Vampires, Assassins, and Romantic Angst by the Seaside: Takoma Reviews
 

The vampires are allegories for something.
The assassins are all searching for redemption.
The romantic angst by the seaside is largely very, very gay. (I've been on a Jarman kick).

Enjoy!

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Vengeance, 2022

Ben (BJ Novak) is a writer living in New York and dating a rotating cast of women. One night he gets a call that a woman he dated, Abby (Lio Tipton), has died. Ben goes to Abby’s small hometown in Texas, where it becomes clear that Abby’s family believes he was Abby’s boyfriend. Soon after his arrival, Abby’s brother Ty (Boyd Holbrook) drafts Ben into a plan to investigate and avenge Abby’s death, certain that she did not accidentally overdose as reported.

This comedy mystery has some decent moments of levity, but it doesn’t quite pull off its main character arc in a satisfying way.

The film is at its best when it’s gently skewering Ben’s pretentiousness and his implicit assumption that he’s smarter, more cultured, and just better than Abby’s family and the rest of the town’s inhabitants. In one scene, he nods along as a local record producer, Quentin (Ashton Kutcher), laments the fact that people post pictures of Audrey Hepburn without actually having seen her films. Later, Ben references Chekov’s Gun, and when Abby’s sister Paris (Isabella Amara) notes that she doesn’t think there was a gun in any plays she read from Chekov, Ben concedes that he’s never actually read anything by the man.

I also appreciated the film’s point about the exploitative nature of a lot of true crime content, and specifically the seemingly infinite number of true crime podcasts. Speaking with his editor back in New York (a wonderful, very welcome Issa Rae), Ben constantly refers to Abby’s family as “characters”. Their grief---the loss of their family member--isn’t nearly as important to him as getting quirky soundbites of them professing their love for Whataburger. It is dehumanizing to Abby’s family and to Abby herself, made all the worse because Abby’s family is so open with Ben because they believed he loved and cared for Abby. As Ben digs deeper into Abby’s life, he discovers depths to a woman he cast aside and forgot about.

I really enjoyed the cast, especially the actors who played Abby’s family. In addition to Amara and Holbrook, Dove Cameron as her little sister, Eli Bickel as her little brother, and J. Smith-Cameron as her mother all make a strong impression. The performances and the script keep them from being flattened into twangy stereotypes.

But fundamentally, the film seems to be a bit conflicted about its small town Texas setting and citizens. Early in the film, Ty tells Ben that unofficial policy is that you don’t call 911. Ty intends to find and kill whoever was responsible for Abby’s death. Ben discovers that the police, when they are minimally involved, write everything off as an “accident” and care very little for the frequent overdoses taking place in their town. With the exception of the character who turns out to have been involved in Abby’s death, everyone is shown as just hunky-dory nice people. Even characters who did something that could have killed (and did seriously injure) a person are let off the hook with a wink and a shrug.

I was also conflicted on BJ Novak playing the lead role, which seems like it would be more suited to someone about 10 years his junior. On one hand, it speaks to the immaturity of the character that he’s in his 40s but still talking philosophical nonsense at parties. But on the other hand, the quest to go and define America using a podcast feels much more in line with a younger character. He’s fine, and his comic timing is good, but it makes the film (which he also wrote and directed) feel a bit like a vanity project, especially considering the way it concludes.

Also, and maybe this is just me, I kind of wish there had been more of an actual mystery? It’s immediately obvious who is responsible, even without the law of economy of characters pitching in. I liked a scene where Ben confronts a local drug dealer named Sancholo (Zach Villa) and the conversation that follows. The film could have used more moments like that.

Overall a decent comedy-mystery, but it doesn’t feel like it makes the most of its premise.

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Samurai 1: Musashi Miyamoto, 1954

Tazeko (Toshiro Mifune) and Matahachi (Rentarô Mikuni) are fighters who find themselves on the losing side of a battle between two large clan groups. On the run, they end up in the care of a widow and her daughter. While Matahachi has a betrothed waiting for him back home, Otsu (Kaoru Yachigusa), he ultimately runs off with the two women. It is Tazeko who returns home, only to face a village that is hostile and suspicious of him. Only a local priest, Takuan (Kuroemon Onoe) seems interested in justice.

This is a fun, frothy mixture of action-adventure, romance, and drama. It serves well as its own story, but also in setting up the trilogy of which it is the first part.

There is something really engaging about the different cycles of disillusionment, awareness, and enlightenment that the main characters go through, and how they meet at different points in those cycles. Tazeko begins the film in a bitter mindset, having been part of the losing side in the big battle. Abandoned by Matahachi, Tazeko returns home only to find himself unwelcome. Faced with Matahachi’s mother and fiance, Otsu, Tazeko cannot bring himself to say that Matahachi has run off with the widow and abandoned them. And on Otsu’s side of things, she waits faithfully for Matahachi, eventually realizing that Tazeko has been shielding her from that heartbreak.

The evolving relationship between Tazeko and Otsu is really sweet, all full of youthful idealism, misery, and passion. It’s even more enjoyable the way that it is framed as taking place under the knowing eye of Takuan, the wise priest. “I don’t know much about love,” he demurs at one point, despite having basically played matchmaker between Tazeko and Otsu. When the young people are heading into rash decisions, you get the sense that he’s always one step ahead of them, either allowing their actions or gently steering them off-course when needed.

The movie also looks pretty good, making great use of color. We get lush green forests, and dark shadowed barns. We get a lovely shot of long reels of fabric being washed in the ocean like long jellyfish tendrils. I particularly loved a shot of the fugitive Tazeko emerging from the night blue dark woods into the warm light of a fire where Otsu and Takuan wait.

The performances are all very good. Mifune was always good at playing characters who are skilled, but also have something to learn. Yachigusa is very sweet as Otsu, and she is easy to root for as she unpacks the way that Matahachi’s betrayal has impacted her. Onoe is a lot of fun as the priest who gently but firmly points the lovers away from danger and toward each other.

A fun action-romance that definitely leaves you ready for the rest of the series.

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Samurai 2 Duel at Ichijoji Temple, 1955

Picking up a few years after the end of the first film, Musashi (Toshiro Mifune) has been on the road honing his skills as a fighter. While his swordsmanship has improved, he is chastised by some of his elders for not understanding the chivalrous aspect of being a samurai. Arriving in town to challenge the head of a famous school, Seijuro (Akihiko Hirata), Musashi once again encounters his former flame Otsu (Kaoru Yachigusa). Also in town is the friend who betrayed him, Matahachi (Sachio Sakai), as well as Akemi (Mariko Okada), the daughter of the women Matahachi ran off with and who still believes Musashi will be with her.

This was a fun, albeit plot-heavy, follow up to Samurai 1, with all of the action and romantic angst of the first film dialed way, way up.

The Musashi of this film is more controlled and mature than the man we saw in the last film, but he’s still trying to sort out exactly what it means to be a real samurai. He has honed his technical skills, but is still vulnerable to emotion and unable to really understand those around him, especially the women in his life.

As with the last film, the acting is all very solid. Mifune is good in the lead role, letting Musashi be someone you can root for while also being a bit frustrating at times. Yachigusa is sympathetic as Otsu, a woman who has given years of her life to waiting for a man who might no longer want her. The way that Otsu and Musashi’s uncertainty bounce off of each other is engaging and frustrating. Hirata makes Seijuro the kind of antagonist where you count the minutes until someone puts him in his place. Okada has maybe the most challenging role as Akemi, whose behavior makes her an impediment to our protagonists, despite the fact that she’s treated unfairly by just about everyone in the film. Koji Tsuruta is mostly enjoyable as enigmatic swordsman Sasaki.

There’s a neat dynamic to the film where the whole movie builds to a duel between Musashi and Seijuro. Both out of his own cowardice and the urging of his underlings, Seijuro does his best to dodge actually having to fight Musashi. This involves various plots and schemes, including setting up traps and underhanded ambushes. At every turn, fate or secondary characters intervene to keep Musashi as a threat to Seijuro. But along the way there are prices to be paid, including Seijuro punishing Akemi for her love for Musashi by raping her while her mother and associate listen on but do not intervene.

I had a hard time with the way that the movie treats Akemi. She wants to believe that Musashi might run away with her, taking her away from the adults who want to use her as a bartering chip. And for her feelings, she is brutally assaulted. What is hard to watch is the way that neither the movie nor the characters seem all that sympathetic toward her plight. At one point she is overwhelmed and ends up passing out. She wakes up to find she’s in a hut with Sasaki, who then proceeds to act as if he’s going to rape her before declaring that he was “just joking.” Hilarious. Akemi has clearly become a bit unhinged but the movie constantly undercuts what she’s going through by focusing on how her actions get in the way of Musashi and Otsu ending up together.

But aside from the treatment of Akemi---which, again, is not totally unsympathetic but is definitely lacking---I really enjoyed this one. The plot does come at you fast and hard. The scenes cut from one to another at a pretty quick pace. As one small subplot resolves, another two leap up in its place.

Another satisfying entry that resolves major character arcs while still leaving room for the continuation of the story.

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The Batman, 2022

In a grimy Gotham City, Bruce Wayne/Batman (Robert Pattinson) perpetually takes out his angst over his parents’ murder on the various big and small time criminals. But things escalate quickly when a man known only as the Riddler (Paul Dano) begins gruesomely taking out powerful players in the city. Working with Lieutenant Gordon (Jeffrey Wright) and a young woman named Selina (Zoe Kravitz) who is determined to find her missing friend, Batman must discover the identity and objectives of the Riddler and how it connects to his own past.

While there was plenty to like in this film, from the performances to some of the action set pieces, there’s an overriding sense of disjointedness.

I suppose a big part of how much someone likes this film will depend on how they feel about Pattinson’s iteration of Batman. I liked it. This is a Batman who is deflecting his own pain outward on a scale made possible by his vast financial resources. He calls himself Vengeance early on in the film, a nickname that Selina uses whenever they interact. This is the unhealthy compulsion of revenge mixed with escapism. Pattinson’s Batman is probably the least social of any version I’ve seen, spending almost zero time as Bruce Wayne, and even then only apparently by necessity. I also liked that we see that this is a Batman who is sometimes rough around the edges. When he takes off his mask, we still see the dark paint he wears around his eyes. A thrilling aerial ride from a rooftop goes from exhilarating to bad news very quickly.

I actually enjoyed all of the acting in this film. Kravitz is delightfully prickly as a woman who resents the way that Batman keeps trying to turn her investigation into support for his own. Wright’s Gordon falls more into sidekick mode than gruff authority, but he’s a welcome presence. Dano’s Riddler is appropriately unhinged and a good foil for Batman’s own roiling anxiety. I wouldn’t have ever recognized Colin Farrell as a character who is a precursor to the Penguin, but he’s good even under all of the prosthetics. You’ve also got John Turturro as a smooth gangster and Andy Serkis in the role of Alfred.

In terms of the plot of the film, I was very drawn in by the mystery aspect of it. There are cyphers, and subtle clues, and Batman has to unravel several elements of both old and new city corruption. Instead of yet another Batman origin story, here we get a Batman recontextualizing his origins. It makes for more compelling viewing, honestly, especially when so many movies feel the need to go back to the beginning for every single “reboot”.

But there’s something ultimately loose and unconnected about the story, which is too large in scope but without fully satisfying payoffs. Selina’s search for her missing friend is probably the plot I found most engaging and moving, and it does result in one pretty memorable confrontation. But somehow I didn’t feel very connected to the overarching plot about the Riddler’s mission, despite the mystery elements and the performances. And at almost 3 hours long, I really felt the length of the film in a negative way. I found myself wishing that they’d stuck to a more streamlined story, or somehow managed to abridged the stories they did tell. I also didn’t super buy Selina being genuinely attracted to Batman, but maybe that’s just me.

I’d definitely watch another Batman film from this same crew, though I can’t imagine wanting to revisit this one anytime soon.

Otsu, you're so good, you're so pure, you're so cute <3

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Confessions of a Psycho Cat, 1968

A deranged, wealthy woman named Virginia (Eileen Lord) invites three acquitted murderers into a bizarre game whereby she will pay them $10,000 to hunt them down in the streets of New York. Agreeing for different reasons, the men scatter as Virginia tracks, traps, and attempts to kill them.

This film is an absolute hoot, and it lives in that special space where most of its faults end up being endearing elements to its kooky vibe.

All the praise in the world goes to Eileen Lord as Virginia, playing a woman who is unhinged but also scheming. Her money and social position allows her access to many resources that she uses to track down and kill her targets. She hits a maniacal tone that is perfect for the film’s bonkers plot and she’s watchable to the last frame.

There are plenty of movies out there where people end up being hunted by some rich or crazy (or both) person or group. What makes this film a bit different is that the people being hunted are total garbage. Yes, they are all killers. There’s no innocent party here who accidentally ends up in Virginia’s crosshairs. And in flashbacks we get to watch their crimes, including a man laughing as he injects a woman with drugs and watches her overdose. I’m not saying that you root for Virginia, per se, but being released from anxiety about the wellbeing of her victims allows the film to play out with a tension that is more fun than nervous.

The hunting of the men and their killings are an interesting mix of elaborate entrapment and bizarre staging. One minute Virginia is bribing someone to help her lure one of the men into a trap, and the next she’s flouncing around in a matador costume, ready to impale one of her victims. Virginia’s a wild mix of brains and brawn, and it means you never totally know what she might be up to.

The main downside is the 10 or so minutes of “sexy inserts” that were put into the film. In this subplot, a group of twenty-somethings are gathered in an apartment, having a laconic orgy. The scenes are, honestly, pretty boring. These characters don’t really factor into the main plot, and they don’t have personalities. There’s this hyper-awareness that it’s just women taking their shirts off to be groped by men who seem to intend to have sex without ever taking off their pants. If that floats your boat, great, but I was promised a maniac hunting men through New York, and every time the film decides to go back to the apartment of underwhelming sex scenes, it was like “No!”.

This is a short, sweet little piece of ridiculousness and I quite enjoyed it.

I’m here for The Vampires and Assassins.

I was hoping that the vampires, assassins and gay romantic angst were all in one movie. I'd definitely watch that movie.

Re: Vampires, Assassins, and Romantic Angst by the Seaside: Takoma Rev
 

A very gay thread so far, as nobody's sad here.

It is….it’s called Twilight.

Not a movie, but I will just point you at the 2020 Dracula miniseries (which is three episodes).

Jarman's Edward II gets you 2/3.

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Small Soldiers, 1998

A boy named Alan (Gregory Smith) is astonished when he discovers that the new toys in his father’s store are autonomous and mobile. That astonishment quickly turns to alarm when he realizes that the soldiers are determined to defeat their enemies, the Gorgonites, peaceful fantastical creatures. With the help of a neighbor named Christy (Kirsten Dunst), Alan tries to save the Gorgonites and fend off the murderous soldiers.

While not perfect, this tongue-in-cheek romp from Joe Dante is better than expected and benefits greatly from a game cast and good effects.

Smith and Dunst make for engaging leads, both playing teenage protagonists who turn out to be capable and brave as they deal with the outlandish threat of the deadly toys. They are supported by a deep secondary cast that includes Jay Mohr and David Cross as the toys’ inventors, Phil Hartman as Christy’s materialistic dad, Tommy Lee Jones as the toy soldier commander, and Frank Langella as Archer, the leaders of the Gorgonites.

The effects are also shockingly good. Yes, a few of the parts with the toy soldiers start to skew into that uncanny valley, obvious CGI look. But for the most part, the animation of the toys and the way that they are integrated with the live action is really good. This is especially true of the Archer character. I think it helps that the toys are meant to have somewhat restricted motions and also have very visible joints, but I was constantly pleasantly surprised.

The tone and content of the film land in an interesting, very PG-13 place. On one hand, there’s the childhood fantasy aspect of toys coming to life. On the other hand, there’s . . . the reference to the Bataan Death March. It’s a movie that could be enjoyed by an adolescent or an adult.

I liked the film the most when it was in its more earnest mode. I liked Alan’s interactions with the gentle Archer, or Cross’s character enthusiastically talking about the potential for the toys to help children learn. At times the film’s humor could be a little grating, especially the Gorgonite who was inexplicably designed to be full of puns, which totally doesn’t fit with the peaceful creature vibe of the rest of them.

The film also lands some solid, if gentle, jabs at pop culture and marketing to kids. “That sounds like a lot of violence,” one of the developers notes. “Righ, so call it ‘action’,” retorts the CEO. There are also some gentle pokes at the American obsession with “military grade”, something that is still very present in today’s marketing to adults and kids.

I did get a little fatigued with the film going into the action-packed last act. I’ve never been all that taken by people fighting dolls/toys in movies, and this was no exception. The unending war movie references do help a bit in this regard, but I could still feel myself checking out a bit as the final siege began.

Silly, but largely enjoyable.

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Bullhead, 2011

A man named Jacky (Matthias Schoenaerts) finds himself in the middle of a messy situation involving the illicit use of hormones in beef cattle. As if this weren’t bad enough, one of the men involved, Diederik (Jeroen Perceval), was a part of a horribly traumatic experience from Jacky’s youth. As the walls begin closing in on the “hormone mafia”, Jacky is forced to reckon with the unresolved demons from his past.

This film is a painfully intimate portrait of a man turning himself inside out because of what he thinks he is supposed to be.

The story itself is an interesting blend of crime thriller and psychological drama. Jacky isn’t the real focus of the investigation, but he’s tangled up in the crimes and as we learn about his past, we understand the reasons he makes the choices he does. Part of what makes the film so difficult is knowing what kind of choices he’s bound to make.

Yes, this is one of those movies where someone you want to root for just keeps digging themselves deeper and deeper into a hole. Jacky isn’t at all to blame for the horrific thing that happened to him as a child, but his coping mechanisms are clearly not sustainable and he can’t separate himself from a concept of masculinity that is actively doing him harm. The longer the investigation goes on, and the more agitated Jacky gets, the more we wait to see if Jacky will cross a point of no return. Key to this dynamic is a woman named Lucia (Jeanne Dandoy), who is also a part of Jacky’s past. It’s through her perspective that we can see both sides of Jacky: someone who has love to give and who clearly needs love, and someone who is so angry that he is genuinely dangerous.

Jacky, as we see constantly through the film, is addicted to steroids and testosterone. It started as a medical intervention due to an injury he suffered as a child. But we see in flashback sequences how anxieties about “being a real man” were put into his head from that young age. Jacky is so convinced that he is incomplete that he buries himself under pounds of muscle and a duffle bag full of various drugs and supplements. If Jacky could see a way to being vulnerable, or compromising, things would go a lot easier for him. But he is so sensitive to any signs of weakness that he constantly backs himself into a corner.

I always enjoy Schoenaerts as an actor, and I think he’s really great here. For all his bulk and posturing, the hurt that won’t leave him always lingers right there in his eyes. He is a man who is always in a state of punishment---either punishing himself or punishing others. I also really enjoyed Perceval’s performance as Jacky’s grown up childhood friend, carrying around a guilt that sits adjacent to Jacky’s trauma. Dandoy is also good in her role, portraying a woman who is empathetic but wary in just the right proportions.

I will often give warnings about animal content, but in the case of this film I think it’s worth mentioning a sequence of violence against a child that is incredibly disturbing. The scene is not graphic, and it is a key plot point of the film, but it is harrowing to watch.

No complaints about this one. It’s a devastating character study sitting inside the framework of a crime thriller. This was the first feature film from director Michael Roskam, and I think it’s an impressive debut!

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X, 2022

A small crew of adult film workers head out to a remote farm property to film an adult movie. Director Wayne (Martin Henderson) is confident that with actresses Maxine (Mia Goth) and Bobby-Lynne (Brittany Snow) and actor Jackson (Kid Cudi), plus cameraman RJ (Owen Campbell) and sound-operator Lorraine (Jenna Ortega), he’s onto something brilliant. But the elderly couple who own the farm, Howard (Stephen Ure) and Pearl (Mia Goth), are hiding some deadly secrets.

Despite doing a very fun job of playing with both film-within-a-film moments and meta-horror moments, this fun slasher left me just a little wanting.

Overall, this film is very fun, and the game cast really elevates it. A big part of the film’s plot revolves around Goth’s character Maxine having an “X-factor”, and it’s certainly true in the sense of this film. Goth has an undeniable presence here, and you can totally buy that Wayne believes she’ll be a star. Henderson as Wayne plants his character firmly with one foot in optimism and the other foot in pragmatism. Snow and Kid Cudi add a humorous spark in their supporting roles. Campbell’s turn as RJ, determined that this film will be ART, is a lot of fun, especially when he has a meltdown over his girlfriend wanting to participate in the film. Ortega’s Lorraine feels a bit slight, but she at least gets some really fun moments in the last act.

There are also some very strong visual moments. Not being anything like an expert in 1970s erotica, I can at least say that I liked the look of those sequences and the way that the color schemes were used. And on the horror front, there are also some great and creepy images. A fantastic overhead shot involving an alligator. Engaging shots combining background and foreground. And several moments where the characters are bathed in blunt, bloody red light.

In the interest of avoiding spoilers, I’ll just say that when it comes to the character motivations and how it connects to the bloodletting, this film actually has a very well-realized character arc for all of its major players. Time is taken to establish elements about Howard and Pearl that pay off later and keep them from being just random scary old people boogeymen. The movie even goes to a place not usually addressed in horror movies, and that’s the jealousy that older people can feel toward younger people not just of their youth/beauty, but of their potential and their experiences.

I also appreciated the film’s attitude toward its adult film stars. It’s able to poke a bit of fun at them, but doesn’t dehumanize them. There’s the old horror trope of the disposable, slutty character (and the male equivalent of the disposable bozo), but all of these people are the slutty ones, LOL, and none of them are disposable. They are all more or less likable, which adds emotional investment to their fates as the film progresses. It’s kind of a neat trick that this was a film where I cared about the characters even as I appreciated the over-the-top way that many of them were dispatched. I particularly liked the hard look that the film took at RJ, a man who rhapsodizes about the artistry of his film, but then has a little-boy meltdown when his girlfriend wants to participate. A lot of people have this unhealthy push-pull relationship with sexual personas, lusting after them and feeling contempt for them at the same time. The character of RJ calls out this dynamic and his bathtub breakdown was one of the funniest parts of the film for me.

Somehow, though, I didn’t quite get to a place of love with this one. I think that honestly, a big part of it was the decision to have Mia Goth also play Pearl in prosthetics and makeup. Why did they do this? The makeup, with all due respect to the people who surely worked very hard on it, looks like bad old-age makeup from the 80s. Howard and Pearl don’t look like real people. They look like younger people wearing a lot of prosthetics, and it’s perpetually distracting. There’s something about centering horror on someone elderly (and even emphasizing the “horror” of elderly bodies) and not even having an older person in that role that just feels off to me. I kept waiting for something to happen to justify it and . . . nope.

Altogether a fun film, but didn’t land quite as well as I hoped it would.

Someone wasn’t kidding when she said she had a lot of reviews she needed to post…..👀

There are like . . . 80.

While I liked this more than you did, and feel it's one of the better Batman movies, I can agree with some of your issues with it; like a number of movies its length, it would've benefitted from being trimmed down some (down to an even 2 & 1/2 hours in its case) and having some of the plot cut out, since it felt like they were trying to slightly force an epic feel to it without that being fully earned, its "grimdarkness" felt a bit derivative without adding much of its own to the Batverse (I felt like I've seen the introductory scene where Bats says "I'm vengeance" or some variation of it a million times now), and it also felt like they were trying to have some sort of personal redemption arc for Batman where he learns to not just be a symbol of fear, but a figure of hope by the end, without properly following through with all of that journey, leaving some of that feeling overly implied rather than explored properly (say what you will about the excessive exposition of Nolan's entries, but at least you knew what he was trying to say there). Still, Reeves is a good director with a knack for memorable setpieces (particularly during the escape from the police station sequence), so I still enjoyed it on the whole in the end.

I enjoyed it, but the last act in particular felt kind of messy to me. And a long movie with a messy final act makes it hard to maintain enthusiasm.

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Antonia’s Line, 1995

At the end of World War 2, Antonia (Willeke van Ammelrooy) returns to her hometown with her teenage daughter Danielle (Els Dottermans). The town is filled with quirky characters, and through sheer force of will, Antonia and Danielle bend the small society around them to accommodate a welcoming, matriarchal compound. As the years pass, the relationships and dreams of those in the community are tested by forces both within and without.

This Danish film is an unabashed fairytale about creating the kind of society where the only real enemies are time and differences in desires, and how even those foes can be accepted as part of the natural order of things.

Antonia, brilliantly realized by van Ammelrooy, is the heart of the film, but the best testament to her character is the way that her bold spirit percolates down through the generations. Early on, Antonia makes it clear to Danielle that the institutions in place in the town---the church, the school, the tradition of marriage--will not define or confine them. As a young adult, Danielle decides that she wants a baby (but not a husband), and she and Antonia just . . . go about making that happen and meet some great friends along the way. Danielle’s child, Therese (Veerle van Overloop) is a math and music prodigy who also marches to the beat of her own drum. Each generation has her own desires, and it’s engaging watching how they support each other down different paths.

The women in the family are well matched by the people, men and women, with whom they build alliances. With pretty much just two exceptions, the film takes a positive viewpoint on all of the characters. Even the man Danielle hooks up with to get pregnant is cast in a very positive light, seen as an affable guy who we later learn is living the happy life he deserves. There’s also the local farmer who woos Antonia, a young man who grows up with Therese and loves her, and the local curate. There’s also the nihilistic man named Crooked Fingers (Mil Seghers), whose lamentations about the damned state of existence finally latch on via his tutoring of Therese. The film nicely balances its vision of a matriarchal compound without the need to put down men or the women who want a more conventional life.

I really liked the film’s approach to conflict. It would be easy to have the whole film revolve around pitting the women against patriarchal authority figures. Instead, both of the unlikable characters are dealt with in relatively small amounts of screentime. There’s the local pastor, who hypocritically rails against the sins of the women in the community, before being set straight by Antonia’s lover. The more insidious character is Pitte (Filip Peeters), a young man who Danielle catches raping his developmentally disabled sister, DeeDee (Marina de Graaf) in the first act, and who returns later in the middle of the film to cause more pain. But the film isn’t interested in watching the women slug it out with him. It’s also not interested in reveling in his misdeeds, and the worst act that he commits is left off-screen.

It would be reductive for the film to center conflict (and specifically conflict with men), and so I loved the way that the second half of the movie focuses almost entirely on the relationships and how the extended family handles the inevitability of aging and loss. The movie repeatedly makes big jumps in time---in one part Therese goes from being a teen to being in her early 20s. Each women descended from Antonia has her own desires and trajectory, and we watch them grapple with how to accomplish them. For example, Therese is very conflicted about whether or not to have a child, something that her lover clearly wants. Her true passion is mathematics and music, and on a certain level it doesn’t necessarily make sense for her to have a child. Despite the fairytale vibe, the questions the women have to answer about how they want to live their lives feel very grounded and relatable. The film is none too shy about the way that societal constructs keep people from being happy---such as a subplot about a Catholic and Protestant who live in adjacent apartments and love each other but won’t get together because of their difference in religion--and looking at an ideal world where people can push such constructs aside.

Visually, I found the film very delightful. There are several overt fantasy sequences, such as a statue of Jesus turning to look at Danielle, or a stunning moment where Danielle (who is one of the better realized queer characters I’ve seen in a hot second) envisions Therese’s teacher as Aphrodite emerging from the sea. There’s this great mix in the portrayal of the village between the kind of quirky design you see in a film like Delicatessan and a sense of reality. Also, love forever to any movie that’s willing to put a range of bodies on display with the understanding that they are beautiful. A sequence where four very different couples all enjoy some conjugal fun was sweet and funny.

My only critique with this one is that, while I understand their necessity in the story, I didn’t love the time jumps. This might just be me, but big jumps in time often have the effect of making me feel a bit disconnected from a story. Obviously without the time jumps the movie would be a billion hours long, but I still felt a strange kind of disappointment every time the narrator would say “Years passed . . .”. There are also a few times where the male characters in the village are used almost like a deux ex machina. I don’t mind it in the sense that Antonia and her family have more than earned their loyalty, but at times it feels like it’s letting those characters do the dirty work so that Antonia’s hands stay clean. (Although those moments are incredibly satisfying, so . . . ).

Just a real delight. Joyful and bittersweet all in the same breath.

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Nostalgia for the Light, 2010

The Atacama Desert in Chile is notable for its extremely low humidity, which makes it the perfect place for astronomers to construct observatories and study the universe. The Atacama has another distinction, however, namely that it is the dumping ground for a tremendous number of tortured and executed political prisoners from the Pinochet era. As scientists attempt to discern light and energy patterns dating back to the beginning of the universe, determined women comb the desert for the bodies of their lost loved ones.

It can be such a fine line between telling a harrowing story and feeling like you’re veering into exploitation. This film takes a truly devastating situation and frames it wonderfully and empathetically by examining the way that the astronomers and the family members are trying to understand the past.

This film has been sitting in my heart since I watched it. It would have been easy for the film to center on the torture and murder that took place, but instead the film is almost entirely focused on how people cope with their pasts, be that family past or the past of the universe. And somehow, this gentle simplicity proves much more devastating than any catalog of criminal acts.

One of the best interview subjects in the film is Gaspar Galaz, a Professor of Astronomy. In one of three sequences in the film that really stuck out to me, Galaz reflects on the different ways that people respond to the quests of the astronomers and of the families. He notes that it’s troubling that people are more aware and supportive of the work of the astronomers, when what the families have gone through is part of their country’s history. He also reflects on the way that people will support the astronomy, but will say to the families that what’s in the past is in the past. Galaz is an empathetic person, and I appreciated that he was able to talk about his enthusiasm for astronomy without ever sounding like he was minimizing what the families are going through.

A second incredible sequence involves a woman recounting what it was like when the searchers finally found her brother. All they could find were some teeth, some skull pieces, and a single foot. She describes spending the night in a house with her brother’s foot, the joy of having found him and the heartbreak of confirming his death smashing together. This interview, and an interview with a 70 year old woman still combing the desert for her lost brother, really pierce your heart.

Then comes an incredible part of the film where the astronomy and the lost families come together in a single person. Valentina Rodriguez was a child when her grandparents were forced to reveal the location of her parents. They did so, managing to save Valentina but at the loss of Valentina’s parents. Valentina talks about this past, her gratitude to her grandparents for raising her, her feelings about being a parent of her own child, and how the eons-long cycles of the world help her to cope with the pain that she feels. Intercut with Valentina’s interview are shots of the grandparents sitting on a couch in the house. They don’t say anything. What can they say? Their silence speaks volumes.

This movie is a gorgeous, heartbreaking but not hopeless, look at how we process our own lives and our place in the world. I found myself incredibly drawn to all of the interview subjects, and I think that the filmmakers did an incredible job of honoring the stories and memories of the victims of Pinochet’s regime without ever feeling exploitative.

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Stork, 1971

Stork (Bruce Spence) is fed up with his corporate job, and so he quits in splendid fashion and goes to live with his friend, Westy (Graeme Blundell). Westy shares a house with Clyde (Helmut Bakaitis) and Tony (Sean Myers), who are both dating Anna (Jacki Weaver). Stork becomes obsessed with getting together with Anna.

Occasionally entertaining in its abrasive approach, for the most part this one falls a bit flat.

For better or for worse, the movie rests on the audience’s relationship to Stork. At its best, the film and Spence show us someone who is full of bluster, but also plagued by an identity crisis and some deep insecurities, especially around sex. At the same time, that bluster is very . . . blustery. Stork expresses himself in rants and bellows, often with the camera right in his face. It feels like a lot, and the longer the film lasts, the more abrasive it can feel.

The supporting performances are all pretty good, with Jacki Weaver being the standout as the much lusted after Anna. The movie seems to have some contradictory feelings about Anna---can a woman be in a relationship with more than one man and NOT be a slut?--but I really enjoyed her character. The film also gets some good physical comedy out of placing Weaver next to Spence, who looks like he’s twice her height. (Though a perhaps unintentional side-effect is that sometimes it looks like a grown man and a child which, you know, gross.)

It’s ultimately the film’s relationship to Anna that gave me mixed feelings about the film. Late in the movie, Anna discovers that she is pregnant. Tony immediately demands that she get an abortion, and continues to badger her about it even after she says she wants to continue the pregnancy. In this last act, Stork decides that because he has had sex with Anna, she is now “his.” Maybe this is supposed to come across as his naivete, but I thought it had weird, controlling vibes. It’s actually Clyde who comes across the best, willing to marry Anna despite not knowing if the child is biologically his.

I know that this film has historical significance in terms of kicking off the Australian New Wave. And I do think it’s worth watching, because it has that very left-field, independent feeling to it. There’s certainly something happening in this film, even if that something wasn’t mostly for me. There’s plenty of casual homophobia and sexism tossed around (“I’m not a lesbian, I’m a normal woman”), and it being “era appropriate” doesn’t make it more palatable. The central plot around Stork’s obsession with Anna didn’t feel all that compelling to me, and so I had very little to anchor me in the story.

Interesting as a historically significant film, but it didn’t do a lot for me.

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The Eagle Shooting Heroes, 1993

The conniving Ou-yang Feng (Tony Chiu-wai Leung) and his cousin (Veronica Yip) attempt to overthrow the throne. But to do so, they must hunt down the princess (Brigitte Lin) who holds the royal seal. Both parties are soon on the hunt for a mystical kung fu manual. Also in the picture are Huang Yaoshi (Leslie Cheung) and his companion Suqiu (Joey Wang). There’s a suicidal beggar (Jacky Heung) whose attempts to die at Feng’s hands repeatedly end in mishaps. A fighter (Carina Lao) whose gender is ambiguous seeks revenge for the death of their lover (Kenny Bee). Finally, an eccentric gentleman, Tuan (Tony Ka Fai Leung) tries to achieve immortality.

Wowza. This wuxia adventure parody is a complete free-for-all, but with so much talent in front of and behind the camera, it manages to be a mostly delightful one.

This is the kind of movie where there are at once a thousand little subplots and also one loose, sprawling overarching plot. It also comes with the wonderful relief that if at any point you’re not totally sure what’s happening, it really doesn’t matter. Is Carina Lao playing a man, or playing a woman who has always passed for a man? Inconsequential. Are those dudes in the background working for Feng? Doesn’t matter.

This film is straight up 90+ minutes of a prestige collection of Hong Kong acting talent pulling faces, flopping around, pretending to control dancing centipedes with tiny drums, and seducing or rejecting one another every five minutes.

So, yeah, it’s kind of great when it works, because there’s a level of commitment from the actors and also a level of professionalism from the production itself (Sammo Hung was the action coordinator). It’s stupid, but it knows it’s stupid and, darn it, it’s going to be the best kind of stupid you’ve ever seen. At one point Tony Leung, In the Mood for Love dreamboat, tries to teach another character how to flirt while suffering from allergy induced sausage lips. I’ve already mentioned the tiny drums. It really feels like everyone involved has totally embraced letting loose in a talent-without-ego vibe.

This extends to the trappings of the film. The costumes are colorful and expressive. The effects in the action scenes are solid. The movie knows when to look good and when to intentionally be goofy, such as when the characters encounter three monsters in a cave who are clearly dudes dressed as a gorilla, a godzilla, and a big bird.

There are only two downsides here. The first is that there are times that the jokes stretch on a bit too long. There’s a line where something is stupid and it’s fun, but then it just starts to wear out its welcome. This happens on and off throughout the movie. There’s also some very early 90s humor, like a sequence where a cross-dressing Tuan tries to seduce an uncomfortable Yaoshi. Tuan is actually a pretty fun character, in my opinion, of the “I’m amazing and just try to tell me otherwise” variety. But with Leslie Cheung having been actually queer and the entire joke hinging on “a man flirting with a man?!”, it feels a bit off even if it manages to avoid feeling entirely mean-spirited.

Definitely a unique film and a really good time.

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The Fearless Hyena, 1979

Shing Lung (Jackie Chan) lives in a village with his grandfather (James Tien) who tries to train him in the secret ways of martial arts. But Lung is reckless and undedicated, preferring to gamble and get into silly brawls. Lung’s skills soon come to the attention of an inept martial arts teacher (Lee Kwan), who hires Lung to teach his students and fight students from other schools while wearing ridiculous disguises. But things get serious when an evil kung fu master (Yam Sai-kwoon) rolls into town, gunning for Lung’s grandfather. Lung must dedicate himself to the wise teachings of a man called the Unicorn (Hui-Lou Chen) in order to come out triumphant.

This film, which marks the debut of Jackie Chan as a writer/director, is a delightful comedy-action romp that wonderfully centers Chan’s physical and comedic talents.

Overall this movie is about pitch perfect for an action comedy, which is to say that it has just enough plot to move you from one action sequence to the other without it feeling jarring, but it also doesn’t get too bogged down in its story. There’s a nice alternation of comedy sequences leading into action sequences, leading back into comedy sequences, with just enough real emotion coming from the relationship with Lung and his grandfather to keep the movie grounded and give Lung a satisfying character arc.

The heart of the film, though, is the range of action scenes, and they do not disappoint. While any Jackie Chan film is going to be a showcase for his athletic talents, and this one definitely is, I was mainly taken by the humor. At one point, a cross-eyed, fake-mustache-wearing Chan sidles toward an opponent to the Pink Panther theme, and it’s a winner before a single punch is thrown. Later, Lung dressed in drag as a no-nonsense young woman who cheerfully demolishes an opponent who keeps trying to flirt with her. (Also, kudos to the film for Chan just . . . looking nice in drag.) The film reaches its climax as Lung uses a type of emotion-based kung fu to battle his opponent.

There are also some notable non-action or minimal-action sequences, such as a bit where Lung tries to get a job working for a shady coffin salesman, or where he tries to win at a rigged cup and ball game.

As you might expect, the characters are not super well developed. This mainly is an issue with the villain, who is not remarkable as a character aside from being the evil guy who shows up to do evil things. But there’s enough humor and affection between Lung and his grandfather and later Lung and the Unicorn to keep you invested in the outcome.

Good times.

I believe we were promised Vampires….where are the vampires?

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The Time Machine, 1960

An inventor named George Wells (Rod Taylor) creates a machine that can move objects and people through time. Excited to see the progress of human development, George moves forward in time. He is dismayed to learn of the world wars, but that doesn’t hold a candle to the long-distant future where he befriends a teenage girl named Weena (Yvette Mimieux) who is part of a strange, passive society.

A killer concept and wonderfully engaging special effects make this film incredibly watchable, while some dopey, dated sci-fi tropes render the character arcs a bit underwhelming.

The best aspect of this film is the way that it goes about portraying the time travel element, via visual cues and stop-motion animation. George spends a lot of the film simply sitting in the time machine as the world changes around him. The passage of time is conveyed largely via the changing styles of clothing on a mannequin in a clothing store across the street from George’s home. Later, George will watch as a volcano erupts and he is surrounded by hardened lava, leaving him no choice but to wait until the rock naturally erodes around him. The effects don’t always make sense (at the speed time is passing, he wouldn’t see the mannequin being undressed and redressed), but who cares?

There are also some very interesting aspects to the future society that George encounters. Their civilization has advanced to the point where all of their needs are being automatically met. As such, there is no longer a need to work or learn. The people are passive to the point that they sit by indifferently as someone drowns. Ben Franklin once dreamed that physical labor would be taken over by automatons, freeing up all citizens to pursue art and science. This story posits that, actually, freed of the necessities of survival, most people will turn into slugs. George is horrified to discover that the innovative drive of the past has been forgotten completely.

Where the film loses me a bit is in George’s character, and specifically his behavior in the segment in the far future. There’s a very touching sequence where George goes just about 20 years into the future, emerging in the middle of World War One. Thinking that he’s spotted his best friend, David (Alan Young), George discovers that it’s actually David’s son, James. Further, he learns that David has been killed in action, but that he put safeguards in place so that George’s home would never be sold or torn down. It’s very sweet and speaks to the friendship between the men.

But then George hits the far future and, WOW, does his entitled Western tourist vibe hit hard. He goes into the place where the people live and basically invites himself to dinner. When they aren’t curious about him, he throws a little hissy fit. It is, in a word, embarrassing. Really embarrassing.”Perhaps curiosity has died. Perhaps even courtesy has died, but I have come a long way and there are things I would like to know.” After more aggressive questioning, he rains more contempt down on the young man who tried to answer his questions. Later in the film, he tells Weena that he shouldn’t be mad at them, after all, they’re ignorant just like the indigenous foreign people of his own time!

And while the age difference between the characters of Weena and George isn’t terrible (Mimieux was 17 at the time of filming, and is 12 years younger than Taylor), the framing of their relationship as romantic/sexual gave me the big time icks. George refers to Weena as a vegetable. At one point he says, “Only children are afraid of the dark. But then, you are a child, aren’t you?”. It’s yet another iteration of this weird sci-fi fantasy about finding a woman with a post-puberty body and the mind/maturity of a child and I find it off-putting every single time. (There is one other woman in the movie, George’s elderly housekeeper, whose defining characteristic is that he mocks her fashion style at one point).

So points for style and for the development of the friendship between George and David, major eyeroll to the last act.

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Back to the Future 2, 1989

Moments after the events of the first film, Marty McFly (Michael J Fox) and his girlfriend Jennifer (Elisabeth Shue) are scooped up by Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd) and carried off to the year 2015 where Marty’s children are in a lot of trouble. But Doc’s attempt at benevolent intervention backfires when old nemesis Biff (Tom Wilson) learns about the time machine and uses it to craft a very different past and future.

Plenty of imagination on screen and engaging performances add fun to this film, though it ultimately ends up pulling itself in far too many directions.

There is a lot of enjoyment to be had in this movie, and particularly in the first act that takes place largely in the future. Of course there are always a few moments of snickering at the way that a movie envisions a future that is, as of viewing the film, in the past. The 2015 of this movie is all self-lacing sneakers, hologram waiters, instant faxes, and fingerprint-activated doors. I thought that it hit a good sweet spot of not feeling like it was trying too hard to predict the future, while still having some fun with imagining it. (And also poking some fun at the perpetual nostalgia grind with an 80s themed cafe).

There’s also, as you’d expect, some nifty machinations with the time travel element. The events of the film take place in the present of the 1980s, the past of the 1950s, and the future of the 2010s. And this includes overlap with the events of the first film, so that Marty and Doc Brown must dance around their previous adventures. It all comes across pretty well in terms of keeping the causality fun and light.

But as the film went on, I have to admit to finding it less fun. There’s almost no character work, which is a shame because Fox and Lloyd are very likable in their roles. Heck, Fox plays Marty, Marty’s future self, and Marty’s future son. There are some brief moments where Doc expresses regret about having meddled in the past and future, but those moments aren’t well developed.

I also found that the antagonism between Marty and the various incarnations of Biff started to wear thin. Really thin. As with the first film, Biff’s aggression toward Marty’s mother (Lea Thompson) is the centerpiece of things. (Though in this go around we get a Marty who is fixated on his mother’s breasts and even feels the need to remark on them!).

The inclusion of the character of Jennifer is even more baffling. Within about 5 minutes, Doc knocks her out because she’s “asking too many questions”. He and Marty then leave her unattended and unconscious in an alley near where future-Biff’s gang of no-goods roams around. You know, the character whose defining characteristic is bullying and sexual aggression? The character isn’t really used in any capacity, and it feels like a waste of a performance.

So there’s good stuff here, but in emphasizing the twists and turns of the plot, the characters really slip away, especially leading into the last act.

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[b]Back to the Future Part 3[/B, 1990

A direct continuation of the second film in the trilogy, Marty (Michael J Fox) heads to the 1880s in order to rescue Doc (Christopher Lloyd), who is stranded with a busted time machine. Marty must, of course, contend with the past iteration of his bully, this time as “Mad Dog” Tannen (Tom Wilson). But a further complication arises when Doc falls in love with a woman named Clara (Mary Steenburgen), which makes his choice to go back to the 1980s a difficult one.

While far more streamlined than its immediate predecessor, this conclusion to the trilogy plays a lot of the old hits to some diminished effect.

There’s definitely much less of a manic feeling to this movie, which spends almost all of its runtime in the past. There’s also an increased emphasis on the characters instead of just the time travel mechanics. Marty finally gets some sense knocked into him regarding his inability to walk away from conflict, courtesy of his ancestor Seamus. Doc also gets some good character work, with him deciding that he must destroy his time machine and his burgeoning romance with Clara.

Steenburgen is also a very welcome presence. I mean, she’s a woman in the Back to the Future franchise, so she naturally must be graphically sexually harassed, groped, and pushed to the ground. But at least she also has a personality, likes books and science. And, you’ll never believe it, she actually gets to do a few action-y things. She’s pretty well rounded, and it actually makes Doc’s conflicted feelings seem realistic.

The Wild West sets look pretty good, and there are some good gags, such as Marty impulsively taking the name “Clint Eastwood”, or the local funeral director taking Marty’s measurements in the moments leading up to a duel.

Ironically, what drags this one down a bit for me is the time travel stuff. It doesn’t feel fresh or innovative, and I found myself tuning out every time they started getting into the mechanics about how to get the car going the requisite 88MPH without the use of gasoline. The film felt about 15-20 minutes too long for my taste.

A decent end to the trilogy.

Yup; at any rate, while we're on the subject, what do you think about the other Batman movies you've watched?

I'm still posting February watches. I believe vampires enter the fray around April? Sorry!

I'm a very casual fan of Batman generally, though I ADORED the animated series growing up.

I have vaguely positive feelings toward Batman and Batman Returns, but haven't seen either in over a decade. I generally liked Nolan's trilogy (and was an extra in the third one, good times) but don't consider any of them favorites. I haven't seen anything with Affleck's Batman. Do you have particular favorites or favorite portrayals?

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Time Lapse, 2014

Finn (Matt O’Leary) is a painter who makes his living as a property manager along with his girlfriend, Callie (Danielle Panabaker). They live with friend and roommate Jasper (George Finn). One day while doing a wellness check on a tenant, they discover a strange machine that seems to be able to take photographs of the future. While at first the trio is able to leverage their new knowledge to their own advantage, things soon begin to escalate out of hand.

While this film generates some interest in a few small departures from the sci-fi “curse of knowing the future” trope, it doesn’t quite justify stretching a TV episode premise into a feature length.

There’s a snarky line from (I believe) a Roger Ebert review, where he says that what happens in a certain movie will “come as a great surprise to anyone who hasn’t seen a movie before”. This really sums up how I felt about the events of this film. Had I not seen many, many iterations of this premise beforehand, I think I would have been much more taken by it.

What I did like about this variation of the story was the idea that the three central characters become fixated on the idea that they must perfectly replicate what they see in the camera’s images. If the photo shows that they are sitting on the couch in certain clothing, then they MUST sit on the couch in those clothes. It’s kind of a neat twist on the idea of magical thinking. They get it into their heads, due to the unfortunate demise of the machine’s inventor, that any deviation from the prediction could spell doom for them. A lot of movies about knowing the future center on the idea of determinism. Are things fated to happen, or can they be changed? Here the characters are so terrified of the consequences of breaking the rules that the question of fate and free will gets all jumbled up in their fear.

I also have to give credit for the way that the film handles a sci-fi story with essentially no special effects. There’s smart budgeting at play here, understanding that the future-predicting machine is simply a mechanism for the story, and thus it doesn’t need to be fancy.

But live by the sword, die by the sword. The strength of stripped down sci-fi is often the way that it functions as a character drama, and the problem here is that the characters are pretty hard to take. They are all pretty obnoxious, and not in ways that make them fun to watch or compelling. Finn is almost a parody of the whiny, self-involved artist. Callie is weird and passive-aggressive. Jasper is dumb as a bag of rocks. There’s this attempt at a love triangle between the three of them, but these moments serve only to exacerbate how awful they all are.

In other reviews, I see that some people were really impressed by the final moments of the film. I have to say I wasn’t. From a plot standpoint, it was something I anticipated from very early in the film. From a character standpoint, I didn’t find it very compelling. If you’re hoping that sitting through the film will be worth it for the final “twist”/plot resolution, I’m not sure that’s a good hope to have.

This is also a case where information learned in the last act (or really the last 10 minutes) raises a LOT of questions about what has come before it. It casts certain decisions and events in a very different light, and retroactively makes at least one of the characters even worse.

A decent execution of a classic premise, but ultimately kind of a let-down.

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Naked Killer, 1992

Kitty (Chingmy Yau) is a highly spirited young woman with a particularly ruthless way of dealing with unsavory men who cross her path. After her father is killed by her step-mother’s lover, Kitty decides to kill the lover, which puts her on the radar of Sister Cindy (Wei Yao), a professional assassin. But Kitty and Sister Cindy’s glorious days of dispatching wicked men face complications in the form of a traumatized police officer named Tinam (Simon Yam) who has a crush on Kitty and a vicious former pupil of Sister Cindy’s named the Princess (Carrie Ng).

While there are definitely some early-90s elements that don’t play all that well to a modern eye, this is one heck of a fun romp wherein the main character repeatedly threateningly tells her friend “I’ll burst your ****!” and the handsome male lead vomits profusely every time he looks at a gun. Yeah, it’s good times.

The film is at its best when it leans into the overtly zany world it’s created where it seems perfectly reasonable that a woman would surprise a man by being nude in his shower, emerge somehow fully dressed seconds later, and then explode his head with two dumbbells. The action is wonderfully over the top and ludicrous, and the performances are a perfect fit.

Yau is so much fun as Kitty, one of those rogue characters that live by their own special moral codes. Shortly after flagrantly murdering a man, Kitty runs across Tinam, easily taking his gun from him. But when Tinam becomes ill at the sight of the weapon, Kitty gives him a little pep talk and also gives him back the gun. Yao’s Sister Cindy is also a ton of fun as a woman whose every move--seductive or deadly--is planned out to the letter. And while the evil lesbian trope might be a bit tired, Ng’s Princess is the perfect villain for the film, landing in a perfect place between evil and seductive.

For the most part, the movie also manages to land in the right place in terms of the sexy/erotic elements of the story. In every single sequence aside from one scene between Kitty and Tinam, sex is being overtly wielded as a deadly weapon. Whenever someone runs their hands down another person’s body, or slinks through a door in a skin-tight outfit, you’re just waiting for the cut of the knife or the snap of a bone. The women in the film are fully in control of their bodies--with one scene as an exception--and so the movie sidesteps most negative connotations of exploitation. Because the power plays exist almost exclusively between the women themselves (do you pass the Bechdel test if the conversations between women are largely about men . . . but also mainly about how to stab them in the genitals?), there’s not a sense of them being used just as bodies.

Where the movie loses some of its zest is in trying to shoehorn a conventional romance into the movie. The beginning of the relationship between Tinam and Kitty is actually a lot of fun. Framing the male half of the relationship as the more sensitive traumatized half and the female half as the more assured, authoritative part is a neat reversal of the usual dynamics. But as the film starts to push them together more seriously, it gets a bit boring. The female characters are so compelling and fun. Tinam is fun as kind of a doofus, but once the movie wants us to buy Kitty getting all hot and bothered over him it feels kind of dubious and in a different kind of wish-fulfillment lane.

It’s also the case that the over-the-top assassinations become less frequent as the movie goes on, and there’s a zest to the first third that the film doesn’t quite manage to hold onto in the later acts.

Still, this is a rollicking good time about some women whose love language is locking each other in a basement with slobbering sexual predators.

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The Last Woman on Earth, 1960

Evelyn (Betsy Jones-Moreland) is on an island vacation with her husband Harold (Antony Carbone). One day, while scuba diving together and with Harold’s lawyer Martin (Robert Towne), they emerge from the water to discover that a short-lived, inexplicable lack of oxygen has killed off all of the air-breathing beings on the island (and maybe in the world). As the three work to survive in a suddenly very different existence, tensions arise.

With no sci-fi to speak of aside from the inciting oxygen deficit, this film settles into a locked-room style drama, with the titular last woman on Earth, Evelyn, as a prize in a game of posturing between the two male leads.

There are a lot of films that deal with the premise of a last person or small group of last people after some sort of event sees the rest of humanity wiped out. There’s always something interesting about pondering which of society’s rules a person or group might continue to adhere to, and which conventions might get shoved by the wayside.

Unfortunately, the film sets its sights on just one question, ie will Evelyn and Martin, like, do it? It’s maddening on a couple of levels. The first is that the film acts as if not having sex with a woman in your proximity is some kind of serious psychological torture. I’ve known people of all different genders and sexualities who have had to go long stretches of time without sex--for example during extended stays in a remote research station, or while running a field hospital--and they all survived just fine. At one point, Harold talks about the “two man, one woman problem.” But this feels incredibly presumptive and absurd. The trio doesn’t try to leave the island because Harold doesn’t like the look of the weather, and so they haven’t really explored whether there might be other survivors. For example, anyone receiving oxygen in a hospital, anyone else diving, anyone in an airplane, etc.

But even if we forgive the fact that the film and the characters seem to leap to this conclusion, it still creates a very frustrating dynamic. Harold is super controlling. Martin thinks they need to accept their situation and just do what they want. Evelyn is constantly framed as the prize for whichever man “wins”.

The problem is that both men are total duds in their own ways. Harold is, as mentioned, very controlling. This includes forcing himself on Evelyn when she tells him no and saying “my wife” the way someone might say “my car”. He doesn’t even seem to actually like her all that much. He rambles on and on and on about his work ethic and how he “made” himself.

Martin is framed more sympathetically. I mean, the bar is low, right? He . . . doesn’t put Evelyn down or sexually assault her, so by default he’s better than Harold. But Martin also doesn’t seem to care that much about Evelyn’s happiness. There’s one really strong, shattering moment where an excited Evelyn talks to Martin about the possibility of them having a baby together. Martin shuts her down immediately, saying that humanity is on the way out and there’s “no point” bringing a child into the world. The camera lingers a moment on Evelyn’s face. In thinking that she might escape Harold’s control, she’s ended up with yet another guy who wants to drag her along in his philosophy without any real conversation or compromise.

The last act is particularly maddening. Just a collection of stupid, stupid choices culminating in a moment that’s framed in a positive light but which I found really depressing. I do have to give the film credit for something we almost never see in a movie: showing a character having lingering effects of head trauma and those effects slowly worsening as time goes on.

And some of the dialogue is . . . woof. Consider the following conversation:
- I no longer see the reason for catching fish we'll never be able to eat.
- All right, Martin. What do you want to do?
- To look at many things, not just fish.
- You afraid if you look at a fish too long, you'll begin to look like one?
- Maybe, Harold, maybe that's exactly what I'm afraid of.
- Boy, oh boy, it's certainly a good thing the world ended when it did. You never would have made it, boy, never.
- Made what, Harold? A millionaire? Money? Money and fish, fish and money. Harold, if rotten money smelled like rotten fish, they'd have given you a bank to yourself.

There are a handful of moments with some nice grit, but overall it’s a wet squib of a love triangle drama.

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Dinner Rush, 2000

On a winter day in New York, an older man named Enrico (Frank Bongiorno) is ruthlessly gunned down after dropping his grandchildren off after school. The rest of the film follows an evening, some time later, in the restaurant that is co-owned by Enrico and Louis (Danny Aiello). An eccentric group of characters are thrown together in the tumultuous evening, including high-strung chef Udo (Edoardo Bellerini), Udo’s screw-up sous chef Duncan (Kirk Acavedo), food critic Jennifer (Sandra Berhard), know-it-all bartender Sean (Jamie Harris), and mystery man Ken (Joe Corbett). But also present is loan shark Carmen (Michael McGlone), the man responsible for Enrico’s death and who threatens more violence if he’s not given part ownership of the restaurant.

Despite a handful of short sequences taking place in other locations, this is essentially a one-setting film and it manages to wring multiple brands of tension out of the various subplots taking place in this eventful evening.

It’s very much to the credit of the writing and the acting that, for the most part, the different plot pieces tend to be engaging enough that you’re never too impatient for it to get back to a certain thread. The highest stakes plot involves the attempted muscling in on the restaurant by Carmen and his equally threatening associate. This plot is further complicated by the fact that Duncan has placed a large bet with Carmen. The presence of a police detective, seemingly invited by Louis, further implies that things will not go over smoothly.

At the same time, you have Louis and Udo in a power struggle, as Udo wants to be a partner but Louis mourns the way that the restaurant has moved away from its family style roots and into a more “exclusive” experience. Of course every character needs at least two subplots, so we also get to see that Udo’s sort-of girlfriend, restaurant worker Nicole (Vivian Wu), is having an ongoing fling with Duncan.

When it comes to the upstairs of the restaurant, a sense of performance is present in all of the interactions. The dynamic between Udo, Jennifer, and another critic called the Food Nymph (Sophie Comet) is both performance and seduction. Udo is aiming for good reviews, but it’s clear that the Food Nymph has been more than taken by his food and his deferential attitude. At another table, an art collector (Mark Margolis) holds court to a table full of local artists hoping for a big break.

Across the board the acting is pretty good. The camera roams through the restaurant, giving a cluttered, intimate feel to the movie. The vibe is busy, dangerous, and mundane all wrapped together. Sitting alongside the romantic triangles and “what is art?” banter is always the threat of violence, but the film doesn’t rush to get there. It feels as if whatever happens must evolve naturally from the interplay between the characters.

I had very few issues with this film, aside from the fact that there are times when it starts to tip almost into farce territory. Jennifer first showing up in a horrible fake wig. The Food Nymph practically experiencing orgasm eating some of Udo’s food. The police detective and his wife eating dinner as the detective suspiciously eyes the other patrons. The film does mean to be funny, but at moments it pushes the viewer’s suspension of disbelief a bit far.

A neat crime/drama built from a solid ensemble.

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Happy Together, 1997

Lovers Po-Wing (Leslie Cheung) and Yiu-fai (Tony Leung) arrive in Argentina as the launch to a new phase in their on-again/off-again relationship. Things sour as they run short on money and have a disastrous trip to see a waterfall. Broken up, but forced to continue to live in Buenos Aires due to a lack of funds, the two go their separate ways until Po-Wing is attacked and Yiu-fai agrees to let him stay at his place while he heals. The two continue a roller-coaster of intimacy and jealousy, drawn to each other yet driving each other crazy.

While most movies about seemingly-doomed romantic relationships make me want to run for the hills, this sweetly-observed story about two guys who tenderly dance one minute and steal each other’s passports the next had me enraptured and holding out hope that somehow they’d find a way.

There are multiple dimensions to a relationship---love, trust, sexual attraction, affection--and the great tragedy of the relationship between Po-Wing and Yiu-fai is that they can never seem to get all of their ducks in a row. Whenever they seem to have one element in sync (compassion, lust, etc), some other element drives them apart. At different points in the film we see the best of what the two men can be as a couple. But we also see them at their worst in ways that make you think that they’ll probably never get themselves sorted out.

A lot of movies about troubled romances tend to paint them as having one piece that works (like a great sex life) and then another piece that is totally incompatible. I really liked this film’s take on the characters, which is that they almost can’t seem to help sabotaging things when they are going right. Yiu-fai takes Po-Wing’s passport and refuses to give it back. Po-Wing gets unnecessarily hurtful in talking about how many guys he’s hooked up with since he and Yiu-fai split.

Both men are, at times, impulsive or petty or maddening. But the performances from Cheung and Leung are undeniably magnetic, so that even at their very worst I found myself wanting things to turn out okay for them. By the nature of the structure of the film, Leung’s Yiu-fai comes off as more sympathetic, partly due to a subplot about Yiu-fai befriending a Taiwanese man named Chang (Chang Chen) who dreams of traveling.

There’s also an incredibly appealing sensuality to the way that the film is shot, especially the scenes between Po-Wing and Yiu-fai. The romantic sequences between them contain lots of thrilling moments of incidental intimacy---such as the way that Po-Wing slips his hands inside the sleeves of Yiu-fai’s shirt as the two dance. There’s a comfort between the two characters (via the apparent comfort between the two actors) that gives the relationship a lived-in quality that you don’t often feel in romantic films. That awareness of intimacy/sensuality extends to the broader world, such as in a sequence where a lonely Yiu-fai finds himself surrounded by the nude bodies of his co-workers at a slaughterhouse. A series of scenes ranging from that locker room sequence, to a part where Yiu-fai seeks out anonymous sex at a porn theater, to a shot of Yiu-fai hosing blood off of the slaughterhouse floor is a heady mix of overt lust and implicit despair.

A fabulous drama-romance.

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As Tears Go By, 1988

Wah (Andy Lau) is mixed up in debt collection with local criminal organizations. One day out of the blue he gets a phone call from his aunt that his cousin Ngor (Maggie Cheung) will be coming to stay with him as she pursues diagnosis for a lung ailment. Wah finds himself drawn to Ngor, even as his friend Fly (Jacky Cheung) digs them in deeper and deeper in debt and rivalry with other local gangsters.

Layering his typical existential romantic crisis over a small-potatoes crime plot, Wong Kar-Wai crafts a film far more interesting than it deserves to be, albeit one that doesn’t quite feel complete.

I read a review of a Wong Kar-Wai film that described his movies as portraying “the feeling of another life slipping away.” I mean, dang if that isn’t a PERFECT description of the sense I get from what I’ve seen of his work. Here it is Wah going through the motions, feeling like a big man, until Ngor’s gentle presence makes him realize just how empty his life is.

Lau makes for a strong lead, even if Wah is kind of a mess. He does a good job of portraying a kind of awakening inside of his superficially macho character. True to life, Wah doesn’t change who he is or drop everything for love, but instead begins to exist in a state of being unsettled. There’s something better out there, but what would it mean to reach for it?

Cheung is quietly charming as Ngor, even if she does come off at times as a bit too meek or too much of a Mary Sue. In an early sequence, literally the first night she stays in his apartment, Wah comes home drunk, trashes the place, breaks a bunch of glass, and then when she gently inquires about what’s wrong, he chases her down, pins her against a wall, and threatens her. And Ngor . . . just sort of shrugs this off? I mean, it’s one thing for a character to be kind and calm and compassionate. But it’s quite another for someone to meekly accept physical and verbal abuse as par for the course. She is very sweet and lovable, but her casual reception of Wah’s abuse feels like a big red flag.

Really, though, the main point of contention I had with this film was the character of Fly, who is just the worst. Every choice he makes is bad. Loyalty to your friends is great and all that, but watching Wah bail Fly out over and over and over just got maddening. As the film worked toward its final act and more serious conflict with the other local criminals, Fly’s actions started to feel too stupid, too contrived. At a certain point, the reality holding the romantic plot and the criminal plot together starts to thin out, and they don’t feel as if they belong in the same film.

The movie is undoubtedly visually stylish and dramatic. There are lots of moments of visual overlap and call back, such as Wah’s confrontation with Ngor mirroring an earlier confrontation Wah had with his ex-girlfriend. There’s a lot of overt drama with arguments taking place to a background of thunderstorms and stark angles. The soundtrack is also very in-your-face, lending the whole film a very heightened emotional tone.

A decent drama-romance that doesn’t quite cohere its elements as an overall story.

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Yes, Madam!, 1985

Police Inspector Ng (Michelle Yeoh) must collaborate with UK Inspector Morris (Cynthia Rothrock) when a murdered undercover agent has his passport and some incriminating microfilm lifted by two small-time criminals Asprin (Hoi Mang) and Strepsil (John Sham). Unfortunately for all involved, shady businessman Mr. Tin (James Tien) will stop at nothing to get his hands on the microfilm.

A steady dose of fun action sequences makes this over-the-top crime/action/comedy an easy, breezy watch.

A lot of reviews of this film note that it kicked off a subgenre of women-led action films, and it’s easy to see why. Yeoh and Rothrock are a tremendous amount of fun every time they’re on screen, whether that’s Yeoh’s inspector making a memorable arrest in a bookstore or Rothrock’s enthusiastic investigator literally leaping at any chance to kick the bad guys in the face to some mix of amusement and concern from her Hong Kong hosts.

I’ll admit that I don’t have the best eye when it comes to things like stunt doubles being swapped in and out, but there are several sequences where it’s very clear that Yeoh and Rothrock are doing the physical work and they are both compelling action leads. This comes in moments small (like Yeoh spryly leaping over a guardrail at an airport) and large (like Rothrock making a wire-assisted kick off of a wall to down a baddie). They both espouse a kind of cool confidence in their abilities and that feeling helps the film transition from talking to action and back to talking. The final showdown with Tin and his various henchmen is all-out and a fantastic climax to the story.

I wasn’t nearly as taken with the comedy subplot about the doofuses who steal the microfilm and clumsily try to turn it to their advantage. Part of that was having to look at a real-life animal abuser for a fair amount of that subplot. Part of it was that those sequences seemed to linger on a bit too long. And part of it was just impatience in wanting to get back to Yeoh and Rothrock.

Overall a fun action flick that’s taken down a notch by its comedy subplots, yet lifted by a solid final action sequence.

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The Left-Handed Gun, 1958

Billy the Kid (Paul Newman) is a young man who is illiterate and unmoored. He finds some mentorship in the form of a boss named Tunstall (Colin Keith-Johnston). But when Tunstall is murdered by a group of men--which includes a local sheriff--Billy swears bloody revenge. But a tentative amnesty is threatened by Billy’s violent spree, and his former friend, Pat Garrett (John Dehner) sets out to bring him to justice.

Some solid imagery run up against a borderline deranged protagonist makes this Western uneven but also compelling.

I don’t admittedly know very much about Billy the Kid, but I can’t help but wonder what inspired such a bizarre take on him in this film. We first meet Billy as he wanders through the desert, soon to be rescued and hired by Tunstall. Billy is disoriented, with simple questions like his name or where he’s from taking him moments to process and answer. But even after Billy is recuperated and rehydrated, he remains a character who seems in some way unattached to the world around him.

In some ways, this makes for an interesting dynamic. Billy has his own sense of honor and justice, and that sits uneasily alongside the fact that he can be impulsive and seemingly turn on a dime. There’s a scene in the movie where Billy and his friend Charlie (James Congdon) end up pinned down in a house in a shootout. Wandering too close to a window, Charlie is shot and begs Billy for help. Without going into more detail, what happens next is so strange and borderline inexplicable.

It’s a good thing that the film lays such a good groundwork of the relationship between Billy and Tunstall, because as the film goes on the viewer does want to see revenge. This impulse is constantly being challenged because of the way Billy goes about getting that revenge. There’s maybe some point where what he’s doing veers into the indefensible and unhealthy.

There is some really solid imagery here. A low-angled shot where a man suddenly looks up to see Billy holding a rifle aimed squarely at him is memorable, as is the immediate aftermath of the violence. The man is literally knocked out of his boots by the gunshot, something that happens right in front of a little girl. In another sequence, Billy returns to the shack where Charlie was shot, looking through the starburst shape of the shattered window.

Ultimately the film is both helped and harmed by its take on the main character. It’s so hard to get a handle on Billy that his moods and actions can feel random at times, disconnecting from a character arc. But I still found the character and the story interesting enough to stick with, helped by some memorable staging of certain sequences.

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The Heroic Trio, 1993

In an urban landscape, a villain known only as the Evil Master (Shi-Kwan Yen) has a talented follower called Ching (Michelle Yeoh) stealing babies of wealthy, noble families in order to find a future king of China. On the case is Inspector Lau (Damian Lau), but the real heroes in this case are the wild Chat (Maggie Cheung) and the principled Tung (Anita Mui), who also happens to be Lau’s wife in disguise. As they come into conflict with each other, the three women must face a shared traumatic past.

With a delightfully incongruous mix of city thriller and fantasy combat, this melodramatic supernatural action flick keeps a solid momentum right up until its memorable last act.

The film kicks off with extravagant wire-work as a mysterious figure steals a baby and delivers it to her master. With that tone set, the entire narrative revolves around wonderfully over-the-top action setpieces, such as Chat dropping a rocket into a metal barrel, launching her into the air and into a building where she takes out a gang committing a robbery. Throughout the film the three women come together with or against each other, fighting over heir-apparent babies and conflicting loyalties.

Cheung’s black-leather clad, goggles-wearing Chat brings most of the comedy in the film. Mui and Yeoh hold things down on the drama front, especially Yeoh’s conflicted character who goes along with the Evil Master’s plan because she wants to protect a scientist (James Pax) who is working for the Evil Master perfecting a cloak of invisibility that Ching uses to steal the babies.

The tone of this film is all over the place, but it works? The action is outlandish, but the emotion stays grounded with the three protagonists. In a genuinely gasp-inducing turn of events, one of those outlandish action sequences results in some unexpected and upsetting consequences. There’s also a very endearing aspect to the unspoken romance between Ching and the Inventor that builds as the film goes on.

The only real downside to the film, for me, was that Ching’s motivations for staying with the Evil Master don’t totally wash. And unfortunately the film makes the mistake of letting her explain that motivation over and over, so that it rankles each time.

I have to say, however, that any complaints I had were absolutely power-washed away by that final action sequence, in which the Evil Master’s skeleton puppets Ching’s body, and there’s no way to describe it in words that can fully convey how awesome and bonkers it is.

Good times.

This is a fun, fun film. Michelle Yeoh is always superb.
Have you seen The Stunt Woman yet? I have that saved to watch soon.

I haven't! After I finish the 2023 challenge, I need to loop back around to some of the collections on Criterion.

I just noticed it’s leaving criterion at the end of the month.

Yikes!

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Police Story 3: Supercop, 1992

Hong Kong detective Chan (Jackie Chan) teams up with a mainland Chinese detective Yang (Michelle Yeoh) to take down a ruthless drug cartel. Going undercover as a pair of siblings, they ingratiate themselves with a cartel member named Panther (Wah Yuen). But various complications arise, not the least of which is the unfortunate presence of Chan’s girlfriend, May (Maggie Cheung) at one of their high-stakes meetings.

Riding the good vibes of the chemistry between Chan and Yeoh, and capped by an absolutely mad final action sequence, this film is high on its own supply and it’s great.

How and why there wasn’t an entire series of films made starring Chan and Yeoh is absolutely beyond me. Their banter and the way that both their martial arts and their physical comedy styles complement each other is insane. It really says something when you’ve got Maggie Cheung on deck and there’s barely room to fit her in as a subplot.

The story itself moves along at a great clip. We establish the mission, Chan and Yang infiltrate the gang, and then there are a series of hijinks to get them in close proximity to the drug kingpin, then a further complication involving having to bail out the kingpin’s wife who is the only one who knows the password to the cartel’s massive bank account. The balance between the story and the action is very good, with each piece flowing naturally from the last.

The action does tend to run toward larger setpieces, with many, many moving parts. By the time you get to the finale, you basically need all the helicopters, trains, cars, and motorcycles to up the ante. That said, there’s still time for Yang kicking a woman in the crotch before kicking her fully through a conveniently placed stack of boxes, or Chan to mug on top of a moving train as an opponent heads unwittingly for a low-hanging sign.

It is true that Cheung is underused, and the sequences involving her character mainly tend to center on her being humiliated or roughly handled. It would have been nice to see her given a bit more depth, or just more of a chance to show off her comedic chops.

I also had mixed feelings watching some of the stunts, knowing that there were several times that the actors were endangered or injured. I suppose at this point, Yeoh FALLING OFF OF A MOVING CAR INTO THE PATH OF OTHER MOVING CARS is more of a historical curiosity, but it’s still troubling to see several sequences in which the safety is precarious at best.

Altogether a winning film built on engaging performances and memorable action.

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Solo: A Star Wars Story, 2018

In a galaxy far, far away, a young Han (Alden Ehrenreich) escapes a miserable life of forced labor and falls in with a group of thieves led by the charismatic Beckett (Woody Harrelson). When a robbery goes wrong, the gang finds themselves in thrall to the powerful, controlling Dryden Vos (Paul Bettany), who just happens to have control over Han’s lost love, Qi’ra (Emilia Clarke).

Stranded between feeling like a stand-alone film and a ~part of a cinematic universe~, this one mostly coasts on the charms of its cast as they banter through a series of action set-pieces.

As what you might call a “casual appreciator” of the original Star Wars films, I have no real emotional stakes when it comes to the expanded universe. Aside from The Force Awakens, this is the only film outside of the original trilogy that I’ve seen. And . . . it’s okay.

The plus side is definitely the cast. Ehrenreich has probably the hardest job, tasked with a character who needs to end the film set on the arc of becoming the cocky, jaded Han Solo that we meet in the original films. Ehrenreich is likable and sympathetic, though I felt that the writing often let him down. Considering the way that he is connected to almost every other character, he feels strangely isolated. His friendship with Chewie is probably the most compelling, but everything else feels very superficial.

The rest of the cast is also very solid, and they benefit from more focused character dynamics. Phoebe Waller-Bridge is funny and moving as L3, Lando Calrissian’s (Donald Glover) robot co-pilot. L3 is a staunch advocate for robot rights, and what feels like a cheap joke about Lando having a crush on her later turns out to be more true than we’d first suspect. Glover is charming in his turn as Lando, and his banter with L3 and a later more serious scene between them is some of the strongest stuff in the film.

Clarke has a lot of presence, but that mostly calls attention to the relative weakness of the character. Is Qi’ra a victim of essentially sex trafficking? Or is she an empowered, cagey woman? The movie kind of wants to have things both ways. I think that a character COULD be both, but it would require more nuance than this film is capable of. The film wants to treat her a bit as a trophy in a tug-of-war between Han and Dryden, and it’s a dynamic that is not executed well. Likewise, Harrelson’s Beckett is positioned as a mentor figure to Han, but the film consistently skirts around more serious relationship building between them. It means that many moments that should land with a punch instead land with a shrug.

The movie also looks, well, not great. There’s a very generic (to be fair, established by the original trilogy) grungy futurism thing going on, with security guards monitoring workers on little televisions. But the overwhelming palette is sand yellow and mud brown. I didn’t hate the action sequences, but neither did I feel drawn in to them. There’s a train robbery in the first act that is pretty swell, but from there it’s kind of a gloop of lasers and zooming spaceships.

Worth a watch, I suppose. But nothing very compelling.

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Wild Girl, 1932

In a rural California town, Salomy Jane (Joan Bennett) is a tomboy who restlessly resists the wooing of charming gambler Jack (Ralph Bellamy), the ineffectual Rufe (Irving Picher), and the handsy politician Baldwin (Morgan Wallace). But things take a turn one day when a stagecoach robbery takes place and a local is murdered, with suspicion of the murder falling on a newly arrived stranger (Charles Farrell). Salomy has reason to defend the stranger, slowly coming to realize she has feelings for him.

This movie is an everything bagel of comedy, drama, thriller, romance, and Western---and this bagel is, for the most part, delicious.

On the comedy front, the film delivers a series of ribald jokes with the same pattern of giving a meaningful pause before delivering a second half that renders the statement innocuous. “He was stripping women . . . of their jewels.” “When you find the right man you’ll get out of those pants . . . and into a dress.” The cast has a good old time delivering these lines, and their amusement is contagious.

The drama and thriller elements are also pretty effective. In a sequence that’s all the more shocking for following on a lot of silliness, Baldwin waits behind a tree near where Salomy is swimming nude in a lake, accosting her when she emerges. The attack leaves her with nasty bruises on her arm, something we see twice more during the film. Salomy hypothesizes that a later attack on Baldwin was probably motivated by the similar assault of another woman, something that proves prescient. The other drama subplot involves a local man who is suspected of committing the stagecoach robbery. The film spends a lot of time with the man, his wife, and their children, giving a lot of impact to what comes later in that plot.

The romance is also fun for the most part. For a while it cruises along in a “love at first sight” mode, but there’s a pretty good sequence in the middle where Salomy realizes that the stranger may have killed the man who tried to rape her, and is deeply disturbed by the idea that he might be executed for having done so. With the local authorities basically brushing off her report of being assaulted, all she can offer the stranger is affection and a pretty sexy kiss. There is something a bit disappointing about the fact that Salomy likes a guy and then all of a sudden goes around in modest dresses instead of her pants and shirt. Thankfully she’s still very feisty to the last frame. Farrell plays his part well, a job that requires being adorable, guileless, and rugged in turn.

A special mention has to go to Eugene Pallette, the local carriage driver who acts as almost a greek chorus to all of the action. He keeps each character up to date on the latest events, and gently intervenes at certain moments to help make things right and support the community.

The one aspect of the film that sticks out like a sore thumb is the treatment of its Black characters. While Louise Beavers is an engaging presence (and gives a great delivery of the “get you out of those pants” line), her character is the stereotypical Mammy. (And, yes, that’s her character’s name). The portrayal of the Black characters is positive, technically, but “positive” in the sense that they are enslaved people who are just as happy as can be. Just a whole lot of laughing and singing and hanging out--yup, the life of an enslaved person in the 1800s! It’s not a huge part of the run time, but these scenes occur enough to leave a lingering negative vibe.

Overall this one packs enough laughs and moments of genuine heart to be worth a watch, with a note that the racial politics are unfortunate.

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Me and My Gal, 1932

A new police officer on the beat named Danny (Spencer Tracy) strikes up a romance with a feisty waitress named Helen (Joan Bennett). Things get complicated when Helen’s married sister, Kate (Marion Burns) has a fling with gangster Duke (George Walsh) who ends up on the lam.

Built on the crackling chemistry between Tracy and Bennett, this one ends up as an effective mish-mash of comedy-romance and crime thriller.

From the get-go, Danny and Helen are very well matched so that the banter and good-natured ribbing feels mutual and not off-putting on either side. In one sequence, the two of them cuddle up on a sofa and as they exchange banter and sweet nothings, we hear their inner-monologues. “Why I’ve never even kissed a guy!” Helen exclaims, followed immediately by the thought, “I hope he didn’t hear about the fireman’s picnic!”. It’s a romance where they both know what’s up, so the different versions of game-playing never feel gross.

The subplot with Kate, Helen’s sister, is a bit more uneven. We’re introduced to Kate’s husband, the slightly geeky Eddie (George Chandler) who leaves for long stints at sea. We also meet Eddie’s father, Sarge (Henry Walthall), a disabled war veteran who has lost the ability to speak and must use a wheelchair. Kate is a bit more of a dumb-dumb archetype, though it should be said that the film is somewhat sympathetic to her. (In one of my favorite lines of the film, Danny tells a disconsolate Kate that she should stick by Eddie, “Even if he does look like a runaway horse.”) The thrills mostly come from this subplot, with Sarge being aware of Duke’s presence in the house, but unable to communicate this to Helen or Danny. There’s also a really fun prison escape sequence.

The heart and soul of this one is the banter, and that carries over outside of the wooing between Helen and Danny. It’s all very charming and moves along at a good clip. (“There was another bank robbery today.” “Oh, who’d the bank rob?” “No, someone robbed the bank.” “Ah, turned the tables on them, eh? Smart!”)

The film is very light, which isn’t exactly a criticism unless you wanted more gritty reality from the gangster/bank robbery elements. A fun little comedy-romance.

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Toy Story 4, 2019

Having been gifted from Andy to Bonnie in the previous film, Woody (Tom Hanks) and the rest of the toys face a new crisis as Bonnie heads off to Kindergarten. With one last road trip before Bonnie starts school, the toys are shocked to stumble on their old friend Bo Peep (Annie Potts). Still grappling with the loss of Andy and his sense of purpose, Woody starts to question what his own future might look like.

Despite the third film having ended on what felt like a good place of closure, this one takes the lives of the toys a decent step forward.

The existential questions about the toys’ consciousness takes on a deeper dimension in this film, where Bonnie cobbles together a plastic spork with googly eyes and pipe-cleaner arms, and somehow her love of her creation, Forky (Tony Hale), brings him to life. Forky believes he’s trash---and much of the first act is dedicated to keep Forky from throwing himself in the garbage--and in trying to help Forky find his purpose as a toy, Woody begins to question his own purpose.

As with the rest of the films in the series, much of the movie hinges on a rescue mission. In this case, Woody and Forky get dropped out of the family’s RV on the vacation and the rest of the toys must help reunite them in the midst of a carnival. Their progress is impeded by a bitter, broken toy named Gabby (Christina Hendricks) and her sinister army of ventriloquist dummies.

The emotional stakes, as always, are high. Woody still hasn’t reconciled the loss of Andy, something made worse by the fact that he doesn’t have the same relationship with Bonnie as he did with Andy. The toys’ unflinching loyalty to their kids---the same kids who at times thoughtlessly cast them aside---has always had an uncomfortable masochistic streak. And in this film, for the first time, the toys are allowed to think outside of the toy box. It’s a welcome step forward, and one that balances the souls of the toys with the reverence that the series has for the bond between children and their childhood toys.

The voice cast is deep and endearing as always. My only real complaint is that the mission to retrieve Woody and Forky seems to go on a fair amount longer than it should. It feels a bit overly familiar.

A worthy sequel, and one that leaves its characters in a lovely place.

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Psycho Beach Party, 2000

Outsider Chicklet (Lauren Ambrose) just wants to be a part of the local surf scene, but the male-dominated surf crew wants nothing to do with her. Worse, a mysterious killer is roaming the streets, knocking off various people with different connections to Chicklet. As the intrepid Monica Stark (Charles Busch) investigates, the bodies continue to pile up.

While there are a handful of teen beach movie/slasher parody moments that land their jokes, most of this comedy ends up feeling a bit lifeless.

I’ve seen another film written and starring Charles Busch, 2003’s Die Mommie Die. It’s actually a sentimental favorite of mine. The performances are all on the same level, which is to say totally over the top. That feisty, overwrought energy is sorely missing in this film, which ends up a few steps short of what makes a parody enjoyable to watch. A lot of the humor here seems to have stopped at: what if the line deliveries were bad and the special effects were terrible?

The cast seems game enough: Amy Adams as a local mean girl who’s dating one of the surfers, Matt Keesler as a Swedish exchange student living with Chicklet and her mother, Beth Broderick as Chicklet’s concerned mother. But a good attitude only takes you so far. A lot of the sequences feel redundant, and they aren’t memorable for being good or delightfully bad.

There’s also something a bit awkward about how the film tries to utilize its more edgy elements. Chicklet has a movie version of dissociative identity disorder that turns her into a sultry seductress or a stereotypical “sassy Black woman”. We get several allusions to the fact that Chicklet might be gender-non-conforming or gay, but this is seemingly dropped as the movie goes on, and the combination of this with her mental health issues feels disjoint in terms of what the movie is trying to do with the character. When further combined with the fact that her “seductress” persona is having sexual relations with an adult man, it all skews uncomfortable instead of fun.

There are some strong moments. A few of the fake surfing scenes are enjoyably cheesy. A scene where alpha surfer Starcat (Nicholas Brendan) teaches Chicklet about sex in a way that starts out very innocent and then takes a sudden, ribald turn.

I also have to shout out Tera Bonilla, a dancer who does a great go-go routine for the opening and the closing credits. It’s 2-3 minutes of high energy, sexy fun that the film it bookends never manages to match or top.

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Venom: Let There Be Carnage, 2021

Following the events of the first film, Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) is still host to the symbiotic creature Venom. Hoping to up his reputation, Eddie goes to interview convicted serial killer Kasady (Woody Harrelson), resulting in Kasady acquiring some of Eddie’s symbiote-rich blood and manifesting a new monster called Carnage. With the help of his ex-girlfriend Anne (Michelle Williams) and her dopey new boyfriend Dan (Reid Scott), Eddie and Venom must stop the new deadly duo.

In a superhero market saturated by serious, world-ending, sprawling cinematic universes, there is something totally refreshing about a movie willing to be exactly the right kind of stupid.

I enjoyed the first film, but did not find it particularly memorable. This one, though, is one of only a handful of big-budget comic book films I could actually see wanting to rewatch. The movie embraces a certain degree of ridiculousness right from the get go, and it carries through the rest of the run time.

I think that liking or not liking this movie probably fully hinges on how charmed you are with the banter between Eddie and Venom, and their old married couple-like squabbles. Venom demands to be let out to eat someone. Eddie asks why he doesn’t just eat the two chickens living in their apartment. “But Sonny and Cher are best friends!!!” retorts an appalled Venom, as the bird mill around in the background. Too stupid or perfect stupid? For me it’s the latter.

Venom himself is used as an effective physical comedy mechanism. Whether that’s Venom making Eddie a deliriously messy breakfast to cheer him up, or the shenanigans Venom gets up to when he jumps ship from Eddie and ventures out into different hosts.

The only problem with the way that the film totally centers Eddie and Venom is that it really doesn’t do much with its supporting characters. Williams, despite some weak writing for her character, still makes an impression as Anne. But Naomie Harris is criminally underused as Frances, Kasady’s love interest and some sort of a mutant with deadly sonic powers. She features a bit in the climax of the film, but she’s woefully underdeveloped and so her long-awaited reunion with Kasady doesn’t have much emotional resonance. I found myself mostly checking out for the final big action scene.

Much more fun than I expected.

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Big Brown Eyes, 1936

Manicurist Eve (Joan Bennett) is in a spiky romance with detective Dan (Cary Grant). When a criminal gang led by a private detective named Morey (Walter Pidgeon) kills a baby while committing a jewelry robbery, Dan ends up on the case. Eve leaves her job and ends up working at a newspaper. Together they work to find evidence to put the killer--a sadistic member of the gang named Cortig (Lloyd Nolan)---away for good.

While neither funny enough to be a screwball comedy, nor serious enough to be a crime thriller, there are enough charms in the antics and banter of Bennett and Grant to make this one a pleasant viewing.

This film feels a bit like it’s trying to take a page out of The Thin Man’s book: a quirky, brilliant couple solving crimes and pulling laughs along the way. Bennett and Grant have all of the necessary wit and timing to make their characters engaging. There is a fun dynamic whereby Eve tries to use her position at the newspaper to spur along the investigation.

There’s also some good humor in the vanity of the men who are in the gang. Cortig likes having his nails done while he’s hand-fed a milkshake by an attendant. Morey also seems to frequent the manicure services. There’s something both funny and gross about these people who killed a child just shrugging it off and going out for some indulgent self-care.

Somehow, though, the balance between the comedy and the crime elements doesn’t totally work. There are a lot of dastardly crimes that can happen and somehow still vibe with comedy, but killing a baby seems to be over a certain line. There’s only so much you can enjoy jokes when a murdered child hangs over the room. It might have been okay if that crime had been used to incite our loathing of the criminals, but it’s brought up with much frequency. The pivot from “dead baby” to Cary Grant doing silly voices is too much of an about-face.

And speaking of silly voices, this film features a pretty whacky gimmick. Namely, the idea is that Cary Grant can perfectly mimic the voices of other people (an effect achieved in the film by overdubbing him at those crucial moments), and can also throw his voice. It is . . . weird. Very weird. It does get one good laugh, when Eve does a sarcastic rendition of his trick, but otherwise it just felt far-fetched and strange in a way that didn’t jibe with the reality of the rest of the movie.

Worth a watch, but it’s an odd duck of a film.

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Man Hunt, 1941

Alan Thorndike (Walter Pidgeon) is a British man on vacation in Bavaria. As a “sporting stalk,” he gets Adolph Hitler in his rifle sights, before being captured by German forces. Tortured in an attempt to get him to admit that he was acting on behalf of the British government, Thorndike manages to escape and make his way back to England, where he is stalked by two German agents (George Sanders and John Carradine). He gets some help from a plucky young woman named Jerry (Joan Bennett), but his pursuers are ruthless.

This odd film, boosted by some great staging by director Fritz Lang, is ultimately more interesting for its political positioning than for its story or characters.

Despite featuring a British protagonist and taking place only in Europe, this film was made by an American studio, and its perspective on the war is fascinating. Made before America joined WW2, the movie serves as a moral call to action, centered on the choices made by its main character and the immorality of his enemies.

The first 45 minutes or so are not quite as interesting. There’s a lot of conversation and some of it feels redundant. Weirdly, you end up understanding the position of the German officer, who is incredibly dubious when Thorndike continues to insist that almost assassinating Hitler was just his idea of a lark. We’ve all been there. On vacation in the mountains, and you set yourself up to fire a gun at a head of state. It’s a classic vacation rite of passage.

There is a solid sequence once Thorndike escapes and tries to hitch a ride on a ship leaving for England. Things also pick up in the middle of the movie as the pursuit becomes much more action-driven. There’s a great chase scene that takes place in a train tunnel, all shadows and silhouettes.

I thought that the characters were likable enough, though each has something that keeps them a bit at a distance. Thorndike is our protagonist, but we start the film with him doing something incredibly outlandish and then getting outraged when people don’t believe his explanations. I also found that he came across a bit stiff and removed when you’d expect a bit more emotion. His affection for Jerry feels real enough, but Bennett’s accent is . . . . something. Ultimately, because the film has the war at large on its mind, Jerry serves chiefly as a motivating agent for Thorndike, and not as her own character. Her character’s arc is literally resolved off-screen, and it’s frustrating.

What makes the movie most interesting is its position as a war film made during the war it’s portraying. Hanging over the whole film is the opening sequence and its implications. The film isn’t so much after a kind of sci-fi adjacent “What if someone had killed Hitler?” idea, but rather questioning moral obligation when given the opportunity. Should Thorndike have pulled the trigger? If you know someone is actively harming others or going to harm others, what are your responsibilities? It’s an interesting choice that the German agents all speak with British accents. It makes the film feel at once insular and global. If there’s any doubt about the film’s point of view, it’s settled in the final sequence, which rivals the opening moments in outlandishness.

Worth checking out, though more as an interesting example of a film directly using its narrative to compel political action.

I think I rated this the same as you did. I think most of the appeal of the play that it was based on probably had to do with the female characters probably being played by men.

It's unfortunate, because so much of it just lands flat.

Have you seen Die Mommie Die!?

Re: Vampires, Assassins, and Romantic Angst by the Seaside: Takoma Rev
 

Hey Takoma, I see your watching a lot of old films. Do you have TCM or are you getting them from the library? I have never see a lot of these. But that's probably because I don't feel that Hollywood films come into their own till the late 30's and early 40's. Which may be due to a great influx of talent from Europe.

I'm watching a lot of them on a mix of streaming services, mainly Criterion Channel. I have gotten a few from my library system, though they can be hit or miss with what they have of older DVDs.

Takoma actually saw these films upon their first release. She’s secretly a vampire, herself.
This thread title about “Vampires, Assassin’s and romantic angst”? It’s a reference to herself and her immortality.
Tread carefully. Like most vampires, she’s a bit of a “neck romancer”.

👀

Re: Vampires, Assassins, and Romantic Angst by the Seaside: Takoma Rev
 

I think I need this thread to remember how to watch movies again.

A public outing/shaming? My friend, why do you think I employ those assassins.

I don't know. I kind of admire the zen of "I'm not going to tell you why, but you should watch this movie, it's great."

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The Woman in the Window, 1944

Richard Wanley (Edward G Robinson) is a mild mannered professor who becomes enamored with a woman in a painting displayed in a window near his club. One evening, by chance, Richard meets the woman herself, Alice (Joan Bennett), and accompanies her back to her place against his better judgment. When a jealous lover bursts in and attacks Richard, he kills the interloper. Faced with scandal and ruin, Richard and Alice agree to work together to cover up the crime. But their trust in one another is strained as the man’s disappearance and death become quite the big deal.

This film is an engaging thriller that balances on the precarious alliance between its two main characters, though the whole thing really goes off the deep end with an absolutely terrible ending.

A lot of plot summaries or other materials around this movie use phrases like “siren” or “femme fatale”. But one of the things I liked the most about this film is the way that Alice actually doesn’t fit that character type. Is she a slinky, seductive woman who tempts Richard away from the safety of his routine? Yes. But tellingly, it’s always Richard who makes the decisions or comes up with the schemes that embroil them more in danger. I suppose a cynic might argue that this is a plot by Alice---let Richard be the one to make the wicked choices. But we see nerves from Alice in moments where Richard is absent, leading me to believe that her fear and shakiness is real and not some act she’s putting on.

The real lure in this film is the lure of adventure. Richard and his friends spend a long time talking about the idea that they are too old for such adventures. All through their evening together, Richard keeps saying that he “should” go home. He “should” stop at two drinks. But it takes very, very little nudging from Alice to get Richard to step out of the safe lane. Alice is a single woman, while Richard is married and a father to young children. If Alice is a “siren” because she seduced Richard away from his routines, what can we say about Richard, who seems to see Alice more as a symbol of youthful adventuring than as a real person?

The murder plot itself unfolds in a rather enjoyable way. Having disposed of the body, Richard and Alice must sit back as the police try to piece together the different clues. Alice’s deceased beau was apparently a bigwig, and so his disappearance and murder garner a lot of attention. Richard gets a front-row seat to the action, as one of his friends is a police detective. (There’s also a hilarious newsreel interview with the boy scout who discovered the body, who hopes to use the reward money to send himself and his little brother to college). Unlike a lot of murder cover up plots, Richard and Alice make very few errors. Alice makes one big mistake that one senses was more out of plot necessity than the reality of the character. Yet despite their surprisingly not-terrible efforts, complications still arise that might require more illegal and more immoral actions.

The film effectively builds to a powerful, emotional climax. Well. The film effectively builds to a powerful, emotional climax until it feels the need to shoot itself in the foot. I expected to read that the ending was studio-mandated or something, only to learn that it was Lang’s idea. Color me baffled. It would be a huge spoiler to discuss specifics, but the only word that really comes to mind is disrespectful. It is an ending that is disrespectful to the characters, the story, and to the viewer.

A fun crime thriller that really drops the ball in the last 10 minutes.

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The Woman on the Beach, 1947

Scott (Robert Ryan) is a Coast Guardsman recovering physically and mentally from having been aboard a ship that was torpedoed. Coming out of his hospitalization, he starts to rush into a marriage with the sweet Eve (Nan Leslie). But soon after proposing, Scott encounters the lovely and sardonic Peggy (Joan Bennett) on the beach collecting driftwood. Peggy is married to Tod (Charles Bickford), a painter who was recently blinded during a domestic dispute with Peggy. A dangerous, fraught triangle soon forms between Scott, Tod, and Peggy.

Full of high drama, this story about obsession and identity seems to come to some dubious conclusions but holds interest with solid performances.

While I’m not entirely sure how much the messiness of the whole story was intentional, it does give the film some emotional realism. Scott might be physically recovered from his experiences, but he is not mentally well. His behavior is characterized by obsession and impulse. First, he pushes Eve into agreeing to marriage. Later, he will become obsessed with the idea that Tod is not really blind and will go to some extremes to prove it. He truly seems like a person who is flailing around, performing his idea of loyalty but endangering and harming others in the process.

Tod makes an interesting foil for Scott. Having lost the ability to paint as he once did, Tod has notions of becoming a writer. But whether for lack of talent in that department, or just the frustration and anxiety produced by his loss of vision, his genius with the paintbrush doesn’t seem to translate to the pen. He must also deal with the looming fact that as a painter he is now considered “dead,” something that drives up the value of all of his remaining paintings. Tod is bitter and angry, and he expresses his emotions via aggression toward Peggy and a needy desire to befriend Scott.

Peggy is the most challenging character. At times, she comes off as a pretty nuanced person. She admits to Scott the unflattering circumstances of Tod losing his vision. And while we see that Tod himself has a nasty, at-times violent temper, Peggy’s guilt over the hurt she’s inflicted on Tod keeps her loyal to him. Peggy knows that while they stay at the seaside, she will only be tempted by Scott and others. She repeatedly begs Tod to go back with her to New York, where they can renew their relationship, but he won’t have it.

I really went back and forth with how I felt about Peggy’s stand by your man act. On one hand, I did respond to the idea of her feeling guilt. On the other hand, Tod is so consistently abusive---physically and psychologically--that it was hard to root for her to stay with him. We see him hit her. We also watch an incredibly uncomfortable sequence where Tod wants to show off a painting, specifically a nude that he painted of Peggy. Tod is obviously in pain, but he’s so comfortable inflicting harm and embarrassment on Peggy that at a certain point her desire to stay with him became maddening instead of understandable.

Visually, the movie is incredibly dramatic. The sequence where Scott first catches sight of Peggy on the beach, she is eerily positioned amidst fog so that there’s something dream-like about it all. Later there will be showdowns on a cliff’s edge, on a boat out at sea, and a burning house. It’s a film where an orchestral score practically explodes every time Peggy and Scott launch into each other’s arms.

A good drama that doesn’t always seem sure about who it wants to center. The relationships and behavior are nicely complex, with solid performances.

In this scenario, you’d be the assassin.

Please don’t assassinate me…..

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The Reckless Moment, 1949

Lucia (Joan Bennett) has a husband who, for work reasons, is often away for long stretches. Their college-aged daughter, Bea (Geraldine Brooks) is dating a sleazy older man named Ted (Shepperd Strudwick). One night, Bea and Ted have an argument in the family’s boat house, and the next morning Lucia finds Ted’s dead body. She does what any good mother would do and disposes of the body. Unfortunately for her, a blackmailer by the name of Martin Donnelly (James Mason) has some incriminating letters written by Bea, and he wants a huge stack of cash to keep quiet.

More effective as a domestic thriller than the romance it tries to wrestle to the forefront, this one keeps you on the edge of your seat with a series of twists and turns.

Part of the fascination I had watching this film came after about 10 minutes, when I suddenly realized that I’d seen it’s remake, The Deep End starring Tilda Swinton as the mother and Goran Visnjic as the enigmatic, sexy blackmailer. Despite knowing the overall arc of the film, I enjoyed noting the differences and how it unfolds its different twists and turns.

It’s interesting how time determines the details of the story. In the 2001 remake, the hinge of the blackmail is the fact that the main character’s son is gay, something that it’s implied the military-minded father would not be okay with. Here, it’s simply that seventeen-year old Bea has written some simmering letters to Ted. But what the film leverages well is the audience’s awareness that Bea was involved in Ted’s death. Lucia knows that anything connecting Ted to her daughter could prove their undoing, and so she must do anything to get those letters.

I really enjoyed the thriller aspect of the film. Mason’s Donnelly is a quiet, but insistent man. He is not overtly threatening, yet he frequently drops mentions of a man named Nagel, a much more brutal partner. He has no idea that Bea or Lucia are mixed up in Ted’s death. Lucia is surrounded by a rising tide: Donnelly’s blackmail and the police investigation closing in on her. Worse, Bea has no idea that she was involved in Ted’s death, and so Lucia must constantly give her knowing looks, trying to get her daughter to act with more caution.

And while it is slightly to the detriment of actually liking many of the supporting characters, the film really paints a picture of a woman who has been saddled with a very dependent household. At one point, Donnelly asks with some irritation, “Don’t you ever get away from your family?”. And honestly, it’s kind of absurd. This is a household consisting of Lucia, a live-in housekeeper named Sybil (an UNCREDITED Frances E Williams, which is some inexcusable racist garbage), Lucia’s father-in-law (Henry O’Neill), a nearly-adult daughter, and a teenage son (David Bair). And yet, somehow, they all (Sybil excepted) chase after Lucia like little lost puppies. They are constantly asking, demanding, whining, badgering. You can understand how this household works on a normal day, but with the added pressure of the blackmail pushes things quickly to the cliff’s edge.

The part that doesn’t work quite as well is the romance between Lucia and Donnelly. Given more time to brew, it could work. It worked in the remake. But here it simply feels rushed. All of a sudden Donnelly does this about-face from wanting to blackmail this woman to wanting to protect her. Because . . . she’s a good mom? Mason does a pretty good job of portraying a guy who has fallen for someone, but there’s something that simply doesn’t work. The film needed more intimacy between them, more moments of longing from Lucia.

As it stands, the film seems to chicken out because it wants to keep Lucia as a strongly moral character. If she were to show overt attraction---sexual or romantic---toward Donnelly, it would be a betrayal of her family-centered character. It’s too bad, because there are a few moments where the film is on the edge of acknowledging how hard it must be to have your partner--your sexual partner, your fellow parent, your emotional support--be away for so much time. But it always reverts back to framing her as the strong family woman who will do anything for her often-obnoxious brood. (In peak headache mode, her son comes home one day having learned a new song and plays it RELENTLESSLY over and over. That’s some domestic realism for you.)

A thrilling premise and engaging twists and turns keep this one interesting, even if the romance subplot doesn’t totally land.

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Bulldog Drummond, 1929

Hugh Drummond (Ronald Colman) is a bored WWI veteran who puts an ad in the paper asking for an adventure. He gets more than enough excitement when Phyllis (Joan Bennett) comes to him asking for help saving her uncle, who is being held captive by the scheming Dr. Lakington (Lawrence Grant) and the devious Irma (Lilyan Tashman). Mounting a daring rescue mission, Drummond doesn’t quite count on how far the villains will go to reclaim their hostage.

This was a fun, frisky little comedy-thriller that gets by on the fun of its cast and premise, albeit with a plot that hangs a bit loose at times.

The plot and action borders on farcical, as Drummond gets some hotel rooms, goes and grabs the uncle, and then . . . comes back to the hotel and high fives everyone, before being surprised that the bad guys thought to follow them in a car.

But everything oscillates between being totally over the top---Tashman in particular seems to be made of big gestures and vamping---and silly, so somehow the movie generates its own brand of momentum. The film swings from flirty conversation to a short burst of action, back to conversations, then back to action. It works because it’s all coherent within its own world.

Colman makes for a dashing lead, and Bennet is appealing as the woman he’s helping. Each viewer’s mileage may vary when it comes to the secondary characters, like Drummond’s dopey sidekick, Algy (Claud Allister), who is the source of a lot of the film’s comic relief.

There are a few moments that do skew a bit dark for the generally light vibe of the film. The dispatch of one of the villains is particularly rough, albeit only seen in silhouette. There’s also a longer-than-needed sequence where a restrained Drummond is taunted by one of the bad guys who begins to rape an unconscious Phyllis in front of him. It’s gross to watch, but also kind of weird that only Drummond’s feelings seem to be considered. It just goes a step or two beyond what you’d expect from the tone of the film.

Overall, this is a light, fun comedy-thriller that’s well worth a watch.

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The Son of Monte Cristo, 1940

Duchess Zona (Joan Bennett) is the rightful ruler of her people, but she is threatened by political scheming from General Lanen (George Sanders). Betrayed from within her own household, Zona makes a run for it with her faithful servant Mathilde (Florence Bates). Unable to make it out of the country, they are discovered by the dashing Edmund Dantes Jr (Louis Hayward), the son of the Count of Monte Cristo. Edmund goes undercover as a wealthy banker to get in with Lanen, all the while donning a disguise and using his swordsmanship to compromise Lanen’s plans.

This is a light action-romance that’s an inoffensive way to pass the time, needing better character development and more engaging plot points to muster up more interest.

Bennett is plenty lovely as the Duchess Zona, and Hayward is plenty dashing as Dantes. Sanders sneers and smugs his way through the film as the despicable Lanen. But all of these characters feel like they need to be turned up several notches. Zona’s defining characteristic is worrying and needing help. As the film tries to engage us with the blossoming romance between Zona and Dantes, there’s a disconnect because the characters themselves are not very engaging.

The film gets closest to its intended high spirits in the sequences where Dantes conspiratorially commiserates with Lanen, all the while Lanen being unaware that Dantes himself is the mystery man causing him so much difficulty.

The action scenes are kind of tepid. There’s a sequence toward the end where Lanen is trying to force Zona into marrying him that is all kinds of shades of the similar sequence in The Princess Bride. But, again, everything here is just a bit too muted. Zona doesn’t seem nearly as distressed, Lanen nearly as gloating, nor Dantes nearly as frantic as the sequence needs to hit those intense emotions.

Not a bad film, per se, just could have really used more lust, violence, or melodrama. This feels like the sugar-free version of the story.

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There’s Always Tomorrow, 1956

Cliff (Fred MacMurray) is married to the lovely Marion (Joan Bennett), and has three children. But despite the affection he has for his family, they don’t seem to appreciate or connect with him very much at all. One day, Clifford gets a visit from his former employee, Norma (Barbara Stanwyck). Running into Norma again later while on a business trip, Cliff revels in spending time with someone who finds him interesting and exciting. But soon his children begin to suspect that he’s having an affair, and Norma and Cliff must reckon with what is becoming more than a friendship.

An excellent entry in the subgenre of dramas about people who one day wake up to find that their domestic life suddenly feels like a prison, this nuanced story excels by refusing to cast any of its characters as villains.

When a film works really well, it’s so easy to see how it could have all been rendered simplistic. It would have been so simple to make Stansyck’s Norma a seductress. On the flip side, it would have been so simple to make Bennett’s Marion a shrill shrew, driving Cliff away.

Instead, the film really shows the way that someone in a family can experience a kind of gentle, indirect alienation. It’s not that anyone in the film is overtly mean to Cliff. Rather it’s clear that he simply doesn’t seem to matter to them. When he returns home from work in the opening sequence, everyone else already has plans, and none of them involve Cliff. In his own household, Cliff feels like a third wheel, and it makes it very understandable why he would react with such fervor to someone finally giving him direct attention.

The thing about all of the adults here, and especially Norma and Cliff, is that they’re just so dang nice! Cliff is just a good guy. Norma is also seen to be sensitive and responsive. Beyond just caring about Cliff, Norma is able to see the dynamics within Cliff’s family and respond to all of the members of his family with compassion, even at the potential cost of her own happiness.

While there is obviously sexual attraction between Norma and Cliff, the film is incredibly wise to keep most of the focus on their friendship and eventually their romance. Were the movie to center on physical attraction, this would feel like a cliche story about a man who hits middle age and then feels the need to go out and have an affair. But all Cliff wants is some excitement and to be the priority for once. We might infer that the sex lives of two busy people with three children isn’t exactly on fire, but the problem at the root of Marion and Cliff’s relationship isn’t a lack of sex, it’s a lack of connection and intimacy. There’s a great sequence where Norma has Marion try on a lovely dress that she’s designed, and even says she’ll give it to her for free. Marion ultimately turns down the offer, noting that nothing could make Cliff sexually interested in her after so many years of marriage.

My one struggle with the film was in the framing of Cliff’s exclusion. I found myself questioning the degree to which Cliff himself had participated in it. For example, he seemingly had no idea that his daughter had a dance recital. And when he finds out, he doesn’t express an ounce of interest in it or ask to go along. Too often in marriages, women are expected to be in charge of scheduling and social arrangements, and it feels a little bit like Cliff hasn’t done much to engage with those aspects of his family’s life. It made me a touch less sympathetic because there’s this implicit assumption that Marion is in charge of all the kids’ schedules, but that she should totally rearrange everything when Cliff walks in the door wanting to go to the theater. I think it’s a dated aspect of the film that hasn’t aged too well, though it’s a very minor complaint because the rest of the family dynamics are very well sketched out.

This is a mature drama that tackles the idea of family alienation with nuance and compassion for all of the characters involved.

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Creed, 2015

Adonis (Michael B Jordan) spent his childhood in and out of foster homes before finally being taken in by his father’s wife, Mary Anne (Phylicia Rashad). Spending his weekends fighting in backroom bouts down in Mexico, Adonis finally quits his office job to focus on fighting full time. Reckoning with the fact that his father was the famous Apollo Creed, Adonis tracks down Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone) to get him in real fighting shape. As he juggles a quick rise in profile, he must also balance a romance with neighbor Bianca (Tessa Thompson).

While I have something of a personal aversion to boxing films, I found this one to be full of heart and loved the performances and characters.

A film like this really depends on solid dynamics between the characters, and the movie really nails that element. Jordan has pretty great chemistry with all of the other cast members, so whether he’s hashing things out with Bianca, having a tense discussion with Mary Anne, or bantering with Rocky, it’s all good. There’s an overriding theme of family and identity and belonging, and it all gets a lift from how well the cast coheres with one another.

I admittedly don’t know much about the Rocky series, and I appreciated that the film worked perfectly well without needing much background. I’m sure it might be better for those who do have that background, but the story and themes come through very clearly.

A lot of the film is driven by the character of Apollo Creed, who only appears in the film via “archive” footage, but who looms over everything. Adonis is the product of an extra-marital affair, having never known his father. He is taken in by Creed’s wife, but his existence is kept a secret. As a fighter, to claim his father’s name would be to invite immediate scrutiny and comparison. He is trapped in a rough position, and the higher his profile rises, the more his father’s legacy looms. But it’s also his relationship to Creed that gets Rocky to agree to train him. All through the film, his relationship to his father is a double-edged sword.

The boxing sequences themselves are effective. Shot in an “on the ground” manner, they feel immediate and intense. They also work because of the character of Conlan (Tony Bellew), Adonis’s opponent in the climactic final fight. Conlan is an almost perfect foil for Adonis: both men struggle with their temper and their desire to fight. Their final fight is as much a battle of personalities and grit as it is a meeting of two different techniques. Conlan is more than just a one-dimensional villain, and it makes their showdown much more satisfying.

An engaging, rousing film.

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Sebastiane, 1976

After daring to stand up to the Emperor, Sebastiane (Leonardo Treviglio) is reduced to the rank of private and banished to a remote troop on the coast. Once there he does find a sympathetic soul in Justin (Richard Warwick), who slowly falls in love with Sebastiane. But Sebastiane’s commander, Severus (Barney James) becomes sexually obsessed with him and torments Sebastiane for refusing to be with him. The more Sebastiane refuses to submit, the more intense Severus becomes in his punishments.

This overtly erotic drama-thriller simmers under a blunt sexual gaze and beautifully staged images.

I think that the perpetual nudity and sexual tension is what seems most striking at first, if only because it is so rare to see male bodies regarded with such a stark sexual perspective. But for me what really leapt off of the screen was the lovely imagery (though, yes, it does often overlap with the eroticism that’s embedded throughout). In one sequence, Sebastiane sits on a rock out in the water. The surface of the water is reflective, but where Sebastiane’s shadow falls, you can see through the water. Pushing the film’s theme of Sebastiane’s suffering as being sexual, we see the sky from the point of view of a disoriented Sebastiane who has been staked out in the sun for hours.

The film also does a pretty excellent job of showing the way that the performance of gender/bodies/power can easily trip into sexual context. Who is in the best shape? Well, that quickly can turn into who has the hottest body. Who is in charge? Well, all of a sudden you’re looking at who dominates who. Who is well-liked and charismatic? Well, now you’re just asking who everyone has a crush on. It’s clear in the film that many of the soldiers engage in queer flirting and sex acts out of boredom or lack of female company. But there are also several of the men, in addition to Justin, for whom the queer longing is genuine and not a result of their geographic and social isolation.

It’s in that portrayal of genuine queer love and lust that the film excels in both its erotic content and its more thriller-like aspects. On the romantic side, we get the tender relationship between Justin and Sebastiane. Justin tries to protect Sebastiane, and constantly tries to convince his friend to be less disobedient. Justin does this even when it comes at a cost to his own wellbeing. There are also soldiers Anthony (Janusz Romanov) and Adrian (Ken Hicks), who do seem to be in love with each other. A love sequence between Anthony and Adrian is probably the height of the romantic gaze on queer love. The camera doesn’t merely linger on the bodies of the men, but on the clear connection between the two of them.

It seems appropriate, if not a bit tragic, that Severus spying on Anthony and Adrian’s love-making is what seems to crystalize his own sexual obsession with Sebastiane. Severus seems convinced that he can break Sebastiane, and as the film goes on he is willing to go to more and more extreme lengths. There’s no question that Severus could rape Sebastiane if he so choose, but it’s pretty clear that physical domination is not what he’s after. (Or maybe not only what he’s after). He wants Sebastiane to say yes to him, but the more he tries to do so with force, the more contempt he finds in Sebastiane, who redirects his own desires into a kind of infuriating pacifism and endurance.

I had very few issues with this film. I didn’t care for some of the treatment of animals in the film, especially the rough handling of some of the pigs in the movie.

A unique film that would make a great “tragic queer things happening in military groups by the seaside” double feature with Beau Travail.

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Jubilee, 1978

Queen Elizabeth (Jenny Runacre) is shown the future when John Dee (Richard O’Brian) summons the supernatural Ariel (David Brandon). And that future is bleak! The streets are ruled by violent young people, especially the volatile Amyl Nitrate (Jordan), pyromaniac Mad (Toyah Willcox), violent Bod (Runacre, in a dual role), and a hodge-podge of fellow punks. As they pursue their own interest, they must contend with the equally violent police and the far reach of powerful music producer Borgia Ginz (Orlando).

This might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but I found myself totally on its frequency and enjoying the dark humor and pointed critique of it all.

There is a kind of rebellion that consists of pushing back against oppressive social and political structures. There is another kind of rebellion---a very teenage flavor, typically---that consists of pushing back against ANY structures just, you know, because. Shut up! You can’t tell me what to do!

The characters in this film represent a heady mix of both flavors of rebellion. This isn’t mere teenage restlessness. We see that there’s been a general breakdown of the society around them, and also the violence that comes at them in the form of murderous police. But their response to the chaos around themselves is to push back with an equal dose of chaos, dishing out plenty of pain to those who cross their paths.

Jordan makes a strong impression as Amyl, who thinks back wistfully on her time as a ballerina, but is now obsessed with writing her own history books. Amyl seeks to compress history, simplifying and drawing parallels. Her history lectures are a mix of youthful philosophizing (“Was Hitler really that bad? Or does it just seem that way because he was so recent?”) and teenagerish trolling (she devotes a mini speech to valorizing the crimes of Myra Hindley). In Amyl, we get the classic youthful contradiction of someone who is at times incredibly self-assured, and at the same time clearly very lost.

The film does a good job of leveraging the supporting characters to good effect. One of the punks, Crabs (Nell Campbell), has a bad habit of falling for guys and then taking part in their murders. In a visual, visceral scene, Crabs has sex with a young man she calls Happy Days (Gene October) entwined in a large sheet of red plastic sheeting before her roommates pounce on him and together they asphyxiate him with the plastic. Ian Charleson and Karl Johnson play a pair of incestuous, laconic brothers called Angel and Sphinx. A young Adam Ant plays a promising musical act known as The Kid.

But in addition to the engaging, tragicomic chaos of the street kids, there’s a plot thread that centers on Borgia Ginz, the music producer. Having seized control of all media production, Ginz holds a tremendous amount of power. Through him, the punk aspiring anarchy of the young people is commodified into music singles and concerts and merchandise. The teens want to escape the structures of power around them, but ultimately find themselves turning again and again to the oldest power structures: money and fame. It’s a criticism that’s still relevant today: people who rail against social structures but still adhere to those structures for comfort and safety. At the same time, and despite the characters being pretty despicable at times, there’s not a lack of sympathy for the teens. Sure, they’re a mess. But what else are they supposed to do? What other pathway have they been given?

There is a degree to which the film is a bit more subdued than you might expect. But there were plenty of plot twists and turns, or engaging visual moments that I stayed onboard with the film from beginning to end.

Om Natten, 2007

Mette (Neel Ronholt), Sara (Laura Christensen), and Stephanie (Julie Olgaard) are all young women seriously ill with cancer. As they bond with each other, they must also navigate the complicated relationships they have with their loved ones, and also their fears and anxieties about what their future holds.

This was a well-acted short that paints an agonizing portrait of dealing with deadly illness at a young age without quite managing to say much that’s new about such a situation.

The actresses all do a good job of showing the ups and downs of dealing with a serious, possibly terminal illness. They are constantly being torn between addressing what’s happening in the moment and thinking about the bigger picture. One of the women hasn’t told her parents that she’s ill, and you can sense that there’s almost a superstitious element to it. Sure, it sounds like they’ve had a bit of a bust-up, but maybe more it’s that calling them would make her situation real in a way that she’s hoping to deny.

At every turn, this is a pretty grim film. The doctors and nurses are shown to be only medium supportive, often telling the women that they need to just take their pills---morphine--and try to chill out. It’s an incredibly isolating scenario, and the only moments of lightness or hope come from the way that the women bond with one another, planning a New Year’s celebration amidst downturns in health and looming scary operations.

At times, though, the film slips into “the misery is the point” territory. The character who won’t call her parents has the most complete arc, but the other characters sometimes feel like they’re being used mainly to facilitate that character’s realization that she needs to reach out to her family. It’s not exploitative, per se, but it does sometimes feel as if the voyeurism of seeing these women at their most vulnerable isn’t balanced by what the film is trying to show us about their experiences.

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The Holy Girl, 2004

Amalia (Maria Alche) is the daughter of a woman named Helena (Mercedes Moran) who works at a hotel where a medical conference is taking place. On the cusp of womanhood and trying to reconcile her religious devotion with her emerging sexuality, Amalia becomes fixated on a man named Dr. Jano (Carlos Belloso). This dynamic becomes incredibly complicated when Jano commits an act of sexual assault against Amalia at the same time that Helena is becoming attracted to him.

Anchored by a sensitive examination of the way that a young person is trying to reconcile seemingly incompatible elements of her internal life, the various plot strands don’t quite cohere in a satisfying way.

Much as she did in the film The Headless Woman, director Lucrecia Martel mines a great deal of tension and interest by immersing the viewer in the perspective of someone who is confused and not being helped all that much by the world around them. Amalia makes for a compelling protagonist, as she tries to simultaneously interpret the behaviors of the adults around her and make sense of the seeming contradictions between her religious beliefs and her physical desires.

The film does a pretty great job of drawing a clear line between the internal workings of the character of Amalia and the actions of the adults, especially Jano. From Amalia’s point of view, Jano’s public assault---in which he grinds up against her at a musical performance---is confusing, maybe a little bit of a turn on, and certainly a call to action. We see how Amalia tries to put Jano’s action into some sort of context, eventually landing on the idea that it’s her religious duty to “save” Jano. But the movie is completely unambiguous about what kind of person is and how wrong his actions are. And it’s this clear stance that makes Amalia’s turmoil all the more powerful. We can see that Jano is a creep, but Amalia is so wrapped up in trying to figure out what it all “means” that she over-corrects in trying to figure out how to help him.

At the same time that we’re watching Amalia figure out how to save Jano (and going “Oh, sweetie: no, baby. No.”), Helena’s attraction to Jano evokes a really different reaction. As an adult, you expect her to pick up better on his ick factor. Obviously the fact that he’s assaulted her daughter adds dramatic weight to all of their scenes together, but there’s a frustration in watching her pursue this guy who is wildly uncharismatic. While Amalia seems blinded by her lack of experience, Helena seems blinded by a kind of desperation.

Belloso’s performance as Jano is something of a secret ingredient to the film’s success, as it would have been very easy to make him a suave player. But instead he’s a relatively subdued character, the kind of bland that allows each woman to project her own ideas onto him. Because he’s such a blank slate, he can be whoever they imagine him to be.

Ultimately, however, the story didn’t quite cohere in the way that I hoped it would. The character work with Amalia is really strong, but the subplot with Helena and Jano feels like mere observation. There’s nothing wrong with observation, but contrasted against the strong work with Amalia’s character it feels aimless and a bit lacking. Too much time in the film is spent away from Amalia, and not enough of it feels worth leaving that character behind.

Strong performances and one great character arc, sitting in a film that doesn’t quite pull all of its threads together in a satisfying way.

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The Boss, 2016

Michelle (Melissa McCarthy) is a high-flying investor who gets nabbed for insider trading. On leaving prison, her only ally is her former assistant, Claire (Kristen Bell) and Claire’s daughter, Rachel (Ella Anderson). As Michelle tries to get some traction back, she is sabotaged at every turn by her nemesis, Ron (Peter Dinklage).

This comedy has winning turns from all of its leads, but they cannot overcome an unfunny script that strands them in mean-spirited, repetitive sequences.

It should not have been hard for this film to be a really good time. McCarthy is hilarious and I find Bell to be one of the most charismatic people---in character or in person--ever. The supporting cast is talented and the premise, at its core, leaves space for plenty of slam dunk jokes. So why is this movie so deeply not good?

It becomes really clear about one act in that the film’s strategy is just to take, like, three jokes and recycle them for the whole runtime. Joke one is Michelle saying inappropriate things in front of children, usually Rachel’s scout troop. Joke two is Michelle and Ron having had a robust love/hate sexual relationship. Joke three, which appears in the last act, is wouldn’t it be funny if a man was willing to perform oral sex on another man as part of a heist?

Those three jokes make up about 80% of the humor in the film, and they aren’t funny the first time. Fundamentally, the movie can’t decide what it wants to do with the character of Michelle. Is she deep down a good person who was just wounded by a tragic childhood? Or is she actually a bad person? A lot of the humor comes from her going above and beyond just hurt person behaviors. I really didn’t care for a running joke where she bullies one of Rachel’s fellow scouts for being gay and “manly”. She mocks a person whose pet has died. She tells a recently bereaved man that his wife was a “whore”.

Meanwhile, Bell’s Claire is mainly used as a plot convenience, most often just standing in the background while Michelle says something terrible and then going “Michelle!” in a scolding way to absolutely zero effect. There’s a kind of cute subplot where she starts dating a smitten co-worker named Mike (Tyler Labine). One of the only genuinely fun parts of the movie involves Michelle critiquing the outfit Claire is planning to wear on their first date. When she reveals that it’s a nursing bra, it got a genuine out loud laugh from me. But we can’t have nice things in this film, and the last act is just Mike repeatedly arguing or offering or questioning a plan that involves giving a security guard a blowjob.

There are a handful of decent visual gags. I liked the touch of all of Michelle’s shirts being these ridiculously high turtlenecks. Michelle’s absurd teeth-whitening device is funny. But pratfalls eventually just don’t pop when they’re surrounded by such underwhelming characters and writing.

A very disappointing product from some actors I usually really enjoy.

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The Crash Reel, 2013

Leading into the Vancouver Olympics, the big drama in the snowboarding world was the rivalry between Shaun White and Kevin Pearce. But before the Olympics take place, Pearce suffers a catastrophic head injury while training. This documentary examines Kevin’s path to stardom, his attempted recovery from his injury, and the bigger picture of the ethics of extreme sports.

This documentary is exceptional, managing to tell a clear, coherent story while alternating between the searing Pearce family dynamics and the bigger picture of risk and extreme sports.

The part of the documentary that hit the hardest for me was the stretch covering Pearce’s recovery in the hospital. It is both amazing and heartbreaking to watch him slowly emerge as his brain heals. For weeks and months, his family is by his side as he regains the ability to speak, listen, walk, and remember. The film is willing to take time to acknowledge how lucky Pearce is in his recovery, taking a few minutes to remember another young man who came into the hospital at the same time as Pearce, but who did not survive.

But what comes after Pearce’s physical recovery is just as harrowing. Once he regains the ability to walk, and once he’s had surgery to correct a lingering issue with his eyes, Pearce wants to get back on the slopes. This causes a tremendous amount of distress to his family, especially his mother and father and one of his brothers, David. David has Down Syndrome, and he has very complicated emotions watching his brother willingly go back into a sport that could leave him permanently disabled or dead. David has no control over his disability, and to watch someone make a choice to risk his brain health is particularly hurtful and anxiety producing for him. Pearce takes his family’s reluctance as a lack of faith, but it becomes clear that he’s not aware of some of his own limitations in the wake of his injury. The family gives the documentary crew wide-ranging access to their home and most personal conversations.

Zooming out slightly, the film does a great job of exploring the way that traumatic brain injuries can become an “invisible disability”. On the outside, Pearce looks fully recovered and is even very articulate. But scenes from therapy sessions and some of his private conversations reveal that he’s suffering from serious depression and mood swings. Later in the film, he meets another young man who looks totally recovered on the outside, but has some really serious lingering effects. This young man is unable to touch his elbow on command (“This one?” he asks, touching his foot, then his shoulder). Worse, he’s seemingly lost a good sense of his morality, telling a story about running over his little brother in a golf cart with a big smile on his face and saying terrible things to his mother.

Finally, the big picture thread of the documentary is about the ethics of the sports themselves. Most athletes don’t have insurance, or else their sponsors only cover them in very specific events (and don’t cover them at all for training accidents). As years have gone by, the dimensions of the sports have grown tremendously: a half pipe used to be 8 feet tall, but now can be 22 feet tall, meaning that someone who takes a bad jump can free fall as far as 40-plus feet before hitting the ground. As one of the interview subjects notes, people WANT to see gnarly wipeouts and crashes. For some fans, the idea that someone could get hurt or even killed is part of the appeal of the extreme sports world. Of course, this is all a sliding scale. How high is too high? How fast is too fast? People can die from just skiing down a normal slope and hitting a tree, so how do you make extreme sports safe? And what does “safe” even mean?

At first I had a hard time clicking with the people in this film. There are a lot of people in this crowd who give off bad-boy-rich-boy-spoiled-kid vibes. When people laughingly talk about trashing hotel rooms or having wild parties, my sympathy tends to drop significantly. But director Lucy Walker does such an amazing job of framing the way that these young people are vulnerable to a larger system, that whether or not I liked them, I still felt moved by their stories.

Whether you have an interest in snowboarding/sports or not, this documentary is a must-watch.

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Cocaine Bear, 2023

A drugs drop goes terribly wrong, resulting in several gym bags full of cocaine dropping into a national park. Sari (Keri Russell) is trying to track down her daughter and her daughter’s friend who have played hooky to hike to a waterfall. Ranger Liz (Margo Martindale) is hoping to impress an inspector she has a crush on. And Eddie (Alden Ehrenreich), in mourning over the passing of his wife, has been sent with his friend Daveed (O’Shea Jackson Jr) to retrieve the cocaine by his gangster father, Syd (Ray Liotta). Unfortunately for all involved, a local black bear has gotten into one of the duffel bags and is very, very high on cocaine. As the aggressive bear roams the forest looking for more drugs and more human snacks, the various characters must survive the wild animal and each other.

Despite a faltering final act and one or two subplots that don’t really work, I was charmed by this film and had a blast watching it in the theater.

This movie wants to be an on-purpose trashy film. And honestly, for the most part it worked for me. The movie won me over when the bear did a line of cocaine off of a man’s severed leg, and it had me on its side from that point on. Ehrenreich and Jackson Jr get the best writing and also the most interesting subplot. Ehrenreich wants out of the criminal life, and Jackson Jr is torn between supporting his friend and getting their job done. The two have good chemistry and rapport, and they also benefit from some of the better writing. Ehrenreich is the only character who gets anything resembling an arc, but it’s enough to pull the film through the weaker moments.

I also really enjoyed a sequence in which two paramedics (Kahyun Kim and Scott Seiss) arrive, totally unaware of what has been happening. (“They called us here for a concussion!” one of them wails, looking at a man whose head has been completely obliterated.) The whole scene is funny, and it culminates in one of the better comedy-action set-pieces in the film, all set to the bounce and bop of “Just Can’t Get Enough”.

The rest of the movie, outside of Eddie and Daveed, is passable, and at times kind of weak. The plot about Sari looking for the two kids (played by Christian Convery and Brooklyn Prince) falls pretty flat. I personally think that this comes down to some really weak writing, especially for the kids, and the young actors are left stranded with clunky dialogue that no real child would ever say. The adult actors have more experience navigating this kind of writing, but the children clearly are having a harder time getting around some of the language. There’s no character growth for Sari or the kids, and it feels like they get a full 10-15 minutes of screen time that would have been better spent with other characters. Isiah Whitlock Jr. plays a detective also on the hunt for the missing drugs, and he likewise gets very little in the way of an arc.

Fortunately, the film is just 95 minutes long. Whoever animated the bear deserves major props, because it looks great and has as much or more personality than the human characters. Whether it’s dancing in a rain of cocaine, “swimming” backward on the dirt toward a terrified Eddie, or glaring down at intruders into its territory, the bear is a winner every time it’s on screen.

There are definitely some weak moments and subplots here, but the plots that do work and a fantastic coke-raging bear keep the film moving.

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The High Note, 2020

Maggie (Dakota Johnson) is an assistant for successful musical artist Grace Davis (Tracee Ellis Ross), but Maggie dreams of being a producer. Secretly doing remixes of Grace’s work, Maggie is constantly being shut down by Grace’s manager, Jack (Ice Cube). But when Maggie discovers a talented, relatively unknown artist named David (Kelvin Harrison Jr) and convinces him to let her produce his album, she starts to be pulled between her dreams and her obligations to Grace.

The characters and performances in this one are interesting and fun to spend time with, but the plot meanders before concluding in a distractingly contrived manner that is very unsatisfying.

There are really three different stories taking place in this film, and until the last act they weave into one another in a pretty neat way. There’s Grace and the crisis she faces as she must decide if she’s going to push to make new music or allow her manager to bundle her off to Vegas for a future of greatest hits tours. There’s the story of Maggie trying to realize her dreams of being a producer and the conflict that creates with Grace. And finally there’s the sweet romance that starts to blossom between Maggie and David as they work together.

For the most part, these plots mesh together pretty well. Grace’s mounting panic about her future and her relevance as an artist only amps up as Maggie starts to pull away, and as a result Grace becomes angry at Maggie and displaces a lot of her frustration onto the young assistant. Grace is surrounded by people whose main interest is Grace pulling in more and more cash, leading them to try and push her into decisions that are the most financially beneficial. This isn’t just Mark, but also a woman named Gail (a very funny June Diane Raphael) who is Grace’s “house manager”, which largely seems to consist of lethargically cleaning out the swimming pool and lusting after Grace’s fashion hand-me-downs. In her vulnerable state, Grace reacts poorly to Maggie’s honest, challenging opinions about where Grace should go with her music.

There’s also good interplay in the subplots about Maggie producing David’s album and their emerging romance. Maggie has led David to believe that she is a producer, not just an aspiring one, and so the closer they become, the more this deception-by-omission takes on weight and consequence. Johnson and Harrison Jr. have strong, subtle chemistry that suits their scenes well. Their ease with one another makes them seem well matched both professionally and personally.

There’s also a pretty strong supporting cast, including Bill Pullman as Maggie’s music loving father, Eddie Izzard as one of Grace’s contemporaries, and Zoe Chao as Maggie’s best friend.

But a weak ending can really ding a film, and I did not care for the last 20 minutes or so of this one. At all. We learn a piece of information that feels beyond contrived, and there’s an unnatural sense of contortion in the plot as it works to get all of its characters where it wants them by the end. While I appreciate a film where there are no overt villains, that means that the character arc must come to a satisfying place. And in that regard this one just doesn't stick the landing.

A good film with strong performances and characters, let down by an unsatisfying last act.

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The Substitute, 2007

A wild high school classroom gets quite a jolt when a substitute teacher (Andrea Jublin) arrives and throws the classroom into even more chaos with his own erratic, unprofessional behavior.

This short comedy juggles two different concepts, neither of which pans out in a particularly satisfying way.

For about the first half of its run time, the film tries to get laughs out of the substitute saying or doing shocking things in the high school classroom. He flirts with one of the teenage girls, he makes sexist and homophobic remarks to the students, he bullies and embarrasses one student in particular. If you don’t guess in the first two minutes where this is going, well, maybe you’ll be surprised by a reveal that comes halfway through the film.

In the second half, the film contrasts the classroom ecosystem with a more corporate world. Here there are hierarchies, power struggles, and so on, but with a veneer of civilization. The main character gazes longingly across the street and into the rooms of the high school.

But . . . what is this movie trying to say about these kids or about this man? There’s a voiceover at the end of the film where the man waxes philosophical about the purity of high school, but that doesn’t at all match what we see of the high school or what the man tries to find in his adventure in the high school. By the time the film ends with a dedication along the lines of “to those who have trouble controlling their behavior”, I was totally lost.

I will give a shout out to the young man who plays a teen from whom the substitute steals an autographed soccer ball. He is very funny and goes all in with his performance.

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The Mozart of Pickpockets, 2006

Richard (Richard Morgieve) and Phillippe (Phillippe Pollet-Villard, who also wrote and directed this short) are hustlers who are part of a crew who use fake IDs and staged scenes to rob people around town. When their compatriots are busted, including their fake ID maker, the two men are at a loss. Until, that is, a young boy (Matteo Razzouki-Safardi) begging in the street follows them home and shows his own special talent for slight of hand.

This is a darkly funny, well-paced drama comedy.

This short film puts its main characters’ positive attributes and flaws front and center, giving you equal opportunity to cheer the group on and facepalm when they make bad choices.

Morgieve and Pollet-Villard are charming as the lead duo, two men for whom short cons and theft are such an ingrained way of life that they can’t even conceive of not surviving that way. Razzouki-Safardi is, well, adorable. But the young actor also pulls off the ability to make his character seem at once sly and guileless, which is a charming and mystifying combination.

Once the men realize what a gift they’ve found in the young boy, they are not content to merely get by, and they come up with grander and grander plans to take advantage of his skills. This adds suspense to the final act, as you must wait to see if the men have pushed their luck just one step too far.

An engaging story that uses exactly the right amount of runtime.

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Tanghi Argentini, 2006

Andre (Dirk van Dijck) is an office worker who has been wooing a woman named Suzanne (Hilde Norga) online, bonding over their mutual love of dance and specifically the tango. As the two prepare to meet for the first time, Andre has a serious problem: he can’t actually dance. Andre begs his colleague, Frans (Koen van Impe) to help him learn the tango, but can the two of them get Andre dance floor ready in two weeks?

This is a breezy, sweet short with a great plot and a neat ending.

The film starts with a pretty typical look at isolation of cubicle work, but soon turns into a cute look at a friendship that develops. Frans is at first hesitant to help Andre, but before long the two are shimmying past each other by the office’s filing cabinets. Whatever happens with Suzanne, it’s fun watching Andre and Frans bond over their shared mission.

This is the kind of film where, once it’s over, you realize how well laid out all of the elements were. The performances are fun and the whole thing is very heartwarming.

Definitely recommended.

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The Tonto Woman, 2008

A woman named Sarah (Charlotte Asprey) has been returned from years of captivity with American Indian tribes, but has been left marked with facial tattoos and the community’s knowledge of her experience. Her husband (Richard Brake) has banished her to an isolated shack in the desert. One day a man named Ruben (Francesco Quinn) arrives to rustle some of her husband’s cattle, but instead finds himself captivated by Sarah.

This western short looks amazing and its lead characters are engaging, though the way that it pulls in the husband character at the end feels a bit contrived.

I can’t say enough nice things about how good this film looks, from the sets to the costumes to the makeup showing Sarah’s tattoos. There’s a great mix of grit and beauty that evokes a lot of great trappings of Western films and makes you feel at once that you’re at home in this world.

I also enjoyed the budding relationship between Sarah and Ruben. Sarah is used to men coming to gawp at her, both voyeuristically watching her bathe and just wanting to catch a sight of her and her marked face. But Ruben is genuinely interested in Sarah herself, eschewing his cattle rustling plans to woo her, despite hostility from the locals.

But once Sarah’s husband comes back into the picture, the plot and character work feel like they lose a bit of heft. The husband character simply isn’t very well developed, and the movie sidelines Ruben to show us the reinvigoration of a marriage that we have no reason to think highly of. This man has banished his wife to be lonely and spied on by random pervs, and then Ruben comes along to just facilitate saying “But she’s still hot, though, right?”.

So the ending might be a bit of a let-down, but with its amazing look and moving central story, this one is definitely worth checking out.

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Department Q: A Conspiracy of Faith, 2016

Detectives Carl (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) and Assad (Fares Fares) are put on the case of a message found in a bottle from a child claiming to have been kidnapped. Finding the long-lost message just happens to coincide with the kidnapping of a brother and sister from a deeply religious household. As the detectives scramble to find the original victim and recover the most recent ones, the kidnapper (Pal Sverre Hagen) plays mind games with them.

This mystery-thriller is incredibly engaging when it’s in investigation mode, but when it tries to explore bigger themes it falls a bit flat.

The mystery aspect of this movie is incredibly interesting. I really enjoy mysteries where an old case and a new case overlap, and solving one leads to enlightenment about the other. The detectives are at once trying to find the writer of the original note and trying to save the children who have just been taken. Understanding what is happening hinges on figuring out the connection between the kidnapper, the original victim, the new victims, and the families involved.

The action itself is also pretty compelling, and this film has a much higher body count than I’d originally expected. Outside of the two leads, I really could never be sure who would survive. Characters who seemed to be key players would unexpectedly not make it to the next act. The film establishes early on that the kidnapper has probably killed at least one child, and so the fate of the kidnapped children was never obvious.

The performances are pretty good from all of the leads. There’s a kind of self-satisfaction that Hagen exudes as the kidnapper that makes him very menacing and very easy to hate as he goes about his actions. The two lead detectives have good chemistry. One of the better dynamics in the film is the fact that Assad is religious while Carl is not, and yet the religious communities/families with whom they interact assume Carl as their natural ally. I think the film manages to make some interesting observations about the way that insular communities can work, and the dangers of assuming who “your people” are in terms of where you place your trust.

What doesn’t work so well is the film’s attempts to examine the idea of faith via its villain. I mean, people can definitely have some wacked out ideas, but when the bad guy laid out his motivations and intentions, it just seemed really dumb. There’s a neat question through the film about what it means to have faith, who deserves our faith, and what a betrayal of faith looks like. If the family of the kidnapped kids gets help from the police, are they showing a lack of faith in God? Does faith or the lack thereof help when your job forces you to encounter depravity and cruelty on a regular basis? That’s all fine and interesting. But the villain’s ideas are cartoonish compared to these more nuanced questions, and it was honestly hard to take the character at all seriously once he’d given his big monologue.

And while your mileage may vary on this point, there was some silliness in terms of different characters having almost supernatural abilities to sneak up on others, sneak past others, go unnoticed, etc. Not awful, but something that ramps up in the last act.

A solid mystery that doesn’t quite stick the landing, but benefits from the suspense it holds through almost the entire runtime.

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The Tempest, 1979

In this adaptation of Shakespeare’s play, Prospero (Heathcote Williams) is a sorcerer who has been banished to an island with his daughter, Miranda (Toyah Willcox). When Prospero learns that the family who betrayed and banished him is passing by the island, his spirit assistant Ariel (Karl Johnson) creates a storm to drive the ship onto the island. Prospero’s brother, Alonso (Peter Bull) and Alonso’s son Ferdinand (David Meyer) are separated in the shipwreck and make their way to Prospero’s decaying mansion.

A captivating blend of Shakespeare’s play and Jarman’s visual and thematic sensibilities makes for an engaging film.

I like a whole spectrum of approaches to adaptations of Shakespeare. I’ll sit down and watch what’s essentially a filmed version of a stage play, but just as easily enjoy an adaptation that plays a bit with the story/setting.

This adaptation is definitely one that pushes Jarman’s style to the front, but at the same time it highlights aspects of the play and gives time and space for the characters and the language of the source material. And that’s where this film won me over: it manages to present a distinct vision and show respect for the original text all at the same time. It’s a solid synthesis, and it never feels like the words are fighting the film around them.

About five films into Jarman’s filmography and I’m starting to get a sense for his vibe, and I quite like it. His eye for the composition of shots, and the way that he’s willing to let figures linger in the frame so that it’s more like a tableau. Shots that might otherwise feel labored, like Miranda delivering lines while perched on an old rocking horse, instead land because there is such care taken in the composition of it and it highlights rather than distracts from the language. And there’s a queer eye and energy to his movies that make them stand out, especially among films from the same era. There’s nudity from both men and women, but it skews more toward the men and with a frank erotic gaze that is unlike anything else I can really think of. A boldly staged sequence with Elisabeth Welch is nothing short of fantastic.

The story here is one that explicitly includes magic, and Jarman integrates it in a way that is both playful and casual. Prospero shows Miranda their past in a magical staff. In a later sequence, he freezes Alonso and the others. It’s a good match for Jarman’s visual sensibilities.

The only downside for me with this film was that at times I didn’t feel that I was 100% following the plot. But this is a film that coasts more on mood than on a literal understanding of what’s taking place, so this was not a big deal.

A fun adaptation.

Well, just regarding the theatrical live-action Batfilms that I've seen, I was very meh on '89, but I enjoy Returns a lot because it feels like the movie Burton really wanted to make, with more style, but more importantly, a lot more substance than '89, particularly with Selina's whole character arc, which is one of my favorite ones in a movie, to be perfectly honest. Besides that, the Schumacher ones were annoying (though Batman & Robin is funny in a so bad it's good way, of course), The Dark Knight Trilogy is very good (with TDK itself being an all-timer, at the risk of sounding like another cliched fanboy), and The Batman was good, if a bit overlong and derivative feeling at times.

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Gone in the Night, 2022

Kath (Winona Ryder) and her younger boyfriend Max (John Gallagher Jr) have booked a rural cabin for the weekend, but when they arrive, the cabin is already occupied by Al (Owen Teague) and Greta (Brianne Tju). Uneasy, Kath agrees to spend the night, but in the morning both Max and Greta are nowhere to be found and Al claims the two ran off together. A disgruntled Kath returns home alone, but soon decides to find out why Max left her and ends up working with the cabin’s owner Barlow (Dermot Mulroney) to get to the bottom of what happened.

No bueno.

Winona Ryder wears a scared, startled expression through 98% of this film, and it’s like she’s perpetually caught in the moment of realizing the quality of the film she’s in. I’m a fan of Ryder, Gallagher, and Mulroney, but they cannot save the absolutely terrible story and far-fetched character behaviors.

The actions of the main characters dings the credulity of this film at every step, starting with Kath and Max agreeing to stay in the cabin after Al menacingly tells them they aren’t welcome and all but spits in their face. Al and Greta wear matching teal rain slickers, even though they’re inside, and it looks like they’ve been caught in the act of cutting up a body. Naturally they all decide to sit down to play a board game about sex. And when Kath wakes up the next day and Max has DISAPPEARED(!!!!!!!), she simply gets in her car and drives home.

The structure of the film is that it intercuts between the present and the past, slowly filling in the details of what happened before Kath and Max arrived at the cabin. And with every scene that gave more information about Kath, Max, Al, and Greta, the more I hated each and every one of them. The relationship between Kath and Max is grounded in so much open contempt that it’s hard to believe that they were ever even in a decent relationship. Al and Greta, to stay spoiler free, are just super irritating. Max is as dumb as a box of rocks, and figuring out what happened to him becomes less and less compelling every time his character opens his mouth.

The movie is also built to ramp up to discovering the truth about what happened that night at the cabin. The answer is at once exactly what you’d guess and at the same time, much stupider than you’d expect. The very end has the distinction of being terrible and ambiguous.

Bad. And not fun-bad. Bad-bad.

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The Angelic Conversation, 1985

Including only as dialogue Shakespeare sonnets read by narrator Judi Dench, a man goes on a quest to claim the man he loves.

Another Jarman/Shakespeare fusion that absolutely works if the director’s style is your cup of tea.

For me, Jarman’s films are like a cinematic parfait where each layer holds up on its own, and the combination of them enhances the overall experience. In the case of this movie, it’s the slow-motion photography, the exclusion of language outside the recitation of the sonnets, and the visual representation of longing and desire that fuse so marvelously.

The good news for anyone watching this movie is that the make-or-break moment comes in the first minute. Are you into watching 90 minutes of figures moving in slow-motion, at times abstractly, while an unseen narrator recites Shakespearian sonnets? If yes, welcome aboard! If no, you’ve been shown exactly what this movie is and can quietly make your exit.

As Jarman’s style is right up my alley, I was on board. I am, sometimes to a fault, a narrative/story-centric viewer, but this film held my attention all the way to the end. Jarman’s visuals are so captivating that I find myself simply not caring as much whether I’m understanding the story, or if there’s even a linear story to understand in the first place. The slow-motion gives weight to every little gesture made by the actors, stretching a brief longing glance into an aching eternity. The lack of dialogue means that the film’s real language is look and touch and gesture.

This film is at once dreamier and more “low budget” looking than the other films I’ve seen from Jarman. There’s a very “shot on video” look to some of the sequences, but the composition keeps them from coming off as flat or cheap. There’s a minimal story to be found here, but that is very much by design.

Recommended for anyone who thinks the first two minutes are pretty swell.

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Alyce Kills, 2011

Alyce (Jade Dornfeld) is an off-kilter young woman working an unrewarding office job, whose only real relationship is the live-wire friendship with the outlandish Carroll (Tamara Feldman). After a night of drinking and heightened conversation, the two end up on the roof of their building where bad choices and an untimely stumble lead to Carroll plunging to the street below. Terrified that she’ll be blamed for the accident, Alyce implies that Carroll attempted suicide, and in the aftermath her sanity slowly starts to slip away.

A familiar story is elevated by a hilarious performance from Jade Dornfeld and a strong balance of horror and comedy.

The best part of this film are the first and last acts. The first act does a fantastic job of fleshing out the close but slightly demented relationship between Alyce and Carroll. Instead of merely a quick sketch of their friendship, the film gives us breathing room to get to know these women and their peculi ar dynamic. Alyce and Carroll are close, but there are layers of tension to it. Alyce is clearly the second fiddle in their relationship, and we learn about a previous incident in which Alyce was jokingly called “Single White Female” because she was trying too hard to emulate Carroll. When Carroll says that she and Alyce should have sex to get back at Carroll’s cheating boyfriend, Alyce treats it as a joke before gently asking, “Are you serious?”, only to have Carroll laugh and turn her back. Alyce seems to desire Carroll and desire to be her, and this dynamic adds weight to Alyce knocking Carroll off of the roof and the aftermath.

The middle act is a bit less successful. Alyce really starts to fall apart at work. She makes her way to a drug dealer who demands sex acts from her for drugs. She has visions of Carroll and nervously continues to cover her tracks even as her mental state deteriorates. It all feels a bit overfamiliar.

But the last act brings the film back to the good side of things. As Alyce becomes totally unhinged, she really lets loose on all those around her who she perceives as having done wrong. The character work that the film put into the first act really pays off here, as Alyce’s violence is not indiscriminate. Even as it seems obvious who has a target on their back, the movie finds a way to show moments of empathy.

What really makes this film work is the balance of dark comedy and genuine horror. The star here is Dornfeld, whose physical mannerisms and line deliveries are fantastic. There’s a scene where Alyce takes home a personal trainer, Karl (Max E Williams), and their sex quickly becomes physically aggressive. As Alyce torments Karl by squeezing acne sores on his back, Karl finally lashes out, punching Alyce in the face. Alyce flies backwards off of the bed, heels over head. It’s a pratfall, one that is funny because of the physicality and it is tense because of the violence itself and because of the violence we know it may trigger from Alyce.

A horror comedy worth checking out for a fantastic lead performance.

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Turbo Kid, 2015

A young man known only as The Kid (Munro Chambers) survives on his own in a post-apocalyptic future. One day he is befriended by the strangely perky Apple (Laurence Leboeuf), and the two begin to pal around. The Kid and Apple soon become enmeshed in a battle of wills between a ruthless overlord called Zeus (Michael Ironside) and a freedom fighter called Frederick (Aaron Jeffery).

This madcap action-comedy charms via an endearing central relationship and knowing winks at the post-apocalyptic genre.

This film is a pretty great testament to the fact that a film doesn’t have to be perfect if it’s got a good pace and endearing characters. The Kid and Apple have a sweetly awkward relationship that stays perched between a friendship and a romance, all of it playing out in front of a more traditional storyline including a man standing up to a tyrant, pit fights, and horrific technology used to mine human bodies for drinkable water.

The film, for the most part, balances on the right edge between being a futuristic film and being a parody of a futuristic film. The whole world and characters are real enough to generate some emotional investment, and yet there’s just enough of a dose of parody that it doesn’t bother you all that much when something doesn’t quite make sense.

Apple is an interesting character. To an almost absurd extent, she’s what people mean when they talk about the trope of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl. She’s cute and fascinated by the Kid, and mainly exists in the plot to further the Kid’s character arc. (There’s an aspect to her character that seems like an attempt to lampshade this element of the story, and I think it works to a moderate degree). But Leboeuf makes the character just weird enough that despite her more limited function in the plot, she’s very engaging. Chambers is solid as the Kid, someone who has been forced to grow up way too fast in this uncertain and dangerous future.

Ironside and Jeffery play their characters incredibly broadly, and for the most part it works. It gives the sense of the Kid and Apple being these real side characters behind an over-the-top futuristic soap opera.

A fun film, worth watching for the engaging central performances.

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Not Quite Hollywood, 2008

This documentary recounts the shift in Australian film leading to a slew of unhinged, wild films coming out in the 70s and 80s.

This documentary gives a pretty thorough overview of the emergence of raunchy, horror, and action films from Australia, though it seems far more charmed by the films and their creators than I was.

“Racism and homophobia can be charming,” remarks the straight, white interview subject, and this kind of sets the tone, for better or for worse, for the whole documentary. In short, all of these guys think they’re pretty great, and their reminiscences and reflections make for a heady mix of fascinating background stories and eye-rolling moments. So many moments call attention to who is included and who is excluded in this historical retelling.

The positive side of this film is that they managed to get hold of many of the directors and actors who were actually in the films. The interviewees for the most part speak with very open candor about their experiences and opinions of the films. There are wild and wooly anecdotes, particularly in the section about action films. The film leans mainly on Quentin Tarantino, James Wan, and Leigh Whannell (credited as the “star” of Saw--how far he’s come since 2008!) for commentary from a contemporary audience.

Probably my favorite conversation was around the way that Australian films gained popularity abroad. In particular, I was very interested by the split perception of the Australian landscape. As one interview subject notes, to many foreign audiences, the Australian outback looked alien, foreboding, and dangerous. But for an actual Australian audience, these scenes looked like they were taking place in their backyard. It’s an interesting exploration of the way that films that have a solid sense of place can be received in very different ways by the people who live inside of or outside of those spaces.

Unfortunately, much of the vibe of this movie is “Boys’ Club”, and it’s a dynamic that gets old pretty quickly. All of the directors, film critics, producers, writers, and contemporary interviewees are men. Quite a few actresses are interviewed, but with the exception of Jamie Lee Curtis I would say that 80% of their contribution is talking about the circumstances of them taking off their clothing. There’s a lot of commentary about all the female nudity actually being feminist which, okay, but the directors just don’t address the incredible amount of physical and sexual violence featured in the films. One of the actresses remarks that the men in a film about motorcycle culture were very aggressive toward the women during filming and after that remark the film simply moves on to another discussion point.

Likewise the film just doesn’t address racism or homophobia after lampshading both of those topics in the first few minutes. It’s like the film wants to hold onto it’s “aren’t these guys just such wacky characters?!?!?!?” attitude toward the directors it interviews and so it skirts topics that would damage that vibe. This feels at the least disingenuous and given the candor of the interview subjects, it also feels like a huge missed opportunity to frankly examine the ups and downs of outlandish independent filmmaking. The film only really seems to tackle this dynamic in discussing the injuries (and some deaths) incurred by stunt people on some of the action films.

I was also hoping that I might walk away with a little watchlist of undiscovered gems, only to find that I’d seen most of the movies and had very little interest in the rest.

Well researched and nicely divided into chapters, but it chickens out when a topic doesn’t fit with its desired tone.

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Honor Among Lovers, 1931

Julia (Claudette Colbert) works as a secretary to a man named Jerry (Fredric March). Jerry is smitten with Julia and frequently offers to give her money, an apartment, a cruise, etc. Julia is also being wooed by Phillip (Monroe Owsley), who one night after some strong-handed pressure from Jerry, convinces Julia to get married. Julia agrees, and then must navigate Jerry’s resentment and Phillip’s insecurities.

A somewhat cynical look at trying to find love as a working woman, a mostly insightful story is let down a bit by an unnuanced conclusion.

There’s something especially bleak about a film that centers romantic relationships but all of the options are terrible. Jerry and Phillip are both total creeps in their own way, and the great tragedy of the film is the idea that Julia needs to pick between them.

Even if you think that office romances, including between a boss and an employee, can be okay, there are still a lot of red flags in Jerry’s behavior. He constantly talks about being together at work. What he’s proposing---giving her money, getting her an apartment--is all side-piece stuff. At a nightclub later in the evening, he corners her and demands that she let him take her on a cruise. When she demurs, he grabs her arms, to the point that she has to tell him to let go of her. Julia doesn’t seem charmed by Jerry’s attention so much as afraid and overwhelmed.

And it’s with this unrelenting pressure that Julia ends up with Phillip. This part of the film feels incredibly realistic. Julia isn’t so much drawn to Phillip as she is being driven toward him by Jerry’s uncomfortable and constant pestering. When Jerry finds out that she married Phillip, naturally he fires her. This means that Julia is even more reliant on Phillip because she’s now unemployed. Jerry immediately offers Phillip a job helping to manage his money, which sits in this interesting space where it looks like he’s grudgingly supporting Julia, but really he’s just putting himself in a position of power over her by controlling her husband and her financial situation.

Phillip is a total goober, and so it’s only a matter of time before he messes up. When this inevitably happens, Julia has no choice but to turn to Jerry for help, which ratchets up the tension in the “love triangle” to incredible proportions.

But it’s in this last act that the film lost me a bit. I read one review that argued that we the audience are meant to see that Jerry has masterminded this whole scenario, cornering Julia into a position where she is indebted to him and where he can be her savior. And honestly, I’m not 100% sure how I read the end of the film. The staging of the scene where Julia asks Jerry for help and a later scene between the two--the acting, the music score, etc--all seems to point more to an interpretation that Jerry has realized he needs to offer Julia a real relationship and that he’s now the more mature choice for her to make. It makes me think of something like the ending of Gigi, where we are expected to cheer for a man deciding to offer a woman a real relationship instead of just making her his mistress.

I give the film major points for showing us just how sleezy Jerry is and how much of an absolute turd Phillip is. It’s self-aware enough in the first two-thirds of the film to feel like something of a subversion of the classic love triangle romantic drama. I think that it’s let down a bit by the events of the final act and where it leaves the main characters.

Worth a look for sure.

Although many countries can make an argument as to how misogynistic they were/are, Australian culture up to probably the 1990s holds a special place inasmuch as how normal it was in general. You can probably glean a pretty good appreciation for how it was from this documentary itself - and some of the things said by various filmmakers, and some of the experiences related by certain actresses, don't do us proud. Mark Hartley's hands-off approach lets some of that stand out, without being redressed, but at least it means we can come away from the documentary with our eyes open about it. I would have hated to have been a woman in Australia during the 1970s - you'd be constantly harassed and that harassment would be seen as normal. The objectification in the cinema of the time speaks for itself.

Fortunately, being the melting pot of different cultures and nationalities the place is, Australia is a completely different place to what it was back then. You'd have to travel to country towns to go back to those days - and I guess unfortunately those places haven't changed much. I spent some of my youth in one of those country towns, and there are dark undercurrents in those places that make them dangerous in general. In our more civilised and populated places, the country has become more progressive than I would have ever dreamed possible, and those awful elements of Not Quite Hollywood are sometimes hard to sit back and watch/listen to. So yeah, it's not great that none of the people involved address what they did back then, or show that they've learned anything at all in the interim.

I just felt as if it was a missed opportunity, especially the lack of interviews with any indigenous actors.

Honestly, the interview subjects were so candid, I almost wonder if the filmmaker didn't want to ask some of those more pointed question for fear of outing some of the more vile racism and misogyny. The one actress talking about the mistreatment of the women by the male actors who were "in character" seemed to be as far as the movie was willing to go in that direction. There's something kind of funny about the idea of wanting to celebrate films that are daring and outlandish, but being afraid to ask genuinely probing questions about them.

Though you can't deny the film's power as a historical document, whatever your feelings about the interviewers or the interview subjects.

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Even Pigeons Go to Heaven, 2007

A priest tries to sell an elderly man a contraption that he claims will transport the man to heaven.

This animated short has plenty of dark-edged whimsey, but fumbles in its conclusion.

The first half of the short is pretty solid as a critique of the way that some religions create a transactional dynamic by making the focus of the film a person literally selling a pathway to heaven. And there’s a great visual gag involving what the old man sees inside the machine versus what’s happening outside of it.

But despite a pretty solid premise, the film doesn’t quite know how to end. It doubles down on being cynical, and just doesn’t stick the landing.

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Mikey and Nicky, 1976

Nicky (John Cassavetes) and Mikey (Peter Falk) are small time gangsters who set off on a charged odyssey through the city nightscape when Nicky becomes convinced that he’s going to be killed by their boss and his associates. The two men cycle through periods of nostalgia and alienation as the dangerous situation brings out the depth and fractures in their relationship.

This is a fantastic film in which the plot is driven almost entirely by the revelations about the relationship between the two main characters.

The entire runtime of this movie forces you to witness relationships that demonstrate an uncomfortable truth: sometimes the deepest relationships are also the most poisonous. I’m not sure there’s any better way to think about Nicky except as a sweet dose of poison. Every interaction we see is colored with threats of violence, humiliation, and a don’t know/don’t care attitude toward the feelings of others. Nicky physically attacks or threatens to physically attack everyone who is even remotely an ally, whether that’s Mikey, his girlfriend Nell (Carol Grace), or his wife Jan (Joyce van Patten). And yet through some innate charisma, he always seems to turn them back to his side of things. Or does he?

Nicky is exactly the man we meet in the first ten minutes, with very little variation. We see the patterns of abuse and cajoling that make up his existence. He has stolen mob money. He cheats on his wife. He’s openly, provocatively racist. He laughs at the memory of Mikey’s dead brother. It’s against this force of personality that we are able to watch the slow reveal of the character of Mikey. Mikey starts out as the picture of concern, forcing Nicky to take stomach-calming medication and running out to a late-night diner to procure milk for his friend. Is this loyalty, or is this someone indulging the whims and needs of a dead man walking?

This tension---about what Mikey knows about the danger Nicky is in and his part in that danger---adds a compelling thrum of emotion to every single scene in the film. A hit man (Ned Beatty) in a car searches the streets, seeming to have a sense of where the two men have been. The threat is real, but where will it end. When Nicky forces Mikey to sit in the kitchen and listen while he has sex with Nell on the living room floor, you wonder if this is the act that will finally cause Mikey to give up on his friend. But you also wonder if these kinds of acts are why Mikey has already given up on him.

Making Nicky so overbearing and offensive is a genius move in this film, because Mikey as a character is utterly trapped. If he is loyal to Nicky, you find yourself thinking, “Wow, do you have no self-respect?!”. And if he is complicit in the hit on Nicky, you think, “How could you set your friend up to die?!”. Whether Mikey has betrayed his friend or is genuinely trying to help them, this is a friendship that is on its last, tottering legs. Up until the last minutes of the film, you don’t know how it will all pan out. But in a great bit of parallelism, we can infer Mikey’s ultimate decision from the way that he speaks about his younger brother, who died of scarlet fever.

Cassavetes and Falk are perfectly paired, with Cassavetes bringing an overt, sprawling energy to Nicky while Falk’s Mikey has emotions that are just as strong, but simmer dangerously under the surface. Grace and van Patten bring a kind of resigned despair to their roles as the women in Nicky’s life. He is cavalier with their feelings and disloyal on multiple fronts, and yet they always soften when he begs forgiveness, even if he’s threatened to punch them in the face just moments before.

Director Elaine May shoots the nighttime city as a place that is at once cozy and dangerous. There are diners, candy shops, and apartment living rooms. But the streets are dark, and it’s easy for the characters to suddenly find themselves alone on a sidewalk in front of closed businesses. I liked the sense in this film that the city itself isn’t inherently dangerous: the two men, and Nicky in particular, tend to make their own danger.

A great film anchored by great performances. The fact that May didn’t direct another film for a decade after this is a travesty.

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Two Trains Runnin’, 2016

In this documentary from Sam Pollard, June of 1964 involves two groups arriving in Mississippi: college volunteers who are coming to help with the civil rights movement and voter registration, and young men who are interested in tracking down “lost” blues singers. But the hostility toward the Northern outsiders applies whether they are there to register voters or track down old bluesmen, leading some of the college students toward violent and tragic events.

The revelations about the violence and intimidation in 1960s Mississippi won’t shock anyone who is even moderately familiar with the Civil Rights movement, but the unique combination of the events of the Freedom Summer and the search for musical inspiration makes for a story that mixes terror and joy in a heady, compelling way.

The film does a good job of establishing the political dynamics of 1964 Mississippi, including the complicated relationship between that state and the white college students who would arrive en masse to help with voter registration and other Civil Rights activities and advocacy. Despite orientations and practice in how to defend oneself from being beaten by the police, you can tell that the college students do not fully understand the scope of what they are getting into.

It is explicitly articulated by one of the interview subjects toward the end of the film, but the Civil Rights movement needed white people to go and stand on the front line. It would only be the deaths of the some of the country’s loved and cherished white children that would drive enough anger the the violent oppression to actually effect change and actually trigger the conscience of many Americans for whom the deaths of Black people were not a compelling reason to fight. Given the violence and the anger from those who oppose the voter registration drives, you know that it’s only a matter of time before someone obliges with the requisite violence against the college students. Perhaps the only surprise is the direct involvement of the police, though I didn’t find myself overly shocked at that revelation.

Where the plot about the hunt for the forgotten blues singers intertwines beautifully is in the way that it presents a different reason that people from out of the state/region would want to venture down to Mississippi. While the Civil Rights workers were driven by their sense of justice, the musicians are driven by a connection to the Delta Blues that they cannot fully articulate. Despite having origins in a life experience very foreign to young white men from New York, there are universal themes and a depth to the music that compels, among others, a young John Fahey, to drive cross-country. One of the most tense sequences in the whole film comes in an animated scene portraying a moment when the musicians and their Black local contact stopped to ask some white men for directions. Despite them having nothing to do with the Civil Rights activism, this whole scene simmers with the potential for a horrific outcome.

Narrated with warmth and urgency by Common, the film really features a great group of interview subjects for both the Civil Rights and the Delta Blues threads. Particularly moving is the testimony of David Dennis, one of the Freedom Summer organizers who expresses regret at not being able to protect some of the college students who were under his supervision.

A unique way to present and personalize a major historical moment by anchoring it to a highly specific personal quest.

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The Last of England, 1987

Incorporating a mix of documentary footage from Derek Jarman’s youth and fictionalized sequences of a dystopian, authoritarian future, this film explores the degradation of decency and democracy in England.

For several minutes in the middle act of this film, a naked man consumes a plucked-from-the-field raw cauliflower while standing next to a barrel fire. Absorb that. Appreciate that. Are you in, or are you out?

I’m definitely in. Jarman’s eye for dramatic staging, willingness to mix film speed and camera movements speaks to me, and I’ve realized that I enjoy it whether it’s framed in a highly personal context or in service to a more conventional narrative.

Jarman can certainly compose one hell of an image, something that the internet mainly seems to celebrate in the is-this-a-Vogue-cover images from a sequence featuring Tilda Swinton as a bride who, in mourning, cuts up her wedding dress with a huge pair of scissors.

But the film is full of other images that are disquieting in less conventional ways. (Though the Swinton sequence is fantastic.) My remark about the man eating the cauliflower may have seemed glib, but it’s an uncomfortable viewing. Not so much because of the nudity or the frequent abrupt close-ups of the man’s mouth, but because the sequence lingers on for a long time, taking away the buffer period where you might giggle a bit at the staging and forcing you to sit with this man. Feel relief as he slings a blanket around his shoulders, only for the blanket to eventually partly fall away. Wonder how aware he is of his existence, and what he’s feeling in this moment.

There’s also a scene in which a young man has sex with a soldier whose identity is entirely concealed by his uniform and mask. Like the other sequence, it goes on for a duration that exhausts the jolt instinct and leaves you to focus on the men and the enormous, inexplicable flag on which their lovemaking takes place. The staging is so allegorical as to risk absurdity, and yet it’s so visceral and goes on for so long that it defies just being a shocking image.

The home movies themselves are also interesting. Frankly, it’s intriguing to see someone ostensibly pining for a very middle-class upbringing with very suburban, heteronormative trappings. You’d imagine that a gay person who was raised in the 1950s and 1960s would have some complicated feelings about their childhood (and I really don’t know enough about Jarman as an individual to know about his upbringing or the relationship he had with his family as a child/teen). The film operates only at extremes: the idealized youth and the terrifying future.

I think that this is one of those films that just purely is what it is. If Jarman’s style is your thing, it’ll be a hit.

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Random Acts of Violence, 2019

Todd (Jesse Williams) is the writer-illustrator of a successful series of comics based on a real serial killer who was active when Todd was a child. Fretting over how to find an appropriate ending to his work, Todd and his friends find themselves being stalked by a mysterious figure. Is this someone who has taken their fandom of Todd’s work too far, or could this person be related to the original killer?

This horror-thriller raises some interesting questions about the ethics of true-crime content and the focus on victims versus perpetrators, but never quite interrogates those questions with enough zeal.

While overall this film didn’t rise above somewhat typical slasher stuff, there was one exchange that I thought was pretty great. Todd is arguing with his girlfriend, Kathy (Jordana Brewster), about his choice to make the killer the protagonist of his series. Kathy has a side project of her own where she is collecting stories about the victims of the killer. As the argument heats up, Todd finally asserts, “People care about people who do things, not people that things happen to.” It’s a frank justification for the fascination--and even borderline hero-worship--of people who commit terrible violence against others. As we start to learn more about Todd’s own past, his fascination with such violence takes on a different dimension.

But even as the movie tries to confront some of these cultural issues, it only does so in fits and starts. In many other respects, it tries to have its cake and eat it, too. The murders committed by the killer--both in the comic books and in reality--are salacious, like two young women and a young man who are killed and sewn/lashed together into a “triptych.” The killings are incredibly outlandish and the film itself revels in the fear of the victims and the horror of the violence. The opposing dynamics of raising ethical questions and then flaunting those ethics is certainly a choice.

Like a lot of horror films, this one withholds information about characters and their pasts in order to save up for a big twist at the end. A twist has to be very strong to be worth such contortions, and unfortunately the one in this film is merely okay, and also pretty predictable. And of course the side effect is that we are held at arm’s length from the main characters and the killer, to the point that it’s hard to know exactly how we’re meant to feel about any of them.

The concepts here are worthy of a horror film, but the exploration of those concepts ends up being disappointingly superficial.

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Brother’s Keeper, 1992

This documentary follows the murder trial of Delbert Ward, an older man who has been accused of killing his brother. The film focuses on the lives of the brothers, the events of the trial, and the community response to the whole affair.

A fascinating look at the social politics around major events in small communities, brushing up at times against its own exploitative desires.

There are three major strands to this documentary: the lives of the Ward brothers, the progression of the trial and questions about the propriety of the investigation, and the reaction of the community.

The most exploitative element of the film is definitely the view into the lives of the Ward brothers. There are constant references from other interview subjects to the brothers living in a different time. The brothers run a small farm, raising poultry, pigs, and cattle. They live in a small house, sharing bedrooms and beds. Their property is a sprawl of derelict vehicles and scrubby farm cats. Maybe this says more about me than it does about the Ward brothers, but I wasn’t all that shocked by what I saw. The film keeps trying to raise the stakes here, such as by including an overlong sequence of the brothers killing and butchering a pig. But the secluded, low-tech living is not atypical of what you get in very rural areas, and this was a place where I felt the film leaning toward an audience that doesn’t know what people are like past the suburbs.

The trial itself is just a hair short of a farce. All of the Ward brothers are hard of hearing, and several of the witnesses are the same. The prosecutor frequently shouts his questions over and over, followed by the judge shouting the question. The Ward brothers are also illiterate, and so can only respond with a shrug when presented with documents to read. A medical examiner takes the stand, spelling out his very long name for the record without being asked, and then talks to the jury as if he’s lecturing a group of ten year olds. What does swirl around the whole thing is a controversial confession signed by Delbert that he smothered his brother. The defense asserts that Delbert, due to being illiterate, was tricked into signing the confession without understanding what it said or the implications of such a signature.

But it’s the response of the community that is the most interesting. Having not cared one bit about the Ward brothers before, the town suddenly mobilizes around them, holding basically town meetings in a local diner. Different townspeople have different theories, some of them incredibly outlandish. The dead brother, William, had a variety of medical and mental health issues. When a cow is disoriented, you sometimes plug its nose to make it move. Thus, reasons one person, Delbert must have been trying to help his brother by treating him like a cow. It seems as if the people are more united by a cause than by actual concern for Delbert or for the truth about William’s death.

Fundamentally, the film somewhat dances around the idea that Delbert did kill William, but that it would not be justice to lock him up for that crime. Further, there seems to be a sensibility that all of the brothers were implicitly involved with the decision to commit what might be thought of as a mercy killing. Just left to hang out there in the breeze is the bizarre detail that semen was found on William’s body, with the salacious suggestion that the brothers were having sex when Delbert killed him. (One interview subject explaining why no one should care if the brothers were/are all having sex with one another is an exemplar of “that’s their business” rural thinking that I miss from the Iowa of the early 2000s).

A wild ride that ends up somewhat tarnished by the film’s insistence on seeing the brothers more as an exhibition than as real people.

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Parallel Mothers, 2021

Janis (Penelope Cruz) finds herself unexpectedly pregnant after a relationship with a married colleague (Israel Elejalde). Deciding to have the baby, Janis meets pregnant teenager Ana (Milena Smit) when the two share the same maternity ward. As complications arise in both of their lives, Janis ends up inviting Ana to live with her. But complications around the babies and the womens’ relationships to the children and each other take many unexpected turns.

At once meditative and chock full of plot and character revelations, this is a breathtaking and moving film.

In a movie this strong and also this full of plot developments, it’s hard to talk about it in any kind of specific way for fear of giving things away. But there are still some things that can be safely said without revealing key plot points.

The first is the fierce lead performance from Cruz, as a woman who decides to have a baby despite knowing that she will be going it alone. Deciding to have her child carries a particular weight, as Janis is also in the middle of a quest to find the location of her grandfather’s body. Having promised her mother and grandmother to locate her grandfather, who was executed by the fascists during the Spanish Civil War, the awareness of what it means to become part of a generational chain weighs on her. Janis has a dedication to the truth and integrity, and these aspects of her character will test and turn on her in ways she could never imagine later in the film.

Smit is also very good as Ana, a young woman grappling with the direction of her life, her complicated relationship with a mother (Aitana Sanchez-Gijon) who is up-front about the ways that being a mother derailed her life, her sexuality, and the traumatic context around her own pregnancy. Ana is the more impulsive character of the two, and certainly at times more annoying. Smit is actually in her 20s, and she does a lot to create a vulnerability in her character to ground Ana as a teen.

The supporting cast is strong as well, including Elejalde as a man who is clearly enamored with Janis, but is starkly brought to the realization that he doesn’t have a say in how she lives her life. His overt attempts to distance himself from the pregnancy--first trying to push Janis into an abortion and later questioning the baby’s paternity--are pretty gross. But the character is given some dimension by his involvement in the quest to locate Janis’s grandfather. The splendid Rossy de Palma is on hand as Janis’s closest confidant.

Visually the film is very engaging. The stylistic choices are at times in-your-face and at times more subtle. A repeated motif of people or items framed in red permeates the whole film, from framed pictures to the stitching on the pillows in a hotel room. Cruz has such an interesting face, and Almodovar always frames her to the best effect.

I had very few qualms with this one. There was one development in the ever-evolving relationship between Janis and Ana that I didn’t totally buy, either realistically or thematically. For the first half of the film, the plot about searching for the grandfather’s grave didn’t feel entirely connected, but by the last act it strongly cohered with the rest of what happened in the movie.

A fantastic, moving film.

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Dog, 2022

Briggs (Channing Tatum) is desperate to be redeployed after having been sidelined due to a traumatic brain injury. Barely coping with his injury and his restlessness, he jumps at a chance to get someone to sign off on his readiness for service. This chance involves escorting a war-traumatized dog named Lulu down the west coast in order to attend the funeral of Lulu’s handler, a man who died after suffering some serious mental health issues of his own.

Engaging, moving, and sweet when in its simplest moments of man-dog bonding, this one is totally bogged down by cringe-worthy comedic set-pieces.

There are plenty of films out there about the redeeming experience of caring for a troubled animal. And there’s a good reason for that: the formula works! Many people know exactly the healing dynamic of caring for an animal, and the particular bond that can form.

In its best moments, this film captures exactly that. Two damaged souls starting out from a place of frustration and anger and mistrust, developing a mutual affection and grudgingly coming back to life and joy. The parallels between Briggs and Lulu are pretty overt, and in Lulu’s eventual fate--after the funeral she is to be killed because of her lack of control--Briggs sees the futility of his own attempt at a comeback.

All of that is good stuff. Even when it borders on being overly-obvious, it’s good stuff.

And then there’s the comedy. Dear lord, the comedy.

Every time Briggs and Lulu interact with someone on their journey down the coast, the film absolutely goes into the toilet. There’s the encounter with the hippie women in Portland, energy workers who want to have a tantric-themed healing threesome. And wouldn’t you know it, that dang dog and another meddling hippie get in the way! Whomp whomp. There’s the encounter Briggs has with marijuana farmers he stumbles across in the woods. (What are the odds?!). And you’ll never guess the wacky (and racist!) hijinks that ensue when Briggs pretends to be blind in order to get a free night at a swanky hotel!

This stuff is bad. It’s bad stuff.

And enmeshed in all of this is the weird line that the film tries to walk in regards to its main character and the idea of the plight of veterans.

An uneven mix of tones that’s worth a watch, but with really tempered expectations.

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War Requiem, 1989

The memories of an elderly soldier (Laurence Olivier), being cared for by a nurse (Tilda Swinton) play out to the strains of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem. A British soldier (Owen Teale) is slain by a German soldier (Sean Bean), but the interaction between the two men carries on into the afterlife.

Very much in keeping with Jarman’s style, this film is full of visual interest but doesn’t ring quite as unique as his other movies.

Of the Jarman films I’ve seen, this was the first one that didn’t totally grip me. I think it’s mainly to do with something I don’t really associate with Jarman, namely imagery that is familiar without being subverted.

This isn’t to say that it’s bad by any means. Jarman’s eye for composition is incredibly strong, so even the images that ring familiar--a soldier stretched out on barbed wire, mud covered soldiers, wounded men covered in grime and blood--are beautifully presented. And what takes it into a different realm than most films is the eerie sequence in the afterlife, where the German soldier is given the chance to atone for his actions.

The film has no dialogue, and the only audio is a reading of Wilfred Owen’s poetry and then the music and lyrics of War Requiem. At times, this is incredibly effective. Real war footage or Swinton’s nurse howling in agony over the loss of a soldier are accompanied by the dramatic strains of the opera. Any notion that the fanfare of the music might lend the sequences a celebratory note are quickly dismissed by the misery and gore on display.

At the same time, the use of the music had a distancing effect for me. The intensity of the score required a bit of endurance, and I felt my attention flagging in the middle third of the film. The afterlife sequence in the last act is very strong and so the film ends on a high note.

Recommended for Jarman fans, less so for those who don’t strongly vibe with his style.

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Men, 2022

Harper (Jessie Buckley) has decided to rent a house out in the country in a small village as she tries to cope with the traumatic death, most likely a suicide, of her husband, James (Paapa Essiedu). But the village itself is strange, seemingly populated only by men, all wearing the same face as the man, Geoffrey (Rory Kinnear) who rented her the house.

While built on a really neat premise, this one doesn’t quite bridge the gap between its interesting ideas and the specifics of its characters.

In a film as clearly symbolic as this one, a viewer can’t help but decide what they think it all means. For me, this was an examination of the way that a person, and especially someone with whom we have a complex, intimate relationship, can have different dimensions to their persona. Escaping an unhealthy relationship becomes difficult because it’s easy to get tangled up with the different versions of someone, navigating their shifts in persona rather than finding a way to break things off.

The moments in the film where this is most effective is when the different men play off of one another, with one man offering protection or relief from the stress caused by another. The moralizing priest invites sympathy when he speaks kindly to Harper after a young man swears at her. Geoffrey diffuses Harper’s fears when she becomes convinced that she’s being stalked, bravely investigating the house and yard when she says that she thinks someone is there.

I think that the film gets at an uncomfortable truth about relationships that are unhealthy or even overtly abusive (as is the relationship between Harper and James): very rarely is it all bad. There is almost always laughter or tenderness or a little act of kindness. And those bright spots are what sow doubt and guilt when it comes to wanting to end things. Harper is kept just on the edge of wanting to leave, and in her isolation she must rely on the cues of the men around her to decide if she is safe or not. Harper shares physical space with other women for only about a minute or two in the entire film. With no friendly faces around, she begins to lose her bearings.

The performances themselves are good, with Buckley’s Harper arriving as a woman already somewhat unraveled, fighting against having her week of rest and healing derailed. Kinnear does a good job of giving the various characters enough of a distinctive personality that it lifts itself out of just being a gimmick.

Where the film doesn’t work quite as well is in the lack of context of the relationship between James and Harper. The James that we see in the film is pretty monstrous. He is verbally and physically aggressive with Harper. He is cruel and manipulative, telling Harper that if she leaves him he will kill himself so that she’ll have to live with the guilt of his death. The function of the film is to allegorically show us the way that Harper has to fight through the different “men” that her husband was: caretaker, moralizer, impulsive, mentally unstable, protector, etc. But we are only shown the bad sides of James, and so Harper’s conflict over his death doesn’t land very well. Five minutes of watching James berate, punch, and threaten Harper and I felt like his death was probably in her best interest in some ways. The allegorical village is meant to hold a mirror up to James, but we’re shown only a superficial and unflattering picture of the man to go off of.

There are some pretty gnarly visuals, and the film was more gruesome than I expected. I found myself appreciating the imagery and gore, and was also surprised at how much I liked the overbearing score.

This one doesn’t quite nail the exploration of its themes, but is worth checking out for good performances and satisfying visuals and mood.