the breakup project my dear melancholy. that 80s sound was inextricable from him. perhaps it comes back to those mj comparisons he couldn’t let go of; whatever it was, it worked. then, after hours came out. after meeting oneohtrix point never on the set of uncut gems (which i’ll come back to), he gained a new artistic goal: to conceptualize the emptiness he felt with regards to his fame and the awful masculinity he’s been perpetrating the whole time, which likely led to the end of his relationship. after hours is an album which certainly follows in the trends of the overlabored “concept” albums which usually turn me off. but with the help of opn, as well as metro boomin, whose influence in his own right helped define the popular hip hop sound of the time, and max martin, who was a pop stalwart of course, all helped him craft some really incredible melodies with dense, diverse production, drawing on sounds not enough people really were in popular music of the late 10s/early 2020s like d&b and garage (no offense to pinkpantheress ma’am but abel did kinda help lay the groundwork for her sound to become so mainstream). the album has all kinds of sounds but ultimately still feels cohesive in, again, that signature weeknd isolation and sadness and emptiness. hardest to love and scared to live for example are songs which make me sob every single time i listen. pop music from a self-hating hedonist screaming into the void. in my opinion after hours is his best complete work since his first mixtape, and also probably my favorite pop album of the 2020s, being one of the closest any has come to the experimentation and unpredictability pop artists of earlier decades always used to go for (kylie minogue, madonna, etc).
after hours and its biggest hit blinding lights honestly came to define the pop sound of this new decade through the isolation of the pandemic, and for better or worse this 80s revival trend finally became *the* dominant sound. i dont really like hearing it anymore because most artists use it so derivatively, with no sense of weight to the grooves, and no one really putting their own spin on it. you’ve heard every song before. gaga’s mayhem (hello again, gesaffelstein) is the only album since after hours i’ve actually found interesting in this lane. and frankly, in abel’s hands too i’ve started to get bored. many people love dawn fm, and to his credit it does have some bangers; but the fact that one of those is literally just him singing over an untouched classic city pop instrumental says a lot. the derivative nature of his music really became apparent to me. the modern weeknd sound had hit its peak and there’s really nowhere to go with it. his latest album hurry up tomorrow, created in tandem/mostly after the making of the new film, brought back some of the more varied trap and soulful elements that i was missing, but it’s so fucking bloated it’s hard to say its an improvement. enjoy the show and timeless are really the only songs i return to.
so now, we circle back to uncut gems. because as many pop artists do, abel felt like his stagnation as an artist could be fixed by spreading out into different and related disciplines. some of his music videos were cool, but as a film buff whose favorite movie is trouble every day, it was only natural for abel to use his clout to enter popular hollywood (the safdies are independent, sure, but come on. uncut gems is a sandman vehicle with an insane cast lol). and the safdies use him fantastically, in his one scene pretty much perfectly encapsulating his mysterious image of that early 2010s era and the way it was a front for his awful misogynistic tendencies. it’s a cameo that brilliantly showcases who he was and is, and tracks with the self-effacement he’s been about throughout his career.
but i guess this and his music videos weren’t enough, because it really gave him the encouragement to keep going with his acting career. and again, he’s far from the first pop artist to pursue acting and filmmaking. the art of the music video has always been very quick encapsulations of cinematic adventure and experimentation, a place for singers to flex their passion for art as a whole and hopefully enhance the contexts of their songs. even if the images were seemingly meaningless, they had genuine feeling. additionally, in the past, artists very conscious of their image who entered the realm of serious filmmaking - such as madonna, bjork, bob dylan, prince, the list goes on and on - had a very different industry to work in. the artists they chose to work with for their visuals were more original, and had a different kind of trust from the people giving them money. even when the movies sucked, it was a more sincere kind of sucking (at this point i’m really not sure if i’m making any kind of sense but bear with me), where the vanity still made you want to hand it to them for trying.
these days, film is a far too overly literal and cynical art. everything has to pander to an audience’s intelligence. nothing feels natural anymore, nor original. when it comes to popular art, every image and line of dialogue has to have an immediately apparent meaning in order to be praised. everyone’s a nerd now, and everyone has to show it off. so when vanity projects arise, they’re often very obvious in what they’re tributing and what they’re about. in a way, it parallels the 80s revival trend in pop music: everything is a tribute now.
i think abel kinda got caught up in that, and specifically the ways in which his music and his image were being misunderstood after he learned the dark side of what he and the industry as a whole perpetrate. for the kind of introspection and self-critique that i feel like has always been a part of his aesthetic, there’s only certain types of filmmakers he could end up working with.
i really wish he chose to collaborate with the filmmakers who’d actually do something interesting with his image, naturally exposing the hollowness of the weeknd or perhaps taking it in different directions: his idols like abel ferrara, claire denis (whether you like her modern approach or not), david cronenberg, cameron crowe, terence malick, hell harmony korine for that matter (not like he’s doing much of value for travis scott but still, it’s something). or artists like lynne ramsay, luca guadagnino or even jane schoenbrun, who are often flawed and juvenile in the images and aesthetics they use but are at least aware of their limitations and work them into the text and subtext. i wonder if this is what amy seimetz was doing (i haven’t seen any of her work before) with the idol before she got fired and abel and sam levinson redid everything…
instead, abel has got to work with artists who don’t understand how hollow their images are. people for whom the subtext is the text. the modern “indie” scene (like i said with the safdies, i mean this less in terms of actual production conditions and moreso in broad aesthetic/how general audiences perceive it) is filled with filmmakers obviously indebted to kubrick, tarkovsky, scorsese, malick, cassavetes, etc. and who want to remind you of it at every turn. and so the trey edward shultses and sam levinsons and soon apparently the russo brothers of the world are who he’s obviously going to gravitate towards to literalize the pain he tries to put into his music, just because, like the music video directors who can get away with it 3-4 minutes at a time, they like a lot of the same stuff as he does. (there’s some other filmmakers that havent collaborated with the weeknd that i think fall into this camp - david lowery, robert eggers, ari aster until he got to beau is afraid, and more who i'd like to diss but people keep calling me annoying whenever i do so i'll shut up).
at least the idol is often really funny even when it’s bad - abel does some gallo/cage/pacino-esque coked-out histrionics that i find really entertaining and quite fitting for his character, and the rest of the supporting cast is also having fun in spite of the bullshit filmmaking tics levinson is using to capture them - and it has broad insights into the state of popular music coupled with a satirical honesty that works sometimes and, once again, fits with the whole weeknd project of exposing what it’s like for a lonely sex addict to become a part of a predatory industry. it's got a good soundtrack too - popular with carti and miss madonna is a total 00s neptunes ripoff but it's a catchy one; and false idols is underrated with a fantastic hook from red rocket's susanna son and a really fiery lil baby feature.
however, even considering how flawed the idol is, hurry up tomorrow doesn’t fare even nearly as well. directed by trey edward shults, who is one of the most thuddingly literal aestheticians of the A24 era (and that’s saying something lol), it’s hard to really find much value in what is just a collection of *obvious* images which are reduntantly presented in the most film student-y ways. annoying long takes and slow zooms galore. even when shults goes for abstraction, which normally i’m a sucker for in anything, it comes off as annoying, as it’s always just there for a very single-minded purpose that has zero emotional resonance other than “woah… this is what they see cause they’re so fucked up... isn’t this crazy…” everything calls attention to itself without ever actually feeling introspective. it’s hard to be surprised coming from the guy who made the glorified spotify playlist about abuse that is waves, or it comes at night which vies to be the emptiest horror movie of the elevated era; but i feel like you can do so much with a persona like abel’s and he just refuses to…
much has been said about the performances in hurry up tomorrow; abel certainly isn’t as fun (intentionally or not) as he is as tedros, instead just coming off as weepy and one-note in that “we love gena rowlands and isabelle adjani!” way you expect (same goes for ortega, who is a very talented actor but is given the least interiority to work with possible; and keoghan is kind of going for a peter falk thing but it just ends up being about as deep as jonah hill in the beach bum). ironically it’s the clips that have gone viral of tesfaye being funny where in context i found the most in his performance, those moments of histrionics actually being the most emotionally volatile he comes off throughout, and the most honest about the cracks in his image. but it feels very pointless when the years of his music have done this interrogation already.
one of the viral clips has ortega's character tie abel to a bed, her singing and dancing on top of him to his hits blinding lights and gasoline (one which she herself jokes didn't do so well) while he screams for help, a la the caan and bates dynamic in misery. it's a very funny and stupid and on-the-nose scene, but as it evolves she starts expounding on the meaning these songs have but in the most shallow ways of doing so ("it's about pain, heartbreak...") and then starts berating him for the way he treats women, and for a second i saw the purpose once again, the whole weeknd auteurist project's aim kind of returning. is abel truly introspecting the way his music claims he is? is there truly a deeper meaning to his art, or is it just shallow signifiers, an excuse to keep perpetrating his awful behavior? these are interesting questions; however, the next thing i asked myself was, is it enough to justify a 106 minute music video with awful elevated horror movie moments and boring formal choices and zero sense of characterization or genuine complexity in and of itself? the answer is… not really.
i just recently watched otto preminger’s angel face, which so efficiently sets up its toxic codependent relationship and the self-destructive behavior of each principal without ever once calling attention to itself or the complexity the writing and performances create. it all just happens. relationship dramas used to just be like this! meanwhile in their attempts to make these characters “mysterious” quite literally nothing happens in the first half of this movie… when we finally get to the thriller part of the film, we have to have ortega literally spelling out musings on the weeknd’s toxic codependent relationships…
all the movies this consciously or unconsciously reminded me of - all that jazz, opening night, misery, the shining, vanilla sky, dancer in the dark, better man, the tree of life, persona, possession (a big blindspot of mine but they cited it and every movie these days cites it for their awful homages so i get the gist), and more - whether i like them or not, at the very least feel like they're doing something singular, like there’s a unique reason for their existence. in spite of my vested interest in the weeknd over the years, and my somewhat genuine pride that he's on the journey of healing from his traumas and becoming a better person with his rich celebrity status (haven't really heard of many celebrities donating as much to palestine aid as he has, for example), i fail to really see the value in hurry up tomorrow the film. i wouldn't call this film misogynist at all, like i see some are; nor would i call it entirely vapid, or just a straightforward vanity project, considering how self-effacing it is. but all things considered, it never escapes the feeling of deja vu, that i’ve seen every image before. it’s boring as sin, and that's a sin that's hard to forgive.