Schmear Hunter's Brainwash [94]
Unpacking the Hype, Elevating the Unknown: 'Bugonia,' 'The Lowdown,' 'The Chair Company'
Hunters,
I acknowledge it’s been a long while since you’ve heard from me. As No Notes has grown, my time and attention have been diverted away from this Substack and The SchmearCast. I have not forgotten about my subscribers, and it pains me weekly to not get a newsletter or two out, yet such is the grind.
If you aren’t following No Notes, 1) I highly recommend it, and 2) let me catch you up on what’s been going on:
There was:
- TIFF Coverage, including the premieres of Hamnet and Frankenstein
-New York Film Festival fun, like asking West Side Highway runners their red and green flag movies and singing with Stellan Skarsgård at the Sentimental Value red carpet
-chatting up the fine film lovers of the Hamptons International Film Festival
-Interviews with actors and filmmakers, including Tessa Thompson for Hedda, Mary Bronstein (If I Had Legs I’d Kick You), Abel friggin FERRARA, with much more on the way…
Last night, Sena Adjei, Alison Sivitz (Bald Ann Dowd), and I, for No Notes and The Cinegogue, hosted a raging Halloween bash on the Lower East Side in New York.
Thank you so much to any and all readers that turned out.
All of this is a lot of fun but a major amount of work. BIG things are happening, and I want to be better about spreading the love more equally, bringing you, reader, into the goings-on.
More change might come, but for today let’s take it back to basics, because I’ve been watching a lot. Here are some good old-fashioned recs to get you right.
The Hype
Bugonia (Movie)
The Unknown
The Chair Company (TV)
The Lowdown (TV)
Bugonia (Theaters)
What is it? Two conspiracy-obsessed young men kidnap the high-powered CEO of a major company, convinced that she is an alien intent on destroying planet Earth.
Watch if you like: Kinds of Kindness, The Menu, The Lobster, Ex Machina
Schmear’s Verdict: Bugonia is an engrossing but exhausting mind game—well acted and conceptually clever, yet too deliberate and thin to match the fire or conviction of similar 2025 films.
I wish—just ever so slightly more—that Yorgos Lanthimos’s Bugonia kept us on its knife’s edge it dances on for much of its plot. This is a chamber piece, a battle of wits (or lack thereof) between Jesse Plemons’ character Teddy and Emma Stone as tech CEO Michelle. The film has modern undertones, speaking to the present capitalist condition, but it’s really more about how people rattle each other’s cages.
It’s hard not to appreciate Plemons and Stone absolutely going for it and putting everything into such despicable types. It was also enjoyable having a pure plot with a meaning and message as opposed to the surrealist brain vomit of Kinds of Kindness.
Bugonia is overlong and taxing, unraveling its layers deliberately. It’s a war of attrition being waged on the viewer, our patience being tested just as the characters are in the film.
There’s some sense of indignation, but it feels trite and played for laughs, situating it akin to yet separate from the purer “mad as hell” streaks of similarly minded films from this year, including It Was Just an Accident, No Other Choice, and One Battle After Another.
Examination reveals a story that is threadbare where those others are rich. The dreamy Alicia Silverstone flourishes failed to register. Much more affecting and grounding was the work from Aidan Delbis, who plays Don, the cousin of Plemons’ character. Don’s clear-eyed perceptiveness, even with and perhaps because of his intellectual disability, makes him stand out against the solipsism of our leads.
The reveal is a swing and a miss; the air of unknowing is preferable—it would’ve been bolder and braver to leave us in the feeling of dark self-doubt and moral ambiguity like the aforementioned films do.
That being said, the final images were striking and beautiful in an apocalyptic fairy-tale kind of way. It brought Bugonia full circle, contextualizing the transience of our existence as we squabble to no end.
While imaginative and effective, many other movies this year are aiming and firing at the present with more accuracy and force. Bugonia is a leaner exercise, lacking a certain involving quality but still wholly amusing.
The Lowdown (FX/Hulu)
What is it? A determined bookstore owner in Tulsa moonlights as an investigative journalist, digging into local corruption. When his reporting uncovers sinister connections, he must protect both his family and the truth.
Watch if you like: Eddington, Reservation Dogs, No Country for Old Men, Twin Peaks
Schmear’s Verdict: The Lowdown is a warm, meandering hangout noir—part Coen Brothers, part Altman—anchored by Ethan Hawke’s lived-in charm and Sterling Harjo’s deep affection for Tulsa’s dusty, peculiar soul.
It’s hard to pinpoint what I love most about The Lowdown. Maybe it’s the ensemble—Peter Dinklage, Kyle MacLachlan, Keith David, and (Tulsa native) Jeanne Tripplehorn—each one adding color to Sterling Harjo’s dusty, oddball world. Maybe it’s star Ethan Hawke in full Philip Marlowe mode: sexy, scruffy, and a little pathetic as Lee Raybon, a man stumbling through his own myth. Or maybe it’s Tulsa itself—a setting rarely seen on screen, which Harjo dissects with humor, affection, and curiosity.
The show feels born from great Western crime novelists—Jim Thompson and Cormac McCarthy—but shot through with Robert Altman’s looseness. There are shades of Twin Peaks too, in its conspiratorial weirdness and melancholy charm.
I loved Harjo’s Reservation Dogs, one of the best shows of the past decade, so I was on board for whatever came next. But The Lowdown isn’t a slam dunk from the start. It meanders. The first few episodes drift off-road—little diversions and curlicues that feel like detours from the main plot. Eventually you realize that these hilarious, odd tangents are the show’s soul and deepen its sense of place.
Ethan Hawke, of course, holds it all together, playing a hard-boiled pseudo-detective, but also a dad, a lover, and a hustler chasing half-truths about a recently deceased townsperson. He grounds the show’s quirks with his lived-in, deeply human performance.
The cast clearly enjoys being in this world and speaking Harjo’s dialogue. Compared to Reservation Dogs, this is more plot-driven but still allergic to the sleek rhythms of prestige TV. It unfolds slowly, with literary grace notes—like posthumous Tim Blake Nelson narration or editing that makes the series’ imagery linger longer than expected.
You can feel the Coen Brothers in its bones, but Harjo’s tone is lighter and warmer. The Lowdown is a hangout noir—a show with diners and pancakes, bookstores and jokes—a richly woven tapestry of small-town life and old school in the best way.
The Chair Company (HBO)
What is it? Follows a man who investigates a conspiracy after an embarrassing incident at work.
Watch if you like: Friendship, I Think You Should Leave, Lost Highway, Severance, The Office
Schmear’s Verdict: Tim Robinson turns workplace humiliation into existential horror with The Chair Company, a deliriously funny and unsettling descent into ego, embarrassment, and the absurd.
What if an ill-timed pratfall took on cosmic proportions of consequence? That’s the setup of Tim Robinson’s new series, The Chair Company, about a real estate executive in Ohio who, during a big presentation, eats shit in front of all his colleagues.
It’s an I Think You Should Leave sketch stretched into a full-length series—an idea that may grate on some but will delight many. Robinson remains a modern-day expert at dissecting male ego and insecurity under late-stage capitalism through absurdist, surrealist comedy.
He’s the master of the spiral-out, and this time his character wages a holy war against Tecca, the titular chair company, leading him down an increasingly bizarre rabbit hole. The series shares The Office’s fascination with workplace humiliation, Severance’s eerie corporate surrealism, and even DNA with David Lynch’s Lost Highway in terms of the emasculating k-hole fugue state the series can enter.
Jim Downey, memorable from One Battle After Another, is hilarious here, but The Chair Company belongs to Robinson—his estranged brand of humor and his ability to access real emotion through ridiculousness, not unlike Adam Sandler, particularly his Barry Egan character in Punch-Drunk Love.
In the first episode, as Robinson’s character watches a slideshow of his family while Jim Croce’s “I Got a Name” plays, you’re unexpectedly moved—and weirded out by how hard it hits. This will then be accompanied by the most cock-eyed, spit-take interaction or joke fathomable, keeping you off-kilter consistently.
This isn’t new for Robinson, who evoked similar feelings in Friendship, another seemingly silly work that reached deep, dark places. The Chair Company is a phone-off, lights-down kind of show—if you’re not fully tuned to its wavelength, you might feel bored or whiplashed. But if you give yourself over, the rewards are plentiful.
Thanks for reading!!